Monkey raiding our mango trees. Still a better mother than most Quiverfull mom

We’ve been having an interesting conversation in the comments of the last No Longer Quivering post “Immigration Bad, Quiverfull Good”

It was Tim Bayly’s piece on how terrible it is that white people are not reproducing at the same rates as those brown people he’s so frightened of. We’re talking about education and raising children, particularly how expensive and hard a college education is to obtain.

Well, let’s talk about that. Particularly in the world of Quiverfull. As expensive and difficult as it is to get a good education that will lead to a self-supporting job as it is in the world, just imagine how much harder it is for kids in religious worlds. They face numerous restrictions and educational gaps that most worldly kids do not face.

One of the things I like best about living here in Costa Rica is the howler monkeys. They are in my yard every single day because I have fruit trees. Even morning and afternoon the mother monkeys come down into our fig tree, rather low in the tree below the security fence and flake out for a nap. The babies don’t nap, they play in the tree, sometimes near, but most of the time not so near the momma. No one gets hurt, or afraid, or bent out of shape about the burgeoning independence of the babies.

Which makes me think about Quiverfull kids, how they often suffer from parents who are too involved, that restrict every aspect of their lives. If those mothers were monkeys they’d have the babies on short leashes instead of granting them the freedom to explore and grow.

Our discussions about college debt and growing up bring up an important aspect of growing up, that Quiverfull kids miss out on. Readiness to adult at 18 years old.

Are they ready to adult at 18 years of age? Most kids are not. That’s one of the reasons that the college experience can be a good growing and learning experience beyond the classroom. Kids learn to meet their own needs that mamma and daddy may have always done for them. Cooking, laundry, figuring out how to budget, time management, so many things. All the while having the safety net of mom and dad not too far away. It’s a training wheels time.

This is what the crux of parenting actually is, raising to your kids to be productive, happy, well-functioning, productive members of the greater society. You’re not raising them to inflate your own ego, or to have satellites to praise and revere you. For the benefit of everyone else, not just yourself.

But that is not the goal in Quiverfull, it’s to raise soldiers for their version of Christ, without education, without professional positions and ways to support themselves. Children that stay children. Who will always turn to the parents over everything. Yet are expected to marry at 18, be mature and adult enough to navigate the rocks of marriage. Impossible!

Thoughts? Let’s continue talking of the problems of education, paying for it and how handicapped things like religion, social class and poverty can make people.

Just look at how the kids of the prominent Quiverfull enforcers have turned out. Tell me again how wonderful that worked out.

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