Parental Duty

An interesting article in The Wall Street Journal noted that "we are living through a particularly anxious moment in the history of American parenting." For a long time, many of us bought into what's known as the "cognitive hypothesis" of raising kids. It's the belief that success in raising children depends more than anything else on cognitive skills. Based on this theory, what matters most is how much information we can stuff into our kids' brains.

But the author argues that parents should focus on developing "noncognitive skills," things like persistence, self-control, curiosity, and conscientiousness. We used to call that character formation.

And how do we develop a child's character? According to the author, sometimes the best thing we can do is to love our kids and "back off a bit" by allowing our children to face adversity. Let them fall. Let them fail. "Overcoming adversity," the author states, "is what produces character. And character, more than IQ, is what leads to real and lasting change."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sounds a lot like the Apostle Paul's advice in Romans 5:3-4: “Not only that, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”

Parents are bombarded with a dizzying list of orders when it comes to screen time and young children: No screens for babies under 18 months. Limit screens to one hour for children under 5. Only “high-quality” programming. No fast-paced apps. Don’t use screens to calm a fussy child. “Co-view” with your kid to interact while watching.

The stakes are high. Every few months it seems, a distressing study comes out linking screen time with a growing list of concerns for young children: Obesity. Behavioral problems. Sleep issues. Speech and developmental delays.

Maya Valree, the mother of a three-year-old girl in Los Angeles, understands the risks and constantly worries about them. But limiting her daughter’s screen time to one hour feels impossible as she juggles life as a working parent, she said.

Over the last few years, her child’s screen time has ranged up to two to three hours a day, more than double the limit recommended by pediatricians. Valree puts on educational programming whenever possible, but it doesn’t capture her child’s attention as well as her favorites, Meekah and The Powerpuff Girls.

“Screen time is in the top three or five things to feel guilty about as a mom,” she said. “I’ve used it to pacify my daughter while cooking or working or catching up on anything personal or professional.”

Too much screen time harms children, experts agree. So why do parents ignore them? Parents need to have some type of distraction for their kids, and “screens tend to be the easiest option, the lowest hanging fruit,” said pediatrician Whitney Casares. “I hear more people saying, ‘I know screen time is bad, I wish we had less of it in our family, but I feel helpless to change it.’”

The most recent data available comes from a national survey of nearly 1,500 families with children ages eight and younger conducted in 2020. The survey found that few families were not coming anywhere close to pediatricians’ recommended limits.

• Children under two watch an average of 49 minutes of digital media a day, while the guidelines recommend avoiding screens for children under two.

• Children ages two to four watch an average of two-and-a-half hours a day, more than twice the limit recommended.

• Children five to eight watch just over three hours a day. The American Academy of Pediatricians does not provide strict time limits for school-age children but advises parents to make sure screen time does not displace other activities.

Trinity Evangelical Divinty School professor Kevin Vanhoozer writes about caring for his aging mother in an issue of CT magazine:

For nine years now, I have been watching my mother’s identity slowly fade as memories and capacities switch off, one after another, like lights of a house shutting down for the night. Marriage may be a school of sanctification, as Luther said, but caring for aging parents is its grad school, especially when he or she lives with you and suffers from dementia.

It’s been said that as we become older, we become caricatures of ourselves. Dementia speeds the process. It’s easy to see why: With loss of executive cognitive functioning, we’re less prone to monitor what we say and do. We begin to fly on auto-pilot, re-tracing again and again well-trod paths.

What lies under … the social masks we have carefully constructed? What lies under my mother’s happy face? (“I’m fine,” she’d say, even after a fall). I recently discovered the answer.

Years into the dementia, she lost her last line of defense and began to voice her inmost thoughts aloud. “Father, don’t let me fall” accompanied her every shuffling step behind her walker. Initially I thought this terribly sad—clearly, she wasn’t fine but anxious—yet I eventually found it comforting. The Bible depicts life as a walk: Shouldn’t we all be praying to the Lord to help us avoid missteps? Though she had forgotten former friends and neighbors, and large swaths of her own life, she remembered the fatherhood of God.

In a nod to the adage about family life that parenting is the hardest job in the world, most parents (62%) say being a parent has been at least somewhat harder than they expected, with about a quarter (26%) saying it’s been a lot harder. This is especially true of mothers, 30% of whom say being a parent has been a lot harder than they expected (compared with 20% of fathers).

