Spirit-Led Parenting

Back in 2012 I trained to be a parent coach with a wonderful organization called Hand in Hand Parenting. I wrote a book based on their approach and taught workshops up until 2019 when I moved to Italy. 

Then in 2020 lockdown happened and I struggled to reconcile everything I have learnt about childhood trauma with what was unfolding. 

I couldn’t teach or hold space for parents as I was just so alarmed by the lack of dialogue about what was happening to children. 

I couldn’t wrap my head around how I’d learnt so much about connection, and now we were in a mass isolation experiment with no thought to what the consequences would be. 

Now four years later the research is coming out about how lockdown caused developmental delays. 

When life returned to relative normality I decided I wanted to start teaching again but in reality everything had changed. 

I couldn’t teach the Hand in Hand Parenting approach anymore because I was no longer practising one of the core aspects of it; Listening Time. 

Some of you may be familiar with Hand in Hand Parenting, but for those who aren’t, listening time is a way parents talk and listen to each other to express feelings about how parenting is going and heal hurts that may be getting in the way of being the parents they want to be. 

In 2022 I had a supernatural encounter with God and realised that the Christian God of the Bible is real. And God began to show me things in my life that needed to change. 

One of them was that he wanted to be my counsellor. He wanted me to bring all my problems to him in prayer, rather than to other people.  

After that I struggled. About a year or so later, I realised I wasn’t actually bringing my problems to anyone, because it turned out that building a relationship with a God that we ‘see through a glass darkly’ can be much harder than reaching out to a flesh and blood person.

Slowly, slowly, I have begun to learn what it really means to have God as my confidant, to cast all my anxieties on him rather than try to do it alone. And I’m learning how to hear back from God too. 

The other day I opened up the file of my old parenting book, and began to completely rewrite it, this time with God at the centre. I’ve tried to do it a few times in the last few years, but never got very far. The timing wasn’t right, and I wasn’t quite clear on what needed to be written. 

The question is, how does God want us to parent, and how could a secular approach that doesn’t bring God into the picture have all the answers? It’s not like I can just add in a ‘bit of God’ and then voila! It’s a bit more complicated than that. 

Slowly, slowly, I’m getting a bit more clarity. 

Recently I came across the work of Tom Holland and his book Dominion, and the shorter and easier read of The Air We Breathe By Glen Scrivener. These books tell the history of the Western world that some of the values that we take for granted such as equality, and compassion actually come from Christianity’s impact on the west. 

The rise of gentle, and positive secular parenting approaches actually comes from the Jesus’s story and what he taught us all. 

So it’s about taking things back to the root. 

We are made in the image of God, who is loving, kind, compassionate, forgiving and who gives us grace. This God loved us so much that he died a horrible death, so that we may might build a relationship with him. 

In a fallen world, we suffer many wounds as children, and that can impact the way we parent and what we think of as good parenting practises. We also sin and make many mistakes. Some Christian parenting approaches have been no better than child abuse. 

However through a relationship with Jesus we can be made anew, we can start to talk to God, and he can take the baggage of our emotional wounds so they no longer have to impact us in the present. 

What I didn’t know 12 years ago, is that we can only get so far healing wounds without God. Because we were made with a God-shaped hole inside of us, it’s only when that gets filled that we can truly escape the labyrinth of the past and an endless cycle of seeking healing. 

I never seem to know what God has in store for me, but for now I’m going to keep rewriting the book and see where it leads. If you’d like parenting advice from a faith- based perspective then I will posting it on a different blog. You can sign up here.