Parenting Fail

All of us can name something we are not naturally gifted to do. Most of us have more than one thing we are not good at. They’re still young, but so far two of my children do not display a natural aptitude for mathematics. It makes sense — I don’t either. They figure it out, sometimes failing, sometimes needing more help, sometimes with tears, but math does not make sense to them instinctively. My middle child though — that girl gets it. I do not even mean her grades. They’re fine. What I mean is that given the chance to study a subject, she will always choose math. Her face lights up when faced with a puzzle or problem to solve. This also makes sense — my husband is just the same.

All this is to introduce a conversation I had recently with someone about my oldest child’s math course. If math is not the natural fit for him, if he does not show much interest or drive to study it, why is he in the highest available math class? The answer is because he will then enter high school in advanced math classes, leading to more advanced math classes and higher test scores, which we all know leads to good colleges, good majors, and good jobs. I don’t need to worry about his future if I do everything I can to ensure present success. I asked a teacher, “What if he just went to regular ninth-grade math when he started high school?” It did not compute, pun intended. Why would you not want him to be in AP Calculus his junior year? Why would you not encourage him towards the highest level of all subjects? Why would you risk his future academic success by not pushing him to be better at math? It was as though I was crazy for entertaining the idea of regular old ninth-grade math.

Last month, a host of articles about parenting hit the internet. I even wrote one. In the New York Times, parents were encouraged to “mindfully underparent.” The Atlantic suggested that “lighthouse parents” should be our models. Emily Oster, everyone’s favorite data-based parenting expert asked the question, “Are we doing too much for our kids?” The Surgeon General issued a warning about parental stress. Everyone was talking about it, including me. While the articles were high on theory and low on practical implementation, the authors all pointed to a general desire among parents, backed up by data and research, to stop worrying so much about our children, to feel less compelled to play the game of whose kid will keep up with the Jones’ kids, and to let our children fail or at least feel some negative emotions. It’s as though the entire parenting world, experts, parents, grandparents, and community members all cried uncle at the same time.

And yet, if I look at my friends, neighbors, and even fellow church members, none of us has stopped doing everything. And more importantly, no one has stopped worrying about it. The hamster wheel keeps turning and no one is getting off.

To be realistic, in this current environment we can’t jump off the wheel. At some point, probably in the 80s and 90s, we started to parent through reverse engineering. Start with where we hope our child will be as an adult and just work backward. In a recent survey, 88 percent of parents said their children’s financial stability and job satisfaction as adults were extremely important to them. Some people might argue this is due to our obsession with status, that wealth brings power, and we are always trying to get ahead. I think it is not so much the wealth that parents desire but the absence of financial stress, perhaps because millennial parents have faced just such stressors since getting out of school. Whatever our reason for wanting it, if we want our child to have financial stability, they need to have a good paying job; and to have a good job they need to go to a good college; and to go to a good college, they need a well-rounded and academically successful high school career. And we know where that starts — academic enrichment activities, extracurriculars, and you guessed it, advanced eighth-grade math.

But finance is not the only area where we try to reverse engineer our children’s fortunes. Maybe we just want our children to be good humans. I have seen that written in parenting spaces. We want them to enjoy serving others, so we encourage them to join community service projects. We buy books about justice issues. Most importantly, we teach them how not to be bad. We highlight responsibility, we reward good behavior. As they get older, we punish bad behavior and keep them from bad influences, all to raise good humans.

Perhaps we want our children to be healthy. If we want them to be healthy adults, they need to be active, make good choices about food, and avoid harmful behaviors. And if we want them to be active and make nutrition a priority, then they need to develop a good palate and avoid sedentary activities. To do that we need to feed them only the right foods and never expose them to sugar or salt, we need to get them into physical activity and sports now, the more the better.

Or perhaps, as Christians, we want our children to be good Christian adults, so we encourage them to be in Christian fellowship groups in college or go to church in college and avoid temptation to do whatever it is that we deem “UnChristianlike.” So we sign them up for youth groups and Sunday school programs, we send them to Christian camps and build a foundation of memory verses or quiet times or family devotions now so that their future faith is secure.

All of this parenting to a future goal, this financially savvy, ecologically and socially conscious, healthy, fit, passionate Christian human, is making us miss what our children probably need most: our present attention, our interest in who they are now and what they are like now.

So what are we to do with this? No one will get off the hamster wheel on their own. Do you want to be the parent who doesn’t put their child in advanced math and maybe ruins their financial future? Or the parent who lets their kids eat sugar and they end up with a sweet tooth as a grown-up? Or the parent who doesn’t buy them a book about being climate-conscious and they grow up to never recycle? Or the parent who doesn’t do Bible memory verses and they grow up to never go to church again? Some of these are tongue-in-cheek but my guess is some cut deeply.

We want to support our children, encourage them towards good futures, and provide opportunities for them, and at the same time we want to be less distracted, less busy, less involved in overparenting them. We want to be excellent parents while still allowing them agency and freedom. We do not want to stress about their futures or ours. We wish we could drop all of the pressure and achievement culture and be balanced.

But, as Romans 7 tells us, “Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched person I am!” We know that we cannot guarantee the outcome of anything, especially when humans are involved. We may even feel the damage it is doing to our own peace of mind, all this worry about our children’s future. But we also know our will to change is compromised. All the desire to change our parenting mindset will not produce change. We cannot let go of this idea, this ladder, this wheel — choose your metaphor — on our own, because to be honest, we do not have faith that our kids will be okay.

We will only be able to let go of control, or even just the illusion of control, through faith and trust. And those are gifts, not something we can muster up on our own. And to be honest, we do not usually get to choose our moments of surrender. We will lose control. We will make mistakes. We will forget all the things we promised to do and will do the very things we swore not to. But when that moment comes, we know that God in his infinite mercy is waiting to catch us and our children, to rescue us from the clutches of death. As Paul writes at the end of Romans 7, “Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” The cross is God’s answer to our inability to save ourselves from over- or under-parenting, from our clutching of control and desire to manipulate. Failure may not look like a rescue, but in God’s hands it always is.