Inspired parenting

In this lively chat, which featured many questions from site visitors, Mark began by explaining that both the children and their parents in any family are all God's children, that each of us has a Father and a Mother who is God. A parent himself, Mark says he's found keeping this idea in the forefront of thought is essential. He also emphasizes the importance of viewing our children as God, our Parent, is seeing them. He says that we can see our children "as fully capable-- as good, pure, patient--and those qualities expressed in your child is natural!"

Questions posed by visitors include parenting issues such as feeling under-appreciated or overwhelmed by the demands of small children, not having quiet time, religious differences, balancing parenting and work. Mark offers thoughts on how to prepare children to make wise decisions, helping kids deal with pressures at school, and caring for a child with down syndrome.

The transcribed text has been edited for clarity.

Rosalie Dunbar: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another spirituality.com live question and answer audio event. My name is Rosalie Dunbar and I’ll be your host for the next hour. Our topic today is “Inspired parenting,” and our guest is Mark Swinney, a teacher and practitioner of Christian Science from New Mexico, which is a Southwestern state here in the United States. There he devotes his full professional time to the public practice and teaching of Christian Science. He and his wife Rene, have two grown children, Erin and Ryan, and those of us who know Mark, know well that his love for all children is always shining brightly. So don’t hesitate to send in your questions. Mark, do you have some thoughts to get us started?

Mark Swinney: Hello, Rosalie. It’s always a treat for me to speak with you on this program. Thank you for inviting me. Well, the first thoughts I have—really I would have to say this. I maybe have been on this program a few times, but this particular subject is one I would say I feel most humble about. I don’t know if anybody who’s ever walked the earth, probably, has felt they did a perfect job in parenting. It’s certainly a work in process. I’m in that category. I’m working my way through it, too. But one main idea that has been very helpful to me, and it kind of covers everything, probably, I’m going to talk about today, is the fact that both the children and the adults—the kids and the parents—actually they’re all God’s children. And that’s what we are. We’re all kind of like brothers and sisters, and we all have a Parent—a Father, a Mother, who is God. I feel that if that isn’t forefront in my thought, if I feel that in some way I’m going to play the role of being parent or creator or something like that, I’ve already kind of set myself up for some tears. Really, I need to remain a child just like everyone else in my family—a child looking to the Parent who is God.

Rosalie: Well, that sounds like a great idea. One of the questions that has come up in a number of conversations I’ve had in talking to people about this chat is: say that you are a parent, and sometimes you have three children, and the first two kids are kind of seem like they all fit together, but the third one is kind of different. And there’s, maybe not a difficulty in getting them all to work together, but there’s just that feeling of difference. I know in one of the families I’m aware of, there’s a situation where two really quiet parents got a really noisy child, and everyone thought maybe the hospital made a mistake! And I just wondered if you had some thoughts about those kind of situations?

Mark: Definitely, I do. Well, as I mentioned, if we’re all God’s children, if we’re the creations of God, then we each existed long before we ever met our human parents. And so it isn’t a surprise that kids arrive into our families, really in different states— they’re just different ways. God created all of us to express Him fully. All of the goodness that is God, is expressed in His children—each one of us. So our potential isn’t so much like materially personal, it’s actually divine. And what I mean by that is that the nature of God is just absolute good, and every bit of God is expressed in each of His children. We all are different because God expresses Himself uniquely in each of us, but our potential is the same, because it’s in God. Now, families kind of are assembled together. You know there’ll be some parents, or maybe one parent, and there may be some kids. The kids arrive, but they were already created by God. The parent didn’t do that job. You can’t create something that’s already been created. So each one of us, we arrive as ourselves, and we’re placed together in these families. So what happens I think is that the kids—they all have different things to learn. This world is like a laboratory in which we learn that God is our Parent, and that we have the potential of God’s goodness in everything we do. So, step by step, day by day, experience by experience, we learn that. Each one of us, we’re kind of at a different place in that learning. And it’s OK. The variety of the children we have, it just shows that they’re individual, and they’re showing up—they each have different things to learn. It’s really clear, I have seen it often, where there will be a family, and the kids grow up in exactly the same environment, they eat the same food, they sleep in the same bedroom sometimes, they hear the same sorts of discipline, and things taught, but they turn out very different—just after a couple years, you see big differences. Of course, that’s natural, because they’re God’s children and they just joined the family for awhile.

Rosalie: That does sort of imply, then, that the parents also are children who are learning lessons from God.

Mark: Isn’t that interesting? I think that the parents sometimes, they get a child, and the child is there teaching them, more than they’re teaching the child. And that certainly has been true in my case. I know it.

Rosalie: Well, Anessa in Brooklyn, New York, says: “There are times when I try to make my very headstrong child do what is right, but I get such resistance that I don’t know what to do. When I get in these situations I’m so frustrated that I get angry, and then later I berate myself that I couldn’t have found a spiritual way to deal better with the situation. How can I find healing for both myself and my son around this issue of battle of the wills?”—which I think is probably a pretty common situation.

