Category: Parenting

The Kern Curriculum: Raising Gifted Children (And Why You Shouldn’t)

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If you’re looking for a shortcut to elite academic performance in your children, stop right there.

This post is about raising children who perform at high levels academically. But if your goal is to produce a high-performing child so you can feel successful, this isn’t for you. I’m not saying that to be rude. I’m saying it because it’s a spiritual problem, and you should treat it like one.

Start with first principles: the meaning of life, what love of God and neighbor requires, and why wisdom grows through discipline and virtue. Get that straight first. Then come back.

Because top academic performance can be a good thing. It often requires a love of learning, a willingness to do hard things, and a certain kind of competence that translates into other areas of life. But academic excellence is a tool and a byproduct. It’s downstream from something deeper. If you aim at “gifted” as the goal, you will poison the whole project before it starts.

What I Mean by “Gifted”

By “gifted children” I’m not talking about status games or bumper stickers or showing off at the Thanksgiving table.

I’m talking about a child who can sit down, work through something hard, think clearly, and keep going when the material resists him. That requires focus, discipline, and consistency, and those habits spill into the rest of life.

That kind of excellence is compatible with a flourishing life. But it only stays healthy when it’s properly ordered under higher things.

Where My Boys Are

My two sons, Luke (9) and Levi (6), are doing math and reading well beyond their grade levels.

Luke is doing around 7th grade math. He is reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and other advanced books. Levi is doing around 4th grade math and reading The Hobbit on his own.

I say that because people ask, and because I want to explain something simple: we didn’t do anything magical.

We started late. We didn’t rush reading. Luke didn’t start seriously learning to read until he was six, and Levi until five. We didn’t have them do schoolwork before they were at least five years old. When they were emotionally mature enough to sit down and work for an hour or two, we started building. That’s all it was.

The Three Ingredients

The method is simple, but it is not the standard American family pattern.

1) Homeschooling gives you control of the environment

I’ll say this plainly: my methodology doesn’t work without homeschooling.

There are great public school teachers, and many children come through the system well. But my method depends on controlling pace, time, expectations, and household culture. A school designed for a roomful of children cannot give each child the same freedom.

If you want mastery-based learning, individualized pacing, high accountability, and a coherent household culture, you need control over the environment. Homeschooling gives you that control.

This isn’t equally accessible to everyone. Single-income families make real sacrifices. Single parents and dual-income households may face constraints that make homeschooling nearly impossible. I’m describing what worked for us, not pretending it is universally available. If homeschooling isn’t possible, the other principles can still bear fruit in whatever setting you have.

People will bring up socialization. I’m not worried. Children have always been socialized by family and community. The modern school system isn’t the only way to become a normal human being.

2) You must nurture a stable home

The deeper questions of household order, fatherhood, marriage, authority, and spiritual formation deserve their own treatment.

But I will say this: education is downstream from the emotional and moral climate of the home.

If the home is chaotic, if the parents are at war, if there’s no rhythm, if the children don’t trust you, if everything is bribery and negotiation and meltdown management, your curriculum won’t matter. The stability of the home is the soil. The schooling is the plant. If the soil is poisoned, the plant won’t thrive.

This is also where screens belong in the conversation. We didn’t demonize screens, but we didn’t let them run the house either. They were guarded behind right relationship. If everything was in order, obedience, attitude, responsibilities handled, then yes, there was room for games and shows. If things were disordered, screens only made the whole household weaker. We treated entertainment the way you treat dessert. It isn’t evil. It just isn’t the center of the diet.

3) You must challenge them gently and consistently

The core is simple: daily practice, gently enforced, aimed at mastery.

We did not dabble, wait on each morning’s mood, or work in short bursts followed by months of nothing.

We made it a rhythm. Five days a week, for at least an hour or two a day. And we don’t follow the school break system. We don’t take summer off, winter off, spring off as a rule. We have break days. We travel. We rest. But the default is that learning is normal, like brushing your teeth.

This matters because children don’t rise to your speeches. They rise to your habits.

