One of my parishioners posed the question about parenting five children. My general answer–which can be applied to 1 or 11 children–is that it comes with all sorts of inherent traps related to doubts about whether we are doing well or whether they will end up on the front page of the city paper for the right or wrong reasons. I confess my skepticism about parents who act as if the struggle is not necessary.
Because of my role in the community, I receive lots of questions on parenting and I happily oblige with my thoughts, but never from the standpoint of achievement, but from the perspective of mutually pursuing the good of our little ones; and certainly not as an expert, but as a traveler on the yellow-brick road. I begin by asserting that I am in the middle of the battle with five kids ranging from 4-13. Everything is fresh and applicable, and it is a lot easier to opine when the experiences are literally running around your feet.
Whatever piece of wisdom I offer may stem from the incalculable amount of hours I’ve spent reading and writing on parenting over the last 15 years and hopefully, and primary, a heavy dose of biblical wisdom. But as we all know, the entire process is a flurry of unexpectedness. Parenting is not formulaic, it’s relational adjustments momentarily and momentously. Parenting is the art of adjusting to circumstances well.
As a member of the hated patriarch, I support a healthy dose of rituals that shape a home. Some things ought to be consistent like a Tom Brady Superbowl ring. Family worship should happen consistently, but not rigidly like a Puritan songbook. Table dinners together should happen as frequently as possible. But none of these things are Gospel necessities. We are not saved by food or singing, but by faith alone. Faith manifests itself in food and singing and Bible reading and table fellowship, but those are not the final ingredients of justification. Of course, my entire public writing history is a history of encouraging those endeavors as unto the Lord. But I hope I have not treated them as a self-help manual.
However, but, therefore, alas, ergo, the essence of parenting is the existential perspective. Parenting is not looking to what our children should be, but building our little humans now. Of course, we should all have some vision for where we want them to be, but the danger of majoring on that point is that we too often become the critical religious leaders in the now when that unblemished image is marred in some way. We crush our children because Thursday did not look like Tuesday. Guilty as charged.
Let’s assume we have a terrible day of parenting where we spent the entire day practicing spanking rituals and we are exhausted enough that the only solution after they go down is to make the heart glad with a glass of wine or two, then we ponder, “What did I do wrong?” The answer is not to bask on what you did wrong, but on what you did right. Parental strategies occur well when there is a commitment to drawing children into the blessedness of God. They must know that their actions are good and desirable. (“Son, I was so proud of you when you helped your brother in the kitchen this morning”) If so much of the dialogue is the spirit-crushing variety, it’s often because that image you have has become an idol.
The point is that parenting can too easily be seduced into an apocalyptic nightmare. If our child does not act like the well-trained 6-year-old scholar, we run into despair. Remember, however, that the whole business of “out of the heart the mouth speaks” still applies no matter how well prepared a child may look. The most obscene figures in our society are well-put-together human beings.
The faithful parent sees each trial as a step into more faithfulness. I offer this as an example of the kind of parenting wisdom we needed some years ago:
When our child was really tiny, there was a mom who was fond of corrections. Mind you, we were in our 20’s with a newborn and what we needed was the kind of masterful encouragement that bore fruit in perseverance. But in this case, this mom added her incessant creative solutions to help our child stop crying, or behave better, or nurse better. You can take one or two words of wisdom, but when such a fellow traveler begins to offer unsolicited advice, then we call such folks societal nuisances. Quickly I discovered that such people would not make good friends for my wife nor for my little tribe.
Parenting is done best in the daily walk, not in the ideal. If we hide the struggle while pursuing the ideal, we will die in the pursuit. Friends whose first response to your parenting trials is to offer alternative structures to everything are not really friending your parenting, but acting as demoralizers. Parents of little ones need other parents who can come alongside and gently add the comfort of the Spirit when things are in survival mode around the house, and add a point of exhortation when you are beginning to treat parenting like a hippie–“Let Jonny do as he pleases!”Communities embody a cohesive system of parenting, especially the longer they are together. That’s good and noble. But if the standard is unreachable and captain sad-you-see treats your parenting like an opportunity to exercise his great gift of discernment, that’s a loss to the community-building exercise. No one wants a community where their acts are judged prematurely and unlovingly.
When you are at the stage we were 13 years ago with all the book knowledge and no practical experience, seek the blessing of a family who is a little or relatively ahead of you and pour your question-repertoire upon them. Let them bless you with their lessons, and if they are gentle souls who are honest about the trying little years, buy them good food and seek them as often as they are able to found. Those are the people you wish to grow into as parents. The same applies to any stage of parenting. The secret is that there is no secret, but faithful living and faithful inquiry and faithful trying and failing and trying and living more faithfully as a father or mother. To “train up a child” is not a slogan for formulaism, it’s a proverb for the long, painful, but joyful and learning process of parenting. Parenting is forming humans now, not idealizing the “when.”
Paint the beautiful picture, but do not forget the millions of dots that compose that picture. Each step is grace to cover our faults and to join our hearts to our children and theirs to ours. Go in peace to live another day in that grace.
