To Train Up A Child<\/a>, chapter 20, part\u00a01<\/p>\n Toward\u00a0the end of To Train Up a Child,<\/em> Michael writes a letter to his sons (in the next section, Debi writes a letter to her daughters). Michael says that he is writing this letter to his sons because \u201cthere is always the possibility that I could be gone by the time they have children of their own\u201d and \u201cthere is so much I would like to see them keep in mind.\u201d<\/p>\n Gabriel and Nathan Pearl,<\/p>\n I cannot imagine the kind of world tomorrow will bring, but unless it is the Millennium it will be even more hostile to the family. If the Lord should tarry long enough for you to marry and begin rearing children, your Daddy has a few words of advice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Notice how much depends\u00a0on how one defines \u201cthe family.\u201d<\/p>\n In the first part of his letter, Michael tells his sons how to pick a wife.<\/p>\n First, know that the woman you marry will be the lifelong mother of your children. All that she is in the accumulation of past experiences will be present as the mother of your children. There is not a more major decision affecting the future of your children than the choice of your life\u2019s partner. The relationship between a man and his wife has more effect on the children than any other factor. A couple may express their differences only in private, but they cannot hide the effects from their children. Remember, your family will be no better than the relationship you have with your wife\u2013their mother.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019ve noted before that one reason the Pearls have as many followers as they do is that combined with all of the terrible, horrible things they write are a smattering of things that are reasonable, or even good. This bit classifies as the former\u2014it\u2019s mostly\u00a0reasonable<\/em>. One thing I liked about the man who is now my husband, back when we were dating, was that he was good with kids. I knew I wanted kids, and I didn\u2019t want to parent alone\u2014I wanted my children to have an involved father who enjoyed spending time with them.<\/p>\n That said, there\u2019s an aspect of the way Michael lays this out that makes me nervous. \u201cA couple may express their differences only in private,\u201d he says, \u201cbut they cannot hide the effects from their children.\u201d The import\u2014knowing that this is coming from Michael\u2014is that you should marry someone with whom you have no differences. The problem is that I don\u2019t think that exists. Every couple will have their disagreements from time to time. That, also, is one thing I liked about my now husband, when we were dating\u2014he was good at resolving conflict. When a disagreement came up, didn\u2019t get angry, he didn\u2019t yell or give me the silent treatment, he\u00a0talked through it.<\/p>\n From where I\u2019m standing, how one\u2019s partner handles\u00a0differences is far more important than whether there are differences\u2014because there will be<\/em> differences. But from the Pearls\u2019 perspective, a woman is to mold herself to the man she marries\u2014to adopt his religious beliefs, his political beliefs, his views on life. If she molds herself to him, there won\u2019t be difference. Of course, she will also be surrendering her mind.<\/p>\n In his next paragraph, Michael again gives fuel to those who would argue that his teachings really aren\u2019t that bad\u2014that they\u2019re misrepresented by dissenters:<\/p>\n Be sure to cultivate your relationship with your wife. Meet her needs. Make her happy. Her state of mind is going to be 50% of your children\u2019s example, 100% when you are not there. If you will love and cherish your wife, the children will love and cherish her also. If you are a servant to her, the example will translate to their experience.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There is nothing in Created To Be His Help Meet, the marriage manual written by Michael\u2019s wife Debi, to suggest that he is a servant to her. Nothing<\/em>. And that book is chock full of anecdotes from Debi\u2019s life, the main thrust of which is that Michael demands to be served, and that Debi learned to be happy when she learned to cheerfully serve him no matter how ridiculous his demands.<\/p>\n When you look for a wife, and mother for your children, the first qualification is that she love the Lord and be His disciple. Nothing else will keep her for the duration. She will need to know how to pray. A girl who takes Christ for granted will do the same with her family. A man and his wife are \u201cheirs together of the grace of life (1 Pet. 3:7).\u201d It takes two, equally yoked, to pull the family wagon safely through the hostile deserts of this life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If your religion is as important to you as Michael\u2019s is to him, yes, marrying someone who shares your religious beliefs will likely make your life smoothest. Mixed religion marriages absolutely can work out, but they are definitely more work.<\/p>\n The second thing to look for in a prospective wife is cheerfulness. Now, some might ignore this qualification altogether; but I can\u2019t emphasize too forcefully the value and practicality of this quality. A girl who is unhappy and discontent before marriage is NOT suddenly changed afterward. Everyone has trials and adversities. The happy, cheerful girl has learned to deal with them and still enjoys life. No man can make a discontented woman happy. A woman who does not find joy from a wellspring within will not find it in the difficulties and trials of marriage and motherhood.