Your child, your teacher?

Our children can teach us important lessons and remind us of crucial truths. Though our parenting mindset is necessarily focused on being the teacher (even more so during a national lockdown), we need to be open to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, we can learn from our own children.

By their very nature, our children will be unaware when they are imparting some lesson to us, and as Christian parents, we need to be humble enough to learn from them.

I was recently reminded of an important truth by one of my older children: being raised in a Christian home is a privilege. She said: ‘I’ve realised how lucky I am to be in a Christian family.’

The initial joy at my own child recognising this fact soon gave way to a reality check – as a Christian in a secular Western country, have I actively exercised this privilege in the way I teach and engage with my children?

It’s not only a matter of privilege. A child placed in a Christian home is highly favoured by the Lord, bringing with it their own awesome responsibility before God not to reject the things they are taught and to open their own hearts to Christ and repent; to know God for themselves and not rely on a Christian upbringing.

In the UK, the chances of being born to Christian parents has plummeted. According to 2013 research, half the population described itself as not belonging to any religion compared to 31.4% in 1983. Just 41.7% of people identified as Christians compared to 65.2% in 1983.

In 2021, being born into a godly home is a privilege that must be treasured. Like my own children, I was born into a Christian home. But as the Christian worldview was all I ever knew, I didn’t appreciate the privilege that was mine until later.

My own daughter’s acknowledgement of her birth privilege has illuminated to me the need for Christian parents to reinforce the reality of this privilege to own children. I have started consciously to tell my younger children how blessed they are to be in a Christian home – and why they are so privileged. It has made them think.

Christian parents also have an awesome privilege: that of teaching our children the Scriptures, to immerse them in the Christian worldview from their earliest days. We neglect this at the risk of our children’s souls.

But be warned against relying on your own efforts for their salvation. We can spend all the time available teaching our children the Scriptures and raising them in a godly way, but it is their ultimate personal responsibility to turn to Christ. We cannot do it for them. Is any verse more often recited to our children than: ‘Remember your Creator in the days of your youth’ (Eccl.12.1)?

Let me encourage you from personal experience. An older child may resist your Biblical response to a key issue, but that does not mean they always will.

Family worship times are not always stress-free, but take heart. You’re fulfilling a God-given responsibility and honouring the Lord, even when it seems too much trouble. Years after we started, it is still often frustratingly stressful. Two younger children are easily distracted (usually by each other or the family dog) and I feel guilty that we still haven’t cracked the art of a peaceful time of family readings and prayer, when each child listens intently to God’s word, and closes their eyes in prayer without a wandering mind.

But be encouraged: when I finally succumb to the tiredness of the day and crawl into bed to enjoy some physical and mental solitude, one of my teenage children invariably comes up to join me – asking if we can read and pray before I go to sleep. And how can I refuse?

What joy that brings my heart and what hope this might bring to others.