Lately, I have been thinking about parenting and how to be a good one...there are so many formulas for being a good one and so many ways to be a bad one...it is really an impossible feat without God and His redemptive work on our children's behalf. Then, I've been thinking about parents who run themselves ragged trying to turn out these "perfect kids" (see article below) at the expense of what???? Their marriages, their own physical, spiritual and emotional health??? It is tough not to make kids the center of our world today, but no matter what we do I hope to remember that there were no perfect parents in the Bible, that our parent's parents did not have them signed up for Kindermusik, and every rec sport and tutoring at Sylvan...and they turned out fine...they didn't need anti-depressants, have ADHD, or have juvenile diabetes???? I don't know why we push ourselves so hard and why we are so quick to condemn ourselves and those around us...I hope I can just enjoy parenting and do the best I can to be "faithful" (whether they listen or not) and not an anxiety-driven wreck over them and their future...they are after all on loan to me; They are God's children really. So as my Mom used to tell me--I just need to "take a chill pill" about my parenting!
2 Articles I read really shaped my thinking this week...
One was in Homelife entitled "Drop Off Discipleship"..the magazine discussed that so many parents want the programs at the church to do the job of raising and "programming" their kids to grow up to honor God. The programs are not working b/c kids are leaving the church in a mass exodus. There have been many, many occasions where I have wished that there were more "programs" for my kids at my church...dropping them off and letting someone else do the training would be much simpler than planning devotions, teaching them songs about God's word and faithfulness, praying, and memorizing scripture with them myself. BUT, thankfully Jonas and I have had to take responsibility for doing that ourselves. Don't get me wrong--our church teaches Jeb God's Word every Sunday and he comes home and can completely verbalize what he learned and how it can be applied in life--I am amazed. But an hour a week is not what is going to cause him to develop his own self-disciplined,prayerful, faithful walk with Christ. It has to be modeled at home. What an amazing challenge. I was so saddened to read the stats of how many kids 18-30 are leaving the church...I guess all that programming didn't stick?
I love this excerpt from another article I read today that my sis sent me b/c it is exactly what I've been thinking...
They Myth of the Perfect Parent--Christianity Today
We must rethink our assumptions and
our calling. We are responsible to teach our
children the fear of the Lord, to impress
his laws on them when we “sit at
home and when [we] walk along the
road, when [we] lie down and when
[we] get up”—meaning all the time
(Deut. 6:7). And we are commanded
to not exasperate our children, but to “bring
them up in the training and instruction of
the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). But we must be clear
about our own limits. We are not capable of
producing perfect followers of Christ, as if
we were perfect ourselves. Our work cannot
purchase anyone else’s salvation or sanctification.
As we consider adoption we have talked to a few folks who just say things like "the gene pool" issues that come with not knowing what you are getting...what in the world are they talking about? God is clear about making each person wonderfully--none of us EVER know what we are getting when we choose to parent??? What about all those parents who seem to do it all right but their kids are a total disaster? This article answers that--we must be faithful...not perfect...not even close.
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The Myth of The { C o v e r S t o r y }
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y family and i were traveling in
Guatemala a few years ago. We visited
a man who had given his life
to serving a poor congregation. We
sat at the kitchen table with him, a
man who had been bent into humility
by the burdens of pastoring in a
struggling nation while raising four
children. Still in the muddy trenches
of parenthood with our five sons and
one daughter, we confessed to him
our feelings of inadequacy.
“Your children are grown. What
have you learned looking back on
your years of child-raising? Do you
have any advice for us?” We looked
at him, needy, expectant.
He would have none of it. “I’m not one to talk to. I don’t exactly have a perfect record.”
One of his children was immersed in an addiction, he told us, visibly sad. Another had a
failed marriage.
He was silent for a moment, nodding slowly, and then continued. “I never lived up to my
mother’s expectations either. I’ve been reading her journal lately, and I see how she prayed
for me, what she prayed. And I’ve never lived up to what she hoped for me,” he said, his
voice a near-whisper. “I think she considered me a failure.”
In my mother-mind, I supplied the last words: “And considered herself a failure as a
parent.” This conversation shook me profoundly, touching one of my deepest concerns.
Prevailing Parental Panic
I’m hardly alone in my fixation. More than any other generation, today’s parents are worried
sick that they will mess up their children’s lives. A massive 2006 study revealed that parents
post significantly higher rates of depression than adults without children. Judith Warner’s
2005 book, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety, captured the national obsession
with successful parenting and its overwrought attempts to secure happiness and success for
one’s offspring—and, by extension, oneself as a parent. Joan Acocella’s November 2008 New
Yorker article, “The Child Trap,” disdainfully chronicled the anxiety and success-driven
extremes of what she named “overparenting.”
