Introducing toddler to faith: “The Story of” books

I came across some great books at the used bookstore here in town. They are “The Story of…” books. There’s lots of stories, from George Washington to Easter. And the faith-based books are some of the most accessible I’ve seen for children. The author is Patricia Pingry. I bought several for T-Rex including the stories of the ten commandments, Easter and Jesus.

One thing I really like about these books is that they aren’t wordy. There are few enough words to keep your young toddler interested. There are also other things to keep their attention. T likes to point out the “puppy” and the “boy.” She also likes the picture where the family is praying and we usually pause to say a prayer on that page. The concepts are also easy to comprehend, like describing the commandments as “God’s rules” just like we have rules at home and at school.

We’ve been looking for some good introductory books and were so grateful to have run across this series.

Genetics and Parenting – Two Blogs

I wanted to point out two blog I just learned about, both from mothers who are working through the theological and practical aspects of living with and having children with disabilities.

Amy Julia Becker recently wrote a piece in Christian Century about her experience introducing her three year old with Down syndrome to several doctors-in-residence who came to observe her family. She keeps a nice log of life with her daughter and her journey through Princeton Theological Seminary.

The other is Ellen Dollar, a woman with a bone disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta, which her eldest daughter also has. She writes about life with her disorder and about the choices around reproduction when you know the possibility of passing on a disability to your offspring. She also has a book coming out in 2011 exploring questions in this vein. Check her out.

The problem with “Christian parenting”

When I started this blog one of the things that bothered me was the idea of “Christian parenting.” On their own those words are (fairly) straightforward. Put them together and you are looking for trouble.

That trouble is the idea that there is a specifically Christian way to parent your child, and that the goal of the Christian parent’s life is to figure that out and apply it. I am starting to read Cloud and Townsend’s book, Raising Great Kids, and appreciate one observation from a meeting of parents they attended when writing the book:

“Although people were prefacing their remarks with conversational niceties, I could feel the underlying tension. On one end the spectrum my luncheon partners advocated structure and control at the expense of everything else. To raise and obedient child is the most important thing. On the other end, they advocate love over structure. Having a child feel loved and secure in love is primary. Structure plays a secondary role.

Then there were those who emphasized the sinfulness of children. According to them, if you didn’t seize every opportunity to get control of the little sinners, you would lose them for sure. Still others emphasized the inherent goodness and innocents of children, feeling that they only sin when they have been mistreated by the outside world.

The tone of their voices and the expression on their faces revealed that they saw the other side as the villain.”

I couldn’t help but laugh out when I read this thinking about how well they described the kind of diversity I would get if I put all my friends around the table to talk parenting shop. And although I’d like to think that years of friendship and similarly intense conversations would stave off the antipathy the authors note, I am not sure there wouldn’t be a little bit of smoke coming out of some ears.

One reason is that growing a child is extremely important. In our church, the Mennonite church, our goal is to raise a child who understands as best she can the consequences of the Christian life, even that she may be called to die for her faith, and to accept this life through the sign of baptism. This is a very, very big deal and a charge that would fill me with dread and sleepless nights were it not for the grace of God. Parenting a child towards fullness of faith is no easy task.

Another reason is that parenting is also about community. Cloud and Townsend point out that choosing a different way to parent from your own mother or pastor or best friend is a type of judgment. It’s a difficult dance and one that can end up hurting quite a few people who are close to you.

I don’t have any bold suggestions of ways to make these conversations less intense and more grace-filled. While I like Cloud and Townsend’s suggestion to reframe the parenting question in terms of its goal, raising a child of character, I know lots of people for whom this suggestion wouldn’t be’t adequate. It’s just a tough thing.

St Nicholas Day Resources

St Nicholas Day was this past Sunday and we enjoyed starting our tradition of celebration with 15 children and their families. Below are some resource for putting together your own event.

The Saint Nicholas Center – This is where your planning begins. An organization devoted to the promulgation of Saint Nicholas tradition, they have everything you need to know: crafts, stories, books and decorations. The rest of this post will show you how we used their suggestions.