Mark: Definitely, you hear that a lot. Well, one thing I want to say, first of all is, often the qualities that we may not appreciate that much in our kids, when they’re kind of exalted a bit, turn out to be very useful qualities. So somebody who is—a child who is showing willfulness, like you’re saying, and it’s a battle of wills, later on that toughness will come in very handy, because that person will be strong when challenged—challenged maybe on some very hard things. So it’s not like you just want to break someone’s will. It’s just that we exalt it. Now, the battle you’re talking about where it’s just a battle of wills, and you’re really just fighting it out on the same level as the child, gets you nowhere fast, and I agree is very, very frustrating. Sometimes it’s important to step back, and really acknowledge the presence of the divine Parent in the room—of God in the room. Sometimes it’s important just to step back, and be still. Put your finger on your lips, don’t speak, and let our Parent—let God—give us instruction on what to say, or maybe what not to say. Also, it’s important to see the child actually through the eyes of God, so to speak. Now, that’s prayer. When you’re praying for your child, you’re beholding your child as God beholds your child. And that’s the best way I can think of to love my child, is to try to see the child as my Parent is seeing my child. My child, in God’s eyes, is fully capable, is only in love with good, is pure, is patient. And those qualities expressed in my child, that’s natural. I want to step back some times and just acknowledge it. Be grateful for those qualities—they’re present. And as you do that, that has the effect of exalting the willfulness into solidity. It just moves it forward. It kind of gets exalted into a more pure quality that has usefulness.

Rosalie: Like strength and persistence, that kind of thing?

Mark: Exactly, and that’s what kids benefit from, especially early on—that strength, that discipline of thought. As soon as a child learns that that discipline is within him or her, then that is a great strength.

Rosalie: Now I wanted to get back to your comment about all of us coming from God, and Robin in Seattle has asked a question that ties in with it. She says: “Could you talk a little bit about the true spiritual activity of pregnancy and childbirth?”

Mark: Well, here I am—I’m a man, and so I’ve never had a baby. And I don’t presume to say well, I just know it all, and all of this. But I think that it is key to acknowledge that each child of God is fully developed now. But what do I mean by that? Does that mean that God, who the Bible says is Spirit has developed his children, encased them in flesh, or something like that. That they are like souls on their own, and that God somehow gives them a matter-suit or something like that? No. Like produces like, so God, who the Bible explains is Spirit, is Love, creates with the substance it knows. And so therefore each of us are created spiritually. We are. We’re created a hundred percent spiritually. There isn’t any matter to God’s creation. That fact—you can’t really depart from that, when you’re thinking about pregnancy, because pregnancy is, again, just the event of a child joining your family. But what joins your family, if you’re really honest about it, what’s joining your family is a spiritual idea. That is key. Because I think that if I believe that my child was born into matter, at some point I’m just going to be terrified he or she’ll die out of it.

I’ll tell you, early on I’d been praying about this very thing, and I was challenging myself, as my wife was pregnant with our first child, to be clear on whether God truly creates us all spiritually. I mean not a lot of people in the world are thinking along those terms. But when you step back, and consider it, it makes complete sense that we actually are spiritual. Well, when the baby came, the baby was delivered, I got to catch the baby. I’d played baseball in college, so you know I was good at catching things. And so when our baby came out, it had effects of a problem I had prayed about and been healed of previously. I had had a foot that had just not grown right. And when our daughter arrived, I saw both her feet had evidence of this same deformity, and it just broke my heart. I just felt bad about it. I remember that evening I was praying—and you know I had been praying for a long time about this idea that God creates us just completely spiritually. I’d really been thinking about that. But I knew I had further to go. This is how parenting helps, us I guess. I had further to go, and I remember praying and talking with God. I said, “God, you know what, I think I believed that I played a part in the creation of this new addition to our family. I think I believed that through DNA I had passed along this evil.” And I said to myself, “Now wait a minute,” as I prayed, I said, “God, I know You already created this child, and this child was complete, perfect, expressing Your perfection, long before I ever met her. And so I can see I’m mistaken if I think I had played even a little part in the creation of her.” Now, what I was doing there as I prayed, that was actually like a Christian Science treatment. I was addressing my thought about this issue. What happens is when your thought yields to the truth of God and man, when you allow your thought to yield to it, to let the Truth take over, let what God knows become what you think, then that brings the healing power of God, the law of God, to bear on your thought. Your thought embraces your whole experience. A couple of days later I remember our midwife came to visit the house—we’d had the baby at home—and she was going to do a checkup, and I knew she was thinking about these feet. The baby was wrapped up in these—like a blanket—and she unwrapped the blanket, and I hadn’t even looked at my daughter’s feet for a long time, but they were both normal. And you know I was very glad that day. I was thinking about it actually not too long ago. I watched my daughter—she’s grown up now, she’s a ballerina, and I was watching her dance the roles of Snow Queen and Dewdrop in Nutcracker, and I thought about it because in Dewdrop at the end in her production, Dewdrop does a series of fouette turns, which are—it’s a spin where you’re doing it on one foot and your other leg is kind of propelling you into the spin. She did several of those, and I thought, “Isn’t that good? It’s true. She was perfect in God’s image long before I ever met her.” And as my thought yielded to that fact, it made a big difference. It changed me. It just really changed me in how I thought about pregnancy, childbirth, creation—all of that.

Rosalie: Thanks, while you were talking I was thinking of this statement in Science and Health which is well worth pondering for any kind of new birth, whether it’s the birth of a child, or birth of a business or whatever. It’s page 463 : “To attend properly the birth of the new child, or divine idea, you should so detach mortal thought from its material conceptions, that the birth will be natural and safe. Though gathering new energy, this idea cannot injure its useful surroundings in the travail of spiritual birth. A spiritual idea has not a single element of error, and this truth removes properly whatever is offensive.” And then it goes on from there, but I was thinking that that was exactly what you were doing in your prayer. You were simply removing those material accompaniments.

Mark: That’s exactly what happened. That illustrates it perfectly. I like where Mary Baker Eddy there talks about material conceptions, removing our thought from that. Now that is—think of how much God loves us, that we’re not material conceptions, we’re actually conceptions of God. We’re mental, in a way. If God is completely spiritual, ever present, for us to be conceived, it’s a mental process, where the mental conception, the spiritual conception is of God. Yielding to that fact just a little, “removes properly whatever is offensive.”

