Candace Nassar (00:00.811)
Well, welcome everyone. Today I’m talking with Leanne Mancini, author of Raising Kids to Follow Christ and host of the award -winning podcast Raising Christian Kids. She’s also an award -winning Christian children’s author and executive producer of the animated TV series Sea Kids, which is based on her children’s books about cute, colorful sea creatures who learn about God’s morals and values and how to live those daily. Sounds great, huh?
She’s an adjunct professor at South Florida Bible College and Theological Seminary, as well as a sought after speaker. So we are blessed to have her on our show today and welcome Leanne.
Lee Ann Mancini (00:40.568)
Thank you for having me, Candace. I’m so happy to be here.
Candace Nassar (00:43.691)
Yes, we appreciate it so much. So Leanne, tell us a little bit about your family. I just read your wonderful bio, but tell us about your family as well.
Lee Ann Mancini (00:52.952)
I’ve been married for 37 years and we’ve actually lived in the same community for 36 of those years. So yeah, it’s unusual. We just love where we live. And I have two adult children. I have a 33 year old son who recently got engaged and I have a 31 year old daughter who just got married this past year. Well, October.
And it’ll be a whole year in October, so we’re excited about that. And we’re just, I’m just so blessed. I’m so thankful and blessed.
Candace Nassar (01:23.521)
That’s great. Yeah. So we have kids of similar ages. So that’s fun. And I’m sure you’re like me. My son has been married for three years and I think it’s getting to be time for grandkids. So we’ll see how that goes. But we both have lots of wisdom. We have a heart and a passion to help moms raise kids for Christ. So I’m excited to get into it. So why don’t you tell us what led you to write this book?
Lee Ann Mancini (01:53.368)
Well, about five years ago, I was reading the statistics that 40 % of children from middle school and 65 % from high school and college were walking away from their faith. These are children from Christian families. And it was so alarming and I was thinking, my gosh, we’re gonna lose a whole generation. They’re not gonna know who Christ is or believe who He is.
And so I started researching the brightest minds in children’s spirituality to see what we could find out, how we could stop this from happening. I felt the Lord calling me that this was my mission to do this. And so five years later, I wrote my book, Raising Kids to Follow Christ: Instilling a Lifelong Trust in God , and I’ve put a lot of information into this book, and it’s more of an application book for parents. It tells them what the problem is and what we need to do, but it goes a step further and it tells them actually how to do it. And right now the statistics are even worse. Only 1 % of our children from Christian homes have a true biblical worldview. That.s 1 %…
Candace Nassar (03:04.449)
Yes, I saw that in your book and that’s really shocking. So we’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about how to instill a Christian worldview. So that’s where your heart is. You have obviously raised your kids to follow Christ.
Lee Ann Mancini (03:22.934)
Yes, and I have to say, when parents read my book, they’re like, well, I didn’t do half this stuff. And I said to all of them, whenever I talked to them, “Look, I didn’t do half the stuff that’s in my book.” I didn’t know, but my kids still ended up believing. I did the best I could with what I was given. And I prayed over them constantly. I think prayer is the most important thing because you’re going to find times where your kids are either teenagers or younger adults or even younger now. Or you’re going to have to pray to God to get through the situation, to guide you and to open up their eyes. So prayer is the first most important thing that we can do for our children. You know, Candace, it’s so sad. Right now, 70 % of children between the ages of 13 and 14 from Christian families, they don’t believe Satan exists. They think he’s a fictitious character.
Candace Nassar (04:05.139)
Absolutely.
Lee Ann Mancini (04:18.328)
And 84 % don’t believe we’re born into sin and need a Savior. So we’ve lost a whole generation. And I believe it’s because parents are not sure how to raise their children to have that strong foundation in a world that is trying to, know, this whole culture, this gender confusion. It’s not like when we were raising our children, that’s for sure.
