A Mother Can’t Be Endlessly Available:

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I think mothers today carry a particular kind of guilt that women in other generations may not have known in quite the same way.

We worry constantly about whether we are giving each child enough.

Enough attention.

Enough conversation.

Enough individual time.

Enough enrichment.

Enough memories.

Enough of ourselves.

There is always another article explaining what children need emotionally, another reel showing some beautifully arranged activity a mother has prepared, another woman apparently baking sourdough with one child while discussing Shakespeare with another, and before long an ordinary mother can begin wondering whether folding laundry while telling her four-year-old to go play is evidence that she has somehow failed to cherish childhood properly.

I remember the season of little children well enough to know how convincing that guilt can become.

A small child has a remarkable ability to need you precisely when someone else also needs you.

You sit down to teach one child and another suddenly has something vitally important to show you.

The baby needs feeding.

Somebody cannot find a pencil.

Dinner eventually has to appear.

The bathroom did not clean itself overnight, despite years of giving it ample opportunity.

And in the middle of all of this, a mother can begin feeling that somebody is always receiving less of her than they deserve.

I wonder, though, whether we have confused loving our children deeply with being endlessly available to them.

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Titus 2:4 tells older women to teach the younger women “to love their husbands, to love their children.”

There is no question that tenderness, attention, affection, and genuine enjoyment of our children belong within Christian motherhood.

A child should know he is wanted.

He should know his mother delights in him and that there is room for his questions, his troubles, his strange little stories, and the thoughts that finally come pouring out five minutes after bedtime.

Yet love also prepares a child to live in a world where he will not always be the person whose need is answered first.

That preparation can begin very gently, right at home.

A mother may be teaching math to an older child while the youngest wants her attention, and sometimes the loving answer will be, “I want to hear about that when I finish helping your sister. You may play until then.”

The child may not especially enjoy that answer.

That does not make it harmful.

There is something valuable being learned in the waiting.

Someone else matters too.

Mother has responsibilities.

The whole household does not rearrange itself around every desire the moment it appears.

Those are small lessons, but they reach into something much larger than household order.

Philippians 2:4 says, “Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.”

A child is born with very little natural interest in that arrangement.

Anyone who has raised a toddler understands this without needing a theology textbook.

Small children arrive convinced that hunger should be addressed immediately, the desired toy should belong to them, and whatever mother happens to be doing is considerably less urgent than whatever thought has just entered their head.

That is childhood.

It is also why children require training.

Part of raising them involves slowly widening their world until they understand that other people exist with needs, responsibilities, belongings, conversations, and limits of their own.

I think we sometimes feel guilty about teaching this because modern motherhood has placed enormous emphasis upon making children feel heard, and there is good reason for some of that.

Children should be heard, when it is important.

They should never learn that their thoughts are inherently bothersome or that adults are too important to care about them.

Still, being heard does not require being heard immediately every time.

A healthy family has room for both attention and waiting.

There should be evenings when we put aside what we are doing because a child truly needs us, along with ordinary afternoons when the child discovers that being loved securely gives him enough confidence to occupy himself while mother finishes her work.

That kind of independence can become a gift.

Children who are always entertained eventually come to believe boredom is an emergency someone else should solve.

There was a time when children naturally spent much more of daily life alongside adult work.

They watched meals being prepared, gardens tended, clothing mended, animals cared for, houses cleaned, and necessities provided.

They joined in as ability allowed, and a tremendous amount of education happened simply because they were present while real life was taking place.

I think there is wisdom worth recovering there.

Our children do not need every hour transformed into something designed specifically for them.

Sometimes the education is watching mother live faithfully.

A little girl sitting at the kitchen table with paper and crayons while her mother prepares supper is learning more than how to entertain herself.

Over the years she is absorbing what it takes to make a home function.

Eventually the crayons may be replaced by a knife and cutting board, and she will stand beside her mother helping because observation slowly became participation.

This is one reason I have always believed children should have responsibilities within the home.

Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go.”

Training implies preparation for somewhere beyond childhood.

We are raising people who will eventually need to govern themselves when nobody is standing over them.

They will have work that must be completed when they would rather do something else.

They will live among people whose needs sometimes take precedence over their preferences.

If they marry, they will discover very quickly that love requires consideration, patience, service, and a willingness to be inconvenienced.

Those muscles are easier to develop when they have been exercised in childhood.

There is another side of this that mothers need to hear.

You are allowed to have work.

You are allowed to finish something.

You are allowed to tell a child who is old enough to understand that you cannot be interrupted for the next twenty minutes unless something genuinely important happens.

Your motherhood is not measured by the number of minutes each child possesses your undivided attention.

Children can grow securely in a home where mother has responsibilities beyond entertaining them, especially when they know that her attention will eventually return.

Psalm 103:14 says of the Lord, “For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.”

I think mothers need to remember their own frame too.

There are limits to one human being.

Trying to remain emotionally and physically available to every member of a family every waking minute can eventually produce a mother who is so depleted that the people she loves receive mostly the exhausted remnants of her.

Sometimes guilt persuades us to give children what they never actually needed, while depriving them of something they very much did.

Order.

An ordered home does not have to be rigid or sterile.

Mine certainly never qualified for either description.

There can be laughter, interrupted schedules, babies having difficult days, unexpected visitors, and laundry sitting where laundry has no business sitting.

But children benefit from knowing that life has a rhythm larger than their immediate wants.

Ecclesiastes says, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1.

There is a time for mother to sit on the floor and play.

There is also a time for mother to work while the child learns to play nearby.

There is a time for a child to speak and a time for him to learn that two adults are already speaking.

There is a time for help and eventually a time when the child himself becomes part of the help.

These lessons are rarely learned without some resistance because self-denial has never been the natural instinct of the flesh.

Jesus said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Luke 9:23.

Someday our children will have to decide whether they themselves will follow Christ.

Long before that decision becomes fully their own, Christian parents can at least give them a home where yielding, serving, waiting, considering others, and accepting the word no are familiar concepts.

That is valuable preparation for life.

And perhaps we mothers can release some of the guilt along the way.

Your child does not need a professional entertainer.

Your child needs a mother.

A real one.

One who hugs and listens and reads stories, but who also has dishes to wash, lessons to teach, a husband to love, people to serve, and a life with responsibilities that occasionally require the child to wait.

There will be days when we get the balance wrong.

We may become too distracted and realize a child has been asking for our attention in the only way they know how.

At other times we may interrupt important work because guilt has convinced us that saying “not right now” is somehow unloving.

This requires wisdom more than formulas.

But I do believe we can trust that children who are securely loved are capable of learning self-denial without being damaged by it.

In fact, they need to.

Because eventually they will leave our homes and enter a world that will not revolve around them.

I want my children to know they were deeply cherished here.

I also want them to leave knowing how to notice another person's needs, how to work when work needs doing, how to wait without falling apart, and how to understand that love often requires making room for someone besides ourselves.

Those lessons may begin with something as ordinary as a mother saying:

“I love you. I want to hear about it, but let me finish this first.”

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