STRAIGHTENING AMERICA’S PARENTING PATH
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight. – Proverbs 3:5 – 6 (NIV)
Flip those two well-known Bible verses over and they read something along the lines of, “A person who leans on his own understanding (or the understandings of other sinful human beings) rather than God’s is a person who has not fully submitted to God, in which case his paths will not be straight.” Or, the shorter version: “A person who believes in his self-sufficiency will not be able to walk a straight path.”
Postmodernity is generally dated from around 1970, but the postmodern worldview had its nefarious beginning in the Garden, when Adam and Eve came to possess counterfeit knowledge of good and evil by eating from the taboo tree while still in their natal, unsaved state.
God is a God of objectivity, logic, and absolutism. He designed us in accordance with those principles, but in a stunning moment of false revelation, our first ancestors became trapped in a worldview in which self, subjectivity, irrationality, and relativism rule—a perpetually toxic worldview that has clamored for our attention ever since. God is Light and Life; that self-centric worldview is darkness and death.
I was in graduate school (1969 – 1972) when the pseudo-science of psychology began to inform the rearing of children in America. Until then, child rearing in Western Civilization had been informed by biblical principle. Even most non-believing parents subscribed to age-old understandings of children and parental responsibilities. Since trading tradition and God’s Word for progressivism and psychology, every marker of child mental health has been in free-fall. Millions of children are taking bogus pharmaceuticals for behavior problems they bring with them to school. Nearly all kindergarten teachers report being hit, kicked, and spit on by five-year-olds. Once upon a time, teenagers were merely mischievous; today, many of them are dangerous to themselves and others.
Pre-1970s, a couple might raise twelve children while experiencing only occasional stress. Today, what is now called “parenting” is generally thought of as being ridden with frustration, anxiety, stress, anger, resentment, guilt, and a ubiquitous feeling that nothing works. For many parents, everything, from the moment the kids get up in the morning until they finally consent to stay in bed, is a hassle. Gentle parenting doesn’t work. Attachment parenting doesn’t work. Democratic parenting doesn’t work. Spanking doesn’t work. Time-out doesn’t work. Being a working mom doesn’t work. Staying at home doesn’t work. Therapy doesn’t work. The drugs don’t work. Nothing works, which probably explains why women with children take more anti-depressants than any other demographic.
America’s parenting path isn’t straight. It’s not even wobbly. It zig-zags all over the parenting map. Common sense fell off the luggage rack forty years ago and no one seems interested in re-tracing our steps and retrieving it.
The Bible is clear, the paths of a person who trusts in the Lord with all his heart will be straight. That person will be able to clearly see where he is going, which will be where he should be going. It logically follows that if a path is not straight, the person in question is not trusting properly.
When it comes to the upbringing of children, America has been trusting in psychology for over fifty years…trusting in the understandings of sinful human beings, and that is almost as true of parents who identify as Christians as it is of those who identify as Nothings or Anythings. How much longer is it going to take for us to figure this out? Truth is not complicated. Truth does not strain the brain. If it’s complicated, it’s likely not the truth.
Some 2,900 years ago, the psalmist wrote, “It is God who made us and not we ourselves” (Psalm 100:3). Sinful human beings are never going to do a flawless job at anything we undertake, but we will do a much better job when we obey the instructions of our Creator as opposed to those snatched out of thin philosophical air by other sinful human beings. Amen.