Basically Altrusitic? Reconciling Research and Christian Parenting

The NYTimes published an article on new findings that humans are, at a base level, a mix of both cooperation and selfishness. The study, which began as working towards defining the innate differences between primates and humans, found that even without guidance from parents, children are helpful. They will help an unrelated adult with the door at 18 months and will look with a parent for a lost item at 12. As they grow, they become selective in the types of cooperation. By 3 most children try to enforce social norms and the rules they know. The study’s author calls the trait separating humans and chimps “shared intentionality.” The article concludes:

“Children are altruistic by nature,” he writes, and though they are also naturally selfish, all parents need do is try to tip the balance toward social behavior.

I’m often at a loss in terms of reconciling contemporary findings in human development and social/child psychology with some aspects of Christian parenting. While I know the data isn’t perfect, I don’t want to throw out the fact that almost every child is predisposing him or herself to helpfulness as I think about what T needs to grow in charity and love. At the same time, I know that sin is more powerful than simply needing to “tip the balance of toward social behavior.”

How do you respond when reading things like this?

Making Advent Happen

It felt like it took about 20 minutes for Thanksgiving to give way to Christmas. For Christians we should be wondering, what happened to Advent?

The trend of skipping over the contemplation and repentance of Advent is an especially hard trend to buck when you have children. Not only do you have to fend off the media blitz of the season, aimed directly at your kids, you also have to contend with your school celebrations, neighborhood decorations and your round-the-clock Christmas music station. The Christmas culture is everywhere and it is powerful. How do you keep your child appropriately in the place of Advent’s waiting and watching?

One family I know takes quite seriously the fast of the Nativity. Their idea of fasting from “screens” (i.e. computer and TV) would help to weed out some of the major influences of preemptive merriment. In many liturgical traditions the music of Christmas and the decorating for the season happens on Christmas day, not the 4 weeks prior.

What would be really be wonderful is to encourage a small culture of family and friends to help you transform the time of Advent. What a wonderful thing to stand is solidarity with others who can help you us go deeper into the true meaning of Advent – a time of repentance, waiting and watching.

Is Homemaking Every Christian’s Vocation?

My friend Gwyneth and the folks at Uganda Christian University passed along an article by Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh called “Education for Homelessness or Homemaking? The Christian College in a Postmodern Culture,” presented at a conference at Calvin College on Christian education.

In sum, the writers explain that the postmodern goal of Christian college education is upward mobility. We send our kids off to college to make it in the world (socially, financially, in their careers). By contrast, agrarians like Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson explain that what Christian education should be about is returning young men and women to home, placing them vocationally in one place to build a socio-economic community. This doesn’t mean we necessarily return to our home of origin (if we even have one), but that we work towards becoming embedded in our local histories and stories in order to live coherently the great story of God’s redemption of creation. We cannot love abstractly, and we cannot love without proximity. Homemaking allows us the nearness we need to actually do as God commands.

My friends and I talk a lot about the goal of training up a child in the way of the Lord. Most of the time those conversations feel abstract. I appreciate how this article provides a more definitive reality for which we are to strive. It also presents us with a clear look at what to avoid:

According to the new norm, the child’s destiny is not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them; succession has given way to supersession. And this norm is institutionalized not in great communal stories, but in the education system. The schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance that it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to say the future, of the child.… The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community.

David Orr offers five concrete suggestions regarding homemaking. The first is establishing ecological literacy, a knowledge base of how our world actually works. Second, we need to be honest with our children about the crisis at hand. Third, we need to know about the forces that have shaped the world to be as it is. This requires a broader education in religion, science and social studies. Fourth, we must instill a strong doctrine of creation in our children. Fifth, we need to reinterpret the world’s measures of success in terms of how God understands the good.

(I’d add a sixth point: that Christian colleges need to stop charging so much that young people, especially those facing their debt in the altered reality of economic recession, cannot help but plan their education around a lucrative career. We’re still under the thumb of my husband’s Wheaton College depth, eight years after graduation. Living in the reality of homecoming is extremely difficult when the education provider sets you up to have to follow the money, the job, the promotion in order to pay back what you owe. But I digress.)

I am wondering how these lessons, aimed at shaping a Christian college education, translate to the raising of our young people who are still in the home. How do we begin to instill these lessons in our children?

(Read more in the authors’ book: Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement.)

Kids in Church

Bringing up the cry room topic leads into many other issues related to the contemporary experience of worship with our children. I  was thinking the other day about sitting in my Episcopal church, bored out of my mind as a young person. There was nothing done to the liturgy to make it “appeal to the youth.” In fact, one my strongest memories of my childhood church experience was reading through the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer as fast as I could. Then I would see how far the real service had gone. It was never very far along. I always wondered, why can’t they just say this quicker so we can all get out of here.

