January 29, 2010

The Myth of the Perfect Parent
Why the best parenting techniques don't produce Christian children.
Leslie Leyland Fields | posted 1/08/2010 10:16AM

My 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 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 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 have a more potent impact on 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."

Parents' most consuming concern is that their children 'turn out'-that
they grow up to be churchgoing, God-honoring adults.

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 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, they also 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 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 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?"

Clearly then, 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 fa-thers, 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 by 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, she
writes, is "the belief that we should have control over our children
when it is hard enough to have control 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.

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.

The notion of the infant as an arriving tabula rasa upon which we
inscribe our design remains deeply embedded in our culture.
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 as well. 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 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 Traps Us in Worry and
Guilt