Rosalie: Right. And a site visitor from Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, says: “Our one son was born with Down’s Syndrome. I no longer blame myself, and I’ve tried so hard to see him as perfect. We have a beautiful relationship, and I long to see our son as God created him.” And I’m trusting that some of the ideas you’ve just been sharing will be helpful to that person.

Mark: Oh, absolutely. The thing I said at the very beginning, that we’re all God’s children, that means then that we, as children, must be willing to be led. Jesus talked about being as tractable as a child—be willing to be led. And I feel that that means then that we must be willing to have our thought led forward. So as you’re praying, day by day for your child, don’t do it alone. Let your Parent help you. Let God lead your thought, opening the way so that you see more and more of the true nature of your child, because in the Bible it says what God has done, He does forever. It’s done forever. And so the way God created your child, it’s in God’s image. Nothing can change that. No event can change that, no thought, no fear—nothing can change what God has done, because we’re not separate from God. As the conceptions of God, we stay at one with God. I said at the beginning, one of the leading ideas in parenting for me that’s been most helpful is that we’re God’s children, we’re all God’s children—parents and adults. The second thing that I would put on the same level is that we always remain at one with our creator. God isn’t just near us taking care of us or something like that. God isn’t just really near us. Because we’re the conception of God, then we’re at one with God, because God is omnipresent. And it is so important, I feel, to behold that oneness. So, as you walk from room to room in your house, and you and your child go about your day, sense the presence of God. Sense your oneness, and your child’s oneness with God, because I know that as soon as I behold that oneness, everything is right.

Rosalie: Now I have a couple of questions that relate to step-parenting. I’m going to read you two of them. One is from Africa: “I married a man with two children who are already married. One found it very difficult to see me in her mom’s place, and it’s very difficult to know that there is someone in this world who hates me. Any thoughts to assist being her friend?” And then the second one is from Amy, who says: “I’m in the role of stepmother. The biological mother is not around much, but when she is the children seem to forget about me and I end up with hurt feelings. I know this is not right. How can I obtain relief from anger and disappointment toward the mother? Perhaps I’m playing too much the role of mother, and not recognizing God as the perfect Parent.” So we’ve got kind of two sides there of essentially the same question.

Mark: Well, I would say that step-parenting is one of the greatest privileges one can have in the parenting process. I think step-parenting is just a great opportunity. Yes, your feelings are going to get hurt. And it’s going to be hard to even establish a little bit of authority, sometimes, in your work with the child, but great good can be done. Sometimes it’s over a long period of time. Step-parenting can be kind of like turning that great big ship, the Queen Mary. It may take a long time to turn direction. It takes many miles to make a turn I’ve heard. But you know a good thing happens when that ship turns. The same thing with our kids and the ones that if we’re step-parents, oh, it may seem like we’re really making hardly any progress, but over the years loving a child enough to drop your feelings, and continue to reflect the parenting qualities of God, it can do great good. I’ve seen it. I have a friend who married into a family, and the kids—some of them were teenagers already—and it was really hard. I mean it was as tough as anybody could ever imagine, because the kids really—I don’t know how you could say it—they just were kind of all over the map. But he just was solid, and stayed tough. Sometimes he just had to step back, and just quietly do the parenting, but he didn’t abandon them mentally ever. He constantly prayed for them, constantly worked, constantly tried to show them the right example.

You know what? Sometimes you just don’t know what good you’re doing. I remember once I was—I’ll tell this quickly—I was teaching school for this job I had just for a short time. I was teaching this class for kids who would be judged slow readers. And these kids had to be taken out of their regular class to be put into mine, and there were only a few kids in the class. Because they’d been taken out of their regular class to do this, they just hated me. Oh my goodness! This one seventh-grade girl, she looked at me—I knew she was like a nice person. I watched her with all of her friends—but she looked at me, I’d never had a seventh-grader hate me that much. She really did. Well, over a whole year she went from a second-grade reading level up to seventh-grade—her level, because we just worked day after day after day. And she hated me most of the day. But I saw then, finally, she got to her reading level, and school ended and we went our separate ways. I saw her a couple of years later just spontaneously—we just ran into each other. And sometimes when you meet someone and they’re not expecting to see you, how they first look at you can be very telling. And she looked at me, and smiled, and said, “Mr. Swinney!” And ran over and then she was telling me about her high-school and all that. I thought, “My goodness.” Here I was fortunate enough to get to hear and see the good that happened because of that work, but I never knew it was happening during all those traumatizing days.

Rosalie: Right, right. Would have never guessed that that would be what would be going on.

Mark: Well, God doesn’t give up on anybody, and so we can express that same grace, and love everyone, and don’t give up on them.

Rosalie: Well, I’ve got two related parenting questions here. Chrissie from Northern Virginia says: “I love having quiet study and prayer time to really feel in touch with God, but sometimes now that I have an infant and two little girls I find myself struggling for anytime alone, let alone any good stretch of time to really be quiet and think. Do you have any suggestions on keeping spiritually nourished during such busy times?” And then from Nolla in Montreal, she says: “I’m a stay-at-home mother and really feel frustrated from all the work to be done—without a reward. I know several mothers at home who feel the same, serving everyone in the family with no appreciation at all of all the work involved. Is there any way to feel appreciated? Since the current way of appreciation in this society is money, in this role, of course, we are not paid for staying at home and doing the work, nor for education.”

