One thing I know to be true is that our spiritual growth and our parenting are intertwined and if we are open to it, they have a profound way of strengthening each other. The greatest mistake we have made in our modern world has been to forget this.
Let’s face it, parents are parenting alone, and lonely. When I ask mothers what they want most in their motherhood, the answers are always a version of ‘more peace and balance’ and ‘deeper connection with my children’. Unfortunately, it’s all too common to experience neither. As a society, we are drowning in parental guilt and the heartbreak of feeling like we’re not enough is eating us alive.
Despite all the parenting information available and consumed, we are still struggling to find balance, we’re unable to be the patient, peaceful parent we wish to be and too often, we lack confidence in our parenting. We agonisingly wonder why the positive parenting and ‘how to’ methods we read and rely on work for a short time, and then catapult us back to square one.
When you add up our fixation on everything from what foods we feed our children to how we respond to their tantrums, the busy-ness of our schedules, the busy-ness of our children’s schedules, the insecurity caused by the comparison of perfectly curated social media pages of friends who ‘have it all together’ and the ever growing amount of information telling us ‘how to do it right’, it is no wonder parents are struggling!
The truth is that we can’t do it alone- we were not made for that. We talk endlessly about missing ‘the village’ that once was, but what about the most important part of our support system- God? Without God’s help, we simply cannot reach that parental potential we all strive for in this age. Without God, our source of power, guidance and peace in our parenting has been forgotten, left behind. We have divorced God from our parenting, creating an incessant need within us to parent from surface-based external sources, a pressure to do it perfectly and a lack of inner resources to do it peacefully.
When we as parents start to look for deeper answers in our parenting, we find that our parenting struggles are not a result of what we are doing, but rather, the disconnected state in which we are doing it from. This revelation in itself is an invitation to return to God- to open our hearts to deeper conversion and to grow in holiness; this is the very foundation to living and parenting from a place of true connection & peace.
“As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself, unless it remains part of the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty; for cut off from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:4-5)
Just as a branch needs its vine, we need God’s nourishment to both internally feel at peace and externally reach our potential in all that we do. In the context of our parenting, the fruit that comes from this foundation of a deeper conversion to God is a naturally deeper connection to our children, a space for them to attach securely to us and the ability to see them through the lens of love rather than fear and anxious ‘shoulds’ that is too common in our society. When we strive to invite God into our parenting, we naturally respond consciously and have a greater capability to put healthy parenting principles into place in a lasting way. In addition to this, we are gifted with a healthier mindset and our very own parenting manual; The Holy Spirit.
I was that mother who consumed every piece of positive parenting information I could get my hands on- books, courses, seminars etc. in order to feel as though I was getting this parenting thing right. No matter how much information I had, something was still missing. No matter how many of my own triggers I worked on, no matter how much of my childhood trauma I went into, there was still something missing. At the time, I had all the information I needed but the problem was I was lacking the foundation, the roots- God. I was relying on my own strength to be fruitful in my parenting.
It took an almost break down to realise that the difficult period I had been experiencing in my parenting was actually an invitation from God to draw nearer to Him, to rely on Him. As I began to do so, this deeper conversion transformed my life and my parenting and my parenting continued to invite me to draw closer to God- a beautiful cycle of conversion and growth.
So, as we approach the month of Mary, let’s take inspiration from our perfect mother and invite God back into our parenting so that we can move away from the stressful, guilt-inducing side of modern day parenting and instead, closer to God’s peace, guidance and support.
Jess Crino
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