No, I’m not talking about the childrens’ attitudes, although that comes into consideration when teaching. I’m talking about my attitude as a Sunday school teacher. I was not a good candidate to teach kids at church—Sunday school, nursery, midweek programs, or Vacation Bible school. Or anywhere. At all. Because of my attitude.
As a child, I loved to babysit. I wasn’t thrilled about helping with my ten-years-younger brother. Yes, I helped when my mother asked, but often with a reluctant and resentful attitude. Selfishly, I didn’t want to give up playing or my preteen activities. But the experience I gained with my brother made me a popular neighborhood babysitter, especially for babies. As a preteen, watching my brother wasn’t fun, but I enjoyed earning money and babysitting for other kids.
Babysitting gave me lots of experience with children. I knew kids required work and lots of patience. I never had fantasies of sweet little cherub babies to play dress-up or house. That was not my idea of fun. In fact, I turned the other direction and decided to avoid kids in my later teens. In my twenties, I became very career-focused. My goals did not include marriage or children in my twenties or possibly my thirties. From my career-centered perspective, I considered children noisemakers at best, and an obstacle to career goals at worst.
Later, after years of marriage, God worked in both my husband and me to change our outlook. He softened us to children overall and, even more challenging, to the idea of having children ourselves. Click ahead to our late-thirties, and God had drastically changed our priorities. Some might describe this as a 180 degree change, but the difference was more than one-dimensional. First, I gave up my dream job in biomedical device research to slow down for a pregnancy. God expanded our lives to include two precious littles, plus the chaos and responsibility of a growing family. Then I gave up my rewarding nursing faculty job to change my focus to at-home mothering. My husband and I chose to live on his salary as I jumped off the career track.
During that process, God softened me to children. He awakened in me a desire to teach my own children first, and then other children. It started, as it often does, with a shortage of church nursery workers. As I took turns helping in the nursery, I started to enjoy working with kids. My developmental psychology and pediatric nursing studies came back to me as I spent time with children. I loved to observe their unique characteristics as they achieved developmental milestones. Many of the kids I watched in the infant and toddler nurseries were my children’s friends, whose parents I knew. What a bond that created, to spend time with my children’s friends and see them learn and grow. I found joy in seeing babies learn to sit up, toddlers give up crawling to walk, and children develop speech.
Thanks to amazing mentors like Kathy K in the toddler nursery, I learned how to teach. I remember her reading, while sometimes using a puppet, for a short lesson. At most a few minutes long, the lesson was repeated at least three separate times. That made so much sense to me. Teach kids to their limit of attention span. Yes, it’s short, but you can repeat the lesson several times during the Sunday school hour.
Kathy helped me realize the importance of teaching the lesson at the child’s developmental level. I have employed that tactic many times in the intervening decades. Prepare the lesson for the child’s level of understanding. Recognize the limits of their attention span. Even a baby can be read to, and the book can be repeated at intervals. Respect children’s activity levels. Look for activities in the book that can be mimicked.
I still use those teaching insights. For example, my children’s book Silly Lily and the Polka-Dot Lunch visually and verbally depicts the main character’s anger. During my author visits, I point out illustrations that depict Lily’s anger and we talk about turning your anger around. Then I turn the page and point out how Lily changed her words and body language. As a group, we then stand up and try the same thing. Starting with angry body language, we turn around and change to kind, gentle actions.
Just like Lily needed an attitude turn-around, so God had to change my attitude about children. I once found children too much work and a distraction from my goals, but God convicted and softened my heart. Now one of my life goals is to pour Jesus into children. Only God could turn this self-centered career woman into an avid Sunday school teacher. No longer reluctant, I now love teaching kids at church during Sunday school, midweek programs, and Vacation Bible school.
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