Archive for the ‘Parenting’ Category
Kept alive
Seeing the parental relation is what the Scripture describes it, and seeing Satan has perverted it since the fall for the diffusion and multiplication of depravity and eternal death, the education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God—this is his task on earth.
Dabney, Parental Responsibilities
Home schooling
Here is my philosophy of home schooling; if you are home schooling or are considering it, I hope you will find it encouraging.
- I love the Christ Church statement that “Christian children deserve a Christian education. The problem with secular education is not so much that our children receive bad information, but bad formation. We desire education for our children that rejects the formational liturgies of secular schools, which include nationalist liturgies, radical environmentalist liturgies, sexual revolution liturgies, which all warp and twist them into faithful disciples of the state. We pursue for our children an education that will provide for them Christian formation, so that they will be above all disciples of the Lord Jesus.”
- I’ve not read all the way through The Well-Trained Mind, but I have found the prologue to be very helpful and encouraging, something to come back to from time to time. We’ve also heard good things about Anyone Can Homeschool.
- Most of home schooling is parenting. Curriculum is a context for working on obedience, self-governance, the fruit of the Spirit (in you and them!), scrappiness. When all curriculum is forgotten, those things will carry them through their adult life and its variety of vocations. This is a long and graduated process; some kids may need to do their work at the kitchen table for a long time, and everyone needs some amount of checkup and accountability even once they reach the point they are doing most of their own objective grading.
- There are a lot of options and everyone does it a little bit differently. Don’t feel you must do it one particular way. In particular, some folks feel that you must supplement with online options or things outside of the home. Certainly that’s a fine option, but it’s not necessary—even for subjects that you don’t feel up to teaching. Your goal is to reach the point where they are self-motivated and self-coaching learners. Always feel free to experiment but also remember that curriculum choices aren’t likely to solve problems so much as amplify or dampen them.
- Few things are necessary. Don’t be anxious.
- Dad’s vision and desire needs to be the horse that drives the cart of home schooling.
- Co-ops can be very helpful but aren’t necessary. I prefer a co-op that is administered by dads but that is hard to find. I personally think the cost-benefit of a co-op is better for older kids.
- I’m a member of both NCHE and HSLDA and appreciate their work. They have good resources on how to do it in NC.
- We’ve adjusted curriculum over time, mainly (1) to adjust depth and intensity as the kids get older, and (2) to seek for options that are less parent-dependent. We started with Sonlight when everyone was little and use Tapestry of Grace now (formerly with a co-op, now on our own). We like Apologia for science and Teaching Textbooks for math, primarily because they allow for a lot of student independence.
- I require music (start with piano, move to something else if you like) and cross country (a sport that works well for a larger family) regardless of interest levels. Others do it differently! These last few years I’ve appreciated the freedom that home schooling allows for my older kids to pursue jobs. It’s been fun to work with them on time management and prioritization.
Love in the time of Chinese flu
Now is a good time for the church to remember our call to unity. But we’ve all seen unity used as a cover to downgrade truth, righteousness, and genuine love. So it is equally a good time to be cautious about how that unity is urged and achieved.
As a practical example, I can show love for my brother Tom by standing six feet away from him and being charitable and gracious towards his reasons for wanting to exercise caution. But is there any situation whatsoever where my brotherly love for Tom restrains me from hugging Joe?
This article by Brett McCracken is typical of some of the poorly framed calls to unity nowadays. Ironically, you could say that Brett is insufficiently nuanced, or perhaps that his indecisive nuance is insufficiently masculine or fatherly.
Brett makes a simple but common category mistake: the man of weak conscience and the anxious man are not necessarily the same. As Friedman stresses, and as any good parent knows, our goal for the anxious is not to keep them from falling into sin, but to provide them enough firmness and exposure to mature. To be clear: I do not mean to imply that everyone taking precautions is anxious, nor do I mean to imply that that the best medicine is always to confront someone’s anxiety head-on.
However, anxiety is sin. And that leads us to another of Brett’s mistakes, which is to leave out almost entirely the category of the prophetic. He does want us to be faithful to the gospel, but there are many other points at which truth, righteousness, and beauty call for taking a loyal stand. Such a stand may appear to some to lack the humility and patience that Brett stresses. Brett himself makes the mistake of opposing confidence and humility; contrast this with Paul who exhorts us to be convinced about disputable matters, and we all remember Chesterton’s cutting insight on the true meaning of humility. And of course Brett himself is confident; we expect no less of someone writing to urge the church how to behave. Prophets know that their message can and must be grounded on a better sort of humility and patience and love. Every good parent knows that firmness is compatible with these things, and even Brett is exercising a kind of mollified firmness toward the prophet; the problem is that he is equating agreeable unity with true unity and thereby pointing his firmness in the wrong direction. It is easy to take a stand on yesterday’s issues, and for peace, but difficult and unpopular to take a stand on today’s issues.
