Tag Archives: Community

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Why parenting is different now than when my parents were growing up

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I had a talk with my parents about what it was like for them growing up in a very very poor country before coming here, and I found out some interesting challenges that I wanted to share with you. My Dad grew up in a small village and he had to walk a mile to his farm which had lots of trees and plants that his family picked to sell the produce in the market. And they hunted for animals at night with a lantern. That’s how they grew up.

So, I wanted to ask them to tell me how things have changed for raising children from that environment compared to here in the affluent West. And below is the list of some of the challenges.

Education

  • My grandparents were not really focused on monitoring my parents education in school, they were more worried about passing on skills that would help them to tend the land so they could pass it on
  • The teachers in that country were mostly males and they were focused on academic achievement and competition, especially since intelligence and scholastic aptitude was a ticket out of poverty
  • There was NO emphasis on self-esteem, compassion, sex education, drug education, leftist politics or other secular leftist ideologies in the schools – and nobody wrote to politicians or attended marches for extra credit
  • The headmaster and the vice principal (both males) lived next door and they would come over to talk to my grandfather about my father, and to play cards while talking about politics in front of the children
  • Teachers were allowed to punish children in class with spankings
  • Teachers would inspect the students for dirty fingernails, messy hair, dirty uniform, or minimum decency clothing standards, etc. and you got rapped on the knuckles with a ruler if you were bad
  • My Dad attended a Presbyterian school and all the teachers attended church on Sundays
  • There was intense competition and last-man-standing contests for prizes, and all the sports were competitive with winners and losers – some people put a lot of effort into contests to get better so they could win
  • The teachers were not unionized and there was a free choice of which school to attend
  • none of the children had money for alcohol, drugs, contraceptives, etc.

Family and Community

  • My Dad grew up with a stay-at-home mother who monitored them, and they came home for lunch
  • There was no TV or video games, so family interaction was more common – like working together on things and doing chores to help make ends meet
  • my Dad’s chore was to fetch water in the morning from half-a mile away (several times)
  • No TV and no video games also means more sports and activities with the neighbor kids
  • Food was scarce, and there was no processed food or fast food – so kids were less obese
  • Neighbors came over more to play cards and discuss things so that children learned about adult stuff by listening and watching them debate and discuss ideas, instead of from watching mainstream news media, which is somewhere to the left of Satan, politically, on social, fiscal and foreign policy
  • My grandfather would make my father volunteer in a store in order for my grandfather to get credit at the store, and he was able to work because there were no regulations on children working to help to support the family as long as they also went to school
  • My father was earning money for the family at an early age – he saw his parents working hard and that was all the motivation he needed to want to contribute – not like today when it is difficult to make children do anything
  • My father used to volunteer to help other neighborhood children learn mathematics (I later did the same thing, but for money)
  • My father learned to hunt and fish so that he could help the family to survive
  • My father had 6 young siblings so he had experience raising children and learning to cook by watching my grandmother cook

If you’re wondering how I got into this long conversation with my parents, it’s because the woman I am performing acts of love on inquired repeatedly about my parents, and I got into a long discussion with them, touching on this topic and many other things related to parenting. The net effect of this on me was to make me a little more tolerant of my parents. They came from a simpler culture where they had more support from teachers and neighbors, while facing fewer challenges from the culture and secular leftist elites. My Dad worked 3 jobs when he got here. My Mom worked too. We were incredibly poor.

Commentary

Are Christian churches and parents producing solid young Christians?

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Let’s look at the facts from a recent Pew Research survey.

Excerpt:

A recent report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life seems to validate concerns among Christian leaders that younger generations of Americans are losing the spiritual moorings that have helped keep their nation strong from its founding.

Analyzing the extent to which the religious views of America’s “millennials” — adults between the ages of 18 and 29 — differ from those of adults over 30, the Pew Forum’s “Religion Among the Millennials” report found that they are in general less affiliated with a particular religious faith than their over-30 counterparts, attend religious services less often, and say that religion is less important to them.

Here are some of the findings of the report:

  • Twenty five percent of 18-to-29-year-old adults say they are religiously unaffiliated, describing themselves variously as “atheist,” “agnostic,” or “nothing in particular.” By contrast, about 19 percent of adults in their 30s, 15 percent of those in their 40s, 14 percent of those in their 50s, and less than ten percent of those 60 and older identify themselves as unaffiliated.
  • Only 45 percent of adults under age 30 say that religion is important to them, compared with almost 60 percent of adults 30 and older.
  • Sixty-five percent of 18 to 29-year-olds say they are “absolutely” certain of the existence of God, compared with 73 percent of their 30-and-older counterparts.

What about surveys conducted by Christians?

The findings of the Pew report appear to reflect the results of similar surveys conducted by both Catholic and evangelical researchers. For example, a recent survey by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion found that over 80 percent of Catholic adults aged 18 to 30 think that “morals are relative” and that “there is no definite right or wrong for everybody.”

Similarly, a 2008 study by evangelical pollster George Barna found that half of all adults in America say that Christianity is just one of many faith options… Barna found that unlike previous generations, over 70 percent of American adults today have jettisoned an organized approach to their faith and are more likely to come up with their own set of religious beliefs, with over 80 percent of young Americans under the age of 25 inclined to customize their faith.

And from Christian Newswire:

“In today’s world Christian children and teens are in serious crisis,” says Larry Fowler, Executive Director of Global Training for Awana and author of the new book Raising a Modern-Day Joseph: A Timeless Strategy for Growing Great Kids, (David C. Cook, January, 2009.) “What we see happening in the world is merely a reflection of what is happening in the church. Most Christian teens succumb to the world and fall away from the Lord by the time they leave home.” According to Josh McDowell Ministries, denominations are seeing anywhere from 69 to 94 percent of teens leave the church after high school.

