Looking up to Children Podcast Episode

What would it look like to just be a little bit more playful with the kids that you see and interact with, or how might your mindset towards them be able to shift in a way that would just value them and interact with them in a way that’s consistent with this idea that they have the same Imago Dei that you and I do as adults. 

Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. I’m back with the second part of this series on children. and the beauty of children. We’re speaking about that child ages three to nine-ish and what they offer us as adults. Amy Mamadov and Brian Sutter are here to share in this conversation. It’s really healthy for us to have these children in our life. Right. So, Amy, what have children taught you?  

Yeah, I mean, there are so many, but I think the biggest one that comes to mind is how much more of a flexible person they’ve made me. When you’re in childhood play, you’re like, where am I going to go today? 

And just things that you learn to let go, you know? So, they mix the Play Doh. I have a lot of brown Play Doh in my office and in my home because it all gets mixed, and you really realize it didn’t hurt anything. You know, why stress and try to micromanage that? And so, I feel like letting go of things or, my example with the life game is just that I could focus on the enjoyment and not on the pre- programmed play. 

It needs to look like the Claymation on the box, or we need to follow the exact rules. And there is space for following rules. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but I think flexibility and spontaneity and just joy, you know, just really learning to laugh and laugh at yourself, too. I mean, kids will keep you humble, the things that they come up with. 

So, I always feel like when kids start bringing me pictures that they’ve drawn, I’m like, oh, I’ve got it. You know, we’re hitting a sweet spot, and I had one little boy one time bring me a picture. He was probably about first grade and I looked at it and I was like, oh, it was the Pillsbury Doughboy. 

And I thought, why did you think of me and draw this? But, you know, kind of humbly, I thought, I’m just going to choose to be flattered. The relationship, it just continues to grow. Yeah. I’ve got some very revealing pictures of myself. It’s like, okay, well, that’s obvious to her. Yeah. Okay. Well, let’s go back to that concept. 

So, when you get a picture, though, there’s a level. Can you unpack that a little bit? Yeah, I think anyone who’s worked maybe in a classroom as a teacher with young kids, you know, kids have that idea that maybe you live there, they might see you at the grocery store and they think, what are you doing out of the classroom? 

And so, knowing that a kid thinks about you outside of that immediate setting is just a special place, like that they have thought about you and want to bless you with the gifts that they have. And you know, that can be really easy to be like, oh, another picture, file it away. 

But that was their work, their creation, their creativity, their thought about you. And so, I always think they’re really special. So, I got it. Wait, let’s talk about blessing. I think there’s something really cool about blessing for a child. For example. It’s very easy to bless a child. I could go blow Wren’s mind when I get home from work. 

Totally. It could be with a story, an imaginary story. It could be, you know, a secret. It could be some object that I hold in my hand and can see. You know what I’m saying? It’s so easy to bless them. You know what I mean? And us adults, you it’s hard to surprise me, you know what I mean? And you think of a child, and God wants to bless us, right? 

And sometimes I wonder if I’m kind of a high maintenance, difficult person to bless. Oh, like we just get so used to things that aren’t ordinary, but they’re ordinary because we’re around them so often. And we miss the blessing. And we miss it. And I was just on a walk, this was a few weeks ago, with a nephew, and I mean, with every step he was blown away with things that are there every day. But it is just like another water puddle. Oh, good. Did you see that? And, you know, it’s just like everything and it’s just an amazing thing. And if we can slow down, and I think that’s one of the things that I’ve learned from kids is they are just so good at being able to move into seeing the wonder and awe that is around us. 

And they’re not constrained by time and all of these other things. The younger ones especially aren’t like, I’ve got to be cool and got to keep it together. They’re just out there and you just get a very genuine response, even if it’s not the response you’re hoping for. It’s just genuine and there’s something really beautiful about that. 

They live in an honest, real world. Exactly, yes. There’s no pretense. I think a child, really embodies being well. They are human beings in the purest sense, because they can’t do anything. They don’t provide a service. I think this is something that’s actually hard to find in our world, right? Is a human being who solely lives on and burns the fuel of being. 

Doesn’t play come out of that? I mean, we’ve talked about the usefulness of play, but at the end of the day, they’re not really making real food. They’re not really doing a real job. It’s all producing a whole lot in a way. There’s no production and there’s something really, really genuine there that children embody, I think. 

