Leah Sax:
Hello and welcome to Episode 15, Season four of Delight Podcast. I’m Leah Sax

Adam Curtis:
And I’m Adam Curtis.

Leah Sax:
It’s been exciting to see how our Delight Podcast family has continued to grow, how people have been using the podcast for different areas of their life. It was lovely to hear how one church family in Crouch End was using the Hospitality podcast as a basis for some of their Bible study time.

Adam Curtis:
And here in Christ Church, Sidcup, the youth group on the weekend away, were listening through some of those podcasts and discussing them together.

Leah Sax:
Indeed, we’ve reached out to our Delight Podcast family in researching today’s podcast episode, we’re looking at parenting and we were very aware that neither Adam or I are parenting. So we did a canvassing of all of all our nearest nearest.

Adam Curtis:
We are Inadequate for this.

Leah Sax:
In no way qualified. I have three godkids, a niece and a nephew, but am not a parent. So thank you for those who responded with faithful and wonderful questions.

Adam Curtis:
Sadly, we haven’t been able to ask all those questions, but instead what we have done is focus down on questions about raising a kid to know the Lord Jesus Christ. And we’re very aware that in parenting is a much bigger topic than that. But that is going to be our focus today.

Leah Sax:
Indeed, we didn’t think of like five extra podcasts we could do that just drew out on the topics we discussed. Our guest today is Lucy Rycroft. She is currently in charge of digital marketing at Parenting for Faith. She also has her own website, The Hope Filled Family, which she’s just put on pause while she’s doing this year with Parenting for Faith. She is married to Al and has four kids.

Leah Sax:
Welcome, Lucy Rycroft to Delight Podcast.

Lucy Rycroft:
Yay!

Leah Sax:
Hello.

Lucy Rycroft:
Was that natural enough?

Leah Sax:
That was beautiful. That was amazing. I love it because I asked Lucy just now is like, feel free to respond because so frequently I say welcome and there’s just silence. I’m super excited to have you for many reasons, but one tiny reason is that we found you because you listened to the podcast.

Lucy Rycroft:
Yes.

Leah Sax:
So we found Lovely Lucy and we were like, Oh my goodness, we’re doing a podcast on parenting. She knows lots of things. But before we get into our topic, could you tell us a little bit about how you came to know Jesus? Yes, well, thank.

Lucy Rycroft:
You for having me. It’s an absolute I was going to say delight to be here. I’m sure that’s a joke that’s been done many times. Not even a joke anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I was so blessed, really, to be raised by Christian parents. My parents had been missionaries for about 15 years before I was born, and then I was born in the boring UK, so I just had a really boring existence. Unlike my brothers who were raised overseas, my dad was a vicar. I really saw Jesus at work in both of their lives. You know, there was kind of no question that God was active in the world and active in our situations and wouldn’t have articulated that at the time, obviously. But looking back, it was just so kind of normal and natural and Jesus was the centre of their lives and their decision making. I came to faith myself when I was about six years old. I remember fairly clearly which room of the house we were in and my mum was with me. My mum doesn’t remember that at all. Interestingly, um, and I’m going to age myself by saying it was the morning after I’d been to an Ishmael praise party. So if you are listening and you remember Ishmael praise parties, then congratulations. You’re as old as me. But Ishmael was a fabulous children’s worship leader. He used to prance about on stage and get everyone really excited about Jesus.

Leah Sax:
And when you say you came to Faith at six, what did that look like? Was there a prayer you said? Was there a truth about God that just kind of really struck your six year old soul?

Lucy Rycroft:
Yeah. So it’s hard looking back to kind of remember what was going through my mind. But I would say as much as I’m able to sort of, you know, 30 something years on, I know there was a prayer involved. Mum prayed a prayer with me. I think it probably just all made sense to me. I had no reason to question it. I’d seen it, you know, it wasn’t just on a Sunday. I’d seen this active in my parents lives through the week and it continued to make sense as I grew older as well.

Leah Sax:
Was there ever a time that you did question it or did that making sense continue throughout those teenage years?

Lucy Rycroft:
The making sense continued definitely through my teens, but my lifestyle didn’t always show it. I mean, I think that’s probably quite, quite true of a lot of us in our teenage years. So yes, I was still going to church on Sunday. Yes, I was still reading my Bible, still talking to people about Jesus. But I found that hard to to marry up with my lifestyle all the time. Didn’t really doubt. I don’t know why that is because lots of amazing Christians I know have been through periods of doubt. All I can say is I guess all our faith journeys are very different, very unique. My dad passed away last year. I did quite a lot of reflecting after that about the influence of my mum and my dad on my faith. I think more and more I’m just so grateful that they showed me the reality of life with Jesus. You know, there was no big shock. I think sometimes when you go through a period of doubt or questioning about faith, not always, but sometimes it can be because you thought Christianity was one thing and you get into adulthood and realise it’s it’s not. You know, I was under no illusion that my parents were perfect, that everything always went right in life, that we wouldn’t ever face hardships. I think I’d just kind of knew that Jesus was always there with us and I had that understanding. So I feel very blessed really for that. And I suppose that’s something I’m trying to show my kids too, that Christianity isn’t like easy. It’s not always easy to follow Jesus. And, you know, it’s not like bad stuff is never going to happen to us, but we can go through that with Jesus by our side.

Leah Sax:
Yeah. Now I know you have four kids. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah.

Lucy Rycroft:
Yeah. We have 13 year old son and 11 year old daughter. Eight year old twin boys. We had The first two of them. The eldest was two. And then we had our baby girl. Just in those early weeks and months of feeding her being up in the night with her, I started to read the blog of an old friend who had adopted, and adoption was something that previously we had talked about only as far as you know, if we can’t have kids biologically, that’s the route we’ll go down. That sort of felt right to us. And I said that and it felt right in my head. But in my heart I did not want to go there like I was. I was really secretly breathing a sigh of relief when we got pregnant because adoption scared me, actually. And adoption was not something that I felt that I could do. And yet in this short period of time after our daughter was born, I just felt God’s kind of really getting me excited about adoption. I was almost jealous of my friend who had adopted. It was really weird and this went on for a couple of months and then I just said to God, Look, if you’re calling me to this, you’ve got to call both of us.