Candace Nassar (04:45.355)
Yeah. And I think because they don’t realize how damaging the culture is in a lot of ways, they take for granted that the church is going to handle it or whatever, and they just don’t understand how important it is what we do at home. So actually, that’s a great segue into my next point that I want to talk about. It’s your subtitle, Instilling a Lifelong Trust in God. And so what do you think are the key principles to accomplishing this? That’s a wide open question.
Lee Ann Mancini (05:22.207)
Yes, well before I answer that I just wanted to say you talked about the church. The statistics for Christian children’s pastors, this is all according to the latest statistics with Barna Group and the Arizona Christian University, that 53 % of Christian children’s pastors believe in reincarnation.
Candace Nassar (05:26.805)
Mmm.
Candace Nassar (05:44.737)
Can that be?
Lee Ann Mancini (05:44.792)
And 50 % believe that Jesus actually sinned on earth in his human form. So you can’t rely on the church. We have to start training them at home. We have to educate ourselves and train our children well at home. And I’m sorry.
Candace Nassar (06:03.312)
And so, to accomplish instilling a lifelong trust in God, what would you say are some of the key principles?
Lee Ann Mancini (06:11.308)
Well, to instill a lifelong trust in God, I think we really have to look at how we’re raising this next generation. We cannot give them a “Sunday school faith”. Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis calls it a “Sunday school faith”, where you read the Bible and you pray and you read your children some Bible stories. We have to do so much more than that. And I talk about, now everything I talk about in the book, most of it can be,
applied to teenagers as well. But I start with the beginning, which is in the womb. Jeremiah, David, Samuel, they all were taught from infancy. And we know that at 18 weeks of pregnancy, the fetus can hear the mom. So you start talking about Jesus as soon as you’re pregnant. Volunteer at your church nursery, the fetus hears songs about Jesus. And then volunteer after they’re born. When they’re two years old and they’re getting ready to take a nap, instead of saying let’s take a nap, you say let’s take a Sabbath’s rest. Now they don’t understand the meaning of Sabbath, but what you’re doing is you’re building a vocabulary and a category in their mind for the term Sabbath. Then from the ages four to seven when you’re explaining these biblical concepts, you’re planting seeds into rich soil that can grow deep roots.
Candace Nassar (07:21.483)
Yes
Lee Ann Mancini (07:40.098)
That’s just a little bit of what I can share for the beginning. I have so much more in the book.
Candace Nassar (07:45.6)
Absolutely.
Lee Ann Mancini (07:46.956)
But that’s how you have to start-building a strong foundation.
Candace Nassar (07:50.679)
So you talk about in the book the Shema and Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 7, which actually we just started a live teaching series called Raising Virtuous Children this fall. So it goes so hand in hand with everything that you talk about in the book. When we talk about the Shema, we talk about teaching our children to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul and strength.
And that is devotion, that is complete loyalty to God alone. so using that verse as a foundation. It really, goes on to talk about how we do that. We impress these things on our children by just constantly talking about them. So like what you’re saying from the womb on, just continuing to use the vocabulary and talk about how God is working in the creation in our lives and answer prayer.
What are some of the other things like, I know you mentioned in the book, and I do want to talk about this for a second, is being active in the church, that families should be active in the church. And I feel like church attendance today is very optional to families. What are your thoughts about that?
Lee Ann Mancini (09:05.4)
Yes, well, you know, I’m glad you brought up the Shema because a lot of parents will cite Proverbs 22, 6, training them up in the way they should go and they shall not depart from that.
That is not a guarantee. Proverbs are not a guarantee. King Solomon was writing the Proverbs to train his sons to be future kings. So it has a lot of wisdom. Proverbs is mostly wisdom. But the Shema, when you rise up, when you walk along the path, when you lie down, you impress these principles, press means to mold, to brand, to mark, you’re instilling biblical doctrine. You’re actually indoctrinating your children in the Word of God.
