TLP 35: Parental Blindspots | Tim Challies interview, Part 1

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I think every parent has that wake -up moment where they look at their child and see themselves reflected back.

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And that's the time for serious introspection and repentance. Welcome to Truth.

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Love. Parents. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents.

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Here's your host, A .M. Brewster. Have you ever been sideswiped by a car because you didn't check your blind spot?

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You know, the hardest part about not being able to see things? You don't know what you're supposed to be seeing.

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The same is true, I found, in parenting. Even when we're at our parenting best, ambassadors for God, seeking only

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His glory, sometimes we just miss things because we never even thought to think about it. And unfortunately, as the saying goes, we don't know what we don't know.

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But there is hope for these parental blind spots. There is an answer. Do you remember what happened the first time you sat behind the wheel of a car?

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Most likely, your parent or the driver's ed instructor introduced you to the driver's seat, and among other things, they told you about those pesky little things called blind spots.

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You didn't even know they existed, but whether you understood it then or not, you would be glad that you learned about them.

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That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to discuss some blind spots that show up in our parenting.

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And here to discuss this issue is Christian parent and author, Tim Challies. We share many of his parenting articles on TLP's Facebook page, but you can find his complete collection of articles on every facet of the

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Christian experience at Challies .com. Of course, I'll include a link in the description. Thank you very much,

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Tim, for joining us today. How are you doing? I'm doing great, and thanks for having me. It's my pleasure. Well, before we jump into the discussion,

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I just need to point out three things to my listeners that Tim and I have in common. The first is our stunning good looks.

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Obviously, I'm joking here. Tim's a great -looking guy and all, but we ran a Facebook ad with Tim's image on it, and a number of the listeners who know me commented on the similarities.

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I know you can't tell because you've never seen me before, but maybe I should post a side -by -side comparison, but I'm not certain if the world can handle all of that ruddy good looks.

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Yeah. I usually get compared to Edward Snowden. I don't know about you. I've never gotten that. I think maybe

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I'm a little pudgier than you are, but yeah, I can kind of see that. The second thing we have in common is our love for end times

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Amish vampire fiction. That's right. You heard it. End times

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Amish vampire fiction. If I'm not mistaken, it was in 2009 that you wrote a humorous article called

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The Ultimate Christian Novel. Is that right? Yeah. I have to ask, what was the motivation, the inspiration for that?

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I think it was just a lot of the silly novels I was seeing in the mainstream market and then being imitated in the

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Christian market, so I actually dreamed up an Amish vampire end times novel.

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Yes. That sort of brought all three together and, believe it or not, was actually offered a contract to write the book.

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There were a couple of publishers who were actually interested in doing it. Obviously, it's a spoof, but just thinking it would be fun and it would sell well, but I figured

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I had better things to do with my time. I can see why. I mean, it was hilarious. I've introduced so many people to that.

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I think maybe you should probably thank me for part of your reader base anyway, because I just,

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I've shown it to tons of people and then the last thing I think, well, not the last thing, actually, there's probably, there's many more, whether it be our love for God and family or ministering to the body of Christ, really,

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I think one of the last similarities I really want to focus in on is this. A lot of Christian parenting blogs and podcasts, a lot of speakers and preachers have allowed secular failure philosophies to inform their advice.

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I've listened to many things. I've read a lot of things and it sounds good up to a point until all of a sudden, you know, traditionalism or psychology or a number of other factors slip in under the radar that aren't biblically informed.

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And what I really appreciate about Tim is that you are, you're comfortable taking a stand against culture when there's truth at stake and that's extremely valuable and necessary in our, in today's climate and culture.

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Yeah, well, thanks. And I totally agree. There's an amazing amount of junk that's coasting into the

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Christian world and often comes by way of the big books out there or non -biblical psychology or whatever it is.

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So there's always these ideas pressing in. And yet what's remarkable is how many kids still turn out so good, at least, you know, they turn out so well.

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So God's grace is so amazing that I think there's great hope for us, whether Christian parents or just looking at parents around us who aren't believers.

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God has amazing ways of working beyond our abilities, beyond what we actually think we know or know well.

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And that's so true because I know, I don't know about you, but for me, you know, if my parent, my children's ability to turn out well was completely dependent upon my parenting, they would be in a world of hurt.

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That's without Christ, without what he does, we're all in trouble. Now you have, you have three children, is that correct?

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I do, yeah. I've got a son who's 17, I've got a daughter who's 14 and a daughter who's 10. All right, great.

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So a lot of, a lot of experience being brought to this discussion. I have a son who's 10 and my daughter is seven.

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And I think that any parent who's being honest realizes that the good things, the amazing things that are happening in their child's lives, transforming them, it really is the power of God.

