Gospel-Centred Parenting

One thing that many of us learned from the Covid-19 restrictions, was how to live a quieter life. Our lives became far more old fashioned; more time with the family unit, inability to travel long distances, fewer opportunities for consumerism, no family attractions open. If you experienced a time of self-isolation it was even more the case. There was plenty of time to play board games, camp in the back garden and have movie nights. The pace was slow, there was no pressure to keep up with the Jones’ (or their kids); time stretched out before us endlessly.

I wonder how you found it? How your children found it?

There were undoubtedly hard things about the restrictions, but in a way, the slow pace of life was liberating.

For 18 months or so, many children’s clubs, parties, ministries and play dates had to cease. For long periods of time schools had closed their doors and churches too.

Our children’s lives were not overscheduled. They couldn’t be.

How did the quiet, unhurried days of childhood impact you and your family?

Did your children develop new interests and hobbies during that time? Did you see sibling relationships develop? Did you have more time to develop habits of Bible study and prayer and to discuss spiritual things? Did you see your responsibility as a parent in a new light, since it was all down to you?

Now that life is returning to normal, it’s worth stopping to ponder these things. And to take lessons, learnt from the restrictions, into life going forward.

Pressure to keep up

From very early on in parenthood we experienced the pressure of feeling like we needed to “keep up”. Whether it was with baby milestones, baby classes or having the right toys for our baby’s development. Health visitor checks, product marketing, peers with babies and social media can all contribute to feeling like we need to constantly do or buy the next thing to prevent our child from falling behind and damaging their life prospects.

As a parent it’s very easy to make decisions out of fear.

This doesn’t stop in infanthood. It continues.

We need to get them into the best preschool, or make sure they are doing enough extracurricular activities, or we buy the educational app so that they don’t fall behind in phonics. We are fearful. We want to “keep up”, we don’t want to “fall behind”, in fact we want them to “get ahead”.

So we buy the next thing, sign them up to the next class, pay for the private tutor for their SATs.

But this constant comparison of ourselves and our children to other parents and children is exhausting, and not rooted in an understanding of the gospel.

The gospel of grace can free us from trying to justify ourselves, but more on that later…

Freedom from comparison

The lockdowns forced society to slow down. We didn’t need to and we couldn’t try to keep up with the Jones’. No one was getting ahead in music lessons – not even the Jones’ family, none of the kids could do gymnastics at the club, social media had no flashy day trips on it. What freedom!

But of course we don’t live our lives like that do we? God hasn’t designed us to live in isolated units where we can avoid the sin of comparison and fear by avoiding people. That’s actually to distorted view of sin anyway – sin resides in our heart, we can’t avoid it by disengaging with people.

What we need is the glorious truth of the gospel to help us to address our fears and to free us from the comparison game.

Why we don’t need to fear

It is very natural to fear as a parent, because we live in a broken world where things do not operate as they should do, however:

We don’t need to operate out of fear because we know the living God.

God the creator made our children. He entrusted them to us to parent, but ultimately they belong to him, their maker. He knows the number of hairs on their heads, he knows that they are only dust, he has every day in their lives ordained in advance before they comes to pass. He loves them. He offers out the gospel of salvation to them, made available to them through grace alone, through the death of Jesus in their place. NOT dependant on their efforts, intelligence, beauty, good behaviour, humour or popularity. His demeanour towards them is compassion and mercy. He lovingly placed them in families of faith where they can hear about his beautiful gospel. He even uses the hard, difficult things in their lives to refine them, and to work good for them.

Therefore if God is for them, who can be against them?

We don’t need to sign them up for all the classes, fearing their life prospects will be affected by us missing the right extracurricular activity. He is a sovereign God – who is ultimately in charge of their lives.

We don’t need to rank them next to other children, based on their merits. God loves everyone he made, with him there is no favouritism, and he gives every individual unique and wonderful gifts and abilities.

We don’t need to justify ourselves as parents by giving our children every single enrichment opportunity. We are parents by grace, not because we deserve it and we don’t need to prove our worth to God or to other watching eyes. Our children can “miss out” and perhaps it could be a good thing!

We don’t need to overschedule them. That’s an incredibly modern, western, first world phenomenon, and research shows it isn’t the best thing for children.

