Happy Halloween!

Free-Range Versus Helicopter Parenting

Dave grew up in an environment without a lot of parental supervision: he biked to school and lessons on his own, hung out at friends’ houses without adults around. I grew up with parents who were involved in every aspect of school and social life: they drove and stayed with me through every lesson and recital; I wasn’t allowed to go on sleepovers. He recognizes that his parents could have been more involved and that he was lucky to live in a community with intelligent, loyal friends. I recognize that we lost out on the benefits of community and a directive style of parenting doesn’t work equally well on all personality types. But the point is, we tend to come at this issue of “free-roaming” versus “helicopter” parenting from different sides.

On the one hand, you have helicopter parenting. This has been around as a recent trend so I probably don’t have to describe it much: it’s the parent who feels they must control and directly supervise every aspect of their children’s lives. Their infants must eat pureed organic foods and listen to Mozart. Their toddlers must potty train on schedule and read early. Their kids must start a rigorous schedule of sports and music lessons. Everything they consume, wear, and do is carefully curated, ultimately to achieve success, however defined.

Critics of helicopter parenting point to research that suggests kids parented this way turn out to be less flexible and more anxious and self-conscious, as well as more likely to be medicated for anxiety and depression. They have more difficulty devising their own plans and carrying them out, skills involved in executive functioning.

On the flip side, you have free-roam parenting, a concept that has been brought out more in recent articles. The TIME article I discussed earlier found that many families with high-achieving siblings let them free-roam as children. A recent NPR article discusses how our society’s averseness to leaving children unattended is more moral judgment than actual risk assessment. A recent NYT magazine article highlights an “anti-helicopter” parent’s desire to establish a “playborhood” where kids have self-directed, physically riskier, communal play.

Free-range parents feel that kids need to have unsupervised, even risky experiences to form happy memories, to learn how to titrate fear, to develop self-efficacy, to problem-solve on their own, to build confidence. They feel kids need to self-explore to develop independence and responsibility. Kids are allowed to go places on their own, to be taken care of by other adults or play with other kids without adults around, to have free-play without agenda or programs.

The opposition to free-range parenting seems obvious, probably because parenting has been trending away from the more hands-off styles of the 60’s and 70’s for a while now: it’s almost a moral assertion that a parent must constantly watch their kids, that anything else is unsafe. My personal objection to free-range parenting is that it can slide into neglect—I see our neighbor’s kids doing nothing but drinking sodas and jumping on trampolines all day with nary an adult in sight, though maybe that’s a bad value assertion?

The first thing I would say about all this is that there is some class distinction involved. Typically, helicopter parents are wealthy and high-educated: frankly, it takes a lot of money and/or time and energy to hover over your kids. Families with less resources, or families with more children, may naturally tend to free-range more.

The second thing I would acknowledge is that there’s a natural bit of discomfort when someone’s parenting style differs noticeably from your own. I’ve been around parents who are much more controlling of their kids’ exposures and activities than I am, and it makes me feel pressured, and less able to relax. I feel I have to monitor my kids more because I don’t want them to do anything to offend them; I feel more judged, and that my kids are being judged more. I’ve been around parents who are more free-roaming than us, and it makes me feel a bit dumped on: I have to be the one to make sure someone’s kid isn’t stabbing someone else in the eye, because their parent seems totally unconcerned.

The third thing I would say is that, like any trend or style of parenting, I think the point is less to judge others than to examine yourself: to ask, what is the goal or point of my parenting? How can I incorporate the strengths of various trends, or what I see in others’ styles, to that end? In what way am I falling into cultural mindsets that are not helpful?

Finally: which is better? Well, I’ll have to leave that, maybe, for later, as this post is getting too long… feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts.

How Sex Points to God

There’s a difference between gratitude and adoration. Gratitude is when I say, “thank you for this, God.” Adoration is when I ask, “how does this reveal an attribute of God that I can admire him for?” Gratitude goes as far as saying, “thank you for sex, God; it is a good thing”; adoration takes it further, asking “what does sex reveal about God’s nature and narrative?”

Putting God and sex in the same sentence can seem awkward, which I think reveals how much we are creatures of our culture, and how powerfully Satan uses sex to drive us towards shame, instead of pointing us towards God.

J.L. Packer writes about how sex is a signpost to God: now if you camp under a signpost you’re not going to get much of anywhere. If you’re driving down I-64 and camp under the sign that says “Virginia Beach, 60 miles” and say, “we’re here, honey!” you won’t get there. Yet that’s what we’re doing: our appetites are so habitually inflamed as to distract us, or our shame is so great as to paralyze us, from moving on to the destination.

So how does sex point us to God?

It points to one way in which we were made in his image. God is one God, but in three persons, and at the center of the Trinity is a state of mutual, self-giving love. C.S. Lewis calls this the “great dance”: a dynamic, pulsing activity in which the Father, Son and Holy spirit pour love and joy into one another continually, and sex mirrors that.

Sex points to what it will be like to be with God in heaven. In Ephesians 5:31-32, Paul writes, “the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” This is why, I think, sex can never be just about the body—it involves the heart, mind, soul, all of us—because it is meant to point to the wholeness of union we will have with Jesus one day for all of eternity. That is the story God is writing us for, and sex now is somehow just a faint foretaste of it.

