* This article is now complete and will be pulished by Boundless and the Association of Marriage and Family Ministiries. I have posted it under the Articles link.
** Below is a rough draft. I am posting it for feedback. Please feel free to point out what is good and bad, what you would like to hear more or less of, where you think it is off or on. Thanks in advance!
From a distance, parenthood looks like the next step in human maturity—adolescent, college student, young adult, married person, parent. (For some reason, popular perception of empty-nesters doesn’t translate to the final step in maturity.) Those without children, tend to view those with children as wiser, more responsible human beings. After all, recent studies have shown that only the well-educated and affluent are the married-with-kids type.[1]
However, close-up encounters with parents reveal that maturity doesn’t go hand in hand with motherhood or fatherhood, even if the mother and father are married. Yet, if we are to parent well, some level of maturity is necessary. Perhaps even more important is the willingness for a parent to mature as a person with their kids, a challenge well captured by Dan Allender in his book How Children Raise Parents.[2] Indeed, if we are willing to learn along with our children, parenthood may prove to be a maturing, even transforming experience. On the other hand, disengaged or duty-driven parenting can easily result prove to be a paralyzing and heart-hardening experience. Regardless of how you parent, one thing is certain; raising children will bring its fair share of fear and frustration both to mother and father.
The challenges of parenthood begin before our baby is born! The nine months before birth are a microcosm of the liberties and limitations of parenthood. Sonograms, name selection, baby room shopping, loss of time, money, and sleep all transpire in those few months, the beginnings of the diverse joys and pains of parenthood. Fear sets in early on. Will the baby be born healthy or at all? How will we financially support another person? What about breast-feeding and diaper-changing? How will my spouse change? What if I screw up my kid? Can I do this? Depending on how we respond to these questions, fear of failure can result in earnest preparation or personal paralysis.
After the baby is born and the novelty wears off, our fears can quickly turn into frustration. While I trembled at the thought of guiding and providing for our second before she was born, afterwards I found myself incredibly annoyed and frustrated with her incessant crying. Responsible fear is easily turned into selfish frustration, and questions begin to cascade from our minds. Why won’t that baby just shut up? How am I supposed to work on three hours of sleep? Why won’t my child just obey me the first time? What happened to my wife/husband? Where did all my free time go? Who am I? How do I respond to that!
The various frustrations encountered in parenting can quickly turn into anger or despair in lament over the loss of past freedoms. We discover just how much pre-parenthood personal freedom we had when we lose sleep, time with our spouses, time to see movies, to have dinner out, to enjoy quiet coffee shop reading and reflection, and time with friends. Depending on how we respond, frustration over freedoms lost can lead to personal reformation or deep-seated resentment.
How are we to redemptively engage our parental fears and frustrations? How much of our fear and frustration is valid and invalid? How can frustration lead to redemption instead of resentment? In the space that remains, we will explore some of these gut-level questions with the aim of shedding light on what it looks like to parent by faith in the midst of fear and frustration.
Fear of Failure Parenting
In the months leading up to our first child’s birth something radical happened. All of a sudden, my strolls through bookshops led me, not down the usual Theology, Literature and Sociology aisles but quickly into the Family and Parenting section. Fearful of parental failure, I was willing to learn from anyone. My reading was not limited to the subjects of children and fathers but even extended to literature on motherhood. I recall an afternoon spent at Barnes & Noble, where I scoured the racks for wisdom. Consumed by the fear of failing as a father, I desperately picked up The New Dad’s Survival Guide: Man-to-Man Advice for First-Time Fathers by Scott Mactavish. I didn’t have a clue who Scott was, but I knew I was both a first-timer and in need of survival tips.
Fear jump-started my parental preparation. I began gather in as many survival tips as possible. I soon called a weekly meeting for expecting fathers to plow through the emotional, spiritual, and practical issues of fatherhood. I frantically looked for post-graduate job placement and began to budget with a passion. In earnest preparation I sought to stamp out my parental fear.
