Here is a look inside the life of a husband and his wife and a father and his children. It’s a story most men can relate to: a father with a less-than-generous salary and a wife with her hands full of kids and homework, striving to raise a family of morals, hard work, and responsibility. It’s the human condition—spots, blemishes, stains, and imperfections—but it’s what makes us better men, fathers, and husbands. I found the extraordinary Chris Scott through my radio show.
The Scott family has a special birthday tradition. When a Scott boy turns five years old, his father, Chris, takes him on a personal father and son fishing trip. At the crack of dawn, Chris and his son set off for a day of fun, laughs, and hopefully fish. It might not seem like much of a birthday present, but when you’re competing with seven other siblings for your father’s attention, the time is priceless.
For Chris Scott and his wife, Shirley, this is all part of the joy, and inevitable struggle, of raising eight children on a modest middle-class salary. They can’t afford the newest toys, the best schools, the big house, or the latest fads. The Scotts don’t keep up with the Joneses, but they find a way to make it work. Here’s their story:
By day, forty-three-year-old Chris Scott works as a document control coordinator at an engineering firm in Houston, Texas. It’s not especially glamorous. Chris said, “I push paper electronically.”
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But after work is when the real coordination begins—being a husband to his wife and a father to each of his eight children, who range in age from sixteen years to two weeks.
Chris and Shirley never intended to have eight children when they married in 1991. But now they wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Children are a blessing from the Lord,” Chris said. “We have this idea in our culture that just a few kids is the ideal family. But if you look at Scripture, it says ‘blessed is the man whose quiver is full’ [Psalm 127:5]. I can’t get away from the Scriptures that say it’s a good thing to have kids.”
It’s easy to have children. Raising them is the hard part. Adopted at birth, Chris points to his own parents as a faithful model for his own parenting. Initially, his mother worked, but later decided to stay home to care for Chris and his sister while his father provided for the family. Although this resulted in a drop in the family’s income, they decided that it was more important for Chris’s mother to be home and keep him out of trouble.
Chris acknowledged how countercultural this approach is in the contemporary landscape of dual-income American families, but he stands by it: “I’m living proof that it doesn’t take two incomes to make it—what it takes is living within the means of the income that you have.”
Chris also emphasized the importance of Shirley’s role as a full-time mother. Originally, as Chris put it, “She was thinking she would work part time, but God changed her heart. Hannah [the oldest] was in her arms not more than sixty seconds and it clicked: ‘nobody else is going to raise this little girl.’”
Part of that philosophy of child rearing includes homeschooling their children.
“We’re strong proponents of homeschooling—academically the statistics are strong, but we homeschool for character. We want our kids to be trustworthy and honest, loyal and faithful, and to have those character qualities. Eventually the skill or job that God’s got for them will come out.
“Our goal and our hope is they will bring glory to God in what they do and go farther and higher than we’ve gone.”
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Last November, Chris moved his family from Pearland, Texas, a suburb close to Houston, to Alvin, one a little more distant from the city. As a father to seven boys, Chris sees attending to his property, a fixer-upper on 1.7 acres, as not only an opportunity to show his sons how to work hard, but as a time to bond with them. “Now we’ve got more room than we know what to do with. We have three push mowers on 1.7 acres. It takes a while, but they get it done. We work on the house, we work on the cars, but we have fun together.”
Yet even with a full-time job and the responsibilities of raising eight children, Chris never loses sight of his most important commission—his wife. “God, wife, children, country in that order,” he said unflinchingly.
“When my sister and I were little, I remember my parents getting away once in a while. They told me, ‘You need to date your spouse. Keep that spark flying. There were two of you before three or four or five of you.’ So we try to at least once a week go on a coffee date—run to Starbucks or the store—and have some time together. But even more importantly, we don’t let the kids stay up late, they’re in bed by 8:30 or 9:30, and afterward we sit and visit for thirty minutes or an hour and discuss what the day entailed and what’s on our hearts.”
In spite of his convictions, he admitted there are times when he is not the perfect father.
“They know that I get mad sometimes, and I’ve got to ask for their forgiveness. Sometimes I’ll put the wrong priority on stuff—I like fishing—and I’m very project oriented so I’ll put things off until I get a project finished.”
But he realizes his need for contrition when he slips up.
Inevitably, Chris says, there are times when he questions how he has spent his adulthood, but quickly realizes how blessed and meaningful his life is.
By his own admission, Chris doesn’t have the most exciting job, or the nicest car, or the biggest house. But he is molding his children into men and women of moral uprightness, of vocational diligence, of love. He’s doing it through yard work, through nightly Bible study, through camping trips—lifetimes of memories that don’t depreciate, don’t get repossessed, don’t get laid off.
“I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I prefer the company of my wife and children over anyone else.”