Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing

I read this quote from the Puritan Cotton Mather on the importance of keeping the main thing the main thing for Christian parents.

Before all, and above all, ’tis the knowledge of the Christian religion that parents are to teach their children…The knowledge of other things, though it be never so desirable an accomplishment for them, our children may arrive to eternal happiness without it…But the knowledge of the godly doctrine in the words of the Lord Jesus Christ is of a million times more necessity for them.

We can stop feeling guilty about our children not being in a sports team, or being unable to attend music lessons or other activities. These are good things, but if we forgo these because spiritual development and family relationships are more important to us, we do well.

How to Have ‘Easy’ Children

It is not an infrequent experience for my wife and I to be complimented our children’s behaviour in public. I say this as a matter of fact and not in order to boast. After all, I get to see my kids at home, and these observers do not. I know their wicked little hearts! It does seem however that people are genuinely surprised when children sit politely at a table and eat nicely at a restaurant, or follow Mum around the supermarket without whining and throwing tantrums.

Part of the reason for the surprise is a now widespread and defective philosophy of child-rearing. Faulty philosophy has an unfortunate tendency to lead to faulty action. Many young parents have imbibed a child-centred philosophy from their own upbringing and schooling, and combined with their naively optimistic view of human nature, they carry this with them into their parenting.

Recently when talking with some young couples without kids about disciplining children, we surprised them when they asked what a parent should do to train truculent and disobedient toddlers.

Our rule of thumb is that as soon as the child is able to deliberately disobey (and that happens from around 6-9 months for example when they refuse to lie still when you are changing a nappy), you must sternly reprimand them and as appropriate force them to do what they are told. This may mean a sharp tap on the hand, or as they become a bit older, on the bottom although in NZ these days you might need to be careful should you use this kind of physical discipline, and may need to consider how best you can force your toddler to do what he is told without falling foul of the law. The goal of a parent in the early years say until around 5 must be to aim for instant obedience. Your children must learn to come under your authority without question or delay. That is probably the most important lesson you can teach your children in the early years, and will set you up for a more pleasant parenting experience in the primary school years.

So our young friends were surprised by the fact that force would be used on a toddler. This lack of experience and knowledge leads to one of the most disturbing trends I have seen in the parenting of toddlers – attempting to reason with them. Never reason with a toddler. Never get down to their level and put on a soft wheedling voice pleading with them to use reason and do the right thing. Readers, I’m sure you’ve seen something like the following scenario.

“Now Jack, we mustn’t stand on the blocks or we might break them, and then we won’t be able to play with them any more,” pleads the careworn Mum while the little (parent-made) monster Jack grins malevolently back at Mum with a ‘Try make me’ look in his eyes.

What a parent must do is show that they are a loving but strong authority who must be obeyed immediately. If Jack has been asked to get off the blocks and is dilly-dallying, grab him immediately and take him off the blocks and in a stern no-nonsense voice, say something like, “Mummy said off !” Fewer words are better and more memorable. Emotional lectures are a waste of time. The message must be simple and short and backed up with your physical presence and action. If at home and away from nosey do-gooders, a little tap on the hand to remind him to obey immediately in the future will not hurt him, but likely save him from a whole lot of trouble later.

Failure to act as the authority in your child’s life from in these early years will turn young children into brats who other adults will secretly (or not so secretly) hate to be around. And as Jordan Peterson argues in his 12 Rules for Life, that is not good for them.

Well-behaved children who are a delight to be around are the result of firm training in these early years. One of the most annoying things my wife and I hear is “But you’ve got easy children.” Our experience has been that almost every one of our children have been difficult in the early years. Some have been more compliant and willing to come under authority, but others have been determined to push the boundaries and refuse to come under authority for some time. Persistance in crushing this rebelliousness has been hard but has paid dividends for them. Yes, that’s right for the child.

Some may object to the use of phrases like crushing rebellion as unloving. Get rid of this weakness. Parents have a God-given duty to discipline children and train them up. What is truly unloving is caring about your own feelings of dislike for discipline and upsetting your children than for the child himself. Rebellion and sin lead to death, and no loving parent wants that.

God’s word puts it bluntly. “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him” You might think those feelings preventing you from disciplining your children are loving feelings, but the action they give birth to is not love but hatred. Discipline is the sign of a loving parent. God disciplines those he loves, those who are his sons. If we refuse to discipline our children we are treating them as if they are bastards (Hebrews 12:7).

