I fell off of the interwebs the last two days because the moment for mucking out my church’s Sunday School rooms came upon me. For two days I shoved bookshelves around, swept away dust and cobwebs, tested every glue stick and threw half of them away, and sifted through piles of discarded construction paper, making sure no precious treasures lurked in their scribbled depths.
This year we did something I didn’t think possible. We did Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (CGS) through the summer. For those who might be new to this blog, CGS is not peculiar to my parish—Good Shepherd. It is a way of being with Children in church that is used all over the world. The thing is, like most situations, it fits neatly into the September to May paradigm. You kick off your atrium around the time most children go back to school, and then you wind it down after the Feast of Pentecost and have the summer to recover yourself.
But we’ve never stopped any of our Adult Education programming over the summer, and so for twenty years have had to cobble different programs together for children, trying to keep them interested. We’ve tried memorizing scripture. We tried a sort of paired-down VBS. We wrote some curriculum. One year I just passed out a lot of candy to anyone who came to church in July. And then, one day last year, our wise Children's Director looked us solemnly in the face, patted our hands, and made those of us who work with children face facts. The Christian Life doesn’t stop just because the school year does. Let’s try doing CGS all year, she said.
I didn’t think it was possible. But, you know, with God a lot of things are possible and so we came up with a plan—one I’ve been racing to keep ahead of since the end of May, trying to solve problems as they arise and generate a semblance of quiet calm. That part turned out not to be possible, but I can’t blame God.
What I can blame God for is that just when things normally ramp down and get quiet as families rush out on the weekends to the beautiful lakes nearby, or drive to beaches in New Jersey and Delaware, and go to visit family and friends, they instead decided always to appear in church and Sunday School as the hot and humid summer slipped by, and we happened to grow as a congregation. Let’s go to church in Binghamton said a lot of people. Lots of these people had children and so my idea of combining groups normally separated into rooms by age, because I assumed no one would come, turned out to be kind of a bad idea.
Anyway, the parents in my church are some of the sanest, most sensible people around, witness their persistence in bringing their children to church and coming themselves. Raising children in today’s culture is an uphill climb, as everyone knows—vven the New York Times. If you click over there, you will find, as you scroll down, a large headline. “Today’s Parent:” it says, “Exhuasted, Burned Out and Perpetually Behind.” “The surgeon general,” apparently, “is warning about parent’ stress, a sign that intensive parenting may have become too intense for parents.”
In spite of being far too online, I hadn’t heard of “intensive” parenting, though, I think we can all see that the task has become more intense every year for at least the last twenty, or as long as Social Media has been around to transform every facet of being human into something insane and vaguely unpleasant. I suppose it can’t be a bad thing for the surgeon general to notice these sorts of tribulations. From the article:
In his recent advisory on parents’ mental health, the United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek M. Murthy, said out loud what many parents might have only furtively admitted: Parenting today is too hard and stressful.
I wonder what he means by “too.” Everything is hard and stressful. But if something is “too hard” than the implication, at least as it appears to me, is that there is almost no point in attempting to do it. I can’t reach the top shelf of my cupboard because I am too short. I can’t shove my dresser across the room because I am too weak. I can’t give my children the golden childhood dream they hope for because I am not God. But perhaps I am reading too much into the surgeon general’s warning. How did it come about that parenting became “too hard?”
It’s because today’s parents face something different and more demanding: the expectation that they spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children. These pressures, researchers say, are driven in part by fears about the modern-day economy — that if parents don’t equip their children with every possible advantage, their children could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life.
Who doesn’t love contemplating the souring economy in the dark hours of the anxious morning? Being “driven by fears” is becoming a national pastime. Still, one might blandly observe that no one “has” to give their children “every possible advantage.” Most people understand the sheer impossibility of such an idea. I expect the surgeon general hasn’t met those people. Anyway, now we come to the intense bit:
This parenting style is known as intensive parenting, as the sociologist Sharon Hays described it in the late 1990s. It involves “painstakingly and methodically cultivating children’s talents, academics and futures through everyday interactions and activities,” the sociologists Melissa Milkie and Kei Nomaguchi have written. But we may have reached a point, the surgeon general and other experts suggest, where intensive parenting has become too intense for parents.
Yes, of course. You can’t do this. You aren’t God, though, perhaps like me, you wish you could be at least half a god on those helpless occasions when you don’t know what to do and everything feels like it’s unraveling, or hasn’t gone the way you wanted.
Parents blame themselves when they fear they don’t measure up. A majority say they feel their children’s successes or failures reflect on them, and significant shares feel judged for their parenting, the Pew Research Center found. The surgeon general called out an intense culture of comparison, exacerbated by the internet.
When will we be able to get a warning for the internet? Anytime you try to click on Insta a large bright sign should flash before you asking you to reconsider. Do you really want to know how your friend’s kids are doing right now? Unless you happen to know they’re not doing well, in which case, by all means, click because it will make you feel better about your own paltry success. Otherwise, leave it alone. Go weed your garden and stare into the middle distance while your child blathers on about his incomprehensible science assignment.
