Tag Archives: Parenting

Polemics

Ryan T. Anderson presents the case for natural / traditional marriage

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Does government provide incentives for people to get married?
What effects does redefining marriage have on society?

A must-read long paper from the Heritage Foundation. It’s a great concise presentation of the reasons why the United States should not redefine marriage. (H/T A tweet from Ryan T. Anderson)

Abstract:

Marriage is based on the truth that men and women are complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the reality that children need a mother and a father. Redefining marriage does not simply expand the existing understanding of marriage; it rejects these truths. Marriage is society’s least restrictive means of ensuring the well-being of children. By encouraging the norms of marriage—monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and permanence—the state strengthens civil society and reduces its own role. The future of this country depends on the future of marriage. The future of marriage depends on citizens understanding what it is and why it matters and demanding that government policies support, not undermine, true marriage.

Excerpt:

Supporters of redefinition use the following analogy: Laws defining marriage as a union of a man and a woman are unjust—fail to treat people equally—exactly like laws that prevented interracial marriage. Yet such appeals beg the question of what is essential to marriage. They assume exactly what is in dispute: that gender is as irrelevant as race in state recognition of marriage. However, race has nothing to with marriage, and racist laws kept the races apart. Marriage has everything to do with men and women, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers and children, and that is why principle-based policy has defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Marriage must be color-blind, but it cannot be gender-blind. The color of two people’s skin has nothing to do with what kind of marital bond they have. However, the sexual difference between a man and a woman is central to what marriage is. Men and women regardless of their race can unite in marriage, and children regardless of their race need moms and dads. To acknowledge such facts requires an understanding of what, at an essential level, makes a marriage.

And a bit later:

If the law taught a falsehood about marriage, it would make it harder for people to live out the norms of marriage because marital norms make no sense, as matters of principle, if marriage is just intense emotional feeling. No reason of principle requires an emotional union to be permanent or limited to two persons, much less sexually exclusive. Nor should it be inherently oriented to family life and shaped by its demands. This does not mean that a couple could not decide to live out these norms where temperament or taste so motivated them, just that there is no reason of principle to demand that they do so. Legally enshrining this alternate view of marriage would undermine the norms whose link to the common good is the basis for state recognition of marriage in the first place.

Insofar as society weakens the rational foundation for marriage norms, fewer people would live them out, and fewer people would reap the benefits of the marriage institution. This would affect not only spouses, but also the well-being of their children. The concern is not so much that a handful of gay or lesbian couples would be raising children, but that it would be very difficult for the law to send a message that fathers matter when it has redefined marriage to make fathers optional.

And one last one:

In fact, much of this is already occurring. Heritage Foundation Visiting Fellow Thomas Messner has documented multiple instances in which redefining marriage has already become a nightmare for religious liberty.[48] If marriage is redefined to include same-sex relationships, then those who continue to believe the truth about marriage—that it is by nature a union of a man and a woman—would face three different types of threats to their liberty: the administrative state, nondiscrimination law, and private actors in a culture that is now hostile to traditional views.[49]

After Massachusetts redefined marriage to include same-sex relationships, Catholic Charities of Boston was forced to discontinue its adoption services rather than place children with same-sex couples against its principles.[50] Massachusetts public schools began teaching grade-school students about same-sex marriage, defending their decision because they are “committed to teaching about the world they live in, and in Massachusetts same-sex marriage is legal.” A Massachusetts appellate court ruled that parents have no right to exempt their children from these classes.[51]

The New Mexico Human Rights Commission prosecuted a photographer for declining to photograph a same-sex “commitment ceremony.” Doctors in California were successfully sued for declining to perform an artificial insemination on a woman in a same-sex relationship. Owners of a bed and breakfast in Illinois who declined to rent their facility for a same-sex civil union ceremony and reception were sued for violating the state nondiscrimination law. A Georgia counselor was fired after she referred someone in a same-sex relationship to another counselor.[52] In fact, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty reports that “over 350 separate state anti-discrimination provisions would likely be triggered by recognition of same-sex marriage.”[53]

This article is long and comprehensive. It will take some time to read. It’s includes logical arguments as well as empirical evidence from research – with footnotes. I really recommend taking a look at the article. Even if it takes a long time to read, it will definitely expand your mind to think about why we had a definition of marriage in the first place, and what we would lose by changing that definition. When you debate people who want to redefine marriage, it’s very important to appeal to logical arguments and evidence from studies. Get the conversation away from emotions and instead introduce facts and arguments.

