Reasonable Faith

Guest (Male): Hi Dr. Craig, thank you for your contributions to Christian theology and philosophy. I am interested in pursuing a PhD in philosophy and teaching, God willing, at some point in the future. However, my wife and I are also prayerfully considering having children. I have concerns that having children will make further education or career changes difficult. I have a few questions for you.

One, in your experience, if you have experienced it or know others who have, how did you balance raising children and pursuing higher education? What advice would you give, if recommended at all? Two, how did you handle your personal spiritual life, prayer, scripture reading, etc., with developing your children's spiritual life and family devotional time?

Three, how did you maintain a life of constant learning and writing papers, books, while raising children? How did you find or make the time? I appreciate any feedback. Thank you again for your help. Sergio, United States.

Dr. William Lane Craig: I’m glad that you asked me simply to share my personal experience, Sergio, rather than to give advice. The decision to start a family while pursuing graduate studies is certainly an enormous choice. Jan and I decided to delay starting a family until my graduate studies in philosophy and theology were completed. So, our daughter Charity was not born until our tenth wedding anniversary.

I’m so glad that we waited. Neither Jan nor I felt the compulsion to start a family, and we were very happy together. Having no children gave us enormous flexibility to move about during my doctoral studies in England and Germany. Not only did being alone together enable me to focus on my studies, but it also gave us the opportunity to get to know each other better and build our relationship before the disruption of children entered the scene.

By the time we had Charity, I had a full-time job as a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and so could provide for my family. That being said, I agree with those who say that the decision to have children rests ultimately with the wife. If your wife really wants to have children now, then you should not deny her that privilege. Refusing to start a family when she wants to could foster tremendous resentment that would have long-lasting negative effects on your relationship.

So, if she wants to have children while you are in graduate school, you should agree to do so and just deal with the academic consequences. Remember, your personal relationship is far more important in God's sight than your academic success. Besides taking our children faithfully to Sunday school and church and providing them Christian illustrated books to read, every night after supper, I would read to the children from an illustrated comic book Bible.

The pictures, which were very well drawn, really made the stories come alive. Then we would pray before doing other evening activities. It's important that you as the husband take the leadership in this area rather than leaving it to your wife. We do not want our children to have any feminine image of Christianity. We want them to understand that Jesus was a man's man and that strong men follow him.

Here's the paradox, and I'm not kidding. I actually became more productive after Charity was born than I was before. I wrote and published more things after she came on the scene. I don't understand how this is possible, but it happened. This was not achieved by taking time in the evenings or on the weekends away from the family to devote to study.

I had already made a pledge to Jan that I would not study in the evenings or on the weekends, and that pledge continued to hold after we started our family. I think that this sort of commitment drives one to become extremely productive in the workday hours that one does have. Rather than sitting about or shooting the breeze, I devoted every minute of my working hours to my philosophical and theological studies.

The consequence was tremendous efficiency and productivity. The point is that I did not have to sacrifice our principles in order to do this, but simply to become better at time management. May the Lord guide you as you seek to integrate your studies and family life.