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

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March 14, 2023

Rapp Report episode 262 In this episode, Andrew welcomes John and Cindy Raquet to the show to discuss their book, Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. We discuss the importance of recognizing that parents and children’s struggles with sin differ. We also discuss the challenges of parenting eight children and how the book’s authors discovered the concept...

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00:25: ChumbaCasino .com No purchase necessary, void where 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?
00:35: We, it's not like we as parents are the perfect in every way and you children need to get your act together.
00:42: 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.
00:52: But when you get down to it, it's a lot of times the same struggle. One, two, three.
00:59: Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.
01:05: 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.
01:15: Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, the executive director of Striving for Eternity and the
01:23: Christian podcast community of which this podcast is a proud member. Check out strivingforeternity .org
01:29: and thechristianpodcastcommunity .org to find out more. Now, I have some special guests on today.
01:36: 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.
01:43: But this is the gentleman who married my daughter. Now, some of you are going, well, Andrew, why didn't you marry your daughter?
01:49: Which at the time I was a little upset with as well that they didn't ask.
01:55: 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
02:04: John to do. And I'm like, well, I can perform weddings. This is not a difficult thing.
02:09: 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.
02:22: So we needed someone else. And I have to admit, John, you did an outstanding job with my daughter's wedding.
02:32: 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.
02:39: And I have, we're, well, we are indirectly family now.
02:44: We'll have to explain that as well. But let me welcome John and Cindy Raquette to The Rap Report.
02:52: Thank you. Very good to be here. Thanks for having us. So we're going to cover your book, which is called
02:57: Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. And so, folks, this is a book that is available at Free Grace Press.
03:05: 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.
03:15: And you're going to see why you should get that throughout the show. But let me first start off with you.
03:21: You two and I are sort of related because my son -in -law has a identical twin brother that married your daughter.
03:34: And so, there's going to be some things that, you know, I've seen, I know your family a little bit.
03:40: And you just have a few children, right? Not too many. You don't have a lot of experience with parenting.
03:46: Help folks understand how many children, or let me correct that, how big is your softball team and the ages, the age ranges now.
03:56: Yeah, so we only have eight children. They are aged at this point, you know, 30 to 15.
04:04: 30 to 15. Even roughly through there. And only eight, which a softball team is nine,
04:10: I believe. So, you know, no, you're not, because the two of you, you have a substitute, see?
04:16: Oh, yeah, that's true. And then there's some spouses. So that's... It's growing. It's actually a wiffle ball team in our family.
04:23: We play wiffle ball. Ah, okay. And 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 infants, he was like one, and one of the best behaved one -year -olds
04:41: 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,
04:51: I remember someone saying that you know how good of a job you do as a parent when your children raise their children.
04:59: And it really starts to see how well you pour into them. So, I want to be able to talk through the book.
05:07: I will admit though, just to get this out of the way, John, I realized in chapter two,
05:13: I didn't like you. I just realized, I saw that you don't like running. And I was just like, this is bad.
05:21: I mean, I started off chapter two. I still remember, I started off with, you start off saying you don't like running.
05:26: I run on average about a half a marathon a day. How could you not? But when we look at this book,
05:37: I first want to ask you, obviously, you guys have had a lot of experience parenting with eight children.
05:43: I've gotten to meet several of your children, having been invited to your one daughter's wedding.
05:52: So, I got to meet the family. I will say for my audience that they know all of your children that I met were just wonderful children, wonderful Christian children.
06:05: Very respectful, very kind individuals. Not saying that to flatter you, just saying that so my audience knows that I bring you on because I've seen the work you've done in parenting with the results.
06:21: So, but let me ask you first a question I like to ask when people have written a book. What brought you to write this book?
06:28: 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
06:35: I've read on parenting. If you see the cover, you're going to see blue tape. Don't talk about that because I'm going to ask you specifically about that because that was,
06:44: I told my audience last week that they should tune in this week because we're going parent by blue tape and you're going to need to tune in to figure that out.
06:53: 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.
07:02: One is we feel like, you know, we have been greatly blessed by the children
07:08: 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?
07:16: The hard way. Yeah, we did things the hard way and then sort of later on realized, you know, I think maybe there's better ways.
07:22: So, in the process of being in our church 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.
07:35: 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 theory and kind of the principles of parenting, but a lot of the questions that parents were having were very, very practical in nature.
07:51: And we kind of joked because we kept writing the same long emails to people. And we said, you know,
07:56: 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 a more efficient way to do this.
08:09: So, we, I can let you. Yeah, a lot of students were in our homes as college students, and then they got married and moved away and started having children.
08:19: And then we would get these questions by email or text or possibly face -to -face.
08:25: And we also realized besides the fact that we're writing the same emails over and over, it's actually easier to say the principles in a neutral setting.
08:35: 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.
08:43: 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.
08:50: 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.
08:58: So, right. And we had a goal to get it done before our first grandchild was born.
09:05: For that very purpose. So, we had centerpiece. You know, our children know we're not like aiming at anything they're doing particularly.
09:14: And just squeaked it in there. I guess, Grace, it was almost on time. Almost on time.
09:20: 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.
09:37: So, I want to get into the subtitle of the book. So, it's called
09:43: Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. This is a subtitle. Blessing Others, Blue Tape Boundaries, and Other Practical Perspectives on Raising Children.
09:55: So, this was the thing, and I should have mentioned, John, I know your background a little.
10:01: You are an engineer by trade, but you also are a pastor within your church. So, I should have mentioned that as some credentials.
