Parent Driven Parenting

If your baby can’t read the Bible by age three you’re definitely failing. You should pay someone a lot of money to make it look like he can read. Or just fudge it on social media. 

I’ve been pretty fascinated by the Varsity Blues scandal—the one where some Hollywood celebrities tried to buy a way for their children to attend elite universities. A lot of messing around with tests, buying access to things, signing children up for sports teams for which they weren’t qualified, nor had shown any interested in playing, that sort of thing. The wholesome family vibe of some of these celebrities makes the irony a the best part of the story. It’s not like people who had lots of children from lots of failed marriages and started panicking when they were sober for a few minutes and tried to pick up the pieces when it was too late. It’s the people who parented in a deliberate way from day one, who managed and organized the lives of their children at every turn. This one wrote a Parenting book for crying out loud.

So anyway, it’s an interesting juxtaposition with the person in Texas who wants her son to be transformed into a girl, as if that were possible—which it’s not, and I’m not going to argue about it here. At least from the reporting, this desire is not coming from the child, who couldn’t possibly know anything of that magnitude at the age of seven, but from the parent. And only one of the parents, the other one has been cut out of the picture.

I mean, for a long time there has been the trend of Child Driven Parenting, which puts the needs of the child before anything. And honestly, when the child is in the driver seat that’s a pretty uncomfortable ride, even for the child, who shouldn’t be expected to know how a whole family should be organized. I don’t know if it was much better than the Family Driven Parenting of Focus on the Family. Maybe? I don’t know much about it.

The thing that I liked about my parents, and the thing that I’ve done with my children, is Church Driven Parenting. It’s a pretty easy strategy. You literally drive them to church and then stand around trying to decide whether to drink coffee because you’re tired, clean out a closet because its disgusting, or write a Sunday school lesson or something. Eventually you just sit down at a gross parish hall table, adjust your eyes to your phone, and start scrolling.  You do have to drive home again, but if you time it right, the children ate a bunch of weird left over food out of the church fridge and they can just go straight to bed.

In other words, I don’t know if you need a strategy. Anything that has the word ‘Driven’ in it sounds sort of mechanistic and inhuman. Why not just be who you are and let the child be who he is? Preach the gospel with the words, try repenting of your own sins, serve up the food and yell about the homework. Do it over and over world without end amen. If your whole temporal hope is bound up in the identity and success of your child—or gosh, if your whole reality is bound up in the identity and success of yourself—you’re doing it wrong.