From interaction with friends to instruction received at home, children interpret their experiences through a worldview that is trying to answer fundamental questions: who am I, what do I exist for, what will make me happy. Tedd and Margy Tripp argue that parents are always answering those questions for their children, whether deliberately or not, and that formative instruction is therefore not optional but inevitable.

Where Shepherding a Child's Heart concentrated on correction, this companion volume concentrates on instruction: the ordinary, repeated, unhurried conversation in which a child is given a true account of God, of himself and of the world. The authors treat the parent's own need of the gospel as honestly as the child's. Published by Shepherd Press and best read alongside the earlier book.