Orthodox Christian Parenting - Recipes for Raising Children

by Marie Eliades, Marie L. Eliades M.A. (Compiler), Christine Jennings (Drawings)

How do we learn to cook? Becoming a great cook doesn’t happen when we walk into the kitchen for the first time. We pick up a cookbook, glance through the recipes, and decide what to cook. Then we look for ingredients that we have on hand or need to shop for. Do we sit and read the whole book in one sitting, and instantly become gourmets? Good cooking is science, art, and personality. We try new things and grow in our skills. Learning isn’t simple; we experiment, we fail, we add to the recipes, family and friends share their favorites, which become ours. We omit the things we don’t have a taste for, but we have a guide, a cookbook to help us. We learn to raise our children with similar methods. It takes years to raise Orthodox Christian children. How do we approach this daunting task? Can reading a book provide the answers? When a child is born are we instantly expert parents, or does it entail some time and experience? Orthodox Christian Parenting – Recipes for Raising Children, is not to be read in a day, or applied unilaterally to all families. It is to be consulted, read, reread, and referred to often as we journey through their formative stages, just as we do with our favorite cookbook. This cookbook contains recipes from the Church fathers (old and new), saints, monastics, priests, priest families, and our many experienced friends. We pray that this book—together with your faith and love for Christ, your friends and family, your parish and spiritual father—will provide you with the best ingredients to create your unique family recipe for growing children into loving, faithful, Orthodox Christian adults.

500 pages, Perfect Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Silouan]

Should be required reading for all parents trying to raise their children in an Orthodox manner. As I am convert, this answered a multitude of my questions that I haven’t wanted to bog my wife down with (she is cradle). That said, there were definitely some puritan-esque elements that seemed a little excessive. For example, there was a chapter on “what to do if your teenager starts listening to heavy metal music.” Maybe I am just so far removed from a true Orthodox phronema and need deeper repentance to see the potential dangers there. I mean, I see them just as I could see a concern for them listening to any secular music but to single out “heavy metal music” felt very boomery. For me personally that wouldn’t be top of my list of concerns for my teenager in today’s day and age especially since there are even Orthodox metal bands. Now if there was a chapter; “what to do if your children start listening to mumble rap” that would make sense in my brain but I digress. Outside of the couple things that stood out as being slightly excessive and a bit too boomery, if you are Orthodox and have kids this will be a treasure trove.