You know, a lot of times the words that we associate with play with children, they call play the work of childhood. Play, usually we hear fun or, you know, excitement, creativity. And with adult work, you can hear things like fulfillment, rewarding, and those are all positive things, but you don’t necessarily hear fun or, you know, it’s like it’s work. 

It’s kind of the curse of man in a lot of ways that it’s hard. And I do think that tasks and work in the sense of we need to be busy and contributing has been around since before the fall. Adam had his job to name all the animals, the Bible talks about him being placed in the garden to tend it and look after it. 

Work became unfortunate when it started fighting back to us, you know, when the curse happened, and it became hard, and it became difficult to complete. And so, I feel like children’s play more mirrors that pre-fallen work, like they have a task. They need to be busy. They need to be doing things because they’re learning skills, but it’s just for pure enjoyment. 

I completely agree. There is something very beautifully pre-fallen in this child, age band two to nine. And I get it. You know, we’re just moments old and full of sin, right, all of that. But Wren wants to help. She wants to unload the dishwasher. It’s a fight for the rest, but she wants to. And why do we say no? 

Because she’s going to break something, you know what I’m saying? But she wants to do chores. There is a delight. It’s almost like she understands work better than I do. To your point about being like Adam. She doesn’t even have a category for work, right? So, it can all be just play. It’s a type of play. 

Yeah. And again, back to the relational piece of like, there’s part of it probably where, oh, this is something mom or dad, their eyes light up with, oh, okay, yeah, I’d be glad. Maybe I can help, you know, and contribute to that sort of thing. And it just makes me think, too, with kids and the way we’re talking about them, we talk about this idea that all humans have value and worth. 

And we’re very theoretical in that. But I think this is very practical, like, what does that actually look like? And the reality is that that’s a truth about kids, not because of how productive they’re able to be, but just because of their being, and it really puts, I think, some real practical legs to a very high-level concept. 

And Brian, I think that is my personal growth right there. Whereas for some of my children, the older children, I saw them as a future person. And I need to pour into them. I need to teach them. I need to bestow this on them. I need to steward them. I need to because, after all, they’re going to be adults someday. 

They were a project in a sense. Whereas Wren is complete in and of herself. Does that make sense? Yes, a hundred percent. She’s right where she should be. And she should be embraced for who she is now instead of being in the future with them. Absolutely. Now, the thing that I’m thinking of as we’re talking about this, I’m envisioning the mom who’s got three kids at home. 

And they’re 4, 3, and 2, and like, are you kidding me? Three blessings, Brian. Exactly. Wow. Three blessings. Praise it all. So, I mean, what we’re saying absolutely is true, but this I think is like, if we can just capture a little bit of this vision. And kind of see the value in play and that there’s so much going on and if we can participate in that and encourage that to any degree, there are so many good things that are going on. 

But it’s hard too, and we’re not trying to minimize that, but we also have to fight to see this, and sometimes it’s passed us by before we see it, and we’re just trying to get to this next thing instead of like, wow, can I just get caught up in the wonder of them being able to play and what their little minds are wrapping around here and join them in that. 

And Brian, can you even say a little bit more? I love how you talked about; I don’t know if you used the term God image bearing, but the value of life. If we look across cultures and even across history, children haven’t always been valued with equal worth to human beings that are older, right? Am I right about that? 

Exactly. I think so. And I think it’s one of those things where that’s been a long historical view of Christianity that we’ve been created in the image of God as humans and therefore we have equal worth and value and yet practically it’s not always lived out that way. And I think kids would be a really good example of that. 

We’re like, okay, set them aside. Even like with the disciples with Jesus, right? It’s like, okay, let’s get the kids away so that Jesus can do the important work. Exactly. And Jesus is like, wait a second. You’ve missed it. It’s a different economy than that. And I think that’s so hard to hold on to but what a great example. 

And what does that look like when I’m with my kids at home or when I go to church and making sure that when one of those little guys looks at me that I smile and think about what, how could I interact with him in a playful sort of way where it’s like, oh, go right by to have an important conversation. 

Yeah. That’s good. Brian, I think you make a good point with playfulness. Can be even if you don’t have time for play you can bring playfulness into your work, which can be your laundry. So your kids are around you and you think small children, like really young children, one of the first stages of play is container play. 