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We bring a lot of great stuff to the table. Obviously God uses us in many ways. But those things that kind of make us cringe are the things that probably our children resemble us the most in.

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Have you found that to be true? Yeah, absolutely. I think every parent has that wake up moment where they look at their child and see themselves reflected back.

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And that's some time for serious introspection and repentance and hopefully changing course a little bit, because you do, you see your kid freak out and throw something and you think,

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I know exactly where he got that from. Or your child doing a silent treatment or going and slamming a door and sulking behind the door for a while.

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And you realize a lot of this is learned behavior. My son walks around the house when he talks on the phone and I'm sure that's because he somehow saw me do it.

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And, you know, they imitate us and the good, the bad, and they doesn't really matter.

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Very true. Well, I think one of the things that we want to focus on today is this idea of parental blind spots.

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And I mentioned it in the introduction, how it's so easy for us to just not be aware of these parenting traps in part because, well, we just don't see them.

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And I think a good example of this is your article, why my family doesn't do sleepovers.

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I know for a while there that was your most viral article. Is that still true now? Yeah, by far, far, far.

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It's the most popular thing I've ever written. I would say, I think it's been read maybe over 8 million times now, or it's next closest would be in the hundreds of thousands, not even at a million.

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Oh, wow. Well, it resonated with me as I've obviously did lots of people, I think in a unique way, maybe, maybe not.

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Being a family counselor and working at a home for at -risk teens, I have some personal, unique insight into the darker side of sleepovers, some of the very, very dark sides of sleepovers.

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And I was just really impressed that you dealt with it in the way that you did, because I think this is a perfect example of a very specific parental blind spot.

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It's, it's considered a normal culturally acceptable activity that seems to be an expected almost right of passage, but you didn't bow to that idea.

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And I'm curious why. Yeah. I'd say what's considered normal is to allow your kids to do sleepovers.

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What's considered abnormal is to raise any flags at all. And I think that's mostly something that's bound to North America as I've traveled a little bit and spoken to people.

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It seems less common elsewhere. But we faced a lot, just personally, we made that decision in our family.

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And that was based on having seen things like, I think you're referring to where we see we had just growing up, saw lots of opportunity for children to be harmed.

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We saw children who had been harmed that way. As I mentioned in the article, we knew a chief of police who had told us never allow your kids to do sleepovers.

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We collected all that data and said, you know what? The benefit they would get from it just doesn't outweigh the risk.

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And then, so we made that decision and we faced a lot of heat from our, the parents of our children's friends who took it personally, or who would blab to our kids about how overprotective we were and things like that.

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So it was a difficult decision to make, and it's been a difficult one to hold to, but we really, really believe that for us with our situation, it was well within our rights to do, and we thought it would be wise and still hold to that.

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Is it fair to assume that you've gotten some negative heat from some of those 8 million readers?

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Yeah. Yeah. And you know, nothing too inflammatory, but a lot of people saying we're too overprotective or that it is a rite of passage that our children need to learn to face those situations.

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And, you know, there's something absurd about suggesting that if a teenage boy is approaching a 10 year old girl at night, that that's a growth opportunity for her to, to grow up by telling him to get lost or something, there's some risks that just aren't worth taking.

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And you don't put your child in those risky situations so that they can grow through them. So, you know, a lot of it was of that nature.

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I also received so many emails from people saying, thank you, because I was molested at a sleepover.

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Thank you. Just found out my child had been molested at a sleepover or even just a, you know, what sleepovers were, where we started to experiment.

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I wasn't molested, but I experimented or, you know, we would do things we shouldn't have done.

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So I've gotten lots and lots of positive feedback as well. So anecdotally, I think there's a strong case to be made.

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Yeah. I think my personal reaction just as a father of two, and then obviously being mean, remembering what

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I was like when I was a kid I think my response was similar and not to the degree that there had been molestation or anything like that, but it definitely had thrown open doors, doors of great temptation.

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Many of which I succumbed to whether it was friends and I looking at inappropriate magazines or watching inappropriate movies or just the plethora of things that can happen and the temptations when there aren't any mature, loving adults around.

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And so there was that from my side that I saw. But there was also just kind of this, this resonation.

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It's funny knowing that having experienced that as a child, I still was kind of left with, wow, you know, that's so right.

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I don't know why I never thought of that. And I kind of imagine that a number of your readers probably responded that way.

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They weren't necessarily they wouldn't have espoused those ideas about sleepovers beforehand when they read it, they obviously weren't against it, but they probably just responded with,

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I never looked at it that way. Right. And I think this is why it's helpful to cue this up as you have under the heading of blind spots, because we all approach parenting through our own experience.

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Right. We we look at it and say, well, my experience was this. Therefore, I will or will not do that.