And the church is, first it starts at home, but there’s an extension and that’s the church. Be involved with the church, volunteer at your church, let your children see this worldview. The worldview is everything that happens in their world. And let them understand from being very young that this is how we live our life, this is our worldview, and other people live it this way, that’s their worldview. Because there’s really only two worldviews, there’s God’s, based on the word of God, and there’s man, where man becomes God. And we live differently from them. And so when you start doing this early, it gets ingrained in their hearts and in their minds and they realize this is just how we live and this is what we believe and they don’t question it as long as you live it out in your home daily also, or act as if Christ is standing right next to us because really he is.
Candace Nassar (11:04.641)
Yes, yes. And I think that when we attend church, we just show that priority to our kids, that there’s nothing else. That the Sabbath on Sunday is the day of the Lord, and that this is part of that. And I know for me, we just didn’t back down on that. And I can thankfully say that my three adult children still prioritize church attendance and that community that we have to have to hold ourselves accountable and, you know, process life, just all the things that we do when we attend church. It’s not just about taking, I can just watch it online and get the same thing. It’s a community, it’s a commitment, it’s iron sharpening iron. So I think attendance and being active in the church is a really key thing in discipling our kids.
Lee Ann Mancini (11:57.534)
Absolutely, absolutely, I agree. And just make sure you’re going to a strong Bible-believing church, not a church that has watered down the gospel or has taken the gospel to a whole other meaning to represent their worldly values.
Candace Nassar (12:03.702)
Yes.
Candace Nassar (12:14.999)
That’s a good point. Yes, absolutely. And then modeling. We’re talking about modeling at home and I love that you use the phrase that we use all the time in MomQ. “More is caught than taught.” So, and you see, like you were saying earlier, we have to do it like Jesus is standing right there next to us. So all those things are super important in instilling a lifelong trust in God, wouldn’t you say?
Lee Ann Mancini (12:41.153)
Absolutely. Your children need to see you living out your biblical principles. It becomes a way of life. It becomes their daily habit. And they think that this is how we live. They just accept it and they understand it because they see mom and dad living it out.
Candace Nassar (12:50.775)
That’s right.
Candace Nassar (12:57.857)
Yes. So character development-you spend some time talking about that. I really loved your whole chapter on “virtues”. And again, as I said, we’re doing this live teaching series called Raising Virtuous Children. And you talk about developing their character and some of the things that can be done for that. What, why is character development so important?
Lee Ann Mancini (13:20.642)
Well, I’m glad you brought that up. I’m actually co-writing a book with another author about virtues, how we can teach our children to be virtuous. Second Peter says to supplement our faith with virtue. In a world devout of virtuous morals, we have to raise our children to believe in how to be kind and loving and have temperance and how to be truthful. In short, how to be like Christ.
Candace Nassar (13:27.755)
Mmm!
Lee Ann Mancini (13:50.74)
All the things that we’re supposed to be living, you know, as Christians, we need to teach our children how to live those out. Virtues are very, very important. It’s how your character, it describes your character and how you live daily. And we have to make sure we do that as well. We can’t be hypocritical because then our children won’t believe what we’re saying to be true if we’re not acting out being virtuous. So in the chapter I talked about virtues and I have Bible stories that talk about where they can read to instill these virtues and verses and games they can play also to teach them how to be virtuous. It’s so important to be like Christ.
Candace Nassar (14:29.632)
Yeah, really.
Candace Nassar (14:36.661)
Yes, and I loved it. I loved all the practicals, the games and the suggestions. It’s chock full. So that was really good. So let’s talk now for a minute about the biblical worldview that you were referring to earlier. How early can we start this?
Lee Ann Mancini (15:00.12)
Well, a child’s worldview starts to formulate at 15 months, and it’s solidified pretty much by age 13. So at 15 months, they’re observing everything around them, knowing who they can trust. I can trust mom and dad, but the stranger that’s coming towards me, I’m gonna hide behind mommy’s legs because I don’t know this person.
Candace Nassar (15:15.297)
Hmm.