Mark: I love it! Well, first this idea of getting quiet time. Yeah, that can be tough, especially when you have a lot of very young kids. And sometimes when they’re first born they’re up at all hours of the night. I guess I can understand it can be tough. The quietness actually can become more of an attitude that you develop. Just because everyone around you is excited, doesn’t mean that you have to be excited. That inner stillness that allows you to yield to God’s love, and God’s messages to you, that inner stillness can be happening all the time. I used to live in New York City for a while, and I remember I enjoyed when I would be waiting for the subway in the most packed, crazy crowd, getting that mental stillness, that inner stillness, that allowed me to sense God’s presence. And I would kind of have fun doing it, even when it seemed like it would be impossible. And even if you just do it for like four or five seconds, that can feed you for the whole day. And so that stillness—it’s natural, it’s a quality you can develop, just like playing tennis. It’s something you can work on and get better at.

All right, with this idea of being appreciated, I’ll tell you that’s what’s been helpful to me, not just being appreciated but what parenting does. It just knocks the rough edges off of us, and we get an opportunity to really become unselfish. The world may not appreciate what a mother or a father does for his or her child—yet God does. If you work as an agent of God in your family, and that’s all, maybe no one will know what you’ve done. No one will have any idea of the work you’ve done alone, yet God will bless you as it says in the Bible: You’re His good and faithful daughter or son in whom He is well pleased. So, yes, maybe the world doesn’t appreciate what it means to be a parent—maybe they don’t—it’s all right. God does, and I promise you that’s good enough for me.

Rosalie: And sometimes it’s helpful when you’re kind of doing the more drudgery kind of things, to just give thanks to God for the strength to do it, or whatever task ahead, that God will give you the inspiration or intelligence to pursue how to treat your child, or take the next step in terms of your duties, cultivating a sense of gratitude for God’s presence as a very present help at all times. Sometimes that really eases the feeling of separation, because a feeling of not being appreciated is often a feeling of separation from good. That you’re kind of the person who has to make the good happen, and nobody cares. But the source of the good is really in God, and to whatever degree you can have that feeling of God’s presence revealing the good to you as well as to your family, then it becomes kind of an adventure of seeing how God is going to reveal good in your life today.

Mark: I love that! I’m going to use that myself—this idea of allowing God to reveal that good in me or in the situation or a family—to watch for that. This hits on a point that I know a lot of parents think about, and that is—it has to do a lot with what the world appreciates. So many parents feel that a child is sort of a representative of the human parent—that how the child behaves, what the child chooses to do, or what the child turns out like, it reflects directly on the parent. And so, parents become—sometimes they just really have their priorities mixed up, because they feel that everything the child does reflects, maybe badly, on the parent. And it’s just not so because, again, the child existed before he or she met the parent. Just because a child has hard things to learn, it’s OK. It was important that this child is in your family. Think about it. It’s like a compliment to you. If you have a child that has hard things to learn, well God saw that you were a person who would help to help this child grow. And so it’s OK. If you have somebody who’s—I don’t know—is really tough to deal with. That’s all right. I have found that an important part of parenting relates to what you’re saying—letting God reveal the present goodness of the day. Now, sometimes it can work this way: sometimes you see your child making a choice, or doing something that, really, you can tell is really a bad idea—really a bad idea. Now, sometimes the very best parenting is to step back, and don’t say a word, just behold your child at one with God. And let the child have his or her experience. Now, I don’t mean that if your child is playing in the street, you should leave it there, I’m saying that if a child—let’s say someone is making a choice about a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or some kind of job, or something like that—step back, and let God reveal the goodness of the day. If you step in, the child won’t learn the lesson, and then will have to learn it another time, maybe more drastically. So often the best thing is to step back, and don’t be so selfish as to keep a child from his experience. Let him have his experience so that he’s strengthened by it. It is an aspect of parenting that can be some of the most fun. You’re not looking at your child as someone who is just going to learn his lesson, you know, you’re making a stupid mistake. No. It’s better than that. You’re beholding the oneness of God and your child, so that the lesson is learned quickly. There’s no “I told you so’s.” It’s just moving forward in our growth as we learn about our relation to God.

Rosalie: Yes, and I think that one of the key points you made there is that you don’t stop praying. That the prayer has really got to be going on, so that there’s kind of a safety net there for the child, and that you can be there as a source of strength for them should things turn out badly.

Mark: Yeah.

Rosalie: And then, again, sometimes kids surprise us, and it turns out they make a decision we think is totally off the wall, and it’s just the right thing. So you never really—you can’t really predict how it’s all going to turn out. So that’s why sometimes you just have to let go, and let God be the guiding light for both of you.

Mark: I love it! That’s that selflessness we have to learn. Let that will drop away and let God’s will become your will.

Rosalie: Now, this is a related question, and it’s: “You hear on the news about children and young people innocently making choices that wind up being life-changing or even life-threatening. Sometimes something as simple as a schoolyard dare or simple curiosity seems to turn into a seemingly dangerous situation. As my children grew older and start making choices apart from me, how can I prayerfully support them in making wise decisions?” And that kind of ties in with what you were just saying, but that point about dangerous situations occurring when you’re not there I think is something that shows up relatively frequently.

Mark: Yes. You can’t be with any person a hundred percent of the time. You just can’t do it. As the children move away, you’re not with them at all. And so, yes, there can be that tendency to want to be God for that person, and take care of things, and make it right. Remember when you’ve heard little kids in the store when they fall down and they say, “Momma, make it all better.” Well, there are times when Momma is miles away and can’t make it all better in that way. Yet, actually every parent has the opportunity when praying for their children to explore and enjoy and embrace a child’s oneness with God. You can tell I’m bringing that up a lot, but it’s the key thing. If I thought my child was just being taken care of by God, sort of guided over by God, where God was sort of watching over them, I would be terrified. I would. Because if God’s just watching over, well, I don’t think that’s going to be good enough. But if my child is actually at one with God, well I’m not afraid for God, I’m not afraid for God at all. And that’s actually how it’s set up. Each one of us exists as the effect of this perfect cause called God. And cause and effect, they don’t separate. A human parent separates from a child. But God, as the divine Parent, never leaves. The child is always at one. And that goes for us, too, as parents. We’re not on our own, trying to be good parents. It’s not worth trying that. Instead, we’re at one with God, expressing God’s parenthood.