Idolatry and Family

Over the past few years, I’ve heard and read a troubling little concept. It runs along the lines of “we’ve got to be careful we are not idolising family.” One time I have heard this is in response to parents who spend significant amounts of money on Christian education. What intrigues me about this is that these warnings to avoid idolising family are becoming more and more common in a period of history when family seems to be less and less important even in Christian circles. It seems to me that we are as a whole less likely to idolise family than previous generations. So what’s going on?

First of all, let’s think about idolatry. What is it? Well, of course, one way of thinking about it is placing something before God. God alone is to be at the centre of our lives. He rules, and we worship him alone. Thus far so good. Nobody I know is encouraging fathers or mothers to hold their families as more important than God.

Another way to think about idolatry is disordered desires. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo wrote on this subject. He said, “Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves that less or more which ought to be loved equally.” (On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28)

So what does this mean for the family? Yes, we can be involved in the sin of idolatry if we love family more than it ought to be loved. One example of this would be if we are not willing to give up our family for the sake of Christ. This is a very real issue for say a Muslim convert.

But I would suggest that in the Western world, we are more likely to be guilty of a disordered desire in the other direction. We are more likely to love our family less than we should. Is spending thousands of dollars a year to give your children a Christian education idolising your children? Of course not. It’s simple obedience to the king. In fact, I suspect that most reasons for not obeying God’s requirement to train our children ‘Christianly’ is rooted in some other idolatry. We have actually loved something more than family when we should have loved it less.

So the next time you hear someone talking about idolising family, ask yourself, “Why are we so prone to identifying as an idol the thing which is least likely in our cultural milieu to be one? Perhaps we do it to excuse ourselves from doing the hard work of what we ought to be doing. In this case, prioritising our families as highly as God calls us to.

Four Aspects of Training Parents are Responsible For

A biblical view of education holds parents, and particularly fathers responsible for the training of children. At the end of the day, fathers will stand before God and have to give an account of how their children were trained. So today, we will briefly look at the four aspects of training parents are responsible for.

First of all, we are responsible for what we personally teach our children about God’s world. Christian parents are called by God to train their children to know and love God. In Deuteronomy 6, Moses tells God’s people, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Godly parents do not just love God with all their heart, soul and might, they teach that love to their children. Here in Deuteronomy, this is framed as an all of life thing. This teaching happens everywhere.

So secondly, we should see that as parents we are responsible for what we model to our children. So much of teaching goes beyond the words we say. It is the model we provide. For instance, as parents we might teach that we should obey God rather than men, but if our interactions with others indicate an unhealthy fear of man and we are unable to stand up for truth when it counts, we are providing our children with a mixed message lesson.

Thirdly, as parents we are responsible for the teachers we place over our children through avenues such as school and sport. This matters. When we as parents place our child under the tutelage of another adult, we do not magically hand our responsibility over. It’s not as if God’s understanding of the family shifts in this instant. No, fathers are still the heads of their household, and they are still responsible at this point too. Now, this should have implications for who we decide to place in teaching authority over our children. Jesus himself pointed out, “The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.” Is your child’s atheist teacher at school who you want your child to be like? Is the coach who teaches children to ‘look deep inside themselves for strength’ helpful to your child’s spiritual formation?

Finally, we are responsible for the indirect teaching that happens to our children based on what our children do in their spare time. This is perhaps the area we as parents think least about. The most obvious example of danger here is in our children’s discretionary screen time. Most of us are careful about who we let come around and babysit our children. Most of us want our children’s school teachers to be men and women of integrity. Are we applying this to the digital realm? We wouldn’t let a transgender or LGBT activist into our house to lecture our children about affirming a friend who is ‘coming out’. Nor would we let a woman into our house who had the design of performing a strip-tease show or demonstrating sexual positions. And yet, without proper parental responsibility in the area of screens, we may be actually unintentionally allowing these things.

So there you have it. We are responsible for not only what we teach and model to our children, but also who we place in a teaching position over them, and also the indirect teaching they receive through what we allow them to do in their spare time. This should drive us to greater thoughtfulness in each of these areas.

Tell the Coming Generations

It’s an odd thing that those who should be most concerned with education place so little emphasis on it. For the Christian parent, next to ensuring the salvation of their own soul, their next greatest priority is the spiritual welfare of their children. And yet the Western Christian, by and large, has not connected the dots.

