On the CWM blog, we hope to introduce and connect you to great books or resources for living the a life of faith. Our Motherhood Mondays column will be posting interviews from Crossroads members about their favorites at least once a month. To start us off, Alex Hand is sharing one of her favorite parenting books, Loving the Little Years: Motherhood in the Trenches, by Rachel Jankovic. Enjoy!
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Loving the Little Years is written by Rachel Jankovic in a season of her life where she has five kids ages five and under (three in diapers!). She writes to share wisdom and practical ways that she found to find joy in the midst of a season when it could have been easy to grumble, sit in exhaustion, and just await the next moment alone. Through insightful stories of her life, she highlights the need for us to first have God teach us so we can come with right hearts and perspectives to enable us to use God’s model to parent our children.
2. What did you like about this book? How is it different from other books on the subject? What specifically encouraged or blessed you?
Our family went from 0 to 3 kids in 17 months, and to be honest I never had the time or energy to read much of anything outside of the Bible. But this book is a quick, 102-pages that can be read in just a couple of nap times. It challenged and encouraged me so much that I still think of specific wise ideas more than four years later. This is not a how-to step-by-step for discipline or a complete laying out of parental strategy. Each chapter is only a couple pages long and highlights ways we can exhibit God’s love and grace to our children as we train them to walk in His ways. As much as it was deep and convicting, it was funny and relatable.
3. How did this book impact you? Did you implement something new? Did it lead you to praise God or serve Him differently?
In 2016 when I read this book with a three year old, one year old, and baby at home, I clung to it’s practical wisdom, specifically the chapters on: setting expectations, loving a child with a different personality and gifts than our own, using stories to help children see sin and vice more clearly (and virtue), and drawing our children to be in right fellowship with siblings as a way of teaching to love our brothers and neighbors.
This time as I re-read the book, I underlined sections of nearly every chapter that convicted me or where I found God using it to correct my heart. Maybe the overarching theme coming from the first chapter is that the state of my heart is the state of my home. She says, “It is no abstract thing--the state of your heart is the state of your home. You cannot harbor resentment secretly toward your children and expect their hearts to be submissive and tender. You cannot be greedy with your time and expect them to share their toys. And perhaps most importantly, you cannot resist your opportunities to be corrected by God and expect them to receive correction from you.” This time, more than specific tools and nuggets of wisdom to apply to my kids, I found that first God has some parenting to do with me.
If you’d like to read this book, you can buy it here.
Alex, thank you for your beautiful honesty, transparency and genuine heart for our Lord - you are inspiring! I found myself nodding as I read of God parenting you through a 'parenting book" - I think I have felt that way with every good parenting book and class I've ever taken (and often as I directed a wayward son I heard the Lord telling me the same thing I was telling my child!)
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