Sex points to the gospel in involving the ability to create new life. After all, God didn’t have to create sex for procreation. I can think of a few alternative ways of mingling genomes. But God chose to have a covenant act of self-giving bring new life, a life that we cannot take credit for masterminding, and I can only think that it points to the gospel.

Ultimately, I think sex makes us realize we are creatures with needs that only Jesus can meet. If I dig deep enough, I see that sometimes underneath the need is a desire for connection, meaning, understanding, and identity that ultimately only Jesus can satiate. As Isaiah 54:4-5 says, “Fear not, for you will not be ashamed; be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer.”

Evangelism in the Christian South

Michael Wolff in his article “The Party Line” in the New Yorker talks about the schism in America, between a quicker-growing, economically vibrant, morally relativist, urban-oriented, culturally adventuresome, sexually polymorphous, ethnically diverse nation, and a small-town, nuclear-family, religiously-oriented, white-centric other nation. When we lived in Boston, which was the former, we shared the gospel by engaging it intellectually, examining alternate-faith assertions, applying doctrinal truths, living out social engagement in the context of urban community. We were living out gospel relevance in a culture that despised the exclusive claims of the Christian faith.

But here in southern, suburban Virginia, sharing the gospel feels completely different. Church here is culture: it’s a social meet-and-greet, a see-and-be-seen. You hear “have a blessed day” and people dropping the fact that they’re “a Christian” at work as a way of connecting with people, whether or not they actually act like one.

It makes me think of how Tim Keller describes a cultural being inoculated to Christianity. An inoculation is when you introduce a mild form of the disease to render a person immune to the real, full-blown version of it. Being steeped in either a mild, nominal Christianity, or a separatist, legalistic Christianity, is a bit like producing spiritual antibodies: it makes people resistant to the real thing. It gives just enough of an illusion of religiosity that true life-change, true heart-knowledge doesn’t happen.

So this makes how we share the gospel different. It’s less about daring to bring God up, then trying to wade through lingo and lethargy to get at heart-change. I’m grateful we go to a church that emphasizes vulnerable community and practical application. We’ve been challenged to abandon consumeristic mindsets towards church services and ask where God wants us to be to live out our faith in a real way with real community. We admittedly look a little different than the average, two-physician family ensconced in the suburbs: we both commute out to underserved rural and urban areas to work; have made unique work-life balance decisions that abdicate both career glory and full-out home-schooling stay-at-home-mom culture; we commute out to a church plant where the folks are all racially, stage-of-life wise, and socioeconomically diverse.

In the end, we try to be transparent in living out how the gospel has changed our lives. People here aren’t interested in apologetics debates or shocked at faith claims: they want to see what difference any of it makes, in how you act towards your family, handle suffering, relate in friendships. In the city, it was easier to look radically different right from the outset; around here, not so much, but over time people do start to notice.

The Lavishness of God

I’m reading John chapter 2 today and thinking about the lavishness of God.

The setting of Jesus’ first miracle is a wedding, which in first-century Jewish culture was a week-long affair to which nearly the whole town was invited. Back then, drinking wine was the equivalent of drinking water: in fact, their wine was mostly (anywhere from 30-90%) water. It was less to enhance the wine than to improve the water, which by itself was unsanitary to drink, causing nausea, dysentery, or worse. Lowering the alcohol content through dilution was probably necessary as everyone from babies to adults drank the stuff, all day long.

Paul Lukacs writes an intriguing book called Inventing Wine in which he notes that ancient wine contained additives such as pitch, lead, lye, ash, resin, gypsum, marble dust and myrrh, to make the wine more drinkable. They would then add honey, salt, pepper, and all kinds of spices and oils to improve the flavor. Ancient wine likely tasted nothing like our wines today. I like his quote from Pliny: “It is a proof that wine is beginning to go bad if a sheet of lead when dipped in it turns a different color.”

So when the bridegroom ran out of wine only three days into the wedding, it was a deep and public embarrassment: more like running out of water in a culture where hospitality was highly valued, than like not having a wet bar at the reception. Jesus asks the servants to fill six thirty-gallon jars with water, which he turns into wine—the best wine.

Now the symbolism here is rife—the emptiness of Judaic rituals replaced by the poured-out wine-blood sacrifice to come. Our shame replaced by the restoration and satisfaction wine symbolizes (Amos 9:13-14, Joel 2:19). The baptism by water John the Baptist proffered replaced by the baptism into salvation by Jesus’ blood, and the intoxicating Holy Spirit. Jesus as creator, creating something that brings noticeable joy to the celebration, blessing the institution of marriage and pointing to the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:9).

But look just at the numbers of the thing: six jars holding 20-30 gallons each; let’s say 25 gallons, to average it. Each filled to the brim. That’s 150 gallons, or 567,750 mL. If an average glass of wine is 175 mL, then Jesus made just over 3,244 glasses of wine. You could then debate whether that wine was diluted with water, presumably after being tasted by the master of the feast but prior to being served to the guests; if three parts of water were used for one part of wine, then that’s possibly nearly 13,000 glasses of watered wine. Some commentators suggest this was Jesus’ wedding gift to the couple, who could sell it afterwards to supply their financial needs.