Rosalie: I have a question that is a different aspect of parents. It’s about the situation in the news. It’s from a listener in Wisconsin, who says: “Mark Kelly doesn’t blame the shooters parents for his behavior when he shot all those people in Arizona. But you can’t help but think that if they’d been good parents, he couldn’t possibly have turned out this way. What do you think?”

Mark: Well, again, each of us shows up long before we ever met our parents. We meet our parents, but we were already created. Now God didn’t create a shooter, God didn’t create a violent, vengeful person. That’s not so. That man was not the product of his parents, or his parents’ environment. Now, that said, each of us always can do more in reflecting God’s parenthood. I look back and I think about all the things I could have done better as a parent. I could have done so many things better. Yet, I have seen some very interesting cases where a child grows up in an environment that is just terrible, where the parents are abusive, and there just isn’t anything nurturing about the environment. I’ve seen that, and the kids can turn out wonderfully. And that is such an interesting thing, where the soil is just horrible but the plant is a beautiful rose. And so in that case, here the parents, they didn’t fulfill their work as parents, they didn’t begin it. In fact, all they did was damage, but the child grew. It’s because the child’s at one with God, and that kind of thing, you see that way more often than you see someone come from a good family who makes a big mistake like that shooter. If we’re willing to watch for the expression of God in one another, in ourselves, and in one another, then we’re beginning the road to real parenting. We’re not products of our parents’ thoughts, of a man’s thoughts, we’re products of God.

Rosalie: Well we’ve got a number of questions, speaking about beliefs about children and about religious training. And there is one saying: “How do you pray for a child who says they do not believe in God?” But there were a couple of families, one where a spouse can’t mention Christian Science in the household, and is wondering how to get Christian Science teaching to the child? This is from Ellen in Minnesota, who says: “I’m a life-long Scientist, but my husband is of the Lutheran faith. I bring my kids to a Christian Science Sunday School, but my husband insists that when they are older, they need to take confirmation classes since the rest of his side of the family is of the Lutheran faith, and all of them have been confirmed. Do I feel guilty if I allow it, and just go with the flow? How do you handle something like that?”

Mark: Well, first of all, there’s no way that anyone can reject God. They can say it, but we only exist as the evidence of God’s presence. And so there really isn’t a way to not be under the love and law of God. It’s just impossible. You can’t get away from God. It can’t be done. It doesn’t matter if somebody believes that he or she has. It doesn’t matter. The presence of God is solid—it’s always there. There’s nothing you can do about that. But I remember reading something about a man who was watching someone give a speech. He said—I’m just paraphrasing this—but he said, “I can’t really hear what you’re saying, because what you are, is communicating much more than your words.” I’ve never forgotten that, because in a family it’s what we are that says so much more than the words that come out of our mouths. And so, see someone could argue with what you say. But they can’t argue with what you are. And so, as you are living the Christ, if you’re living the expression of God moment by moment, you are communicating everything necessary. If God is forefront in your thought, and everything you’re doing is just to work as a transparency of God’s presence, that’s perfect parenting because now the Parent is God, it’s clear. It takes discipline of thought to keep this approach. I know that. And so, you’ve got to catch yourself doing it right. In a day, if you only spend fifteen minutes in the whole day, but it adds up to fifteen minutes of being a transparency to God in your family, and that’s what you’re living, hey, rejoice, because maybe tomorrow it will be fifteen-and-a-half minutes. It’s what you are, that’s what communicates. Now, as you do that, you’ll find that the opportunities to communicate the ideas of Christian Science, or of what you want to pass along, you’ll have those opportunities. But if your acts, if your behavior, is in conflict with what you’re saying, it doesn’t matter if you read the Bible from cover to cover once a week to your child. It’s allowing yourself to be a transparency to God. Because what you are communicates much more than what you say.

Rosalie: Now this is a comment from Mary, who says: “Responding to mothers or fathers feeling that no one appreciates what they are doing, if you are making an effort to do a good job, even if you make mistakes now and then, and continue to try to express God’s qualities of love and steadfastness, your children will realize this one day. And you may be as fortunate as I have been, and have your grown children one day thank you. And, believe me, that will make it all feel so worthwhile. Hang in there. Keep doing your best, keep turning to God, and they will be able to articulate their appreciation one day.” That’s a very encouraging thought there.

Mark: I love it!

Rosalie: Yes. Now this is Christy writing from Boulder, Colorado: “I recently saw a documentary at my kids’ school that described the stresses placed upon middle and high-school students who want to succeed—such as five hours of homework, advanced placement classes, and multiple extracurricular activities. The documentary showed lots of problems these pressures create for children, including depression, and even suicide. But it didn’t have any solid solutions or suggestions for changing the status-quo. Because this type of concern is getting a lot of media attention right now, I’m wondering if you could offer a spiritual and healing response to this?”