Lucy Rycroft:
It can’t be me persuading my husband. You’ve got to call him, too. And within a few days, I was I was coming downstairs in the morning and he said to me something that he’d read in the newspaper. He was just kind. Of reporting back to me something he’d read, and he just said, Guess how many children were adopted in the last year? And it was some article about how know how there was so much red tape and bureaucracy involved and children weren’t getting adopted. And things actually did change for the better after that. But just the fact that that had kind of stuck out at him through what he was reading, I was like, Great, thank you, God, you’ve opened that conversation. Now we can have this conversation. To cut a long story short, when our birth kids were six and four, we welcomed our twins. They were 14 months at the time and they came to join our family. So we’re a blended family.

Leah Sax:
And how have you seen God’s faithfulness during those years?

Lucy Rycroft:
Parenting is not for the faint hearted. It’s difficult. It’s not easy at the best of times when you add adoption into the mix, you’re adding trauma, early life trauma, you’re adding attachment issues, you’re potentially adding additional needs and lots of unknowns. I mean, there are unknowns with your birth kids, right? You don’t know when you have a child how they will end up being, you know, and what they’ll end up struggling with. But there’s all sorts of extra things, I think, that come with adoption or fostering. We’ve seen God faithful in those times, faithful often to forgive us when we do the wrong thing and we mess up as parents, which I feel we do a lot faithful in drawing all four of our children towards him in their different ways through the challenges. In many ways it helps us to see God’s grace more because we are really broken as a family and we were before. You know, there’s no such thing as a perfect family. We’re a broken family. But I think especially when you’re bringing in pain and you’re bringing in suffering and you’re bringing in effectively other members of birth family or whatever, you know, family life is, it just gets more complicated. We are so grateful, really, for God’s faithfulness through all that. How do you think.

Leah Sax:
You’ve grown faith wise during that time?

Lucy Rycroft:
I think sometimes God has to break you in order to strengthen your dependence on him. I am by no means there yet, but I have discovered a huge amount about myself, about my sinfulness, my selfishness as a parent, my desire to control my impatience. And that’s all come out just parenting, parenting all my children. But I think especially through adoption, because it’s a different level of patience, it’s a new set of needs added on to the needs that children have anyway.

Leah Sax:
Now I could ask you so many questions on this, but I’m aware we’re kind of delving into our topic, which we’re going to chat about later. Can you tell us a little bit more about the role you’re currently doing?

Lucy Rycroft:
So I work at the moment for Parenting for Faith, which is a fabulous ministry under the banner of BRF. This is a maternity cover. I’m just here for a year. What I was doing before and what I will hopefully be doing after is running a faith based family website called The Hope Filled Family. That started out as a blog when I was a mum of a two year old and a baby. And it’s ended up being what I consider to be my job and what I’m called to do to minister to families in the chaos and the mess and the busyness of our lives, creating resources that fit into busy family life. You know, a lot of Christian resources out there. Imagine that you’re going to have all this time to sit down with your children. They’re all going to be quiet. They’re all going to listen to the Bible being read. And that’s not really always our reality. So I’m very much about equipping mums in particular dads to grandparents, anyone involved in the life of children, and also helping to give them some resources that really work within their family life to draw everyone towards Jesus.

Leah Sax:
That’s really exciting. You sound like the ideal candidate to be talking to us about parenting. Thank you so much.

Leah Sax:
Hi Delight Podcast family. We gained nearly all of our audience through social media. So every time you share the pod, a post or a blog, it invites new people into our family. So thank you for liking and sharing and subscribing. I know we go on about it all the time. Please do drop us a DM. Let us know what you thought of today’s episode or what you’d like to hear in the future. You can check out our website at DelightPodcast.com. There you can find transcripts of each episode, more detailed show notes, and the latest blog by guest and return blogger Cat Brooks on parenting.

Adam Curtis:
It seems that there are two contradictory images about parenting in society at the moment. First, I see on social media the image of family bliss. To be a parent seems like the most wonderful, idyllic and fulfilling thing you can possibly do. Leah here tells me that the Kardashians make it look like a walk in the park.

Leah Sax:
Well, what can I say? Don’t actually watch the Kardashians. I’ve heard it not against anyone watching it as you were mine.

Adam Curtis:
We’ve heard on the grapevine. My second image I see in culture and society is that in countless TV shows, parenting is made to look like a massive chore and something you can only survive with lots of wine or child free time. Lucy How should a Christian process these images?

Lucy Rycroft:
You’ve hit the nail on the head really there with both of those images and they do contradict. But Jesus speaks into both of those so powerfully. And I’m so grateful for being on this journey with him. I think this idea that parenting is wonderful and idyllic, you know, for me, it’s not the Kardashians, it’s Stacey Solomon, who I absolutely love. But she was asked the other day on social media, what’s it like now having five children and hoped she would say, I mean, she’s usually quite good at being honest, but she was like, oh, it’s wonderful. I love being a mum. And I was like, It’s so hard. Just tell it like it is. Come on. But I think if we go into parenthood thinking that it’s going to fulfil us, you know, that being a parent is somehow going to complete us, then we will be really, sorely disappointed. And actually that’s a huge pressure to put on our children to be the people, you know, who are going to fulfil us because only Jesus can. And I suppose it’s not dissimilar to, you know, wanting to be married because that sense of that partner being the only one that can fulfil you is so strong. And yet that’s not true. We know that that’s not true in Jesus.

Lucy Rycroft:
Children are a wonderful blessing from God. You know, the Bible tells us that so many times, and we are so grateful that it’s not just us who have made the children, but God has made the children. That’s what we believe. And it has many wonderful moments and many blessings to it. But your children will not fulfil you. Having children will not complete you as a person. Only Jesus can do that. Coming on to our second myth of like, Oh yeah, it’s such a chore, isn’t it? And we just need to like, get the kids to bed and open the bottle of wine and all the rest of it. Believe me, I’ve had, I’ve had evenings like that too. Yeah. Again, I think Jesus really speaks right to the core of that because he says, and I don’t have the reference with me, but he says, You know, if anyone would follow me or come after me, he must deny himself, pick up his cross and deny himself. And I think that’s that’s a verse that we don’t often we like to glaze over that. I think these days we don’t often talk about that. But, you know, there is a sacrifice to following Jesus, to putting Jesus first. And I think in parenting that is seen in the things we do every day for our children, you know, we lay our lives down.

