Gospel-Powered Parenting

This parenting book stands above the rest.

There are two things that Farley does particularly well that I'd like to draw attention to.

First, he distances himself from those that insist we must remove our children from the world (e.g. public schooling, Halloween, etc) in order to protect them from the world. He acknowledges that parenting always involves some protection, but he righly points out that an isolationist mentality often ends up with legalism. Farley recommends parents raise up their children not by changing and controlling their environment (things external to their children), but by going after their hearts.

Second, he picks up a theme from a great parenting book from the 1970s, How to Really Love Your Children, and emphasizes the importance of affection and different ways to show it to your children.

In places Farley sounds a lot like Tripp's Shephering a Child's Heart, but I think Farley is clearer in his main point of going after heart issues. Gospel-Powered Parenting may be the best parenting book I've read.

Getting kids ready for Sunday

5 steps to master to get kids ready for Sunday from Stuff Christians Like:

1. The Pre-Game
You know Sunday is coming. It's been in the same spot on the calendar for as long as you’ve been alive, so don't act surprised when your head pops off that pillow and you think, "Oh no, I have to get the kids ready today." Pre-game the night before. Lay out bowls and clothes and shoes. Make sippy cups the night before. (I can't wait to retire the words "sippy cup" and "tinkle" from my vocabulary.) Prepare before the day actually arrives so that you're ready for the storm.

2. Sell it to your kids
One of your biggest jobs as a parent is to play the role of studio audience or laugh track. In the same way that a studio audience will laugh on cue to let viewers at home know it's time to find a particular scene in a show funny, your job is to back up whatever your husband or wife says with raucous enthusiasm. Here's what it looks like in my house:

My wife: "L.E. and McRae, aren't you excited about Sunday School?"
Me (Immediately after she says that): "Yay Sunday School! You'll get to see all your friends and have goldfish and make a craft. Yay!"

Before they have a chance to even think about putting up a wall of resistance I piggyback what my wife has said, adding details, amping up the excitement, laughing on cue if that's what the moment requires.

3. Hustle them to the bathroom like a SWAT team.
I can't prove this, but I think my children have entered into a silent pact with each other to see who can use the bathroom the least amount of times in any given week. Roughly 72% of my creativity/energy at home is expended trying to convince them to use the bathroom. So, to avoid this "no bathroom liberation front" my wife and I try to shuffle our kids to the bathroom as soon as they wake up. Before they can give each other a secret handshake or a head nod and remind each other "viva la revolucion" we've grabbed them right out of bed like a SWAT team and marched them into the bathroom.

4. Distract them with stories.
It took me years to learn this, but if I want to get my kids to do anything, and this is for those rare times when they are refusing to instantly follow my Godly, fatherly advice as the leader of the house, I'll tell them a story. It usually involves an animal. And the plot unfolds as they acquiesce to what I need them to do. For instance, "And do you know what your grandfather did with that bullfrog when he brought it home? Go ahead and take another bite of Cheerios and I'll tell you."

5. Use a series of aerobic moves to get them dressed.
Is it lying if you tell your kids that you want to see how high they can raise their hands in the air just so that you can slip a dress over their head? Is it lying if you made getting on tights a jumping contest in which you bounce them on the couch as high as you can all the while pulling the tights up? Is it lying if you make putting on shoes a fun race? I hope not, because otherwise, I'm a wicked huge liar.

On most Sundays my wife and I are the first couple to drop our kids off at Sunday School when the classrooms open. Then we go sit in the sanctuary for 20 minutes and have a "mini date."

How about you?

Do you have any tricks you use to get your kids ready for Sunday School?

Young Peacemaker re-visited

We finished our second pass through The Young Peacemaker this week. We first read it together in 2007. This time we went through it during family worship and found it to be a really useful training resource for working through sibling rivalry and other forms of conflict. Many of the ideas in the book are probably too much for a child under 6 to grasp, but all of the children enjoyed the role play and stories.

This is a great resource for a family to use and re-use. We'll probably go through it every other year or so for many years to come.

"My wife and children are killing me" and it's the best thing that could happen

This is an excellent post for fathers and those who love them. It's an excerpt from Andrew Peach's post at First Things's On the Square blog.

Most fathers-to-be suppose that their old ego-centered lives will continue more or less unabated after the child arrives. With the exception of a few more obstacles and demands on their time, their involvement with their children is envisioned as being something manageable and marginal. Nothing like a complete transformation—an abrupt end to their former life—really enters men’s minds.