Jesus gives lavishly. In the areas of our life where we are empty, when our own efforts to purify ourselves fall short, Jesus fills us up, to the brim, with lavish grace, with life to the full. He meets our thirsts and brings us from shame to celebration. When we follow in faith and obedience, we are witnesses, like the servants drawing the liquid from the jars: privy to the miracle, beholders of the glory.

Pitfalls Of A Big Family

I have this theory that when it comes to the optimal number of kids, it’s a balance between your ability to give each child the individual attention and care they deserve, and the benefit of greater community. You have too few kids, and they miss out on the camaraderie, love, and learning to sacrifice that the unique personality of each sibling—and the unique combinations of each of those personalities—provides. But have too many kids, and some of their needs can slip by under the radar since you’re too tired or taxed to notice. It’s just impossible to give each one the same degree of attention when you have many.

We’re at a stage in life—four kids six and under—where the group effect is particularly pronounced. It’s easy to fall into something author Rachel Jankovic (who had five kids in five years) calls the “bulk effect.” She gives a great example of this in her book Loving The Little Years: Motherhood In The Trenches:

“Let’s say that you are trying to get ready for church, and one child is disobedient (something petty, like not putting on their shoes when you told them to). They wandered off and got distracted and loitered in the living room for a minute. In that minute the baby starts crying, you see the clock and realize that you are going to be late, you can’t find the wet wipes or the baby’s shoe, which you know you put on the table last night. The baby is still screaming, so you are trying to rock the car seat with your foot while doing the hair of your middle child who will not stop bouncing. You are shouting out to your husband to see if he knows what happened to the baby shoe, probably punctuated with ‘Sit still. Stop. Don’t wiggle.’ As it turns out, your husband is out looking for someone’s lost shoe in the car where they are prone to remove them, so you get no response. You begin to have evil thoughts about shoes. The tension is mounting. You may very well be feeling hot and sweaty while your coffee is getting cold on the counter, untouched. At this moment, the child who didn’t put his shoes on comes wandering back, refreshed with a nice spell of magna-doodling. What do you think happens?

“You take that shred of guilt and then harness onto it the stress of the whole situation. You make your child into a scapegoat… He did, after all, disobey… the consequences for his sin go way up, and the consequences for yours go way down. It is simply a classic shifting of the blame. … Oftentimes you won’t even discipline the sin that did occur, because you are wanting to leave this situation with the feeling that you were full of grace toward that child who maliciously magna-doodled. Next time, you say, you will get spankings. This time, you will just have to bear the weight of my discontent, my anger, and my lack of self-control.

"If you took the actions of each individual child, nothing big happened. One kid took her shoes off last night in the car. One kid keeps bouncing when you are trying to fix her hair, one kid had a dirty diaper, and one kid magna-doodled instead of putting on his shoes, and the baby just wants some attention… The combined effect is certainly ripe, especially when you add in the things that Mom and Dad were responsible for. The time. The lost clothing that could have been found last night. Not noticing the distracted disobedience right away. Not getting up early enough to drink your coffee.

“The situation is not sin. It is merely the combined effect of a lot of people. And just because you can pin down one sin in the batch does not mean that child is responsible for the situation. Your children are not a situation. They are individuals. Disciplining an individual for a collective situation is a great way to alienate your children. It is not only unjust and unkind, but it is untrue to the gospel. Christ takes our sins; He does not load us down with someone else’s.”

The bulk effect is when I let my reaction to the overall situation unduly affect my reaction to one child; when I functionally make them responsible for the behavior of the group. There’s a difference between asking Elijah to be quiet because Esme is still sleeping, and becoming mad at him because she woke up. There’s a difference between reminding Eric to let Elijah pour his own cereal because he’s two and wants to feel grown-up, and snapping at Eric because he triggered Elijah’s third tantrum of the hour. There’s a difference between reminding them they’ll have to deal with certain grocery-cart arrangements, and getting upset at them for making a grocery run so complicated—it’s not their fault there are so many of them. When having a lot of kids becomes a problem, it’s my responsibility to deal with it.

The other pitfall for big families is mistaking our ability to contain and organize them for actually addressing their hearts and seeing their needs.

Big families naturally require a lot of organization—keeping them clean, clothed, and fed is a major operation. It’s practically consuming in and of itself. I think our lives are doable because we’ve gotten pretty good at running the ship, but we have to remember that, as Jankovic puts it, “Christian childrearing is a pastoral pursuit, not an organizational challenge. The more children you have, the more you need to be pastorally minded.”

This means a lot of things. It means being willing to let the operation be interrupted if there’s an emotional need. It means seeing my kids: observing shifts in mood, the faint door-slam, the persistent grumpiness, and taking time out to get to the root of it. It means spending time alone with each child without an agenda. Since I have limited energy and resources, it might mean putting aside my career or ministry in some way so I don’t miss out on being able to know and address their hearts and minds.