Don't 'Parent' Your Children... Raise Them

Whenever I ask an audience of parents, “Raise your hand if parenting is the hardest thing you’ve ever done,” I am suddenly looking at a sea of hands.

Unquestionably, parenting is a most difficult and even sometimes vexing proposition. For some folks, the rigors of parenting have even precipitated serious mental health issues. Lots of moms (and a few dads probably) are taking psychiatric drugs for depression, chronic anxiety and other emotional problems brought on by the relentless pressures of parenting even one child.

Did you happen to notice that I italicized every use of the word parenting in the above two paragraphs? I did that to foreshadow the following point: Parenting a child and merely raising a child are two very different horses of two very different colors. Parenting is a post-1960s phenomenon, pulled out of thin air and then successfully marketed to American parents by self-anointed parenting experts who have come largely from within the mental health professions. 

As were 99.999 percent of people born before 1960, I was merely raised. Ironically, when I became a parent in 1969, the same year I entered graduate school, I became a believer in parenting. My psychology professors said it was a great and remarkable improvement over the old way, and so, wanting their approval, my wife and I jumped on board the parenting train. In 1976, when I began writing my syndicated newspaper column, I promoted—you got it!—parenting!

Around 1980, however, courtesy of almost scary behavior problems that had developed with our first-born, I began to experiment with the old way, the upbringing my wife and I had experienced as children. Immediately—and I mean immediately—everything about our family began to turn for the better, and the more Willie and I persisted in old-fashioned “Because I Said So” child rearing, the better things became.

How does mere child rearing differ from parenting? Good question, so let’s answer it!

The former is simple, straightforward, commonsensical, and grounded in scriptural understandings of children and parental responsibilities. The latter is difficult, crazy-making, illogical, and grounded in theories generated from within one of the most (if not THE most) atheistic professions ever devised by the devious minds of men.

A short list of the salient differences between parenting and mere child rearing includes:

Parents who parent make Big Deals of their kids. In effect, their kids become flesh-and-blood idols. Making matters worse…MUCH worse!...they try to be liked by their kid-idols. They have some strange desire to be their kids’ friends. Parents who merely raise children take child rearing very seriously—IT’S a Big Deal, but their kids are not. They love their children as much as anyone else, but they do not treat their children as if there is something “awesome” about them, they don’t care if their children like them or not at any given moment in time, and their friends are people their own age. 

A child who is being parented is at the center of attention in his family. A child who is being merely raised begins his life at the center of attention in his family (as infants must) but is moved into a satellite position by age three, at which time his parents have become the center of HIS attention. What a concept!

Parenting is about doing as much for one’s child as one can possibly do in a 24-hour day. Mere child rearing is about training a child to take responsibility for himself, beginning with training him to do as much as he can do for himself, as early as he is capable of doing it. For example, in 1955, Harvard and several other major universities discovered that nearly all 24-month-old American children had been successfully toilet trained (i.e., were accident-free). Back then, mothers did not agonize over toilet training. They simply did it. Today, the average age of toilet training is between 30 and 36 months, and toilet training has become (for moms, mostly) the single most nerve-wracking and insanity-inducing hurdle of the preschool years.

Parenting is about promoting self-esteem, which is accomplished by applauding (literally and figuratively) nearly everything the child does. “Great job!” is the mantra of a parent who parents. Mere child-rearing begins with the understanding that the child in question is sinful and that humility, not self-love, is the ideal.

Parenting promotes the demonic notion that the busiest mom is the best mom, which contrasts sharply with the pre-1970s mom’s understanding that “mom” was a person to whom a child gave respect, not instruction. A good example of the good-old days when children were merely raised is from my very own childhood. I was maybe five when this happened. I asked my mother to do something for me, something I was unquestionably able to do for myself, something like, “Will you get me a glass of water?” She looked at me with eyes that burned like coal. “Just who do you think I am?” she snapped, startling me. “Your personal slave? Don’t ever ask me to do that again, do you understand?” You bet! Moms don’t talk to their children like that anymore. They labor under the fiendish belief that the Good Mom is a Unfailingly Nice Mom and the Nice Mom is Servant to a Child As a result, they allow their children to rule and walk all over them. 

Parenting is forever, and it means always having to say you’re sorry. Children who are parented live with their parents as long as their parents will allow it, which is anyone’s best guess. Children who are merely raised understand by the time they are teenagers that that their parents’ goal in raising them is to cause them to want to strike out on their own, which they are all too happy to do.

Parenting is co-dependency, especially mother-child. The mother’s sense of self-worth is dependent on her child’s accomplishments, and her child’s sense of well-being becomes dependent upon his mother’s near-constant attention and enabling.

Parenting is done primarily by the mother; the father, meanwhile, becomes her parenting aide, there to assist and fill in for her when she needs a break (in which case she gives him a list of his interim responsibilities). Mere child raising is something for which both parents take equal responsibility, always letting their child know, however, that their relationship with one another as husband and wife eclipses their relationship with him as dad and mom, which amounts to the best news he may ever receive in his entire life!

CODA: I am sometimes told that I’m “picking” on women, causing them to feel like THEY are responsible for ALL the problems inherent to post-1970s – here we go again – PARENTING. Well, I do believe women hold the key to restoring mere child rearing to America, but I’m not picking on them. In that regard, please stay tuned. My next column for Clear Truth Media is titled, “If Your Kids Don’t Drive You Bonkers, The Good Mommy Club Will.”