Today’s issues are no small matter because they hinge on a number of points that do call for our loyalty: the priority of God’s call to worship in the heavenly assembly; truth; a biblical approach to quarantine, including a biblical value for livelihood and work; a biblical understanding of spheres of authority and their requirements and limits; and a wise, fatherly, and firm response to the truly infectious sin of anxiety. Surprisingly, these points all in fact involve a love for our neighbor, a placing “the interests of others above the self” as Brett rightly appeals but too narrowly applies. In addition to the more popular truths of humility and patience, the church has the solemn responsibility to proclaim these truths as well. With our childlike faith, we ought always to be in the vanguard of the children who expose the emperor’s lack of clothing.
We will surely be worshipping together in ten years’ time and with even closer bonds of unity in Jesus our king. Holding that anticipation over all is a good way to frame the great patience and love we exercise today even in our firmness. We are loyal to truth, righteousness, beauty, and to one another.
Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord
With John, Christian parents long to say that “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” (3 John 4) There is much wrapped up in “walking in the truth,” but it certainly includes our children’s “believ[ing] in the name of [God’s] son Jesus Christ.” (1 John 3:23)
We earnestly desire to pass on to our children an inheritance of faith and trust and the fear of the Lord. If, however, we are anxious parents, the unspoken inheritance we are passing on to them by our example is a lack of trust, and a fear of things other than the Lord. One of the greatest stumbling blocks to faith we set before our children is our disobeying Jesus’s command, “do not be anxious.” (Matthew 6, Philippians 4)
In one sense it is hard to obey this command because the things we fear seem more present than Jesus. However, we can battle this by remembering that Jesus is in control, he is trustworthy, he loves us, and he himself is not anxious. Because he cares for us we can cast all our anxieties on him (1 Peter 5:7). The more we practice this habit of leaning on Jesus’s greatness and goodness, the easier it will become.
Unless the LORD builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the LORD watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. (Psalm 127 ESV)
See also: A Failure of Nerve
A Failure of Nerve
For several years now I’ve appreciated and benefited from Edwin Friedman’s book on leadership, A Failure of Nerve. I enjoy thinking about big ideas that help to make sense of God’s world. For example, it is helpful to think of all sin as being a form of idolatry, or a form of pride, or arising from a kind of covetousness. We look for a structure of conflict and climax in most of our stories. René Girard teaches us to look for imitation and scapegoating in all of the crises of story and history, and points us to the one scapegoat who alone can cover mankind’s sin.
Edwin Friedman’s organizing big idea revolves around anxiety. He was a student of organizational behavior, ranging from families and churches to businesses and nations. He suggests that all of the ways that an organization can break down involve a kind of anxiety on the part of the group or the leader or both. And from this he draws a program of non-anxious leadership.
Friedman sees anxiety behind how a group or organization becomes stagnant, resistant or even hostile to change and growth; and also behind leaders’ addictions to either quick fixes or to data rather then decisive action. He suggests that a non-anxious approach to leadership is crucial, that the “calm presence” of a leader matters more to calming an organization’s anxiety than almost anything else the leader says or does. He develops this into an idea of what he calls “differentiation,” which is the leader’s own focus on his integrity and stability. Out of this non-anxious differentiation, he charges leaders to allow their organizations to experience a healthy dose of their own learning experience and even pain so that they can mature; what you might call a sort of non-anxious “tough love” that is appropriately sympathetic but does not devolve into the kind of empathy that is powerless to help others grow. In Friedman’s model, the leader functions both as a kind of anxiety absorber and also an immune system.
Although Friedman was not a Christian, many of his ideas have Christian parallels. Jesus charges us not to be anxious, and the fact that Jesus himself is not anxious is perhaps the greatest boost to our own faith. It is faith, after all, that is the true antidote to fear and anxiety, and Jesus invites us to bring our cares to him. Perhaps a way of expressing Friedman’s differentiated self is to say that it is a faith-filled, wise, mature, patient, and Spirit-governed self. This integrity of a leader includes the careful watching of his life and doctrine, and the taking of logs out of our own eyes before we address the specks in others’ eyes.
There is a superficial way of reading Friedman that suggests that leaders should be aloof and uncaring. I don’t think this is what he is saying, but in any case we want to be careful not to swing the pendulum that far. And while anxious leadership may be the problem of our time, we should also be on guard for a sinful complacency.
Additional reading:
- Friedman’s outline
- Challenging presence
- Alastair Roberts’ lengthy review and interaction
Friedman’s outline
Edwin Friedman summarizes his leadership principles as follows:
A summary of principles
1. Society
- The characteristics of a chronically anxious family, organization, or society—reactivity, herding, blaming, a quick-fix mentality, lack of well-differentiated leadership—will always be descriptive of a regressed institution.