10:09: But 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?
10:20: That was the first question that I had asked. Well, you need to read this book to understand.
10:27: 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.
10:35: We want to discuss boundaries with kids, especially for young kids. And I will preface, I think this book would be really for people that are planning to have children or parents that have younger children, up to,
10:51: I don't know if there's like an age limit you really have, but it seems it's really good for parents for those first like five, six, ten year range.
10:59: 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?
11:16: 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.
11:24: So, when we started parenting, I remember spending weekends going around and putting cabinet locks on and putting up fences.
11:34: 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.
11:45: 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.
11:53: And 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.
12:08: 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?
12:14: And that worked incredibly well. And 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.
12:26: 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.
12:37: So, then we started thinking, well, where else might it be a blessing to have the child recognize that area is not for me.
12:46: This area is my place to be. So, we started regular masking tape on carpet.
12:53: That's a horrible idea. Once you trample over it for a long period of time, and we rent a rental home too.
13:00: 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.
13:10: 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 we put some tape at the bottom of the stairs?
13:25: Can I put some around, you know, your China tea set over here that's reachable or what?
13:31: And the child would respect, at least our children, they knew blue tape means that's not for me.
13:38: 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.
13:49: 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.
13:59: And as soon as I saw it, I laughed. And it is, it was an interesting idea.
14:04: And I think this is, folks, this is what I think sets this book apart from any other parenting book that I had.
14:11: 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,
14:23: 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,
14:32: I realized that that would work. And the thing I walked away from, it was realizing there's, it seemed like there's a lot less stress for the parents with the, what you proposed.
14:46: Have you found that to be the case in your life since you've actually practiced it? I'm just being theoretical.
14:54: 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, you know, is around them.
15:14: And, and, and yet they'll go and do things like take books off the bookshelf or take pants out of the cabinet.
15:20: 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.
15:31: And, you know, it's, it's not cute after a couple of months, it's actually really disruptive.
15:37: And if you think about it, you know, all of us adults included live within boundaries and those boundaries are good.
15:43: 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.
15:53: And it's really not a big heartache for them at a young age. It's much harder on the parent to be consistent.
15:59: But if we are consistent early on, it's such a stress relief because just they have their safe space.
16:08: 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.
16:16: See if that counts. You know, like every one of our children did that. What really is the line here?
16:21: 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.
16:35: It's, you know, some people may not choose to use that application of it, but it's just a possible application.
16:42: And we tried to be careful within the book to say, here's something you could try versus this is a, thus says the
16:48: Lord principle that you need to heed because it's from God's word. You can be a completely, you know, faithful Christian parent and never buy a roll of blue tape.
16:58: 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, not actual, like you must do this.
17:11: Yeah. But I think that's where we found a lot of the questions we were getting were kind of in that realm, right?
17:16: Not, I mean, everybody understood the goal, but practically, you know, what are some ideas for, for these kinds of situations?
17:25: Yeah. And, and the thing is, is that you can have someone who is not even a believer, but you mentioned,
17:31: Cyndia, a really key word, consistency. My sister, for example, is a very
17:37: A type personality. And so she, she chose very early on with her kids, like when she made a rule, it was never going to be broken.
17:44: So she had to be careful what rules she was going to make, but she, she never, she would never spank her children, but she was so consistent that her kids always knew where the line was.
17:57: They, and they always knew you were never going to get away crossing that line ever. And, and her kids turned out really, really good.
18:04: And so I think, and I'm going to have more questions on consistency later, because I do, 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, it doesn't have to be blue.
18:17: It doesn't have to be the painter's tape. I mean, like there's a tape you use for wires, you know, as, as you, as you travel and do
18:24: 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.
18:30: So the idea that you're saying with the tape is just having a tape that's easy to put down that can be take up without any residue, especially if you're going to other people's homes.
18:39: And so with that, then I want to explore this question for you is, so what, what's the reaction that you get when you come into someone's house?
18:47: 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.
18:57: Cause now you, cause this is where we're, you know, I, I see you, you're with a play date with someone else and they don't have blue tape, but you do have the blue tape, right?
19:07: 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.
19:15: So what is it like when you go to someone else's home? How, 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?
19:28: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think, 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.
19:38: 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, set up some blue tape.
19:47: Or sometimes in a hotel room, if we were staying overnight, it just was easier as a family to say, okay, baby, this isn't yours over here.
19:54: Stay over in this area. But I, 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.
20:05: 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,
20:12: I've got blue tape here in a very short, you know, visiting situation, someone else's house, but having children that still understand the concept of boundaries, right.
20:21: 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 tape right now, still carries over.
20:37: And I think that that's where it helpful. I think it, you know, it is a challenge as we interact with others, whether they're other, you know, families that have similar age 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.
21:00: And so, you know, we do think there's a need for a lot of graciousness, right?
21:05: There's not sort of some absolute objective standard that everybody must parent by.
21:11: And, and so I think just having a certain amount of graciousness and teaching that to our children too, right?
21:17: 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.
21:27: So those are bad kids, right? And that's not really an accurate view of things.
21:34: And so teaching them know that their parents haven't taught them that, or so this isn't a boundary for them.
21:39: This is just your boundary. And also with the blue tape, that's generally in our family for kids under two.
21:45: 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.
21:57: 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.
22:09: And those were for some of the different ages of children. Oh, wow. They took it in another level. That's the only thing we ever did.
22:15: 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.
22:24: This was in another country and it was a gas stove that. And so like 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.
