Parenting by Developmental Design

You, Your Child, and God

Vivian L. Houk

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781606087961
  9781498254052
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621891376
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this book, Vivian Houk acknowledges that parenting is really hard work. There is no getting around that. It just is! While many books have been written about all major areas of development, she brings light to what may be the least understood and most confusing area of parenting today: the spiritual lives of their children. Parenting by Developmental Design was written for interested and engaged parents who need affirmation and want to know more about the pathway of spiritual formation for their children. For those who don't know how to begin, it offers hope and encouragement. "God has given us some amazing and powerful tools," writes Houk, "which are useful and effective in providing direction for those of us who suffer from the fear of failure or incompetence. We have the gift of imagination; the use of symbol, ritual, and celebration; and the tools for calming fears and healing wounds. And above all, the gift of the Holy Spirit. You are not alone or incapable." Anyone who values the stories of both the adult and child who walk with God will find this book enjoyable, engaging, and challenging.

1

The Case for Childlikeness

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in
the kingdom of heaven.”

—Matthew 18:1–3

Mike Mason, in his book The Mystery of Children, writes, “The way to be a good parent is by growing in childlike faith and the way to become childlike is to love a child. For we take on the likeness of what we love. If we loved children more, we wouldn’t mind being one ourselves.” Those words were exciting and encouraging to me because loving my children was something I understood. It required no extra reading or researching when time was so short and precious. It occurred to me that if I were to study my children I might also learn how to be a child of God. What a mystery! To paraphrase Mason, our children are bridges into that mystery. They show us how to cry out for help to the One who can help us. Children have been sent to confuse all our plans, frustrate our best interests, outwit us at every turn, drive us to our knees, and reduce us to tears. And yet, we are presented with another paradox: Children are the ones who can show us what it means to enter into the Kingdom of God as a child.1

Childlikeness

Children really know how to experience life in a way that is very different from the way we experience it. As newborns they truly reflect another world, one that they have recently known. After all, they came into this life directly from God’s hand, having experienced His creative energy and life. They are fresh bearers of the image of God. In a conversation with a young mother about her child, she said that as she became more spiritually aware and connected to Jesus, her children’s intimacy with God as infants and young children became evident. When she had her fourth child, they spent several days in bed together, and God’s presence with the baby was palpable. The young mother was drawn to it and could hardly leave her and the Spirit’s presence.

The very young have a strong capacity to accept what might seem farfetched to an adult who has much more life experience, because the veil between this world and the unseen world is so thin for children. This veil thickens over time as strands of reason, logic, and misconception get planted deeply within a person’s soul and spirit. A young mother shared with me a recent experience she had with her six-year-old daughter: Her daughter kissed the air while exclaiming that God was everywhere. She believed she was kissing God. She knew He loved her always. On another occasion, this same child woke up and ran down the stairs exclaiming that she was full of God’s love today. What a wonderful example of the childlike spirit in us that needs to be awakened.

I am also reminded of the story of a three-year-old girl who asked her mother if she could go into her baby brother’s bedroom. Because the baby was sleeping in his crib at the time, the mother told her daughter “no.” The little girl was persistent and eventually wore her mother down. Out of curiosity, the mother stood outside the baby’s door, peeked through the crack, and heard her little girl say to her infant brother, “Please tell me about God. I am starting to forget.”

For years I thought those kinds of spiritual experiences could only happen to well-informed and educated adults. A child would have to wait until they were intellectually capable of developing and activating that capacity out of their more adultlike understanding. My views changed dramatically after working with young children who had no trouble believing the impossible and seeing what adults couldn’t see in the spiritual realm. Because of my experiences working with young children, I have come to believe that all children come directly from God’s hand, full of knowledge and experience of God. They are capable of praise and worship even though they don’t have understandable language to express it. Their expressions of wonder and awe at the created world are their forms of praise and worship. It is beautiful and awe-inspiring to see.

Jesus was very aware of the capacity of children for simple faith, and He often pointed adults to them as an example of the way they should approach life on this Earth. He told the disciples many times, as recorded in the Gospels, that the way into the Kingdom of God was to come as a child. I believe that children’s exuberance for life, their humility, their ability (and willingness) to question anything, and their capacity to live fully in the present moment are a few of the reasons Jesus kept referring to children when speaking to the adult population. He saw their value. They were capable of pure love and devotion, something he desired from all of us.

