Advent - Preparing your Children

Take your children to Sunday school. For 45 minutes each week your children can have a free lesson on the love of God and the history of the our faith tradition. They will play games and paint and glue. They will decorate cookies and make smoothies. They will dig in a sandbox and use more glitter than is necessary. As parents all you have to do is get them up, feed them breakfast and bring them to church. (You have to feed them breakfast no matter if you come to church or not so really it just means getting going on Sunday morning.) There are classes for adults, but if no adult classes catch your eye there is coffee and the newspaper.

Here at our church we now have Starbucks coffee, with all of the fixings - sugar, sweeteners, half and half, skim milk and flavorings. There are comfortable chairs in a lovely alcove just outside the children’s area where a parent can alight to relax or talk with other parents while their children are inside learning about the love of God. Soon we will have several Sunday papers to read as well.

Some children and teens come to Sunday school nearly every week. They don’t want to come every week, but their parents bring them anyway. It isn’t a child’s decision. It is a parent’s decision. Whether a child is raised attending church and Sunday school is the responsibility of the parents, like vitamins and potty training, not appreciated by the child at the time, but important none the less.

Parents should not abdicate their responsibility to whining, complaining children or sleepy, insolent teenagers. Teenagers are legendary for making bad choices and ill considered decisions. Don’t leave it up to them to go or not to go. Parents often make children do things they don’t want to do, learn to swim, bath, eat vegetables, do homework. Sunday school isn’t as bad as any of those things. Once they get there they will have fun most of the time and probably get some kind of unhealthy snack. They need to go to church and Sunday school. They need to learn the stories both old testament and new. They need to meet and know the people of their church, to be part of the church community.

I have a nephew whose parents have never taken him to church. His parents never had to argue about getting up on Sunday morning, about what is and is not acceptable to wear to church. They never had to hiss between their teeth dire warnings in an attempt to curb misbehavior during the service. They never had to tell him he could not spend the night at a friends house on Saturday night because there was church in the morning. Now he voices to his parents, in the presence of his grandparents, his disappointment that his parents never took him to church. The lesson here is that as a parent there is no winning the admiration of your teenagers in this regard; either they are mad because you made them go to church or they are mad because you didn’t make them go to church. If they are going to be mad either way then err on the side of  them learning the golden rule and the Ten Commandments. Take them to church and Sunday school, start this advent and Christmas season. It’s a thankless job, but that’s part and parcel of being a parent.

Peace to all this season of preparation,
Michelle