It’s no secret that many college students spend much of their four years at school drinking way more than they probably should. Now, a new study is actually putting a number on the plethora of unfortunate consequences that comes from a wild night of college drinking.

Over four years, researchers say the average college student deals with 102 alcohol-related consequences the morning after. These range from blacking out, suffering a hangover, being pressured to have sex with someone, or having to miss work or class because they drank too much the night before.

However, the team found one major factor keeps many students from overdoing it at a college party—strict, disapproving parents. Researchers say college students who thought their parents would disapprove of their alcohol-related dilemmas ended up reporting fewer negative incidents after drinking than their peers who partied harder.

Research professor Kimberly Mallet said, “Kids really look to their parents for guidance in a lot of ways even if they don’t outwardly say it. It’s empowering for parents to know that they can make a difference. We often think of peers as having an influence on drinking behaviors, but we found that parents can make a difference, even after their child has left home.”

Most know that the coronavirus pandemic had a significant negative effect on mental health. United States adults were three times more likely to experience mental distress, anxiety, and depression than adults in 2018 or 2019.

But teenagers tell a different story. Researchers surveyed teenagers in the summer of 2020 about their mental health and compared the results to a similar survey in 2018. They found that the percentage of teens who were depressed or lonely actually fell in 2020. The percentage of teens who were unhappy or dissatisfied was only slightly higher in 2020 than 2018.

What explains it? Researchers attribute positive mental health outcomes in teenagers to two things: more sleep and more time with family. Positive family relationships are linked with better mental health outcomes, and most teenagers reported spending significantly more time with their parents and siblings. In fact, 68% of teenagers reported that their families grew closer during the pandemic, and less than 1 in 20 of those reported feeling depressed.

There’s an old saying that says, “A parent’s job is never done.” Norma Brickey typifies that statement. Norma Brickey, 82, has been driving the streets of Columbus, Ohio, with a sign in her car window. It reads: “My son needs a kidney, O positive,” followed by her phone number.

Brickey knows the difficulties of finding a kidney firsthand: Both she and another of her sons have had kidney transplants. All three suffer from polycystic kidney disease. With more than 121,000 people on the kidney transplant waiting list, 3,000 being added every month, Norma is not content to sit around and wait.

Robin Young with NPR’s Here and Now asked Brickey how her efforts were going so far. Brickey replied:

I finally did get organized, and I still have a lot of callbacks to do. I’ve tried to reach them, but I don’t get answers all the time. But I keep trying. But I’ve had a lot of people that called. I have probably about 20 people that are testing, some of them have called me back, and they haven’t tested that out. I’m still searching. I’m still on my mission.

Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of the best-selling book How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap, has a popular TED talk video on what she calls the "checklisted childhoods." Here's her description of the checklisted childhood:

We keep [our children] safe, and sound, and fed, and watered. And then we want to be sure they go to the right schools, but not just that—that they're in the right classes at the right schools and that they get the right grades in the right classes in the right schools—but not just the grades, the scores—and not just the grades and scores, but the accolades, and the awards, and the sports, and the activities and the leadership. And so because so much is required, we think, well, then, of course, we parents have to argue with every teacher, and principal, and coach, and referee, and act like our kids' concierge, and personal handler, and secretary.

And then with our kids, we spend so much time nudging, cajoling, hinting, helping, haggling, nagging, as the case may be, to be sure they're not screwing up, not ruining their future. And in the checklisted childhood, we say we just want them to be happy. But when they come home from school, what we ask about all too often first is their homework and their grades. And they see in our faces that our approval, that our love, that their very worth comes from A's. And then we walk alongside them and offer clucking praise like a trainer at the Westminster dog show.

It's the sound no relay runner wants to hear: Ping. Ping. Ping. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the United States men's and women's 4x100-meter relay teams dropped batons—and heard the pings of them hitting the track—during a disastrous performance that prompted the chief executive of USA Track & Field to promise a "comprehensive review" of the entire relay program. Four years earlier in Athens, shoddy baton passing by the American men had allowed a British relay team to pull off an upset, while the United States women were disqualified after a botched exchange. There have been similar troubles at the world championships.

