The Anxious Generation of Parents

And what should be truly Christian about raising humans

This month, I’ve been writing about relationships: dating, marriage, and now parenting.

I recently chatted with Marissa Franks Burt and Kelsey Kramer McGinnis about their new book, The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families. (The conversation will hopefully post next month!) I’m not going to lie. It was a tough read for me. It touched some sore places in my life, especially about my mistakes as a parent.

I’m not sure there is anything in life that can hurt more than knowing you have wounded your child. You may know you didn’t injure on purpose, but somehow it doesn’t assuage the guilt. This is especially true for someone like me, who remains hypervigilant about error (and punishingly self-critical about fault).

By faith, you can know the future is God’s—but what can be made of the past, you wonder? Are your parenting mistakes indelible? Your faults irrevocable? The damage to your children and your relationship with them all but assured because you managed to screw it all up?

The Myth of Good Christian Parenting was born to address the failures of authoritarian parenting, done in the name of God. The authors survey evangelical parenting literature that influenced so many Christian parents, including my parents, my husband’s parents, even the two of us. These were books that told us we could parent “biblically”—by which they meant (or we interpreted) “infallibly.” Who doesn’t want to do everything right, especially for their kids?

This literature includes books like James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline and Gary Ezzo’s Growing Kids God’s Way and Ted Tripp’s Shepherding a Child’s Heart. As Burt and McGinnis rightfully point out, there was an alluring kind of prosperity gospel coursing through the pages of books like these. They assured us that we could do the right thing as parents and produce nearly perfect human beings, however much these authors also emphasized the reality of sin.

I remember when our first child was still a baby, everyone was reading Gary Ezzo’s On Becoming Baby Wise. By God’s grace (and with some helpful counsel from a mother-mentor), I avoided that book, knowing that I couldn’t be tempted with its promise of control. I also had the suspicion that children couldn’t be expected to be trained like seals. So, I skipped it, a decision for which I’m immensely grateful now. It didn’t save me from being a severe parent (which I was, especially in those first years), but at least those personal faults weren’t exacerbated with the mistaken notion that God has one way, and one way alone, to parent every child—involving, of course, teaching your small baby to stay on a blanket lest she get smacked.

But I wasn’t safe from all the messaging about making children obey “all the way, with a happy heart.” I certainly wasn’t overly critical about the instruction to spank my children. We were growing up in a subculture that underscored the importance of parental authority, which my own parents had pretty much handed over to me by the time I was in my early teens, to my great harm. I wasn’t just reading the books that insisted on a heavy hand with my children. I was also parenting out of my own story of my parents’ permissive neglect, so I took it upon myself to do better.

Like all new and naïve parents, I pledged to do everything better than my own parents.

It’s easy, of course, when you’re young and idealistic to imagine that you’ll never make mistakes. But you do. You are nothing if not inconsistent and sometimes entirely capricious, even occasionally cruel. Your children aren’t good seals, and neither are you.

You read the Christian parenting books, and you also read the Bible. Goodness, you’re even up early to pray on your knees for the wisdom and patient love you need for parenting this herd of littles (and yes, by now there are five, so you’re more tired, more irritable). But day after day, you fail your very best intentions. Worse, you know this isn’t just failing yourself or even your kids. You’re failing God. It’s all a recipe for the kind of anxious parenting that makes the surgeon general issue warnings about something humans have been doing for millennia.

I no longer believe much of what I did when I was a young mother. But here’s something I glimpsed at then—and hold more firmly to now. If there is anything that makes parenting truly Christian, it’s the radical trust that God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Children need to encounter the steadfast love and abounding mercy of God through their parents. But parents, too, must receive this love and mercy for the mistakes they will inevitably make, not because they didn’t care—but because they did.

Burt and McGinnis helpfully point out that for those of us formed by some of the aforementioned books, we didn’t always faithfully imitate the character of God in our homes. We were far too concerned about the exercise of our authority and our children’s prompt obedience that we missed the gently graciousness of God’s parenting: “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust,” (Ps. 103:13, 14).

But perhaps what they may miss, as young parents themselves, is clearly offering the reliable hope of the gospel. The gospel doesn’t excuse bad parenting—but it offers radically good news. The worst of parents, like the chief of sinners, can come to Christ, repent of their misdeeds, and receive mercy. They can be freed from shame and guilt, and that freedom can give them the courage to confess their sins to their children and seek repair.

I’m starting to see that parental guilt may just be part of the gig. We’re human—and humans are fallible, beset by this terrific capacity that British writer Francis Spufford calls the “human propensity to f*#$ things up “. Every faithfulness we attempt will be an imperfect stewardship. James K.A. Smith reflected on his own parenting regret in his recent post about being a Grandpa.

“One of the clichés about grandparenthood,” Smith writes, “is that it’s a second crack at parenthood . . .It’s not just that you might finally be emotionally healthy enough to be gentle and patient with your grandchildren in ways you weren’t with your own children (Kids, again: I’m sorry). It’s that you’re still a parent to your children who are now parents and your story is far from finished. Grandparenthood is a “new context” for parenthood and even if you might have “previously failed” in that project, or not “realized” it in all the ways you might have hoped, your story with your children is still unfolding. It’s never too late to still be the parent you wanted to be. Indeed, it’s never too late to be the parent you needed. To be that for your children is to be exactly the grandpa your grandchildren need.”

I don’t have grandchildren yet, but I can imagine grasping at exactly this hope. As I read from Scripture, my life—this “tale to be told” (as it’s so vividly described in the New Coverdale Translation of Psalm 90:0)—is not yet fully told. By God’s grace, the past cannot and will not determine the future. If that were true, we’d be fatalists, having no reason for hope that God might mercifully intervene, changing the course of events by an infusion of unmerited favor.

But hope is the substance of Christian faith. Not hope in ourselves and in our perfect “performance” as parents. But hope in a God whose ways are not like ours. It’s hope that can make parenting—and every other aspect of human life—truly Christian.