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:
- Do we have the money and the time to make this commitment?
- Why do we want them to start this club?
- If they go to this club will we still have enough time in the week to invest in our own relationship with our child?
- What are our family priorities and how does that determine what we do each week?
- Will our child have enough time for unstructured play? Time in nature? Time with family? Time with friends? Time by themselves?
- How long term is this commitment? When will we review it?
- 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.