22:37: So they've expanded on your idea. They have, yes. And the reason
22:42: I ask that question is because when I was raising children, we had a kind of a program.
22:49: 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.
22:57: 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
23:05: 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.
23:20: And so I wanted you to be able to make it clear to folks that this is, these are you've because you do this throughout the book.
23:26: 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,
23:35: 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,
23:41: 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.
23:51: I want you to be able to explain that. So folks, this is John and Cindy Requette there with the book
23:56: Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. It is available on free Grace Press.
24:01: It's also available on Kindle on Amazon. I encourage you to get a copy at free Grace Press. In fact,
24:07: I often do this with publishers that are books that I really, really support.
24:13: Folks, if you have a bunch of parents in your home, new parents, people that are newly married or just starting out in parenting,
24:23: 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.
24:37: 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.
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25:59: So John and Cindy, as we come back, I want to ask you about in your book,
26:04: Purposeful and Persistent Parenting, you start off speaking about grace -filled parenting.
26:11: Would you be able to explain what that is? 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,
26:24: I want to graciousness towards my children. I want to forgive them. I don't want to have their performance be kind of what dominates our relationship.
26:32: But at the same time, as parents, we can't just say it doesn't matter how they behave. Just do whatever, right?
26:38: And we do want to teach them the specific things. And there are ramifications if they don't obey.
26:46: 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 makes us relate to each other.
26:56: So in terms of our own children, you know, our relationship with our children is not based on their performance.
27:03: And this is true of us as believers, right? Our relationship with our Lord is based on Christ's performance, not on ours.
27:10: And in a sense, that's very much kind of like the relationship.
27:15: We love our children, whether they're obeying or not obeying, right? And that's understood.
27:21: 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.
27:34: 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.
27:43: 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.
27:55: 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?
28:08: 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?
28:22: 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?
28:34: 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.
28:52: 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.
29:05: 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.
29:24: And yet I didn't think about it with not complaining about our children as parents, and that was something
29:31: 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?
29:43: Well, part of it is our own hard attitude. Children are an unmitigated blessing from the
29:48: 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.
29:59: 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.
30:12: We don't want them grumbling and complaining because ultimately their grumbling and complaining is against the
30:17: 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
30:28: 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?
30:45: Why is it important for us not to do that for the child's sake? So I mean, some of it gets back to this principle that our relationship with our children shouldn't be based on their performance, right?
30:58: 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.
31:09: 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.
31:19: That'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.
31:26: And with small children, especially, yes, they have a sinful heart and they are selfishly oriented from birth.
31:34: 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 are properly rested to the extent that we can control those things.
31:50: 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.
32:05: 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.
32:16: If we really are. And let's be clear, like, you know,
32:22: 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.
32:29: That's not what we're talking about. You know, we're talking about, you know, an attitude of sort of annoyance and frustration and this is just not right.
32:40: You know, God is these are not gifts that God has given me, you know, on our part.
32:46: We can 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.
32:55: 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.
33:05: You know, I witnessed someone who they had a child, natural born from the couple.
33:12: Second child was adopted. And I watched how the mother just would constantly with the child present talk about the child in a negative way as if maybe
33:27: 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 hearing how she spoke about each of them,
33:42: 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 talk 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.
34:04: So you lay out in the book different ideas of some boundaries in that sense with consistency of what, where there should be limits for us as parents, but what should we, what information is okay for the kids to hear or not?
34:18: Like, what do we keep to ourselves? What do we, what's public versus private? Why is that so important?
34:28: Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that we've seen and, you know, and ourselves can think through is, you know,
34:40: 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.
34:57: 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.
35:07: And our goal should be integrity. Our goal should be consistency across all of that.
35:13: 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.
35:27: That's true as an individual too, but, but certainly as a family, then, you know, what the children then kind of pick up is not that there's an overall principle.
35:37: It's that pretty much, it just depends on, are people going to see you that that's what determines whether you can do something or not.
35:45: And that's, that's not a healthy way to live. Mm -hmm. Obviously there's private information that it's okay to have private information within a family, but you want their, their heart attitude, their character, what you're working for as a family to be the same, whether there's somebody in the room or not.
36:03: And ultimately, you know, Christ is watching. The Holy Spirit is here with us. We're never not before the face of God.
36:11: So we want to live that way in all the spheres of our life. And so one way you can kind of evaluate is kind of getting a sense that if somebody is visiting you or living with you for a weekend or something like that, or even coming over for a meal, what changes when that happens?
36:27: Right. And that can give you a sense sometimes of, okay, well, you know, maybe there's some things that we need to work on and, you know, to, to reduce that inconsistency.
36:37: We talk about some other areas of consistency, just like if you set up a boundary, just being consistent and enforcing that that's kind of consistency over time.
36:46: But we also want to encourage parents to really consider consistency between what they say and what they do.
36:53: If you're constantly teaching your children some principle, but then they see you acting otherwise, that's obviously not a good teaching situation.
37:04: So, so you want to be making sure like in Deuteronomy, these things shall be on your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your children.
37:11: This is, the essential part is you kind of can't really be effectively teaching what you don't believe and, and practice yourself.
37:19: Yeah, I know from personal experience with my kids, I mean, my kids have never seen my bride and I yelling at each other because we never actually have yelled at each other.
37:28: We have disagreements, but we, even the disagreements we do in private. And then they went on a
37:35: Disney cruise with my parents and I never thought to prepare them for how my parents speak to one another.
