Growing up, there was much talk about training the child in the way they should go. This is of course, a scriptural idea, but behind it lay the kind of fear mongering about securing your child’s salvation before they found themselves on the wide road to hell. There was much conversation about sleep training, and teaching children to sleep, and teaching them to obey and be good and compliant—and once again it’s not that sleep or obedience are bad things, but somehow the church methods of bringing about these desired behaviors began to look very opposite from how I now see God parenting us.
I’m not sure why we were taught to fear attachment parenting—as if science must always inevitably lead us away from God and his design instead of towards it. I do not blame those that instructed me in these methods of child-rearing, for like all of us parents who love our children, we do the absolute best with the information that we have. We are always swinging the pendulum some way or other from the way our parents and grandparents did things; I think this is a very natural attempt at course correction. And I deeply hope that those who have come before me and taught me my whole life will in no way feel shamed by what I write in this essay, but will know that I honor and respect the upbringing that they gave me, even though I may now be choosing to do things a little differently with my own offspring.
I read a poem by Amy Bornman this morning about a mother and her child entitled “the mother quietly making a nice lunch” (click here to read it) in which she talks about the small moments of making herself a nice lunch during the child’s nap, and her last lines struck me especially: “there is/ no end to any day, there is only the/child’s voice, and the mother’s footsteps,/over and over again.” And immediately I was struck by the similarity of this mother’s responsiveness to her child’s cry, and God the Father and Mother’s responsiveness to us when we cry. I hear it again in these lines from the Psalmist David in Psalm 18:6:
“I called to the LORD in my distress,
and I cried to my God for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears.”
And again in Psalm 34:4-6
“I sought the LORD, and he answered me
and rescued me from all my fears.
Those who look to him are radiant with joy;
their faces will never be ashamed.
This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him
and saved him from all his troubles.
Truly, lines like these are echoed all throughout the Psalms, and themes of this call of the child and response of the LORD are pictured throughout scripture. Why is it then that in Christian circles, there seems to be an increased prevalence of the ideas that parenting responsively will lead to our children being somehow spoiled?
Certainly there are times when we cannot respond immediately, (especially in our finitude as human beings), and the more children we have it seems to harder it is to parent in a way that is dialed in to the needs to each child as individual. Yet, we see this pattern in scripture of God coming when we call—and we see it echoed in our very biology, that the way to develop a secure attachment with our child is to hear their call and answer it—over and over again.
Hundreds of times they tell us it takes—for this call and response to develop a deep trust between parent and child. And yet the reverse is also true in Christian circles, where we seem to demand immediate and sure faith from children who are calling once again, to see if God will answer. Why do we feel the need to box these believers in to a trust that is still being formed? We seem to demand a fake trust, or to teach that a lack of trust in God is somehow a personal failing and not the work-in-process relationship that scripture illustrates.
Yes, we can trust God. Yes, perhaps we should trust God. But I don’t believe God asks us to trust him without giving us evidence that he is trustworthy. And perhaps unlike your pastor or Christian leader has taught you, I no longer believe that God is disappointed in my lack of trust.
"As a father has compassion on his children,
so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.
For he knows what we are made of,
remembering that we are dust.”
-Psalm 103:13-14
There have been times along my parenting journey when the sting of sin is so brutally obvious, and those times are most apparent when my children, who have every reason to trust me, apparently don’t.
“Where’s my food?!?” They demand in panic if I haven’t yet dished up their plate.
“You don’t care about me!” They cry when I don’t give them their way.
“You love (insert name of sibling) more than me!” When someone else has something they think should be theirs.
Not to mention the way my toddler son cries like I’ve left him forever when I go downstairs to get something for one minute—his instant tears pooling in his desperate eyes, asking how I could possibly go away from his sight for a moment.
Not to mention the way they cry if you prevent them from darting into the street, or sticking a screwdriver in the electrical outlet, or turning on the gas knob for the stove—
They are but dust. They are but children—and so am I. A child that does not always understand why. A child who still believes food is scarce even though I haven’t gone hungry a day in my life. A child who disbelieves her beloved-ness because it doesn’t manifest the same way as someone else’s beloved-ness at this exact moment in time.
And if God has this kind of patience with me; why should I not extend this same patience to my own children? Why do I expect them to be independent of me when dependance is what we are all built for? Why should I teach them to be self-sufficient in their emotional regulation when I can scarcely be? When I myself need to constantly cry out to God for peace or patience or joy or love?
I think the villainizing of emotional needs that has taken place in many christian circles has sadly extended to our sweet children, and emotional needs are seldom considered legitimate. If my child stops crying the moment he lands in my arms, then that means he was crying for “no reason.” If my babies are eating solids, then they should be sleeping through the night, because waking up is only for “legitimate” physical needs and not emotional ones. Why is it wrong for my babies to want reassurance that I am still near even while they sleep? Why is it bad for them to long for the comfort of my presence especially when we have spent the day in strange places, or apart?
This world is broken—and we are all broken too. God is here to mend us and make us whole; and he doesn’t do it by leaving us to cry alone. He doesn’t tell us to be good soldiers and buck up under the stress. He doesn’t demand more from us than he knows we are capable of giving—he knows we are dust. He sends Jesus to stand in the gap between our sinful-world-induced lack of trust and his infinite trustworthiness. He parents us with a gentle responsiveness that does not always give us what we want, but that gives us what we need—emotional needs included.
Sometimes it’s a loving reproof. Sometimes it’s a nap and a snack as he did with Elijah in the wilderness. (1 Kings 19)
Always, I believe he considers the bond between us; because after all, that was why he came. Always, he considers our frame, and asks for what we have—not what we do not have apart from him.
With the twins I have struggled to most with the sleep deprivation. Last night I was recalling with my husband on the two week period where I was *literally* getting up upwards of 12 times a night between the two babies—getting about 45 minutes of sleep at a time. It was sleep deprivation like I had never experienced before, and certainly I longed for them to sleep, and found myself very envious of the God who is a parent who needs no sleep. But what I wanted even more than sleep was for my children to know, down deep in their bones made from my bones that I will come when they call.
They turn two next month, and some nights I get a bit more sleep, and some nights I wake up in their bed with them, and some nights I only get up once or twice—the needs vary. But what hasn’t varied, is what has developed between us: a deep bond and a secure trust. And that is worth losing sleep over.
I have now more firmly than ever pushed aside the supposedly “christian based” sleep training books. I have shelved the parenting books that tell that I must crack down on my toddlers bad behavior or else risk them turning out to be a horrible teenager. I have gone against the grain and risked allowing my children to tell me what they really think instead of hiding their distaste behind a mask of carefully manicured false respect. I have not taught them to fear me—though I hope I have taught them to fear God in all the ways that are right for them to do.
Instead, I have been leaning in to the ways that God made me and my children—our nervous systems and our brains and the ways that science has revealed we build trust and make social connections. These methods which as I read the scripture with fresh eyes, are in fact more consistent with the way God parents than I had ever dared to realize.
And as I do this, I am realizing that it isn’t all up to me either. I’m not just stuck in the role of the adult who has to make sure everyone does what they are supposed to all the time. I don’t even have to have answers to all the hard questions my children ask. Instead I can say, “let’s ask Jesus about this together.”
Instead, I’m discovering, it’s still safe to be a child who calls in the night.
Your children are very blessed to have you as their mamma!