Asaph in Psalm 78 does. He writes, “things….that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might, and the wonders that he has done.” In fact ‘telling’ the next generation is not just something for super-spiritual Christian parents. No, it is the command of God for us all. Asaph continues, “He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children.” It’s not a small thing to fail to pass on our faith to our children. It is disobedience against the Almighty.

What is the expected result of following God’s commands in this aspect of life? It is a passing on of the faith. Asaph writes “that the next generation might know them [the laws of God], the children yet unborn and arise and tell them to their children.” We see a passing on of the knowledge of God’s law from one generation to the next to the next. But the ultimate result of all this is “so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments; and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.” The command is designed to produce a people faithful to God.

It seems to me that Asaph’s general expectation is that as we teach the next generation the law of God, then that generation should set its hope in God and avoid the sin of willful rebellion against him.

What do we see today in God’s church in the West? We see successive generations of the church being smaller. Many leave the faith as they hit adulthood, and never come back. The church seems weak. Congregations are often ageing, and even those churches which are youthful are often filled with people who could be accused of being more in love with the social norms of the day than the law of God. A generalization to be sure but accurate.

Could it be that families are failing in their duty to teach their children? Could it be that Sunday school once a week, prayers before meals, the odd short devotional after dinner combined with the fun party atmosphere of youth group on Fridays cannot withstand the daily assault they are suffering from the secularists who run our education system? Might we be suffering the just rebuke of God for our idolatrous worship of the state and the handing over to Caesar what rightly belongs to God?

COVID 19 Offers A Chance to Alter Course on Parenting

In my daily skim of the news recently, I came across this article bemoaning the government’s response to COVID 19. Why? According to the Ministry for Women. the government’s approach favoured men and was likely to exacerbate gender inequalities.

How so? Well, apparently the ‘shovel ready’ projects benefit workforces that are dominated by men, whereas women tend to make up a larger component of industries such as retail, hospitality and tourism which have been hard hit. Now I don’t really want to get into whether the government’s response to the economic situation, that they by their actions have foisted upon us, is wise or not.

What I do want to look at is one particular quote in the article.

Impact of COVID 19 on Women in the Workforce

Professor Jennifer Curtin, the head of the University of Auckland’s Public Policy Institute is quoted in the article.

My concern about this shovel ready, Ministry of Works, nostalgic spending is that, what happens if too many women lose their jobs, then can’t find a job, and end up staying home and taking care of children?

I read this and thought. Wow, that could be great! Imagine that. An economic crisis that forces us to think about more than just money. An opportunity for families to see value in the home economy and the little lives there. But no, I obviously missed the point. Curtin continued.

Then we end up looking like we looked like in the 1950s. Back to the same old breadwinner model where the bread-winner was the guy.

It’s hardly an argument, but it seems that we must assume that if this economic crisis caused women to stay home and care for children that would be bad. Why? Reading between the lines Curtin might be arguing it is bad because it’s an old model, and gives men more power and women less opportunity to work outside the home.

What is Progress?

But what evidence do we have that the 1950s model was worse than the one we have today? From whose perspective are we making this value judgment? As a child, I appreciated the fact that my mother stayed at home and cared for me. As a teacher, I see kids starved of a mother’s love who could do with a more old fashioned hands-on approach.

Curtin herself, in questioning the budgeting process wants a gender-responsive system where government agencies have to explicitly ask who benefits from policies and address inequalities. Perhaps that thinking should be applied to our children. What benefits them? Would having Mum at home help or hinder their development as human beings? What does true social progress look like?

Well, the research is in. Having a Mum at home for young children, and being home for children when they return from school is best. If you are interested in reading further into this and are not concerned about the inconvenience it might cause your family should you be convinced, a place to begin would be Mary Eberstadt’s Home-Alone America. She looks into the impact that family-child separation has in a number of areas. The book investigates the impact of daycare, as well as other negative effects of typical modern patterns of family life. From obesity to mental health to STDs, our modern patterns of child-raising have wreaked havoc in the lives of countless children.

Unfortunately, as adults, we tend to focus on getting what we want, and the voiceless children struggle to get what they need. So when issues occur in the lives of our children, we don’t look at our lifestyles. Eberstadt notes that “the passionate desire to attribute today’s behavioural and mental problems to inanimate suspects…despite serious evidence to the contrary shows us how reflexively our society fastens on to some explanation, any explanation that does not involve parents.”