My favorite book on the marriage issue is Ryan Anderson’s “Truth Overruled”. If you don’t have it, I really recommend it.

News

Study: brain of child neglected by mother is smaller and underdeveloped

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Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail. In the past, I’ve written about how much children need their fathers, but this time I’m focusing on how much children need their mothers, especially in the first 5 years of development.

Here is two brain scans to compare:

Brain scans of 3-year old children: normal vs neglected
Brain scans of 3-year old children: normal vs neglected

Excerpt:

Both of these images are brain scans of a two three-year-old children, but the brain on the left is considerably larger, has fewer spots and less dark areas, compared to the one on the right.

According to neurologists this sizeable difference has one primary cause – the way each child was treated by their mothers.

The child with the larger and more fully developed brain was looked after by its mother – she was constantly responsive to her baby, reported The Sunday Telegraph.

But the child with the shrunken brain was the victim of severe neglect and abuse.

According to research reported by the newspaper, the brain on the right worryingly lacks some of the most fundamental areas present in the image on the left.

The consequences of these deficits are pronounced – the child on the left with the larger brain will be more intelligent and more likely to develop the social ability to empathise with others.

But in contrast, the child with the shrunken brain will be more likely to become addicted to drugs and involved in violent crimes, much more likely to be unemployed and to be dependent on state benefits.

The child is also more likely to develop mental and other serious health problems.

Professor Allan Schore, of UCLA, told The Sunday Telegraph that if a baby is not treated properly in the first two years of life, it can have a fundamental impact on development.

He pointed out that the genes for several aspects of brain function, including intelligence, cannot function.

[…]The study correlates with research released earlier this year that found that children who are given love and affection from their mothers early in life are smarter with a better ability to learn.

The study by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, found school-aged children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress.

The research was the first to show that changes in this critical region of children’s brain anatomy are linked to a mother’s nurturing, Neurosciencenews.com reports.

The research is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Lead author Joan L. Luby, MD, professor of child psychiatry, said the study reinforces how important nurturing parents are to a child’s development.

My friend Katy tweeted this article from far-left NPR:

Parents do a lot more than make sure a child has food and shelter, researchers say. They play a critical role in brain development.

More than a decade of research on children raised in institutions shows that “neglect is awful for the brain,” says Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. Without someone who is a reliable source of attention, affection and stimulation, he says, “the wiring of the brain goes awry.” The result can be long-term mental and emotional problems.

The article goes on to talk about children who grow up without mothers in Romanian orphanages:

As the children grew older, the researchers were able to use MRI to study the anatomy of their brains. And once again, the results were troubling. “We found a dramatic reduction in what’s referred to as gray matter and in white matter,” Nelson says. “In other words, their brains were actually physically smaller.”

The scientists realized the cause wasn’t anything as simple as malnutrition. It was a different kind of deprivation — the lack of a parent, or someone who acted like a parent.

A baby “comes into the world expecting someone to take care of them and invest in them,” Nelson says. “And then they form this bond or this relationship with this caregiver.” But for many Romanian orphans, there wasn’t even a person to take them out of the crib.

“Now what happens is that you’re staring at a white ceiling, or no one is talking to you, or no one is soothing you when you get upset,” Nelson says. So areas of the brain involved in vision and language and emotion don’t get wired correctly.

I expect the woman I marry (if I marry) to have a college degree, and preferably a graduate degree, and a couple of years of employment. But I think to be fair to the research on child development, she has to stay home and invest in those children through the first five years at least. After that she can stay home or work as much as she thinks is beneficial to the family goals of impacting the university, the church and the public square – as well as continuing to raise those children.  I would take over more of the parenting as the children’s needs changed. When it comes to children, we work backward from their needs, and those needs create responsibilities and obligations on the grown-ups. That doesn’t mean the children are spoiled – it means that they get what they need.

