I remember clearly the precise moment I became a parent. In some ways, a familiar script unfolded. My husband and I rushed to the hospital. Friends and family waited anxiously for a phone call that would deliver the good news. And then, it happened. I was handed a gorgeous baby, rosy with dark hair. I had waited and hoped, and now here she was, a perfect little human being, entrusted to our care.
In other ways, I felt as if I were outside looking in, watching a scene I had never expected. Only a few moments earlier, I had held my daughter’s birth mother’s hand as this beautiful baby was born. This little girl was now nestled in my arms, but at that moment I suddenly felt flummoxed. “Well, hello there,” I remember thinking. “You’re the baby, and...I guess I’ll be...the mom.” It was enormous.
I am not the only one to experience the transition to parenting in this way. And if that first moment of parenthood does not create the sense of being in over one’s head, it is all but guaranteed that some later moment will. To become a parent is to be entrusted with something infinitely precious: a human life. Parents take up a work of intense companionship and tender, relentless formation unlike any other.
Parents of faith often see their work as something more than chance or even choice—to see their lives with their children as a calling. But in order to understand how to live that calling, we also need to stop and ask the question: “What is parenting, exactly?” I do not mean that we should ask about the goal of parenting, although that is certainly connected. And most parents do have some sense that their parenting efforts are directed to certain ends. They want to move children toward being functioning adults, or perhaps good citizens. Parents of faith may have an explicit goal of handing on that faith and fostering in their children a meaningful relationship with God or with the church. If they are thinking more specifically, parents may have other goals: to raise children to be happy, to be thoughtful, to be kind; to value education or family; and to live fruitful lives. Goals of these sorts matter, but they make sense only insofar as parents take the fundamental step of asking what the fundamental reality of parenting involves.
Three common models of parenting come immediately to mind: provision, instruction and discipline. All parents know that providing and caring for children is essential to their task. From the first baby blanket to a college education, parents must ask what their children need (and sometimes what they want) and then determine whether and how they can meet those needs. The model of instruction is central for most parents. Parents teach everything from how to hold a fork, to the habit of saying “thank you,” to ways to understand people and the larger world. Finally, even if it is not what they most look forward to, the majority of parents would name “discipline” as a central model for what they are doing as parents—and for some, this would top the list.
I would not suggest that we simply erase any of those ways of imagining what parenting involves, but I do want to offer other models that I believe to be richer ones. They serve to expand our imagination about this work, and—perhaps unexpectedly—they also yield many practical kinds of encouragement and direction for parents.
The Parents as Mapmaker
The first model is that of mapmaking. To see the model fully, imagine a parent seated at a desk, a large sheet of paper in front of them, and a child (or children) seated on their lap. The process of parenting, I am suggesting, is something like sketching out a map as the child watches. Explicitly—and even more powerfully, implicitly—a parent “tells” a child what the world is like. This includes, of course, forms of instruction. (“If you want to get to here, you’ll have to walk this way.”) It is a more multilayered and profound kind of instruction than a straightforward explanation of how to travel from A to B.
Mapmaking involves sketching out possibilities and edges. It means marking dangers. (“Here is a tall mountain range. And over there? Dragons.”) It means deciding which features and details are included. (The height of mountain ranges? The best spot to stop and see the view?) It will, of course, reflect the parent’s own knowledge and experience in many ways. Roads that she has traveled herself will be detailed and precise, and others may be indicated only vaguely. Or there may be places parents have never been, but where they very much want their children to go, and those will be drawn with vivid colors. The map may also be inaccurate—and parents do their children a favor if they remember that. For better or worse, a map does two things: It notes certain locations, and it has a center and an orientation around which these locations are placed. Parents cannot simply throw up their hands and say, “I have no idea.”
The process of parenting is something like sketching out a map as the child watches.
In particular, parents place an X on the map that marks a crucial spot for their children: “You are here.” Parents don’t simply sketch a world; they also tell children that they are part of this world, with varying relationships to various places. They indicate that some things are near and some things are far, as well as how the child might get from here to there.
For parents of faith, imagining a map also offers possibilities beyond simply speaking of a divine person called “God” or a reality called “church.” It means thinking about the center of the map and its fundamental orientation. To sketch faith for a child means drawing a map in which true north is a God who is good, a God who is love. It means suggesting both a spot on the map and also invaluable travel companions that together make “the church.” The “you” indicated on the map, moreover, has not been shipwrecked in that spot accidentally but is placed and is beloved, connected to God and to a company of saints. This map will also include an awareness of sin: signs pointing out spots that are dangerous, or the traveler’s own tendency to become disoriented. Faith may move parents to mark other spots in specific ways, but it is the central orientation that is most important, and upon which all else must be built.
