In Their Own Way: Accepting Your Children for Who They Are - Softcover

Zurheide, Jeffry Robert; Zurheide, Karen Johnson

9780806639574: In Their Own Way: Accepting Your Children for Who They Are

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806639571 ISBN 13: 9780806639574

Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Pub, 2000

In each chapter of this innovative book, you’ll find information and spiritual ideas on how parents can find ongoing strength and share love and grace within the family and community as they raise a child “not perfect” due to health problems, handicaps, or behavioral problems.

In Their Own Way gently offers hurting parents what they need most—God’s grace. It is only with the grace of God, say the Zurheides, that parents can learn to accept their children, whatever the cause of the children’s difficulties. With God’s grace, parents can create new dreams for their children, even as they grieve the loss of their earlier, high expectations. Ultimately, parents can extend grace to others—in their families, their churches, and their communities.

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From the Publisher:

From the Introduction (pre-publication version):

The “Perfect” Child

“How many hopes and fears, how many ardent wishes and anxious apprehensions are twisted together in the threads that connect the parent with the child!” —Samuel G. Goodrich

Although our own children are hardly old enough to be the sole sources on which to base this book, for decades we have observed the struggles and disappointments—small and great—of those with adolescent or grown children. We have watched our parents and their peers suffer along with their children. We have seen our own friends ache when their children chose poorly. As a pastor, Jeff has counseled with parents hurting deeply over their children for any number of reasons. While director of a statewide parent support network, Karen often heard parents of children with birth defects lament the medically based limitations that threatened their children’s futures. Clearly, the effect on parents of their children’s imperfections and failures can be, in one way or another, monumental.

We wish we could make it all better for you and your children. We wish we could offer solutions for fixing your children’s problems. While many books do offer techniques and strategies to assist parents in helping their children, that is not the purpose of this book. Instead, we offer parents a way to live on in the midst of it all, whether or not things get better for their children. We offer parents God’s grace.

Expectations

Even before we become parents, an entire mountain of expectations for our children is beginning to take shape. Parenting overflows with hopeful anticipation from its very outset, with a precious baby being a bundle of pure potential. If healthy at birth, our new children seem to have limitless potential.

Like countless generations of parents before us, we modern mothers and fathers want nothing but “the best” for our children. Some of our expectations for them, such as good health, are instinctive. Others are more personal, perhaps relating to what we ourselves have accomplished—or failed to achieve. Some expectations, such as a higher education, may be the result of societal norms. Still others are prompted by advertising that relentlessly teases us with pictures of the American good life—beauty, success, fame, fortune. Yes, that is what we want for our children. We want it all.

These expectations for children may be conscious—clear to us, even obvious to those around us. Or they may be so deeply ingrained that, as long as they are easily met, we are not explicitly aware of them.

Stop for a moment. Think about the early expectations you had for your child. To start with, you anticipated a healthy baby. You would do your best to assure your growing child’s well-being so that he or she would develop on a normal timetable into a strong, physically fit youth and adult. Should there be any health concerns along the way, God forbid, modern medicine would resolve them.

Your desire for your child’s good health and safekeeping was natural parental protectiveness at work, observable throughout the animal kingdom. But avoidance of deadly disease and accident is not what every human parent has always expected. In times past, infant and child mortality rates were extremely high. Life was less safe, and life expectancies were short. This is true even today in many parts of the world. But in the United States and other developed nations, we generally assume our children will live long and survive us by at least a couple decades.

Beyond good health, you no doubt anticipated that your child would be bright and inquisitive, a child who would catch on quickly and do reasonably well in school. You thought you would encourage your child’s cognitive development by reading together, discussing school experiences, helping with homework, and fostering learning in every form. You were certain your child would at least match your intelligence and your own level of educational accomplishment.

As to appearances, you expected your child to look beautiful, handsome—resembling you, only better! If necessary, you would find a way to pay for the braces or the diet camp or whatever else it might take to maximize your child’s attractive appearance.

You further assumed, as any parent would, a well-adjusted, responsible, hard-working child, who would make wise occupational choices along life’s way. Careers would be personally satisfying and monetarily rewarding. Your child would be financially independent, even successful. It surely would be an added bonus if that child could support you in your old age!

Not to overlook what really matters, you also expected a loving, grateful child, with whom you would be emotionally close. You two would nearly always get along, with the normal exceptions of toddlerhood struggles and adolescent rebellion, neither of which would be of great consequence.

More specifically, your expectations may even have included a child who would share your particular talents and interests. Imagine how wonderful it would be to enjoy together music or sports or movies. And even more wonderful, to be bound together by common values and a mutually vital faith in God.

Such closeness to you would be mirrored in the well-chosen, deep friendships your child would make and in a loving, compatible marriage. Eventually, the happy couple would go on to have nearly perfect children—your grandchildren!—making yet another perfect family. All in all, your nearly perfect child, with a minor rough edge or two just to make life interesting, would bring you great joy and make you proud.

While perhaps no one really thinks his or her child’s life will be so completely without problems, our hopes and dreams are surely for our children’s lives to be trouble-free. And, at the beginning, before real life gets in the way, this is what we innocently expect.

About the Author:

Jeffry R. Zurheide is pastor of the historic First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City. With a D. Min. in pastoral care and counseling, Zurheide has served as a hospital chaplain and has taught seminary courses in pastoral care. He is the author of When Faith Is Tested: Pastoral Response to Suffering and Tragic Death (Fortress Press).

Karen Johnson Zurheide has served as executive director of a statewide parent-support network in Connecticut. Her first book, Learning with Molly, helps parents pass on values to small children.

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