Professor Harold Hill had to create a problem to sell a solution. The shifty protagonist of the musical comedy The Music Man knew this fabricated dilemma had to be a problem that the parents of River City, Iowa, would care about. They had to care enough not only to listen but also to invest their time and money in the absurd solution he was about to propose: a boy’s marching band.
“We got trouble, right here in River City!” he cried, pointing to the billiard parlor, where a newly installed pool table threatened to send young boys down the path of crude language, beer, and ragtime. Hill’s rousing appeal to unwitting customers was that the boys were at risk of becoming hooligans, and he had the perfect solution.
After he established the enemy (the new pool table) and the danger (hooliganism), he turned to the crowd of mothers and fathers and said earnestly, “Now I know all you folks are the right kind of parents …”
The right kind of parents. Almost every parent wants to be the right kind of parent. Not just a good parent, but the best parent they can be. And every parent can relate to the feeling of taking an infant home and, amid the joy of bringing a new life into the world, sensing a crushing weight of responsibility. This unrelenting pressure sends parents to books, podcasts, blogs, and influencers. To be sure, not every parenting expert is a crook or scam artist, but even the most well-meaning self-appointed writers, coaches, and teachers may sometimes exploit parental fears.
Many new parents worry trouble lurks everywhere, that every day with their baby is an opportunity either to get it right or to fail. As their kids grow, they feel constantly at risk of being too permissive, too authoritarian, too involved, or too hands-off. And many experts, both Christian and otherwise, convince readers that parents are tragically unprepared for what lies ahead.
The most powerful figures in the parenting-advice niche have long built their influence by addressing spiritual, social, even political concerns. They place the day-to-day, relational work of parenting in the context of a larger social project. Discipline, behavior, and even sleep training become proving grounds and indicators of whether one’s family is helping move society in the right direction or contributing to decline.
The stakes feel especially high for Christian parents. We may not be explicitly taught that children—their behavior, health, or salvation—directly reflect our own spiritual goodness, but some come to believe it. Fear and a fervent desire to be the right kind of parents can make people desperate for answers, promises, and a guarantee that their kids will be okay.
Fear and longing make it easy to sell things to parents, too. The runaway success of Baby Einstein is a perfect example. In five years, the company grew from an in-home video project to a multimillion-dollar business, selling to Disney for more than $25 million in 2002. The promise of Baby Einstein was right there in the name: Einstein, shorthand for genius. Even though it turned out there was no evidence that these products were actually better for babies’ brain development than other toys on the market, the promise alone was enough to get parents to buy, just in case there was any truth in those too-good-to-be-true claims.
When I was a new parent, I was particularly susceptible to the marketing of aesthetic baby accessories. Like many other millennial moms, I was drawn to muted color palettes, matte silicone teethers and food trays, creamy beige muslin and linen, and wooden toys. Instagram and its endless stream of targeted advertisements were really good at telling me what motherhood was supposed to feel like. These brands weren’t selling me products by highlighting practical needs. They were selling me a little piece of aspirational motherhood, a filtered image of what my home should look like.
Marketing to parents almost always includes these kinds of promises. Any list of best-selling parenting books reveals the top-of-mind parental concerns of the day: baby brain development, helping children become resilient, kids and diet culture, working during pregnancy, sleep difficulties, or dealing with screen time and mental health. Christian families add their children’s eternal salvation and spiritual health to the list. Many Christian parenting books heighten parental anxiety by suggesting that parents cannot trust their own instincts and need to carefully navigate an ocean of information to find the right formula for success.
In his 1948 bestseller, Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote his now-famous admonition to anxious mothers: “Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.” But Christian parenting content has often had the opposite message: Don’t trust yourself. That’s helpful for anyone trying to sell a parenting book, if not actually helpful for parents. Nor is it resonant with the full biblical witness, which teaches that we and our children are sinful and fallible—as many Christian parenting books emphasize—but also that God entrusts our children to our care with the clear expectation that we are capable, with his help, of raising them faithfully, patiently, and compassionately.
As a result, many Christian parents, especially evangelicals who faithfully read books like James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline or Tedd Tripp’s Shepherding a Child’s Heart, have come to believe they cannot trust their instincts.