37:43: And they came back from the trip and I still remember my daughter telling me that she and my son were hiding behind the bed when my parents would, because they would yell at each other and my kids were fearful, like, are they going to get divorced?
38:00: Are they going to kill each other? Because they had never seen that and they were still very young.
38:06: And that's just a difference that, you know, we end up seeing is we made the decision that if we talked about how we were going to parent the kids, we would step aside, we would talk it out and then come with a more unified face.
38:21: And that becomes really important. And I think throughout your book, there's one word that keeps coming up and I want to,
38:29: I want to take a break out, but after the break, I want to talk about the importance or the role that consistency has, because you, you speak about it in the book and there's, there's a lot.
38:40: And that's why I think this book is so valuable, especially for folks to get with younger children to start training them this way young.
38:47: But the book, folks, is Purposeful and Persistent Parenting by John and Cindy Raquette.
38:52: And it is available at Free Grace Press. That's the best place to get it. Also go to Kindle to get a
39:00: Kindle version. You can go to Amazon. So we are sponsored here by Lagos Bible Software.
39:06: That is software I am a heavy, heavy user of. I actually have more books in my
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39:52: And so if you really want to dig into God's word and dig deeply and really get to understand it, my encouragement to you is to get
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40:31: God's Word, today. So we're back with John and Cindy Raquette, Purposeful and Persistent Parenting, available at Free Grace Press.
40:41: And the question I have as I look through the book, and even as we're discussing, there's one word that keeps coming up.
40:48: It's consistency. What role does consistency play in our parenting? I think it's very important.
40:57: And to be honest, it's also probably the thing that parents, including we, struggle with the most.
41:04: Like there is no perfectly consistent parent. And typically what would happen with us is we would kind of get re -energized about the parenting, what we needed to do in parenting and say,
41:18: OK, we need to be more consistent and follow up when things are not going well in this certain area.
41:25: And we would do that well for a time. But then, you know, life happens and we get busy with other things.
41:31: And over a while, we realize things have kind of slipped. And we'd find ourselves, you know, as the children got a little bit older even and could understand this, we'd come back and we'd say, you know what?
41:40: We think that we have been not being consistent. We have kind of let some of these things go.
41:47: That that's our fault. Please forgive us for not doing that. And we're going to have to kind of start things again.
41:54: And we're going to we're going to hold shore up the expectations, particular standard, you know, whether it's everything from doing chores to to just obeying when when those kind of things.
42:07: So so I do think that that, you know, it's very important. And just being honest, let's recognize this as parents.
42:15: It's probably the hardest thing for us to do, but it's certainly worth striving for. Yeah, and that is something that is, as you said, is one of the hardest things that I found when
42:26: I was a parent. I think my theory always was with my bride and I was the fact that there was always one of us that was the stronger one at any one time.
42:38: There's one that was more the disciplinarian and one that was just frustrated. And we we kind of take turns in those roles and switch.
42:45: But we always, you know, one of us at least was there to provide that consistency so that, you know, there would be times and more being me,
42:55: I think that needed her support sometimes. But I found that I found it to be something where the consistency, when we were more consistent with the children, we were able to disciple them better.
43:08: We were able to train them better. It just seemed to flow better. And then when we were not consistent, which was usually, you know, for me personally, because I'm a busy person,
43:23: I keep my schedule, as my wife would say, over committed. And that ended up having an effect with the kids.
43:30: And I didn't realize that till many years later. And so the idea of consistency you have going throughout the book, it's not that we have to be perfect, but it's the goal.
43:45: Would that be a fair way of expressing your thoughts? Yep. Yeah. And I think, you know, we talk about consistency over time, meaning, you know, today, this is, you know, if the child does this, this is kind of how that's what's going to happen.
44:01: That that's true tomorrow or the next day and a month from now. Right. And then we also talk about or think about consistency between parents.
44:09: And that's one thing you were just talking about. And that, yeah, there's not a battle between parents, not necessarily of how to do these things or there shouldn't be.
44:18: That's something to work out. So that at least as you're interacting with the child, that there's not, you know, the easy parent and the hard parent.
44:25: Really, there should be consistency there too. These things are easy to say, easy to write in a book, hard to live.
44:32: Absolutely. I'll be speaking at a couple of marriage conferences coming up.
44:38: And one of the things I'm going to say, and I've always said this, I can give you advice so that you will never have a fight in your household.
44:47: It's very simple for me to say, all you have to do is have everyone in the household showing more love than they receive.
44:55: And it's impossible to get into a fight. And people laugh because they suddenly realize, well, that's easy for me to say, but living that out really hard, which leads me into one of the things you did cover in your book is some pitfalls.
45:08: What are some pitfalls that you identify within parenting? I mean,
45:17: I think one of them has to do with even the title, the idea behind being purposeful.
45:25: I think it's very easy to just kind of respond to situations and to parent by responding.
45:34: And instead of stepping back and thinking more proactively, how can we teach ahead of time how to deal with this?
45:42: So a good example that probably all of us have faced is when you're in the grocery store and you've got a tired child and they see some candy that they really would like, and they ask for that and we say no.
45:56: And they maybe get really upset and throw a fit, right? And at that moment, the natural easing for a tired parent is to just pull that piece of candy in.
46:07: Everything's dealt with, everybody's happy, right? But when we look at that long term, that clearly is not going to be helpful, right?
46:15: And so you find yourself in a difficult situation like that. But if you never step back and say, how do we address this better?
46:24: How do we teach our child ahead of time in a time when they're receptive and not maybe tired about these things and train them proactively?