Of course, this gives parents very interesting questions to ask of themselves: What is the map that I am drawing? What is the map that I have drawn so far? These are not easy questions to answer. So much of this is known deeply and intuitively, and parents may well not realize what they are communicating. Here, a secondary practice of mapmaking could come in handy: narration of, and conversation about, the contours of this particular map. In the model of mapmaking I am offering, a parent might speak as she sketches. (“Here is a small stream. It’s bigger in summer and smaller in winter, although that’s hard to see here. Here is a great city. Your grandfather and I visited there once.”) And, just as important, a parent asks questions. (“Over here is a desert. Do you know what plants you would find there?”) As a child grows, those questions will change, and a parent will not simply describe but will hear their child’s impressions too. (“Have you gone this way? What did you find?”)
Over time, a new phenomenon appears: Each child is building her own map (the map that she will pass on to her own children, perhaps). A child’s map will always differ somewhat from the parent’s, and it may differ greatly. Parents are called both to offer their own map and to cheer on the child who begins to imagine her own. Even if adult children decide that this map they have been given is all wrong, they have at least seen a map made. They know to look for pathways and water sources. They know that maps are for sharing and using with others.
This model of mapmaking, it must be admitted, relies more on categories of picturing and discussing than on doing. For the latter category, I want to suggest another model of parenting, one that I understand to be even more comprehensive and important: We can think of parent and child as involved in a process of apprenticeship.
The Child as Apprentice
Apprenticeship, which still survives in some of the arts and some of the trades, was once a dominant form of education. The basic form is a simple one: An apprentice works alongside a master, watching carefully and slowly moving into greater and greater participation in the work. A masonry apprentice learns bricklaying by watching and then joining in the work of a master bricklayer. In the art studio, an apprentice might be allowed first to clean brushes, then to mix paint, then to begin adding details to paintings. Apprentices to the great artists of the Renaissance did these very things. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, became an apprentice at 14 as part of a chain of apprenticeship that was eventually a chain of masters. He studied under a master named Andrea del Rocco, who himself had studied under Donatello. The apprentice eventually receives payment and produces her own masterpieces. The master, close at hand, oversees this process throughout.
Too often, parenting slides toward imagining something that parents are doing to their children.
Too often, parenting (and, in a sense, even the term “parenting” itself) slides toward imagining something that parents are doing to their children. Parents can get pulled into something perhaps better described as management of children. We get them ready for the day. We feed them; we bathe them; we pick them up and bandage wounds. And we try to follow all the advice. When they are newborns, we try to put them to sleep on their backs. When they attend school, we try to set up space for them to do their homework. We try to praise them more often than we criticize them. Ultimately, though—and sometimes it seems almost ceaselessly—parents are doing things to and for our children. This model has real weaknesses. It can create anxiety in children. It can erode the relationship between parent and child. And all this management, frankly, is exhausting—both for parents and for children. The model of apprenticeship, on the other hand, offers a number of fruitful emphases for parents.
The model of apprenticeship is more about parents simply being with their children, doing life together. If it becomes a guiding model, then it actually leads to less vigilance and less alarm. It involves less planning and less organizing. It involves more presence, more patience, more playfulness and more calm. The calling of a mother or a father to walk with their children, sharing work, sharing play, sharing themselves, is a richer reality.
If I were to draw on lived experience, I would say that this picture of parenting actually looks something more like what we tend to associate with extended family members spending time with children. Picture an aunt or uncle who’s involved, who knows a child well and who spends time with the child regularly. A certain overarching dimension of simple companionship is evident. Grandparents, famously, are always more relaxed.
Parents are likely to immediately respond, “Of course grandparents are more relaxed! They don’t have the same responsibility for the outcome!” This kind of relaxed vision may seem unrealistic. But in my own parenting, I have found that it is more effective, and more practical, than we might imagine. It can include teaching, but it does not rest on constant, explicit instruction.
And interestingly enough, the focus of the master is not even on the apprentice in a direct way. Of course, the master will keep one eye toward the apprentice to see what it is that she does well, or even to offer a word of correction. There is a fundamental way, however, in which the two are faced toward the thing that they are doing—together. It may be a subtle difference, but there is something important in this model: The child is not a product but a beloved person.
Embracing Ongoing Learning
To fill out the picture of apprenticeship, there are at least two other essential elements of the model that I have in mind. First, I think of the way that many parents concern themselves with “getting it right” at every stage of their parenting journey. There is nothing wrong with a desire to do well, but in an age of social media and comparison, this can become suffocating. To talk of the work of apprenticing one’s children need not mean that one’s own mastery of everything is complete. In the apprenticeship of parenting, part of what a parent shares is her own ongoing learning process. Practically speaking, a child who sees her parent apologize, and even more, a child who sees her parent apologize to her, is being apprenticed in an important way.
Second, children are not apprenticed only to their parents. Children learn in a studio filled with artists; they learn in community. Parents can seek out communities who will contribute to their children’s apprenticeship, but they cannot conjure them from nothing. Ideally, parents are welcomed, along with their children, into communities that are already functioning in this way.
There may be programs or various forms of religious instruction in communities that can function as a form of apprenticeship, especially when we remember that the goal here is not simply conveying information. Initiatives like clubs and camps and classes are most valuable when they set the stage for the real work of apprenticeship: the long, patient process by which more experienced people come alongside those less experienced and share with them the most valuable resource of all, which is themselves. They offer a context to do the work of the body of Christ—worshiping, serving, building, celebrating and mourning—together.
