Parenting with Purpose and Persistence: A Discussion with John and Cindy Raquet

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Voidware prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details. And then we also recognize that we are fellow sinners with them, right? We, it's not like we as parents are the perfect in every way and you children need to get your act together.

You know, the real picture is we struggle with sin and they struggle with sin. And it may be that their struggles are expressed in kind of different ways. But when you get down to it, it's a lot of times the same struggle.

One, two, three.

Parenting Philosophy: Grace, Sin, and Shared Struggle

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, the executive director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community of which this podcast is a proud member.

Check out strivingforeternity .org and thechristianpodcastcommunity .org to find out more. Now, I have some special guests on today. And when I say special, these are, this is, I'm going to have to tell a little bit of a story before we bring them on.

But this is the gentleman who married my daughter. Now, some of you are going, well, Andrew, why didn't you marry your daughter? Which at the time I was a little upset with as well that they didn't ask.

And when they explained it to me, I totally understood after the wedding. My daughter said to me, Dad, you're not going to be able to do what we want John to do. And I'm like, well, I can perform weddings.

This is not a difficult thing. She's like, Dad, with your family there, you will not be able to share the gospel to your family the way we want it done because the family would be really upset with you being the one doing it.

So we needed someone else. And I have to admit, John, you did an outstanding job with my daughter's wedding. So that's how we got to know each other. So you're, this is, folks, this is a couple that I have, I've personally gotten to know.

And I have, we're, well, we are indirectly family now. We'll have to explain that as well. But let me welcome John and Cindy Raquette to The Rap Report. Thank you. Very good to be here. Thanks for having us.

So we're going to cover your book, which is called Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. And so, folks, this is a book that is available at Free Grace Press. That is the cheapest place, best place to get it.

So go to Free Grace Press and get a copy of Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. And you're going to see why you should get that throughout the show. But let me, let me first start off with you. You, you two and I are sort of related because my son-in-law has a identical twin brother that married your daughter.

Right. And so I, there's going to be some things that, that, you know, I've seen, I know your family a little bit and you, you just have a few children, right? Not, not too many. You don't have a lot of experience with parenting.

Help folks understand how many children, or let me correct that. How big is your softball team and the ages, the age ranges now? Yeah. So we only have eight children.

They are aged at this point, 30 to 15. 30 to 15.

Even roughly through there. And only eight, which a softball team is nine, I believe. So, you know, no, you're not because of the two of you, you have a substitute.

See, there we go. And then there's some spouses. So that's, it's growing.

It's actually a wiffle ball team in our family. We play wiffle ball.

Ah, okay. And you're, you're now working on grandchildren. I know because I've gotten to see one of your grandchildren who is just like super adorable and probably like one of the best behaved children, infants.

He was like one and one of the best behaved one-year-olds I think I've ever come in contact with. So, which plays into what we're going to talk about your book on parenting, because, well, one thing that we do know is I remember someone saying that, you know, how good of a job you do as a parent when your children raise their children.

And it really starts to see how, how well you, you pour into them. So I want to be able to talk through the book. I will admit though, just to get this out of the way, John, I realized in chapter two, I didn't like you.

I just realized, I saw that you don't like running. And I was just like, this is, this is bad. I mean, I started off chapter two. I still remember, I started off with, you start off saying you don't like running.

I run on average about a half a marathon a day. How could you not? But when we look at this book, I first want to ask you, um, obviously you guys have had a lot of experience parenting with eight children.

I've gotten to meet several of your children, having been, you know, invited to, to, um, one of your, one of your one daughter's wedding. So I got to meet the family. I will say for my audience, so they know all of your children that I met were, were just wonderful children, wonderful Christian children.

Uh, very respectful, very, just, just very kind individuals. Not saying that to flatter you, just saying that. So the audience, my audience knows that, uh, I bring you on because I've seen, I've seen the work you've done in parenting with the results.

So, but let me ask you first a question. I'd like to ask when people have written a book, what, what brought you to write this book? Why did you feel the need to write it? And there's going to be something special in this book, folks, that is different.