- When any institution, relationship, or society is imaginatively gridlocked, the underlying causes will always be emotional rather than cerebral.
- All pathogenic (that is, destructive) organisms, forces, and institutions, whether we are considering viruses, malignant, cells, chronically troubling individuals, or totalitarian nations, lack self-regulation and are therefore invasive by nature and cannot be expected to learn from their experience.
- For terrorists to have power, whether in a family or in the family of nations, three conditions must be fulfilled: (1) the absence of well-defined leadership; (2) a hostage situation to which leaders are particularly vulnerable; and (3) an unreasonable faith in reasonableness.
- A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.
- A society’s culture does not determine its emotional processes; rather, a society’s culture provides the medium through which a society’s emotional processes work their art.
- The basic tension that must constantly be re-balanced in any family, institution, or society is the conflict between the natural forces of togetherness and self-differentiation.
2. Relationships
- It is easier to be the least mature member of a highly mature system than the most mature member of a very immature system.
- Increasing one’s pain threshold for others helps them mature.
- Stress and burnout are relational rather than quantitative, and are due primarily to getting caught in a responsible position for others and their problems.
- In any partnership, the more anxious you are to see that something is done, the less motivated your partner will be to take the lead.
- In any stuck relationship between an overadequate member and an underadequate other (person or organization), the overfunctioner must change before the underfunctioner can change.
- In any relationship anywhere, the partner doing the least amount of thinking about the other is the more attractive one to the other.
- When people differ, the nature of their differences does not determine the extent or the intensity of the differing.
3. Self
- Trauma lies in the self-organizing quality of the system and the response of the organism rather than in the event. In other words, the trauma is in the experience and the response to it, not in the event itself.
- The toxicity of an environment in most cases is proportional to the response of the organism or the institution, rather than to the hostility of the environment.
- What is essential are stamina, resolve, remaining connected, the capacity for self-regulation of reactivity, and having horizons beyond what one can actually see.
- There is no way out of a chronically painful condition except by being willing to go through a temporarily more acutely painful phase.
- People who are cut off from relationship systems, especially their family of origin, do not heal, no matter what their symptom.
- Most of the decisions we make in life turn out to be right or wrong not because we were prescient, but because of the way we function after we make the decision.
- A self is more attractive than a no-self.
4. Leadership
- Mature leadership begins with the leader’s capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny.
- Clearly defined, non-anxious leadership promotes healthy differentiation throughout a system, while reactive, peace-at-all-costs, anxious leadership does the opposite.
- Differentiation in a leader will inevitably trigger sabotage from the least well-differentiated others in the system.
- Followers cannot rise above the maturity level of their mentors no matter what their mentor’s skill and knowledge-base.
- The unmotivated are notoriously invulnerable to insight.
- Madness cannot be judged from people’s ideas or their values, but rather from (1) the extent to which they interfere in other people’s relationships; (2) the degree to which they will constantly try to will others to change; and (3) their inability to continue a relationship with people who disagree with them.
- People cannot hear you unless they are moving toward you, which means that as long as you are in a pursuing or rescuing position, your message will never catch up, no matter how eloquently or repeatedly you articulate your ideas.
- The children who work through the natural difficulties of growing up with the least amount of difficulty are those whose parents made them least important to their own salvation.
(Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve, 201-203)
Challenging presence
Edwin Friedman has his own way of charging parents to keep a close watch on ourselves, to pay attention to the logs in our own eyes:
Everything I have said above [about data addiction and anxiety] holds true for parenting as well. Over the years I found parents so engulfed in data and techniques that I stopped trying to educate them and started trying to free them from this “syndrome.” I developed a presentation entitled “How to Get Your Kid to Drop Out and Save $100,000 in Tuition” (it was $30,000 when I began). I always mention at the very beginning that all the specific “techniques” I am going to offer such as how to escalate conflict, screw up communication, and increase the generation gap will work better if parents will commit themselves to reading all they can about raising children. This, I point out, will help make them more anxious, more inconsistent, less self-confident, and far less the kind of non-anxious, challenging presence that could ultimately cost them a bundle of tuition. The advantages of trying to keep up, I point out, are that they can consistently worry if they are reading the right book, if the real truth has just come out and they do not even know about it, and if there are experts out there who “know” how to do it.
Parenting is no different from any other kind of “managing.” The critical issues in raising children have far less to do with proper technique than with the nature of the parents’ presence and the type of emotional processes they engender. I have, for example, almost never seen a mother who had mature relationship with her own mother have trouble with her daughter. Similarly, I never saw a highly reactive or hypercritical father who was not distant from his own family of origin (and who, thereby, made the members of his new nuclear family too important to him).