Lucy Rycroft:
So I’m not sounding like a martyr here. But for the parents listening, you daily lay your lives down for your children. You know you are daily sacrificing your free time, your disposable income, your taxi service. You know, everything about your life as a parent is geared around providing for your children and providing well for them. There’s such peace actually, in that When we see that as part of our discipleship, as part of our obedience to the Lord, you know, we’re not moaning, Of course, every now and again we need to have a moment. And parenting is difficult. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have child free time. We shouldn’t open a bottle of wine every now and again. You know, all those things are God gifts to us as well, God given gifts. But actually to turn the whole thing around and say, God, when I’m getting up in the night, I hate, you know, I’m so sleep deprived and yet, Lord, I’m doing this for you, you know, you’ve given me this precious one to care for. What a privilege. What a responsibility. Please. Now give me the strength to face the day ahead.

Adam Curtis:
From that perspective. Just so beautiful. The image that. Yeah, in parenting. Who are we doing this for? We’re not doing this so that we can be fulfilled by this, by this child. We’re doing this for God and for his glory. What would you say is the purpose of parenting? How is it different if you’re a Christian?

Lucy Rycroft:
That’s a really interesting question, and I’m sure you would get as many different answers as as you know, for the number of people you asked. What comes to mind, first of all, is that the aim of parenting really is to bring our children to independence. You know, from the moment they’re born and they’re totally dependent on us till the moment they learn to walk and tie their own shoes and drive their own car, you know, you’re getting your child ready to live independently of you. But also we know that for many children that isn’t a reality. If you’re raising a child with additional needs who’s always going to need care. If you’re raising a child who has struggles with mental health, who is always going to need support and care, you might raise a child who is independent, goes off lives their life, gets married, gets divorced and moves back in with you. You know, and suddenly you’re sort of parenting again in much more of a hands on way. So we just don’t know what the future holds for our children. So independence is one thing, but it’s not something to grasp too strongly. We shouldn’t be sort of thinking, well, in ten years time, five years time, two years time or whatever, I’m going to be free of my children. That isn’t the case. You know, you continue parenting even when your children aren’t living with you. So I think then it comes back to and especially as Christians, our job as parents is really to provide a loving, safe, secure base for our children for as long as we have them. We want our children to to know that they’re loved unconditionally, that they can always come back home. This is always their home. And I hope that that in a very, very, very faint way reflects the heart of their father God, whether or not they choose to to follow him themselves. I hope that through parenting, we all can show our children a tiny glimpse of the unconditional love of our Father God.

Adam Curtis:
We’ve acknowledged in this podcast already that parenting can be incredibly hard, and I just want to spend a few moments just maybe speaking directly to those parents who are feeling, feeling the fire, feeling the pressure right now. What encouragement would you have to that parent who’s just feeling isolated, who’s feeling alone in the task? Maybe they’re a new parent who’s up all night with a little one or they’re a parent of a teenager who’s just shutting them out and literally shutting the door in their face. What encouragement would you have for them?

Lucy Rycroft:
It’s something that I think we all experience as parents at some point in our lives. If we haven’t yet, then we will do in some ways. Actually, you can feel a bit more isolated as your kids get older because often when you’ve got babies and toddlers, you’re on parental leave, you’re able to get out to baby groups and classes and you know, you’re much more flexible in the day. As your kids get older and their lives get busier, your life ends up just kind of supporting theirs and driving them around to things and watching all sorts of things that they’re involved in. And you sometimes lose that support network a little, so you might feel isolated as a parent of a baby. You might feel isolated as a parent of a teenager or even a 20 or 30 something. I would encourage you by saying what you’re feeling is not unusual. Sadly, it is something that many of us have gone through or will go through. There’s a wonderful verse in Isaiah 40:11, and it says, He gently leads those that have young. And I just love that image of God. You know, he’s not standing over us as a kind of evil taskmaster, you know, berating us for where we’ve slipped up as parents. He’s gently leading us. You know, sometimes we have no clue how to parent and we feel on our own. And yet God is right there with us, wanting to lead us as we lead our children.

Lucy Rycroft:
Call out to him. You know, your prayers do not need to be long. They do not need to be articulate, especially if you haven’t had much sleep. It’s often impossible. But just to literally call out to God, God, just help me. Help me in this situation. Be here. Comfort me. Be my companion as I go through this. But secondly, I would say the African proverb says, it takes a village to raise a child, and we all know that. But it sometimes takes a bit of effort to find that village, especially today, where we live, quite inward looking lives, really. You know, we don’t live in extended family groups. We don’t tend to know our neighbours as much as maybe we did sort of 60 or 70 years ago. It does take a little bit of effort to find that village, but I would really urge people who are feeling isolated to find that village. There is a village out there ready for you. When we moved to York, which is where we live now, nearly 14 years ago, we were expecting our first son. He was born like three months after we moved, so we didn’t know anyone, you know, We’d just moved here. Al had started working for a church. He was full time. I’d just finished my teaching career. I wasn’t going to go back for a bit. If I hadn’t have gone out and found my tribe, I’d have been incredibly lonely. You know, we were nowhere near family.

Lucy Rycroft:
We’d just left our friends in Cambridge where we had been living. I was really grateful for all the different groups and things that I could get to. And I met probably hundreds of parents in those early days, but 2 or 3 of them have stuck and become really close friends and are still part of my support network now. Find your tribe. And you know, these days you don’t even have to leave your home to find your tribe. There are apps where you can connect with other parents in your area who have children of a similar age. There are Facebook groups, there are all sorts of online communities and even maybe just dropping a message to the people. You do know. You know, if you’re starting to feel sort of disconnected from your your friends before you had children, you know, who maybe haven’t had children themselves. So they’re out at work all day, you know, while you’re stuck at home with a baby or whatever. Just send them a text, you know, and it’s hard to ask for help. I know that it’s hard to reach out, but just share. Just be willing to to share and be honest about how you’re feeling. And if you’re somebody who receives a message like that, then act on it. You know, offer to go round and pray, drop round a meal, pray over text, whatever, whatever you can do, whatever you can manage, I think just helps people to feel like they’re less alone.

Adam Curtis:
I really hear that call there as a single man to act on it. From my perspective of the single guy, look at parents and I often think, Oh, they look like they’ve got lots of community and lots of people around them and they must be really supporting there must be really supported. Actually. That’s not always a reality. Yeah, and sometimes what people can see on the surface isn’t isn’t really what’s going on.