God has hardwired children to flourish when they have time with their parents, time in self-directed play, time developing close friendships (not simply acquaintances), time in the natural world that he has made, and time to be bored. None of these things require lots of money or rushing about from one activity to the next. But they do require the courage to say “no” to societal pressure to conform.

And they require faith that God will use these simple means in the life of your children.

We like extracurricular activities!

After all of that, there’s a real chance that you could think that we are anti-extracurricular activities, but this isn’t the case. Our children do a number of clubs and they are enormously beneficial.

But we want to be careful and even prayerful in the decisions we make about what activities our children do. We all only have a limited amount of time and money and we need to think carefully about where we invest it. When we say yes to anything, we are saying no to something else – so it’s important that as parents we are priority and value-led in our decision making and not just saying yes to every opportunity. And we don’t want to set a pattern in our children’s lives of them being over-busy and always feeling like they have to be productive or entertained by adults.

Questions to ask

Here are some questions you could discuss with your spouse before signing your children up to a new club:

1. Do we have the money and the time to make this commitment?
2. Why do we want them to start this club?
3. If they go to this club will we still have enough time in the week to invest in our own relationship with our child?
4. What are our family priorities and how does that determine what we do each week?
5. Will our child have enough time for unstructured play? Time in nature? Time with family? Time with friends? Time by themselves?
6. How long term is this commitment? When will we review it?
7. When in the week do we have time to be alongside our child to help them develop their faith and Christian worldview?

Pray

It may seem over the top, but we’d encourage you to pray and ask God for wisdom about what clubs you send your children to. We’ve found God to to incredibly clear in his guiding us to and against clubs in recent months.

We couldn’t get peace about a particular gymnastics class, which is God’s providence was because our middle son’s broken arm was going to take longer to heal than the doctor’s predicted. We’re so glad that we didn’t sign him up!

We also got nowhere with a particular beavers group, but God directed us to another one; which our eldest son absolutely loves and which purposely didn’t celebrate Halloween. We had no way of knowing that the Scouts leader was sympathetic to Christianity at the second beavers club, but God did!

God loves your children more than you do. He cares about how they spend their time and who influences their young hearts. As you pray about clubs he’ll direct you.

Further Reading

If you have found the topic of this blog post helpful then you may find these books helpful for further reading.

Balanced and Barefoot*

Simplicity Parenting*

The Lifegiving Parent*

For the Children’s Sake*

We all take a personal approach to social media, especially when it comes to our children. One family may not post any pictures of their children online, others only from behind, others post regularly and with pride – anecdotes, quotes and first day of school pictures get posted up. It’s great that families take different approaches – as long as you come to a conclusion thoughtfully while respecting your child then there’s freedom.

But, whatever our approach to social media, let’s not be ashamed of our highlight reel.

Let me explain…

I (Cathy) can tend to focus on the negative. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an utter idealist and romantic; completely sentimental and soppy. But, along with that, I can get really down about the bad times – especially with parenting. Now that we have a 7, 5 and 2 year old, I do know that the toddler tantrums decrease, the potty training doesn’t last forever and whatever bad vice or habit we are currently facing, may well just be a phase and a simply a symptom of childhood immaturity – but those battles are still hard in the moment.

Coming to the end of ourselves is great, because it forces us into the arms of Jesus. Jesus who can equip us with everything good for doing his will, to work in us what is pleasing to him. (Hebrews 13:20-21).

But how about the other side of the coin – the side of thankfulness and joy – when it comes to our children? The side that stops to reflect on how far we’ve come as parents, and the victories won in our children’s lives?

And that’s where the highlight reel comes in…

The highlight reel gets a bad rap – it’s accused as showing off, being insensitive, being disingenuous. But when we acknowledge that it’s simply the highlight reel, then we’re free to enjoy it and enjoy other people’s. No one photographs the arguments, the filthy debris behind the couch or the puddle of wee on the bathroom floor. Instead we photograph the firsts, the chubby cheeks and cheeky grins, the finger painting and certificate holding and medals and awards. Because those beautiful, unique moments of childhood are hard-won, once-in-a-lifetime-never-coming-back-moments. They are what make it worthwhile. We all only get one childhood, and it’s over in the blink of an eye.

