Holding a baby, whose needs are hard to understand, we get in the habit of asking, “what does she want?”. The baby grows into a toddler and then a preschooler and before you know it, she is taller than you. If the dependent years of mothering are built on trying to solve the question, “what do they want?”, then we will miss out on the work we’ve been entrusted with and we’ll probably not enjoy doing it. The questions we ask form the character of our children.

Most people assume that loving someone means giving that person what they want. When mums do this, we measure our mothering by how pleased our children are. This becomes unsupportable by the time you have three children (perhaps this is why many people don’t have more). Given human desires are so changeable and bent away from goodness, given humans have trouble knowing the difference between what we want and what we need, ‘want’ is a poor foundation for mothering. We need something solid outside human whims.

God says that love is always about doing what is good—the very best possible good—for that other person. Neither we nor our children are wise and holy enough to define what that good is. Quite the opposite. We need God to tell us. Duties to our children need to centre on God, otherwise, we end up giving our kids the wrong thing. That’s another reason why we need our Bible open, to help us see. The article #4 (next up) will be about God-centred duty.

When duty is disordered, it’s all about what the other person wants from us. As I mentioned in article #3, this sort of duty is destructive. Duty is a good that is due to someone else, but the someone else is not the one who determines what that good is. The good given through duty is a good which is defined by God, in a relationship ordained by God. Good duty is done for God’s sake, in God’s way, beginning with God’s love.

To do God-centred duty as we raise the children he has entrusted to us, our most common question must be, “what is good for them?”. And the answer must come from God’s Bible. If mothering is a puzzle always trying to figure out, “what does he want?”, then the child is the authority, defining the terms and being trained to expect parental duty to be about him. This question presumes the child has a mature sense of what is wise and good. But children haven’t lived long enough to develop that yet. To know and choose what God says is good is something that needs to be trained and learned. That’s what we’re parenting for! It’s the job of parents to discern what the good is and to apprentice our children into it. Hour by hour, it’s our job to help our kids grow into God-centred goodness. That is what love is; God’s and, therefore, ours.

On Friday, article #4 will look at how God-centred duty, rather than undermining love, is one of the great means of God distributing love in his world.