Mark: That’s such an important question. Thank you for sending that in. Yes. The competition between kids, it’s something that our culture, especially here in the Western hemisphere, it’s something we hear about a lot. Getting into the right school, or doing appropriately well in sports, or whatever—all of that—that pressure can be tremendous on a child. It’s different for a kid sometimes than it is for an adult because sometimes a child will be known for one particular thing. Let’s say someone’s a figure skater or good at chemistry, or whatever, the adults all walk up to the child, and say, “How’s figure skating?” or “How’s chemistry going?” “How are your grades? What colleges are you thinking about?” And pretty soon, how chemistry is going or how skating is, or how college is, becomes who you are. And when that doesn’t go as planned, oh my goodness, a child’s whole identity can fall apart. That’s a tragedy. I feel that, again, each one of us, because we are individuals, and God has created us long before we meet our parents, we’re all individuals, that each of us has a very individual role to play. It’s sort of like the numbers in a number system. The number thirty-one is unique. The number eleven can’t take its place. Thirty-one is thirty-one and without number thirty-one, the whole number system falls apart. So each one of us is necessary, but we’re all unique. So, I think a good approach to parenting is walk right away from competition—setting up competition, I guess you could say, in the family between the different children in the family, and with the other children in school or in sports, each of us has an individual contribution to make. And so, as a good parent, what you’d want to do is watch and see what your child is passionate about. What does your child like to do? And whatever that may be—it doesn’t matter what it is, it really doesn’t—because whatever that may be, it’s the laboratory in which he or she kind of begins to learn about the potential one has as God’s child. It doesn’t have to go on forever. It doesn’t have to be something that you talk about with all your friends. Just allow your child to be an individual. Let number thirty-one be number thirty-one. That’s the only one that ever is going to exist. And so you couldn’t compare one child to another. They’re just different. And that’s the beauty of it. You wouldn’t want a garden with exactly the same flower on every row. You want variety. We want that in our families, too. I know in my family, for my two children, I would really doubt if they ever—I hope not—if they ever felt a slight competition with one another, because right from the start, we enjoyed the differences that God was bringing out in each of them. Whatever I could do to help them with what they were passionate about at the moment, I will do. I’ll just do that. I’ll just supply the opportunity and God will help them grow.

Rosalie: Thanks. This is a comment from Kay in Michigan. She says: “As I was a divorced mom and spent many hours working away from home as my children grew up, I felt I missed out on seeing each child’s uniqueness. However, recently I’ve learned that we can begin today to see and experience the good in our grown children. My oldest son has a tenderness and compassion that’s wholly angelic. My daughter is a strong, pure, and lovely mom to my two grandsons. My youngest son is independent, and is amazingly intelligent. As Mark began this talk, explaining that parents as well as our children are God’s children, it just made such sense. It lifts, for me, that burden a single parent can sometimes feel even after they’re grown. I got a little teary, knowing that God is the true Parent. Thanks so much.” So that’s a very nice comment there.

Mark: I love that. It’s only January but she just made my whole year. I just love it. That’s so good. It’s true.

Rosalie: Now this one is a follow-up question on wise decisions: “If a child chooses to no longer share a parent’s prayerful way of handling things, is it still OK to pray for them?”

Mark: It really kind of depends on—well, if your child lives with you or not, that kind of thing. You have the right to pray about anything in your experience. You have the right to do that. And so, you can take your example on how to handle this from Jesus. Think about where Jesus was walking through a crowd, a very noisy crowd one time. And his disciples were there with him, and I guess he was trying to move through the crowd. And as he moved along, a woman reached out, touched just the edge of his clothes, and he stopped. And he turned and he asked the woman, “Who touched me?” And she had been ill for a long time, but was healed there on the spot. Jesus didn’t ask anything about her. He felt that call, that touch, but before he even looked at her, he’d already decided what she was. So it was within his own thought that he addressed the situation. It was that altitude of thought that brought healing at that moment. He had the right to address his thought about anything, and we do, too, as parents. And so, just as Jesus did, we can turn to our Parent, turn to God, and get the correct thought about our child. We have complete authority for doing that. And so I wouldn’t dream of spending a day in my life without going to God to learn about what my child is. I do that every day. Both my children are out of the house, but I don’t feel at all disconnected from them. I’m not like holding onto them somehow, but I’m saying I feel close to them, even though they live many, many miles away from me—hundreds of miles away from me. But every day I look to God to see what they are. I couldn’t dream of spending a day not doing that, and I always will. I go right to God, and I want to know what they are. I go on the strength of that idea, when I think of them throughout the day. It’s not like a constant thing, but it’s just another aspect of parenting.

Rosalie: Now, this is from Diane in California. She says: “I’m a life-long Christian Scientist but sometimes I seem to get overwhelmed by fear for my children’s health. I never had any fear growing up, and I’ve had many wonderful healings for myself and them. But sometimes it’s so gripping.”

Mark: I have to tell you a funny story that will help you on this. You remember I told you earlier on about that nice healing about my daughter when she was first born. Well, oh, about a few months later, she just had started walking. She was so cute, walking around, and we just had so much fun. You’ll just love this. One day, she was just starting to walk around the house, and she walked over to this planter we have inside the house, and we didn’t see it at first, but she started eating these plants. And it turned out these plants were poisonous. We didn’t have any idea, but there they were—there were these poisonous houseplants that were right there in the house. So, she’s eating them. My wife, I guess, saw it, and she was coming to tell me. So my daughter, she walked away from the planter, opened up the front door of our house, started walking down the steps, and fell down—it was the first time she’d ever been on steps, it was cement steps, she fell down, and she cut her face and her lip and it was just bleeding. I found her out there, and I picked her up, and she’s crying. There it was, she’s just bleeding, she’s eaten these poisonous plants, and I thought about—I laughed—because earlier, remember I had promised God, I said, “God, I think I believed I’d played a part in the creation of this dear child,” and I told Him I was sorry. Well, you know what, I had further to go on that. I could see what I had said before. If I believed that a child is created as matter, if I believed that a child is something other than God’s child, well then I’ll have a great fear. And that’s the beauty of original Christianity. Jesus’ message is that we’re God’s child. We’re actually spiritual. And I know most of the world doesn’t look at things in those terms. They think of us as material. That it’s a beautiful day when a child is born into matter. And I love when children show up, but they show up as God’s children—they remain spiritual. We don’t just start out spiritually, and then become material for awhile and then return to being spiritual upon death. No, we just stay spiritual. And I could see I needed to go even more deeply there. And that’s what I did there out on the steps. I’m holding her, she’s crying, but then she stopped. In just a very short time, by the end of the day, you would never have known she’d fallen, and there were never any effects of those plants. But it changed me forever. Holy mackerel! I’ll tell you, I knew then that I needed to let go just completely of the idea of people being material in that way. I knew then, when my son showed up, I didn’t have to relearn that lesson. I recognized he’s completely spiritual, he’s the thought of God, he’s the smile on God’s face, you could say.