46:35: That's really the time to deal with that much more than when everybody's tired at the grocery store at the end of a long day.
46:41: And I think it's very easy for parents, for anybody to just kind of go through life and kind of just respond to situations without thinking and thinking proactively and stepping back a bigger picture.
46:54: One thing we started doing that I think was really hugely influential for our children is, you know, they get in the car, they don't necessarily, a young child doesn't necessarily know what your destination is and what's going to be expected of them once they get there.
47:08: So that car trip was an opportunity to dialogue about, okay, well, where are we going? We're going to church or we're going to a wedding or whatever.
47:16: And then say, okay, well, what's important about that? How can we bless other people at this wedding?
47:21: What will be important for you as a child to be sort of in concert with the purpose of why we're going to this event?
47:29: You know, if it's a church, okay, well, we're there to worship the Lord, to hear God's word. So how can you, you know, be a part of that?
47:37: Oh, well, I can not distract others with my body or I can wholeheartedly participate to encourage others.
47:44: You can get this dialogue going about almost anywhere. If you're going to the grocery store, if you're going to the household of some family that you haven't met before, you can, you know, dialogue with your children.
47:56: What's going to be important to express gratitude for this opportunity to spend the day with them, to ask permission before playing with toys.
48:05: You know, there's just, there's a long list of things you can dialogue to help prepare them. But a lot of times we're just busy and we're not thinking about it.
48:12: And we drive up and the kids pile out of the van and they're not prepared. And then you're just reacting rather than having proactively helped everybody get ready for that situation.
48:25: And so this is the idea of the purposeful and persistent. It's going in with the plan, having thought of these things ahead of time.
48:33: I know for my kids, they were actually, we liked, I loved going to restaurants and the grocery store.
48:41: Because, and this goes back to something we just said earlier, that was probably the only areas where I could say
48:46: I was really consistent with them. Like if we went to a restaurant, they acted up. There was like no second, like we would leave a restaurant, we'd leave a grocery store and go home, right?
48:56: And, or, you know, they'd have a punishment. And so because of that, they were really consistent in those places.
49:04: And I just wasn't as good in other places. But, you know, John, you mentioned it.
49:09: So I'm really important for folks, right? Being purposeful, bringing, you know, having discussions in a more relaxed atmosphere instead of being reacting to them.
49:19: I know that it took me a while to learn this lesson, but I, when I try to disciple the kids and teach them things,
49:27: I discovered if you just sit them down on, you know, okay, you're on a chair, I'm in a chair, and now we're going to talk.
49:33: They're fidgety, they don't want to be there. But I discovered that if I had my kids and they're coloring with me and I have the same exact conversation, it was a world difference.
49:45: And though I didn't think of it to be as purposeful as you did throughout your book, but I think that is an important part of it, is to have these ideas ahead of time to realize not just, let me not just react to these things, but, you know, have a plan.
50:01: And I think most people, most parenting books that I've read, the plan for reactive parenting is the rod.
50:12: And I had to look this up. You don't discuss the rod until chapter 18, right?
50:20: That's like the first thing people talk about. You brought it up more than halfway through the book. Well, and, you know, there's an analogy of if you want to teach somebody to fly an airplane, the way to do that is not you get in the airplane and say, okay, go,
50:37: I'll tell you when you do anything wrong, right? That isn't going to work. You have to do a lot of teaching, a lot of this is how this works.
50:44: This is how that works. Let's practice this. Let's do that. And yeah, of course, if they do something wrong, you're going to grab the stick and take it from them.
50:51: You know, going to correct them when they do wrong. But the vast majority of parenting is actually instruction and teaching.
51:02: And so, yeah, and practicing, right? And even, yeah, you teach what obedience looks like, but okay, let's practice that.
51:09: And the kids actually, when they're little, kind of enjoy that, right? In a fun environment.
51:14: And so, yeah, I would very much agree that the real thrust of parenting is on the proactive teaching side, not only the corrective side of things.
51:26: Yeah, I've told people that I started teaching both my kids to drive about two years before they started driving.
51:33: They never touched a wheel. But what I did was, I created a game. And the game was, everyone got points.
51:41: Whoever could spot the driver that was going to switch lanes before, you know, first one to figure it out.
51:47: Because, look, we lived in New Jersey. I know you guys may have not have come to this state, but those turn signals, yeah, those are only to inform the person in the other lane to speed up.
51:58: So, we don't use them in New Jersey. And so, you need other ways to be able to identify when someone's about to crash into you.
52:04: So, we made it into a game. And so, by the time they started driving, and so this was kind of,
52:10: I guess, purposeful, like your book is laying out, because I wanted them to be defensive drivers.
52:16: So, they'd be safe drivers. And that was, I mean, when I'm driving, I'm constantly looking at what other people are doing in their vehicles.
52:23: Okay, yeah, I get it. I have seen the Tesla driver sleeping. Okay, we got to deal with that. But that was a way of me training them before they ever put anything into practice.
52:36: We'd have a game where I would let them drive me home. Okay, you guys give me directions. How do we get home? And granted, it would be fun for them sometimes to turn a different way.
52:45: But then I'm like, okay, you got to get us home from here. You know, I'm not, you're doing it. And so, it got them to pay attention to roads and things like that, because it becomes needful for that.
52:57: One of the things that you did mention though, John, and you talk about it in your book, is the question
53:04: I had written down is, is obedience objective or subjective?
53:12: And you covered that in the book, which is not something I think a lot of people think through. Could you explain why you asked the question, which one it is and why?
