Make them known to your children and your children’s children— Deuteronomy 4:9 (ESV)

 In the text above, Moses continues to give the people the “second Law,” from which the book derives its name, since they had already heard it when they were younger and are now ready to enter the Promised Land, which is Canaan.[1] This line is important for parenting because Moses tells the people to be sure to “make known” (i.e., teach or pass on) certain things to the next two generations. In other words, God wants the generation that was at Mount Sinai to preserve the memories of what happened.

In the context, Moses describes their time at Mount Sinai, including their experience of God’s glory and the giving of the Ten Commandments. Like a museum preserves the memory of people and times past, Yahweh wants the people to preserve the memory of their time at Sinai.

Notice that parents are commanded to teach the next two generations. This ensures that every generation a person survives to see will hear what God has done for them. While they are alive, it is important that they teach the generations after them what God has done. 

Teaching by Talking

How can parents and grandparents do this? They must talk. They must find ways to tell their children and grandchildren about what God has done for them. There are innumerable ways to do this. The point is that it must be done. Parents should talk about what the Lord has done in their lives as they live, informally, as situations arise where talking about the past is natural and easy. But these opportunities can be few and far between. It is not wise to trust that circumstances will lend themselves to natural discussions about divine things. The talking must be done on purpose. 

How can this be done then? The most obvious way is to schedule it. There needs to be a time and a place built into the calendar that makes space for the things the Lord has done to be shared and discussed. The discussion should include an exhortation and charge for children to learn about the past and prepare for the future. This kind of thing is sometimes already integrated into some cultural traditions. In my personal context in the United States, we have several annual celebrations, such as Easter, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. There are also birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations, and retirement parties. These are all times that promote reflection in their own way on the things that God has done for us.

We live in an age of distraction. It is well-noted and highly discussed. We are over-stimulated and unreflective. We tend to keep ourselves busy, constantly entertained, never bored, always titillated. There are innumerable ways to spend our time that keep our focus on the now and the near future. We can travel almost anywhere in the world. We can explore vast vistas of space in modern video games. There are more videos to watch than we could even if we lived as long as Methuselah.[2]

What are the effects of all this? It makes it difficult to talk. Talking can focus on the past, the present, and the future. It also allows two or more people to connect their minds and share ideas. When we talk about the past, the idea is that we would do so with younger people and let them know what God has done for us.

In short, parents need to make space to talk with their children. Our schedules are often too full. There are school responsibilities, church commitments, and extracurricular activities like sports, music lessons, and clubs. There are innumerable worthy things for children to do. They can learn innumerable worthy things. But in the quest to optimize and capitalize on potential and opportunities, parents can forget about the power of unplanned, unscheduled, free time. In that time, parents and children can sit and talk. The TV does not have to be on. No screen needs to light up their faces. Unstructured and unregulated time together as parents and children is one of the great investments so often missing in a world where every activity is at our fingertips.

The Importance of Unstructured Time Together

The great difficulty in scheduling a structured and unregulated time as that it is paradoxical. When do parents plan unstructured time, and how is it unstructured if they are structuring their schedules to include it? It may be better to describe these things in other terms. Rest is one term that may be helpful. If they consider a Hebrew calendar, when with families have had time set aside to talk and be with one another? It would have to be a time when work was not being done but set aside in favor of intentional time for resting, worshiping, and reflecting. This is what this Sabbath was. The Sabbath was a time for rest, when no work should be done. What would the people do? Of course, they would worship. They would rest their bodies. But they would also be exposed to a certain kind of boredom. They would be sitting around, effectively doing nothing. The trick for us is that, in the society in which we live, we know that doing nothing is actually one of the most valuable things that we are missing. That is because doing nothing is not really doing nothing. It is doing something. It might be argued that mindless activities such as playing video games and watching Netflix are closer to doing nothing than the ancient Hebrews died every Sabbath in the wilderness. It stretches credulity to imagine playing video games or watching Netflix as equal to sitting, reflecting, and talking with one another.

Clearly, then, the current generation of parents and children must learn to embrace and teach children to appreciate the most dreaded of states that children tend to avoid at all costs: boredom. It is not only a problem for children. Adults do not generally enjoy boredom either, and with each passing year, the last generation to know life without high-speed internet moves closer to the age of grandparenting. The iPhone was released in 2007, which means that the age of the smartphone is already older than some parents. 

It turns out that boredom is almost certainly one of the great losses in our current cultural climate. Parents must learn to make space to sit with their children. Indeed, it is not only children who fear boredom, but parents as well. Netflix is a very effective babysitter in terms of convenience, but unhelpful in terms of the formation of children.

Conclusion

As parents seek to make known to their children and grandchildren what the Lord has done for them, we will have to navigate territory that has never been navigated before. There are more distractions and more reasons than ever not to do so. The failure of this generation will not be due to evil intentions, but to a lack of intentionality. If we are going to make known to the next generations what the Lord has done, it will only be if we make room in our over-full schedules to do so. Otherwise, time will slip by and the next generation will have no knowledge of how God was faithful to their parents and grandparents. And if they are not aware of how previous generations depended on the Lord, how will they know to call on Him?

[1] “Deuteronomy” is made of two root words: deutero: second; and nomy: law.

[2] Methuselah lived to be 969 according to Genesis 5:27.