Lee Ann Mancini (15:23.768)
So their worldview really starts to formulate at 15 months of age, understanding the world around them, their family dynamic, even maybe like if they go to the church nursery, what kids they like, they understand, well, you know, by the time they’re five, 90 % of their brain is fully formed. So you have that short span. And then by age 13, the statistics show us that by 13, they pretty much have their worldview set in place. Now it doesn’t mean,
Candace Nassar (15:43.361)
Right.
Lee Ann Mancini (15:53.176)
It won’t change during different circumstances. But at 13, they know what they believe to be true, whether it’s something they’ve learned in the home or outside of the home. And they will formulate a worldview based on what experiences they have during that short period of time. You know, a worldview to work has to answer four questions. So if your child says, well, I believe in this religion, or why is our religion
the superior religion, why should we believe in Christ? Christianity is the only worldview that can answer the four questions. Origin-where do I come from? Morality-how do I determine good from evil? Purpose- why am I here? What is the purpose of me being here? And destiny-what happens after I die?
Start teaching our children these things early. Don’t hold back on these concepts or biblical concepts, words, because you never know when a child will grasp it and understand it.
Candace Nassar (16:56.917)
Yeah, those are questions they ask. I can remember my kids asking me when they’re three or four, where do we come from? So these are all natural consciousness that I believe God puts on our heart, right? And, and as parents, we want to be prepared with answers that are biblical and foundations. And so you have a whole chapter in the book about apologetics. And so why don’t you talk about that for a minute?
Lee Ann Mancini (17:22.112)
Yes, I believe we have to teach our children not only what to believe, but why they believe it so that they can defend it. It’s so important. And I would like to say the first and best classroom for a young child to teach them absolute truth, which is, you know, in apologetics, how do you understand what is absolutely true or false so that you can defend your faith, what you believe?
Candace Nassar (17:30.549)
Absolutely.
Lee Ann Mancini (17:49.01)
is outside in the world- nature. Nature is the best classroom to teach absolute truth. And there’s a book that I love called Tactics by Greg Kolkl. And he gives us something simple. He uses the Colombo tactic. And I believe parents should read this book so that they can teach their children some of these tactics. For example, one of them is when someone says, well, there’s no such thing as absolute truth. (Because after all, our children’s Christian pastors, 56 % of them don’t believe in absolute truth. And 90 % of the teenagers ages 13 to 14 from Christian homes, they don’t believe in absolute truth.) And so they’ll say to you, well, you know, I don’t believe in absolute truth. Well, then you simply answer them, “Are you absolutely sure about that?”
You know, there’s so many things and the world is so full of truth. And now there’s a difference between belief and conviction and faith and trust. Those are the things that are important. We can have faith in a lot of things, but what do we trust to be true? We can have faith in things that fail us, but what do we trust to be true? That’s important and that’s what’s absolute truth is. And these are a lot of things in apologetics. taught apologetics at the college and I tried to put a little chapter in there for parents to help them also.
Candace Nassar (19:19.521)
Yeah. We hear that word and it’s very intimidating, but really it’s just meaning that we know what we believe and why we believe it, and then we can just pass that on to our kids. And that comes from reading and studying God’s Word, and there’s lots of resources to help with that. But we do want to give our kids, this is all part of that biblical worldview, and so they can graduate from high school and go to college.
Lee Ann Mancini (19:38.615)
Yes.
Candace Nassar (19:47.291)
and be faced with, and now like you said, and I think it in your book you even said that kids are being taught secular unbiblical principles earlier and earlier these days. So we’re talking about, you know, I’m thinking when they go to college they can defend their faith, but really it starts sooner than that now. So these are all really good, really good principles to think about as we’re instilling a lifelong trust in God.
Lee Ann Mancini (20:13.12)
Yes, and I’d like to say again about the belief and the conviction. We can believe in a lot of things. We can believe in things that are false. And so we have to try to help our children. What’s really important is conviction, because conviction is what convicts your heart, what goes into your heart. We want to have a heart transformation for our children, because they’re sinful from birth, God’s Word says. We want them to believe because they know in their heart, they’re convinced that this is truth and this is biblical truth and it transforms their hearts to help them become strong believers in Christ.