I have summarized many of the characteristics that I believe Jesus saw and valued in children, along with ways that they express them:

Humility

• Say “I don’t know” easily
• Know that some things are bigger than they are
• Know that they are little
• Can live under authority
• Become voracious learners

Dependence

• Ask for help
• Let go in order to let themselves be loved
• Are not enslaved by work; work becomes play

Questioning with a Desire to Learn

• Ask questions to understand something about the “other world”
• Challenge our picture of what life is and should be like
• Love the truth

Image-Bearing

• Take on the likeness of what they love
• Know this world is not their permanent home
• Have a proper balance of interdependence
• Trust, knowing there is grace for making mistakes
• Respond to the love of Jesus

Exuberance About Life

• Love spontaneously
• Exude excitement and enjoy life
• Enter into play completely
• Find and know joy
• Have a heart full of praise
• Exhibit radical amazement

Authenticity

• Radiate wholesome innocence; do not comprehend evil
• Exhibit naïve transparency
• Know their value to God
• Are content to be themselves
• Follow the feelings of their heart

Willingness to Forgive

• Can forgive themselves
• Extend grace
• Embrace the events of one’s life uncritically

Ability to Live in the Present Moment

• Give themselves wholly
• Live in the “now”

Imagination

• See God in the mundane moments of daily life
• Live in a charmed relationship with reality
• Become explorers and experimenters of the heart
• Believe in miracles and mystery
• Have adult consciousness with a child’s vivid senses

An Unselfconscious Presence

• Speak God’s word to adults at times
• Break the mold of the status quo
• Have sexual neutrality

Even if we, as adults, could exhibit all of these characteristics, we would still have to accept the fact that we have been born into a fallen world. This is not our true home, and the enemy is at large. But all of us come into this world with a taste for God that we never forget. It creates a longing that pulls at our hearts until we rightly connect with Him again. Children whose hearts remain open and who experience God in their early years have a much better chance of staying on the path toward God without major detours than those who lost their sense of Him in the first few years.

The following story from a wonderful young mother of four illustrates this very well:

When my oldest child was born, my husband and I went to church but never spoke of God. I was uncertain of Him myself. By the time my daughter was six years old, we still did not have an intimate relationship with Him. He began knocking on the door of our hearts by showing us that we were losing our daughter’s soul. Through several examples, He showed us that her heart was hardening. We woke up.

In contrast, we did speak to our second child about God from the beginning—in all things. It was very organic, natural, and fun. By the age of two, she knew God’s presence, and it was palpable to her. Once I was putting her to bed and she said with a mystical and sure air, “Mom, Jesus is here. You can go.” At age nine she continues to be this way.

Restoring the Heart of the Parent

If you have experienced love at a deep level with someone, you have found yourself thinking about that person on and off all the time. You looked forward to sharing your life experiences with that other person. You might have wondered how the other person would react to a certain situation and would have loved to watch how they handled it. Instant availability would have been great. You couldn’t imagine being without your loved one in life’s joyous or difficult moments.

This is what loving God with all our hearts, soul, and strength is all about. He is constantly and consistently available. He wants us to share every life experience with Him and be dependent for whatever is needed. It sounds so simple and yet seems so difficult at the same time.

If, as parents, we love God this way, He will be a part of our life with our children. It will seem as natural as drinking water is to quench our thirst. We drink in God to replenish and rejuvenate our souls so that we can continue to live the life He has called us to. Drinking Him in gives us life and energy to impart His life-giving wisdom to our children. They already know God but haven’t had enough experiences to recogn...

Table of contents

• Parenting by Developmental Design
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Case for Childlikeness
• Chapter 2: Historical Views of Children
• Chapter 3: Parental Roles in Spiritual Formation
• Chapter 4: How Spirituality Looks in Children
• Chapter 5: The Formation of Spiritual and Religious Language
• Chapter 6: The Role of Child Development in Spiritual Formation
• Chapter 7: The Rhythm of Life and Spiritual Formation
• Chapter 8: The Role of Ritual, Symbol, and Celebration in Spiritual Formation
• Chapter 9: The Role of Imagination in Spiritual Formation
• Chapter 10: Tools for Calming Fears and Healing Wounds
• Appendix A
• Bibliography