So while Curtin might disparage the return of Mums to the home as a result of COVID 19 as some kind of backwards step, perhaps a backwards step is what we need if we are to make positive social progress. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity pointed out that progress is not always forward.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Photo by Jon Flobrant

Maybe we took a wrong turn in our approach to families and childcare. The explosion of mental health issues in children surely tell us something has gone wrong. Statements like Curtin’s devalue children and those who raise children. Implicit in her thinking is that to lose a job and be forced to be at home and raise one’s own children is a backward step. But perhaps these precious little eternal souls are more important than pushing paper from one office to another. Maybe, just maybe, heading back to a more 1950s arrangement might actually be a step forward for many families.

Let’s Think Holistically

Finally, might it not be worth thinking more holistically? Instead of focussing on whether men are getting a better deal, or women are being unfairly treated, I wonder what it would look like if we started thinking of ourselves in terms of households? What if we considered the household as one team? In a team, you have a captain, and you have people playing different positions, but every player has a role to play in winning the game. If we approached the family as a team rather than in an individualistic manner, what might change? What would it look like if fathers captained their families and considered the common good of everyone in their household?

Levi and Mike Discuss Education

In a previous post we looked at cultural blind spots and chronological snobbery. One cultural blindspot Christians often have is in the area of education. Imagine for a moment, a first-century Jew, a recent convert to Christianity was suddenly and miraculously transported into the 21st century West. Trapped in our time, unable to get back he finds a Christian home to stay in. He would no doubt be impressed by our technology, the abundance and variety of food we enjoy and our ability to travel easily and relatively cheaply. I imagine he’d marvel at the ready access we have to the apostles’ words. He might be disappointed by our zeal. There would also no doubt be many cultural differences that might make understanding difficult.

But I put it to you, that he would be absolutely shocked by our take on education.

Imagine no longer. How I managed to record the following conversation, and by what method Levi, our first century Christian Jew managed to be transported to Auckland New Zealand in the year 2020 must remain a secret.  The key thing is I have the conversation. He’s chatting with his host Mike, father of a 21st century Western Christian family. Can I apologise for Levi in advance? He did not grow up in our pluralistic tolerant age. Consider that your trigger-warning.

Levi: Brother, why do your children leave the house every day and stay at school for so long?

Mike: Well, they’re going to school. It’s important. They need a good education.

Levi: What do you mean by that?

Mike: Well, our world is a complex place. To get a good job, they are going to need to understand it properly.

Levi: Well yes, I entirely agree that children need to understand God’s world. But my question is: why do you send your children to pagans to educate? Your daughter informed me yesterday, that her teacher claimed that Darwin’s theory of evolution means there is no God, and your son said his teacher was explaining the importance of accepting people’s choice of gender. I had to question him to find out what that meant!

Mike: Yes, I have to admit, we are not happy about that, but children have to go to school. It’s compulsory.

Levi: That’s incredible. I didn’t imagine that in the future people would be so fettered by the ruling authorities that they could no longer make decisions about discipling their children.

Mike: Well, there are different types of schools. There are Christian schools – but they cost money, and you can try to get an exemption to homeschool, but that would mean Mandy would have to stay at home to teach the children, and she loves her career.

Levi: But didn’t the apostle Paul say in his epistle to the Ephesians, that fathers, that’s you Mike, are to  not provoke your children to anger, but to instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

Mike: How is that relevant Levi? I read the Bible to my children after dinner. I pray for them. I take them to church with me and they have a good Sunday school programme there.

Levi: Well do you think a 10 minute chat once a day and an hour on Sundays in Kids Church fulfils your obligations?

Mike: I guess I could do more. But school’s really just about learning Maths and English you know. How to write and stuff like that.

Levi: But don’t you believe what Paul says of Christ in his epistle to the Colossians? He says, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Mike: How is that relevant? I don’t understand. What do you mean?

Levi: Well Paul is reflecting on how the Son is the creator of all things and they were created for him, and they hold together in him. What do you mean by saying “They’re just learning Maths and English …how to write and stuff like that?” Are these things part of the created order that exist for the Son? Are they separate to it? And if not, why are you letting pagans who supress the truth about God train your young and impressionable children to do these things in a setting where the trainers deny the Lordship of Christ and his relevance to the universe he brought into being?