From any book I've read on parenting, it, it, you'll, if you see the cover, you're going to see blue tape. Don't, don't talk about that. Cause I'm going to ask you specifically about that. Cause that was, I told my audience last week that they should tune in this week because we're going to parent by blue tape.

And you're going to need to tune in to figure that out. So don't talk about the blue tape, but what brought you about to write this book?

Well, I think a lot of it came from a number of different things. One is we feel like, you know, we have been greatly blessed by the children God has given us, but we have absolutely learned a lot and have done a lot of things that looking back, we kind of wish we'd done differently.

Right. So we feel like we did things the hard way and then sort of later on realize, you know, there's, I think maybe there's better ways. So, so in the process of being in our church and, and just being around other people, we started to, and we're around a lot of students, it seems like.

And we had a lot of people start to come ask us questions. How do you do this? What do you do that? And we found that there seemed to be a lot of resources out there in terms of a lot of the. The theory and kind of the principles of parenting, but a lot of the questions that parents were having were very, very practical nature.

And we kind of joked cause we kept writing the same long emails to people. And we said, you know, I think maybe we should just write this down. And in a form of a book and for both our own children, kind of like you were talking about, as well as others, almost more, a more efficient way to do this.

So we, we, I can let you.

Yeah. The, a lot of students were in our homes as college students, and then they got married and moved away and started having children. And then we would get these questions by email or text or possibly face-to-face.

And we also realized besides that, the fact that we're writing the same emails over and over, it's actually easier to say the principles in a neutral setting. So if it's written in a chapter in a book, it's not aimed at any one person.

And yet it's sort of clearly what we wanted to say. It just seemed like a better way to do it. So now if someone asks a question, we'll say chapter three or chapter seven or something like that.

That's a really good point because when we do send an email, people can, even if you're saying something that's general, people think you're being specific to them. Right.

And we had a goal to get it done before our first grandchild was born for that very purpose. So we had centerpiece. You know, our children know we're not like aiming at anything they're doing particularly.

And just squeaked it in there.

I guess, Grace, it was almost on time.

Almost on time. Well, I will say that it was on time for my first grandson, for sure. And I know that for my family, we're going to be the beneficiaries of your book, because I know that my daughter and son-in-law have been influenced by you guys and by the book.

So I want to get into the subtitle of the book. So it's called Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. This is a subtitle. Blessing Others, Blue Tape Boundaries, and Other Practical Perspectives on Raising Children.

So this was the thing, and I should have mentioned, John, I know your background a little. You are an engineer by trade, but you also are a pastor within your church. So I should have mentioned that as some credentials.

I remember when my kids had this book in their house, and I looked at it and was like, what's with the blue tape? That was the first question that I had asked. And they're like, well, you need to read this book to understand.

And so I was really puzzled as they tried to explain this. So when we talk about boundaries, this is something that happens with children. We want to discuss boundaries with kids, especially for young kids.

And I will preface, I think this book would be really for parents who are people that are planning to have children or parents that have younger children, you know, up to, I don't know if there's like an age limit you really have, but it seemed it's really good for parents for those first, like, five, six, 10 year range.

So okay. So with that, the first question that I really would like is, could you explain this blue tape boundary and then how did you discover this?

Blue Tape Boundaries and Training Children to Respect Limits

Yeah, I think actually how we discovered it is probably more of the explanation. It has a lot to do with some of what we said earlier about not, you know, kind of learning ourselves. So when we started parenting, I remember spending weekends going around and putting cabinet locks on and putting up fences.

And we had some visitors that were at our house that kind of said, you know, sometimes you need to maybe think about rather than childproofing your house, houseproofing your child. And at the time we kind of thought, oh, you know, he doesn't understand.

But as we went on, we realized that there's a lot of truth in that. And what, as we sort of started thinking more along, let's train our children to respect boundaries. We had a house where there was a border between the kitchen was linoleum and the dining room area was carpeting.

And we taught the crawling child at the time, okay, stay on the carpeting to kind of keep them out of the dangerous kitchen. Right.