Also, of course, there is no solution to this problem, certainly nothing proposed by any political conservative:
Conservatives still generally prefer that instead of taxpayer-funded government programs, people in families’ communities — relatives, neighbors, church members — mostly fill the gaps. But there has been a decline in the informal community networks helping to raise children. Attendance at community meeting places like churches has decreased. Mothers are likely to work for pay, rather than be home keeping an eye on children — their own and their neighbors’. Parents with higher education are more likely to move far from grandparents to pursue careers
I love how the total dissolution of society is so tidily summarized by America’s Paper of Record, without admitting any culpability, of course. How brilliant the passively worded immiseration of the parenting task—”there has been a decline.” Yes, indeed there has, for discernable reasons that many people foresaw and warned about. Ah Well, we can but carry on.
Remember when the cultural case for being allowed to divorce whenever and for whatever reason you happened to like best was being made? How millions of mothers were told that if they weren’t “happy” their children wouldn’t be “happy?” Which turned out to be not true and essentially destroyed the contentment and well-being of a whole American generation. Well, perhaps this is not what the surgeon general is trying to say in this case, but it sounds eerily similar:
But the surgeon general’s alert shifts the focus to parents’ well-being — which it said in turn affects children’s mental health. The increased demands of raising children, combined with responsibilities like paid work and elder care, have come at the expense of mental health, leisure time, sleep, and time alone or with a spouse.
Of course you shouldn’t be “unwell.” But I think it would behoove almost everyone to remember that life, in general, is just very hard and every age has had to cope with the demands of raising children combined with responsibilities like paid work and elder care. When you are a parent, or any kind of person who cares for another, you sacrifice things like sleep, leisure, and time alone for the sake of the other. It doesn’t mean you have to give in and just be mentally ill, but it’s possible that if you can’t cope, you might have deeply unrealistic expectations about what life on this earth really entails.
Anyway, just one last bit, because I promise, I haven’t forgotten that it’s Sunday and that the lections for the day are beckoning me:
But Dr. Murthy said that a pro-family America would also require a cultural change — one that envisioned parenting as a societal good, and therefore the responsibility of the whole society, as important as paid jobs. He described parenting as “sacred work.”
As I wander over to the Gospel, I just can’t help but observe, again, that it is excessively foolish to dismantle everything that makes life comfortable and good—things like marriage and Christianity—and expect something like “society” to suddenly pitch in. “Sacred Work” forsooth. That is only possible for people willing to worship the God who made the world and makes the child, who are able to observe that children are a blessing that arises out of a marriage between one man and one woman, that marriage itself is a solemn mystery that reflects the Gospel.
But also, it behooves people like me to remember that things have always been really bad. Let’s take a peak at the life of the family, at the task of raising children, at the social fabric encountered by Jesus as he made his way down the mountain one day so long ago:
And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and scribes arguing with them. And immediately all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him. And he asked them, “What are you arguing about with them?” And someone from the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.”
How haunting, for every one of us alive, to have to face those terrible words—"they were not able.” The disciples weren’t able. The poor father, whose own precious son was inhabited by a spirit that was determined to destroy him, wasn’t able. The crowd stood by in total helplessness. There, in that dark and troubled scene is the whole summation of our social, political, and cultural efforts. We do everything we can, but at the end of the day, we are not able to overcome our sin, our confusion, our disintegration, our illness, and worst of all, the devil himself who would drag us and our children and our children’s children into hell.
Jesus surveys the crowd, his own disciples, the man, and the man’s son:
And he answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.” And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”
I think many of us get used to very miserable ways of being. In our helpless and wretched estate, we just cope by trying to explain that things aren’t so bad, that if we just try another program maybe it will work this time. But here this man has finally had enough and has gone to the only source of hope, the only power in heaven and on earth that can really help him with his troubles:
And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, “He is dead.” But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”
And thus those aspirational disciples learned that they had better get themselves to church. For it is not just your thoughts and feelings and hopes that amount to anything. It is the Person to whom you run. When you come to the end of yourself, when you don’t know what to do about your children, when you don’t know what to do about yourself, you go to the Lord Jesus in prayer and ask for his help. And because he is not the surgeon general of the United States who can only vaguely warn you against doing dangerous things like living and having children, he will rescue your soul from death, your feet from stumbling, and your eyes from tears so that you can walk in the land of the living.
Hope to see you there! In church I mean.
This was a description of me when I started out parenting: "you might have deeply unrealistic expectations about what life on this earth really entails." And several years into it, encounters with Tourette's and OCD's made gratitude and begging on my knees displace "expectations" to a great extent. Many years later, having seen friends suffer through more intractable and terrible things, I read about that poor boy who was like a corpse AFTER Christ vanquished the demon and I now know for certain "It is the Person to whom you run". Finding him in church with other believers who don't understand or might have their own captivities seems so counter-intuitive, but He is there as he promised. How would we learn to trust his promises or realize His faithfulness if we had never been driven to need them both so badly?
What I found most disturbing about the New York Times article was the idea that parenting should be “the responsibility of the whole society.” This seems to be a widespread belief on the Left as indicated by the increasing erosion of parental rights. The most glaring example is how so many schools want to help kids turn trans without notifying their parents. Also, they think that a teenage girl should be free to get an abortion without telling her parents. If the Left ever managed to completely get rid of parental rights, I could see them forbidding parents to teach religion to their children on the grounds that religion is “divisive,” spreads “hate,” and is not “inclusive.”