Parenting Research

Jamie Smith on habits and love from 'You Are What You Love':

A mother loves her newborn baby and gazes longingly at it for weeks before it loves her back in return. The baby is learning to love by being loved by its mother.

We love because he first loved us, but we learn how to love in the home.

Our discipleship practises from Monday through Saturday shouldn't simply focus on Bib le knowledge acquisition - we aren't after all, liturgical animals on Sunday and thinking things for the rest of the week. Rather our day to day practices need to extend and amplify the formative power of our weekly worship practices by weaving them into our everyday liturgies. 

Alasdair MacIntyre (Scottish Philosopher) famously said:

I cannot answer the question, 'what ought I to do?' unless I first answer the question, 'Of which story am I a part?'

Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Tate Britain in London features painting entitled 'The Boyhood of Raleigh'. Sir Walter Raleigh was one of QEI's intrepid explorers. He established some of the first British colonies in what is now North Carolina. But he also twice set sail in search of the elusive El Dorado. In the painting, Millais imagines just what creates such an adventurer and explorer. His hypothesis? A good storyteller. Raleigh and a young friend sit entranced by a wizened old sailor who is pointing to an immense sea, captivating them with tales of what lies on the other side.

The home.

Think through the practises of the home. What goal or end are they aiming at?

The frenetic pace of our lives means we often end up falling into routines without much reflection. We do what we think 'good parents' do. And we might think these are just 'things we do' without recognising that they may also be doing something to us. 

No home or family can be its own church; no household is a substitute for the household of God. We all need to locate our households in the household of God and to situate our families within the 'first' family of the church.

Infant baptism (or belonging to a church we might say) shows that what counts as 'family' is not just the closed, nuclear unit that is so often idolised as 'the family'. For churches to function as they should 'natural' families should resist the tendency to fold in on themselves in self-regard.

Marriage: A great quote about the idolisation of marriage and the purpose of Christian marriage.

A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not 'die to itself' that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of 'adjustment' or 'mental cruelty'. It is the idolisations of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the kingdom of God.
-- Alexander Schmemann 

p119 features a vivid picture of the modern wedding and the obsession with novelty that inadvertently makes the wedding more about us than about God:

The implicit mythology of Wedding Inc. also reflects how we approach marriage. Indeed, the myths we load into weddings almost doom marriages to fail. Weddings are centred on the romantic 'coupling' of two star-cross lovers, as if marriage were an extended exercise of staring deep into one another's eyes - with benefits.

See Saturday Night Live's 'MeHarmony' spoof.

Family:

The church constitutes the 'first family', which is both a challenge and a blessing. On the one hand, it challenges yet another sphere of rabid autonomy  in late modernity: the privacy of the family. On the other hand, it comes as a welcome relief: we don't have to raise these kids on our own! 

After his girlfriend unexpectedly fell pregnant at Uni Chris Kaczor in an essay entitled 'Vampire Children' recounts that although he thought children would ruin his life, he actually realised the gift they are:

They are invitations to 'put on' virtues like gratitude, humility, patience and steadfastness. All those years ago I thought that having a baby was the worst thing that could have happened to me. I could not have been more wrong. Having a child isn't the 'end' to the good things of life it is an 'and' to the good things of life.' 

Every parenting strategy assumes something about the nature of human beings.

Given that we're not brains-on-a-stick who learn by having information pumped into them:

We should be concerned about the ethos of our households - the unspoken 'vibe' carried in our daily ritual...

You could have Bible 'inputs' every day and yet still have a household whose frantic rhythms are humming along with the consumerist myth of production and consumption. You might have Bible verses on the wall in every room of the house and yet the unspoken rituals reinforce self-centeredness rather than sacrifice. 

Alexander Schmemann:

It is not the lack of respect for the family... but the idolisation of the fmaily that breaks the moder family so easily, making divorce its almost natural shadows. It is the identification of marriage with happiness and the refusal to accept the cross in it. 

Families work well when we do not expect them to give us all we need. 

If the church is our first family then our second homes should be defined by it, and our doors ought to be open to the stranger, the sick, and the poor.

First:

Our households need to be caught up in the wider household of God: the liturgies of our homes should grow out of and amplify the formative liturgy of Word and Table.

This is an important reason to make music an aspect of family worship. As Augustine is often paraphrased as having said 'he who sings prays twice.' There is something at work in the lilt of a melody and the poetry of a hymn that makes the biblical story seep into us indelibly.

This is also the reason to invite your family into the rhythms of the liturgical calendar.

There is a physicality to such a household worship that encourages us to understand the gospel anew, in ways that endure in our imagination and thus shape how we make our way in the world.