Tag Archives: Parenting

Commentary

Parental authority and the need for independent children

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Mary sent me this interview of Randy Alcorn from Eternal Perspectives Ministries.

Here’s the problem:

What is the greatest challenge parents of young people face?

I would say balance. Parents have to balance their responsibility to govern their children’s lives with their teenagers’ need to develop independence and freedom. Parents have to maintain that tension.

And here’s a snapshot of the solution:

So, what does that mean in terms of parenting? The ideal is prevention. Parents need to develop their relationship with their child and build the level of intimacy that gives them the right to come down hard in certain areas. 

Too often the relationship is typified by Mt. Olympus. Parents come down like lightning bolts to their kids, then return to the top of their mountain. The relationship is confrontational, when what they need is a consistent, loving relationship in which 90 percent of what is done is affirming. Criticism should be the exception instead of the rule. 

Jesus came down to us in the incarnation and we need to come down from our adult world and enter our children’s lives. Only then can we help pull them up into maturity.

You raised two daughters. What patterns did you establish with them?

We talked a lot. When the girls were young, we sat down and read Bible stories and talked about principles, trying to plug those into their current situation—whether it be kindergarten or sixth grade or high school, the principle is the same. We tried to spend the time with them that allowed us to see their lives as they happened. That was a big thing to us.

You sound like you’ve thought this through.

If we don’t think strategically about parenting, then we’ve made a statement: our children aren’t important, or parenting comes so naturally that it happens without our attention. 

If we’re going to influence our children, we need to strategize—regrouping and reevaluating along the way.

Anyone else in agreement with Randy? The idea that what really matters is QUANTITY of time spent talking about the lives of the children and injecting the Christian worldview into the lives of the children every day – instead of waiting until things blow up – sounds plausible. But that requires parents with lots of time for parenting.

So, if you’re a man looking for a woman who can take this kind of challenge on, you’d better find someone with a lot of time for parenting and a track record of effective nurturing. The ideal woman would be someone who dumps everything else whenever she sees an opportunity to influence a person’s worldview, especially in spiritual areas, and take action. If she is able to build up her friends to be world-changers, and has achieved a lot herself, (an investment portfolio, a career prior to becoming a mother, graduate school degree, apologetics and theology capabilities, running a business, reading research papers, etc.), then that would be the best-case scenario – because then she’ll be teaching them from experience of been a Christian herself and succeeded.

Polemics

What can Christians do to prevent abortion?

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WARNING: This post is extremely opposed to Democrats, feminists and the postmodern/relativist/universalist church. Please do not read if you are easily offended.

Consider this account of an abortion. (H/T Mary, The Other McCain)

Excerpt:

My biological father abandoned my mother while we were toddlers.  He was a charming rogue of a gambler who came and went in our lives, leaving a wake of debt and infidelity.  My mother had been encouraged to get an abortion (illegally) by more than one family member when she found out she was expecting me, (the middle child).  Thankfully she gave birth to me and later to my younger brother, and was a loving mother. When Daddy’s gambling debts caused her small teaching salary to be garnished, she filed for a divorce.  Even after the first divorce she had been a good mother, taking us to church, reading us the Bible in the morning before school, singing to us at night, and praying with us for our wandering father.  She was gentle and supportive and I always knew I could go to her for help.  When mother remarried my first stepfather, (who was an alcoholic) things became difficult.

A devastating trauma struck our family in the summer of 1971 when I was 13 years old. My younger brother was killed in a car accident on our way home from a camping trip with our grandparents. He was 10 years old. My grandfather was also killed, my grandmother lost a leg, and my sister and I were injured.  The car accident and family trauma triggered a chain of events that led to my mother and first stepfather to divorce.

My stepfather was committed to a mental hospital briefly, and mother had an emotional breakdown. My sister and I went to live with my aunt and uncle for some months.