There is so much fretting that even the backlash has spawned a notable movement
and subgenre of its own, the slacker mom, visible in such books as Confessions of a Slacker
Mom, The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting, and Bad Mother: A
Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. In these
and other popular books, women compete to claim the most artful and witty negligence of
their mothering responsibilities.
I find most Christian parents at the front of the line—the anxiety and success line, not the
Perfect Parent
M
Why the best parenting techniques
don’t produce Christian children.
By Leslie Leyland Fields
r o b e r t m a c k e c h n i e / s t o n e / g e t t y
24 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y | J a n u a r y 2 0 1 0
slacker line. With my own offspring ranging
from first grade through college, I take
turns stepping into both, perfecting my own
blend of angst and aplomb, depending on the
issue. This one question, however, sends me
elbowing to the front of the anxiety queue,
where I find most of my friends and fellow
believers. Our most consuming concern is
that our children “turn out”—that is, that our
Christian faith and values are successfully
transmitted, and that our children grow up
to be churchgoing, God-honoring adults.
It appears that many of us are not succeeding.
The exodus of young adults from evangelical
churches in the U.S. is well reported,
perhaps over-reported and hyper-hyped. The
Barna Group reported in 2006 that 61 percent
of young adults who had attended church as
teenagers were now spiritually disengaged,
not participating in worship or spiritual
disciplines. A year later, LifeWay Research
released similar findings, that seven in ten
Protestants ages 18–30 who had worshiped
regularly in high school stopped attending
church by age 23. Regardless of which studies
are the most accurate, there is little doubt that
many youth who were raised in the church
do not necessarily stick around.
If this isn’t enough to induce parental
panic, another unsettling report came our
way in a summer 2008 Newsweek article,
“But I Did Everything Right!” Sharon Begley
reported that, contrary to the opinions of
decades of experts, genetics may be a more
potent influence upon child development than
our own parenting practices. Begley summarized
findings from studies at the Center for
the Developing Child at Harvard University
and Birbeck University in London. Jay Belsky
of Birbeck found that the child most likely to
adopt his parents’ values is not the mellow,
compliant child, as one would expect, but
the fussy, difficult child. The fussy child is
genetically wired through the presence of dna
variants to be more sensitive and attuned to
her parents and surroundings. The mellow
child is more like Teflon; good parenting, and
even bad parenting, tends not to stick. These
findings, among others, are part of a leading
edge of study that “promises to revolutionize
our understanding of child development.”
If we decide to credit these recent findings,
we are going to have a lot of questions,
maybe even some righteous indignation. “So,
the game is rigged?” we might choke out. “Our
efforts to raise our children in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord may be useless on certain
children with specific dna variants? Our
chances of passing the torch hang more on their
dna variants than on our own parenting?”
We splutter with good cause. After all,
this directly contradicts the most quoted and
treasured verse in the Scriptures related to
parenting: “Train up a child in the way he
should go, and when he is old he will not turn
from it” (Prov. 22:6). This verse has provided
comfort and direction to generations of parents,
assuring them that nurture, our nurture,
is the prevailing force in our child’s life, and
that if we get it right, the outcome is sure.
But the first blush of retort and defense
should be reconsidered. These scientific
findings are not only ultimately hopeful and
helpful for parents. More importantly, rather
than undermining Scripture, they support
Scripture in an area that has been plagued
with presumption, behaviorism, and wrong
thinking for decades.
‘As the Twig Is Bent . . .’
One of the most resilient and cherished myths
of parenting is that parenting creates the child:
“As the twig is bent, so grows the branch.”
While the nature-nurture debate has ground
on for centuries, nurture has been the clear
popular favorite among most child-rearing
experts and parents. We catch some of the
zeal and heady empowerment of this belief
from one of its most vocal proponents, John B.
Watson, a well-known psychologist at Johns
Hopkins University. In 1924 he famously
claimed that if he were given 12 healthy babies
and complete control over their environment,
he could “guarantee to take any one at random
and train him to become any type of specialist I
might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant,
chef, yes, even beggar and thief, regardless of
his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities,
vocations, and race of his ancestors.”
Though few would subscribe to Watson’s
extreme behaviorism, the notion of the infant
as an arriving tabula rasa on which we inscribe
our design remains deeply embedded in our
culture. John Rosemond, a Christian family
psychologist and syndicated columnist, hears
frequently from parents who believe they have
failed when their children have problems.