53:23: Yeah, yeah. You know, most people don't live life talking about objective this and subjective that.
53:28: But the basic idea is, I think for a lot of us, if we aren't thinking about it, but sort of defining when is it that the child's disobeying?
53:41: And we are taught to teach our children to obey, right? I mean, that's part of what we're, as parents, called to do.
53:47: But so you have to define what is obedience, what is disobedience. If, from the child's perspective, disobedience is when my parent gets upset enough, then
53:57: I've really crossed the line, right? If it's based on the emotions of the parent at the time, which is often how things are, right?
54:06: It's kind of like parents will address things when they get fed up enough. And then it's like, ah, gotta do this. That's a very subjective standard of obedience.
54:14: Nobody can say what that is. It's just kind of what the current emotions of the parent are at the time.
54:20: Unpredictable. Yeah, it's unpredictable, compared with a situation where it's very objective.
54:26: You could sort of look at it. Everybody in the room can know whether that was obedience or not. And it's not based on, is the parent upset enough, right?
54:36: And so that is an environment where it's much easier to both hold a consistent standard, but also what we find is that because it's not based on us being upset enough, that when we are disciplining our child or dealing with them when they're not obeying, it's not an anger on our part.
54:57: It's not an emotional response. It's usually more out of a sense of duty. Like, okay, well, I was hoping to do that.
55:03: I've got to go deal with this right now. But that's a healthier situation in which to be dealing with a child that's disobeying than that we've just reached our boiling point.
55:14: And it's really just kind of based on how we're feeling today. And I think that's one of the great benefits of practicing what obedience looks like.
55:23: Because if you have taught your children, what is obedience, and in our family, obedience had certain requirements.
55:31: You had to do something right away. You had to do it completely. You had to do it with some amount of cheerful assent.
55:40: You may not be happy about it, but you couldn't do it with grumbling, dragging your feet, stomping.
55:46: And we wanted a verbal response so that we had understanding that we had hurt each other.
55:52: So once you teach those things, you practice those things. And the more you practice those things, the more everybody in the room knows exactly when disobedience has happened.
56:02: Like, there's no question on anybody's mind because we just practiced that this morning. And it just makes it easier for you as a parent to be consistent, because if you're not consistent, your kids are going to know it because everybody knows what obedience looks like.
56:16: And we're talking about outward obedience. Our goal is inward obedience.
56:22: With a young child, there's a limit to what you can do there. So we're just teaching them the way they should go and addressing their heart as we go along, trusting the
56:34: Lord will work in that context. You know, John, I grew up in the family that you just described.
56:41: My mother could be set off by anything. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you were the recipient of what someone else did.
56:50: And it was like walking on eggshells. And one of the things that it caused was basically in my household after dinner, dinner was required.
56:59: We were all together for dinner. We'd have discussions at dinner. But as soon as dinner was over, we scattered.
57:04: It was like to go to your room and hide so that you didn't happen to be the one to walk out and be the recipient of something someone else did earlier in the day.
57:15: And you're like, what am I being yelled at for? And one of the things I see with your family, because I've been able to observe it, is your family loves being together.
57:24: They enjoy the time together. I think that the parenting that you lay out in the book has shown that to be the case of everyone enjoys being together because of that, because of your purposeful parenting, where when you have the chaos, you don't want to be around anyone else.
57:43: So I don't have, I didn't grow up with the tight -knit relations with my siblings even as your children have, even with the wide range.
57:53: We had five in our family, five siblings, five kids in our family. So we were called the lucky seven.
57:58: That's what my dad, he named his boat that. So that was what we were always known as. But so folks, again, this is
58:07: Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. We're with John and Cindy Raquette, and you can get this book, and I encourage you to get this book at Free Grace Press.
58:17: So go check out Free Grace Press. You can get it on Kindle as well, but you can, it's, by the way,
58:22: I should say it's freegracepress .com is the website. This is now going to be, folks,
58:28: I'm planning to buy a case of these because this will be my baby gift at every baby shower.
58:37: So that is how important I think that this book is to get in the hands of people, and I encourage you to do the same.
58:43: As we wrap up, a couple of things. You had a chapter that I have not seen in a book on parenting, but I have taught it and think it's the most valuable thing to have with parenting.
59:00: And every time I deal with parenting, it's the idea of protecting our children. Those who are regular listeners here know that I have a background in cybersecurity.
59:10: I have a background in, well, having to deal with bad guys. And so I know, and then
59:16: I have a background in counseling and sexual abuse counseling and things like that. And so I've unfortunately gotten seen the worst of our society and really our society could be described as people that, you know, as John, you've been describing, people that just have this parenting where the child is the center of the universe.
59:36: That's our culture now. I mean, we have a whole culture of people that think they're entitled. And if you offend me, if you hurt my feelings, you should be in jail.
59:46: But when we think about the idea of protecting our children, there's a lot there.
59:52: I mean, I almost think I could probably write a whole book on that. I drove my kids crazy with things like this.
59:58: I mean, my children, one of the things I often tell people, most of the abuses that occur are not with strangers.
01:00:07: We train our children to, you know, stranger danger. And yet most of the abuse comes from people we know.
01:00:13: And so we had our kids, our kids were not allowed to go with anybody, even a parent. Like if my mother was to pick up my kids at school, they were told you don't go even with your grandparents.
01:00:24: Unless they know the key word. So we'd have a question that the kids were told to ask, where are we going? That's a pretty natural question.
