Three Links and a Rant

Or, Babes in Sin-land

Our slightly Seussian tree, as always.

All credit to the boys for getting it up and decorated.

I have arrived with just exactly what you were thinking your Christmastide was missing: an out-of-the-blue newsletter from Martha, complete with fetomaternal microchimerism, persons and personhood, wailing to God, and an anti-anti-gentle-parenting take. All appropriate for when you are pondering the Incarnation and, God willing and the planes don’t stop, spending more time than usual with your own cell-sharers.

Every once in a while I enjoy revisiting this piece by Kristin Collier on fetomaternal chimerism, Some Human Beings Carry Remnants of Other Humans in Their Bodies. She writes, “The mother-child symbiosis serves as a beautiful example of God’s relational creation in a way that speaks to interconnectedness, mystery, and beauty.” Just go read it, really. But if you don’t…

To get to what exactly this chimerism is, we have to first go through that most unique organ—“The placenta is the only purposely transient organ in humans and is the only single organ that is created by two people in cooperation.”

“The growing baby sends some of her cells across the placenta into her mother in a way that we are only beginning to understand. These cells migrate to various sites of maternal tissue and integrate into them. They then assume the function of the surrounding tissue and begin to function as such. The presence of fetal cells in maternal tissue is known as fetomaternal microchimerism.”

“Microchimeric cells have been found in various maternal tissues and organs, such as the breast, bone marrow, skin, liver and brain.” There they may help repair injury such as a C-section scar, prevent cancer, or even possibly cause disease. “The reality of this process challenges our long standing ideas about human beings existing as singular autonomous individuals.”

I want to highlight this quote because of how incredibly bleak the holidays can be in the wake of loss: “Think about mothers who have lost both prenatal and postnatal children, and how they have longed for their children still to be with them in some way, and now we see that they are in fact.”

“We can say that Mary not only carried the Son of God in her body when he was in her womb, but that she likely carried his cells in her body throughout her life in a way that further magnifies her position as the glorious Theotokos.”

Russell Moore writes at CT, “Let Heaven and Nature Wail”. “Jesus taught us that we did not need to approach God with ‘many words’ or ‘empty phrases,’ since our Father knows what we need before we ask him (Matt. 6:7–8). Our prayer, then, isn’t an advance into spiritual mastery but a falling back into something so primal that it’s what we were trying to do when we still had our umbilical cords.”

Gilbert Meilander reflects on how many sins we can commit and how many capabilities we can lose (or not possess yet) before we can no longer be considered to have personhood, and he urges us to tread cautiously with these comparative judgments. “For if that woman drowns or that man falls off the cliff, a world, a person—and not just a bearer of some traits or capacities—will have disappeared. Person is the language of equality, of equal dignity.”

And that brings us to …sigh. I don’t feel like responding to the hot takes right now, but this keeps coming up. The latest is by Marilyn Simon at UnHerd: The Cruelty of Gentle Parenting.

It’s the smug smile that does it for me. You know the type. Through that smile, she calls kids “little shits” to prove her authoritarian chops. “A natural consequence of my own kids acting cranky is that I might lose my shit on them,” she jokes relatably. If you didn’t read it, that is a taste of the tone of the article complete with real quotes. It has become the done thing in certain circles to poo-poo (to continue the author’s theme) gentle parenting.

This particular piece is part of a cloud of gentle parenting critiques seeping into the ether these days. I am not writing to defend the specifics of the philosophy as taught by Dr. Becky et al. There are helpful things to learn about parenting (and peer relationships) from that crowd, but I’m not familiar enough to launch ships on their behalf. Anyway, few people follow a parenting philosophy like this to a T. And when they do, no matter which it is, the result is always dysfunction, whether it’s a child with too much emotional awareness (the horror!) or a malnourished baby thanks to a letter-by-letter take on Babywise. No, this is about the anti-gentle-parenting critiques themselves and what they say about, to borrow from the piece’s subtitle, “the dark corners of [our] souls.”