On the surface, relay batons do not seem hard. They are about 12 inches long, smoothly cylindrical, free from adornments, and they go by a simple nickname: the Stick. Yet every runner fears the ping that can make years of hope come tumbling down the track. One sprinter compared the challenge of the baton exchange to a harried traveler's trying to catch up to (and hold hands with) his wife as he maneuvered on a moving walkway in a crowded airport.

But if you want to win, you have to pass the baton. Before the 2012 London Olympics, one of the men on the USA's relay team said, "We've got the history, and we've got the talent right now. No one can deny that. We just need to get the stick around. That's it. We just need to get the stick all the way around and win."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Legacy; Leaders; Leadership; Mentors—are you passing the baton on to others behind you? (2) Parenting; Children; Youth ministry—are we passing the baton to the next generation"

Os Guinness writes in “Impossible People”:

I grew up in a China that had been ravaged by two centuries of European and American adventuring, and then by World War II and a brutal civil war. We lived in Nanjing, which was then the nation's capital, but there were few good schools to go to, so at the age of five I found myself setting off by plane to a boarding school in Shanghai.

Obviously, the conditions behind the decision to send me out at that age were extreme, and I was not the only one launched on that path so young. But it was the first time in my life that I had been away from my parents and on my own. So, to give me a constant reminder of the North Star of the faith at the center of our family life, my father had searched for two small, smooth, flat stones and painted on them his life motto and that of my mother. For many years those two little stones were tangible memos in the pockets of my gray flannel shorts that were the uniform of most English schoolboys in those days. In my right-hand pocket was my father's motto, "Found Faithful," and in my left-hand pocket was my mother's, "Please Him."

Many years have passed since then, and both of those little painted stones were lost in the chaos of escaping from China when Mao Zedong and the People's Army eventually overran Nanjing, returned the capital to Beijing and began their iron and bloody rule of the entire country. But I have never forgotten the lesson of the little stones. Followers of Jesus are called to be "found faithful" and to "please him," always, everywhere and in spite of everyone and everything.

Christian author and speaker Skye Jethani wrote about his kindergarten-aged daughter's homework assignment: Help your child identify as many logos as possible. Jethani said that without hesitating, she identified Pizza Hut, Target, and Lego. At home, she collected the logos of Disney, Jell-O, and Goldfish Crackers. Later, while drinking a glass of water, she proudly shouted, "That says IKEA!" She spotted the tiny logo imprinted on the bottom of the glass.

Jethani reflected:

Should it scare me that my five-year-old had memorized more corporate brands than Bible verses or even names of relatives? Also scary was the fact that no one taught her to identify logos. We didn't have corporate logo flashcard drills at home. Zoe internalized these logos simply by living for five years in a brand-saturated culture.

This sort of brand marketing has been so effective that the average ten-year-old has already memorized between 300 and 400 brands. When these children become adolescents, each with an average of $100 of disposable cash to spend every week, they will select from these brands to construct their identities—identities they can eat, drink, smoke, drive, play, ride, and wear.

The spiritual value of shopping is not lost on marketers. Douglas Atkins, author of The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers, states plainly that, "Brands are the new religion."

The small island of Igloolik, in northern Canada is a bewildering place in the winter. The average temperature hovers at about 20 degrees below zero, thick sheets of sea ice cover the surrounding waters, and the sun is rarely seen. Despite the brutal conditions, Inuit hunters have for some 4,000 years ventured out from their homes on the island and traveled across miles of ice and tundra to search for game. The hunters' ability to navigate vast stretches of the barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed explorers and scientists for centuries. The Inuit's extraordinary way-finding skills are born not of technological prowess—they never used maps and compasses—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, and tides.

Inuit culture is changing now. The Igloolik hunters have begun to rely on computer-generated maps to get around, especially younger Inuit members. The ease and convenience of a GPS makes the traditional Inuit techniques seem archaic and cumbersome.