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Now, I was never abused or molested at a sleepover. I like you did some dumb things at sleepovers.

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As far as I know, my wife had no really negative experiences and sleepovers, but we had heard and we had seen and we had encountered.

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So our assumption moving in was, let's talk about this and let's lean away from doing it.

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But that was based on our assumption. So if your experiences with sleepovers have only ever been good, then

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I think it would be wise to to read an article like that one, to think widely and to say,

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OK, maybe this is one of our blind spots that we should address. And I'm not saying we can make a strong biblical case. Thou must not do sleepovers.

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That's not my point here. I think it's something that every family has to discuss and decide what's best for them, what's best for their children.

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And there's lots of freedom here. If the Bible doesn't speak to it clearly, we're able to do what we think is the wisest course of action and then just put the boundaries on.

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They will only sleep over in these situations or in these homes or that kind of thing.

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But what we found is by taking it off the table altogether, we don't have to make individual exceptions. So we don't have this parent coming and saying, hey, you let her sleep over at that child's house.

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Why not at ours? We just take it all off. And I found that very, very helpful. Yeah. So in your in your ministry, you have you've you've pastored church, is that correct?

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OK, you've done that. You've you've parented. You have all the research and the experience that's gone into your writing.

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You've counseled individuals. And I'm curious, what other parental blind spots have you encountered that you believe that we should really give some more thought to?

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Because you know what? Maybe our past experiences, that thing wasn't an issue for us personally, but we need to be introduced to the fact that it can be and it has been an issue for many other people.

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And we as parents need to be paying attention. Yeah, I think they vary so much from person to person that and family to family.

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I think there's a lot of value in asking others, which can be the hardest thing to do.

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But to ask other people, what are you seeing in my parenting? Where do you think I may have a blind spot?

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Because it could be so, so different. It's the kind of thing where we know we have them. We must.

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Right. We're not perfect. We're not God the Father here. So we've got parental blind spots. The question isn't, do we have them?

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But where are they? And we need others to help us see them generally. So God places us in local churches.

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He gives us friends. He gives us relationships. What better place to go to someone and say, can you think about this?

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Can you pray about this? Come back to me and just tell me, is there anything? And then humbly to take that.

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And they may say, you know what? You overdiscipline. They may say, you know what? You underdiscipline. They may say,

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I don't think you're training your kids to know the Lord well enough. They may say you're spending way too much time training your kids, not letting them have fun and explore other things.

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You know, it could be could be all over the place. But I don't know how you address blind spots generally without asking for outside input, either through God's word, through prayer.

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But why not ask your local church? Ask a trusted friend or a pastor. And that really speaks to the passages in Proverbs in particular that say there's wisdom in multitude of counselors.

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We've got to surround ourselves with the people who can speak truth into our lives. Yeah. And wouldn't you hate it if something happened and everybody said, yeah,

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I knew his kids would turn out that way. And yet you have been in the same church as them for 20 years and they always just felt,

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I can't tell him that he's doing this so wrong. We all see it, but we're not going to tell him, you know, his kids are completely wild.

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He doesn't seem to notice or his kids are completely deceptive, but they've deceived him. If you know that about someone, then out of love, shouldn't you tell them that that would be so, so hard to go to a parent and speak about their children like that?

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And yet far better to to risk a friendship and at least to address it than to risk the lives or souls of children.

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So perhaps we could say that maybe one of the big parental blind spots in our culture is the fact that just like we tend to have these maverick loner

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Christians, we also have maverick loner families where parenting is my business, not yours. I'll take care of my kids.

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You take care of your kids. And maybe we're missing the fact that to be Christ honoring parents, we've got to be open and vulnerable enough to have the relationships with people where they see our parenting.

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They really, they know what we're doing and we have the relationships whereby they can, they can come to us honestly and say,

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Hey, this is what we're saying. Right. So so much of that just comes down to basic humility, right?

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Understanding I don't have all the answers. I am an inadequate parent. I can't do this on my own. I need help.

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I need other eyes on me. That's, it's only humility that can really get you there. So being a humble person who's willing to, to risk asking for help, knowing that what you hear may be very, very hard to hear, very painful.

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Yep. And that's exactly where Christ started in the Sermon on the Mount. You know, we had to realize that we are poor in spirit.

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We are spiritually destitute. We have nothing to offer. And that brings us to a place oftentimes of mourning.

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I'm certain that you have looked at your parenting as I have mine and said, Dear God, I am failing at this.

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I am not doing this as well as I dreamed I would when I was in college. And then only then do we slip into that humility.

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And then once we go to Christ and say, I can't do this, go to others and say, I need your help.

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That's where that hungering and thirsting after righteousness kicks in, which I think might, it might be fair to say that that's kind of lacking in some of our parenting.