The child is not a product but a beloved person.
It’s important to keep in mind a crucial challenge to apprenticeship parenting. In our post-industrialized world, we are often at odds with this model. In other settings, past and present, parents and children were and are literally able to work together because the work of the parents was not by definition separate from something that children were able to do. Probably the simplest and most obvious example here is a family farm. In that world, children as young as 5 are needed to work together with their parents. But we are in a different situation. What we call “work,” by which we usually mean paid work, now usually means traveling away from home and being gone, sometimes for 10 or 12 hours at a time. It is true that some parents are able to do the work at home, and that can provide some relief. But it can also highlight even more sharply the fact that adult work usually does not mix well with the care of children.
I do not want to simply romanticize the past. Living in the wake of some of these changes, though, parents can keep this challenge in mind. Parents can seek out stretches of time with their children in which they are not pursuing activities or entertainment, but are working together purposefully for some end. I have known parents, for example, who resisted buying or repairing a dishwasher for just this reason. The time spent washing and drying dishes is a perfect example of the sort of time in which the work of apprenticeship is given space to happen.
Christian parents may notice that this model of apprenticeship is a familiar one. Apprenticeship could be a way of thinking of discipleship. In Jesus, God became present for a process of apprenticeship, first with the Twelve, and then with ever-expanding circles of Christians. As Christian parents seek to imitate God, they can see their own commitment to the intensive process of apprenticeship parenting as a reflection of Jesus’ own work among those he loved.
What Are Parents Modeling?
An important question remains to be asked: If parents are like masters and children are like apprentices, then what is the skill that these apprentices are learning? It is not painting or stonework, of course. What is it that parents are modeling?
We could answer the question in a couple of ways. On the one hand, children are apprenticed to parents to learn a million things: how to talk, how to tie a shoe, how to drive a car. On the other hand, underneath all of those things, there are much more profound things being modeled and learned. Even in the case of experienced parents, there can be profound value in stepping back and reflecting on this question: What are the things at the center? What is it that we are teaching our children most fundamentally? Such an important question might even deserve very focused and intentional consideration in the form of a retreat or weekly time of reflection. For couples parenting together, it could be the basis of a rich, ongoing conversation.
As a way to begin that conversation, I suggest three possible answers that one might give about the fundamental character of parenting. These are hoped-for skills that have anchored parenting for me (even when I have fallen short in giving them the priority I intend!).
Parents give children a great gift when they embody the art of living in a web of community and connection.
First is the most important of all—even if it is not the first topic addressed in typical parenting books: We are teaching our children joy. By “joy,” I do not particularly mean cheerfulness. I do not necessarily mean a “good mood,” and I certainly do not mean putting on blinders to avoid painful realities and negative emotions. What I mean is a deep conviction underlying all else—that the world is good and beautiful, and that one is welcomed into it. This includes a sense of wonder at this deeply good reality, and it inevitably results in gratitude, both for the smallest details and also for the remarkable gift that existence itself is.
Second is a sense of purpose. Here I mean seeing myself in the world as an agent, as someone who is interacting in it and with it in meaningful ways. We have already noted how helpful it can be to see this as a fundamental good being accomplished in toddlers, as they try to find ways to change their own situation—and the world around them. The same could be said for teenagers. It is easy to become focused only on setting limits, but parents can also look for ways to celebrate their children’s growing abilities with them.
Third, in this world of beauty—a world in which children are also able to accomplish things and bring about change—parents are apprenticing children to a sense of deep connection to others and to the obligation to respond to others with compassion. Parents give children a great gift when they embody the art of living in a web of community and connection.
Of course, for parents of faith there is a sense in which the practice of that faith sits at the very center of it all. Ultimately, though, conscious faith rests on and incorporates all of these. Wonder at the beauty of the world proceeds as an awareness of God’s personal presence and produces trust, gratitude and a deep sense of being beloved. A sense of purpose becomes a vocation, a calling to live one’s own individual life to God’s glory. And a broad sense of connection to others finds a crucial center in connection with, and commitment to, the church—a connection that constantly spills over in the habit of loving others and inviting others to the table.
Here is the heart of parenting: to live life immersed in joy, purpose, compassion and faith—and to share that life with children.
This model of apprenticeship presents a profound challenge to parents: They must ask in what sense they are a “master” of these skills. Several decades ago a parenting book was published that emphasized how profoundly children can be influenced. The title of the book: Children Are Wet Cement. Some years later I heard another parenting expert refer to this book, saying that the title of the book is right, but perhaps not in the way parents expect. Children are deeply shaped by parents, but parents should not so much imagine that they are intentionally sculpting children into what they want them to be. Rather, children are wet cement whose parents fall face-first into them. Parents do leave an imprint, but it is an imprint of who they themselves are. This influence, this presence, is far more important than any strategies or tricks they could take up.