But then the onslaught begins, and a man begins to realize that these people, his wife and children, are literally and perhaps even intentionally killing his old self. All around him everything is changing, without any signs of ever reverting back to the way they used to be. Into the indefinite future, nearly every hour of his days threatens to be filled with activities that, as a single-person or even a childless husband, he never would have chosen. Due to the continual interruptions of sleep, he is always mildly fatigued; due to long-term financial concerns, he is cautious in spending, forsaking old consumer habits and personal indulgences; he finds his wife equally exhausted and preoccupied with the children; connections with former friends start to slip away; traveling with his children is like traveling third class in Bulgaria, to quote H.L. Mencken; and the changes go on and on. In short, he discovers, in a terrifying realization, what Dostoevsky proclaimed long ago: “[A]ctive love is a harsh and fearful reality compared with love in dreams.” Fatherhood is just not what he bargained for.

Yet, through the exhaustion, financial stress, screaming, and general chaos, there enters in at times, mysteriously and unexpectedly, deep contentment and gratitude. It is not the pleasure or amusement of high school or college but rather the honor and nobility of sacrifice and commitment, like that felt by a soldier. What happens to his children now happens to him; his life, though awhirl with the trivial concerns of children, is more serious than it ever was before. Everything he does, from bringing home a paycheck to painting a bedroom, has a new end and, hence, a greater significance. The joys and sorrows of his children are now his joys and sorrows; the stakes of his life have risen. And if he is faithful to his calling, he might come to find that, against nearly all prior expectations, he never wants to return to the way things used to be.

You can read the whole thing here.

Parenting older children

Here's a link (audio and notes) for the best talk on parenting of older children (tweens and up) that I've heard. The speaker, Bob Kauflin*, manages to condense the wisdom of several great parenting books into one address and weave in stories from his own experience raising six children.

I highly recommend the audio.

*Bob Kauflin is a pastor and worship leader in a Sovereign Grace church.

Raising the third brother

Parents fall into different traps along the way of raising their children. Sometimes they are too worldly and their children reflect that. Other times they see that trap, but they overreact, and instead of worldliness their children develop a joyless self-righteousness. I've fallen into both these traps, some for long periods of time, and value advice on steering clear of both.

Marvin Olasky, in a really good WORLD column, offers a clear alternative. Picking up on Tim Keller's book The Prodigal God, he calls for raising the third brother. We all know the wrecked life of the first brother in our Lord's tale of the prodigal son. And a few spot the more subtle glimpse of his older brother, who is externally "righteous" but internally full of dead men's bones. Elder brothers lack love, charity, compassion, and a sense that all of us are in this mess together.

What's rare, Olasky points out, are third brothers who know deeply that the Father loves them and have patience and love for both the elder and younger brothers.

Third brothers ask pointed questions, and here are ones for each of us to answer: Am I a younger, elder, or third brother? Can we, through God's grace in our parenting, avoid raising elder- and younger-brothers?

The only things we create that will last forever

"As parents the only thing we ever create that will last through all eternity is children. Your children will be there before the judgement seat of Christ. And these dear children that I see week by week growing up are going to last for all eternity. They're going to last forever and forever and forever. That means the most important thing in my existence is how I bring my children to Christ."

Hear the rest of Dr Ferguson's sermon (#8) from a recent parenting conference. It's very encouraging.

Parental High

I've never experienced the (mythical?) runner's high. Sitting on the sofa worn-out after a run this evening Kristin and I divided up the nightly routine of putting the kids to bed and the house in order. It was then that we realized that there is a "parental high".

Here are a few experiences that can bring it on:
- Putting the kids to bed at night
- Having dinner together while a sitter watches the children
- Sleeping through the night
- No more diapers!

Encouraging parents that feel inadequate and guilty

Another good Ask Pastor John:

"First, I want to encourage people that all of us feel inadequate at the front end and guilty at the back end of parenting. We think we're doing our best. We think we've hit upon a way to do this or that. Then 10 or 20 years into parenting we read a book, hear a talk, or observe another person and realize, "Whoa, that's a good idea. I never thought of that, and I never did that. What if I had done that?"

No matter how good we are as parents we wind up feeling inadequate and guilty at the end. The key for having hope and for picking up and pressing on is, first, the cross of Christ, and receiving the forgiveness for our inadequacies and our failures. Secondly—and this is really, really important—it's knowing that God rescues children from the worst of homes, homes way worse than yours."

Read the whole thing.

How can eternity influence a mother's daily tasks?

From "Ask Pastor John [Piper]":

"I believe it is a very high calling to be a mom charged with teaching everything she possibly can to one, two, or eight kids.