Lucy Rycroft:
Absolutely. It’s not always the reality. And you know, I’m convicted even saying this because a new mum friend in our church messaged a couple of days ago and you know usual thing well usual thing from my perspective, having had four children, babies really not sleeping, you know, massive sleep regression. But, you know, when that’s your first child and that sleep deprivation is preventing you from getting out of the house, is preventing you from having any kind of structure to your days. You’ve got the return to work looming and all the pressures that that brings. That’s hard. That’s really hard. And I’m convicted because we were sympathetic by over WhatsApp. But as full time working parent of four, I haven’t been able to do any more than that. You know, and I want to I want to drop round a meal. I want to offer to pray with her. Maybe I will, but I didn’t on the day when she messaged and maybe maybe I should have done. But even more so, I think. So. Not wanting to put the pressure on people who don’t have children. But you know, I think that’s often the case, that if your support network is just people who’ve got children, then they’re often struggling too. And that’s where the church comes in and why the church is wonderful because you’ve got, you know, grandparent figures who whose own children have flown the nest, who have their hands free.

Lucy Rycroft:
You have single people, you know, students. We’ve had loads of babies born to our church recently. We’re quite a small church, but we had three babies in the course of about four months, which was a lot. And every time, you know, I’m talking to one of the parents, I’m like, Where’s your baby? They’re like, you know, they just point to the other side of church where there’s a whole gaggle of students. Like they’re over there. They’re in there in that group somewhere over there. But isn’t that wonderful? You know, these these young men and women, you know, maybe 19, 20, 21 years of age are just fawning over this baby and giving that baby so much love. We all have a part to play. There’s a fantastic book I’ve just finished, actually, by Rachel Turner, who set up parenting for faith, called It Takes a Church to Raise a Parent. I would massively recommend that to anyone, really, especially in church leadership. But all of us are part of a church because it just kind of really affirms the role that we all have to play in supporting parents, raising parents so that they can raise their children in the love of God.

Leah Sax:
It only occurred to me relatively recently when the Bible says children are a good gift of the Lord. They didn’t just mean to their parents. Yeah.

Lucy Rycroft:
Yeah, right.

Leah Sax:
Can we just spend, like, a few more minutes just meditating on that truth of a good gift. Like, what are some of the joys you see in parenting? What are some of the good things? Because I know we can be wonderfully open and talking about the struggles, but I think it’s beautiful to just dwell on those good gifts as well.

Lucy Rycroft:
Yeah, children bring so much life and so much joy, so much kind of freshness, I think, to family life. But yeah, also to churches and communities. And I think sometimes us parents may be shy away from asking non-parents for help because we feel a bit like the UN sort of unspoken thing is, you know, I get the privilege of having these children, but I’m going to dump them on you. But it shouldn’t be like that. You know, children bring joy to everyone therewith. I mean, the questions children come up with, the things they say are so funny often and so insightful and how they see the world. And ultimately, you know, you’ve got small people, small humans who are unique. You know, nobody’s ever been made exactly like your child. And just watching them grow, watching them develop their God given gifts, being able to support that, watching not just their obvious gifts, maybe in academia or sports or music or whatever, but their character, you know, just noticing actually when one of your children is really kind to a younger child or really empathetic towards an animal or kind to an older person, you know, and just noticing those aspects of character is a real joy. My children make me laugh a lot, you know, just at that age. And my 13 year old now is hilarious. We can have some wonderful conversations with him and the stuff he comes back with from school. It’s just, you know, all the funny things that have happened during his day. Some of them are not funny to us. You know, they’re very much like you had to be in the moment. But he’s there at the dining table, absolute hysterics. And we’re just looking at him going, I think you had to be there. But even that even that is so much joy to just see him enjoying life so much.

Adam Curtis:
Oh I hear that. One of the great joys for me during lockdown was bubbling with a family up the road from me. And he’s got three boys. I was over there one night having dinner and then two of their younger lads didn’t know where they’d seen it on social media or whatever, but they were discovering the names which Americans give their kids like Track. And like for us Brits, that is just the funniest name. Like, why would. Yeah. And I realised that someone might be listening and their name might be Track and I’m sorry if I insulted you, but like, they just found that so funny. And as I was listening to them talking about this, I was like, That is really funny. And I just forgotten how funny that was.

Lucy Rycroft:
Track has now removed his five star review off itunes.

Adam Curtis:
Track, You’re alright, Made in the image of God. It’s good.

Leah Sax:
Also, we have a steady 10/20% of American listeners and we embrace all of your beautiful names.

Lucy Rycroft:
But that’s the kind of thing that children bring up, right? Like, where would you have ever thought to to look that up? You know? I mean, I was cleaning my teeth this morning, closed the bathroom door. I did not lock it. That was my error. And no sooner had I started, you know, just thinking like two minutes apiece, just to breathe, pray, whatever, cleaning my teeth in burst my eight year old after a few seconds and starts regaling me with the intricate details of World War two weaponry. But that is a good thing. I couldn’t speak while I was cleaning my teeth because I would have actually said I’m not interested, but they’re doing well. Whatever. It’s gone. Bless him. He’s so into it and I love seeing that he is passionate about it. And and the funny thing is, you know, of course, he comes in through the door, bursts in through the bathroom door, no respect for my privacy and locks it so his brother can’t get in. So he always does that. You know, it’s like your privacy isn’t important, but mine is.

Leah Sax:
My nearly three year old niece enjoys me putting my makeup on for my gigs, which is quite heavy. And she asked me like, Why are you putting more eyes on your face? And my you will say, you’ve got very red lips. Why is the rest of your face not red? Very valid questions. And then, you know, why am I putting more eyes on my face? Anyway? I’m so sorry, Adam. I took us off track, but I just wanted to know.

Adam Curtis:
Thank you for that joy. Thank you for the joy. Because we are now going we’re now moving back into the into some of the hardships because we want to be we want to be real. The highs and the lows. Absolutely. So gear change right here. Let’s speak to that parent who may be going through a difficult time. They’re not experiencing the laughter that children can bring at that moment. Maybe they’ve got a daughter who just doesn’t want to go to school anymore or they’ve got a son who’s just making lots of really bad life choices and they’re just really scared about the direction of travel. What sort of encouragement would you have for that parent who just is looking at some of the decisions their children are making and is just feeling like a failure?

