Stars: ★★☆☆☆ (Not Worth It)
Premise
“Talk about countercultural. In a world where everything revolves around yourself—protect yourself, promote yourself, comfort yourself, and take care of yourself—Jesus says, ‘Crucify yourself. Put aside all self-preservation in order to live for God’s glorification, no matter what that means for you in the culture around you.”
Welch describes a world that wants to convince our children that owning the next big thing will make us happy and that placing ourselves at the center of the universe is the way to contentment. She then walks through how Jesus says exactly the opposite. By creating a Jesus-centered home, in lieu of a child- or parent-centered home, we can help our children combat these cultural norms.
Loved
- Children Learn by Example
This principle appeared throughout the book, and I appreciated the repetition. If I, as a parent, model discontentment and entitlement, this is what our children will demonstrate. I need to be aware of how much “stuff” I buy. Before purchasing something, I should consider if I actually need it and if I can afford it, the same two questions I would think about if my children asked me for more things.
One of the areas that we fall shortest as a family here is in eating out. For a few years, we only ate outside the house once a week on Sunday afternoons. As we are coming out of quarantine, it has become more of a habit when cooking dinner seems like too much work. This is a perfect example of a time when we do not need it because we always have food at home and we cannot afford it because we are working diligently to get out of debt. - Make work part of the family routine
This is an idea I strongly believe in. Everyone should contribute to helping make the house run, even from a young age. However, it doesn’t matter how much I believe in it if I am not making it a priority in our home. For months, we were consistently having the children take out the trash, and clean their room and the living room before they could watch TV in the evenings. As more of our energy has gone to caretaking and general life busyness as the world reopened, this habit has fallen to the wayside. The book provided an important reminder that it is necessary to teach children that they should be responsible for their own items and their own spaces. - Principle > Precept > Person
This concept was new to me, but I can see applications for it in everyday life. When we give our children a principle, for example: You need to use kind words to your siblings, we then need to show them where the Bible says that, the precept. In this case, we use Ephesians 4:29 in our house “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” Then talk about how this precept helps us understand God – He wants us to have strong, loving, and encouraging relationships. This will happen through the wise use of words rather than the foolish and angry use of words.
Didn’t Love
I was looking forward to reading this book because I recently noticed my children asking for more and more things. I wanted some practical suggestions on how to guide them through a sense that they should buy everything they want. However, Welch consistently suggests that we compare ourselves to people who have less than us. Removing entitlement at the root is important in our family because we are incredibly privileged. Both Afa and I have great jobs, and both our families provide toys and clothes year round for our children. They lack nothing. An understanding that these privileges are not afforded to a vast majority of the world is imperative, but the ways in which Welch recommends it is problematic.
One sample quotation of this is: “We can thank that boyfriend for being brave enough to end a relationship that wasn’t working; the homeless person for reminding us of our advantages and vulnerability; the boss, for forcing us to face new challenges.” The idea that we should be thanking people for having no home or be grateful that we can use them for comparison is appalling.
Some dear friends of ours once taught a lesson on always being prepared to give, which for them meant having bottles of water and food in their car for when they saw people begging on the side of the road. They wanted to be ready to meet a need. To me, this is a much better way of approaching the idea of having more than others – always being ready to share what you have. Using other people in impossible circumstances as a barometer for our gratitude is not the way to go about it.
Lessons Learned
- One of the biggest ideas that I learned from the book is that another possible translation for Proverbs 22:6 is “Train your child according to his way, and when he grows old he will not depart from it.” As Welch explains it: “in other words, if you quit the hard work of loving discipline and just give in and let your child have his own way—you will reinforce his sinful proclivities to such a degree that, apart from supernatural intervention, ‘even when is old he will not depart from it.'”
This is certainly a different perspective than we are usually taught on that verse, and when I looked over multiple translations, a majority of them use “in the way he should go,” but the idea that training our child to follow themselves can cause irreparable harm struck me. - Cell phone contracts and social media rules – Welch details the practical ways that they teach their children to be responsible with cell phones and social media. I appreciate that she explains how it works for her family but emphasizes that the rules will look different for every family, and it is important to figure out what works in your home. The idea that parents are very clear about expectations up front makes sense to help everyone be on the same page.
- The discussion on the four risks of overindulging our kids was enlightening:
> We gamble on the future.
> We feed low self-esteem.
> We act neither alien nor strange. [See 1 Peter 2:11-12.]
> We crush contentment.