Raising toddlers

In the middle of the bright lights and confused tourists in Piccadilly Circus is the statue of Eros. Except it isn’t.

Everyone thinks it’s Eros, but that’s because they’ve got the wrong brother. They look very similar. Even their mum probably got them mixed up. The statue is Anteros, the brother of Eros, the Greek god of love and sex. Anteros is the Greek god of selfless love. This matters. The statue of Anteros was paid for by the people of London to remember the life of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, who died in 1885. Please don’t give up on me. I know I have moved from obscure Greek mythology to obscure dead aristocracy, but I am going somewhere wonderful.

Come, Lord Jesus!

Shaftesbury is one of the greatest-ever Britons. He is responsible for outlawing children working in factories. He took the children out of the mines. Both of these laws were bitterly opposed by his rich mates, whose fat profits depended on being able to employ children on miniscule pay to do their hard work. He outlawed children going up chimneys, because what Mary Poppins never explained is that sending boys up chimneys was abusive and frequently lethal. And, finally, Shaftesbury was responsible for the first schools for the poorest children.

Stand at the statue of Anteros and you can look down Shaftesbury Avenue. Because he flattened the slums that stood there, to give London’s poorest better homes, the grand avenue that took their place was named after him. Where did Shaftesbury’s passion for the poor come from? Christ. Where did his Christian faith come from? Not his family. For a large part of his life, his father refused to speak to him, because Shaftesbury’s care for the farmers on his estate, meant that the family’s income dropped through the floor. He spent money on the poor instead of squeezing them to pay him more.

As an MP, he wrote ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ (Rev. 22:20) on every envelope he sent. Towards the end of his life he said: ‘I do not think that in the last 40 years I have lived one conscious hour that was not influenced by the thought of our Lord’s return.’

So where did Lord Shaftesbury’s faith come from?

The power of a knee

He learnt it on the knee of a nameless nanny as she spoke to him of Jesus Christ. Ponder that. The most significant social reformer of his century was driven to push for change by his faith in Christ, which came from the knee of a nanny. So, Lesson One: If anyone ever questions the value of pre-school ministry, please send them to Piccadilly Circus and don’t let them come back until they’ve got the message. A recent survey found that 34% of the UK church say they came to faith under the age of four. Boom!

We recently recorded a podcast episode with Liz Wann, the author of The end of me. It is her account of those pre-school years, when she was taken to the end of herself. For the first time, she discovered the extent of her reliance on Christ. She also discovered that selfless love is the story of parenting babies and toddlers. In those early years, there is little glory, little visible progress or affirmation that your efforts are valuable.

Please tell a young Christian parent about the statue of Anteros. It stands as a testimony to the value of raising our youngest to know that Christ is their Lord and He will return to take them home. We will never have another opportunity to help God’s image-bearers to build their worldview from the ground up, right first time. Keep going. That selfless love is not wasted.