Lucy Rycroft:
Yeah, thanks for asking that question because again, it’s something which we all feel as parents. I don’t know a single parent who hasn’t felt like a failure at some point, or maybe most of the time even. But I think it’s really important to make that distinction between like how we feel about our parenting and how our kids are presenting. Because of course, bad parenting, for want of a better phrase, will result in children who make poor life choices. I know that, you know, having been through the adoption process, but. Also, there is so much that is not linked. And I think if we constantly assess our own level of parenting based on how our children are presenting or how they’re behaving in any given circumstance, then we will feel terrible one minute and then we’ll feel like the best parents in the world the next minute. And actually neither of those extremes is true. I would encourage you by saying you’re not a failure. God has positioned you to parent your children. It’s not a mistake. You were meant to have these children. He’s given them to you. Put them in your life. And whether you’re a good parent or bad parent, that is not based on how your child is presenting right now. Take that away from from your thinking. That is, I believe, from Satan. I don’t believe that is from God. So I want to encourage you by saying you’re not a failure, but also in a funny way. Stay with me on this one. I want to encourage you by saying you are a failure.

Lucy Rycroft:
We all are. I’m a failure. That’s deliberate. We need Jesus. You know, none of us can do this on our own. And we we really tried to do parenting in our own strength. And it’s very, very tempting to put value on what we’re doing as parents. There’s all sorts of pressures in society to do this, do that, do the other for your children. You know, make sure you get them off the screens, get them into nature, feed them five fruit and veg a day, whatever. There’s all this stuff and actually none of those, whilst they may be very good things to do, none of those are pressures that Jesus puts on us. You know, and if we go back to the Bible, what I was thinking as I prepared for this podcast, like what is it actually? What does it come down to? Like living for Jesus? What does it come down to? And I think so many places in Scripture where you could go, but my mind went to Micah six verse eight, it says, What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. We mustn’t underestimate the impact of doing this faithfully. You know, however, our children are behaving, however they’re presenting at the moment. We mustn’t forget that actually, just by us living lives that are wholly submitted to Jesus, that will have an impact on our children. And whatever they’re doing, however they’re responding to God. Remember, their faith journey doesn’t end at 18.

Lucy Rycroft:
It’s not like kind of we input, input, input, you know, as much stuff as possible and then like sit back and hold our breath to see whether whether they’re actually going to follow Jesus. And oh dear, they didn’t. Oh, yes, they did. You know, our faith journey isn’t over until our life is over. My friend’s brother has just come back to faith in his 40s, having rejected it as a teenager, you know, along with his wife and kids. Your faith journey is not over, you know, your children’s journey is not over. It can be really difficult if we feel like, well, especially teenagers, but maybe children as well, making life choices that we don’t think are healthy, that we don’t agree with, we think might have implications for their future, that is really hard. And yet just that memory of, okay, Jesus forgives everything and everyone. There is nothing too big for Jesus to forgive. And my goodness, you know, many of us have made mistakes in our teens. Jesus forgave those and he can redeem any situation. He can forgive any wrong. You know, our children’s life is not over just because they’ve made a poor decision. And our children’s journey with God is not over just because they’ve made a poor decision. And I just wanted to, if it’s okay, just kind of recommend the Parenting for Faith podcast. There was an episode recently. I love the Parenting Faith podcast, which is good because I work for them, but I promise you I liked it before I started.

Leah Sax:
podcast here.

Lucy Rycroft:
Excellent.

Lucy Rycroft:
Yeah, it’s a great podcast to listen to if you’re a parent or anyone really involved in caring for children in any way. But there was a recent episode on What If My Child Hates Church? And that was a particularly poignant one, I thought. And Rachel Turner was our guest for that podcast, and she had a lot of real wisdom to share. So if your children are at that stage where they’re just really rejecting church, they don’t want to go to church. Take a listen to that. That episode, I think it will encourage you.

Leah Sax:
We’ll link it in our show notes as well.

Adam Curtis:
Oh, thank you, Lucy, for that answer. I found so much of you said that was just very liberating. And actually, yeah, it goes back to the Christian fundamentals. The Christian basics is who is the God that we serve and what is his attitude towards us? And when we look at Jesus Christ, it’s love and it’s forgiveness and acceptance. And we know that His Holy Spirit is with us and guiding us. And yeah, I just found that, yeah, so helpful.

Lucy Rycroft:
I’m just going to say, Such a gift, like to have that as a parent because actually the world which suggests it’s very accepting of everything actually isn’t, you know, the world of parenting in particular is not full of grace. You’re expected to achieve certain things in your parenting. So it’s so liberating to have that as a Christian parent and also to pass it on to our children. You know, one of my twin boys this morning did something really not good, made a poor decision just a few minutes before we left for school. I told him off, you know, because it was not an appropriate thing to do. And on our way to school, given that we live over the road from our school so don’t have a lot of time to sort of process. The two minutes that it took us to cross the road, you know, God convicted me and said, Well, you’ve done that kind of thing before, you know, got angry and responded in that way. So I said, I said to him very simply, you know, the great thing is like, God forgives everything. You know, God can forgive you. And actually, as we’re walking to school, I prayed that he would feel a lightness and a freedom in his spirit that day, just knowing, you know, because he said sorry to me. He said sorry to personally to hurt. And, you know, I believe also that in his heart he said sorry to God, or certainly I was talking in those terms. So that’s a real gift to be able to pass on to our children that their wrongdoings are not the end. You know, they don’t have to carry that burden of guilt around with them.

Adam Curtis:
Oh, I love what you’ve just said there, Lucy. I love these these gospel principles. They’re just so beautiful. Now let’s move the podcast on and like to zoom in and make it really practical. Is there a way to parent as a Christian or is there just general principles for parenting? Would you say?