<\/p>\n Courtship is a garden in Spring\u2013everybody\u2019s looks promising; but marriage is a garden in August, when the quality of the soil and seed and the care to guard against pestilence, blight and weeds begins to manifest itself. The fruit of the womb can be spoiled before germination. Give prayerful care to the choice of a wife and mother. A girl who gets her feelings hurt and cries in order to manipulate you will be a ball and chain after you are married. Cheerfulness shows up best when things are not exactly the way she likes them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s absolutely true that you\u00a0shouldn\u2019t expect someone to change when you marry them. It\u2019s also true that\u00a0one of the things that attracted me to my now husband is that he views life as an array of limitless possibilities. Your partner\u2019s temperament is definitely something that should\u00a0affect your decision, when considering marriage. The trouble is that\u00a0girls in fundamentalist Christian homeschooling communities are taught to be happy and cheerful no matter what. I remember being punished for frowning. Being in a bad mood could get you sent to your room. The trouble is that none of this actually gave me tools for dealing with my emotions. They just encouraged me to plaster over them.<\/p>\n In other words, the smile was sometimes fake.<\/p>\n But the biggest problem I have with the above section is this sentence: \u201cA girl who gets her feelings hurt and cries in order to manipulate you will be a ball and chain after you are married.\u201d It\u2019s not that I disagree, necessarily! I\u2019m very\u00a0familiar with this dynamic\u2014I\u2019ve seen it play out in plenty of situations. I saw it play out in the homeschool community I grew up in; there it occurred primarily because women in these situations\u2014women who are expected to submit to and obey their husbands\u2014often have no other way to get what they want. This dynamic is a bad dynamic, but it\u2019s not one that can be fixed, I would argue, until you deal with its\u00a0root causes.<\/p>\n When women cry to get their way, it is frequently\u00a0because they don\u2019t believe their partner will listen to their concerns or needs otherwise.<\/p>\n This one line, by the way, is essentially\u00a0the\u00a0only hint in Michael\u2019s entire treatment that relationship skills matter. One thing I intend to teach my own children when they are older is that relationship skills matter<\/em>. How does a partner resolve conflict? Is communication happening? Do both partners listen to each other\u2014really listen? Having good relationship skills is so, so important\u2014but Michael jettisons this completely. Rather than saying a word about good relationship skills, he tells his sons to look for a woman who is cheerful no matter what.<\/p>\n The next quality to took for is thankfulness. When a young girl is unthankful toward her family or her circumstances, a change of environment and relationships is not going to make her thankful. Thankfulness is not a response to one\u2019s environment, rather, an expression of the heart. Avoid a moody, unthankful, unhappy girl. If she is not full of the joy of living before marriage, she surely will not be afterwards. A young lady who had been married less than a month said to Deb, \u201cI have never in my life been one to have my feelings hurt. But, since I got married, I seem to go around with a chip on my shoulder. I guess it is just that I care more than I once did.\u201d Deb told her, \u201cNo you don\u2019t care more; you just feel that you have more rights, and therefore expect more.\u201d The thing to remember is that personalities and temperaments do not improve after marriage. When the social restraints are lifted, the freedom that comes from a secure union permits one to express true feelings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Can I just repeat what I said earlier about cheerfulness? The same thing applies to thankfulness. In the homeschool community I grew up in, girls\u00a0were taught that we were to be thankful, to be happy, that being moody was sinful. Smile! Count it all joy! This wasn\u2019t exactly a recipe for true and actual happiness. It was a recipe for a facade. It\u2019s true that there are some people who seem to be\u00a0discontent no matter what, but in most cases unhappiness has a cause. Insisting that someone always be happy<\/em> and thankful<\/em>\u00a0without addressing why<\/em> they are discontent is papers over the problem whether than addressing it. This whole \u201cpick a happy thankful woman\u201d bit is starting to seriously grate on me.<\/p>\n It\u2019s very true that you can\u2019t expect someone to change upon marriage. It is true, though, that living together is different from dating while living separately (especially while still living with\u00a0parents, as is likely here). This is one reason it can be helpful to live together before marriage\u2014it gives both partners a chance to move out of the puppy dog phase and see what the other person is like in ordinary life. Michael, of course, is completely against anything of the sort.<\/p>\n There\u2019s another thing. Remember what I said about communication and relationship skills and the expectation, in fundamentalist communities, that women are to obey and submit to their husbands? In the scenario Michael offers, I am curious what was upsetting the newlywed who approached Debi. She tells Debi that she has a \u201cchip on her shoulder\u201d\u2014but does she actually have access to\u00a0other language to describe her discontent with her marriage, and with her husband? She may be using the only language she has.