This is not every parent’s response. Other soon-to-be parents encounter personal paralysis when considering parenthood. Thoughts of failure in meeting our children’s emotional, social and physical needs converge, sending an arrow of inadequacy and inability straight to our hearts. Add to that the wincing pain we feel when we consider the financial demands of caring for another person. As a result, we may spend untold hours worrying instead of sleeping, hardening instead of embracing the in-breaking reality of parenthood. What are we to do with these responses? Is preparation the strong, godly response and paralysis the weak, ungodly response? How should we engage these fears?
You Don’t Have What It Takes
John Eldredge would have us believe that, for fathers, the most important question we can ask and answer for ourselves and our sons is “Do I have what it takes?”[3] He argues that most of us don’t realize that we are built for fatherhood and that we need to know, as our sons need to know, that we have what it takes. Although Eldredge is right in pointing out that mothers and fathers have been given the natural equipment to parent, he underestimates the bent motivations we have in parenting. To be sure, Eldredge directs the wounded parent to the healing Christ but only to get us back on track in the task of child affirmation. As a result, his model of parenting can become task-based, neglecting the sinful issues of the parental heart.
The reality is that we really don’t have what it takes to parent for the glory of God and the good of our children. Our natural equipment for instruction, discipline, care, and love is in disrepair; we can’t consistently and accurately instruct, discipline, care and love our children, even if we have received the love of God in Christ. In dark and honest moments, we will daydream of life without children. Time and again, our children push us to the limits of our love, and we cross the line of selfish anger or embittered depression. We will spank or yell out of spite, not mercy and love. We do not have what it takes to parent our children.
The godly response to our paralyzing fear is not to pat ourselves on our backs and assume that we have what it takes, nor is it to counter our parental limitations with earnest preparation. Instead, we need to redemptively confront our fears. If we respond to fear-motivated preparation and personal paralysis with a you-have-what-it-takes attitude, we bypass the heart, where our fears fester. Though diligent preparation and careful concern can be a godly response to the task of parenting, it is the heart that determines the righteousness of our actions. Related to this fact, is the reality that our children see our hearts as well as our actions and act out of their own impure motives. More than success is at stake, our hearts, parent and child, are on the table in the privilege of parenting. If we are to parent well, then we will need more than task-based survival tips and emotional pats on the back. We need the gospel to redemptively engage our fears…and our frustrations.
Frustration and Parenting
Fear isn’t the only obstacle we encounter in parenting. Frustration over failure and freedoms lost often haunt us. Of course, we don’t always understand this dynamic when we snap at our children. Unlike our son, a sleep-through-the-night poster child, our daughter has taken a cry-through-the-night approach. For a while, this was both her day job and her night job. She was what you might ambiguously refer to as colicky. Needless to say, I have not fared well. More than once I have lost my patience with Ellie’s unpleasant, incessant crying.
Consider this scenario. It is evening, after a long day at work. Owen is in bed but Ellie is hungry, so I feed her, wrap her, and put her in the swing in hopes of some silent time to myself. Five minutes later, her blood-curdling cry severs the silence. I swiftly return to her with sucker in hand to plug up the noise. (Oh the sucker, a tease for both parent and child, which only provides temporary and fleeting relief.) Another five minutes go by and out comes the sucker along with the screams, only this time they are louder and shriller. This cycle repeats about twenty times, and I lose it. I huffily run in to the room, swiftly pick up Ellie, and with a couple shakes I angrily reason with her: “Ellie why won’t you go to sleep? You have already eaten!” Minutes, if not seconds later, I am beside myself. How could I lose my temper with my six week old baby?
In the same scenario my wife responds differently. Instead of getting angry, she patiently returns again and again, speaking sweet words into our daughter’s ear. How does she do it? In loving motherly despair. The next day, she is beside herself in despondency. I receive a call at work. She tells me she just can’t do “it” anymore. She tells me she can’t escape and asks me who she has become and if I can come home and help. She thinks to herself, “I am a terrible mother.”