And that worked incredibly well. We just thought, I wonder if we could, since she's just starting out crawling, if we could just establish this as a boundary before she expects to be able to cross it.

And it just seems so much easier than the constant battle to, you know, sometimes kitchens can be dangerous places and you don't want a baby around an island underfoot kind of thing. So then we started thinking, well, where else might it be a blessing to have the child recognize that area is not for me.

This area is my place to be.

So we started regular masking tape on carpet. That's a horrible idea.

Once you trample over it for a long period of time.

And we rent a rental home, too. So that was, it was just a few hours to get the regular masking. It was not a good plan. So the blue tape, you know, which is less sticky, it's also more visible and worked really well.

But the beauty of blue tape is if you train your crawling child to a blue tape boundary, when you go to grandma's house or somewhere else, if it's not a place you regularly are with permission, of course, you can say, can I put some tape at the bottom of the stairs?

Can I put some around, you know, your China tea set over here that's reachable or what? And the child would respect, at least our children, they knew blue tape means that's not for me.

And that was amazing. So I went to your son-in-law's house. I was able to stay, you know, great couple, your daughter and son-in-law. And I stayed with them for several nights. And as soon as I walked in, I saw the blue tape in their living room, even though your grandson wasn't crawling yet, but they were ready.

And as soon as I saw it, I laughed. And it was an interesting idea. And I think this is, folks, this is what I think sets this book apart from any other parenting book that I had. There's a lot of books that cover a lot of topics that you guys cover and some in similar ways, but none with the creative ideas that you guys had and ideas that, you know, I ended up as I thought through it, I was like, wow, that would really, I haven't, I haven't been able to experience trying it.

I'm looking forward to watching it with my grandchildren, but, you know, I realized that would work. And the thing I walked away from, it was realizing there's seemed like there's a lot less stress for the parents with the, what you proposed.

Have you found that to be the case in your life since you've actually practiced it? I'm just being theoretical.

I think what a lot of parents do unintentionally is rejoice with their children's developmental milestones and their exploration, which they're naturally wired to explore the world and start to take dominion over little areas of the world that is around them.

And, and, and yet they'll go and do things like take books off the bookshelf or take pants out of the cabinet. And initially a lot of parents think, oh, isn't that cute? Look what, look what they're able to do.

They've grown up so much, but another couple months of that, and then pages are coming out of books and, you know, it's, it's not cute after a couple of months, it's actually really disruptive. And if you think about it, you know, all of us adults included live within boundaries and those boundaries are good.

God's given us good boundaries for that are a blessing to us. So it's not a bad thing for our children from the beginning to learn this is for me, that's not for me. And it's really not a big heartache for them at a young age.

It's much harder on the parent to be consistent. But if we are consistent early on, it's such a stress relief because just they have their safe space. It's not that they'll never test your boundaries.

They usually do. They're pretty creative. Sometimes they'll put a book across the blue tape and crawl across the book.

See if that counts, you know, like every one of our children did that.

What really is the line here? But, but yeah, it's very much, but the blue tape is just an idea we wanted to share within the concept of boundaries being a blessing and that not something to shy away from in your parenting.

It's, you know, maybe some people may not choose to use that application of it, but it's just a possible application. And we tried to be careful within the book to say, here's something you could try versus this is a, let's say it's the Lord principle that you need to heed because it's from God's word.

Yeah. You can be a completely, you know, faithful Christian parent and never buy a roll of blue tape and, you know, and I think that's important. Like we tried in the book to be very clear that a lot of this is in the realm of kind of like you're saying, you know, suggestions and advice, not actual, like, you must do this.

Yeah. But I think that's where we found a lot of the questions we were getting were kind of in that realm, right? Not, I mean, everybody understood the goal, but practically, you know, what are some ideas for these kinds of situations?

Yeah. And the thing is, is that you can have someone who is not even a believer, but you mentioned Cindy, a really key word, consistency. My sister, for example, is a very A type personality. And so she chose very early on with her kids, like when she made a rule, it was never going to be broken.