Lucy Rycroft:
There’s never any one way to do faith? I don’t think in any kind of context. Definitely not one way to parent for faith. And I think the wonderful thing about the organisation, Parenting for Faith is very much like, don’t parent like me, parent like you. Everyone is in a unique context with unique characters in their family. Every family looks different. How we disciple our children is going to look different. But if I may, I’d love to share the five principles of parenting faith because they please do. They just fit so perfectly. And they’re principles that apply in every you know, you can apply them to your situation in parenting, whatever your situation is. They are principles that you’re probably using already. Actually, the key tools, we call them key tools that you probably already using in your parenting. But it’s just thinking about how we sort of maybe tweak them slightly to parent for faith rather than just parent. I’ll quickly we’ll see them. There are five of them. The first is creating Windows, actually. These are great discipleship tools for anyone, not just children, creating windows into how we live with God. You know, allowing our children to see us, worship, to see us read our Bibles, to see us pray, you know, often we do those things when they’re asleep. But, you know, can we do those things when they’re awake? And not just that, but how? We process things with God, you know, how we make decisions, how we get through difficult times as a family with God as that’s creating windows.

Lucy Rycroft:
Then we’ve got framing, which is, you know, as parents, naturally we explain to our children how the world works. They ask lots of questions often, but how do we frame things with God in the centre? How do we answer their questions in a way that helps them to see where God is in the world, where he’s active, where he’s working? The third tool is unwinding because children like adults, often have quite a skewed picture of who God is, you know, that’s maybe come from the media or their friends or their teacher or whoever. So it’s just kind of helping to unwind, you know, when we spot something that maybe isn’t the biblical character of God, we can just unwind that or just balance it out a little. The fourth is chat and catch, which is our words for praying and hearing from God. We talk about chatting because we want children to know that they can just talk to God as they would talk to a friend about anything. It doesn’t have to be. Thank you. Please. Sorry it doesn’t have to start, dear Lord, and end with Amen. They can do it any time, anywhere. And God loves to hear from them. And we use the word catch when we talk about hearing from God. Because actually when we use the word hear children think it’s going to be an audible voice. And of course God can sometimes be like that, but usually he speaks another way.

Lucy Rycroft:
So catching means catching everything God has from us. You know, that might be a Bible verse, that might be a picture, that might be a dream, that might be a feeling. It might be a sort of warm, fuzzy feeling as you pray. It could be all sorts of things. So we try and teach children that they can catch in all sorts of different ways. And then finally surfing the waves, which is really getting on board with what our children are passionate about, what they’re excited about, and helping them, maybe giving them opportunities to do that for the Lord. So it could be something in church, you know, it could be that your child is always watching the tech team because they’re just really interested in like how the sound works, how the visuals work, you know, And you can give them that opportunity of maybe like going to sit next to them and maybe like getting involved and learning some of the things that they’ve got to learn in order to sort of join that team. But it could be something different, You know, it could be that they love football. You can help them to get to know some Christian professional footballers or not personally, obviously, but like the stories of some professional footballers who are Christians and just kind of help them to see that faith and football can can match together like that.

Adam Curtis:
raising kids to to come and know and love the Lord Jesus Christ. I’m very aware it’s going to be very different for the different stages where that child is at. So let’s maybe go through a few different stages of life, realising this is probably a bit going to be a bit general, but zooming in on toddlers, how do you help a child who is themselves just learning how to articulate and learning how to speak? How do you help a toddler just engage with Spiritual things?

Lucy Rycroft:
I think it was Dylan Moran who described toddlers as miniature drunks.

Adam Curtis:
See, as a parent, you’re allowed to say that. If I said that, I’m allowed to say that I would be in trouble.

Lucy Rycroft:
You’d be Locked up.

Adam Curtis:
But yeah.

Adam Curtis:
For my own safety.

Lucy Rycroft:
And it’s actually a Really great phrase. You know, we often chuckle about that because, you know, you watch a toddler and they’re stumbling around all over the place. Got no idea where they’re going. They’re like, don’t know what the phrase, but, you know, they’re just happy to, like, go for it, aren’t they? They’ve got no sense of risk.

Leah Sax:
Amazing.

Lucy Rycroft:
They just go for it and they’re, you know, spouting gobbledegook. You can’t really understand what they’re saying half the time. And they’re just loving life and don’t really know what’s going on. And it’s easy to look at a toddler and think, oh, my goodness. Like, you know, they haven’t really understood anything. But we know that the brain does the vast majority of its developing in those first three years of life.

Leah Sax:
It Does! Isn’t it amazing? So yeah.

Lucy Rycroft:
So you look at that tiny baby who’s like, you know, just woken up and you look at that toddler stumbling around like they’ve not got a clue. They’re more active in their brains than we are. You know, their brains are just going like 500%. So I think I would just say, don’t underestimate what your toddler is able to take in. There’s a really lovely story. I’ll never forget. My daughter when she was one. She didn’t learn to speak till she was about two and a two and a quarter or so, and then it all came out at once. But when she was one and a quarter, it was Advent and Christmas. And what we used to do when our kids were really tiny is during Advent we would tell a really simple version of the Christmas story and we would use repetition because that’s great for young children. So that’s another tip I’d give. Don’t try and sort of bombard them with too much information. But every day for a week we would tell one part of the Christmas story, and then for the next week of Advent, we’d tell the next part. And it was very repetitive and we used baby signing and some little figures and things just to kind of really try and engage our then three year old and one year old.

Lucy Rycroft:
It was about a month after Christmas. Our daughter could not speak really. You know, she might have had a couple of words at that stage, but couldn’t really kind of articulate what she meant to us. And I was doing another Bible story with them. It was something to do with Jesus on a boat. So that could have been anything, couldn’t it? Lots of stories could have been carved. The stone could have been getting, you know, all the fish. I don’t know. But anyway, a story with Jesus in a boat, that’s all I remember. And I said the name Jesus. And she did the sign for Baby rocking her arms. Yeah. And I wasn’t talking about Jesus being a baby, but she connected that because I believe she remembered what we had done at Christmas. She couldn’t talk, but she could express that. And, you know, if she could express that, how much other stuff had she taken in that she hadn’t expressed to me or couldn’t express to me? You know, there must be an awful lot in our , 2, 3 year olds heads that we don’t we just don’t see yet. But we will so so keep going. Don’t underestimate what your child can take in. I would just say like, don’t underestimate the impact of just surrounding them in a faith filled environment.