Christian parents have to go even further

Here is a relevant post from Lindsay, a Christian mother who has a graduate degree in biology and was teaching biology before leaving her career to care for her children.

She writes:

Now, can a woman handle the logistics of the home, ensure her family is cared for, and still work outside the home? Perhaps, in some cases – especially if they do not yet have children. But no woman is Superwoman. We all have limitations. It’s just not possible for any woman to adequately care for children and home while holding down a full time job. The care of children and the home is primarily a woman’s responsibility in a way it isn’t for her husband. If there are no children, it may be possible for her to care for the home and her husband and still keep a job outside the home, but she must keep the home and her husband as her priority.

Once children arrive, it becomes pretty much impossible for her to work outside the home and still fulfill her duties at home. The funny thing about children is that they need constant care. One cannot care for children and work outside the home too. The choice once children come along is whether to outsource the care of the children to someone else or to do it yourself. I firmly believe that God entrusts children to a husband and wife because he wants them to be the primary influences in their children’s lives. That doesn’t happen if the children spend a majority of their waking hours in the care of someone else.

Children don’t just need food and shelter provided to them, they need love, teaching, discipline, a sense of security, and examples of how they are to live. All of those things are best done when the child spends time primarily with his or her parents. Daycare workers, school teachers, and even grandparents simply cannot provide them in the same way parents can. No one loves a child like his own parents do. No one has such a vested interest in ensuring that he grows up with the proper spiritual and moral training. Even if others care about the child, the responsibility for the training of a child belongs to his parents. Daycare workers and teachers and grandparents won’t answer to God for the soul of that child. His parents will.

For Christian parents, the stakes are even higher. Not only do they have to care about basic needs of child, but the higher spiritual needs as well. Men really need to be careful to pick a mother for their child who has demonstrated ability in caring for the needs of others, letting the needs of others override her own selfish desires.

News

Before you marry, have enough money saved to keep your kids out of public schools

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Women react to Clinton loss
Women react to Clinton loss

My friend William shared this excellent article from The Federalist, which talks about how public schools, under the influence of Common Core, are exposing children to pornography in order to advance a leftist culture agenda. The article has the stories of several heroic mothers who stood up to the school system and got the pornographic materials removed. Let’s look at one of them, and then I’ll comment on how public school administrators and teachers should be viewed, then I’ll comment on the issue of financing these public schools, then I’ll talk about planning for schooling of your children.

Excerpt:

In 2012, Lebanon, Oregon, mother of two Macey France began studying the nationwide implementation of Common Core. While looking through a document titled “Common Core Appendix B” that contained reading exemplars, Macey found the book, “The Bluest Eye” listed as an example of appropriate assigned literature for eleventh- and twelfth-grade students.*

France, a contributor to the website PolitiChicks, took to her keyboard and typed up a scathing condemnation of the book as not high-school appropriate, including quotes directly from the book, such as:

I am not putting pornographic excerpts from public school books on this blog, duh.

We continue:

As a result, her article “Common Core-Approved Child Pornography” was viewed and shared hundreds of thousands of times and Macey was nominated for a CPAC blogger award for Best Sunlight Post of 2013.

“This is when I first became a ‘target’ for the progressives who support public education and minimize parental rights,” said France, who had a hard time understanding how her well-researched, truthful article could make her the target of the kind of emotional, hateful rhetoric she experienced. It frustrated her to be personally attacked for wanting to protect her kids. It also frustrated her to find many parents who weren’t concerned about their teens reading “The Bluest Eye” because they believed school officials knew more about what was best for their children than they did.

“I was called names, accused of being backwards, racist [Toni Morrison is a black woman], ignorant, a flat-earther, and even received private messages on Facebook telling me how hateful I was,” France said. “I was first introduced to the phrase ‘white privilege.’ At one point, I was called Hitler. I was misunderstood and accused of wanting to ban and burn books [even though] I went out of my way to convey that I am not an advocate for banning literature. I am a huge parental rights advocate. I got the distinct impression I was not supposed to question the manner in which they [educators] related to my kids.”

