What My Toddler is Teaching Me: Patience

 It has now been over a year since I last posted here - the biggest change? My little baby is now a toddler. So lately I have been very much immersed in the great yet rewarding challenge that is parenting a toddler.

One great blessing of this process is that I find that more often than not, I am also parenting myself. I have had a lot of conversations about this with another friend who has a toddler and we agreed that what and how we teach our kids is so revealing about ourselves. We teach them to be patient, to speak kindly, not to get angry when things don't go their way. And yet all the while, we realise that we ourselves struggle with these things - sometimes on a much bigger scale! 

This is one of the joys of Christian parenting. While we have the incredible honour and responsibility of bringing up our children in God's ways and we hold a unique authority over them for that purpose, we also are God's children, and we are being sanctified alongside them and dealing with many of the same struggles with sin. 

One good example of this is patience. Lately my little boy has been struggling with waiting, for anything, for any period of time. We are teaching him the word (and hopefully instilling the concept) 'patience.' (His pronunciation, 'may-neh'). When we are in a trying situation, we remind him "Be patient," and he will pause grumbling, remind himself aloud "may-neh!" and then resume grumbling again. You could argue it works, very temporarily. I have been trying to teach him that the thing about patience is we need to practise it, over and over and over again. It means waiting nicely and quietly, and waiting some more. Sometimes only a minute (''mih-mih'') or sometimes longer. 

I am in a bit of a waiting season myself at the moment. As I have been trying to teach this concept of patience to him, I have been convicted over and over again of my own impatience and discontentment. All the while, I myself am grumbling as I wait for things that I want. I do not wait nicely and quietly. It is unfair and uncomfortable that I don't get my own way, and I am impatient and complaining. 

So now as I teach my child, every day I am reminding myself aloud that patience means waiting without grumbling, over and over again. Being content with not always knowing when the thing we want will arrive, or when the trial we are struggling with will be over. 

This struggle with patience may come in seasons, it may arise from very specific situations, but it also describes all of life on this earth. 

As I learn and prayerfully grow in my own struggle with patience, I pray that God would use me as an example of patience to my son, to show him how he too can wait patiently in the Lord, knowing that He upholds and sustains us, and His timing is always right. 


"I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry."

Psalm 40:1


"For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works."

Titus 2:11-14

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