The predominant argument of the anti-gentle-parenting crowd is in favor of the inherent badness of children. The idea of thinking of your child as good is played for laughs. “…for a gentle parent, children aren’t bad. They aren’t even neutral. They are inherently good. As a mother myself to two teenagers, this is news.”¹ Simon is fixated on the idea that the primary cause for any misbehavior in the child is sin. Any other factors are irrelevant. Contrary to this, I have found that it’s unusual for a child to misbehave purely out of the evil of their heart. Even assuming the worst, most total-depravity stance about their beginning state (and most Christian’s don’t), children simply haven’t had the time to be utterly given over to evildoing.² I read once that big people commit big sins and little people commit little sins. I fear that when someone looks at a child and assumes their sin is Very Big, they are forcing their own internal life onto the child’s. To deny any factor in misbehavior besides sin is to deny the child the chance to know himself. Knowing oneself (which does include one’s ability to do bad, but also includes a lot more than that) is an important step in pursuing a life of goodness. Knowing God is the most foundational step, and that is greatly complicated by believing that you are unworthy to know Him.

Simon seems to think that if we can make children disgusted enough at their own badness, they won’t grow up to be villains. This is a classic parenting-made-simple scam: the believe that if you do it right, they will turn out the way you want. Satisfaction-guaranteed-or-you-messed-it-up parenting. If we correctly control kids’ actions and worldviews, they will turn out the way we want them to turn out. We won’t be humiliated and perhaps some of our regrets about our own life will be redeemed in their achievements. This is a lie, and it uses children. Kids are their own people. They are autonomous moral agents, whether you like it or agree to it or not.

But Simon doesn’t believe that. She writes, “A child becomes an autonomous moral agent only through the transformative process of parental punishment and forgiveness.” Only. The hubris here is staggering. What about love? Helping them to know themselves? Understanding justice and injustice in the world around them? Learning about the heroes of the faith? Teaching them to learn and relate to others aside from punishment, as there won’t always be a switch hovering above them ready to head off any malfeasance? In a balanced life, parental punishment and forgiveness make up only a small part of the formation of a child into a functioning adult. Or the parent can choose to make it the main thing. When punishment is the main tool of moral formation, the message the child receives is that they are bad. They are wrong. They are worthy of destruction. (I can hear Simon cheering.) Do you know what happens when you tell a child that over and over? They begin to believe it. They begin to act like it.

Immediately after the quote above, Simon writes, “It is an act of faith on behalf of the parent which calls out the inner goodness of a child while punishing the badness.” Separated from the nonsense above, I don’t completely disagree. But it is couched in this endless harping on the badness of the child and how unnecessary it is to do anything to guide the child other than pointing out their faults. “Christianity is based on the idea that human nature is corrupt, or rather, that it has been corrupted.” Original sin is important in Christianity, but is it based on that? With no qualifiers? I guess John 3:16 does famously say that “For God so hated sin that he gave His one and only Son…”³

Do I want my children to live lives dominated by the idea that they are worms, they are unworthy, they are dirty, they will only learn through punishment? Will that produce abundant life? Or do I want them to be filled with love until that love spills over, to know that they are treasured, they are worth saving, and that there are many different ways to learn how to navigate life? To be frank, the most dysfunctional people I know all needed more love and grace in childhood, not less. How we treat our children teaches them how to treat others. Do I want my children to look at others through eyes of condemnation or eyes of grace?

Simon compares parental punishment to the criminal justice system and how it gets manipulated in That Hideous Strength (an excellent, wildly pertinent book whose name doesn’t belong in her piece). What an odd thing to do, to compare parenting to being a jailer. There’s a moment of hope in the next paragraph where she clarifies that “it would be unfair to compare the job of a parent…to the task of the judicial system in meting out punishment”, hope which is dashed when she clarifies that the lack of comparison is because the parent’s work “truly is never done”. Ah, so that’s the difference between being a parent and a prison warden. Wasn’t she just proclaiming the evils of Hardcastle’s never-done remedial treatment? But how else is one to deal with the fount of badness burbling from each child’s soul?

To return to the hovering switch from many paragraphs ago, Simon states that “evil acts should be punished because the evil acts originate in the baseness of the human heart.” And this seems to include the everyday sort of evil that creeps into how we treat each other within a family, the little selfishesnesses and bursts of anger, since kids aren’t out there committing felonies. What is odd is that she doesn’t seem to think that as an adult she needs this punishment. She states that ‘“natural consequences’ don’t apply in the adult world.” (That reeks of denial to me.) So why doesn’t she need to be punished? Is she perfect now? Or perhaps the need for further punishment doesn’t occur, since seething self-hatred is doing the job. For the anti-gentle-parenting crowd, the parent’s inherent sinfulness isn’t mentioned, or if it is, it’s considered to be essentially irrelevant. As if it’s not affecting their judgment, their decisions, their punishment of their own children. Bafflingly, Simon returns to the criminal justice system as an illustration of parenting—a child murderer receives an arbitrary, symbolic punishment of 25 years in prison, so likewise her children receive arbitrary, symbolic punishments for their shortcomings, which presumably don’t include murder.