What I didn’t know is that the liturgy was making its way into my heart. Church is a lot like practice when you’re young. It’s painful and boring and sometimes you have to get forced to do it. But in the end you play beautifully. I’m not saying this solves all the problems of squirmy toddlers, Communion-distracting cry-ers or the negotiation of your Tween reading Twilight during the sermon. But to help us along, Debra Dean Murphy’s reflections are poignant reminders of what the pedagogy of worship is all about:

Children need to hear the Bible’s stories in worship—not because they will understand them better there, but because that is where the stories do their formative work, shaping a people week after week, season after season, year after year. When we use the Bible’s stories to impart pious moralisms to children (“be good,” “be helpful,” be nice to your brother”) we minimize Scripture’s real purpose and power, and we fail to communicate to our children that in worship—in the hearing of the Word, the preaching of it, the performance of it through gestures, postures, and holy sign-acts—they (along with us) enter that world and have the hope of being transformed through time—God’s time—by its vision and power.

And since repetition is the key to effective pedagogy, we should regularly communicate to children (and their parents) that they are integral to the whole worshiping body; that their presence is not merely tolerated but happily anticipated. When we “dismiss” children from the worshiping body (for children’s church, say), no matter how well-intentioned our efforts at teaching them about worship may be, we convey to them and to everyone else that dividing the worshiping body is an acceptable norm.

But it is also important that worship not cater to children. Worship that seeks above all else to enact God’s story of redemption and to imagine God’s politics of peace invites and expects the participation of the whole household of faith—young and old, rich and poor, the able and the infirm—with the understanding that, in regard to young children especially, there are privileges reserved for their maturity, mysteries and riches of the worshiping life that reveal themselves as rewards for years of practice and perseverance.

Finally, we engage in the work of introducing children to worship—and overseeing their ongoing participation in it—not in an effort to make them good but that they might know who they are. And we do this with the hope that worship which is attentive to the gospel’s grand story will do its transforming work in their lives (and ours), will feed their imaginations and not their egos, and will help them (and us) learn to order our lives by the gift of God’s time.

Abortion Sign: What would you say?

My dad and I share a car so I am frequently at his office, an office in the same complex of buildings as the one abortion clinic in our town. Literally every day when I round the corner there are protesters at the corner holding signs. Sometimes the signs have the classic phrase “Abortion stops a beating heart,”  others are religious (“God loves your baby” or “Pray the rosary to end abortion”). Some are gruesome and horrifying beyond description.

I often wonder who the protesters are intending to see the signs. Is it the women going into the clinic? Is it pro-abortion advocates, to let them know there is opposition? Is it to bolster to movement? To change minds? Or maybe a little of all of these? It’s hard to think of a single sign that would meet all these ends. Noting their location, I can only assume one primary hope is to get a woman seeking an abortion to go another direction.

Like a lot of Christians, we’re opposed to abortion-on-demand. So I’ve thought on more than one occasion about bringing my own sign out to the corner (unfortunately it’s on a busy road and I have a toddler whose favorite activity is climbing to and from sidewalk to street). Sometimes my dream sign is on the political side

You can’t defeat abortion
Without defeating poverty

or more on the factual, informative side

Women below
the poverty line
are 4x more likely
to abort.

but most of the time I think about what I would say to a woman who finds herself in this horrific situation.

I am praying for you.

or

There are people
who will help you.
Ask me.

or

There is nothing
God cannot forgive.

In truth, I don’t know that protesting is the most effective means of impacting people’s decision to have an abortion. It seems like relationship and conversation could go a lot further. But as a thought experiment: Do you ever think about an alternative to abortion signs you see? If you had three lines on a sign to speak to the heart of a woman about to have an abortion, what would it be?

The Cry Room

There are a lot of questions about inclusion when considering the places where we worship. That’s why I am especially appreciative of Sarah Morice Brubaker’s reflection on the presence of the cry room in our  churches.

A cry room has an ambiguous status: it can be a way of accommodating or excluding, blessing or cursing. To have a cry room or a church nursery is to ask the urgent question, “Who is worship for?”

Certainly one hopes that most Christians would agree that being incontinent or preverbal or wiggly are not grounds for excommunication from God’s people. But then what does it mean if a church sanctuary is a space from which certain kinds of people are excluded for being bothersome? Who are we if, when we say “worship,” we mean “that activity where a certain group of people are protected from hearing the cries of others, so that they can better focus on Jesus of Nazareth”?

She explains that she’s not anti-cry room. She does want to push us to think about what worship means when we remove the wiggly, the loud, the smelly or the old from our midst. What does that mean when those are the people whom Jesus called blessed?

I wonder how other churches have creatively dealt with children and spaces of worship. Have you seen anything done well? What hasn’t worked?