“They think this,” he writes, “because they
believe in psychological determinism—specifically,
that parenting produces the child.”
Many Christian writers and parents have
absorbed these values and drifted into what
could be called spiritual determinism: We have
absorbed the cultural belief in psychological
determinism but spiritualized it with Bible
verses, and one verse in particular. The result
is a Christianized version of the cultural myth.
It reads something like this: “Christian parenting
techniques produce godly children.”
Proverbs 22:6 has been widely adopted as
both psychological premise and theological
promise, despite the widespread recognition
that hermeneutically, the Proverbs are
not promises from God, but general observations
and maxims. (Ironically, if King Solomon
did pen this proverb, as many biblical scholars
believe, he himself failed to exemplify its truth:
In his old age, he abandoned the teaching and
example of his father, as “his wives turned his
heart after other gods, and his heart was not
fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart
of David his father had been” [1 Kings 11:4].)
Despite these problems, entire formulas
and programs have been created to divine
and instruct on the kind of parental training
that will secure the desired outcome. At least
one of these programs, claiming to instruct
in God’s ways of raising children, has sold
in the millions. A few of the more stridently
conservative writers are so confident of
their parenting methods and outcomes, they
describe child-training as a risk-free venture
analogous to staking out tomatoes, training
dogs, and teaching mules, only loosely veiling
B. F. Skinner–like techniques with swatches
of strategically placed Bible verses.
One writer warns mothers that they must
watch all they say and do, because their child’s
mind, “like a videotape recorder,” is “carefully
transcribing every word, right down to
the tone of voice and facial expression.” To up
the stakes further, he cautions that a child’s
mind and “emotional patterns” may be firmly
established by the time he is 2, a “sobering
realization for mothers,” he intones.
Despite the impossible weight of this
responsibility, it holds clear advantages:
namely, it’s much easier to measure the
t h e m y t h o f t h e p e r f e c t p a r e n t
Our most consuming concern is that our
children ‘turn out’—that is, that they grow
up to be churchgoing, God-honoring adults.
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success of our parenting. We simply examine
the evidence—how our children turn out.
One parenting writer warns, “If our parents’
approach seemed close to biblical parenting,
yet bore bad fruit, we can be certain it was
not biblical.” We can know this, he asserts,
because God’s Word gives us exactly what
we need to raise godly children, and if we
correctly apply the principles, “parents will
not be disappointed.”
An entire branch of Christian parenting
takes this tack. “Observe and learn from winning
parents,” one writer advises. Winning
parents are those whose children are “obedient”
and “respectful,” who “know God’s will,”
who “live faithful Christian lives,” he writes.
We should be imitating those parents “who
are successful, not those who fail.”
One best-selling author takes a more
numerical approach to parenting. He begins
by identifying the goal of parenting as raising
“spiritual champions.” To maximize readers’
ability to produce spiritual champions, the
author, a statistician, creates a model based
on surveys, statistical studies, and personal
interviews. His research reveals that a small
family is better than a large family at producing
a spiritual champion, that the firstborn
is the most likely to become a spiritual giant,
and that single-parent homes are seldom successful
in producing said champions.
At the end of this section, he admonishes
us, before we have children, to “. . . count the
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cost of raising them. The research suggests
that the more children you have, the more
difficult it will be to facilitate the spiritual
health and depth of each child.” (This of
course is terrible news for me and others
with multiple children, though it’s good for
the author, who has two.) The book ends with
these motivational words: “Between you and
your spouse, have you covered the ground
necessary to produce children whose lives
honor God and advance his kingdom?”
Some parents are winners and some are
losers. Many friends immediately come to mind:
God-loving couples with a child in jail, with an
agnostic child, with a prodigal daughter, with
children who are lukewarm in their faith, with
children who have not yet proclaimed faith. By
these measures, they are all losers.
Bad Parents of the Bible
The Bible’s examples of spiritual champions
move us in another direction entirely. The
great hall of faith in Hebrews 11 provides us
with a list of men and women who through
extraordinary faithfulness “conquered kingdoms,
administered justice, and gained what
was promised; who shut the mouths of lions,
quenched the fury of the flames”—believers
of such immense faith that “the world was
not worthy of them” (11:32–38).