So she had to be careful what rules she was going to make, but she would never spank her children, but she was so consistent that her kids always knew where the line was. And they always knew you're never going to get away crossing that line ever.

And her kids turned out really, really good. And so I think, and I'm going to have more questions on consistency later, because I did have some things that I saw in your book that I want to bring out.

But when we talk about blue tape, just so the audience knows, it's not specifically, doesn't have to be blue. It doesn't have to be the painter's tape. I mean, like there's a tape you use for wires, you know, as you travel and do AV stuff, they have that gawking tape, which is meant to be able to easy come up and they have lots of different colors for that.

So the idea that you're saying with the tape is just having a tape that's easy to put down that can take up without any residue, especially if you're going to other people's homes. And so with that, then I want to explore this question for you is, so what's the reaction that you get when you come into someone's house?

Obviously, I'm assuming it's mostly family that you would do this, but I mean, you go to someone else's house where they have other children maybe, and you want to put down blue tape because now you, because this is where, you know, I see you're with a play date with someone else and they don't have blue tape, but you do have the blue tape, right?

How does that end up working out? Because you have your boundaries within your home, but you're also saying this could easily extend to other homes. So what is it like when you go to someone else's home, how would you approach that?

And then what are the things that you do if you have other children, even in your own home that aren't with the blue tape, they aren't raised with blue tape?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think one thing to point out is at least as far as the blue tape itself, I don't think we would like use it if we were visiting somebody's home for an afternoon.

You know, that's not really the intent. If we were going to grandpa and grandma's house for several days, you know, that's more the environment where maybe we would set up some blue tape.

Or sometimes in a hotel room, if we were staying overnight, it just was easier as a family to say, OK, baby, this isn't yours over here. Stay over in this area.

But I think, you know, the underlying idea still would be that, you know, at least the children and depending on their age and their understanding of verbal things, right? You know, in an environment where you can't really put down blue tape.

I mean, it would be kind of awkward to, you know, say, hey, I've got blue tape here in in a very short, you know, visiting situation, someone else's house. But having children that still understand the concept of boundaries.

Right. So you can say you need to stay in that room or no, you don't touch the things here, you know, that the the principle of there are boundaries, even if there's not a piece of blue tape right now, still carries over.

And I think that that's where it helpful. I think, you know, it is a challenge as we interact with others, whether there are other, you know, families that have similar children of ours or friends, because not everybody parents exactly the same.

You know, there are some things that one family is going to have that this is very important to us, other things that other families, you know, have different things. And so, you know, we do think there's a need for a lot of graciousness, right?

There's not sort of some absolute objective standard that everybody must parent by. And and so I think just having a certain amount of graciousness and teaching that to our children, too. It's very easy for them to kind of mentally say, look and say, wow, you know, we've been taught not to do that, but those kids are doing that.

So those are bad kids. Right. And that's not really an accurate view of things. And so teaching them know that their parents haven't taught them that or so this isn't a boundary for them. This is just your boundary.

And also with the blue tape, that's generally in our family for kids under two. So a tape wouldn't necessarily apply to all of our children. It would just be to the children that are young enough to not be able to handle the responsibility of being in the kitchen or being near sharp things or something.

So I can't use that for my adult children.

I did mention multiple colors and we were chuckling because we visited some friends of ours and they had multiple colors, blue tapes, and those were for some of the different ages of children. Oh, wow.

Took it in another level. That's the only thing we ever did. They had some children that were able to do the dishes, so they were able to be near the sink, but they had a fairly dangerous stove. This was in another country and it was a gas stove.

And so almost none of the young ones were able to be near the stove, but some of the other children had greater limits within the kitchen than the baby. So they've expanded on your idea.

They have, yes. And the reason I ask that question is because when I was raising children, we had a kind of a program. I'm not going to name it, but the program that people were recommending to train your children and one of the big things they had in there, it got to a point where it almost seemed cultic because what people would do is if you didn't do it this way, then you weren't doing it the way God would want you to do it.