Rosalie: Yes. Now, this is a question from Dawn in Missouri, which is a very simple one: “Do Christian Scientists take their children to dentists?”

Mark: Well, you know, I don’t think there are any rules about what you should do or what you shouldn’t do in relation to some kind of Church rules or anything like that. The contribution that I would say Christian Science makes, is that the fact is that we’re God’s children. Choices about dentists, or any other of those kinds of things, that’s a personal choice, up to the parent. Me, I work as a Christian Science practitioner, and when parents ask me about that, I never give any advice on it. That’s just not what I’m being paid for. I’m being paid to pray, to behold the goodness of God in a child. And so, that’s really a personal question, up to a parent.

Rosalie: This is from Laurie, and she’s saying, “I wonder if I, as a grandparent, can ask a question. I’m concerned about the choices being made by a granddaughter for whom a boyfriend is far more important in her life than going to college or getting a job. I wish my own experiences could help my granddaughter avoid the consequences of my poor choices as teenager and college student. My concern has led me to realize that I treated my parents awfully when I was a teenager, and I often wish that I could apologize to my parents, but they have been gone a long time. Right now, however, I find myself wasting time imagining conversations with my granddaughter in which I describe what I went through at her age, with the hope that she might see things differently. You’ve already offered some excellent ideas. Can you add anything for the sake of other grandparents who want to help?”

Mark: Definitely. I really could. It goes back again to that oneness issue. Now, I think everyone—not just parents—but everybody hopes that people will learn from their mistakes. I hope that everyone learns from the mistakes I’ve made in my life. I hope they don’t have to learn them themselves, I want them to learn from mine. But sometimes they don’t. That’s OK. You can talk until the cows come home, but the talk often does nothing. In fact, the hard part about talking sometimes—it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk to you kids—but sometimes just trying to convince someone of their erroneous ways, causes them to dig their heels in, and be even more determined to make a mistake. And so the whole issue is based on the idea of the child being separate from God, and making destructive decisions. As a parent, there are times where a child might be making a destructive decision, taking drugs or doing some kind of dangerous activity, and you have the obligation to step in and stop it. There are times, though, you’re just not near. You can’t do that. And in this case, here your granddaughter is learning the same kind of a lesson maybe you had to learn, maybe it’s in a different way. But if you behold your oneness—you granddaughter’s oneness with God—you will do more for her than any speech you could ever say to her, beholding her oneness with God. In that oneness, everything is completely good. It’s right. That’s the strength a child has, is its oneness with God. On its own, a child really is just swimming for himself, but at one with God, anything is possible—anything good is possible. So, work with that idea for a bit. You’ll be able to give your granddaughter more than you ever could imagine. But it’s in a child’s oneness with God that you really discover strength.

Rosalie: I just want to add—and Mark you’re absolutely, totally right—but one other thing, it’s sometimes useful to pray for an opportunity. That if it is right for you to say something, that God will open the way for it to be a good conversation, where perhaps a child will bring up a topic or there will be a way that it happens that you can just in a very conversational way, convey some of the ideas that you’re longing to convey. And then there’s the other alternative which is sometimes even more effective where you’ve been telling your child, like “Don’t do X” for five hundred times, the kid is still doing X, and suddenly comes home one day and says: “You know my friend Susan said I should stop doing X, and I realized I’ve been doing X a lot, and I’m not going to do X ever again.” And you’re like, “OK.” So they got it, who cares?

Mark: However they get it, I agree. That’s it. Boy, what you mention about waiting for God to provide the opportunity. That’s a terrific exercise, because it’s just on the edge of your tongue all the time and you want to say it, but if you say it at the wrong time it has no effect. Sometimes even, it has a bad effect. And so, when it’s really the opportunity, when it really happens, sometimes you might have to wait months for that to happen. And that’s an exercise in incredible patience, because you’re not going to speak unless God is moving your lips. You may feel that you’ve got to say it, you’ve just got to say it, and most of the time you don’t. You just wait for the opportunity and then when it comes it’s just all right.

Rosalie: this is from Louise in South Carolina—we’re just about at the end of our time but there are two questions we should get to, this is one of them: “What if you feel you could do a much better job now raising your children than you did while they were growing up? How do you feel that it’s not too late?”

Mark: It’s not. You can talk to my kids, and they probably could give you a laundry list, a big long list of all the things that I did wrong. I love them very, very much but that doesn’t mean I made every decision correctly, and I know I did a lot of dumb things. Yet, overall, I would say I gave them as much as I could at the moment. I did as best as I could at the moment. That’s fine. And my motives there, that can be enough. Today doesn’t mean you’re any less of a transparency to God’s parenting. It’s just different. Early on, maybe you prepared the child’s food, and washed his clothes, or something like that. Well, now your role is still parenting— it’s just different. Now it’s a lot more based on prayer—as a child grows up. It’s OK. You continue to pray, continue to look at the child as God shows you the child is. That is a continuation of parenting. I can’t think of a better way to love a child. You don’t have to be saying a word to him or her. You don’t have to be near them. You just continue parenting. It’s just a different role, but it’s still being a transparency to God’s parenting. I think that makes sense for you.