Mike: Hold on a minute. Yes I believe what Colossians says. But what’s the harm in getting unbelievers to teach my children how to do Maths, write a sentence…you know, that sort of thing. Isn’t that just part of the common grace that God gives to people?

Levi: Let’s grant you that point for the moment. Although I think you’ll find that what people believe necessarily taints everything. But do you really think that’s all your children learn? What about all of the incidental learning that goes on in the classroom every day? The teacher’s attitude to life, their understanding of the purpose of all learning, their approach to the issues of the day. Do you think that all of this is not going to come out in a classroom? Why, your daughter said yesterday at the dinner table that Ms Halcombe had told the class that her entire job could be summed up as enabling the students to be who they want to be?! You’d think she was the very serpent in the garden himself with words like that!

Photo by Daria Shevtsova

Mike: But Levi, Christ called us to be in the world. We can’t abandon the world. This way our children get to understand the world’s perspective on life, and we can show them how it is wrong. They can also be salt and light, just as Jesus wanted us to be.

Levi: Mike! Let me share you the wisdom that comes from history. We Jews have a sorry history that can teach you a lot. Do you know the story of the Judges? Do you know what led to that terrible period in our history?

Mike: Well, surely you can’t be arguing that it was because your people sent their children to non-Jewish schools?

Levi: No of course not. The story begins in Joshua. As our people crossed into the Promised Land, we set up a stone monument with stones taken from the middle of the River Jordan, which God made dry. The monument was to be a teaching tool. When our children asked what the stones meant, we were to tell them the story of God’s faithfulness in our history. Well of course, the memory of what happened lasted for a generation, but as the book of Judges says, after Joshua’s generation died out, a new generation grew up who neither knew the Lord or what he had done for Israel.

Mike: Yeah. I understand that it’s important that we pass on what God has done to our children. But I’m doing that. School’s a separate issue.

Levi: No it isn’t. Training up young minds is the single most important role you have as a parent. In the Law, we were taught the following. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Clearly the training of a child is not a five minute a day role. It’s a process that encompasses all your life with them, day and night.

Mike: Oh, but that’s the Old Testament. That applies to Israel. We are New Covenant believers.

Levi: Do you think that being under the New Covenant places a lesser requirement of love and concern for the spiritual wellbeing of our children than it did for the children of believers in the Old Covenant? You know Jesus warned people against leading his little ones astray. He said those responsible for this would be better off having a millstone attached to their necks and being tossed into the sea. Do you think this suggests that we New Covenant believers should be less concerned about the training of our covenant children now? Do you think Jesus’ requirement to let the little children come to him is compatible with sending them away from him to be trained by those who hate him and are walking away from him?

Mike: Well like I say, I keep an eye on what they are learning, and Jesus calls us to be salt and light. My children can be salt and light!

Levi: But Mike…if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? Look at your children. They dress like unbelieving children. They talk like them. They watch the same television shows, and their role models are the same…what do you call it…’social media celebrities’. Are they salt? As far as I read Scripture, I nowhere see a command for parents to outsource the training of their children to unbelievers in the hope that those unbelievers will be brought to faith. We send missionaries to the cannibals, but we don’t serve them up our children. Besides, when your church sends missionaries to overseas countries, they have to train substantially to be prepared to bring the gospel to this context. How much more children?! Shouldn’t we spend their impressionable years developing in them a Christ-centred approach to the world around them in preparation for a life of being salt and light?

Mike: But Levi, look at the results. Hannah’s friend is now going to youth group!

Levi: Would this still be a victory if Hannah ended up going to hell? Surely you can imagine a world where you are obedient to the commands of Scripture concerning both how you disciple your children, and how you reach out to unbelievers? Surely disobedience in one realm can’t be justified pragmatically by seeming success in another?

Mike: Well I don’t think I’m being disobedient. Besides, like I said, we can’t afford a Christian education. We’d prefer it, but it’s just not doable.

Levi: What do you mean? Is obedience to Christ in this matter impossible? What do you mean you can’t afford it? I know travel is not incredibly expensive, but wouldn’t you be able to cut back on overseas travel? Couldn’t you live in a smaller house? Can’t you figure out a way of making it work?

Mike: Well I suppose we could make it work if we really cut back. But Mandy wouldn’t want to move to another part of town. This is a nice area – it’s close to the city. Our friends are nearby. Plus our house is a great size for us. It’s good for entertaining. We can have Bible study here.

