Our View Of Children

“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.” – Psalm 127:3

I’ve been home all day with all the kids during this odd faux-holiday that is the Bay Area ski week, and it reminds me of the days when the kids were younger and at home all the time. Dave would come back from work and ask, “how was the day?” and I would picture this graph in my head, adapted from a TED talk on parenting. The x axis is time, the y axis is happiness, and in a normal adult day, there is a linear plot that slopes gradually up and down. In a day home with the kids, the graph looks like a line that follows the same average as the linear plot, but instead zig-zags wildly up and down as it goes along. The highs are incredibly high, but the lows are much lower. The entire experience is somewhat emotionally exhausting, and entirely impossible to summarize. Do I tell him about how they said something that made me laugh so hard, or handed me a misspelled love note? Or do I tell him about how they spilled all the food over the floor, or fought for the tenth time?

For some reason, I often find myself sharing about the lows. It’s easy to complain about our kids: to get a certain kind of easy sympathy, to feel like we’re a certain kind of martyr, to gain some kind of credit for what we endure. But the more we do that, the more we build a negative view of children to ourselves, to them, and to our childless friends. One that fits with our culture, which tends to view children as inconveniences. When I go out with the kids, I get remarks like, “you have your hands full”—and it’s not said in a positive tone of voice. The assumption is that kids primarily get in the way, of careers and hobbies and travel and your best life.

But such a view stands in direct contrast with the view of children laid out here. Rarely is there such an explicit statement about children made in the Bible: and their value is seen as undeniably, overwhelmingly positive. This word “heritage” literally means “inheritance, taking possession, occupation”: it is most often used of the territory of the Promised Land that was assigned to various tribes. We should feel about our children exactly how the Israelites felt coming into their promised land after years of slavery and wandering in the wilderness: excited, glad, joyous. The land was no obstacle or hassle: it was their reward. It was God’s gift to them, the arena in which they lived out their vocation, something of lasting value. We should value our children as highly as they valued that land and the covenant with God it represented. 

I once heard someone say, imagine that when your kids turn thirty, you have them close their eyes and ask them, what expression do you remember seeing most on mom and dad’s face? Do you think your kids would say it is one of joy, or excitement? What do our words, actions, and expressions say about how we view our children?