Christianity Today: Parenting

Below is an excerpt from an interesting article on parenting. Here are two things I've learned in my two years of parenting so far: 1) I really don't know what I'm doing, and 2) There's nothing like being a parent to get a person to pray.

One of the most resilient and cherished myths of parenting is that parenting creates the child: "As the twig is bent, so grows the branch." While the nature-nurture debate has ground on for centuries, nurture has been the clear popular favorite among most child-rearing experts and parents. We catch some of the zeal and heady empowerment of this belief from one of its most vocal proponents, John B. Watson, a well-known psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. In 1924 he famously claimed that if he were given 12 healthy babies and complete control over their environment, he could "guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chef, yes, even beggar and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."

Though few would subscribe to Watson's extreme behaviorism, the notion of the infant as an arriving tabula rasa on which we inscribe our design remains deeply embedded in our culture. John Rosemond, a Christian family psychologist and syndicated columnist, hears frequently from parents who believe they have failed when their children have problems. "They think this," he writes, "because they believe in psychological determinism—specifically, that parenting produces the child."

Many Christian writers and parents have absorbed these values and drifted into what could be called spiritual determinism. We have absorbed the cultural belief in psychological determinism but spiritualized it with Bible verses, and one verse in particular. The result is a Christianized version of the cultural myth. It reads something like this: "Christian parenting techniques produce godly children."

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