Prenatal Testing: a Christian Response

Every Western woman who is pregnant is going to be asked about prenatal testing. While genetic testing can be done to help a family prepare for a disabled child, the most frequent outcome is the termination of the pregnancy. Still, some Christian parents say they want to test because they need all the preparation possible (which is interesting because many, many physical and intellectual disabilities are discovered during the ultrasound, only a few weeks later than an invasive genetic test).

When I was pregnant all these things were on my mind. I wrote a post about our refusal to acquire genetic testing and about why it might be a good idea for Christians as a group to say no to the practice if for no other reason than that we should always be expecting that God may give us a gift we cannot comprehend and may not even know we need.

Mel wrote a comment on this. She lost a baby at 19 weeks and had genetic testing done with her second. The test came back “normal” but later on she discovered her child had underlying developmental issues that were not able to be found on a test. I asked her about this experience, whether, in retrospect, testing actually would have helped her “prepare”? Or would is it a myth that we can ever be ready for  a disabled child.

Oh, and no, we are never prepared for specific struggles, challenges, or tragedies. I do think that we can prepare to face the unexpected based upon learning as much about the possible situation and being open to direction from God. Think of David and his experiences w/ the giant. David had not faced a giant before, but he had killed lions and bears. He knew he was brave and he knew he could kill to protect those that needed protection. David was wise enough to use the skill set that was his own. He didn’t try to learn how to fight in armor that didn’t fit him, instead, he used his sling shot. It was tried and true. David also have faith that God would see him through. God had taken care of him in prior tight spots; God would be there for him when he faced the Giant. David used what he knew and trusted in God to do what was thought to be impossible… kill the giant.

However, most of my giant slaying has been done in the midst of a supportive community. Some would argue that David did not have the same luxury.

I don’t know that we are really ever prepared for tragedy or struggle. What I discovered with the miscarriage is that is a remarkably common experience.   One third of all pregnancies end in miscarriage.  Most happen so early in the pregnancy, women just assume they are “late” and don’t realize what actually happened.   When we announced we lost the baby, I had many women come up to me and tell me they had been through the same thing, in some cases multiple times.   It is one of those quiet little secrets that really isn’t a secret.  Devastating, terrifying, terrible, but we were not alone. We felt very supported and encouraged.  Rarely did I meet someone who told me to “get over it.”  Those that did were  usually young women who had no clue.  (Ahh to be young and know it all.)

As for preparing for our daughter’s special needs. We were in an interesting position.  It is quite common in both of our families to have very intelligent children (average IQ 130-145) with one or more learning and/or physical disabilities/delays.  Of my brother’s four children, two were ADD.  My brother was flat footed, ADHD , dyslexic and had an additional reading disability.  My dad was ADHD and dyslexic. I was pigeon toed, dyslexic and had a reading delay. Likewise my husband’s family had numerous issues as well (hubby didn’t walk till he was two, etc.).  Therefore, we were not surprised when our daughter hit the developmental milestones at the later end of the “norm”.  In fact, we delayed getting the help she needed because we figured she would develop speech, etal in her own time just as she learned how to sit up, walk, and run.  It was only after her two year check up when she still wasn’t using spoken words (she communicated w/ ASL) that we started to seek testing and find help for her.   Two years later and lots of intervention, she still uses ASL around the home, but is now speaking on par w/ a 16 month old with others.  She understands everything said to her, but communication is still a challenge. There are lots of other issues in her physical/emotional development, (she hears, fine BTW) but she is making progress.  Like the rest of us in our extended family, the prognosis is good.  I am sure that in 10 -15 years few people will be able to tell that she had any issues at all.

Still, advocating for her needs, finding the help to address those needs, explaining her condition/lack of common communication w/ strangers has been a challenge. I often wonder how parents who are not as well educated as my hubby and I are would handle the situation.  Would they even know where to start? Its hard to say. I sometime wonder if our over education (my term… I have 5 degrees) caused us to not seek help when others might have.  I’m not sure it would have made much of a difference.  The earliest conversation we had about getting her help was at her 18 month check up.  Would 6 months have made a difference? who is to say.

Any other posts on this issue? Emily?

Getting started

Almost overnight it feels like my friends are all getting ready to welcome second babies. We have most decidedly entered the stage of childbearing.

I find a lot of solace and community in parenting blogs. They keep me connected to my friends, get me thinking beyond my own perspective and keep me up to date on parenting information. As our journey through parenting has continued, I’ve thought about how great it would be to have a blog devoted to Christian parenting that brings together the experiences of wise, seasoned friends. So here it is.

But it won’t work without you. The posts don’t have to be professionally written. They can be more questions than answers. They can me about the mundane or the profound. You can write about your experience with cloth diapers, praying with your daughter or what you’ve found to be age appropriate discipline.

I’m going to re-post a few things from my other blog to help get things started. If you send a submission I’ll link you into our blogroll.