Trapped in a doctors waiting room yesterday morning I took in an episode of Home and Garden TV about home design. The couple they interviewed about their home plans insisted that they wanted the master bedroom suite to be at the opposite end of a long hall from the other bedrooms. If they had children, they said, they wanted to make sure that their children did not interfere in any way with their privacy. Their house was beautifully decorated, immaculately put together, and, in my humble opinion very, very cold looking. I know lots of people, including me, say things before they have children that they later disagree with, but I couldn't help but be saddened by the clearly negative message this couple had absorbed from our culture about children.
Later that same day looked through my mail at a flier from a basement waterproofing company. The thrust of their advertisement was that if you finished your basement you could move your kids and all their stuff down there and not have them make noise and clutter in the rest of your house.
Again, the message that our culture seems to send is that you must, at all costs, protect yourself from you children taking over YOUR life, YOUR space, YOUR relationship with your spouse. I am in total agreement that a life which completely revolves around your children is a miserable existence for the parent and also unhealthy for the child. But is the solution to wall off so many boundaries to try to make sure that your children don't intrude? Or is that only a superficial solution to a much deeper problem, the problem of our purpose in parenting?
It seems to me that the ugly child-centered kind of family that most of us instinctively recoil from is largely the result of having unrealistic expectations of childhood. It seems that there is this myth in our culture that childhood should be like DisneyWorld every day --magical, beautiful and fun. I know people who seem to feel that their main goal as parents is to make sure that nothing boring, stressful or unpleasant intrudes on their child's life. This kind of parenting is surely bound to suck the life out of the parent attempting to create this fairy tale. Of course we would want all sorts of boundaries imposed on such a soul crushing responsibility.
If instead we view our whole family as part of a mission to leave the world a better place, to use our resources to bring glory to God and to serve others, then the drudgery of child rearing becomes part of a bigger purpose. Yes, on a daily basis I am denying myself my desires for comfort, for peace and quiet, for leisure, but I am NOT doing it just to cater to the whims and demands of an immature child. There have been many, many times over the last 10+ years that I have selfishly longed for more time, more space, more quiet for ME, or for myself and my husband. But that very emotional and physical exhaustion has been the main impetus in my adult life for my own growth and maturity. And hopefully that legacy of my own growth will teach my children more about self sacrifice than 100 lectures on the topic ever could.
I know that my husband and I have a much healthier and deeper relationship after 6 children than we did in the early years of our marriage. Our children have most definitely intruded on our privacy, but they have also become our greatest adventure together, our magnum opus, the part of us that will echo into the future, long after we are gone.
Later that same day looked through my mail at a flier from a basement waterproofing company. The thrust of their advertisement was that if you finished your basement you could move your kids and all their stuff down there and not have them make noise and clutter in the rest of your house.
Again, the message that our culture seems to send is that you must, at all costs, protect yourself from you children taking over YOUR life, YOUR space, YOUR relationship with your spouse. I am in total agreement that a life which completely revolves around your children is a miserable existence for the parent and also unhealthy for the child. But is the solution to wall off so many boundaries to try to make sure that your children don't intrude? Or is that only a superficial solution to a much deeper problem, the problem of our purpose in parenting?
It seems to me that the ugly child-centered kind of family that most of us instinctively recoil from is largely the result of having unrealistic expectations of childhood. It seems that there is this myth in our culture that childhood should be like DisneyWorld every day --magical, beautiful and fun. I know people who seem to feel that their main goal as parents is to make sure that nothing boring, stressful or unpleasant intrudes on their child's life. This kind of parenting is surely bound to suck the life out of the parent attempting to create this fairy tale. Of course we would want all sorts of boundaries imposed on such a soul crushing responsibility.
If instead we view our whole family as part of a mission to leave the world a better place, to use our resources to bring glory to God and to serve others, then the drudgery of child rearing becomes part of a bigger purpose. Yes, on a daily basis I am denying myself my desires for comfort, for peace and quiet, for leisure, but I am NOT doing it just to cater to the whims and demands of an immature child. There have been many, many times over the last 10+ years that I have selfishly longed for more time, more space, more quiet for ME, or for myself and my husband. But that very emotional and physical exhaustion has been the main impetus in my adult life for my own growth and maturity. And hopefully that legacy of my own growth will teach my children more about self sacrifice than 100 lectures on the topic ever could.
I know that my husband and I have a much healthier and deeper relationship after 6 children than we did in the early years of our marriage. Our children have most definitely intruded on our privacy, but they have also become our greatest adventure together, our magnum opus, the part of us that will echo into the future, long after we are gone.
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