Having put up recent blogs that focus on the MIE families, children’s and youth ministries, I thought I’d launch out into a seires that might help us to reflect on the whole issue of parenting from a Christian perspective. I appreciate that this is a bit of a minefield, and that by and large, people feel strongly about the decisions they make about how they parent. But as a Church it’s great to be able to wrestle these sorts of issues through together. In seeking to speak into this, I’ll be approaching it the same way that I seek to approach everything I teach at MIE:

(i) Let’s see if we can work out what the Bible teaches!

(ii) Let’s see if we can work it out in an atmosphere of grace!

(iii) Let’s see if we can support one another as we work towards God’s vision for family life.

There is one thing that it is helpful to do as we start a journey like this. As we’ve seen in Ecclesiastes, we need not only to understand the Bible, but also to understand ourselves. For example, why have I / we made the decisions I’ve / we’ve made about the kind of parents we aspire to be? This will help explain how I respond to the Bible’s teaching. It gives me as good a chance as possible to hear it in as constructive a way as possible. For something as personal as our parenting, that is an important consideration. So where do we get our thinking about parenting from? Can we identify why we parent as we do? I’d suggest that there are a number of likely sources. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Our own experience of being parented. All of us were kids at one point, and I’d say that our experience of our parents - or whoever it was who cared for us as we grew up - plays a much larger role in shaping our own experinece of parenting than we realise. As we remember and reflect on what was good, what we resented, what was scarring, etc. we are making decisions about how we seek to relate to our own kids. Even as children it is likely that we were already making a list entitled: ‘If I ever have kids, I’ll never say that / do that / make them do that…’. Much of our own parenting is worked out in reaction to our experience of being parented.

We do need to be just a bit careful about this. After all, just because I resented it when I was 8, doesn’t mean it was necessarily bad parenting… and if I’m reacting against that, there is no guarantee that what I’m doing is actually more constructive. We’ll need to be diligent as we reflect on the extent to which this is a driver in my own parenting.

Fear of ________________. Fill in the blank. A lot of parenting decisions can be born out of fear… fear of being judged by other parents… fear of our kids not liking us, or resenting us… fear losing them… fear of them making bad decisions in the future… fear of failure… fear of loss… fear of being unfulfilled… fear of… it’s a long list. Some fear is legitimate. A lot isn’t. Cultivating self-awareness helps us to at least recognise what fears are driving us, and to what extent (we have a tendency to fear the wrong things and to the wrong extent). Having identified them we are then better placed to assess them and their affects on the decisions we make about being parents.

‘Research’. OK so this is where I’m bound to get into trouble! Let me say up front that research is in principle a good thing. And let me qualify that by saying that there is a lot of bad ‘research’ on parenting. Anyone who has read more than one book on parenting is bound to have noticed that ‘research’ seems to lead different experts to very different conclusions. The cynic in me is no longer amazed at how often it turns out that research shows what the people sponsoring it wanted it to show. Even more subtle is how often I find the research that confirms what I want to do / not do anyway. If I want to parent my kids in a child-centred way, I can find plenty of books and conferences that will show me how research shows that is the best way to parent… I’ve learnd to be sceptical of any sentence that starts, ‘Research shows…’ (that isn’t just about parenting by the way!!). Before we use ‘research’ to justify our decisions (especially if it turns out that those decisions don’t resonate very well with what the Bible teaches) we need to ask a range of questions, such as: Who did the research? Have I seen it, or am I trusting someone else’s interpretation of data? Did the people commissioning the research have an agenda? What was it? What was the research about? How was it conducted? Amongst whom?

Cultural assumptions.  It’s amazing how much of our parenting style will be picked up by ‘what everyone else seems to be doing’. In ways that aren’t always entirely apparent we seem to make collective decisions about how we do things, and the simple fact of concensus creates an illusion of unassailable wisdom. What’s more worrying is the cultural norms you can identify source thinkers for. You’d be surprised how many of those thinkers were in fact deeply anti-Christian, and bizzarely anti-family. Underpinning a lot of ‘cultural assumptions’ is the idea that family units are not good things, and that we need to extricate children from parental influence and give them a ‘blank sheet of paper’ (for those of you who like details, many of the ideas that shape our culture’s view of parenting orginated with the philosopher Rousseau, and were developed, amongst others, by educationalist Froebel in the 1830s. For the record, Rousseau abandoned his own five children to Paris Foundling Hospital - an almost certain sentence of death in 18th century France!). Most of us have never read any philosophy of child development, but we do engage with what percolates down from those thinkers in magazines, TV programmes, popular books, parenting blogs and courses shaped by them. It’s also worth remembering that what features in magazines and appears on TV is based on ratings, viewing figures and sales… not necessarily on what makes for godly parenting.

My Insecurity. Let’s be honest. Most of us feel like we’re faking it. Pretty much every single parent lives with a profound sense of failure – with all the accompanying feelings of guilt and inadequacy.  As we work through this series, I’m assuming that as axiomatic. So many who are, or who have been, parents are sowedded to this, that I simply assume it as normative! In part this means that we are always struggling, usually feeling like we’re one step away from everything falling apart, and are kind of desperate to grasp any idea that looks like it might be the silver bullet. Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why parenting is such an emotive topic!

There are so many other sources we use to build our vision for parenting. Our ideas and aspirations usually come from a range of experiences and ideas - sometimes conflicting ones! The Big Quesiton is: how much of our sense of what it means to be a parent is distilled from and resonant with the Scriptures. This is a huge issue for us, and one that is particularly difficult to navigate because we feel insecure about our knowledge of the Bible, and even more insecure and anxious about our parenting. Conversely we are also so deeply invested as parents and our committed to our kids that we can easily feel threatened and judged when those relationships are explored. We are prone to a defensiveness about our parenting that we wouldn’t necessarily feel about other aspects of our life. This is as understandable as it can be dangerous. Dangerous, if it prevents us from being able to discern God’s heart for my parenting, and if it hardens me to the Spirit’s leading us into a liberating wisdom of God’s purposes for family.

We need to be aware of all this, and prayerful in it if we are going to be in a position to hear what our Heavenly Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth derives its name, has to say…