She is such a good girl.
You never have to worry about that one. So mature for her age. I wish they were all like her. The Sunday school teacher said it, and her grandmother said it, and a version of it went on her report card in more formal language, and every adult in earshot said thank you.
Raised to Be a Good Christian Kid Meant Something Narrower Than It Sounded
Being raised to be a good Christian kid arrived as a compliment and was usually meant as one. It is still worth asking what the adults saying it were measuring.
A lot of the time they were measuring how much trouble she was to have around. Not her honesty. Not her courage. Not whether she was kind to anybody when no adult was watching. How little she cost the room.
That is not unique to church. Many institutions that manage groups of children develop a quiet preference for the ones who make that easier, and teachers and coaches and grandparents hand out the same compliment.
What the church version added was a second layer. Agreeableness got attached to holiness. Being easy to manage stopped being a temperament and started being evidence, and a child who was quiet and cooperative could reasonably conclude that she was quiet, cooperative, and right with God, all as one fact.
Nobody Checks on the Easy One
That fusion has a cost, and it usually comes due late.
The most obvious version is the safety one, and it is the reason this comes up in a parenting series at all. A child who has been consistently rewarded for not making a fuss can become slower to make one. Not always, and not in every child. But if the praise she has collected for eight years is all attached to being no trouble, then making trouble is a thing she has to learn to do against the grain of everything she has been told about herself.
The quieter version is that she stops getting asked. Adults check on the kid who is struggling out loud, which is correct, and there is a finite amount of adult attention in any household or classroom. The child who seems fine can receive less of it. Some go a surprisingly long time without an adult asking a real question, because they have not given anybody an obvious reason to.
There is a version of this that shows up in church buildings in particular. The reliable kid gets handed responsibility early. She helps in the nursery at eleven, she is left to finish setting up the chairs, she is the one an adult asks to stay behind for ten minutes. That trust is usually well placed. It is also distributed toward the child with the least practice at saying that something felt off, and that is worth a parent noticing.
Nobody checks on the easy one.
The people sitting across from me at forty are rarely the ones who gave anybody trouble at fifteen. They were the reliable one. A lot of them still are, and that is usually part of what they came to talk about.
The Figure at the Center of It Was Not Easy to Be Around
Something about the whole arrangement has always struck me as odd, and I will own this reading as mine.
The Gospels present a man who was difficult. He overturned tables in the temple courts. He argued with religious authorities in public, sharply, and more than once. He told people that following him might cost them their families. He answered questions with questions, and he walked away from crowds that wanted him to stay.
Whatever else the Gospels are doing with that portrait, they are not describing somebody’s easy child.
And yet a great many Christian communities built around that figure learned to hand their highest praise to children for being quiet and compliant. Week 13 goes into how to talk with a child about who this person was and what the accounts actually say. For our purposes here, it is enough to notice the gap between the character at the center of the story and the behavior the story got used to reward.
What to Praise Instead
The change is smaller than it sounds and it is mostly about aim. Praise the specific thing she did rather than the kind of person she is being.
Ages 3 to 6. Say what you actually saw. You noticed that Ellis was by himself and you went over. That is a different sentence from you are such a good girl, and a four year old can tell the difference even if she cannot explain it. And find one moment a week to praise something that was inconvenient for you. She said she did not want a hug and you can tell her that saying so was the right call.
Ages 7 to 12. Start praising the harder things by name. Honesty when it cost her something. Changing her mind when she found out she was wrong. Saying the awkward thing in a room that did not want to hear it. If she tells you something you did was unfair, and she has a point, tell her out loud that she had a point. That move teaches more than a lecture about honesty ever will.
Ages 13 and up. Say the quiet part directly, because by now she has done the arithmetic on her own. I know you have always been the easy one. I want you to know I would rather have the truth from you than the calm. Then hold still when she tests it, because she will, and the first test may well be badly timed and not entirely fair.
One more thing about praise, since it is easy to overcorrect. None of this means you stop telling her she is wonderful, and a child who only ever hears behavioral feedback is being handed a performance review rather than a parent. Say the warm unearned things too. The change is in what gets singled out as evidence of who she is.
Across all three, the thing to watch is your own relief. Agreeable children are genuinely easier, the relief is real, and it will keep showing up in your face whether you intend it or not. Week 40 takes this further into the difference between being nice and actually loving somebody, which is the adult version of the same problem.
She May Be Easy Anyway
One thing worth saying before you start rebuilding your entire vocabulary.
Some children are simply mild. It is a temperament, not a wound, and plenty of easygoing kids grew up in healthy, honest homes and stayed easygoing because that is who they are. Nothing here means a calm child is secretly struggling, and treating her calm as a problem to be investigated would be its own kind of pressure.
The question is narrower than that. Is she agreeable because it suits her, or because she has worked out that agreement is what gets her the warm version of you. You will not always be able to tell, and you can make it a less useful strategy either way by praising other things out loud, often, on ordinary days.
Next week we deal with the thing that has probably been building under the last several posts, which is what to do with your own anger about how you were raised before it arrives somewhere you did not intend it.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and raising children who never have to be afraid of God.
If you are raising kids after leaving the faith you grew up in, and you want a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and nobody has to pretend to have it all figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All