But as GPS devices have proliferated on Igloolik, reports of serious accidents during hunts have spread. A hunter who hasn't developed way-finding skills can easily become lost, particularly if his GPS receiver fails. The routes plotted on satellite maps can also give hunters tunnel vision, leading them onto thin ice or into other hazards a skilled navigator would avoid. A local anthropologist, who has been studying Inuit hunters for more than 15 years, notes that while satellite navigation has some advantages, its use also leads to a deterioration in way-finding abilities and a weakened feel for the land. An Inuit on a GPS-equipped snowmobile is not so different from a suburban commuter in a GPS-equipped SUV: as they devote their attention to the instructions coming from the computer, they lose sight of their surroundings. They travel "blindfolded." A unique talent that has distinguished a people for centuries may evaporate in a generation.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Spiritual formation; parenting; youth—In the same way, without spiritual disciplines and without Christian community a "unique talent" (faith in Christ) can "evaporate in a generation." (2) Distractions; spiritual perception—This also shows how distractions can blunt our spiritual perception.

If stay-at-home moms earned an annual salary for all the jobs they perform on a daily basis, how much would they earn?

We've released the results of our annual Mom Salary Survey – just in time for Mother's Day! We surveyed more than 19,000 moms since the start of the pandemic and have estimated the value of a mother's work by tracking real-time market prices of all the jobs that moms perform. The result? The median annual salary for stay-at-home moms this past year is $184,820 – rising $6,619 above the pre-pandemic median.

And if you factor in pay premiums that companies offer like bonuses, overtime, and hazard pay due to the increased intensity of the work this past year, a stay-at-home mom could earn more than $200,000 annually! I think we can all agree, they are worth every penny.

And let's not forget all the working moms out there! The data shows that they are spending on average 54 hours per week managing things on the home front in addition to the hours they put in at their job outside the home. When you add it all up, they are spending a total of 107 hours each week split between work and home.

We all know that moms are the ultimate multi-taskers, juggling lots of different responsibilities all day, every day but it doesn't really sink in until you see the full list. This year's study gave consideration to traditional roles – like housekeeper, dietitian, and facilities director – and newer roles – like network administrator, social media communications. In the end, the mom role includes more than 20 different positions. Here is just a sampling:

• Chief Financial Officer
• Child Care
• Housekeeper
• Laundry Manager
• Van Driver
• Meeting/Event Planner
• Kitchen Manager
• Staff Nurse - RN I
• Conflicts Manager
• Interior Designer I

You can view the entire list of 20 positions here

How are moms getting it all done? Moms are burning the candle on both ends it seems. The survey results show that stay-at-home moms work an astonishing 106 hours per week on average which means they are working 15 hours a day 7 days a week.

It's not better teachers, texts, or curricula that our children need most; it's better childhoods, and we will never see lasting school reform until we see parent reform.

—Samuel Sava, early childhood education advocate who helped in the development of Project Head Start and held several executive positions with education-related organizations

On January 1, 2008, Keith Severin and his 7-year-old son, Adrien, agreed that every day, for one whole year, they would spend at least 15 minutes searching together for treasure. The idea came to them when Keith came out of a store one day, and a guy asked him for change. Keith took about two steps from that spot and found a dime on the ground. It was a reminder that treasure is everywhere.

Keith and Adrien stuck to their plan—even when the weather wasn't favorable—and over the course of that year they stumbled upon plenty of loose change, bottles, a silver necklace, and a golf bag pull cart. By year's end they had amassed over $1,000 worth of treasure through their 15-minute walks. But Keith says it was richer by far simply to grow in their relationship as father and son. "It was nice to spend some time with him and get to know him," Keith said in an interview. As they walked, they talked not about treasure, but about vacation, what's going on at home and school. They even dreamed up books they could write about their experiences together.

For sixteen years, Lo Scalzo served as a photojournalist for U.S. News and World Report. He covered assignments in more than 60 countries, winning countless awards and accolades from his peers. He just couldn't stop moving. "I'm something of a travel addict," he admits in his memoir Evidence of My Existence, and photography was his way to satisfy that addiction. But his addiction came with a price. His frequent and compulsive travels abroad left his wife a stranger to him. While he was in Baghdad covering the U.S. invasion of Iraq, she was heading to the hospital with her second miscarriage. Lo Scalzo hated himself for what he felt was desertion, so even when he was given the opportunity in 2004 to cover John Kerry's presidential campaign—quite an honor—he declined. He writes in his memoir:

[T]his time, for the first time, it was so easy to back out—not a guilty concession but what I truly wanted …. [H]ow silly this effort. This stress. Seventeen years of it. Not time wasted but time overplayed, trying to inflate a finite ability through sheer force of will.