As our children grow, the scenarios change but the challenges remain somewhat the same. In this challenge, what are we to do with our frustrations? Talking these things through with my wife has been enlightening. She has suggested that, perhaps part of the reason I can get so upset with our helpless six week old, is that I can not fix her crying. All my earnest preparation, my swaddling techniques, and carefully situated suckers fail in soothing my daughter’s cry. My response to the frustration is to fix things. But is the problem really that I can not fix my daughter’s colic?
The problem is deeper than mister fix-it masculinity. You see, when I am confronted with the fact that I do not have the power to fix my problems, I am forced to recognize that I do not have what it takes. Furthermore, my inability to control my daughter’s crying results in less free time, time to do what I want to do. In these moments, my inability to fix the problem and my frustration from lost freedom combine to produce a powder keg of anger.
For my wife, the problem goes deeper than feminine frailty. When she encounters the challenges of parenting, it easy to mistakenly equate lost freedom with loss of identity. Though she is no longer able to carry on all her hobbies and friendships with pre-parenthood potency, she has not lost her identity, but it is being transformed. Her loss of freedom makes her feel trapped. In turn, her trapped feelings associated with motherhood lead to guilt over passionless parenting. She doesn’t have what it takes to be a good mother.
Faith and Parenting
In these moments, we are asking another question: “Can I have my own way?”[4] Our will is pitted against God’s will. In his providence, we have reached a juncture in which personal freedom must give way to parental duty, and we fight it with every fiber of our being. Why? Because there are places in our hearts over which we have hung the teenager’s sign, “My Room. Stay Out.” These are rooms where the dirty laundry of our hearts reeks of selfishness. We want to parent on our terms and when our terms aren’t met, we get bitter or despondent.
When our freedoms are removed, our idols are revealed. For some it may be the idolatry of time—I want to do what I want to do. For others, the idolatry of identity—I’m not just a mother! In these heart-wrenching moments, when we sense a loss of freedom, God is bringing us to himself through our children. It is when we find ourselves acting like children, defiantly insisting on our own way, that God wants to meet us. His aim is to show us our sinful rebellion against his way and lead us to repentance and renewal. With the outstretched arms of the Spirit and the Son, the Father calls us away from bitterness and despondency into the happiness of communion with the Trinity. God wants to lead us from frustration into fellowship with him by showing us that we do not have what it takes and that we can not always get our own way. Instead, through the frustrations of parenting, God seeks to magnify his sufficiency by releasing his perfect power and love in and through us to bless us and our children. In those moments of weakness, he wants to give us his strength, knowing that we become true parents when we are truly dependent on him.
Fear and frustration will never disappear from our lives as parents. In fact, they cycle in and out, manifesting themselves differently depending on what stage of life our children are in. How we engage our fears and frustration will influence how our children respond to their own fears and frustrations. By surrendering our fears and frustrations and repenting of our bitterness and despondency, we can display the beauty and pleasure of God’s redemptive love for our kids. In turn, we will honor our heavenly Father and help our children learn to struggle well with their own fears and frustrations. By removing our eyes from fears and freedoms and turning them to all that God is for us in Jesus through the Spirit, we will gain more strength and freedom, joy and peace than ten thousand babysitters could ever offer!
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[1] Married couples with children now account for less than a quarter of the U.S. population. Sociologists point out that this marriage gap is largely class-based. Blaine Harden, “Numbers Drop for the Married with Children,” Washington Post Mar 4, 2007: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/03/AR2007030300841_pf.html
[2] Dan Allender, How Children Raise Parents: The Art of Listening to Your Family (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook Press, 2003).
[3] John Eldredge, You Have What It Takes: What Every Father Needs to Hear (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004).
[4] This is second of two diagnostic questions proposed by Dan Allender. His first question is: “Am I loved?” This question gives a biblical twist to Eldredge’s man-centered question: “Do I have what it takes?” In How Children Raise Parents, Allender charts the four different ways we can answer this combinations of questions, pointing out that only answers that provide a biblical path to parenting—“Yes you are loved, and no, you may not have your own way.”