So can I encourage you to start or sustain a highlight reel of your children?

It doesn’t need to be online. It could be a physical photo album, a journal where you consider what you are enjoying about your children right now, a conservation with your spouse about the joyous and humorous things your child did that day, or a family Whatsapp where the grandparents can wax lyrical about how clever and special and beautiful your munchkins are.

It’s about having an attitude of reflection and gratitude. Because when we stop to acknowledge just how incredible these little creations of God are – we bring glory to him, and are hearts are filled with wonder. Reflecting on the blessings and progress, can strengthen us to persevere on the road ahead.

Even Mary, the mother of Jesus did this; she pondered and treasured “these things” (specifically how Jesus was growing in wisdom and stature) “in her heart.” So if she did it, I think we should to. It’s not self-indulgent, it’s having a perspective that this temporary state of our children is just that, and to rejoice in the victories.

⁶ Rejoice always, ¹⁷ pray continually, ¹⁸ give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

If you’d like to follow along with our highlight reel on instragram then you can here. It doesn’t show the recesses of my sinful heart, or that of my children. It’s a celebration of the lives that God has so graciously granted. It doesn’t show the sticky window panes or towering pile of paperwork – but rest assured those things are present. This is the highlight reel – my opportunity to give thanks for his generous grace to us. What a kind God he is!

The title of this has the potential to put people right off reading it. But, before you scroll past, please just pause to give us a minute of your time.

If you strike gold, you want to tell your nearest and dearest where to go and mine the depths, right? Well, this blog post is us doing that.

Until relatively recently we had never wanted to be a screen-free (or minimal screen) family. Screens are convenient, they can keep little ones safe when you’re cooking hot food, and they can be educational too. Sometimes we feel like we need them to survive the day.

But we were noticing some unhelpful patterns in our family, not just for the children but for us adults too – screens often make us less engaged with the kids, more irritable and sometimes lazy.

As for the children, they would argue about what to watch, and would not be able to self-regulate once we turned it off. We tried watching on two devices, we tried watching only a Christian streaming service (Minno), we tried taking it in turns. But we had never tried going without screens.

Over a series of situations (nightmares from cartoons; inappropriate morality on children’s TV, violent play acting), conversations with other mums battling similar situations and things that I had read, I (Cathy) felt like God was calling me to try and massively reduce the screen time in our family.

I knew that this would be sacrificial – our 2 year old sometimes gets up at 5.30am; I knew that I couldn’t do it in my own strength; and I knew that Scott and I couldn’t be hypocritical and spend time on our phones while calling our children to occupy themselves with other endeavours.

I was contemplating the verse “Do nothing out of selfish ambition[…] but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” Would I be willing to get through fewer books on my goodreads each year (what I often do at 5.30am in the morning), have a less tidy house, engage more fully with the children for their entire waking day?

I prayed, I strewed (more about this later), I went to bed early – and the next morning I was really pleasantly surprised. No. I was astonished.

The children didn’t even ask for TV.

So back to the strewing. Strewing is something that I came across on a homeschooling blog. You basically leave out games, toys and activities to entice your children to play with them. I’m not talking about elaborately themed tuff trays here (although if you like that sort of thing then go ahead!). I simply mean, get out a colouring book and some crayons and put them on the table. Put a couple of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together and leave the rest undone. Put together the trainset. Or place the doll and her accessories on the sofa. It can actually be really fun! It’s fun to get out toys that aren’t often played with, and even more fun to set them up like they’ve been partying through the night. We enjoying putting Woody and Buzz on the piano stool as if they were playing it together, and seeing our son’s enjoyment of it the next morning.

It requires 5 minutes of getting out toys before you go to bed. But honestly, it’s so worth it!

Now before we go any further, I think it’s important to say that we usually shy away from “how-to” blog posts like this. Because this is a gospel-centred parenting blog. The gospel is the main thing. We can most definitely use screens to the glory of God. We can also be screen-free in a self-righteous way.

But as we said before, if you strike gold, you want to share the location of the gold mine with those you love. While the amount of screen time a family consumes has no effect at all on their standing before God (we are justified freely by God’s grace, not our own efforts), it is true to say that as Christians we need to live intentionally and thoughtfully in every area of our lives – seeking to bring glory to God.