The truth is that she doesn’t need this punishment as an adult for the same reason her kids don’t need punishment as the defining act of her relationship with them. Jesus paid it all. It’s right there in Isaiah 53. This is the defining fact of a Christian parent’s relationship to God, and it should flow over as the defining fact of the parent’s relationship to their child.

Across continents and millennia, humanity has never had a prevailing problem of being too kind to its offspring. Does the problem exist? Sure. But it’s not the problem. The prevailing problems in the home are the same as those outside of it: selfishness, not wanting to be inconvenienced, anger, acedia, self-righteousness. And that’s just what the parents are up to! (I think I did all five of those at my kids just while trying to write this piece.) To combine these with a parenting philosophy comprised of “Children bad. Children need more punished!” is incredibly dangerous and compounds the evils. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Pursuit of this will bring true life to a home.

Childhood is unique in that parents have that authority and access to warn a child about where they went or tend to go wrong. This is absolutely an essential component of parenting, that I am not advocating dropping. But if that power is not handled in a way that acknowledges that parents also go wrong early and often, it can be tremendously destructive. Few anti-gentle-parenting activists like to acknowledge this, that parents can be wrong about their kids. And few acknowledge the need for parents to call out the good in their children. See it, recognize it, name it. We should be careful about lavishing attention on the bad (or: what we perceive as the bad) instead of the good.

Parents, we do not face a binary choice between milquetoast and militant authority. We can be firm and loving, flexible and strong, understanding and spurring-on-to-better. Even when they chafe at it, our kids know that we know more than them; we don’t need to lord it over them. Seeking to understand the reasons behind a child’s action that displeases us does not make us weak. We can acknowledge the complicated way in which sin infects and taints everything, and also that our children are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God, with their unworthiness not being their primary characteristic.

Simon ends bleakly, emphasizing the scariness of Christianity and how she doesn’t want a gentle father, then with a Nativity scene switcheroo that somehow feels like a jump-scare. A God who becomes a baby doesn’t make any sense in the framework of this cold religion she’s described. (Though I am in favor of returning to a four-last-things bent for Advent—and the receipts are there in the songs I’ve chosen at churches where I had a say in these things.) She seems to think that what she will be called to account for is whether she punished her children enough, not any of those other things that Jesus said about laying down your life for others, caring for the least of these, or the whole Beatitudes.

I write so passionately about this because I was a young parent not very long ago⁴. In that mundane way that all new moms are, I was confronted with my own sin reflected and magnified by the sweet face of a little girl with eyes like a coral-calmed sea. Like Simon, I loved her so much that I realized that I could kill someone with my bare hands to protect her. I was tempted by a couple of those make-parenting-simple scams. But her eyes showed me my own personal chosen sin, and also the natural stain of it in my own trauma, my own physical and mental brokenness, my legitimate fears and my frivolous worries, the brokenness of the world around us, and the places where I had gotten a little lost in my theology while looking for ultimate stability and safety in a world that just won’t provide that. What I saw was that the world between her eyes and mine would be a terrible place for both of us, but especially for her, if it was constantly slingshotting around the black hole of sin. The best I could do for her was try to create a little world that orbited around our only real hope—that God is good, and we, childlike, are in His care.

I wish you a wonderful Christmas! And I hope to pop up with new regularity in the new year.

1. As the parent of a teen and a tween myself, this in context here is nails on a chalkboard. Teenagers are in such a vulnerable place, walking tightropes of expectations and hopes and fears between their parents, themselves, peers, and authorities outside the family. And doing it all while utterly assaulted by hormones.

2. I had a pastor once who addressed the question of sin and what Calvinists call “total depravity” with the idea of “sufficient depravity”. We are all fallen and in need of a Savior. Some people choose to explore their depravity more than others.

3. Now I will earnestly tell you the real verse because all are welcome here: “For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

4. also because I’m moderately hopped up on steroids