What We Actually Did

Here’s what it looked like in practice.

We waited until they were ready. No formal schooling until at least five. No panic about early reading. We didn’t treat our toddlers like resume projects.

Once they were emotionally grown enough to sit and focus, we started building the muscle. An hour at first, then two. Some days were smooth, some were messy. But we kept returning to the table. That’s the whole game.

Our main tool was Khan Academy for math, and we supplemented with spaced repetition using Anki on the iPad. Khan is simple: you keep going until you actually master the material. Anki is simple: you review the right things at the right time until they stick. This isn’t fancy. It’s just applying real learning principles instead of pretending that exposure equals knowledge.

We kept expectations high and pressure low. Gentle prodding is the phrase I would use. We didn’t scream. We didn’t bargain constantly. We didn’t turn school into trauma. But we also didn’t treat their preferences as law. You can be kind and still require hard things from a child. That’s a form of love.

Why This Works When So Much Else Doesn’t

I think a lot of families are running the opposite pattern without realizing it. They outsource formation. They outsource education. They let the ambient culture raise their children. The household has no rhythm. When the guilt sets in, they reach for screens to manage it, and then they wonder why their children can’t focus or endure difficulty.

And then they go looking for hacks.

There are no hacks. There’s order, discipline, love, and time.

I don’t say that to stand over anyone. I know how hard it is. Some seasons reduce a household to survival. But the pattern is worth naming because a better app or curriculum cannot replace a parent willing to sit down at the table and lead.

The Encouraging Part

I don’t think this requires exceptional natural giftedness. In my experience, many children can reach much higher levels with this approach than adults expect.

Not every child will become a chess prodigy or a math Olympiad competitor. But children can go far beyond what adults expect of them when they have a stable home, daily practice, mastery-based learning, and a parent who is willing to lead.

Closing

This post began with gifted children, but giftedness is not the point.

The point is a well-ordered household where the pursuit of wisdom is normal, discipline is loving, and excellence grows over time.

If you want elite academically performing kids as the goal, you’re going to hurt yourself and you’re going to hurt them.

But if you want to love God and neighbor, attain to wisdom, and raise children who can live a flourishing life, then sit down at the table five days a week. Keep it gentle. Keep it consistent. Aim for mastery. And trust that the fruit will come.

Daycare, Attachment, and the Limits of a Pickup Video

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What a Pickup Video Cannot Tell Us

I recently watched a video of parents picking up toddlers from daycare. Several children began crying when they saw their parents. The scene stayed with me because separation in the early years is emotionally serious. But the video cannot tell me that those children were traumatized, badly attached, or harmed by daycare.

The American Academy of Pediatrics describes separation anxiety as a normal stage that can appear in children with strong, healthy attachments. A child’s tears at reunion may express the force of attachment rather than its failure. A short clip does not reveal the quality of care, the child’s day, the family’s circumstances, or the meaning of the tears.

The more defensible concern is positive: young children need stable, responsive relationships with adults who know them and answer their needs. Parents ordinarily carry the deepest responsibility for creating those relationships. When others provide care, stability and responsiveness still matter.

Daycare Is Not One Thing

“Daycare” can describe very different arrangements: a relative caring for one child, a small home setting, or a large center with changing staff. It can involve a few hours or most of a child’s waking day. Treating all of those settings as one exposure hides the questions that parents actually need to ask.

Who comforts the child? How many adults rotate through the room? Does one caregiver remain long enough to know the child’s signals? How does the setting handle feeding, sleep, distress, discipline, and reunion? Does the child have enough unhurried time with parents before and after care?

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study did not find that childcare experience by itself determined attachment security by age three. Across the study’s broader developmental measures, parent and family characteristics were more strongly associated with children’s outcomes than childcare features were, and most associations were slight or moderate. That does not prove every daycare arrangement is good. It does mean that daycare cannot honestly be treated as a direct path to attachment trauma.