Most parents will admit they often do need tips on how to get a toddler to stay in bed. They don’t necessarily even have an “instinct” when it comes to dealing with picky eating, so they go looking for help. But many Christian parenting experts go beyond offering suggestions. They claim to have the right answers, universally correct for every child in every circumstance. Dobson bolstered his work by assuring parents, “I’m drawing on somebody else’s ideas and that somebody doesn’t make mistakes.” Secular authors, however confident, can’t similarly claim divine providence for their sleep schedule and infant feeding tips.
Pick up any Christian parenting book, new or old, and you will likely find this verse from Proverbs somewhere inside: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (22:6, KJV). Many parents in the thick of raising young children read this passage as a command. My job is to train up my child in a certain way, they think. Devout parents of older “prodigals” might see in this promise a sliver of hope that adult children who no longer espouse the Christian faith will someday return to the fold.
Christian parenting resources depend on promises made to parents: If you get it right now, then there will be desired results—if not immediately, then somewhere down the road.
As my coauthor and I interviewed sources for our book, The Myth of Good Christian Parenting, we were struck by how many parents regretted having put so much faith in parenting books. They trusted authors who claimed secular advice would lead them astray, and who argued that if they didn’t treat parental authority as the first principle of the home, their families would descend into chaos. We spoke to adults whose parents had delivered prolonged spankings to “break the will,” leaving bruises. Many felt deceived.
What does it mean to be the right kind of parent? The difficult but perhaps freeing answer is: No author can tell you. No author, however popular, knows you, your child, your family, or your community the way you do. Applying principles from Scripture to daily life raising children is a long, persistent practice, and there aren’t many hacks to make it easier. And despite what some books lead parents to believe, there is no correct application of biblical wisdom that will give them control over their children.
It’s instructive, perhaps, to look at some of the Christian parenting books that came before Dobson’s best-selling Dare to Discipline, which framed parental authority as a remedy for the social upheaval of the late 1960s. For example, Clyde Narramore, a Christian psychologist who founded the magazine and radio show Psychology for Living and helped establish the Rosemead School of Psychology, published Discipline in the Christian Home in 1961.
Compared with the best-selling Christian parenting books of the 1970s and ’80s, it’s rather boring. Narramore doesn’t connect discipline to social order or a moral panic. He qualifies his advice and recommends flexibility on the part of the parent. By the end, a reader might wonder: That’s it?
By the end of the 1960s, many parents were looking for more strident advice. They were alarmed by social and political upheaval, and the message of Dare to Discipline seemed to meet the moment, as did Larry Christenson’s best-selling The Christian Family (both were published in 1970).
In our current era, the success of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is further evidence that parents want to hear from people who address their worries and confirm that something is wrong. Parents are understandably concerned about the effects of ubiquitous screens and social media. Haidt’s message affirms that this is something to be worried about. That’s not to say that every author or influencer who positions themself this way is a grifter. Haidt and many others offer convincing evidence that our screen-dominated world is harming children. But the fact remains that fearful urgency sells.
It may seem ungenerous to compare parenting authors to The Music Man’s charlatan Harold Hill. But the parallel highlights how foolish it is to allow fear and urgency to dictate parenting decisions—and how someone eager for influence and profit can manufacture panic. It’s harder to generate enthusiasm for parenting advice like “Consider your child’s point of view” or “Hold firm boundaries, but be flexible when it seems reasonable.”
In an era of endless influencer content, books, and op-eds, parents can choose to be more attentive to the particular needs and quirks of their families than to societal concerns voiced by talking heads often far removed from our communities.
We can look first to the example of Christ—how he responded to children and adults, patiently teaching the same lessons more than once. We can strive to be more like him each day. We can resist seeing our kids as pawns in a culture war or avatars of whatever transient public discourse about “the kids these days” happens to be unfolding at the moment. We can respond to the children who climb into bed with us in the morning, pray for wisdom, and trust that with God’s help we are capable of cultivating authentic, connected relationships
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today.She is a coauthor of the book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting and writes broadly on Christian music and the intersection of American Christianity and popular culture. This essay is adapted from the first chapter of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.