Reducing the amount of screen time that the children consume has massively benefitted our family. There are far fewer arguments among the children, better engagement between parents and children and far fewer instances of unhelpful behaviour like play fighting and bad language. Rather than filling their minds with unhelpful entertainment, we get an opportunity to develop good and beautiful appetites in our children.

whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

Philippians 4:8

So if you’re wondering what the silver bullet might be for your parenting, then we’d have to of course say that there isn’t one. Parenting isn’t a formula and it certainly isn’t that easy. But for us as a family, reducing the screen time has been the nearest thing to a silver bullet that we’ve ever encountered.

Parenting is hard at the best of times. But during a pandemic it is something else!

Parents have been juggling working (often from home), with domestic tasks, with educating their children, as well as with other responsibilities to their community and church. They’ve been doing this without very much support and while living under a fog of uncertainty as to whether they will need to self-isolate and lose income and health.

Parents should be applauded for what they’ve achieved during this pandemic.

Which is why I felt really upset when I saw this…

This was sent to me by a friend of mine who has a five year old at school (yes this is his remote learning schedule) and a three year old at home who is globally developmentally delayed. She was sent this by the school in anticipation of an announcement of primary school closures in January. She felt totally daunted by this schedule and asked how I managed to homeschool with other children around.

So, in case you were wondering how home educators manage to do this with multiple children and different commitments, let me tell you the secret- we don’t. We don’t even attempt it.

Home educators wouldn’t dream of attempting anything remotely like this schedule or level of academic expectation at home or at such a young age.

But, to try prevent this blog post from becoming one long rant, let me try to offer an outline of how we as a family educate our son at home. Take or leave what you like – but I hope that it encourages you that what you manage to achieve through your child’s remote learning over this next fortnight, or during any time of self-isolation is enough.

As a side note, our child who is home educated is only 6, so he requires less time doing school work than a teenager, but he also requires almost constant supervision while he works. A teenager is already able to use IT and read and write. What I’m trying to address specifically in this blog post, is the unrealistic expectation that parents can constantly supervise and teach their young children for an entire day in the name of remote learning.

We don’t have a schedule, we have routines.

It is very easy for a schedule to go off course: if the toddler needs a nappy change, the DPD delivery comes to the door, or you have to take a work call. So rather than have a schedule with set times where you can fall behind, having routines helps to provide structure to the day while allowing flexibility for life’s unpredictability.

Our basic routines is this:

Morning devotional

Time in nature/ garden/ park – (tire out the toddler)

Lunch

Naptime/ Sitting down school work time (maths, english, speech therapy) max 2 hours

Popcorn and read-aloud time

Nap-schooling not multitasking

All our sit down work happens when our toddler is napping. Multitasking is stressful, so we don’t try to do it. Two hours is the maximum amount of time that we do maths, english and speech therapy tasks (but usually it’s much less time that this). Why don’t you figure out what this looks like for your family. Maybe time the school’s online videos with you work call, or cut out completely what is unrealistic and focus in on a few non-negotiables.

All of life is educational

While your children are learning at your home, you are free to have a different philosophy to the school’s philosophy of education. All of life is educational. It doesn’t have to be academic for it to count. Baking, jigsaw puzzles, orchard toys, board games, letter writing, audio books, lego, fancy dress, crafting, playing in the garden all count, and are actually the foundation of a happy, developmentally healthy education. So embrace it. Send them off to play and don’t feel guilty about it. If they get enough time to play, chances are they will perform better when you ask them to do their set work for school.

Trust your instincts

As your child’s parent you know them best. If your child is resisting doing the work for you or not engaging with what has been set, then know when to ditch it. During the first lockdown our then five year old really struggled to engage with the online maths programme that school were using (and we weren’t very comfortable with so much screen time for him). So we purchased some “Maths No Problem” textbooks and workbooks and helped him do those instead. He was far more engaged and it was much more pleasant experience for everyone. We informed the school and everyone was happy.

