Parenting Is Your Highest Calling...and 8 other myths

Have you ever had days that motherhood didn't feel like the greatest thing on earth? Have you ever wrestled with guilt when someone went on and on about the virtues of motherhood and it was your worst day as a mom? Leslie Leyland Fields just wrote Parenting Is Your Highest Calling...and 8 other myths that trap us in worry and guilt. The title alone made me want to read it. Join me and Leslie as we delve into what one reader titled "a delightfully smart book".

Suzie Eller: I receive about 20 books a month, but the title of yours made it stand out. What made you decide to write this book?

Leslie Leyland Fields: In some ways it didn’t feel like a decision. It felt more like an invasion! For the first fifteen years of my life as a parent, I went to bed weighted with guilt and failure. I hadn’t loved my kids enough. I hadn’t sacrificed enough. I wasn’t the perfect Christian mother I knew God expected me to be! And my kids! They weren’t where I thought they should be either! I began to realize that something was seriously wrong. I began searching the Scriptures on this whole question of parenting, and was shocked---and changed---by what I found. SE: There are so many parenting books out there already! Do we really need another?

LLF: We very much need another parenting book---a different kind of parenting book. One that doesn’t make you instantly feel inadequate for not making smiley-face pizza burgers for your children’s lunches, for not having devotions with your child every night. This book isn’t about doing more as a parent. This is not our problem. We’re already doing way too much! This is not about being more, either. It’s about believing more. Believing more of God’s truths about parenting and less of the cultural myths about parenting.

SE: What’s the fallout from believing these myths?

LLF: I see the fallout everywhere. I see it in the headlines. Just recently a news report went viral: “Kids Curb Marital Satisfaction.” 90% of couples report a decrease in marital satisfaction after their first child is born. Another study, done in 2006, found that parents were more depressed than non-parents. This is just the beginning. I speak to parents all over the country. I hear from new parents who are surprised that parenting is as hard as it is. From parents whose kids are grown, and they’re riddled with guilt because their children didn’t become who they expected. I hear from lots of women who think there’s something wrong with them because they’re not as happy and fulfilled as they thought they’d be. I see parents working so hard to be the perfect Christian parent, but the requirements, the standards keep changing! I see people raising their children by a particular system, believing the results are guaranteed. If I do ABC, then my child will become XYZ. And then the blame when that doesn’t happen. All of this is pandemic.

SE: Out of the nine myths here, which one would you say is the most dangerous?

LLF: I think the most dangerous myth is the one we stubbornly hold on to, out of fear, not faith. For me, I’d say mine is myth 8,”Successful Parents Produce Godly Children.” I’m a success-oriented person. I want so badly for all my children to become godly adults. I want so badly to have simple external ways and means of measuring their spirituality and my “success.” But I’ve discovered how dangerous this is. It leads to either a killing sense of failure---or to pride and self-righteousness. I’m trying, in effect, to earn my children’s salvation and sanctification. That’s God’s work. God’s word is so clear on this. He doesn’t require us to be successful parents; he requires us to be faithful parents.

SE: Who is to blame for the promulgation of these nine myths?

LLF: I see these myths coming from several places. From our culture at large, from our media, from our own self-oriented hearts, and yes, from the church as well. I think we in the church have absorbed many of our culture’s values. We need to take a harder look at the Scriptures---beyond the few verses we quote over and over---at God’s own parenting life recorded throughout the Old Testament. When we examine God’s parenting life, and families in the Bible, and Jesus’ own teachings on the family, we come away with some radically different expectations and understandings about the whole parenting enterprise.

SE: As the mother of six children, you must deal with your share of parenting challenges. In writing this book, what discoveries have made the greatest difference in your own approach to parenting?

LLF: That parenting is so much bigger than me and bigger than how I’m feeling about it in the midst of it. Realizing that my children are not here to fulfill my own needs and desires, but are here for God’s purposes rather than mine. This is incredibly freeing! I have much more confidence. I’m freed to love my children more----because I’m not looking to them to meet the needs that only God can meet. I’m freed from thinking my children will become who I make them. That’s an impossible burden to carry. My whole view has shifted from how I feel about parenting to what is true about parenting.

SE: What do you most hope readers will take away after they put the book down?

LLF: I hope the first thing readers say is—what a glorious God we serve! Because that’s really what this is about---seeing deeper into the heart of God and what he intends for us through parenting and the family. When we realize God is this capacious, this holy, this good . . . When we can see all the way to the end of the ages, and God’s beautiful plan for his own family, all these parenting traps fall away. We are freed, then, to worship and serve God fully, in every part of our lives, especially our parenting lives. For me, this means I’m finally I’m able to give back some of God’s glory that I was trying to steal for myself as a parent. It’s all His!

SE: Okay, let's have a bit of fun for a minute. If we were to look into your home office right now, what would we see?

LLF: Uuummmmmm, stacks of boxes everywhere, a desktop covered with books and file folders, kindergarten art projects made out of cheerios and cotton balls. Not to forget the huge fake palm tree in the corner. And of course, there’s a rational explanation to it all! I’m leaving for fishcamp in 3 days---to a remote island off Kodiak Island (Alaska) where I live and commercial fish with my family every summer. So my office goes with me in file boxes. I’ll have to leave the palm tree here, though. (It’s a pathetic attempt to feel warm through our very long, dark winters.)

SE: What's a typical day for you as a writing mom?

LLF: As soon as I return from dropping the kids off at school, I dash home---keeping the speed limit, mostly---and run to my office. I charge past the breakfast dishes, the dirty floors, the hungry cat, and the wilting plants. They’re all calling, “Clean me! Water me! Feed me!” But I’m struck---providentially, I like to think---with a momentary blindness and deafness that gets me on up into my office, where I shut the door, take a few deep breaths, and begin. For those few hours--- and some days it’s just two or three hours, other days it’s as much as five---I’m totally focused on the work. As soon as the kids come home, it’s piano time and wrestling practice and youth group . . . all that. We’re a super active family. It doesn’t end until about 11 pm, when the last teenager goes to bed. But all this is part of the writing life. I don’t stop writing just because my fingers aren’t on the keyboard. The chapter I’m working on, the theology I’m studying, all this goes with me, no matter where I am, It enriches my everyday moments and enriches my time with my kids. Writing, as with any form of art or discipline, forces me to pay attention to truths and questions when sometimes I don’t want to. It draws me into deep, risky waters. But we’re all called to love God with our minds as well as our hearts and our souls. And we’re asked not to sit on the couch, but to take up the cross every day. Writing is one way I know to do this.

SE: How can readers find out more about you and the book?

LLF: They can go to my website, http://www.leslie-leyland-fields.com. And I’m happy to befriend anyone already on facebook. I’ve got some links there to radio and TV shows I’ve done. I’ll be starting a blog this summer on my website. I’ve been resisting for several years---afraid I’d use up all my words. But I’m going to take the plunge—off the couch, back into the water!