When we returned home to my mother after the divorce, things were not the same. My mother seemed wounded and disillusioned with life.  Without the stability of the family, or the church, we all struggled to recover from my brother’s death. She was still working as a teacher but she was living with my second stepfather, though they were not married yet.  He is a man I have grown to love and respect over time, yet in the 1970’s, when he was living with my mother, he was a different person than he is today and we disliked each other.

My sister and I were left on our own most of the time.  Previously, I had been raised going to church, but after the accident we just never went back. My sister and I became angry and rebellious. My sister left home when she was about 16, and backpacked around the country with her boyfriend. There I was at age 15, my sister gone, and feeling like I was in the way. There was a sense of being an obstacle to my mothers’ relationship with this new man.

My friendships changed from the kids we knew at church to the kids who hung out at the local Teen Center. Some of them took drugs and drank.

[…]My mother signed over guardianship of me to Steven after I had moved to Boston. I remember my surprise when Steven told me she had signed the papers and trying to take this in mentally. A sense of vulnerability came over me, knowing that I was his ward, but we were not married. He had not expressed his intentions of a long-term relationship with me. He had mentioned that he wanted guardianship papers so I could travel across state lines when he was on tour. I had told him my mother would not sign me over to him. I asked him how he had got her to do it. He said, “I told her I needed them for you to enroll in school.” I felt abandoned by my mother as well as my father and stepfather. Steven was really my only hope at that point.

So now what do we learn from this? Who is responsible for Julia’s abortion according to these facts? And what should Christians do to prevent a situation like this from occurring again? Should we wait until the pregnancy happens, or is there a way to attack the root of the problem with pro-family policies and effective church involvement?

First of all, it’s important to point out that fatherlessness causes women to engage in early sex.

Consider these facts:

– Adolescent females between the ages of 15 and 19 years reared in homes without fathers are significantly more likely to engage in premarital sex than adolescent females reared in homes with both a mother and a father.

Source: Billy, John O. G., Karin L. Brewster and William R. Grady. “Contextual Effects on the Sexual Behavior of Adolescent Women.” Journal of Marriage and Family 56 (1994): 381-404.

– Children in single parent families are more likely to get pregnant as teenagers than their peers who grow up with two parents.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics. National Health Interview Survey. Hyattsville, MD 1988.

– A white teenage girl from an advantaged background is five times more likely to become a teen mother if she grows up in a single-mother household than if she grows up in a household with both biological parents.

Source: Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe. “Facing the Challenges of Fragmented Families.” The Philanthropy Roundtable 9.1 (1995): 21.
(Source)

Fatherlessness has many causes, but the most obvious cause is that women freely choose to have sex with men who will not stick around to raise the children. That is why we have an out-of-wedlock birth rate of over 40% – women are consenting to sex with men who will have not demonstrated that they are willing and capable of committing to marriage and parenting. The choice of who to have sex with is, in virtually every situation, the woman’s decision. Women with low self-esteem are especially prone to avoid men who have strong moral character, and definite ideas about religion. They want to avoid being “controlled” or “rejected” when they act immorally. So they deliberately choose men who will not judge them or lead them spiritually. So the blame for fatherlessness lies solely on the woman – she chooses the man who she intends to have sex with.

Women cannot blame an irresponsible MAN for hurting them if they CHOOSE HIM and then he acts… IRRESPONSIBLY. He was irresponsible BEFORE the woman got there, and yet she still chose him of her own free will. Women are very well educated these days, and they have plenty of time to think about marriage. But what I have found is that they often resent the idea of using any criteria for men other than entertainment, feelings and peer-approval. How will they look in wedding pictures, they wonder?

We have already talked a lot about how women choose men using the 180-second rule, based on physical appearances and “confidence”. Women are not doing a good job of evaluating men for the role of husband and father. They are choosing based on shoes and voice and shoulders. So of course this is not going to work. Everything else in life requires lots of time spent reading, planning and testing if you hope to have success. But when it comes to men, many young, unmarried women choose irrationally and stupidly, based on selfishness and vanity. And the problem gets worse as successive generations are raised without fathers. Fathers matter. Fathers need to respected for the role they play in parenting.