Partner with the school but don’t be dictated to by the school

Teachers are amazing creatures, who have done an absolute sterling job during the duration of this pandemic. They have adapted to so many changes, with very little notice and have sacrificed a huge amount to serve our children. They deserve a pay rise, all our respect and lots of kind words from us. Actually the school that our 4 year old attends have been really brilliant. Giving us lots of resources and suggestions while making it known that not every family will be able to do everything that they set. They have been a great support and wonderful to partner with, but our understanding is that this isn’t always the case.

If you are being asked to “homeschool” your children at home, know your limits, know your child, know your existing responsibilities and know when to say no. Or just don’t do it all – the teacher will figure it out, and they will understand. They are paid to teach your children, in a specially adapted space, with training and resources; they will understand that your situation is different and that you simply cannot do it all.

Jesus is with us

Jesus knows what it feels like to be overwhelmed, to be stressed, to be responsible for needy people, to face uncertainty and difficulty and despair. He is sympathetic to you in this. He doesn’t expect you to have it all together or get it all perfect or to be brave. I read this recently in Dane Ortland’s amazing book “Gentle and Lowly” and I found it hugely comforting:

“Contrary to what we expect to be the case, therefore, the deeper into weakness and suffering and testing we go, the deeper Christ’s solidarity with us. As we go down into pain and anguish, we are descending ever deeper into Christ’s very heart, not away from it. Look to Christ. He deals gently with you. It’s the only way he knows how to be. He is the high priest to end all high priests. As long as you fix your attention on your sin, you will fail to see how you can be safe. But as long as you look to this high priest, you will fail to see how you can be in danger. Looking inside ourselves, we can anticipate only harshness from heaven. Looking out to Christ, we can anticipate only gentleness.”

So if primary schools do close, and remote learning becomes the expectation over the next few weeks, then prayer is that you can go into the next few weeks with the pressure off. Jesus deals gently with you. Please deal gently with yourself and your children too.

We are really blessed in our church to have Amy. Amy works for our church full time doing various things including pastoral ministry but focusing on evangelism.

She has been brilliant at mobilising the mums in our church in their outreach. Before lockdown she was helping us to run several courses inluding “wonderfully made” and “Christianity explored” and we were seeing exciting fruit from that.

But during lockdown she’s continued to encourage us to reach out with the gospel despite social distancing.

I wanted to share her event idea with you, because it was really encouraging and fruitful, and perhaps it is something that your local church could do too (although aim to do it quickly, as who knows when lockdown restrictions will be lifted?!).

So the event was called “COVID-19, Homeshcooling and Hope”. It included three 5 minute slots by a different mum in our church who shared some stories about trying to homeschool their children during lockdown (funny, real and sweet stories) and then a “tip” of something that they had tried and had some measure of success with during crisis-schooling. The tone was very conversational, of ordinary mums trying to muddle through, and certainly not as experts. After each slot, we would go into breakout groups (we tried to keep friendship groups together to make conversation easier, to give people another reason to attend the event – i.e. to see friends virtually, and to make follow-up easier). Then there was a 10 minute evangelistic talk at the end of it. If you would like to hear an audio of the event, either for your own encouragement or out of interest then subscribe to our mailing list and you’ll receive a link to all our downloadable material, including this talk. If you’re already a subscriber, look out for this week’s round up of posts in your inbox (it should come on Monday), and we’ve added a link to the download page into that email too.

Also, if you would like to do a similar thing at your church then I am happy to send you my evangelistic talk script, and you can just edit it to use your own anecdotes.

We were really excited by the response to the event. We had 25 mums attend, 17 of which were guests. There seemed to be a real appetite for connecting with other parents, for chatting this stuff through and for the message of hope too.

So Amy and her graphic design fiance designed a 5 week follow-up course and booklet. Based on the same themes as “wonderfully made”, but edited to make it applicable to parents of older children who are crisis-schooling.

The format is similar – 1 mum will have a 5 minute slot on an area of crisis-schooling, another mum will have a 5 minute slot to talk about a common problem area in parenting, and then a 5 minute pre-evangelistic talk (we hope this might lead onto a Christianity explored course once wonderfully made is finished). Between each of these talks, there is time for discussion in breakout groups.

We would encourage you to try something similar with your friends or as your local church. If you have any questions about how this could work in your context just send us a message, I’d be really happy to help, or maybe get Amy to call you – she’s so winsome and encouraging, you’ll be pumped up to do it!

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