Rosalie: Now we have some further questions about the pre-creation of children. And this is one from Massachusetts: “It sounds like parents have no choice over the pre-created children they get. And these God-created children have no say in the parents they’re sent to. What’s missing here?”

Mark: Well, I don’t know if anything’s missing. The Bible says, “God setteth the solitary in families” (Ps. 68:6 ). And that doesn’t just mean families related physically. We have lots of friends we feel that we’re maybe brothers and sisters with. So the way it works, it says in the Bible “. . . all things work together for good to them that love God” (Rom. 8:28 ). Allow that to be—I know that sometimes a parent can be just a heartbreak for a child, and vice versa. It can seem so tough, but that’s OK. It’s not like God sets problems up or allows problems to be. Families are often where problems are resolved and you just move forward. We clean up our acts and we just move forward. The love that connects the family is God’s love. It’s not just human love. It’s God’s love that connects us all. And “God setteth the solitary in families” says the Bible, and so it happens that way. We are blessed, one way or another, with the children who join our family. And our children are blessed too. I know that everyone listening, we’ve seen lots of examples of parenting through the years—lots and lots of different parents, we’ve seen them all do it. I think, as parents, it’s important to consider the things that you’re not going to carry forward as a parent. There may be things that you’ve seen parents do that you decide you’re not going to do. And it’s important to make those choices and stick to them because it’s very easy, I’ve seen, for a parent to parent exactly like he’s seen as an example, and that example, it might be good, but maybe not. And it might be worth it to think it through again, and get it right. As you do that, everybody is blessed.

Rosalie: We’ve had a number of questions that have come in while we were talking that relate to parents not being loving. This one is sort of going to stand for all of them—I mean there’ve not been a lot of them, but there’ve been a few. This is from Dave: “When I was growing up, us children were never told that we were loved. When I grew up I felt I would always tell my children that I love them and still do. I think many feel this same way from my era, but now the young kids are being taught to hug and kiss people they meet for the first time and telling them they love them. Isn’t this going too far the other way and cheapening the meaning?” And I think if you would be willing to address this first part, which is parents who are not loving, including Christian Science parents who are not loving. And then also, how about the question about cheapening the meaning of love?

Mark: Let’s do the cheapening of meaning. How you feel when you say, “I love you,” is what matters. If somebody says to you, if you do something for them, if he says, “Thank you,” you know he means it but not too deeply. But if he looks at you, and says: “Thank you,” you can tell if he means it. And that’s the same with love. If you show love, and say, “I love you,” but you mean it, then it’s of God, and that’s not cheap at all. And there’s plenty of God’s love in you to spread out. You’re not going to run out. And that relates, then, to people who’ve felt unloved when they were children, or maybe even as grown-ups. That love that people love you with, is always just God’s love. That’s a very important thing to realize. It’s sort of like the moon, how it reflects the sun’s light. The moon doesn’t create any light of its own—it just reflects the sun’s light. Similarly, each one of us, we just reflect God’s love. We don’t create, really, any of our own love, we’re just loving everyone with God’s love. Whether or not a parent showed that to you, or not, doesn’t matter. The love of God still is present. And if you look through your life, you’ll see evidence—if you watch for it. Don’t ever look back on your life and think of it as being without love. That’s just not true. Every moment you are basking in the light of God’s love—every moment. It doesn’t matter how people behaved around you. You’re pure, you have an experience of just the goodness and love of God in your life. That’s all that’s there. It’s worth it to acknowledge that.

Rosalie: This is absolutely the last question. It’s from Renate in Neu-Anspach, and she says: “Could you please share ideas on how to balance parenting and work?”

Mark: You know what, I don’t think that I need to put on my parenting hat or my work hat. What I’m saying is, I don’t differentiate my life into different roles. I just think of myself constantly as a transparency to God. If I can do that, then work and family life, they mingle—they’re separate, but they mingle together and they don’t compete. And so, think of yourself in those terms. There’s so much to being a transparency to God. That’s such a helpful idea. So often we think, well, God gives us our identities and maybe a few qualities, but it’s up to us to go off on our own and maybe make something of them. No, God gives us these qualities. We’re the stage on which they show. It’s not like we’re a channel for God. It’s better than that. We’re really at one with God, as God’s expression. And as God’s expression, then there really isn’t a different line between work and parenting or your social life or whatever else you do. There’s just the work of being the agent for God twenty-four hours a day. It’s a good way to live life.

Rosalie: It is. We’ve had wonderful questions, and I want to thank you all for them. I’ve tried to cover all the classes of questions so that those of you who came to the chat late may find answers—for example, we talked about childbirth early on, and there are some other things that we covered early in the chat, so you might want to just go through that again and see if you can find your answers. You’ve all been so fabulous and I’m so grateful for all the questions you asked. Mark, do you have some thoughts for us before we close?

Mark: Well, all I can say is that I’ve learned a lot from hearing your responses too, everyone. And so I promise you I’m going to continue moving forward and learning too. This parenting role is something that constantly develops us, and we should have fun with it. It’s anything but a burden. We really are God’s children. We’re not parents getting instructions from God, who are taking care of children. No. Everybody’s a child of God. And as a child of God, we have the availability of our Parent twenty-four hours a day. I know that I’m going to move forward, continuing to learn, and see what this coming year teaches me about God’s parenting.

Rosalie: Well, thanks Mark. It’s always fun to have you here, and I’m so glad you were with us on this topic. As you know today’s topic was, “Inspired parenting,” and our guest is Mark Swinney, a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science who lives in New Mexico.