[…]Statistics show that even children who grow up in Christian homes, go to church on a regular basis, and participate in youth group activities are abandoning their faith at an alarming rate.

Naturally, my approach to fixing this failure of churches and parents is to leverage philosophical theology to define Christian claims and then leverage apologetics to sustain those claims in the public square. I would emphasize mainstream science apologetics in order to do that. As for the problem of young people being uncomfortable with moral judgments, we need to do a better job of explaining to them WHY some things are wrong.

Here are some -isms that the church and parents may want to try to address:

  • postmodernism – the view that truth, especially religious and moral truth, cannot be known
  • relativism – the view that each person defines their own reality by personal preferences
  • pluralism – the view that all religions are basically the same – they make us act good
  • universalism – the view that all religions are valid ways of knowing ultimate reality
  • syncretism – the view that the truth claims of all religions do not conflict

Perhaps we should be focusing more time talking about truth and morality, using reason and evidence. I think that the critical mass of people in the church are against my plan – they have decided that the purpose of Christianity is to make people have happy feelings and to be part of an inclusive community. It’s not clear to me how happy feelings and an inclusive community are related to the goals of the Christian faith, but that’s what people seem to have decided on, anyway. They didn’t ask me, and they don’t ask me.

Apologetics advocacy

News

Fiscal and social conservatives unite in new free e-book “Indivisible”

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There’s a new book that just came out from the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction by Jay Richards:

To listen to media and political strategists is to get the impression that American public life is a checklist of issues. Some are known as “social” issues (marriage, family) and some are known as “economic” (international trade, wages). There may be some good reasons for this distinction, but when we itemize and divide these topics into two separate categories, we fail to convey the underlying unity of the principles behind the American Experiment in ordered liberty. In reality, the two groups of issues are interdependent. For instance, a free economy cannot long exist in a culture that is hostile to it. The success of free market economic policies depends on important cultural and moral factors such as thrift, delayed gratification, hard work, and respect for the property of others. A virtuous and responsible populace derives, in turn, from strong families, churches, and other civil institutions.

Conversely, economic issues have a strong influence on culture and the institutions of civil society. High taxes, for example, put pressure on families and force parents to spend more time in the workforce, leaving less time to devote to their spouses and children. When government expands spending and control in education, it crowds out parental responsibility; when it expands its role in providing social welfare services, it tends to erode a sense of responsibility among churches and other groups doing good work to help neighbors in need.

The connections are such that the individual issues rarely fit neatly and exclusively into one set or the other. An “economic” issue is rarely exclusively about economics. For instance, poverty in America is often as much a moral and cultural problem as an economic problem. Reducing such poverty depends on civil institutions that inculcate virtue and responsibility as well as policies that promote economic freedom and discourage dependency. Most poverty among children in America is not caused by a lack of jobs but rather by factors such as family breakdown, negligent or absentee parents, substance abuse, or other social pathologies. To consider American poverty in strictly economic terms is to fail to see the full scale of issues involved in this problem.

[…]The following essays are intended as a concise exploration of the link between liberty and human dignity and of the policy issues that tend to cluster around these two themes in American life. This collection brings together a number of well-known social and economic conservatives. To encourage cross-fertilization of their ideas, those known as social conservatives have written on themes normally identified with economic conservatives, and vice versa. The authors highlight economic arguments for issues typically categorized as “social” and social/moral arguments for “economic” issues. Each author focuses on a single topic, briefly summarized below, that is associated with either social or economic conservatives or, in some cases, both.

That’s also one of the main purposes of my blog, to show how fiscal conservatives and social conservatives depend on each other.

Here are the essays and authors:

  • Civil Society: Moral Arguments for Limiting Government – Joseph G. Lehman
  • Rule of Law: Economic Prosperity Requires the Rule of Law – J. Kenneth Blackwell
  • Life: The Cause of Life Can’t be Severed from the Cause of Freedom – Representative Paul Ryan
  • Free Exchange: Morality and Economic Freedom – Jim Daly with Glenn T. Stanton
  • Marriage: The Limited-Government Case for Marriage – Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.
  • Profit: Prophets and Profit – Marvin Olasky, Ph.D.
  • Family: Washington’s War on the Family and Free Enterprise – Stephen Moore
  • Wages: The Value of Wages – Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr.
  • Religion:  Why Faith Is a Good Investment – Arthur Brooks, Ph.D., and Robin Currie
  • International Trade: Why Trade Works for Family, Community, and Sovereignty – Ramesh Ponnuru
  • Culture: A Culture of Responsibility – Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
  • Property: Property and the Pursuit of Happiness – Representative Michele Bachmann
  • Environment: Conserving Creation – Tony Perkins
  • Education: A Unified Vision for Education Choice – Randy Hicks

Seeing the names of people paired with these topics just blows my mind. It would be as though William Lane Craig were suddenly to write a book defending free market capitalism or the war on Islamic terrorism. It’s just WEIRD. And you’ll notice that many of the Wintery Knight’s favorite people are in there; Paul Ryan, Michele Bachmann, Jennifer Roback Morse.  I also like Stephen Moore’s writing a lot.

The entire book is available for free as a PDF download, or you can order it from the Heritage Foundation. I ordered 10 copies of everything at the store, because I wanted a bunch to give away to all my friends. I think this is the perfect gift to give someone who doesn’t see the relevance of public policy to Christianity, marriage and parenting. There is no such thing as an informed Christian who is fiscally liberally or socially liberal.

Oh, and by the way: Ryan/Bachmann 2012 for the win!