Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

When my own children were little, I hated it when parents with older offspring told me that life would not get any easier. Behind their commiseration, I heard, “You think you have it hard? Just wait.” Now, with three sons 11, 13, and 16 years old, I try to refrain from making similar unfriendly observations to new parents. But sometimes I just can’t help it.

In Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, Anne Lamott gives an uncannily honest, poignantly funny account of her son Sam’s first year of life. She swings from moments of sheer rapture to bouts of frustration, tedium, and raw anger. She even sends notes to God in search of the next “operating instructions.” We laugh as readers, for we have been there; and we sigh with relief when she ultimately finds some guidance through supportive friends and a small African-American Christian congregation.

I still could not help wondering, however, what kind of journal Lamott will write when Sam moves into his “tweens,” the term the business world has concocted for consumers age 8 to 14. What will faithful parenting look like when you have to fight with the market, with other parents, and with other cultural pressures over your child’s desires, ambitions, and ultimate commitments? And how will communications with God and the Christian community figure in?

For, as those parents of older children predicted, the demands do not ease up. They simply change and, in most cases, become more difficult to manage. The increased difficulties are partly a natural consequence of dealing with older children and youth. But problems today also have a lot to do with the radical reconstruction of childhood and heightened demands on children and parents.

With small children, struggles revolve around the daily trial and error, hit-and-miss process of figuring out their basic needs. Even though this effort intensifies life, it takes place primarily within the home. Mothers of young children—and, increasingly, some fathers—struggle with vocational questions about juggling family and paid employment or balancing the needs of self and child, often torn between powerful religious assumptions about parental sacrifice and equally persuasive psychological presumptions about pursuing self-fulfillment. As children grow, however, the problem is not so much feeling torn or making a choice between two vocations as being torn by multiple demands and living with the actual choices made. The struggle stretches far beyond the confines of the home to the wider social arena in which children and parents are bombarded by multiple and sometimes staggering expectations.

If nursing an infant is, as Lamott remarks, “the easiest, purest communication I’ve ever known,” then daily communication with intimate family members over the long haul is among the hardest. With older children, one has a larger world with which to contend. This world enters one’s life sometimes wholly unbidden, just as sugar-filled cereals, Nintendo 64, a trampoline, and paintball guns entered ours, through our children’s many, sometimes seemingly relentless desires and requests. Perhaps this is why Lamott and other women have written powerful accounts of early motherhood but seldom delve into the experiences of long-term parenting. After the first few years, the waters become incredibly muddy.

From whom do parents seek guidance when the challenge becomes more complex and wide ranging than how to make it through the day with an infant without losing one’s mind? What does faithful parenting, from infancy until primary responsibility shifts to the adult-child, look like today?

One cannot answer this question, I have come to realize, without grappling with important prior questions: What are the dominant cultural perceptions of children, including religious perceptions, with which parents must deal? And are there better alternatives? How should people rightfully view children in a time of great transition and turmoil?

When I began to write about the dilemmas of early parenting after my first son was born, I tried to be as candid as Lamott about the surprising trials and tribulations, especially about how the very commitment to mothering could both impede and sustain my energies for such reflection. I also attempted to be honest about the value and the limits of Christianity’s governing perceptions of children and good parenting. As much as I hated to hear it, however, a few readers suggested new questions would arise with older children. They certainly have.

I genuinely did not expect, I honestly admit, that each of my children would become such an intricate constellation of relationships, needs, demands, problems, and gifts. Nor did I anticipate the development of an acute empathy for children as a silenced and overlooked group in society and contemporary Christianity in particular. Ultimately, I did not realize how overwhelmed and ill equipped I would feel in becoming a parent in today’s world, nor how frustrated I would become about personal and social irresponsibility toward children in general. No wonder I found myself laughing with recognition when Lamott admits she thought having a child would resemble getting a cat! How is it that most of us have so misperceived the realities of child bearing and rearing?

My children’s needs and desires cause me to question many prominent cultural values. In more Christian language, they call me to account as they reveal ways in which my family and the Christian community fall short of Christian ideals about children and the good life. Most centrally, I have found myself constantly challenged to keep at bay powerful cultural trends and to probe the nature of my faith commitments as I express them to my children. I am especially troubled by the middle-class obsession with securing one’s own children’s success with hardly a thought for other children; and, paired with this, the extent to which parents use their children’s accomplishments in soccer or math or violin to somehow feel better about themselves. From where did such an overriding perception of children evolve, and how does one grapple with this as a Christian parent? What are, I ask, some of the primary revolutions in views of children? And do Christianity’s most basic convictions have anything to say about them? These core questions form the bedrock of this book.

In my search for answers I turn to sources that many people would not think to put into the same conversation—Christianity, feminism, and psychology. I am convinced, however, that much is gained from drawing these parties into richer dialogue. As a Christian feminist mother and a scholar of religion and psychology, my research naturally emerged out of my own personal frustrations with the limitations of Christian, psychological, and feminist views and, at the same time, my belief that all three have important insights to offer.