And to a point where even within the church, I was encouraged by some people to only let my children play with other people whose children are being raised by parents that went through this program. And so I wanted you to be able to make it clear to folks that this is, these are your, and because you do this throughout the book, you give a ton of principles, but also a lot of ideas.

I don't know if we'll get to all the ideas that you have at the back part of the book, but there's, I will encourage folks. I'm going to at least read through some of those is my plan. I want to take a break, but after the break, I want to address, because this really is kind of the foundation, I think, to your whole book, is the idea of grace-filled parenting.

I want you to be able to explain that. So folks, this is John and Cindy Requette there with the book Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. It is available on free Grace Press. It's also available on Kindle on Amazon.

I encourage you to get a copy at free Grace Press. In fact, I'm going to, I often do this with publishers that are books that I really, really support. Folks, if you have a bunch of parents in your home, new parents, people that are newly married or just starting out in parenting, I'm going to encourage you to maybe consider buying a case of them for those in your church.

You can give them for Christmas or just give them as a random gift to them because, well, new parents really need the help anyway, but especially if they're before they start parenting, be a good thing to do.

So when we come back from the break, I want to give a word from our sponsor, and then I want to ask you a question of what you mean by grace-filled parenting. And with that, folks, we are sponsored by MyPillow.

We love their products. I, as you guys know, I use their pillow. I travel with my pillow. In fact, I will be, well, by the time this airs, I will probably be somewhere in Israel, and I will be quite depressed if I cannot get my pillow into my 50-pound limit.

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Go to MyPillow .com and use promo code or coupon code SFE to get your discounts. So, John and Cindy, as we come back, I want to ask you about, in your book, Purposeful and Persistent Parenting, you start off speaking about grace-filled parenting.

Would you be able to explain what that is?

Grace-Filled Parenting and the Need for Consistency

Yeah, I think we wanted to kind of set the stage. And because when you're parenting, there's kind of this tricky balance between, well, I want graciousness towards my children. I want to forgive them.

I don't want to have their performance be kind of what dominates our relationship. But at the same time, as parents, we can't just say it doesn't matter how they behave. Just do whatever, right? And we do want to teach them the specific things.

And there are ramifications if they don't obey. And so, you know, the idea, I think, of grace-filled parenting is very much related to understanding who we are before God and who our children are before God and how that then makes us relate to each other.

So, in terms of our own children, you know, our relationship with our children is not based on their performance. And this is true of us as believers, right? Our relationship with our Lord is based on Christ's performance, not on ours.

And in a sense, that's very much kind of like the relationship. We love our children, whether they're obeying or not obeying, right? And that's understood. And then we also recognize that we are fellow sinners with them, right?

We, it's not like we as parents are the perfect in every way and you children need to get your act together. You know, the real picture is we struggle with sin and they struggle with sin. And it may be that their struggles are expressed in kind of different ways.

But when you get down to it, it's a lot of times the same struggle. We were talking about boundaries earlier and you may have a child, you know, be very upset about some boundary or really push some boundary.

And yeah, you know, as adults, we're not worried about crossing blue tape. But we ourselves wrestle with boundaries that we wish we didn't have and we maybe sinfully struggle not living within those boundaries, right?

And so, at a fundamental level, we're similar with our children. But with all of that and having that kind of a mindset, that does not remove the requirement for them to learn to obey, right? Just like as we are following our Lord, even though Christ paid the penalty for our sins, that doesn't mean that, therefore, we can just live however we want and it makes no difference, right?

And so there's, you know, I think that when we're parenting our children, you know, we do have a role of teaching them to obey and to live within the constraints that God has given, but to do that still with an attitude of graciousness, recognizing that we are struggling with the same things.

You know, one of the things that you brought up in the book that just struck a chord with me and I had to sit and think about, you talk about not complaining about your children. And I never, I guess like I understand the concept, but I'm very clear that, and I tell people, you will never hear me make a joke where my bride is the butt of a joke, because marriage is just too sacred to be, and yet that's what our whole culture does.

