by | 8 July, 2025 | 6 comments
By Tyler McKenzie
I’m Getting a Doctorate Specializing in … Parenting
For those who follow the Engage column, a little personal-life update. About the last 4 years, I’ve been working on a doctorate at Wheaton College, and I am almost done! The last thing left is a capstone qualitative research project on a topic of my choosing that impacts the church.
I started praying about what that topic should be for Northeast two years ago, and I felt God nudge me to study parents. Specifically, my goal is to understand how Christian parents think about passing down their faith to their kids. I have been reading the most up-to-date research in the field, and I will also be conducting my own research this fall. The growth Northeast is experiencing today has been primarily among families with kids in the home. Studying parents made a lot of sense.
As I prepare to do my own research, I have reviewed the most up-to-date and respected studies already done in the field of intergenerational faith transmission. While reading, I’ve honed a list of practices that jumped out of the research. In this column, I’ll share with you my top ten ways parents can increase the probability they pass down their faith … according to the data!
The #1 Most Decided Data Point for Passing Faith Down
This first point is by far the most decided datum out there. It is essential for every parent to embrace. Christian Smith is a leading sociologist who has spent years studying the religious lives of youth. When it comes to kids and faith, Smith’s knowledge spans generations. This is his most decided finding!
His team measured the influence of parents against all other possible factors. They found that parents … not peers, not media, not Tik-Tok, not pastors, not schools, not sports … parents have the most power. Smith writes, “The best predictor of what any American’s religious life will be like in adulthood is how their parents held their religious beliefs while raising them.”
I highlight this for two reasons. First, I want to put healthy pressure on parents to take parental responsibility. We live in a day where we are outsourcing child-rearing. Many parents are too busy with work or “self-care” to be involved. We hire professional childcare, teachers, psychologists, coaches, pastors, etc. to do our job. But nothing can replace your influence. We should be sacrificing time, money, and personal ambition to raise up leaders of consequence for the Kingdom of God.
The other reason I say this is because a lot of parents don’t believe they are influential. It’s long been a parenting maxim that, “Once your kids get to middle school, there is a shift from parent to peer influence.” That isn’t what the data says. Peer pressure is real, no doubt. Once they hit middle school, you aren’t cool anymore. But no matter how much your kids roll their eyes at you, parents have more power than they think.
The Rest of the Top Ten
“If there were one practical take-away from our research, it would be … parents need not only to walk the walk but also regularly to talk with their children about their walk, what it means, why it matters, why they care.” –Christian Smith & Amy Adamcyzk
But here’s an interesting twist! These conversations can’t be parent-led monologues. The data shows that the most effective conversations are kid-led. The parents are responsible for creating an environment of safety and normalcy around faith conversations, but the conversations should be child-centered. The kid asks the questions. The kid does most of the talking. The parent meets the child at their point of curiosity, and then uses wisdom to know when to speak, when to ask a follow-up, or when to offer honest advice.
The terms authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive are not my own. They are used in psychological research to describe a spectrum of parenting styles that range from strict (authoritarian) to soft (permissive). The authoritative style is the word used to describe the magic middle that pulls the good of both sides together. The authoritative style is:
Not only did the research find this style to be most beneficial for the healthy development of children, but this style is also the most effective at transmitting religious beliefs from parent-to-child.
There’s my ten! More on this to come as my research develops. My prayer is this will inform your own respective ministries.
Tyler McKenzie serves as lead pastor at Northeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
Really good stuff here! I appreciate the research and insight. I didn’t have luck following the embedded links. Is there anything you can do on your end to make those work?
Thanks for the notification and sorry for the problem. All links should be working now.
We setup a little ‘story lab’ at a Christian hybrid school and created opportunity for the kids to interview their parents and grandparents about things like “hearing from God” for example.
These simple but intentional tests have led me to believe this is the sort of thing that can be easily done in churches and schools, but busyness and an unspoken status quo of timidity and lack of vulnerability keep things like this suppressed.
Love it!
Such a timely article. Thanks!
Bravo! It’s great to see solid advice based on research and not baseless anecdotes and homiletical tropes. Especially, given the long shelf-life of the baseless assertion about fathers being the singular crucial element (it’s parents in general, and as the research shows, moms tend to be better about this than dads), this list accesses data showing the range of influences. It’s an agenda we can all adopt.
On the matter of conversations with your kids, I will always treasure the moment fifteen years ago when our daughter was a freshman in college. She called weekly to talk to us, and on one call in her first quarter, she told us about the icebreaker in a Bible study she attended. She told us the leader asked everyone to share something they missed about home. Our daughter said that other students in the Bible study responded with things like, “my dog,” or “my bed,” or “my mom’s cooking.” But our daughter told us her response: “the theological discussions at the dinner table.”
It wasn’t conscious or deliberate, just natural for us. But we felt good.
This isn’t impossible. We can do it.
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