Levi: So it’s not actually about the cost? It’s more about the priority you place on it. You’d rather be comfortably well off than obedient to Christ? Maybe avoiding poverty for the sake of Christ has become an idol for you?

Mike: Well, I’m not sure I’d put it that way. You are pretty blunt you know.

Levi: Well I’ll be blunter still. Paul was pretty blunt too you know. Maybe you live in an age where caring about truth isn’t as important as avoiding offending people. Why doesn’t Mandy disciple your children at home? Surely much of her income is spent on having Matthew at the inappropriately named ‘Best Start Day Care’ each day. Didn’t the apostle Paul say in his epistle to Titus that he was to train the young women to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

Mike: Oh, don’t go there. We’ve come a long way since your day. Women are just as important as men, and we no longer believe they should just stay at home looking after the household. We’ve emancipated women.

Levi: May I remind you that in my day, the apostle Paul wrote that male and female were one in Christ. that does not mean we are all the same part of the body. We all have different roles to play. And I object to your use of the word just. What do you mean just stay at home looking after the household. How is training your children and preparing them for a life of service to Christ “just”. What is it she does anyway? Isn’t she a paralegal? Emancipated woman? What nonsense! You’ve exchanged submission to her cherished husband who loves her deeply and service of the ones she loves more than any others in the world for submission to a man she hardly knows and service of people she neither knows nor cares for.

Mike: I don’t see it that way.

Levi: Perhaps it’s inconvenient for you to see it this way. Perhaps you see the sacrifice another way might require, and you’re not willing to count the cost.

Mike: I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. You have your opinion which is good for you, and I have mine, which works for our family.

In Praise of the Home-Making Mum

Today is Mother’s Day. And I want to use the opportunity to praise the mother who eschews career and focuses on family by running her household. I was fortunate enough to grow up with a mother of this kind. The old-fashioned kind, who knitted me jumpers with love, who made wonderful soups from scratch, who cooked healthy meals each night, who read aloud to me, who was always there. Sure we didn’t have the money two-income families had. There were no yearly overseas holidays, no fancy labelled clothes, no luxuries that the ‘cool kids’ had. But we had Mum, and we wouldn’t have traded that for the world.

And my children are blessed to have a mother of the same calibre. Motherhood is a calling that my wife has embraced with gusto. Despite having the intelligence and ability to do many things careerwise, she has instead elected to make a home. My wife stays at home and manages our household. She executes our budget ably, ensuring our single income covers our mortgage and feeds our family of 7. Every night, she expresses her love and care for us with healthy and nutritious meals. She serves our children by teaching them everything, from written English to Mathematics, from Science to baking, from how to look after a household to art. And she does this all because she loves them more than any school teacher (no matter how wonderful) ever could.

And yet, many make light of the woman who chooses this life. Somehow she is seen as inferior and unenlightened or perhaps under her husband’s thumb. She is not. We tell our young women they can have it all. But you can’t. That is a lie. The truth is, that the greatest calling for a Mum is making a home for those she loves! Young woman, if that makes you squeamish, you probably have drunk too deeply from that poisoned secular well of feminism. Young man, let me tell you from personal experience that you want a wife who wants to make a home, not a career. Only this kind of woman will create the stable anchor of love and commitment that a family needs.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes argues in a section on womanhood that Christians should reject the way of the world in its views on womanhood. He points out the patronizing language of those who mock the mother who gives herself to her family.

If someone talks about “economic opportunities for women,” he or she is not talking about the health and prosperity of the household, but about what money you make for yourself. Even the phrase “stay-at-home mom” is patronizing and faintly derogatory, like “stick-in-the-mud mom” or “sit-in-the-corner mom.” Do we talk about a “chained-to-the-desk mom” or a “stuck-in-traffic mom” or a “languishing-in-meetings mom”? To do fifty things in one day for which you alone are responsible, for the immediate good of the people you love, is deemed easy, trivial, beneath the dignity of a rational person, but to push memoranda written in legal patois from one bureaucratic office to another, at great public expense and for no clear benefit to the common good, now that is the life.