Where parents are willing to take responsibility for their own unworked-out relationships either with their own parents or with one another, children rarely develop serious symptoms. Symptoms in a child are most likely to develop in the areas of the parents’ own traumatization where they, therefore, have the least emotional flexibility. (Parents never seem to get the problems they can handle.) And to the extent child-focus enables parents not to have to deal with their own relationships or their own unresolved issues, that projection process will retard if not nullify all techniques and well-meaning efforts to improve the child, including the aid they seek from tutors and counselors.
To expect parents to focus on the emotional process in their own relationships rather than focus on their children requires having counselors (therapists, educators, clergy, and so on) who are willing to do likewise. And it is much easier for everyone to conspire to focus on data and technique instead. The social science construction of reality that would diagnose children instead of family emotional process, and that would allow parents to blame their ethnic background rather than take responsibility for their own responses, furthers the anxiety.
Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve, 112-113
Becoming
We sometimes think our child is deficient because he wants to touch the vase and we have to transform the child into somebody who does not want to touch the vase. But your task is not to teach the child how to be a child—the child already knows how to be a child. You are not teaching your children to be children. You are teaching your children to grow into adults.
This is why, when you are in this showdown across the coffee table, you should look into the future with the eye of faith and see your child standing where you are now standing and their children standing where he is now standing. And how will he know how to deal his son? He will have learned how from you!
If you do not know how to be patient in the face of repeated provocations, your children are not going to know either. When you discipline your children correctly, you are loving your grandchildren. Your job is not to teach them how to be an acceptable child, but to show them how to be a responsible adult—because that is the whole point.
Be honest—you bought the vase at a yard sale last summer and that vase is going to be in another yard sale this coming summer. Who cares about the vase? The child is going to live forever. The child is not something you acquired or are going to get rid of in a yard sale. The vase is. You are not teaching the child to be a good version of what they are. You are rather teaching them to be what they are becoming. . .
This principle does not change. Suppose you are dealing with an obstinate teenager and you are thinking “How to fix the teenager” is your task for the day. Your job is not to fix the teenager. Your task is to model for that teenager how to be a parent. Your teen, in just a few short trips around the sun, is going to have a teenager of her own. You are not training her to be a teenager. She has that down already. You are preparing her for the day when she won’t be. . . .
. . . If I have mastered all the parenting techniques but have not love, I am nothing . . .
Imagine a father and a son in the presence of an unsplit cord of wood. What is the father’s duty? His duty is to take two axes, hand one of them to his son, and to love God and to also love a morning of splitting wood, and to do so alongside his son whom he also loves. That is what godly childrearing is.
Love God, love what you are doing, and love the people God gave you to do it with. Does that remove the need to correct? No, you have to show them how to hold the ax and keep them from swinging it around carelessly. Correction, discipline, teaching, mentoring—all of it must be there because you love Jesus, because you love the wood, and because you love your son. That is what you must do.
Douglas Wilson, Why Children Matter, Chapter 13
See also: Self-control
Singing
Ephesians [5:1] says that God treats us as children. Since Scripture shows how He treats us, we should desire to be like Him in how we treat our children. As He deals with us, so we should deal with our own children. And we see from Zephaniah [3:17] that He rejoices over us.
When Jesus intervened to save us, He did so at great cost to Himself. When He took the loaf of bread that represented His own broken body, He picked it up and gave thanks. As Hebrews 12 says, Jesus did what He did on the cross “for the joy that was set before Him.” . . . God is mighty to save, and He saves with singing.
Now we know from the story of the whole Bible that saving people involves sacrifice, blood, and things being broken. He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us, but He did it with singing. Not only did Jesus give thanks the night He instituted the meal, but afterward they sang a psalm, and then they went out (Matt. 26:30; Mark 14:26). Jesus literally sang as He was preparing to go to the cross.
So, the sacrifices that you will make for your children should be something you can sing over. If there is not a song in it, it is not a biblical sacrifice. Without a song, it is a poor-me, look-at-the-martyr-go sacrifice, and those kinds of sacrifices have a very poor return. You are not just supposed to sing over your children when they are being adorable, asleep in their bed, and you can be at peace with them since they are not misbehaving at the moment. Life is messier than that, and the whole thing—including the mess—should be met with a song. The delight that we are imitating is not an unrealistic delight. This kind of delight takes account of the world as it is, and even so, it rejoices. You sing over your children when you are sacrificing for them, when you are taking the hit for them, and when they have no idea what you are giving up for them.
Douglas Wilson, Why Children Matter, Chapter 3
See also: Singing and slaying
Singing and slaying
The Rohirrim sing oft in battle:
Merry and Pippin heard, clear in the cold air, the neighing of war–horses, and the sudden singing of many men. The Sun’s limb was lifted, an arc of fire, above the margin of the world. Then with a great cry the Riders charged from the East; the red light gleamed on mail and spear.
And much later:
And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of the battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.
See also: Worship is warfare, Treebeard, Worship is warfare (2)
I gotta have my orange juice. 