Raising children safely

“Mummy, this is gravy, not sauce.”

My firstborn is a bit of a smarty pants. Sometimes it makes me laugh; sometimes it makes me pause. And sometimes, if I’m honest, it makes me worry.

Because I wonder if that same sharp mind and quick tongue will make it hard for him to fit in, the way I sometimes didn’t.

When your mind works at a hundred miles per hour and your heart beats just as fast, you see and feel the world differently. You catch the undercurrents others might miss. You sense tension before it spills over. You want to fix things, but you don’t always know how.

And lately, I’ve found myself holding my breath more than I’d like to admit.
The terrible news from Melaka. The stabbing in a school just minutes away from our home.
I look at my boys and think, how do we keep them safe in a world like this?

Not just safe from harm, but safe in heart.
Safe in mind.
Safe in spirit.

How do you explain to a child that the world isn’t always kind, when you still want him to see it as good?

Sometimes, in the quiet after bedtime, I catch myself praying Psalm 121 under my breath:

“The Lord will keep you from all harm; He will watch over your life.
The Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.”

I whisper it like a shield, hoping that somehow those words will stretch across oceans and school gates and playgrounds.

And yet, I know I can’t protect them from everything.
So I try to prepare them instead.
To be kind when the world feels cruel.
To speak up when it’s easier to stay silent.
To be the sort of people who bring light, even in dark places.

But I’m still learning that I can’t do this out of fear
.
Because fear makes me want to control.
And control makes me hold on too tight.

My job isn’t to make their path smooth. It’s to help them find steady footing when the ground shifts beneath them.

My eldest reminds me of myself: curious, intense, a little too serious for his age.
My second? I joke that he’s “resourceful because he’s neglected,” but truthfully he’s the free spirit who teaches me to loosen my grip. He climbs before he’s ready, laughs when he falls, and somehow always figures things out.

They’re so different, yet both carry a piece of my heart that walks outside my body every day.

And sometimes that heart aches.
But other times, when I hear their laughter from the next room or see the way they look out for each other, that same heart settles.

Because maybe safety isn’t something we can build around them.
Maybe it’s something we build within them.

And maybe that’s what God’s been teaching me all along; that His protection doesn’t always look like prevention. Sometimes it looks like presence.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for You are with me.” (Psalm 23:4)

So I’ll keep walking.
Keep praying.
Keep believing that goodness still exists.

And when I feel helpless, I’ll remember these words from a song that’s been quietly playing in the back of my mind:

“You hold it all together, in my hands and in my heart.
You hold it all together, God of my present, God of my future.”

Because maybe that’s all I can do. To keep showing up, trusting that the same God who watches over me, watches over them too.