When “Phil” Goes Bad...?

1:26 PM - Jun. 12, 2006 - Add to the Wildness

Ahh, bad mothers. You know. Those irresponsible people whose kids are better off in the public system. They model society’s ills to their children from the earliest age – addiction, abuse, bad language, poor communication, co-dependency, and so on.

Or is that all there is to being a bad mother? Why do society’s subgroups so love to squawk at alternate parenting models? Wherefore all the hollering that certain parents unquestionably shouldn’t homeschool because of what they’ll unleash upon society over the next 18 years?

The fact is, the term "bad parent" is an arbitrary one. I heard one homeschooling mom accused of being a bad mother by another homeschooling mom because of the sheer lack of discipline in the home. Well, I’d known the woman longer, and the kids always were that way, home or away. Thank goodness she took the burden off the teachers and classmates, I say. Or we’d have soon seen the precedent that grade-school homicide is not always about being a sociopath, sometimes it’s about having to teach one.

We can all agree that kids shouldn’t be abused or neglected. But even those definitions vary. Is spanking abuse? Is requiring kids to do chores? Is it deliberate neglect to insist that a child either finish the supper set before them or else wait to eat until the next morning? Or is it neglect to allow a child to refuse supper and then give them junk food because "at least then they’ve eaten something"? People would argue that such a diet can in fact kill a kid – diabetes and other health problems. Well, quite frankly, I have enough days where I have trouble not killing my own kids, never mind worrying about someone else’s. Today has been totally one of them, so I really don’t care what the neighbours are or aren’t having for supper.

You know what, we all know our own kids best. And I refuse to believe that just raising your kids according to a set of rules will produce good people. Just because you taught them to finish their food, apologize when they get in a fight, eat healthy and obey their parents doesn’t guarantee they’re going to do it when they’re fifteen or sixteen.

Those rules work well when kids are very, very small. They are useful for creating patterns that become so much a part of life that the kid doesn’t question them when they get older. It can help clear the field for dealing with bigger, badder problems. But rules do not create the internal motivation (aka self-discipline) to get a kid through.

Self-discipline: Self-teaching. The problem is, how do you teach a mere child to teach themselves to honour God through respecting society’s boundaries and honouring their parents?

You don’t. You teach them to read and you give them a Bible. You make sure they see you reading yours. You get honest about your own struggles with sin. That, I firmly believe, is all you can do. Model the walk. I’m really bad at it, and so I’m not convinced I can hold out much hope that my kids will do well when they fly the coop. The future isn’t written by us, and if we think we’ve got that power, especially in a formula, better a millstone.