How Today’s Parental Negligence Leads to Tomorrow’s Prodigal Sons: Part 2
“We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were broken down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the center of the island; and their song had ceased.”
- G.K. Chesterton
In part one of this series, we looked at several cultural assumptions that are actively working to undermine the next generation. We noted that these have come about because many parents, like not-so-good King Hezekiah of old, fail to consider the long-term good of their children over the short-term “good” of themselves. We saw how insulating them from failure makes them proud; how hiding them from suffering makes them weak; and how sheltering them from the natural world makes them comfortable with the illusion of autonomy.
What I want to look at today is what the absence of authority does to kids.
This topic is especially relevant in an anti-authority age such as out own. An age where “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” is a legitimate medical condition; an age where the objurgations of a hysterical Swedish teenager can cause a roomful of grown men to start fighting over who is more guilty; an age where the father is viewed more often as an agent of oppression than protection.
We seem to have forgotten that it wasn’t God’s blessing “to make . . . youths their officials, and children [to] rule over them.” It was his judgement.
I believe our zeal to bequeath the next generation the charge of saving our own is misguided and foolish. Why would we assume a platoon of untrained soldiers could stand again a bunch of rabbits with sticks let alone the calculated deceptions of Apollyon?
As parents, we need to adress our negligence in modelling and encouraging appropriate authority head on. If not, we’ll end up with:
Kids who grow up viewing boundaries as hateful
If a parent looked out one morning and saw their child attempting to cross an eight-lane highway, they would likely do whatever they had to in order to “persuade” them otherwise. Most would agree that such intervention wasn’t the actions of a tyrant or an abuser but of a concerned guardian. Whatever else a parent may do, teaching one’s offspring about the subtle dangers of 100 mph steel projectiles is surely near the top of the list.
The problem is that many parent’s spidey sense tends to flag as dangers become less and less obvious. What they forget is that Asbestos will kill you just as effectively as a Honda Odyssey — the former just takes longer.
A further problem is that at the same time the highway illustration would have been persuasive as an analogy, there were also less cars on the road. And most of them obeyed the speed limit. There were no smartphones, tablets, and or internet; there were safer streets, juster courts, and less-militant ideologies. There were less men in blonde wigs desperate to read My Princess Boy to your sons.
In other words, things seem to be more dangerous now then they have been, and yet parents seem less willing to live like it. This is a serious problem. I mean, sure it’s easier to pretend there isn’t any danger than it is having to deadl with it. Discipline really is painful. It isn’t fun to have to haul away a screaming child who really wanted to get to the other side. It isn’t fun to have to lay out the consequences should they decide to go near the highway again.
But then, neglect isn’t without its dangers either. In the words of King Solomon:
Discipline your children, for in that there is hope;
do not be a willing party to their death.
Discipline = Hope. Failure to Discipline = Death. There is no other possible interpretation of this verse. And Solomon isn’t just talking about a child’s premature physical death either — although folly often leads to such.
Our failure to substantiate the reality of authority and consequences is to set our children on a path to eternal death. If our kids don’t learn early that the wages of lying is a sore backside, how will they learn later that the wages of sin is death. To neglect the former is to be complicit in the death of a conscience. To neglect the latter is to be complicit in the death of a soul.
The moral nuclear winter we’re currently living through is what you get when you combine adults who no longer want to take responsibility with youth who’ve never had to; who were coddled in their sin, manipulated into obedience, and generally encouraged to play hopscotch by the cliff edge. They were never told “no” and so now will never be told “no.” They will have their temper tantrums and call it activism. They will play on highways and call it freedom. They will meet with resistance and claim oppression.
None of them are happy. In fact if social media is anything to go by (and it is), they’re uniformly miserable.
Why?
Because they’re on the path of death.
Because their parents didn’t warn them.
Kids who don’t affirm biblical masculinity and femininity
It would be easy to point to the dumpster fire that is the transgender movement to illustrate the decay of male and female categories. But that would be like blaming the act of vomiting for the week-long bout of nausea that led up to it.
The real sickness started when the West decided it no longer needed biblical authority, but still appreciated the warm fuzzies that Christian sentimentalism gave them. A moralistic, therapeutic culture suited the milquetoast appetites of mid-50’s Christianity much better than the severities of Sola Scriptura. And so authority was abandoned; which led to an existential crisis for the children of the 60’s.
If God didn’t really separate dark from light, if he didn’t really make male and female, if he didn’t really raise Christ from the dead then — well, does it matter what we do? Why are we expected to act as if we still lived in a world of ultimate moral categories that our parents clearly don’t even believe? Who’s to say it’s more correct for a man to sacrifice for a woman rather than the other way around? Who’s to say a mom can’t have kids and still work a full time job? Who’s to say anyone should even get a job? Or get married? Or have kids?
Thus the redutio ad absurdum we have inherited today.
The sad thing is, it doesn’t seem like we’ve learned anything. Many parents are still trying to prop up the lean-to of religious culture without any anchor in biblical authority. Many are still trying to hold the values of the world and the values of Christ. And when the values of Christ say we can’t hold both, many are walking sadly away. The fathers stop leading; the wives keep controlling; the expenses keep multiplying; and the respectable sins kept maintaining. Until the faith once for all delivered begins to hang like a moldering scarecrow; lifeless, loveless, and devoid of power.
Parents think their children are going to be okay despite their schizophrenic upbringing. And God can certainly raise up beauty from ashes. But how much suffering would parents have spared their kids had they simply believed and modeled that timeless manifesto, “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.”
So what should our response be moving forward?
Kids need to be been trained to love truth
Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. Proverbs 22:6
Parents need to recapture the vision of childhood as a time of training. A time of guiding young branches towards the light while they’re still green and willowy instead of when they’re become gnarled and woody.
It isn’t simply a matter of creating just moral categories, either. It’s about training a child’s muscle memory towards the good, true, and beautiful. We don’t want to raise children who can simply recite truth but who can delight in truth. We don’t want to raise children who can impassively poke holes in the logic of lies, but who instinctively recoil from them.
For this to happen, Christ must become more than one part of a sprawling religious system. He must become the living bread and the living water. He must become the lily of the valley and the fairest of ten thousand. He must become that which our children can’t live without. They must feel as at “home” with Jesus as Ratty was on his river:
“And you really live by the river?” Mole asked. “What a jolly life!”
“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”
It wasn’t that Ratty had been forced to live on the river in his youth and eventually just resigned himself to it. It was that Ratty was meant to love the river. Just like birds were meant to love the sky and bears were meant to love the woods. Just like kids, adults, and seniors, were meant to love the Christ who came for sinners.
Christian parents, let’s not let an awareness of fallen human nature prevent us from presenting a compelling vision of Jesus to our kids. Remember, you aren’t trying to pull a fast one on them — you aren’t trying to convince them of something you know isn’t true.
You’re showing them the way home.
This is the heart of Jesus for his sheep. And this must be the heart of parents for their children.