The women who flourish most and who delight most in that calling—and who are best at it—are not women whose lives are circumscribed by their houses. They are women who are aware of the world. They're aware of God's global purpose. They're aware of the ultimate purposes of God in history. They're aware of things in history and in the far off reaches of the world today that God is doing. And those are part of what they want to build into these children. They want to raise global Christians, world Christians.

A mother will delight most in the little baby in front of her when she has a vision of God and a vision of the world that's big enough to admit that this little child has a destiny in front of him or her and might become this or that.

If she is totally circumscribed by her little home—with no vision for the world—then I think her domestic scene is probably going to shrivel up on her, and she is going to feel that it is small and constraining. But if she sees it in the wider context of what she is a part of in the missionary enterprise, I think every detail of her life can take on a global significance, indeed, an historical significance.

I really believe that. When I used to sit down for devotions with our four boys at home my mind wasn't simply, "OK I have a duty as a dad: I'm supposed to do devotions at night." My mind was, "What will they become?"

Ralph Winter used to say that nothing has an impact on kids except what they do daily. So we did Global Prayer Digest daily, and we did devotions daily.

The goal isn't just to fulfill some little task that dads are supposed to do. Rather, you're building men who hopefully someday will have absorbed so much of God and so much of the Bible that it's going to shape their whole world. And they might wind up going to Pakistan to help build shelters for earthquake victims."

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Parenting is a strange mix of difficulty and success.

Yesterday one of our children wanted to speak to me in private about being a Christian and talking to the elders of the church about becoming a communing member. I wish I had been better prepared for this conversation, I should have been, but eventually the membership and baptismal vows came to mind and we talked through those together. It was a great moment and a highlight of parenthood.

But that same day another child took a marked turn for the worse in a long pattern of poor and troubling behavior. Hours were spent in private talking through sin and what God requires, but in the end the child was sent to bed without repentance.

On a bit of a humorous note, the "ugly" entry centers on a new trick that Zeke picked up. He's entered that phase of infancy that Kristin likes least. When she's out with him in public and someone compliments us on how cute he is and the person leans down close to him, Zeke enjoys at that moment to let loose with a loud and spewy "pbbbbblllttt"! How long will it take for him to figure out that this is also a fun thing to do during the congregational prayer?

Must remember this when the kids are awake

The importance of patience in parenting...

Children are on a journey in which they are learning self-control and other features of wisdom. Some children pick it up quickly; others learn it gradually after years of creative and patient parenting. Parents know that wisdom does not come immediately, so they are patient with the process of change.

If the child seems untouched by swift discipline, consider what might be more effective in the future. At the child's next explosion of blind rage, if previous discipline didn't help, choose to do nothing at the moment. Handle the situation when calm prevails [when he is open to wisdom].

Edward T. Welch, The Journal of Biblical Counseling, Summer 2007 [not available on-line]

When I'm weak

I'm tired. It's only been a couple of days without Kristin here--but tonight I'm feeling pretty worn out and counting on a refreshing rest. I'm homeschooling less than she does and haven't been to the store yet--how does she do it when I'm TDY?

Over in Alabama, Kristin is probably tired, too. Last night was the first night with Zeke. When it only takes 2 ounces to fill him up, we can expect some long nights for a while.

Each time we've added a child to our family there's been a period of utter exhaustion, but after a while we find a new routine and we're okay. I hope that holds true in this case.

A large family is nothing for a parent to be proud of. A large, godly family is. I want for the strength to do this well. Leaning is the right word...for when I'm weak, He is strong.

Parent Perks

You have to know what to look for, but if you do there are lots of perks to parenting. Two from today stand out.

First was hearing my youngest daughter (18 months old) wake up in her crib singing Holy, Holy, Holy in baby-talk. The second was taking my youngest son (4 years old) up to the large sports field/track on base, taking off his bike's training wheels and telling him that all he has to do is "go fast and straight." He hit a tree head-on, crashed into a sprinkler that popped off his shoe which landed on the sprinkler head and sprayed us all over. But within 30 minutes he was able to bike home without his training wheels and proudly tell his mom! He has been beaming since.

Optimistic parenting

Al Mohler wisely says, "optimism may be naive, but pessimism is atheistic." When it comes to parenting, optimism is called for.

Kristin and I were talking last night that our evening was pleasant because there was less bickering among the children. We thought, could it be that Eli is growing out of that? How wonderful that would be! And if he does outgrow it, then that means the other kids can, too!

Today showed us that none of our children have matured past the point of selfish conflict yet, but there is no reason to think that they won't. God is able to change their hearts, as he has ours, and so we pray with confidence and look forward to a day of peace to come.