01:00:30: That's one that kids would answer. But the answer might be blue cheese. Now I'm not gonna obviously give what the actual answer was for my kids, but it could be something completely bizarre as an answer because that was an indication to the children that we sent them because we'd give them an answer no one else was gonna give.
01:00:50: We thought through things like that. We thought through, you know, I would train the children of what to do if someone picked them up and starts running off because the natural tendency is to say, this is my child.
01:01:00: So I would teach the children to say, this is not my daddy. This is not my mommy. So that people would help them.
01:01:06: I trained our children to say, any time the children were told something like, don't tell your parents.
01:01:14: We said, that was the very thing they must tell us. I remember a time when we started homeschooling our kids and my parents came down.
01:01:20: This will give you kind of an insight, John and Cindy into my upbringing, my parents. But my mother was very much against us homeschooling.
01:01:30: And we were out for dinner with them. And we were careful to not, my parents didn't have alone time with the kids very much.
01:01:41: It was controlled because, especially as they got older because of some of their views.
01:01:47: And so my daughter goes to go to the bathroom at a restaurant and they're gone.
01:01:52: And so my mother said, I'll take her. And they're gone for a while. And we come back and I said, where were you guys?
01:02:00: And my mother's like, oh, it's okay. We were just, my daughter says, we were talking. I said, what were you talking about? And my mother's like, oh, it's okay.
01:02:07: That was just between you and I. And without hesitation, my daughter said, well, you know,
01:02:12: Nana said that I should tell you and mommy that we don't be homeschooled and we want to go back to school.
01:02:18: And she knew that even her grandmother telling her, don't tell your parents was the very thing we must hear.
01:02:28: You have a chapter on protection. Could you go through just some of the areas that you see that we need to have protection?
01:02:37: Because you cover some things of how parents can also be a little overprotective as well.
01:02:43: What, why do we, why is protection? Why do you include that in a parenting book? Well, I mean,
01:02:50: I think fundamentally, we need to recognize that as parents, that is one of our roles.
01:02:56: Like we have a role of protecting our children in a way that nobody else does, right? And it takes great wisdom, right?
01:03:04: There are different situations, you know, there are, you know, you were talking about the context of your family and things that you did and that makes sense.
01:03:12: And there's others that would have different contexts, probably would make different decisions and that can make sense too.
01:03:18: And, you know, this is an area where I think we need to be wise. We need to not take the cues from what is everybody else doing necessarily, because that's not always a good metric.
01:03:31: You know, protecting cannot mean that we never, ever expose them to anything evil in the world.
01:03:39: You know, eventually there are arrows that are set out to be in the world and living as believers in the world.
01:03:46: But it's kind of a question of when, probably in many things, not so much if, right?
01:03:52: I mean, at some point they have to learn how to interact with people that are, you know, maybe are very different or, you know, things that are actually evil as well and know how to do that.
01:04:05: But, you know, areas where, you know, protection
01:04:11: I think is needed, one of them is worldview influences, right? And that can be very subtle.
01:04:17: It's not usually something that's overt, but very much comes through what are they watching? Who are they listening to?
01:04:24: You know, those kinds of things. You know, I think that even what books you're reading, right, there are challenges in terms of it's not, there's sort of things that we know are very easy to say, well, that's not good.
01:04:39: You know, if there's bad language or those kinds of things, and certainly those kinds of things should be avoided.
01:04:46: But it's the more subtle worldview things that are much harder to pick up on, right? You can read a book and it's like, oh, that's a cute story about this.
01:04:53: But then you realize all throughout the story, the kids actually were the wise ones and the parents weren't, right?
01:05:00: And that seems to be an underlying theme, even though if you don't think about it, you never would have really seen that.
01:05:06: But, you know, there's subtle things like that that can come up, but it's difficult.
01:05:12: I mean, in our society today, there's a lot of potential dangers, but at the same time, you're right, we can be overprotective too.
01:05:18: At the right point, we do need to be equipping them to notice the dangers themselves. So, you know, there would be a point where we would sometimes let them select a few of the books at the library on their own.
01:05:30: And then we would get them home and start to read them. And if we found that there were some significant worldview issues, we would stop reading the book, talk about the worldview issues, make a determination whether the book would have any merit at all.
01:05:42: And if it didn't, we put it on a high shelf and everyone recognized that's what you do with books that are not helpful.
01:05:48: So that's fine. But there's some other areas where I think it's tempting for parents to want to protect their children overly much.
01:05:58: This world is full of trials and griefs. And yes, we don't want to overwhelm our children with some of the heavier things that adults are carrying, but children also carry things at a different level.
01:06:11: They're usually not thinking through all the existential connections about something going on.
01:06:17: And I think we were intentional when the Lord brought grief or loss into our life, we would engage our children on that and talk to them about that.
01:06:26: And I think the Lord even used some of our own pregnancy losses to bring some of our other children to the
01:06:33: Lord, because they recognized how much mortality is real and we need a savior.
01:06:41: And so we don't want to overly protect them from some of the means of grace that God may use to draw out their hearts to Him.
01:06:48: Darrell Bock Yeah, you mentioned training our children with grief. I wish I had that chapter when my son lost a fish.
01:06:55: He had a fish died. It was a very special fish to him. But I just remember him sitting in his room cowering and crying.
01:07:02: And I really never prepared. Like I didn't prepare myself for how to train him in something like that.
01:07:10: Now, I mean, you're saying with worldview, I think if you ask my kids, they would probably tell you they hated watching movies with me because I would literally stop the movie and say, like, okay, let's address this.