Candace Nassar (20:47.275)
Yes.
Yes, absolutely. And when our hearts are transformed, we’re living that out in their life. And that’s actually a great segue into my next point that I want to talk about because this month we are talking about on our podcast, Living Out the Gospel. And so how does that impact our parenting? You have a bunch of things in there about discipline and ways and the purpose and all that. So let’s just spend a few minutes talking about how the gospel impacts our parenting. What would you say would be the biggest thing?
Lee Ann Mancini (21:26.54)
That’s a really loaded question. There are so many things. Again, the Shema, every day, moment by moment, teaching your children these biblical principles, living them out. You could role play with your children to prepare them. That’s a great apologetic tool when they come home and they have a problem, role play it out. And also when your child comes to you, Jesus asked a lot. Jesus asked a lot of questions. Okay, so that’s to help them to become critical thinkers. So when your child comes to you with a question, well, “Why does Samantha think that she can have two daddies and not a mommy and a daddy, but she can have two daddies as a parent, that they can marry each other?” Instead of answering Samantha, ask her, well, what do you think? Because you’re helping her to learn how to become a critical thinker and…
she may answer you correctly and then you can say, “Hey, that’s great, I’m glad you think that way because I believe that’s true.” Or you can say, “Well, I’m glad that you’ve shared with me what you think, but let’s look at it this way.” Then you can answer her according to whatever problem that she has regarding that situation or misinformation.
Candace Nassar (22:47.415)
That’s good.
Lee Ann Mancini (22:48.32)
Yeah, the gospel is full of examples of how Christ discipled, because we are called to make disciples. So don’t always think it’s about Christ and his disciples. It’s the way to parent.
Candace Nassar (23:02.251)
Right. And so, and one of the things that we talked about in our first podcast on the series was just how love and grace and that God, you know, the, how God’s love and grace poured out on us should transform how we relate to other people. And so how does love and grace impact our parenting?
Lee Ann Mancini (23:21.824)
Yes, well that’s really in every area, especially in disciplining our children. So we have to understand that discipline means to instruct. So we instruct our children, we teach them. And when they fail and they make a mistake, be graceful. God extends grace for you because we’re all sinners and we all make mistakes. So be loving and be graceful, but be firm in your rules that you set for your home.
Candace Nassar (23:27.627)
Yes.
Lee Ann Mancini (23:51.668)
Wishy-washy parents or parents that are not on the same page or you know, dole out a consequence for disobedience, but then they pull back. These are things we can’t do. We should never, never do that. There’s like two chapters on discipline almost. There’s one about how to teach them how to be, you know, obedient and how to discipline them. Because once you teach them how to be obedient, then you can discipline them properly. There’s so much in the book, my head’s spinning, like all kinds of ideas are falling into my head right now.
Candace Nassar (24:22.581)
Yes, yes. Now I agree, but I guess what I was thinking is you talk about what is the purpose of discipline really and that really is the heart of the gospel as well. Heart transformation.
Lee Ann Mancini (24:38.264)
Heart transformation. Discipline is heart transformation. And discipline means to teach, to instruct. And there’s so many ways to do that. Little ones, and I’ll have moms and dads come back who have teenagers and they’ll say, “Well, I haven’t done all of this. And now I have teenagers that don’t wanna listen to me. We don’t know where to begin.”
Candace Nassar (24:46.998)
Yes.
Candace Nassar (24:50.581)
Yes, and so.
Lee Ann Mancini (25:03.424)
And I say, simply make a sit down and say to your teenagers, I am sorry, apologize to them. Say, I am sorry that we haven’t been doing the things that we should be doing according to the word of God to raise you. So we’re going to draft a family mission statement. We’re going to talk about going to church on Sunday. There’s no excuse. We’re going to steward our funds this way. We’re going to volunteer this way as a family. And then we’re going to also draft a disciplinary contract.