Politics

Exacerbating the situation is the fact that leftist social engineers push sex education and welfare subsidies for women who chose to deliberately avoid men who are protectors and providers. However, women again do not escape blame here, since 77% of young, unmarried women voted for Obama in 2008, according to exit polls. Obama is a Democrat, and Democrats are the party of sex education, single mother welfare, no-fault divorce, and same-sex marriage. Democrats are the anti-marriage party, and young, unmarried women turn out in droves to vote for Democrats. And these policies cause the out-of-wedlock birth rate to skyrocket.

Naturally, the more that these young, unmarried women vote for bigger and bigger government to bail them out of their own irresponsible choices with men, the higher taxes will go, and the less money marriage-minded men will have. Men with less money DO NOT GET MARRIED. And the decline of boys in the schools isn’;t going to help them to find jobs, either. Instead of valuing good men, it seems as though young, unmarried women prefer to marry the government, since government mails out the checks but makes no moral demands. Parenting is left to taxpayer-funded day care and public schools – not fathers. We need to realize that fathers can only be effective when they have authority in the home, and this is usually related to the fact that they are primary breadwinners.

Postmodernism, moral relativism and universalism in the church

Another factor is the church. Julia’s mother was a very devout, spiritual and pious Christian. She attended church regularly, read the Bible and sung all the praise hymns. And how did this affect her decision making? Well – it didn’t. And the reason for this is two-fold. First of all, the church has stopped providing boundaries for behaviors and making moral judgments. Churches have embraced postmodernism (there is no truth), moral relativism (moral judgments are evil because people feel bad when they are judged) and universalism (believe anything you want as long as it makes you feel good). Christianity is no longer presented as being TRUE, with evidence and arguments (apologetics). Instead it is presented as something that makes people feel better, and you choose the religion you like.

The purpose of going to church for Julia’s mother was to have good feelings and a sense of community. She was not interested in discovering scientific and historical evidence that would make the moral rules of Christianity incumbent on her – she was not interested in moral obligations. Moral rules, like the rules around chastity and courtship, are “too strict”. It’s better to just take church as another way of feeling happy, and then do whatever you want. I once knew an adulterous woman who had sex with her boyfriends in the same house as her children, yet she loved to attend church and to sing Handel’s Messiah at Christmas – for the spectacle and the emotional high. Imagine what view of marriage her children got from that?

Anti-intellectualism in the church

In addition to the failure of the church to defend against postmodernism, moral relativism and universalism, there is the problem of the fundamentalist churches that just preach from the Bible without ANY idea of why the Bible should be taken as an authority. So, not only is the church disinterested in talking about the Big Bang, the fine-tuning, the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, the habitability problem, irreducible complexity and so forth, but they are also disinterested in explaining moral issues like abortion and traditional marriage. When churched parents have discussions with their children, they use church merely as a way to boss the children around so that they have less trouble with the kids. They scare them with the Devil and Hell (which are both real) without ever explaining prescriptive moral obligations using evidence.

For example, Julia’s mother’s church and parents SHOULD HAVE explained to her the importance of chastity and courting using evidence from social science that shows how chastity improves marital stability and marriage quality – things like communication and fidelity. The bad effects of cohabitation and hooking-up should have been explained WITH EVIDENCE, like you find in Dr. Laura books or Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse books. I can walk into churches to hear some of the most famous preachers, like John Piper and Alistair Begg, and never once hear a single piece of real-world evidence. All I get is “the Bible says” and that has no effect on people who do not have reasons to accept the Bible as true, and an  understanding of how that truth is applied in the real world. Apparently, in many churches it is considered high-treason to ask – “are these things really true? And how do we see that they are true here in the real world, with publicly testable and observable data”? (Mark Driscoll is an exception, much as I disagree with his male-bashing, feminist bias)

Conclusion

So, in short, young, unmarried Democrat-voting women cause problems for their daughters by raising them without fathers, and the church’s refusal to engage in apologetics and to connect faith to public evidence just makes the problem worse. That’s where abortion comes from, and many, many pro-lifers need to get engaged on these problems instead of waiting until the woman is already pregnant. Yes, we need sonograms Yes, we need to cut public funding for Planned Parenthood. Yes, we need parental notification laws. But we also need to address the problem with pro-family policies and with apologetics and statistics in the church.

