Chief Executive Mom

Visit me at my new website - anniecrawford.com

Establishing God-centered, creative traditions is the most powerful thing we can do to spiritually shape our children. Unique events that are not repeated can be powerfully formative as well, but we cannot plan for these! We have little to do with them, they just happen. However we can have a habit or tradition of prayer so that when the spontaneous does happen, we are centered in Christ and ready for it! There are two types of traditions; "everyday" and "especially" We need both meaningful daily habits as well as special celebrations to look foreword to. Today, most of us present have small children and we are concerned with the traditions appropriate for young children. During this time it is important to establish, simple, meaningful and foundational traditions that we can build upon as the child grows.

Basic everyday traditions to begin even with babies and tiny tots (which in the early years are often more about training mom than child!) include:

~ Personal time in God’s Word – reading/listening to Bible stories alone
~ Morning routine – training a child how to start their day in orderly, timely, thankful way. Begin to teach order, responsibility and thankfulness
~ Family Devotions – instruction in God’s Word
~ Use of Catechisms – knowledge of God and faith
~ Evening routine – resting in God, finding comfort and refuge in Him
~ Daily Blessing – a habit of approval and praying God’s blessing on your child. A vehicle for giving the unconditional reliable love of God.
~ Church – a tradition of community fellowship, learning and serving one another. Piper
suggests having child attend adult service starting at age 3
~ Prayer – tradition of dependence on God. Mealtime and bedtime are not most suitable to requests and petition.
~ Mealtime Prayers – a tradition of thankfulness to God for His provision
~ Quality time with parents – a tradition of showing your child the love of God - Both a daily time and extended weekly or monthly special times of attention
~ Life lesson traditions – hospitality, decision-making, finances, physical activity

This is the point where every family can look considerably different from another, although God is the center for each. Noel Piper talks about her family being very word oriented; they love to play scrabble and word games, they love to read and articulate ideas through words. However your family might be very visual and artistically oriented or music oriented. John Piper writes many, many poems for his children, one for every major event in the child’s life. If you sing, perhaps you will relate a song to many lessons and special events. Perhaps you have a wonderful imagination that can come up with amazing stories with which to teach your children. Perhaps you are a musician or a scrap-booker, and you make a tradition out of choosing a song or designing a page to celebrate different events. Maybe you love to cook and will make a tradition out of baking bread every Saturday with your child and use the time to teach them of how Jesus is the bread of life and we do not live by bread alone but by every Word of the Lord. Perhaps you are an avid hiker and regularly take your children outside to worship God by wondering at His creation. Poetry, music, art, food, nature; hopefully we will be able to draw from all these things to teach our children and establish a rich heritage of tradition, yet one or a few may be more prominent than the others according to our unique families design.

In addition, you may have unique family circumstances. Perhaps your husband is not a believer, or doesn't consider family devotions worth the effort. You will have to creatively modify your circumstances. Perhaps you must work outside the home, or perhaps your children were older now and you will have to use more effort, creativity and flexibility to make changes in established routines.

Pam Farrel shares a wonderful example of a rich family tradition she developed in her book, "The Treasure Inside Your Child". She created a yearly "Learner and Leader Who Loves God Day" for each child where she chose a character trait to focus on with the child for the year and celebrated the success of last year’s progress with a special outing and gift. This book contains a wealth of other creative ideas for implementing the word of God in your family traditions.

In this time I do not have the space to discuss the "especially" traditions, and I refer you to Noel Piper’s book. It contains excellent principles and ideas for approaching Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays, weddings, funerals, anniversaries, and Easter.