Article September 15, 2014 Issue

Reliable parenting books

Mary Trammell

This article was originally published in The Christian Science Monitor.

My husband and I entered parenthood knowing almost nothing about raising kids, having grown up basically as “only” children. We did read some parenting books, but their theories often seemed less than helpful. It wasn’t long before we decided the most practical, day-by-day parenting approach for us was prayer.

Even though my husband and I were then members of different faiths, we both naturally gravitated to the Bible as a parenting handbook. We read the Scriptures together as a family every day, even when our son and daughter were infants, believing that if we gave them a strong moral and spiritual education, everything else would turn out all right. The Bible says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).

Over the years, my husband’s confidence gradually grew in the book I usually studied alongside the Bible, Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. These two books helped us grasp this fundamental point about parenting: that God is the infinitely caring and omnipotent Father and Mother of all of us. Christ Jesus began his famous prayer with these comforting words: “Our Father which art in heaven.” Science and Health gives this sense of that line: “Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious” (p. 16).