Related posts

Mentoring

Mike Licona on the hostility to evangelical Christians on campus

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From Baptist Press. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

Did their youth pastors drop the ball on preparing them adequately to withstand the attacks on their faith they would experience when they went off to college? Yes. But the buck stops with Dad. I failed and I admit I’m embarrassed because, of all people, the children of an apologist should know the evidence.

Let’s take a moment and look at the situation in which our children find themselves. This will help us to see why it’s important to equip them with both evidences and answers to the difficult questions. University campuses are growing increasingly hostile toward evangelical students. A 2007 report by two Jewish researchers found a strong bias against evangelical students at secular universities.[1] More than 1,200 faculty members from 712 colleges and universities were interviewed pertaining to their feelings toward various religious followers. The results were alarming. Three percent of American faculty members admitted having negative or unfavorable feelings toward Jews while 33 percent admitted having them toward Muslims. But 53 percent admitted having negative or unfavorable feelings toward evangelical Christians. The researchers concluded, “Conservative Christians have for some time been concerned about their children’s campus environment. These data certainly legitimize their concerns.”

But it didn’t stop there. To their shock, these Jewish researches likewise discovered that a significant number of American faculty members want Muslims to play a greater role in the American political process while wanting evangelicals to stay out of it. But why? After all, generally speaking, most Muslims are pro-life, against homosexual marriage and women’s rights, at least as they are enjoyed by American women. To me, this suggests we are in much more than a cultural war between political conservatives and liberals. It goes beyond secularism and the religious. On many of our college campuses, it is a war against evangelical Christianity.

I personally have had numerous students from all over North America inform me that professors, on the first day of class, said their objective was to rid Christian students of their faith by the end of the semester. That’s right. The professor openly stated in class that his or her objective was to rid Christian students of their faith within the next hundred days. Can you imagine what would happen if those same professors had instead asked how many of his or her students were Muslims … or Jews? They would have been labeled “Islamaphobe” or “anti-Semite” and would soon have joined a number of others in the job market. But faculty members often get a pass if they’re a “Christophobe.”

I’ve been fussing a lot lately about making good decisions about sex before marriage, and the importance of children growing up with two biological parents. But another thing to prepare for is what happens when your children get into the schools. If you just abandon them to be influenced by their peers, by the culture, and by liberal educators, then you can’t expect your children to have an accurate worldview. Very rarely will you find that their peers, their pop culture influences, and their educators, have any sort of knowledge about what the Christian worldview really says, what the evidence is for it, and what the defenses are to arguments and evidence against it. You have to take the initiative to know this stuff. And if you aren’t married yet, then you need to be picking someone who has looked into the arguments and evidence for the Christian worldview. Economics, social science, education, marriage, parenting are all important things to study, but people already know a lot about that just by being aware of politics and such. That stuff is on the bottom shelf – apologetics is on the top shelf. You have to reach up high to get it – not everyone has it. And you can’t outsource it, either. You have to know it yourself.

What does the Bible say in the shema? (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.

7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

If you want an example of how far teachers will go to indoctrinate your children in university, check out this story from Neil Simpson. His daughter got a homework assignment that was designed to cause her to think that heterosexuality was ABNORMAL. Basically, it was a questionnaire with a lot of ridiculously offensive questions. She was supposed to give it to someone to fill out, so she gave it to her Dad. But her Dad is Neil Simpson – apologetics blogger and super-Dad. He’s posted the questions with his answers, as well as the outcome of the story. It’s worth reading if you want to see a good example of parenting.