Candace Nassar (25:18.721)
I love that.
Lee Ann Mancini (25:33.06)
And these are what is expected and these are the consequences that the child earns. Consequences they earn because of their disobedience. They earned that consequence. Now when you have them involved in drafting these documents, they’re more likely to adhere to them because they’ve had you know part of their hand and part of the process. And then you give them three reasons why you’re doing this that they cannot push back upon: I have to be accountable to God. I’ll stand before him, how I raised you and what I did. I’m doing this because I love you and I’m doing this to keep you safe. These are three reasons that they cannot push back. And then I’ll have a parent say, “Well, you know, we’ve done that. We wrote the family mission statement. We did the disciplinary contract, but they’re still not listening, my teenagers. They just don’t wanna listen.
And I simply say, “You have to understand that they don’t, children don’t have rights.” Now, they have rights to food, clothing, shelter, you know, of course, but they don’t have rights to the cell phone, to the computer, or to the keys to the car. And it never fails. If you restrict their freedom and those rights to use those things because of their disobedience, you’ll see how fast they get into line to obey the household rules and regulations and do it lovingly. We don’t do this in a mean tone. We do this as we’re doing this because we have to be accountable to God because we love you and we want to keep you safe.
Candace Nassar (27:12.651)
Yeah. And I think that a key part of effective discipline is building the trust in the relationship and having that communication between parent and child and listening for understanding and all those things. So yes, we have boundaries and we want to enforce consequences when needed, but we also have to have that relationship piece. And if that’s missing, you might get obedience, but you’re not going to get the heart transformation.
Lee Ann Mancini (27:42.154)
Exactly. I’m glad you said that. I think it’s so important. “Relationship” is extremely important. That’s why when they’re little and they come to you, they want to tell you something. Don’t be too busy, ever too busy unless it’s something you absolutely cannot stop for. Because if you listen to the small stuff now, they’ll tell you the big stuff later. That relationship is very important. I agree.
Candace Nassar (28:00.256)
Yes.
Candace Nassar (28:04.361)
Absolutely. as we are starting to come to the end of our time, how would you encourage parents as they start to build this spiritual foundation for their children?
Lee Ann Mancini (28:18.156)
I’d like to encourage them by telling them never to have any mommy or daddy guilt because there’s no perfect parent. We’re parenting practitioners. And as long as we’re learning from the word of God, reading, you know, parenting books, listening to the experts, listening to people like you, Candace, and your wonderful organization and putting it into practice, there should never be any mommy or daddy guilt. That’s a tool of the devil.
Candace Nassar (28:22.903)
Mmm.
Lee Ann Mancini (28:46.776)
Pray continuously, give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. So when you’re going through a turbulent time with either a two-year old toddler or a teenager having a tantrum, just take a breather and pray and ask the Holy Spirit to guide you and to lead you. And to know that you can raise strong Christian kids. And it’s not about behavior modification because that won’t work
in the long run. It works for potty training, but it won’t work when they get older because there’s never enough rewards that you can give them that’s going to keep them from not doing what they want to do. So it’s all about “heart transformation”, lovingly guiding your children, and most importantly living out the biblical principles daily that you want to instill in your children.
Candace Nassar (29:29.132)
Yeah.
Candace Nassar (29:39.467)
Yeah, that’s really good. All right. Well, how can our listeners find out more about you and your resources?
Lee Ann Mancini (29:47.116)
Well, if they go to RaisingChristianKids, that’s with an S, RaisingChristianKids .com, we have a lot of free resources. We have a segment called “Tips from the Expert Video Series”. Just go to our website and they can find everything that we have to offer and reach out to us if we can help in any way.
Candace Nassar (30:07.831)
Great. Okay. Well, thanks for your insight today, Leanne. I really appreciate it. The book is Raising Kids to Follow Christ. It is available on Amazon and definitely worth a read. So thank you again and have a blessed day.
Lee Ann Mancini (30:24.386)
Thank you, Candace.