Decoration – St Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors (legend says he was a fisherman), children and the poor. We cut out paper ships to decorate. We also brought out my mom’s huge Santa collection. There were a few St Nicholases that we showed the children. You can also decorate with shoes since filling shoes with candy is a big part of the tradition of this day.

Books – Finding an appropriate St Nicholas book can be a little tricky. In general, the negotiation of the party is respecting some parents desire to keep a strong Santa Claus tradition in their house while also making it clear that Saint Nicholas was a real person, a saint of the church.

One book that does a great job of this is is The Legend of Saint Nicholas. It’s good for just about any age. It’s a contemporary story of a boy at the mall who overhears a mall Santa talking about what he “is also called” and the story of his life. The boy hearing the story decides that he wants to be generous like St Nicholas and to celebrate the greatest gift of all, Jesus, by being like the saint. Raises few questions about the possible nonexistence of Santa but tells the story faithfully.

Another book we like is Jeanne Pieper’s The Secret of Saint Nicholas. This book emphasizes the legend of the bishop as a young man when he provided the dowries for three sisters, saving them from being sold into slavery by their poor and virtue-less father. For really little kids there is a board book by Mary Joslin. This is a good resource is you plan on doing the historical Saint Nicholas instead of Santa Claus in your family.

Crafts – We had two activities for our kids. The first was making miters out of construction paper and decorating them. The other was decorating cookies. The younger kids were more interested in the miters than the older ones. Next year, if we have the same wide age range of children, I’ll have two crafts. I’ll keep the miters but will also do something like Apple Saint Nicholas for the older kids. Next year we will also print out coloring pages for children who get done quickly or are bored.

Giving – In addition to crafts and stories, we wanted to make sure that everyone was instilled with the lesson of Saint Nicholas’s charity. So we asked everyone to bring a gift for a child in need. We displayed the gifts and after the story told the children that this was our way to honor Saint Nicholas who loved God so much that he wanted to take care of God’s most fragile children.

Filling of the Shoes – When everyone arrived we asked them to place their shoes inside the door. During the story my husband filled their shoes with treats. We had clementines, candy canes, a chocolate Santa, a few Hershey Kisses and a beautiful prayer card that we bought from the Center. Once again, to help out the parents who do do Santa Claus, we told the children that, on St Nicholas Day, when we tell the saint of the saint he comes to visit and fills our shoes with treats. The older kids caught on quickly and were very funny with their explanation that it wasn’t Saint Nicholas but Saint Jacob (my husband) who had come to visit.

Food – We kept our party early (4 pm) because our toddler goes to bed early. We had heavy snacks and asked a few families to bring something to eat. Next year I think I’ll buy one of the Saint Nicholas Center cookie cutters for our decorating.

Liturgy – At the end of our party we asked everyone to join us for a Saint Nicholas Day liturgy. It was very short (as we were working with short attention spans) but did the trick of, once again, refocusing on the Christian tradition as the reason for our celebration.

We had a great time and look forward to Saint Nicholas Day next year. If you have any traditions, suggestions or ideas, feel free to add a comment.

Basically Altrusitic? Reconciling Research and Christian Parenting

The NYTimes published an article on new findings that humans are, at a base level, a mix of both cooperation and selfishness. The study, which began as working towards defining the innate differences between primates and humans, found that even without guidance from parents, children are helpful. They will help an unrelated adult with the door at 18 months and will look with a parent for a lost item at 12. As they grow, they become selective in the types of cooperation. By 3 most children try to enforce social norms and the rules they know. The study’s author calls the trait separating humans and chimps “shared intentionality.” The article concludes:

“Children are altruistic by nature,” he writes, and though they are also naturally selfish, all parents need do is try to tip the balance toward social behavior.

I’m often at a loss in terms of reconciling contemporary findings in human development and social/child psychology with some aspects of Christian parenting. While I know the data isn’t perfect, I don’t want to throw out the fact that almost every child is predisposing him or herself to helpfulness as I think about what T needs to grow in charity and love. At the same time, I know that sin is more powerful than simply needing to “tip the balance of toward social behavior.”

How do you respond when reading things like this?

Making Advent Happen

It felt like it took about 20 minutes for Thanksgiving to give way to Christmas. For Christians we should be wondering, what happened to Advent?