Lucy Rycroft:
You know, take them to church and church is an absolute pain when you’ve got a tiny child. I know that. I know it’s hard to get there. It’s hard to bring enough snacks. Sometimes breastfeeding, if you’re doing that, that can be hard. And, you know, there’s all sorts of different reasons why we sort of might think, well, we’ll just wait till our children get older. But but no, absolutely be in that environment as much as you can get your children to church, surround them with other people who are worshipping, you know, surround them with prayer and grab a few age appropriate Bibles or books. There are some lovely, lovely Christian books for babies and toddlers. I’ve got loads of recommendations on my website, so if you head to the HopefilledFamily.com, you can see my recommendations. But yeah, absolutely. Like no pressure at all, but just enjoy this stage where their brains are absorbing so much. There’s also a fantastic babies and toddlers course that Parenting for Faith runs. So maybe we’ll put that in the show notes as well. That’s a very, very simple video course you can do at any time free of charge. Yeah, highly recommend that to you as well.

Adam Curtis:
This child is now grown up a few years. Let’s say they’re 6 or 7. How can you help them grow in godliness without being legalistic?

Lucy Rycroft:
Yeah, I think that in family life, routines and habits are just natural, aren’t they? I mean, there are a lot of us function, you know, otherwise. Well, certainly my, my family life would just fall apart as Christians having some kind of Spiritual routine Spiritual habits that kind of makes sense for many families. But that’s not the only way to disciple your children. So suppose I want to say a couple of things. I want to say something to those families who’ve got great routines in place for their spiritual habits and also to families who don’t. I would say if you have those routines, don’t limit your God Talk to those times. Share through the day frame for your children where God is in different situations. Pray for your children wherever, whenever you know. The problem of routines is sometimes that we just that’s when we do our God stuff and then he doesn’t get talked about. And similar to just going to church on Sunday and not talking about Jesus in the week, if we just do a Bible reading in the morning and then we don’t talk about Jesus for the rest of the day, that doesn’t really give a full picture of life with Jesus, which is is ongoing. I think to families probably more similar to ours where, you know, we might try something for a few days or a few weeks and then stop it for a while and then start something else. We’re quite sort of slapdash with our routines. I would just say, don’t underestimate what you can do, you know? Absolutely. Get those habits in place. Don’t be put off. Don’t don’t sort of think to yourself, well, we’re the kind of family who can’t do this, that or the other. Even if you do something one evening and you never repeat that again. Well, that was. One evening, you know that you’re able to share with your children, live your life with Jesus, with your kids, you know, allow them to see how he makes a difference to your whole life throughout the day, not just when you’re reading your Bible.

Adam Curtis:
Okay. This this six year old is now grown up and is a 15 year old and they’re now in a school environment surrounded by social media, surrounded by friends. And there’s just a huge level of secular pressures for them to do certain things, to act in certain ways, to hold sort of very different beliefs to what we find in scripture. How is a parent can you help this teenager navigate the minefield of secular pressures?

Lucy Rycroft:
I think the approach depends on how open your teenager is to Jesus. So I will firstly say something to parents of Christian teenagers, you know, teenagers who are self-identifying as Christians or certainly open to it. And then I’ll say something that will be relevant to all teenagers. If your child is identifying as a Christian or at least are open to it, then don’t neglect your role as a discipler of your child. I mean, it’s great if they can have a mentor at church as well. Maybe a youth leader or someone who just wants to invest in them, then that’s brilliant as well. But also, you know, be prepared to teach your teenager what the Bible says. You know, don’t just expect them to know or absorb that because they definitely won’t absorb it from culture. And unfortunately, they won’t even absorb it from a lot of Christian culture because there’s so much out there now, so much content that just wasn’t there when I was a teenager. They can access so much stuff. I think my husband and I have just become really aware since our boy became a teenager, how much he’s hearing from secular sources. You know, he’s not at a Christian school. He’s only really got kind of a couple of Christian friends, all the social media stuff.

Lucy Rycroft:
He’s playing Xbox games with his friends, you know, all that kind of stuff that goes on. He actually hears very, very little. So who is he going to hear that Christian stuff from? Who is he going to hear the Bible from, if not from us as parents? You know? So we need to facilitate that Bible reading. We also need to to be prepared to sort of teach him what the Bible says. But I think for all teenagers, whether or not they are open to Jesus at this stage, wherever they are faith wise, I think we can teach discernment. This is so important because I’ve kind of possibly a bit feel like I’m giving up a bit. I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that I cannot control what my children see or hear very much. I mean, I can put some safeguards in place, but the reality is when teenagers are out with their friends, they will see and hear an awful lot of things, even if it’s not on their phone, even even if, you know, they’ve got their filters set or they know they’re not meant to watch this or the other, someone will show something to them. So I’ve kind of given up trying to control that. Instead, I think my approach and I’m not very good at this we’re at the very start of our journey parenting teenagers.

Lucy Rycroft:
Our approach really wants to be teaching our children to be discerning about what they view and hear. You know, accepting They will view and hear stuff which is not ideal, but how can we discern that? You know, and I think I think it’s great to have open discussions with our children about things like porn, things like body image, you know, all those kinds of things that they might encounter online, things that they might consume at some stage so that they are ready, hopefully to close that tab when the time comes. But I think even more than that, if we can somehow give them the skills to be able to discern whether what they’re viewing, what they’re hearing is helpful to them as they seek to follow Jesus, That’s helpful if we can do that. And for teens who aren’t claiming to follow Jesus, I think there’s still that awareness of, look, this stuff is not healthy. This does not make you feel good, demeans other people, you know, And if you can appeal to what your teenager understands about the world and their sense of justice, fairness or whatever, then I think we can teach our children to be discerning.

Adam Curtis:
In that we’re moving away from this child who’s growing up through the stages of life and moving instead to a new Christian who’s also a parent. They’ve just become a Christian. They’ve got kids, and their kids have never been to church before. Is it right to like impose your Christianity to take them along to church when they’ve never done that? How can that new Christian parent help their kids to to know Jesus for themselves?

Lucy Rycroft:
It’s such an exciting thing, isn’t it, when someone comes to faith, you know, Amen first thing I want to say, I’m always so excited when adults come to faith. And, you know, we see that happening in our own church as well. But of course, if your parents that is something to consider. What do you do? What you do depends on the age of your children and your circumstances. For example, if you’re parenting with another parent and you have both come to faith or at least are both interested in finding out more and you’ve got little children, then they will probably have to come with you because you can’t easily leave them at home. If you’ve got teenagers who can stay at home on their own, or if you’ve got a partner who is at the same stage of their faith journey as you are, they have an option to stay at home. So absolutely. What do we do? I think, first of all, there’s nothing to say that your children won’t enjoy church just because they’ve never been before. You know, I’ve certainly seen that certainly kind of pre-school and primary school age when people have started coming to our church sort of midway into their parenting journey, actually, often their children settle settling quicker than they do, you know, and they love coming. Children of that age generally, like, you know, people putting on Entertainment for them and sort of putting on activities just for them. So so that often works really well. So don’t assume that they won’t enjoy church. Pick a church that works for your kids as well as for you, which might not necessarily be the same one as the one you have come to faith through.

