by | Oct 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
Today’s resources aim to offer reassurance instead of adding to the weight parents already feel.
A majority of mothers with kids at home today—69 percent in a new survey from Barna Group—say they struggle to “feel like they are enough” as a mother. Only 19 percent said that they feel they are “able to contribute meaningfully to the world.”
What does it mean to be “enough,” and where do moms look as they try to figure it out?
Overwhelmed young moms see social media feeds filled with practical tips, assurance, and, at times, unrealistic expectations. Christian influencers suggest moms should be doing everything from building seasonal sensory bins to catechizing their kids at snack times.
“Moms are discouraged,” said Sissy Goff, cohost of the podcast Raising Boys and Girls and author of The Worry-Free Parent. “They feel defeated or like failures now more than ever in my 30 years of counseling.”
With those changes in attitudes, the tone of popular Christian parenting literature and advice has also changed over the past few decades. It’s less combative than what parents found in bestsellers like James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline (1970) or The Strong-Willed Child (1978).
Instead of emphasizing the importance of requiring good behavior and first-time obedience, newer resources encourage parents to look inward and consider how their beliefs, perceptions, and anxieties affect their ability to train up children in the way they should go.
And yet, Goff observed, this shift away from behaviorism to a gentler approach to Christian parenting guidance hasn’t done much to lessen the guilt and pressure many mothers feel. Books and podcasts can’t compete with the ever-presence and magnetism of social media. And on social media, moms find content …
Continue reading…
by | Oct 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
Criminal dramas are becoming more popular today, but at what cost to a Christian’s conscience?
As a middle school girl, I enjoyed watching criminal dramas with my mom—especially Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. My father, however, believed such media ultimately created the kind of criminals they depicted. And while I didn’t become a criminal, I did grow up with a different sort of brokenness.
As a child, I had abnormal fears and paranoia about being kidnapped. I would lock the doors when my mother worked in the garden and check behind every door for kidnappers. Most of my childhood nightmares cycled through scenarios of rape, kidnapping, and murder. These images and scenes lodged themselves in my brain and replayed obsessively.
I didn’t consider this unusual until I found myself at 20 years old crying on the phone to my husband because a random car pulled into our driveway—and I assumed its occupants were about to break in, tie me up, and throw me in the trunk. In the following days, as I reckoned with reality, I felt ashamed for being so afraid of something I’d only ever seen on a TV screen.
Today, criminal dramas and true crime are becoming more popular than ever. A 2022 poll found that half of Americans enjoy consuming this kind of content—with one in three saying they consume it at least once a week—and 13 percent say it’s their favorite genre.
Of course, we’re not the first or only generation to be attracted to the macabre. People have killed for sport and glorified gore for millennia—from gladiator battles featured in the Roman Colosseum to public executions held in town centers that even children attended.
But treating evil as entertainment can impact an entire society, just as it takes a toll on individuals.
A reporter from …
Continue reading…
by | Oct 19, 2023 | Uncategorized
Upstart candidate Javier Milei says he’s pro-life. But for some Christians, his economic positions may be a bigger draw than his moral ones.
UPDATE (October 22, 2023): Libertarian upstart Javier Milei claimed 30 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election, running on a platform that would dramatically cut state services, swap the Argentine peso with the US dollar and put the country’s abortion laws to a referendum. Milei will face Peronist candidate and economy minister Sergio Massa in the November 19 runoff. Massa pulled out a surprise performance in the race, taking 36 percent of the vote.
—————
SALTA, ARGENTINA—Clutching a yellow flag with a lion’s head, the logo of her favorite presidential candidate, Alicia Ramos rushed to catch a glimpse of the fiery figure she hopes will transform Argentina: Javier Milei, a wild-haired, self-styled libertarian who is currently the country’s presidential front-runner.
Ramos, 29, was one of the hundreds of young people attending a Milei rally in the northern city of Salta, and she remembers the moment she decided to back the unconventional candidate. It was “when he started to speak about dollarization and inflation and, above all, that the country is going to be a liberal country,” she said, referring to Milei’s pledge to replace the country’s currency with the US dollar and use Argentine parlance (liberal) for a more free-market economy.
Ramos, an evangelical, has found that Milei also shares some of her moral values, mentioning her unhappiness with legislation on gender issues and abortion and the progressive politics of the current Peronist government of President Alberto Fernández and his vice president, former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The National Congress decriminalized abortion in 2020 over strong opposition from evangelicals and …
Continue reading…
by | Oct 19, 2023 | Uncategorized
How the next generation’s mental health crisis might recall the timeless values of wandering and wayfinding.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Most people know that something is going badly awry with the next generation.
We know this not because older people are, as always, complaining about how the morals and manners of kids these days are so much worse than they used to be. We know it instead because the young people themselves are telling us so. In almost every category of mental health disorder—anxiety, depression, and so on—we see spikes that are unprecedented. The question is why, and why now?
It’s not often that an executive summary from TheJournal of Pediatrics ricochets around the internet. But this week we saw just that with the findings of a study from three researchers entitled “Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-Being: Summary of the Evidence.”
The broad thesis is that, while many factors have led to the national emergency we are seeing with adolescent mental health, there is one major factor that is insufficiently recognized: the decline in unstructured, unmanaged, and unsupervised play.
The study shows, for instance, how rates of children playing outside has plummeted. This is not because of the “laziness” of video-gaming kids but because of parents’ fears of crime or traffic or, I would add, of not being seen as good parents.
This research is supported by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s upcoming book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which releases in March 2024. After reading the manuscript, I believe this will be a decade-shaping book—Haidt’s arguments are compelling and reshaped my thinking. …
Continue reading…
by | Oct 19, 2023 | Uncategorized
Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” probes the unacknowledged darkness in every human heart.
Lament is at the heart of Killers of the Flower Moon, the latest film from director Martin Scorsese, which premieres on Apple TV+ and in theaters on Friday, October 20. The subject may seem well-worn—a true-life story of a murder spree—but Scorsese elevates it into a meditation on love, guilt, and what it means to be righteous.
Based on a journalistic history with the same title, Flower Moon’s story opens in Oklahoma just after the end of the First World War, when Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) drifts into town following lackluster army service. His uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), offers Ernest a home and work at his cattle ranch in Osage territory.
There, Ernest meets Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a member of the Osage people, in a context that may be unfamiliar to viewers acquainted with other stories of Native Americans. In Osage country, the tables are turned. The tribe’s land has oil—and lots of it. The Osages drive fancy cars, wear fur coats, and drip with jewels. They live in luxurious houses where they employ poor white people, like Ernest, as chauffeurs, cleaners, nannies, and cooks.
All that money—and the young women who inherit it—creates high temptation for ne’er-do-well men looking for a fast path to riches. If those riches come through love, so be it. If not, murder is an option too.
In other hands, this premise would produce a predictable story, a cautionary tale of white people’s injustice to Native Americans. That element is certainly there, but Scorsese has more to say, too, dwelling on all humans’ capacity to ignore the darkness in our own hearts.
The villains of the story are convinced of their own righteousness. They have no interest in …
Continue reading…