I like to take things out. I like to put them back in. I dump them out. I put them back in. And you can do that with laundry. So, your little one year old is container playing next to you while you do your laundry. Or even, I always try to find ways to make teeth brushing playful. If I can make things playful, just the attitudes are different, the willingness to do the daily things that sometimes I get push back from my own kids on. Why is it a surprise? 

We brush our teeth every night, just finding ways to bring playfulness. And I think that’s another thing that comes with practice, Matt, that kids have taught me how to look around and find little playful ways to make the mundane. I mean, we even do that in our adult work. We talk on HR about a personality hire, we brought someone in on the team because they have a good sense of humor or they bring morale, not necessarily because of this huge, deep skill set they have. 

That is the skill set. They bring great things to the team. So maybe said another way, kids seek to find pleasure in everything they do. And we as adults have kind of concluded that there isn’t pleasure in everything we do. Yeah, the pleasure is getting done with everything. Exactly. Checking it off the list. 

Yes. Don’t have to do it anymore. But a pre-fallen Adam would see pleasure in everything he did. You see, they are wired like a pre-fallen Adam, you know what I mean? And so, we need to. I love that. It’s like brushing the teeth. It’s like, no, there’s pleasure here. But, what if I found beauty in the things that I did, even the things that I needed to do? 

I think it’s challenging. Challenges are many levels. Yeah. And I think it’s just a good thing to think about. And I haven’t even thought about this real specifically, but to think about what it would look like to be playful and you’re not time bound and you’re just interacting and you’re learning about language and relationship versus like adult world is very time bound and expectation task. I got to get this done. Exactly. Those are very different experiences that just put you in a very different mindset. One is useful, and the other one is beautiful. When we live in a useful world, certainly the adult mind is usefulness. It wins the day. It gets the paycheck. Like, us as Apostolic Christians, our strength and weakness is we’re pretty good at getting things done, but to slow down, to have fun, to be playful, efficiency, that’s probably something else that’s going to teach us, right? 

Yeah. Is kind of throw efficiency out the window. Oh, yeah. That’s good. Coming back to that flexibility. Amy, have you always responded to kids or is this something that you’ve grown into in terms of how you view them and how you live with them? I think like most people, your personality and your life experiences and sometimes even your birth order or things like that all play. 

And so, I think I’ve always been a playful person. I feel like that’s always played to my strengths. And that’s probably why I’ve continued to pursue it because it also got more and more natural, but probably at the basic level, it was pretty natural in the beginning. So yeah, I do think that it’s something that I’ve grown into. 

And I’ve learned to enjoy myself more and more because I think in my early career, I wasn’t always like that. Like, I mean, you gave Wren as an example. My first job out of college was at an elementary school and I was in elementary school mode. You sat at my table, and we did flashcards, we did worksheets, we had our pencils ready, and it was very, very fun. 

Even I got bored. And then when I shifted more to that younger age group of the toddlers and learned to do more play-based therapy from my coworkers, from learning, from practice, I look back and think, oh, I should have just put the table out and brought in a dollhouse and gotten down on the floor with those kids. 

And so, with Wren, there are times where I’m pushing her a little bit and I can tell it’s getting hard and she’ll kind of get silly, you know, and so I’ve used that to my advantage. She’ll hide something else. Oh, where did it go? Did it go above the van? You know, we’re working on those prepositions. 

Where are things? Yeah. She didn’t escape the work. It just became more desirable. I just found a way to re-spin it so that we’re still working on things. Okay. So, Amy, I’m going to preface my statement as a compliment. Okay. Okay. Here we go. This is a compliment. I’m getting curious myself. 

Because the statement being childish is negative, but Amy, I see in you and I’ve experienced it as you work with Wren and otherwise, you allow yourself to be healthily childish. You see what I’m saying? And we kind of grow out of that, right? And we think health is not being in, I put away childish things, lots of things are going in my head. 

I get it. But this idea, unless you become like a child, isn’t that what Scripture says? And what does it mean to be born again after all? But to become like a child. And in some ways the adult path moves us away from the heart of who we should become, and our children capture it better than we do. So much so and especially those young kids where they haven’t yet figured out this is how you’re supposed to do this certain thing, or this is not how you’re supposed to interact, and they just are. 