Yet these spiritual giants were raised in
anything but model homes, and many of them
were themselves highly flawed parents. Abraham
sired a child with a maidservant, then
agreed to banish the son to the desert. Isaac
and Rebekah were locked in parental favoritism
over Esau and Jacob. Rebekah led her son
to commit an unthinkable travesty: stealing
his brother’s birthright. Jacob learned his lessons
from his mother well and continued on
the path of deceit and, later, of destructive
favoritism among his ten sons. Moses was
given the young, pagan, unmarried daughter
of Pharaoh as his mother. Jephthah was the
son of a prostitute, and killed his only daughter
because of an impetuous vow.
Many more examples from Scripture confound
our parenting expectations, but two
more must be mentioned. Jonathan, David’s
closest friend, was a paragon of righteousness
and purity in stark contrast with his murderous
father, King Saul. And the boy king Josiah,
singularly commended as one who served the
Lord “with all his heart and with all his soul
and with all his strength” (2 Kings 23:25), was
the son of Amon, a man who “did evil in the
eyes of the Lord” (2
Kings 21:20).
By contemporary
standards, most of
these families would
be considered dismal
failures. They include
polygamous families
rife with division and
jealousy, prostitute
mothers, heathen
fathers, clans rampant
with favoritism
and fratricide. The
only discernible pattern
here seems to be
one of human sin.
If our supposition—
that we can
measure the success
of our parenting by
the outcome of our
children—is scripturally
based, we should
be able apply the test
to God himself. After
all, God is not only the
author of our Scriptures,
he is also himself a parent, one who
identifies himself as our Father. The Old Testament
in particular provides a long, deep look
into the Father’s heart. When we look at his
children, however, the news is not good.
The descent into rebellion began with
his very first children, Adam and Eve, and
continued through the days of Noah, ending
in global destruction. Then a new family was
birthed, the nation of Israel, whom God tenderly
calls “my firstborn son” (Ex. 4:22). But
that relationship, too, is torturous, marked
with constant rebellion and the breaking of
God’s father-heart. Our own record as his
children is not much better.
If God’s success as a parent is to be judged by
his children, what can we conclude? That God
himself does not pass our parenting test?
Who’s In Control?
We must assume, then, that there is serious
error in our beliefs about parenting. We have
made far too much of ourselves and far too
little of God, reflecting our sinful bent to see
ourselves as more essential and in control
than we actually are. It’s also our heritage as
good Americans, psychologist Harriet Lerner
observed in her 1998 book, The Mother Dance:
We believe that we can fix every problem,
that we are masters over our fate. The root
of much of our pain in parenting is “the belief
that we have full command over our children,”
when “we don’t even have full command
over ourselves.”
The reflex to judge ourselves by our
children, and to judge others by their children,
has further implications: It reveals a
faulty view of spiritual formation. We often
expect that the children of believing parents,
whether the children claim Christ yet or not,
will show the same kind of spiritually mature
attitudes and behavior we hope to see in each
other: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and
obedience, as a beginning list.
When we engage in spiritual determinism
and a human view of spiritual formation, we
can easily fall into judging others. Jeanine,
a friend of mine for years, told me that her
sixth-grade daughter, Julia, who was struggling
with her identity and making friends,
was labeled “demon-possessed” by another
family in the church. “Some people—even in
church—have already written her off. And
she’s only 11 years old,” Jeanine told me. The
judgment was not only on her daughter’s
spiritual condition but also on her own.
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When a child does make a decision to follow
Christ, we often expect visible, even immediate
transformation. The Bible demonstrates
another reality. God schooled the Israelites for
40 years to walk them from paganism into faith
in the one true God. The disciples lived in the
presence of Jesus for three long years, their
faith still pitifully small despite having constantly
witnessed miracles and resurrections.
And our redemption was fully accomplished
when Christ uttered “It is finished” from the
cross, but our transformation into his image
continues as long as we have breath.
Ezekiel’s Parenting Model
The question we ask of ourselves must be
reframed. We need to quit asking, “Am I parenting
successfully?” And we most certainly
need to quit asking, “Are others parenting
successfully?” Instead, we need to ask, “Am
I parenting faithfully?” Faithfulness, after all,
is God’s highest requirement for us.
We see this clearly in the calling of the
prophets, and particularly in the calling of
Ezekiel. Though Ezekiel was (as far as we
know) not a parent, his assignment to the
people of Israel has remarkable parallels to
parenthood and the question of success.
When God commissioned Ezekiel to
be a prophet, he warned him that he was
being sent to his own people, a nation set in
revolt against God. Ezekiel’s job was to be
a mouthpiece for God, to say, “This is what
the Sovereign Lord says” (Ezek. 2:3–4). God
gives full and dismaying disclosure before
the task even begins: The people of Israel,
Ezekiel’s own people, will not listen to him
any more than they will listen to God himself.