The trend of skipping over the contemplation and repentance of Advent is an especially hard trend to buck when you have children. Not only do you have to fend off the media blitz of the season, aimed directly at your kids, you also have to contend with your school celebrations, neighborhood decorations and your round-the-clock Christmas music station. The Christmas culture is everywhere and it is powerful. How do you keep your child appropriately in the place of Advent’s waiting and watching?

One family I know takes quite seriously the fast of the Nativity. Their idea of fasting from “screens” (i.e. computer and TV) would help to weed out some of the major influences of preemptive merriment. In many liturgical traditions the music of Christmas and the decorating for the season happens on Christmas day, not the 4 weeks prior.

What would be really be wonderful is to encourage a small culture of family and friends to help you transform the time of Advent. What a wonderful thing to stand is solidarity with others who can help you us go deeper into the true meaning of Advent – a time of repentance, waiting and watching.

Is Homemaking Every Christian’s Vocation?

My friend Gwyneth and the folks at Uganda Christian University passed along an article by Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh called “Education for Homelessness or Homemaking? The Christian College in a Postmodern Culture,” presented at a conference at Calvin College on Christian education.

In sum, the writers explain that the postmodern goal of Christian college education is upward mobility. We send our kids off to college to make it in the world (socially, financially, in their careers). By contrast, agrarians like Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson explain that what Christian education should be about is returning young men and women to home, placing them vocationally in one place to build a socio-economic community. This doesn’t mean we necessarily return to our home of origin (if we even have one), but that we work towards becoming embedded in our local histories and stories in order to live coherently the great story of God’s redemption of creation. We cannot love abstractly, and we cannot love without proximity. Homemaking allows us the nearness we need to actually do as God commands.

My friends and I talk a lot about the goal of training up a child in the way of the Lord. Most of the time those conversations feel abstract. I appreciate how this article provides a more definitive reality for which we are to strive. It also presents us with a clear look at what to avoid:

According to the new norm, the child’s destiny is not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them; succession has given way to supersession. And this norm is institutionalized not in great communal stories, but in the education system. The schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance that it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to say the future, of the child.… The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community.

David Orr offers five concrete suggestions regarding homemaking. The first is establishing ecological literacy, a knowledge base of how our world actually works. Second, we need to be honest with our children about the crisis at hand. Third, we need to know about the forces that have shaped the world to be as it is. This requires a broader education in religion, science and social studies. Fourth, we must instill a strong doctrine of creation in our children. Fifth, we need to reinterpret the world’s measures of success in terms of how God understands the good.

(I’d add a sixth point: that Christian colleges need to stop charging so much that young people, especially those facing their debt in the altered reality of economic recession, cannot help but plan their education around a lucrative career. We’re still under the thumb of my husband’s Wheaton College depth, eight years after graduation. Living in the reality of homecoming is extremely difficult when the education provider sets you up to have to follow the money, the job, the promotion in order to pay back what you owe. But I digress.)

I am wondering how these lessons, aimed at shaping a Christian college education, translate to the raising of our young people who are still in the home. How do we begin to instill these lessons in our children?

(Read more in the authors’ book: Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement.)

Kids in Church

Bringing up the cry room topic leads into many other issues related to the contemporary experience of worship with our children. I  was thinking the other day about sitting in my Episcopal church, bored out of my mind as a young person. There was nothing done to the liturgy to make it “appeal to the youth.” In fact, one my strongest memories of my childhood church experience was reading through the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer as fast as I could. Then I would see how far the real service had gone. It was never very far along. I always wondered, why can’t they just say this quicker so we can all get out of here.

What I didn’t know is that the liturgy was making its way into my heart. Church is a lot like practice when you’re young. It’s painful and boring and sometimes you have to get forced to do it. But in the end you play beautifully. I’m not saying this solves all the problems of squirmy toddlers, Communion-distracting cry-ers or the negotiation of your Tween reading Twilight during the sermon. But to help us along, Debra Dean Murphy’s reflections are poignant reminders of what the pedagogy of worship is all about:

Children need to hear the Bible’s stories in worship—not because they will understand them better there, but because that is where the stories do their formative work, shaping a people week after week, season after season, year after year. When we use the Bible’s stories to impart pious moralisms to children (“be good,” “be helpful,” be nice to your brother”) we minimize Scripture’s real purpose and power, and we fail to communicate to our children that in worship—in the hearing of the Word, the preaching of it, the performance of it through gestures, postures, and holy sign-acts—they (along with us) enter that world and have the hope of being transformed through time—God’s time—by its vision and power.