And how fun that is to be able to interact with them, whereas you start to interact with teenagers, it’s like, okay, you can’t get anything, because they don’t want to break the rules and be the one that’s on the outside and that looks a fool. I think that’s another thing when you talk about my own personality, as I’m playing with these kids, as I’m playing in front of their adult parent that came with them might be thinking, what is she doing? 

She’s on the floor, she’s crawling around, she’s barking like a dog, you know, all the things because I’m pretending right alongside them. So, I think I’ve gotten desensitized to feeling self-conscious about it, which I think has been a positive. I think the more you do it, the more you see the value, the more you just realize, even when you talk culturally, you know, I’ve been in homes where culturally it wasn’t appropriate for an adult to get down on the floor. 

So, I do a lot of narrating. This is why I’ve seen it helpful. This is, did you notice how your child responded? It’s always making it a learning experience for everyone in the room to see if that inspires them to try it too. And not that, you know, oh, we in the western culture have it all figured out. 

That’s not what I mean, but it reminded me on the way over here. I was thinking about 2 Samuel 6, when David comes in with the tabernacle and he’s dancing in front of the people and Michal sees him from the palace. And she’s literally like, you look like a fool. She tells him sarcastically, do you realize people are disdaining you? You look ridiculous out there dancing. And he’s just like, I will keep celebrating, this is what I’m doing. And then even the King James Version says, therefore I will play before the Lord. And then I looked it up. I thought, oh, there we go. That’s so great. Okay. Let’s just take that one. 

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing all of the adults thought he was foolish. And all the kids thought it was great. Am I right? Don’t you think? Oh, I would imagine so. They would be like; this guy is the best. That’s our war hero. Yeah. That’s fun. It is a lot of fun.  

I feel like working with children, one of those things that keeps you young and ages you at the same time in the sense of like, I have a bad back from sitting on the floor all the time. But you know, it keeps you youthful in the sense of I even see the potential in toys. When my girls have birthday parties, I’m like, oh, what’d we get? 

And they’re like, oh, don’t take it to your office. You see the potential in a lot of things. You start to get creative like that. And I think that comes from what I’ve learned from children. I would just encourage the audience as they’re thinking, okay, what am I supposed to do with this? What am I supposed to think about? 

What would it look like to just be a little bit more playful with the kids that you see and interact with? Or how might your mindset towards them be able to shift in a way that would just value them and interact with them in a way that’s consistent with this idea that they have the same Imago Dei that you and I do as adults? 

And how to meet them and interact with them. And even like you mentioned earlier, Matt, what does it look like to move in and just try to bless a child, whether that’s at home or church or in those different places, because they are so easy to bless. Just paying attention to them a lot of times can be such a blessing. 

So just an encouragement to, oh man, if this is a new thought or arena, to not get overwhelmed, but just think of maybe some small way to step into it and enjoy kids. They are something that can be enjoyed. You know, and I think about that mother with three children, as you had mentioned, right? 

Share your children. I remember Rebecca and I were pregnant with Josh, and we were given counsel. We asked an older couple, what’s one thing you’d tell us? And we were surprised to learn, they said, share him with people, share him with others. That’s what needs to happen as well in order for adults to get good care as well with children, a good interaction with children. 

I really appreciate it, Amy. Thanks for coming in. You’re welcome. Brian, thanks. Oh, I enjoyed it. The conversation was a lot of fun. In closing, I’d like to go back to Jesus there with the children. You brought it up, Brian. I don’t know this for sure, okay, so I’m going on poetic license here. I’ve always seen Christ as condescending himself in that moment to children, and he did. 

He probably got down on their eye level, but I think if I’ve learned anything over the years as it regards children is we adults do need to condescend to them, but we also need to look up to them. And I wonder if Jesus spent time with those children because they were the only ones that got him. 

And I’m wondering if he was filled up and blessed by them in a way that the adults were just draining him. You know? Oh, yeah. With the squabbles of who’s going to be on your left, who’s going to be on your right. And he’s just like, you don’t get it. Which I think is super fun. Yeah. Right? That he was there, surrounded by a bunch of pre-fallen Adams. 

It kind of felt like he was at home with people very similar to himself. Anyway, perhaps some poetic license there with that story, but I hope each one of you are encouraged. We have so many children in our life, whether it’s in our own families or in our church communities, to bless them and allow yourself to be blessed by them. 

Thanks for listening.