The job would be hard, then—harder than
the prophet could have realized going in. But
God didn’t leave Ezekiel defenseless. He did
not make the task easier, but he made Ezekiel
stronger, hardening his forehead “like the
hardest stone, harder than flint” (3:8–9).
Ezekiel’s response to all this was so
encouragingly human, so like myself at times
and like many parents I know. With the Spirit
of the Lord upon him, he returned to his
people on the banks of the river for seven
days, “overwhelmed” and “in bitterness and
in the anger of my spirit” (3:14–15).
Then the prophetic work of speaking and
enacting God’s words began.
How successful was Ezekiel? The destruction
he foretold played out in every gruesome
detail. From our vantage, Ezekiel’s mission
looks like an utter failure. But God spoke a
few words in this narrative that changed
everything. As God commissioned Ezekiel
to speak his words to Israel, three times he
prefaced his commands with this phrase:
“whether they listen or fail to listen” (2:5, 7;
3:11). One of those three times God completed
the sentence: “Whether they listen or fail to
listen . . . they will know that a prophet has
been among them” (2:5).
This was Ezekiel’s responsibility: to speak
and embody God’s words before the people
in such a way that they might know who he
was, a righteous prophet of God, and that they
might know who God was. Ezekiel wanted
more than this, of course. He desperately
wanted to turn the people back to the living
God and prevent the impending and appalling
judgment and death. The record does not
tell us if anyone repented as a result of his
words, but Ezekiel was never accountable for
the repentance of others. He was accountable
only for his steadfast obedience.
Faith Rather Than Formula
It is likely that we are asking the wrong questions
as parents. We are so focused on ourselves—
on our own need for success and the
success of our children—that we have come to
view parenting as a performance or a test. It
appears we are failing the test, as large numbers
of our youth leave the church when they
leave our nests. And now genetic research
tells us the test may even be rigged.
We cannot pass this test, I’m afraid, nor
could we ever. If we are graded on a curve, we
will always find parents and children who are
more obedient, more joyful, and more peaceful
than we are. We will find parents whose
children turned out better than ours, parents
with a higher percentage of “spiritual champions”
than we can claim for our efforts.
If we are graded instead on an absolute
scale—as I believe we are—we fail even more
miserably. But this is why a Savior was provided,
and gifted to us through grace, through
faith—“and this not from yourselves, it is the
gift of God—not by works, so that no one can
boast” (Eph. 2:8–9). If even our ability to believe
in God is given to us by God, then how much
of parenting can we perform on our own? We
must proceed, then, on our knees first, beggars
before the throne, if we are to parent well.
We must rethink our assumptions and
our calling. We are responsible to teach our
children the fear of the Lord, to impress
his laws on them when we “sit at
home and when [we] walk along the
road, when [we] lie down and when
[we] get up”—meaning all the time
(Deut. 6:7). And we are commanded
to not exasperate our children, but to “bring
them up in the training and instruction of
the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). But we must be clear
about our own limits. We are not capable of
producing perfect followers of Christ, as if
we were perfect ourselves. Our work cannot
purchase anyone else’s salvation or sanctification.
Parents with unbelieving children,
friends with children in jail, the discoveries
of the geneticists, and the faith heroes in
Hebrews 11 are all powerful reminders of
this truth: We will parent imperfectly, our
children will make their own choices, and
God will mysteriously and wondrously use
it all to advance his kingdom.
Begley concludes “But I Did Everything
Right!” by saying, “It is time to acknowledge
there is only so much influence parents can
have.” Scripture has taught us this all along.
We are not sovereign over our children—only
God is. Children are not tomatoes to stake out
or mules to train, nor are they numbers to plug
into an equation. They are full human beings
wondrously and fearfully made. Parenting, like
all other tasks under the sun, is intended as an
endeavor of love, risk, perseverance, and, above
all, faith. It is faith rather than formula, grace
rather than guarantees, steadfastness rather
than success that bridges the gap between
our own parenting efforts, and what, by God’s
grace, our children grow up to become.
Leslie Leyland Fields is the author most
recently of ‘Parenting Is Your Highest Calling’ . . .
And Eight Other Myths That Trap Us in Worry and
Guilt (Waterbrook, 2008), from which this article
is adapted. She lives with her husband and six
children on Kodiak Island, Alaska.
Go to ChristianBibleStudies.com for “The Myth of
the Perfect Parent,” a Bible study based on this
article.
