Parents Rethinking Parenting, and Other Partially Encouraging Developments

Found this material interesting on modern parenting:

“But in the past few months, a second wave has taken hold — writers are moving past merely venting and are trying to gather the like-minded into a new movement. Carl Honoré is one. He calls it “slow parenting” — no more rushing around physically and metaphorically, no more racing kids from soccer to Suzuki. Lenore Skenazy is another. She calls it “free-range parenting,” a return to the days when childhood was not ruled by the fear (overblown, she says, with statistics to prove it) that children would be maimed, kidnapped or killed if they did something as simple as riding their bikes alone to the park.”

I don’t support everything in this movement, but there are some promising developments afoot, it seems.  A great article on this topic from a little while back is Joseph Epstein’s “The Kindergarchy”.  Many of us could save ourselves a lot of trouble by simply relaxing about our parenting and truly letting the doctrine of God’s absolute sovereignty inform our work.

There is a tremendous need for good, authoritarian, gospel-centered, hands-on, God-trusting parenting that is not child-centered, anxiety-prone, and weak.  We could use many more parents who inhabit their roles with dignity, authority, and kindness, who neither act controllingly or lacksadaisically with their children.  Articles like those referenced above show us that Christians are not the only people who realize that modern parenting has numerous problems.