01:07:24: Because I remember my daughter would be like, dad, could you stop that? Or we get it. And when they convinced me, they understood how to be critical with those things.
01:07:35: I was like, okay, they can apply that. There was never a book that they read, whether for pleasure or had to read it in school that I didn't read.
01:07:45: I will admit, I'm very glad for audio books. Moby Dick, oh, was that hard. I'm still wondering why that was a classic.
01:07:54: But that's a really important thing is to, like you're saying, we need to know what they're being told.
01:08:01: And whether it's through a TV, through now, I mean, here's an interesting thing.
01:08:06: So the whole thing with TikTok, it's a fascinating thing. I've always warned people against TikTok because I knew from the beginning that this was nothing more than Chinese propaganda,
01:08:17: Chinese using it to infiltrate America. But the Chinese TikTok, all educational.
01:08:24: If we had the Chinese version of TikTok, no one would be complaining about TikTok. But they purposely, in America, put all the things that's going to destroy our country.
01:08:35: They have all this stuff for children that we would never want them to see. Kids who think, oh, well, hey,
01:08:42: I use Snapchat and the picture disappears. No, it doesn't. It stays on a server. And what people didn't realize with that, and I'm saying this so parents understand, some of the things that people think is no big deal.
01:08:54: Well, Snapchat started out as a way to legally upload child porn because the kids were uploading it themselves.
01:09:02: That's legal. And it's the uploading of it. Well, they now had access to all of these things that kids had no idea because they thought, oh, well, it disappears.
01:09:13: And Cindy, it goes back to what you said. Kids don't think of all the ramifications at a young age of how things are going to affect everything.
01:09:23: And so I know time's out. I want to give you guys a chance to say any last things you want to say about the book.
01:09:29: But I just wanted to say this is something that I thought very interesting. The last several chapters. Now, it was interesting.
01:09:35: I said chapter 18 is the rod. So that's really the way I saw this, kind of the last instructional chapter, because the rest of this was just ideas of how to do things as a family, bringing the family together, making family time enjoyable.
01:09:51: But you lay out a lot of practical things of dealing with family book reading, family culture.
01:09:58: You get into what to deal with whining. That never happens with kids, I know. That's where you have the protecting the family.
01:10:04: But then you talk about things like using a schedule and training how to sit still and mealtimes and dealing with Bible memory.
01:10:18: So there's a whole lot of chapters that you have that I found very practical that isn't often included in just how do we create the idea of this is our family.
01:10:29: This is what we do. As a family, we do these things. We read books. You even have things of how to train your children when they're not in your home.
01:10:38: What to give them to do when they're out of your home that would still train them as far as things to listen to and read. So I find this to be super, super helpful for parents.
01:10:47: That's why, like I said, folks, this is going to be a book that I will be purchasing for every baby shower going forward.
01:10:54: If you want to get a copy of Purposeful and Persistent Parenting, go to freegracepress .com.
01:11:01: Get your copy there. Or if you want to get a case of them, go there, get it. So John and Cindy, any last words that you'd have that you want to share about the book or why folks should get it and read it?
01:11:17: I mean, we've covered a lot, but I think when you really step back, what it comes down to, and we were joking about how we only have eight children at the beginning of this, but really every single child, whether you have one child or 15, every single child is a gift from God and is a stewardship and is a blessing.
01:11:40: God has given us children as blessings. And so it is up to us as parents to parent them.
01:11:49: When you read our book, there's a lot of things in there that you could look at and say, that would be useful to us.
01:11:55: And there's other things you look at and say, no need to do that. And you are the parent of your child.
01:12:01: And to take that seriously and to, before God, attempt to do that with the resources and abilities that God has given you.
01:12:10: And we're hoping that this book can be a useful tool, kind of like you've implied. It's like, here's some ideas and suggestions and help.
01:12:18: And then really it's up to you though, as a parent to decide, okay, I have this input,
01:12:23: I've got other input here, but what really is right for us and our family? And I think really one of the reasons that we spent the time writing it is just in the beginning, when we were parenting very differently than the encouragements we have in the book, we weren't enjoying the journey.
01:12:39: It was pretty stressful on everybody. I think our children were experiencing more stress in their toddlerhood than they needed to because it was very unpredictable.
01:12:49: And honestly, our two -year -old was sort of the center of the universe. They were running the show, even though I thought
01:12:56: I was parenting in a Christian manner because I was trying to parent selflessly. But I think
01:13:02: I was really misguided. And so part of why we wanted to write this all down is we really wanted to give whatever encouragement we could to young families in the trenches that this can be a joyful journey.
01:13:15: Yes, there's some hard work involved, but there are great blessings. And a lot of it has to do with what we're doing as parents.
01:13:23: So may the Lord use it in that way if He would choose. Yeah, I can so identify with you,
01:13:29: Cindy, because I was with a program where it was like everything was black and white.
01:13:35: Yeah, I was not enjoying the journey. I wish that I had this book back when I was raising kids, but I'm glad that I have it for at least my grandchildren now.
01:13:44: So I appreciate you guys writing this. And again, folks, John and Cindy Raquette, their book is
01:13:49: Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. And I think you've gotten the idea why the title, because we have to be both purposeful in our parenting, also persistent.
01:13:59: You can get it at freegracepress .com and get from there.
01:14:06: Or if you want to get a Kindle version, go to amazon .com and get it there. But John and Cindy, I appreciate very much you guys coming in and sharing with us.
01:14:15: And I hope all of the listeners will go and get a copy of your book. Thanks for coming on.
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