He later adds toward the end of his memoir what ultimately led to his stepping away from his frantic pace:

How to stop moving? It was about accepting a simple truth: In the world of photojournalism I would always be a man of minor accomplishments. But in the field of fatherhood—to one little boy, at least—I had a chance to become legend.

The book The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates tells the story of two black men with the same name. Both were born in Maryland. Both grew up with single mothers. Both had run-ins with the police by the time they were 11-years-old. But at this point their stories part. Drastically.

One Wes Moore became a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of John Hopkins. He eventually became a Rhodes Scholar. He went on to serve as a White House Fellow under former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and is an Afghanistan combat veteran. He also went on to write the book The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, reflections on his life and the life of the man with whom he shares a name.

As for the other Wes Moore? He currently resides in Jessup Correctional Institute's maximum security unit. He is serving a life sentence without parole for his part in the shooting death of a Baltimore police officer.

The author—we'll call him the "good" Wes Moore—wrote the book to illustrate not the differences between his life and that of the other Wes Moore, but the similarities. In particular, he wants to show what it's like to grow up without a father in the house.

"My mother could teach me to be a good person," said the author in a USA Today interview, "but she couldn't teach me to be a good man." Moore credits family members and teachers with that—men who intervened in his life after his father died when he was only 3.

The other Wes Moore saw his father only three times in his life. It was during the third and final visit that Wes Moore's father looked up from a drunken stupor and asked, "Who are you?" The rest is tragic history.

Two men. Same name. Different life outcomes—likely because of the presence, or lack thereof, of a male figure in their lives. As Roland Warren, president of the non-profit National Fatherhood Initiative, says, "Fatherless kids have a hole in their soul in the shape of their fathers, and it leaves a wound that is not easily treated."

In his book Invitation to a Journey, author M. Robert Mulholland Jr. tells the story of a woman he met who was the result of an unwanted pregnancy. She struggled immensely with the idea that God purposed us into being before the foundation of the world. He writes:

Her mother was a prostitute, and she was the accidental byproduct of her mother's occupation. Although her life's pilgrimage had brought her to faith in Christ, blessed her with a deeply Christian husband and beautiful children, and given her a life of love and stability, she was obsessed with the need to find out who her father was. This obsession was affecting her marriage, her family, and her life.

She told how one day she was standing at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes, with tears of anguish and frustration running down her face into the dishwater. In her agony she cried out, "Oh, God, who is my father?" Then, she said, she heard a voice saying to her, "I am your father."

The voice was so real she turned to see who had come into the kitchen, but there was no one there. Again the voice came, "I am your father, and I have always been your father."

In that moment she knew the profound reality of which Paul [speaks in many of his letters]. She came to know that deeper than the "accident" of her conception was the eternal purpose of a loving God, who had spoken her forth into being before the foundation of the world.

In his book The Masculine Mandate, pastor and author Richard D. Phillips writes of his meaningful relationship with his father. In 1972, Phillips was just 12-years-old when his father was sent to Vietnam. The only way he and his father could communicate was through letters. He writes:

One of the most powerful memories is the thrill of the letter I would receive from my father almost every week …. Recalling my personal letters from Dad practically brings me to tears even now. He would simply begin by telling me about his life. Not big military issues, but "neat stuff" that happened or that he saw. Then he would talk to me about my life, writing things like this: "Dear Ricky, I heard you had a great baseball game and made a great catch. Your mother told me how exciting it was when you won. How I wish I could have been there, but I can see you making that catch in my mind." …

Do you see what [my dad] was doing? My dad was telling me that I was his boy and that his heart was fully engaged with me, even from halfway around the world …. In the midst of a life-and-death war zone, with all the weighty responsibilities of a senior Army officer, my father was truly absorbed in my life. And I knew it. So when he said to me, in effect, "My son, give me your heart," he had already given every bit of his heart to me, his boy. I couldn't possibly help giving my heart back to him.

Hungry at the end of the day, a 15-year-old boy found his mother in bed and was suddenly seized with concern.

"Mom, are you sick or something?"

"Well, as a matter of fact," his mother replied weakly, "I'm not feeling too well."

"I'm sorry Mom," the boy responded with furrowed brow. After a brief pause, he then added: "Don't you worry a bit about dinner. I'm getting pretty big now, and I'll be happy to carry you down to the stove!"