So let us remember our economics. Let us remember that all of our earning money is for the sake of the home. The home is not a flophouse where we stay and recuperate so that we can go back out and earn money, much of which we burn in the very earning of it, with eating out, no frugality, the extra car, the day care center, and so on. John Senior recommends a ‘gladsome poverty’ as a remedy for the madness that subjects the home to the hamster treadmill – labor for the sake of labor, or worse, for the sake of prestige, for a desk and a title. We must say to ourselves, “We will not subject our children to the new thing in the world, having them spend vast tracts of their waking hours in the company of people who do not love them and who will not, a few years later, even remember their names. We will not hang our children by the ropes of our ambition or avarice. We will not institutionalize them at age three so that we may place them in a ‘good school system,’ that mythical beast, at age six. We will not mount the treadmill. We do not care what our ‘betters’ think. They have no great joy to show for all their sweat and grumbling.”

Ministry and Kids

In the past I’ve mused about the most important ministry parents have: their children.

Chatting with my wife after a sermon today at church stimulated my thinking on this further. In Christian circles, we all know of missionaries and full-time ministry workers who have taken their ministry so seriously that it has negatively impacted family life. We’ve heard of children shunted off to another city to boarding school while their parents carry out missionary work. In history, we read of men who were so passionate about serving God that their wives and children suffered in a variety of ways.

I’d never thought of things in this light before, but today it brought to mind the passage in I Timothy 5 where Paul is helping Timothy think through provision for the needy such as widows in the church. Here he writes, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Now in this context, we are talking about physical provision, and that provision, focussed on widows. Yet it provoked this thought in me. If it is such a gross sin to fail to provide physically for our relatives, is it perhaps also a profound sin to fail to care for them spiritually? If we parents become so focussed on serving God in our careers, could we not still be in danger if we neglect the greater priority of loving and discipling our children?

Jesus castigated the Pharisees once for their failure to honour their parents. They had come up with a tradition whereby they could gift money to God. This meant that whatever help they owed to their parents could (according to them) legitimately be refused. We read of this in Matthew 15. So here a spiritual reason was given for neglecting their physical duty of provision to their parents. They reasoned it was morally legitimate to give their money to God in such a way that rendered them incapable of helping their parents. Jesus saw through this and condemned them for setting aside the law of God (Honour your father and mother) for the sake of their traditions. Indeed he said they were only honouring him with their lips, and not their hearts.

Are we in danger of doing the same kind of thing? Parents are called to a radical programme of discipling their children.

In Deuteronomy 6 we see this radical programme in outline.

Hear, O Israel: The  Lord our God, the  Lord is one. You shall love the  Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Deuteronomy 6:6-9

And in the New Testament, the apostle Paul in Ephesians holds fathers particularly responsible for the discipline and instruction in the Lord of their children. To withhold this is to provoke a child to anger.

So my question is this. Is it possible that we might set aside the law of God requiring us to nurture and disciple our children and replace (and justify this replacement) with that pseudo-spiritual tradition of men: “ministry”? What might that say about the state of our hearts? Let us search our own hearts and make sure we retain the priorities God has for us.

Does this mean we should have no other ministry obligations apart from family? Of course not! However, our priorities should be rightly ordered. It’s all too easy for something as unnoticed and pedestrian as family to be usurped by a ministry that might seem more important, seem to have greater impact, be more public and provide more excitement and fulfilment.

Catechising Your Children

The most important job of the Christian parent is to disciple your child. Catechising your children is a great way of doing this in a systematic manner. The children’s catechism is an excellent option that is based on the Westminster Shorter Catechism. From a very young age, children are capable of great feats of memorisation, so why not get them learning good theology.

Another route is to spend time each day reflecting on a catechism question and answer. Starr Meade’s Training Heart’s Teaching Minds: Family Devotions Based on the Shorter Catechism or Comforting Hearts, Teaching Minds: Family Devotions Based on the Heidelberg Catechism are good options here. We have personally used Training Heart’s and Teaching Minds. The material was good, but didn’t work so well for our younger children. It might be something we pick up again soon. Meade focussed on one catechism question each week, each day exploring a new angle or nuance to the question.

One fabulous aid in catechising your children is music. Our family enjoys is listening to Songs for Saplings. There are six volumes of Questions and Answers. The volumes are entitled God and Creation, Fall and Salvation, Christ and His Word, The Word of God, Prayer and the Sacraments and Christ and his return. The music is free to listen to and very catchy. Our kids know lots of Bible verses and theology as a result of Songs for Saplings. Simply say, “Can you go to heaven with a sinful nature?” they will start singing back, “No, my heart must be changed.” There is nothing like music for aiding memorisation of truth.