There is a time for everything, and a season to every activity under heaven. —Ecclesiastes 3:1

Like farming, raising livestock, gathering maple syrup, and the migrations of fish and birds, the raising of children is marked by seasons. These seasons were established by God; therefore, they cannot be altered at the whim of man.

Each of them is defined chronologically, and just as each of Earth’s seasons requires of a farmer a unique set of tasks, so each of parenting’s seasons requires a specific parental role and distinct parental responsibilities. A farmer who conforms his behavior to the unique characteristics of each of agriculture’s seasons is all but assured a high yield.

Likewise, parents who conform their behavior to the unique requirements of each of the seasons of child rearing will be all but assured a “high yield” of reward and satisfaction out of seeing their children advance toward and eventually claim responsible maturity.

The Season of Service

The first of these, the Season of Service, begins at birth and lasts approximately two years. During this initial season parents function as servants to a child who cannot serve himself and cannot anticipate the consequences of his actions. His dependency and ignorance (not to be confused with lack of intelligence!) require that his parents place him at the center of their attention and orbit around him in a near-constant ministry of surveillance and “doing”—checking, feeding, carrying, changing, comforting, fixing, fetching, and so on.

The purposes of season one are threefold:

• To “root” the child securely in the world—to assure him that he is where he belongs, with people who love him and who will take good and proper care of him under any and all circumstances.
• To provide for the child’s fundamental biological needs—put bluntly, to keep him alive and thriving.
• To prevent, as much as is humanly possible, the child from hurting himself.

In all cultures and in all times, the mother has been and is the primary servant during season one. (There have been and are exceptions, but they are individual exceptions that have not significantly tilted the historical norm.) The father, even one who wants to be highly involved, stands slightly outside the periphery of his wife’s busy orbiting. He is her “parenting aide.” Like a teacher’s aide’s, the husband’s job is to assist his wife and fill in for her when she needs a break. Consequent to this child centeredness, the marriage is “catch-as-catch-can” during season one. (To those of you who have noticed what may appear to be an inconsistency between what I say here and what I have earlier said about mothers orbiting around their children and fathers playing the role of “parenting aide,” I will simply say [paraphrasing Ecclesiastes 3:1], “There is a time for everything . . . but it is not the entire time.”)