And yet I didn't think about it with not complaining about our children as parents, and that was something I really thought through and was like, wow, I never thought of it that way. Why is it important that we don't complain about our children?

Well, part of it is our own hard attitude. Children are an unmitigated blessing from the Lord, and in a sense, grumbling and complaining about them is grumbling and complaining about this gift that God has given.

But also, just for their listening, and we want to be instructing their hearts about the gift that they are, and just helping them to see how we deal with our own struggles. We don't want them grumbling and complaining, because ultimately, their grumbling and complaining is against the Lord.

Not that we don't take our burdens to the Lord, we do, but we want to help them not have a grumbly, complaining heart that they just give into without taking their burdens legitimately to the Lord.

So how do you think, if parents are complaining, because you mentioned even the children hearing, what would that do for the child hearing a parent complaining about the child? Why is it important for us not to do that for the child's sake?

I mean, some of it gets back to this principle that our relationship with our children shouldn't be based on their performance, right? So if they sort of get this impression, it's like, okay, well, you know, pretty much how I'm behaving is how pleased my parents are with me or not.

You know, that's going to go against that idea. But, you know, I don't know what it does exactly to a child to hear their parents complaining about them. But it'd be pretty devastating. But I think it could be frustrating.

And we're called not to exasperate our children. That's probably one area where we can do that.

And, and with small children, especially, yes, they have a sinful heart and they are selfishly oriented from birth. But if we are really frustrated with them, it's often our fault, our lack of parenting in a previous context, or our lack of making sure they have food and, and are properly rested to the extent that we can control those things.

You know, like sometimes we've stretched them too thin by living a busy life or whatever, you know, like a lot of times for a young child, if they're really losing it, there's little they can do to have prevented that, you know, we're kind of in charge of their environment.

But even beyond the impact on the child, I feel like the fundamental premise or fundamental problem with it is something in our heart isn't right. If we really are, and let's be clear, like, that, you know, I don't, we're not talking about the situation where at the end of a long day, we get together with another couple, but oh, man, it was a tough day with kids today.

That's not what we're talking about. You know, we're, we're talking about, you know, an attitude of sort of annoyance and frustration. And, and this is just not right. You know, God is, these are not gifts that God has given me.

Selfishness on our part, really. We can be honest with our children when we are struggling with our own sin, but we should acknowledge it for what it is and not that it's their fault. But, you know, mom's struggling with being selfish right now.

I'm asking the Lord to help me be generous and others oriented in this moment, you know,.

Because we all struggle. You know, I witnessed someone who they had a child, natural born from the couple, second child was adopted. And I, I watched how the mother just would constantly with the child present, talk about the child in a negative way, as if maybe I shouldn't have had this one.

And being adopted, I always thought like when that child grows up, knowing he's adopted compared to his brother who is not adopted and, and hearing how she spoke about each of them, I was like, that's, I just was like, that's going to be really damaging when they get older.

And one of the things you talk about in the book is not just boundaries for children, but you talked about boundaries and consistency within parenting, as far as both the, what we say in private to one another, public and within husband and wife versus children.

So, you lay out in the book, different ideas of some boundaries in that sense with, with consistency of what, where there should be limits for us as parents, but what are we, what should we, what information is okay for the kids to hear or not?

Like, what do we keep to ourselves? What do we, what's public versus private? Why, why is that so important?

Consistency Between Parents, Public and Private Life, and What Children Hear

Yeah, I mean, I think the, the, the thing that, that we've seen and, you know, and ourselves can, can think through is, you know, I think it can be a very difficult thing for a child to have a situation where when it's just us at home, it's totally okay to be cutting other people down, to be really mean, to be yelling at each other.

And then as soon as somebody external comes in completely different feel like where it's like, it's like there's the public family and the private family. And our goal should be integrity. Our goal should be consistency across all of that.

And certainly there are certain things, you know, it's not that everything is exposed fully, but, but I think we should be really careful if there's a big difference between what it's like when we're in private and what it's like when we're in public.