Being a parent is a joyful struggle. In my mind, it’s pure, undistilled hospitality: “Hey there! Make yourself at home … forever.”
As with any act of hospitality, there can be so much joy—there’s a new perspective on the world to discover and appreciate as it forms and matures; a new heart to embrace with all its loves and dreams and fears.
But as with any act of hospitality, there can also be struggles. This new perspective doesn’t know your way of doing things; their ways may irk you. This new heart may love different things, dream in different directions, or fear peculiar things—all of which makes everyday tasks more complicated, like breakfast, shopping, or going to the toilet.
Unlike other acts of hospitality, there is a pressure and constancy with parenting that can make it more difficult. Even change itself is constant, such that raising children often feels like we’re always playing catchup.
So here are three very different resources I’ve found particularly helpful as I navigate this parental calling.
Because of the constant change, eventually even the staples are dismissed. Along with toast, Thomas and pasta, our kids sometimes—sadly—move on from Colin and Emu Kids (and these should be staples in every home!)
We’ve really enjoyed discovering a new(ish) band to throw in the mix: Awesome Cutlery. We have found that they prompt not only singing and dancing, but also great chats about God, his world, and our place in it.
This band is aimed at primary schoolers, but our preschoolers enjoy them and I’m sure some highschoolers would enjoy them too. In all three albums they weave together skits, songs, and Scripture to make deep theological truths remarkably simple and clear, in a way that sounds great and is hilarious.
In their skit ‘Party’, for example, and the related song ‘God Doesn’t Have a Birthday’ they explore God’s eternity, Jesus’ incarnation and our second birth—all in simple terms that retain the precision and clarity necessary to teach these truths in a way that doesn’t require us to undo them later on.
What’s more, instead of running away from mystery, they lean into it: it’s okay for God to “blow our minds” because “he is infinite, and I’m just a limited me”. That alone has helped us navigate tricky questions without feeling the need to go beyond the Scriptures.
2. The Parent Hope Project by Jenny Brown
The pressure and the constancy of parenting can often make us feel like we’re going backwards as Christians. We long to grow in the Spirit’s fruit so that our family receives gentleness and compassion from us. Yet in reality we sometimes find ourselves responding with harshness or strictness or shouting.
This can lead to what some have called the ‘shame cycle’: we feel deeply ashamed about how we parented in this or that moment –> we avoid dealing with it but say, ‘never again’ –> in a moment of stress we find ourselves doing it again! –> we start to reinforce an identity: “I’m a terrible parent and a terrible Christian!”
This can feel like such a powerless, hopeless and lonely place to be.
If you’ve ever felt that in your parenting, no matter how many years through the parenting journey you are, I’d recommend listening to the Parent Hope Project by Jenny Brown.
Jenny is a follower of Jesus and a clinical psychologist who specialises in Bowen Family Systems Theory. Family Systems Theory is a branch of psychology that explores how a family or community manages anxiety through relationship patterns. Our families shape our instincts, behaviours and habits. The Scriptures also testify to this: we inherit and cultivate the ways of those before us and around us (Rom 12:1-2; 1 Cor 15:33-34; Eph 4:22; 1 Pet 1:14-18).
This is one reason why growth in the Christian life can feel so hard and take so long. We come to Jesus with various histories, and overcoming these histories often means overcoming automatic and instinctive responses. For example, I may want to bring my calm and gentle self to this moment of discipline or be a source of wisdom and support to my adult child (my values), but find myself yelling, nagging, or preaching again (my automatic responses).
This podcast is Jenny’s attempt to bring together her clinical expertise and her Christian faith to give parents help and hope. Her big idea is that when it comes to parenting, the parent—not the child—is the project. She uses this framework to help us bring our responses in line with our values. To put that in theological terms, it’s focusing on how God is using parenthood as a means of grace to grow us more like Christ. Jenny not only gives an overview of her framework and how it helps parents, but also focuses on each stage of development and some crisis moments.
This is not an exclusively Christian resource, but it springs from Christian values and assumptions, and Jenny’s hope is that it helps Christian parents continue to grow as they humbly observe themselves and then prayerfully apply the power and security of the gospel to their hearts.
Family Systems thinking can be helpful, but it’s a secular framework that, on its own, doesn’t bring any positive values, other than self-differentiation. Instead, we need to plug in some biblical values. We need to answer, ‘What kind of a parent do I want to be in this or that situation?’
This touches on a deeper question that many of us struggle to answer: who am I and what am I called to be and do as a parent?
Paul Tripp tackles this in his book Parenting. He is not writing a ‘how to’; rather he wants give parents gospel principles that build clarity and confidence in the parental calling.
Parenting springs from Tripp’s concern that legalism’s final stronghold was parenting. He felt that many parents expect the law to generate what only the gospel can: heart transformation. We might not articulate that the way we speak about parenting, but in our thinking, we can often believe that the right routines, rules, and discipline, as well as a lot of Bible, will generate the right behaviour in our children.
Yet that’s not how the law works. Yes, we need to teach what is good. Yes, we need rules, boundaries and discipline. And yes, those things can restrain and shape behaviour. But those things alone don’t change the heart; they reveal the heart and restrain evil. Grace is what changes the heart, and Tripp’s big focus is that parents are called to be ambassadors of God’s grace in the lives of the children entrusted to them.
This book offers lots of conceptual help, often in pithy yet profound phrases, such as “Every moment I am parenting, God is parenting me” and “Parenting is one unending conversation so we can be patient with the process of change” and “I’m more like my kids than unlike them”.
This book also offers practical help. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve asked my children the same set of heart revealing questions: What was happening? How did that make you feel? What did you do? Why did you do it? What was the result?
These little discipleship moments have helped him to see the “thoughts and intentions” of his heart (Heb 4:12) and his need for rescue, but they have also helped me to remember that I’m not called to extract the right behaviour from him by any means necessary. I’m called instead to be an instrument of grace in his life, the voice of the gospel and the embrace of God’s mercy even as I hold out the law.