The Sacred Responsibility of Presence

Christian parents should still resist the idea that care is only a scheduling problem. Children are not interruptions to the life we would otherwise prefer. They need our bodies in the room, our attention, our patience, and the repeated experience of being answered.

Mary gives Christian mothers a picture of costly presence, but the duty does not belong to mothers alone. Fathers are not assistants to maternal attachment. They are parents. Grandparents, relatives, and faithful caregivers can also become stable adults in a child’s life without replacing the parents’ vocation.

This is where my judgment remains strong. A culture of work should not force families to choose between economic survival and responsive care for an infant. Employers, churches, extended families, and public policy should make it easier for parents to remain present and for outside care to be stable and humane.

Questions Worth Asking

Some families need two incomes. Some parents are single. Some homes are safer and more stable because a child has access to excellent outside care. It is unjust to treat those constraints as proof that parents chose convenience over love.

It is still worth asking whether our household can recover more time with our children. Could a schedule change? Could relatives help? Could the number of transitions be reduced? Could we choose a setting with stable caregivers or keep a very young child home longer? Those are practical questions, not a verdict pronounced from a video.

The goal is not maternal exclusivity or parental guilt. It is a childhood held together by dependable love. Young children need adults who are present, responsive, and stable. Every family and every care system should be judged by how well it gives them that.

What Gus Did When We Left Him Outside

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One afternoon, our dog Augustine, whom we call Gus, ended up on the wrong side of the front door. Our youngest had accidentally left him outside, and we did not notice for about thirty minutes.

When we opened the door, Gus was lying comfortably beside it. He had not wandered through the neighborhood or chased one of the countless scents beyond the yard. He had stayed close and waited for us.

[Gus joining us for a car ride]

I have known dogs that bolt through an open door. That behavior can come from temperament, training, fear, curiosity, or the scent of something worth chasing. It does not prove that a dog is unhappy at home. Gus waiting by the door does not prove the opposite.

Still, the sight meant something to us. He had been given an accidental opening into the wider world, and when we found him, he was resting at the threshold of his home. We read it as trust and attachment, with all the caution that belongs to interpreting an animal’s behavior.

This is not a test anyone should reproduce by leaving a dog outside an unsecured door. It was an accident. What stayed with me was simpler: when the door opened, Gus was there, waiting to come back to his pack.

What We Told Our Boys After a Shouting Match

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The Incident

One sunny afternoon, Luke, Levi, and their friend Adil were by the creek tossing sticks into the water. Our neighbor called across the creek and warned them that the sticks could dam the water and cause a flood. That would have been fine. Then her husband began screaming threats at the kids and my pregnant wife.

My wife yelled back and told him to stop. I heard the shouting from the house and came barreling into the backyard. I was furious. When the man turned toward me, I shouted over him and told him twice, “I don’t want to hear another word from you.” He turned around and left.

These neighbors had a history of drunken shouting and escalated confrontations. That history explains why we reacted so quickly. It does not mean every part of our reaction was wise.

What We Told the Boys

Once things calmed down, we gathered the boys. They were frightened and confused. We told them that anger can arise when someone threatens you or someone you love. Jesus Himself drove the merchants from the Temple. But anger cannot be allowed to master us.

We also told them that forgiveness and boundaries belong together. Jesus says in Matthew 5:44, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Forgiveness means refusing to nurse hatred. It does not require pretending that a dangerous person is safe.

Jesus remained silent before Herod. We took that as an example of refusing a pointless confrontation. In the same way, we can love a neighbor while keeping enough distance to protect our family. We do not have to keep returning to a volatile exchange to prove that we have forgiven someone.

Forgiveness Without Pretending

We have not yet gone back to smooth things over with the neighbors. For now, the honest lesson for the boys is that we must let go of resentment, pray for the people who wrong us, and keep prudent boundaries. It is also worth admitting that their parents lost their tempers. The boys did not need a performance of perfect calm. They needed us to name what happened truthfully.

We ended the day by praying the Our Father and asking for the grace to forgive those who wrong us. That was the lesson: forgive, tell the truth about danger, and do not let another person’s anger govern your own.