The Danger of Thinking You Know How from a Small Sample
Here are some Caution from a wise woman: about childrearing:
Back when Tim and I had four or five children, all elementary school or younger, life seemed pretty easy. Like many earnest young Christian parents, we’d worked hard at intentional parenting and now we had these generally well-behaved, delightful children. We were fooled into thinking that we had something to do with the fact. I’m embarrassed to say, Tim and I were cheeky enough to feel that we knew how this parenting thing ought to be done, and we were happy to share our “wisdom” with anyone who wasn’t quite so far along as we were.
In reality, we were arrogant fools.
Well, God had some work to do in humbling us, and he proceeded to do it in the subsequent years. Our next babies (all equally delightful to the first four) began coming in rapid succession. Life with six and seven children was more difficult, and our “control” began slipping. By baby number eight things were even more challenging and then baby number nine, born prematurely following a difficult pregnancy, threw us over the edge. Any illusions we’d had about being able to handle this parenting thing on our own were gone as we daily cried out to God for His strength, mercy and wisdom to raise our children. …
A second thing changed as our family grew in both size and age: we began to see more of the complexity of parenting children with different personalities and needs, varying strengths and weaknesses, over different ages and stages. In retrospect we can see how gentle the Lord was with us in our early years. Our first several children were for the most part quickly obedient, though of course there were testing moments with each of them. Many of our later children have, well, been more challenging. We’ve had a chronic biter, an ultra-low sleep need child, and a preschooler who would tell us that she hated God. To top it off, sometimes the very things that had worked with the earlier children were not working with the younger ones. What were we to do?