<\/p>\n And Debi\u2019s response is for her to suck it up<\/em>.<\/p>\n The story Michael provides here does nothing\u00a0at all to prove his point\u2014he says that personalities and temperaments do not improve after marriage, but the woman who approached Debi said she had \u201cnever in her life been the ones to have [her] feelings hurt.\u201d This wasn\u2019t at all a story about a man marrying an unhappy \u201cmoody\u201d woman. It was a story\u00a0about a cheerful, happy woman who became discontent after<\/em> marriage. Michael does not give his sons any tools to deal with that. Instead, he gives his sons the idea that if they pick wrong\u2014if they marry a woman and she turns out to be unhappy and moody\u2014there is no way to fix it. A woman\u2019s unhappiness does not have a reason; it is a force of nature. And that means that they definitely won\u2019t be looking for root causes, or trying to learn why<\/em> their wife is unhappy.<\/p>\n Boys, take note of a girl\u2019s attitude toward her father. It doesn\u2019t matter what kind of louse he may be, if she is rebellious to him, she will be twice as rebellious to you. If she speaks disrespectfully of or to her father, she will do likewise toward you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The problem with this argument (and it\u2019s something I\u2019ve seen outside of the Pearls\u2019 fundamentalist circles as well) is that the husband is not meant to fill the same place as the father. A girl\u2019s father, while she is growing up, is an authority figure. Her\u00a0husband is her equal. That is not the case, of course, for Michael. In the Pearls\u2019 world, a woman\u2019s\u00a0husband\u00a0is an authority figure in the same way her father\u00a0was.<\/p>\n The next quality to look for is a creative hard worker. Don\u2019t marry a lazy, slothful girl. Looks can get mighty old lying up in bed framed in a disheveled, griping, slothful pout. Whatever you do, avoid a lazy girl. If she expects to be waited on, let her marry a waiter. You will have a full job rearing the children without having to rear a wife.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That last line is particularly cringe inducing.<\/p>\n Never marry a girl who feels she is not getting the best man in the world when she gets you. A girl who enters marriage thinking she could have done better will never be satisfied for wondering what it might have been like if\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There are a lot of people out there. You can think the world of a partner without think they\u2019re literally<\/em> the best man in the world. As I see it, there are any number of men out there that a woman would be compatible with and happy with. The trick isn\u2019t finding the best one of that number, it\u2019s finding one<\/em> of them. You only need one, after all.<\/p>\n Avoid the girl who is enamored with her own looks. Better to marry a homely girl who is content to love and be loved than one who is going to spend her years trying to maintain her fading beauty. Life is too big and full to be spent waiting on a disappointed woman who is regretfully looking in the mirror.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is still framed in a way that makes it sound like\u00a0the homely girl is second-best\u2014or at least, a second choice. Why not instead indict men\u2019s focus on looks? Or perhaps I should add\u2014is there a way to indict the male focus on looks as shallow without treating the homely girl as a second pick who is actually better despite her looks because she is content? I am just really uncomfortable with this framing.<\/p>\n Avoid like the plague the girl who would pursue her own career outside the home. A wife must be your \u201cHelp-meet.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Egads!<\/p>\n But seriously now, who didn\u2019t see this coming.<\/p>\n The last qualification is a love for children. A girl who doesn\u2019t want her life encumbered with children is suffering a deep hurt and is walking a road to misery. One day, the Lord willing, you are going to have children of your own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I mean yes\u2014if you plan to have children, you should find a partner who also wants children. The assumption here, though, is that having children is a non-negotiable not because you personally want kids but rather because that\u2019s just how things are. There\u2019s no understanding\u00a0that one of his sons might not want kids\u2014and might be perfectly happy living a childfree life with someone else who doesn\u2019t want kids either. There\u2019s no understanding that a man who ends\u00a0up married to a woman who doesn\u2019t want kids would have to find some compromise or separate; the assumption is that the kids are given, and a woman who doesn\u2019t want them will just end up being\u00a0miserable.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s the end of the bit on choosing a wife.<\/p>\n Returning to something I said earlier, when I give my children relationship advice, my focus will be on relationship skills. Michael is all, are they always smiling? Are they always happy? Are they content no matter what? The questions I\u2019ll ask are very different. How do they resolve conflict? Do they listen to you? Do you listen to them? Do they care about your needs, as well as their own? Do you communicate and talk through disagreements? Those<\/em> are the things that will carry you through a relationship, and through a marriage.<\/p>\n