Half the people you know are crazy and the other half are well on their way. Today’s world is weird, to put it lightly. And in the middle of all this you have these kids in front of you needing tending.
We will get into the questions modernity presents to parents, and their likely answers. But the fact is that we have to be about our business, raising the children God gave us.
As parents, we are on the clock. It might be somewhat malleable on the back end, but we pretty much get a set amount of time to usher our babies into the wider world as grown-ups. And, just to keep it interesting, within that set amount of time we have smaller time frames during which some things are optimally done. If they are left undone or done late, we make things more difficult than they inherently need to be both for ourselves and, unfortunately, for our children.
Each little person is their own. They aren’t carbon copies of one another and they are not perfect mimics of ourselves. Each day brings fresh challenges and no year is the same as the last. And who knows what is going on in your life besides your children! The variations of circumstance paired with personality are limitless.
So, parenting is difficult.
But here is the key. The world would have us parents believe that parenting might be complicated, but it can be easy. In reality, parenting is difficult but extremely simple.
Life itself is complicated, sure. But this part of it? This is dead-simple. You are raising people. You do that by being an adult full of love, wielding wisdom. This is how you meet the difficulties of parenthood.
That is it. Are you an adult, are you full of love, do you endeavor to act with wisdom? If yes, then the difficult parts of raising kids has nothing on you.
So, parenting is simple.
Being an adult somehow acquired an air of undesirability in recent history. Shortly thereafter, people began to sense that something was not quite right with forsaking what is necessary about moving through the stages of life in a natural way, and the practices of adult people gathered about it a new weirdness. “Adulting” became a buzz word because what it represents is something worth speaking about, standing out as it does in bright relief against a bleak landscape of ever-extending adolescence.
So, we live in weird times.
Nevertheless, you can do this well. It is difficult but it is simple.