As my family and I travel doing seminars we often have the same conversation each night, just with different people. Since we have eight children, the oldest being 12 years old, one of the standard questions is “How do you handle having eight children?” The standard answer is, “We didn’t have eight children. We just had them one child at a time.”
God, in His wisdom, knew parents couldn’t handle children if they arrived in litters. So they generally arrive one at a time. One reason for this is to allow older children to gain skills to assist their parents with younger siblings. Our oldest daughter Sunshine, for example, recently taught her youngest sister, Joy to read. Of course my wife gave supervision, but Sunshine did much of the actual work. The result was a double blessing of the older child learning to teach while the younger child learned to read.
Remember, when you have older children training younger ones, they both benefit and you’re free to redeem the time.
Rick Grubbs is best known as the host of “Redeeming the Time,” a one-minute radio program featured on hundreds of radio outlets around the world. He has spoken thousands of times on Biblical time management in all 50 states and 26 other countries. He is the author of the book “Morning Momentum: God’s plan for launching an unstoppable day”. He and his wife Carrie live in Salisbury NC with several of their 12 children.
