In one of the most extraordinary statements of all time, Jesus, taking a little child, told his disciples, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
By challenging us to change in this way, Jesus invites us to accept our own vulnerability and to make ourselves dependent—on God and on others. But he doesn’t ask us to stay there. Rather, he is calling us to a whole new process of development, one in which our heart and soul, and perhaps ultimately our body and mind too, will become all that our Creator intended them to be.
This book, written as a letter to his daughter, Dr Peter Sidebotham, a developmental paediatrician, vividly portrays how children grow and develop—from their earliest beginnings within the womb, through the wonder and excitement of their first words and steps, to the growing maturity and independence of the adolescent.
Peter Sidebotham interweaves his own professional observations and understanding of the processes of child development with a very personal engagement with his daughter as she grows, reflecting on his own role as a father, and using that as a basis to explore his understanding of what it might mean to ‘become like a little child.’