And since repetition is the key to effective pedagogy, we should regularly communicate to children (and their parents) that they are integral to the whole worshiping body; that their presence is not merely tolerated but happily anticipated. When we “dismiss” children from the worshiping body (for children’s church, say), no matter how well-intentioned our efforts at teaching them about worship may be, we convey to them and to everyone else that dividing the worshiping body is an acceptable norm.

But it is also important that worship not cater to children. Worship that seeks above all else to enact God’s story of redemption and to imagine God’s politics of peace invites and expects the participation of the whole household of faith—young and old, rich and poor, the able and the infirm—with the understanding that, in regard to young children especially, there are privileges reserved for their maturity, mysteries and riches of the worshiping life that reveal themselves as rewards for years of practice and perseverance.

Finally, we engage in the work of introducing children to worship—and overseeing their ongoing participation in it—not in an effort to make them good but that they might know who they are. And we do this with the hope that worship which is attentive to the gospel’s grand story will do its transforming work in their lives (and ours), will feed their imaginations and not their egos, and will help them (and us) learn to order our lives by the gift of God’s time.

Abortion Sign: What would you say?

My dad and I share a car so I am frequently at his office, an office in the same complex of buildings as the one abortion clinic in our town. Literally every day when I round the corner there are protesters at the corner holding signs. Sometimes the signs have the classic phrase “Abortion stops a beating heart,”  others are religious (“God loves your baby” or “Pray the rosary to end abortion”). Some are gruesome and horrifying beyond description.

I often wonder who the protesters are intending to see the signs. Is it the women going into the clinic? Is it pro-abortion advocates, to let them know there is opposition? Is it to bolster to movement? To change minds? Or maybe a little of all of these? It’s hard to think of a single sign that would meet all these ends. Noting their location, I can only assume one primary hope is to get a woman seeking an abortion to go another direction.

Like a lot of Christians, we’re opposed to abortion-on-demand. So I’ve thought on more than one occasion about bringing my own sign out to the corner (unfortunately it’s on a busy road and I have a toddler whose favorite activity is climbing to and from sidewalk to street). Sometimes my dream sign is on the political side

You can’t defeat abortion
Without defeating poverty

or more on the factual, informative side

Women below
the poverty line
are 4x more likely
to abort.

but most of the time I think about what I would say to a woman who finds herself in this horrific situation.

I am praying for you.

or

There are people
who will help you.
Ask me.

or

There is nothing
God cannot forgive.

In truth, I don’t know that protesting is the most effective means of impacting people’s decision to have an abortion. It seems like relationship and conversation could go a lot further. But as a thought experiment: Do you ever think about an alternative to abortion signs you see? If you had three lines on a sign to speak to the heart of a woman about to have an abortion, what would it be?

The Cry Room

There are a lot of questions about inclusion when considering the places where we worship. That’s why I am especially appreciative of Sarah Morice Brubaker’s reflection on the presence of the cry room in our  churches.

A cry room has an ambiguous status: it can be a way of accommodating or excluding, blessing or cursing. To have a cry room or a church nursery is to ask the urgent question, “Who is worship for?”

Certainly one hopes that most Christians would agree that being incontinent or preverbal or wiggly are not grounds for excommunication from God’s people. But then what does it mean if a church sanctuary is a space from which certain kinds of people are excluded for being bothersome? Who are we if, when we say “worship,” we mean “that activity where a certain group of people are protected from hearing the cries of others, so that they can better focus on Jesus of Nazareth”?

She explains that she’s not anti-cry room. She does want to push us to think about what worship means when we remove the wiggly, the loud, the smelly or the old from our midst. What does that mean when those are the people whom Jesus called blessed?

I wonder how other churches have creatively dealt with children and spaces of worship. Have you seen anything done well? What hasn’t worked?