Every week for over a year now, I’ve had coffee on Friday mornings with my teen daughter. It started as a discussion date for her reading assignments during her senior year, but she wanted to keep it up not only through the summer, but even into her freshman year at New St. Andrews College.
A few weeks ago she was having me look over a paper when her professor came into the coffee shop. “It’s ok,” she said, “peer review is allowed.” I raised my eyebrows and replied, “Well, #momgoal unlocked. Now we’re peers?” Our coffee dates have been a blessed time of establishing a more peer-like friendship, not because I act like a teenager, but because we both care and talk through issues and events that come up.
When we homeschool, we know relationships matter. We want to have friendships with our children. When they’re all little, that seems feasible if only we stoop low enough for them. Give it a few years and then we realize how easy it is to blow up a relationship with harshness, irritation, and distraction.
Some turn to gentle parenting methods to combat the temptations of anger and resentment (on both sides). “Gentle” sounds like simply being the opposite of harsh, so surely it will restore our relationships and keep us and our kids friends at home and when they leave.
However, gentle parenting assumes parents have no authority and ought to convince and cajole children rather than require obedience. Gentle parenting is a phenomenon of modernity, believing that all authority is tyranny and all obedience is a violation of the individual and of freedom. That is, gentle parenting is antithetical to Scripture; therefore, nothing good will come of it. It cannot deliver its promised aim: strong parent/child relationships.
God established the family. He made each role and causes it to work in certain ways. Then He tells us how it works. God reveals secrets of the universe to us, and even if we believe Him, we still treat His Word as if it is optional or only applicable to some. However, like Tolstoy observed, all happy families are the same. Healthy families function in accordance with the way God made the world.
In The Christian Family, Bavinck likens the familial father-mother-child trio to a trinity, not that God Himself is like these three persons or relationships, but that we can see a way trinity in unity and unity in trinity works in our own relationships because God designs all creation to teach and testify of Himself: “The two-in-oneness of husband and wife expands with a child into a three-in-oneness…united within threefold diversity and diverse within harmonic unity” (8).
Each of the three in a family relationship embodies an essential principle: authority, love, and obedience. Such “constitutes the foundation of all civilized society” (8). It is not that men are only and always authority without any love or obedience, but that each one is given a particular emphasis and function. The role isn’t superficially imposed upon two identical units, either. Men and women were created with these principles built-in.
The family codes in Ephesians 5 teach this threefold cord of the family as well. The husband is a picture of Christ, the wife is a picture of the church. When they are given children who are called to obey both mother and father, what are those children but members of the church and heirs of the father?
Thus, it makes sense that Jesus holds up a child for us to imitate. In the kingdom, we are the children, the members, called to obedience. God is our Father and we call Him Abba. The church is our mother and we are not to forsake or neglect her.
The way fathers father teaches a child about God and Christ, like it or not. His life is a sermon. The way mother’s mother teaches a child about the church and how he ought to relate to the people of God and the application of teaching. The health and strength of the marriage is a testimony—good or bad—to the children of the reality and meaning of the gospel itself.
How the family talks of and worships God will redound back to how the father is honored and obeyed. How the family treats their membership within the church will wind up influencing how the families ties amongst itself strengthen or weaken and how mom’s home is treated.
It all works this way not because it is a superimposed governmental or merely poetic structure. It works because it is how God created it. It is within nature, yet unknown without revelation. Reality is interconnected. You can’t pull one string out without unraveling the whole.
So what does this have to do with our desire to have strong relationships and even friendships with our children? If we truly want that blessing, we must seek it in childlike faith and obedience ourselves, not grab it on the terms that make sense to us.
The foundation of our relationship with our children is based on trust and obedience. My toddlers had to be trained to obey without questioning. My elementary students had to be taught to obey first and ask questions later, and that they were not the ones who decided whether or not it made sense. They had to obey mom because God told them to, so disobeying mom is disobeying God; therefore, the only valid way (but there is a valid way) to disobey is if mom commands something God forbids or forbids something God commands.
Our family operated this way, but we never achieved what some people imagine is supposed to be the goal of such training. Young parents (myself included) imagine that if the training is effective enough, then it can end. It will be accomplished and achieved and the rest of the child’s childhood can be spent in fellowship bliss with rightly ordered relationships.
In reality, it doesn’t work this way. We are all fallen. Training never comes to an end — and as mothers this teaches us about ourselves as well. Our training never comes to an end, either. Just as our children never achieve perfect obedience, neither do we. Yet we do not give up on either, but redirect, repent, and retry.
Sure, it is possible for an insistence on obedience to descend into tyranny. I fell into that hole more than once, though God never left me there. We fall into tyranny when we think that the ultimate goal is simply to be obeyed. However, obedience isn’t about us. It’s not for our convenience or for efficiency within the family logistics.
Just as God is growing us up into Christlikeness, we are shepherding our children to grow up into adulthood, into their own fatherhood or motherhood roles. We are teaching them to obey God on their own. Childhood is meant to be left behind in the relationship between parents and children, but in reality the child relationship moves to be directly under God, a child of God, no longer needing the mediation and representation of mother and father to show the way.
I now have 3 adult children who have left our home and with whom I am friends. The mission is accomplished, but the mission wasn’t actually to be friends. Being friends is a side benefit of the real mission: Following Christ. Aim for friendship as the primary goal and you will likely not get it. You will cling to your children in an unhealthy way and they will have to rip apart to achieve the independence that is their due.
It is only because my adult children are following Christ that we now friends. After all, if they didn’t have Christ how could they have extended the forgiveness I need in all the many mistakes and sins and offenses I committed in our multi-decade relationships? In Christ, we share rightly ordered love, forgiveness, and mission. I am proud to be demoted in their lives. When they were my dependents, I exercised authority over them for their good, whether they liked it or not. Now I rejoice that my authority is not needed and I can merely receive honor—the honor of them humoring me, coming to dinner occasionally, texting me emojis and memes, and sometimes letting me in on their thoughts.
Friendship between parent and child develops not from playing like children together. The friendship comes as fruit of raising your children up to become an adult you’re thrilled to know and talk to. It’s not a direct line, but a path of obedience walked with failure and repentance and persistence.