My problem with public school is not that education school graduates are selecting high brow reading material that is above me. I love Shakespeare and Spenser and Dickens and Austen and other classical writers. The problem I have with public schools is that some of the teachers, and most of the administrators, have this agenda to break down traditional morality and sexualize children at earlier and earlier ages. This is part of the secular progressive agenda – they know that sexualizing children makes them less likely to become conservative, less likely to marry, less likely to have children who are raised by a mom and dad, and who are therefore more resistant to the will of the secular leftist government.

Public schools are leftist indoctrination seminaries

A good example of how this works can be found in the province of Ontario, Canada. There, the Liberal Party government is led by a lesbian woman who left her husband and children to move in with her lover. The Liberal Party decided to re-write the education curriculum so that it would be more in line with their supporters in the Sexual Revolution crowd, e.g. -secularists, LGBT activists, abortion providers, etc. And so, they hired a convicted child pornographer to re-write the curriculum. They didn’t see the public school’s priority as teaching children how to get the skills needed to find jobs that pay. They wanted the public schools to make children non-judgmental about the immoral behaviors of the selfish adults.

It’s very important for parents to understand that people don’t just find themselves in education programs and then in public schools by accident. Sometimes they are in there because they couldn’t find real work in the private sector. Sometimes they are there because they want to indoctrinate your kids with their left-wing ideology. You can’t assume that the people in public schools want to partner with you to pass on prudent and practical Judeo-Christian wisdom to your children. The public school monopoly attracts those who are looking for job security and insulation from the disapproval of their customers. It’s true that some teachers are there to educate students so they have useful skills in order to find good jobs. But in my experience, many of teachers aren’t, and most of the administrators aren’t.

Note: private school teachers and administrators have to compete with other schools, so they are sensitive to meeting the needs of parents. At least you have a choice about where you send your kids, so they have to care what you want for your kids, and how much you are able to pay.

Don’t vote for bigger government if you value quality education

So how do these public schools get their funding? Well, it’s simple. They appeal to voters by saying that the more they spend on public schools, the more children will learn. This actually works on voters who don’t bother to familiarize themselves with the facts:

Education spending has tripled since 1970
Education spending has tripled since 1970

The truth is that parents who want children to do well should always vote for smaller government, lower taxes, and the pushing down of decision-making in education policy to the state and local level. We shouldn’t be swayed by “it’s for the children” rhetoric, because throwing more money at the problem only gives us more sexual revolution indoctrination and more gay rights agenda. Most of the new money goes to administrators anyway – not to the teachers in the classrooms. You might think that the public schools are there to help your children to get a job, but that’s not what they public school administrators think they are there for.

Getting married? Make a plan to provide for your kids’ education

One final point. I am finding myself surrounded by male Christian apologists who want to get married, and who are not interested in being providers. They’ve spend their entire 20s in school as students, they’ve taken money from their parents, they’ve never worked a day in their lives, they have outstanding student loans, they have no savings, and yet they all talk to women they like about marriage. My view is that Christian men should not be allowed to talk to women – even to ask them the time of day or for directions – until they have a STEM degree, 2 years of private sector work experience, all debts paid off, a car and some savings. And why not? Well, for reasons like this article on the public schools.

The public schools are what they are, and Christian parents cannot rely on them to educate our kids. If a man is talking about marriage without having taken steps to get a STEM degree, STEM private sector work history, and an investment account that is added to every month, then he has no business talking to a woman about marriage. He has to be able to show her that he is serious about providing the children with homeschooling or a private school education. How parents plan to educate their kids is a major issue in marriage – it affects whether the children will be effective and influential, or not. A woman should not trust the promises of any man who has not taken practical steps in the past to prepare for the needs of his children in the future. She cannot accept intentions and promises that make her feel good, she has to see evidence of his ability to put aside his ambitions in order to provide for her and the children – that is his obligation as a man (1 Tim 5:8). A man who wants marriage should prepare well in advance for it by having a career that will allow him to earn and save so that his wife and children will not be threatened in their worldview more than they can bear. If he has to give up some student stuff and some ministry stuff in order to prepare for husband / father responsibilities, then he should do that – before the wedding day.