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Parenting really isn't a righteousness thing. It's a logistical thing. It's a facilitation thing.

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And then we, then we come to a place like what you're talking about, where we realize

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I don't have this together and we see the inherently biblical nature of it. And we realize, man,

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I need to be hungering after God, God's will in my parenting. Yeah, exactly.

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So I'm right with you there. Awesome. Well, I think, I think like, for example, in my ministry, there are some things that I have found and not too specific, just with the people

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I'm working with now, I've been, I've been in a number of two ministries actually over the past decade.

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And I've found that there are some key areas that tend to, I think, stereotypically end up being blind spots.

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And I'd like to get some of your feedback on this. One of the ones that I have found, and this was true in my life when

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I was in high school, is the significant influence of friendships, children's friendships.

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Now, I know that we know our kids are having friendships, and we all know there's the good friends and the bad friends.

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But a personal anecdote for my life was that there was a boy that my parents wanted me to spend more time with, specifically to be a good influence.

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You know, my parents, unfortunately, in many ways, wrongfully considered me to be more mature and to be able to help this boy do the same.

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Unfortunately, what ended up happening was that my relationship with him and me being weak as I was, he encouraged me in the wrong things and I gave in.

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You know, it's that concept of, you know, if you are spiritual, help such a one, help restore them, but be careful lest you also get pulled into the same stuff they're doing.

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So I think oftentimes, especially in this world of the internet and the fact that our kids can be texting each other and FaceTime each other and messaging each other and interacting on apps and whatnot, we really don't know who our kids' friends are.

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We really don't know what influences they're under. And I think that ends up being one of these blind spots, because in America, really in anywhere in the world, you know, kids are supposed to have friends, you know, they're supposed to go out and play.

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And I don't know that parents as a whole are really being as careful as we all should be in knowing who our kids' friends are and what they're doing when they're together.

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Sure. Yeah. And I agree with that. I think a lot of parenting comes down to that tension between doing what's helpful to your children, yet also allowing your children to begin to make their own way through life.

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So and the trouble is when children are six years old, there's not a lot of six year old peers who are really going to lead them into too much trouble, right?

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So it's more as they get into their teens, as they progress through their teens, that those bad friends can have a much badder influence, right?

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But at that time, you're also wanting your children to start to make their own way. And, you know, our temptation as parents is to try and guard our children against every possible mistake and every possible form of suffering.

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And yet, sometimes our children just need to make mistakes or full out sin, and we need to let them grapple with the consequences of it.

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So, you know, we can't control them in every way. So I do find that hard. How do you determine who their friends will be?

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I don't know that you can force those friendships the way you'd like. I think most of us had friendships like that when we were a kid and where parents wanted it more than we did.

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I mean, parents all planned out our marriages too, right? At least when they were young, wouldn't that be sweet?

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And those never work out either. So, yeah, I think there's definitely value in knowing who your children's friends are and trying to understand how the children are, how those kids are influencing your own.

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But I also don't want to be fatalistic and throw up my hands. And yet somewhere in there, there's a tricky balance.

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Yep. And I think you hit on it. I think it's not protecting the kids. It's not sheltering them. It's really preparing them.

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It's giving them the information they need to go into those situations where we are going to encounter sin in the world.

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But hopefully we've been prepared and our faith in Christ and our dependence upon his word is strong enough that in that moment, we will respond the right way, which was exactly the issue in my life.

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I was not mature enough, and I needed to grow some more so that I could respond better. So whether I think, you know, entertainment or smartphones, or even just being able to answer the failure philosophies that the world throws at us,

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I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that we as parents just need to realize that our children aren't born inherently knowledgeable of these things, able to answer and give an answer for the things they encounter.

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And we need to be proactive in preparing them for every little area that can come up because they haven't experienced it before.

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Right. Yep. Well, awesome. I appreciate that. Thank you so much for sharing your insight on that, and specifically the sleepovers and the amazing advice about connecting with people in your church, people who know you, and being able to have open relationships with them where they can speak truth into your life and help you determine what your specific parental blind spots are.

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That was amazing advice, and I really appreciate that, and I appreciate the time you've taken today. Yeah, you're welcome.

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I hope all of you will join us next time when Tim will be back with us answering some questions that you have submitted.

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I'm really looking forward to hearing his answers to your questions. They were fantastic questions. I also encourage you to like and follow

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Tim on Facebook and Twitter and swingbychallies .com. You can find all of his links in our description, and please, of course, like and follow

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TLP on Facebook and me on Twitter at AM Brewster. Listen, blind spots are real, but as long as someone can show us what they are, we can do the work to address them biblically because God's Word has everything we need for life and godliness.

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Truth. Love. Parent is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent.

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Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.