Lucy Rycroft:
If you have older children, then yeah, I would say definitely give the choice. You know, if they’re able to stay at home either on their own or with with a partner who’s not coming to church, then definitely give the choice because imposing something on somebody else doesn’t usually work in our experience. But also you can parent for faith without your child attending church. Some of the key tools I talked about earlier, you know, framing things for your children, creating windows. Your child might not be coming to church, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sit down and open your Bible and have your quiet time while they’re in the room or while they’re watching you. You know, it doesn’t mean you can’t play worship music. You’re still a member of that house. You still have rights. And just to encourage you, I was talking to somebody just yesterday who actually came to Faith. He grew up in a communist country and his mum came to faith when communism ended and the country opened up to religion, to faith, and his mum became a Christian at that stage and he became a Christian through his mum becoming a Christian, because he said the change was visible. You know, and I think we forget how much our children are watching us and listening to us. But if you’ve come to know Christ and you didn’t before, the change in your life will be visible. Don’t stress about whether your children want to follow you to church or not. They will notice that something has happened to Mom or something’s happened to Dad.

Adam Curtis:
Amen That is reality of knowing Jesus Christ. He will bring transformation.

Lucy Rycroft:
Absolutely.

Leah Sax:
Lucy Thankfully in my life I have lots of parent friends and it’s been wonderful because I’ve shared their journey of life with me. And I was chatting to a few of them, telling them we were going to do this podcast, and some of the questions that came up was like, How do I keep my sense of self? How do I keep my relationship with the Lord strong when I’m torn in so many different directions and I’m such a different person to the person I was? Pre-children Do you have any wisdom or advice for those people?

Lucy Rycroft:
Yeah. So I think that was really why I started my blog originally because life was chaotic and unpredictable and busy. It was full on having a baby and a toddler. I had this deep sense of wanting to grow as a Christian in this season of parenting, you know, I know I’ve got a faith, so I could bottle that now and I could emerge at the end of, you know, having kids at home sort of 20 years time or whatever, they’ve all left home. And I will emerge with that faith. I know my faith itself is not going anywhere, but I want to smash that bottle. I want my faith to grow. Yes. I don’t just want this to be a season where where my faith just stays the same and how can I do this? And so I started the blog really as my own accountability and to hopefully connect with others. You know, I think one of the problems is that we are so conditioned to think about spiritual disciplines in a certain way. For example, we call it a quiet time. You know, we have our quiet time with Jesus and obviously it’s lovely to have time that’s quiet with Jesus. That’s important for all of us.

Lucy Rycroft:
But you become a parent and you don’t get much quiet time and the quiet time you do get, you’re probably asleep. So where do we go with that? You know, and I think actually opening that up, kind of deconstructing some of that baggage that we might have inherited, you know, which is very, very well meaning from our evangelical tradition. Certainly that’s kind of the tradition I was raised in, just deconstructing some of the baggage that comes around that going back to the Bible saying, well, how can we connect with Jesus? And actually then we read things like Pray without ceasing, and we realise, gosh, that is so liberating because we can pray, you know, through the day everything that’s happening to us. We don’t have to wait till we’ve read our Bible for God to be pleased with us and hear our prayers. God is there all the time and we can read, you know, we can we can put some Bible verses up in the home to just remind us and keep us grounded in times when we can’t find our Bible, you know? Yeah. For nappies and you know, all the rest of it. So there are so many ways we can connect to God.

Lucy Rycroft:
God just loves us, God. I don’t think we understand quite how much God loves us. You know, we get a glimpse of this as parents in terms of how much we love our children, but God loves us so, so much. You know, you would love your child even if they did the worst possible thing. And that’s like infinitely, infinitely more than that is the love that God has for each one of us. I actually wrote a course a couple of years ago to help parents on this journey. It’s called the God Connected Parent, but it’s just really to encourage parents that God loves you. He wants to connect with you. He wants to be part of your parenting journey and he wants you to grow in him and receive from him. You know? And it may not look like what it looked like before, but, you know, he’s not less pleased with you if you’re not having a 30 minute quiet time every day. He’s not less pleased with you. If you can’t remember the last time you opened your Bible, you know, there are ways we can draw towards them. There are ways we can grow in our faith as parents.

Leah Sax:
Oh, my goodness. I Want Lucy to be my best friend? Next time I’m i York, I’m going to invite myself over to her house.

Adam Curtis:
I actually believe that will happen. It certainly will. With you, I just don’t think you’ll stop talking.

Leah Sax:
Yeah. She’s also discovered in our pre chat. Done a music degree. I absolutely love those five discipleship points. She talked about creating windows, framing, unwinding, chat and catch surfing the waves. It was just such a helpful way for me to love the children in my life and to love the parents. Because it isn’t just a children young people way of loving people.

Adam Curtis:
Found lots of the advice you were saying. Just very liberating. I found it very liberating. She wanted to go back to the Lord and actually it’s the Lord leading parents through this task. Liberating and just some of the advice she had to share. Don’t parent like me, parent like you, because I get that sense that there’s this huge sort of just pressure of all the influencers out there who are demonstrating how they’re doing life and parenting. And actually, for many parents, they just feel a bit inadequate and that’s just not true. God calls them adequate and is make them capable for this task.

Leah Sax:
Okay. Lucy So we like to ask our guests one bonus question and our season for graciously season for bonus question is if you could give a new believer one piece of advice, what would it be?

Lucy Rycroft:
I would say in all you do. Run to Jesus first.

Leah Sax:
Thank you so much to Lucy Rycroft for being our guest on episode 15 of Delight Podcast. Please do join us next week for episode 16, where we’ll be looking at the topic of sanctification with Andrew Nicholls. This is Leah and Adam delightfully signing off. Buh bye.

Adam Curtis:
Bye.