The Week-est Link, May 16, 2008: FreeRange Kids, Adorare Mente, & the White Board Sessions

1. Spotted a terrific article in the LA Times the other day about a parent who rebelled against overparenting and let her nine-year-old find his way home on the New York subway. The author, Rosa Brooks, makes the case for letting kids be kids, and play as such. Also, check out a great site called FreeRangeKids that advocates a more hands-off model of parenting.

2. The first edition of the Southern Seminary student journal Adorare Mente is now online. It looks like a really helpful issue. I edited the church history section and selected an excellent paper by SBTS MDiv student Trevin Wax on the Marburg Colloquy, which featured debate between Luther and his follower, Zwingli, on the Lord's Supper. Check out the whole journal.

3. Tremendously helpful and insightful piece by Presbyterian historian Sean Lucas on the pastorate and PhD studies. (HT: JT) If you are an MDiv student and are struggling to figure out what to do on this issue, join the club. Don't be discouraged--this is a tough area. I want to blog about this more in the future (and have in the past), and hope to offer my own little bit of advice on the matter. Fundamentally, know this: it is a great thing to get lots of training before entering the pastorate. We need a small, select group of academic theologians; we need a huge, gifted, well-trained, gospel-driven group of pastor-theologians. Young, gifted seminarian: think hard about this last sentence.

4. Have you heard about the White Board Sessions? Neither had I til I saw a fleeting notice of them at the 9Marks blog. Sounds like a really interesting time. Dever paired up with some emergingish guys will make for some fun, I predict...

5. New Death Cab for Cutie album is out. My buddy Doug Hankins is currently letting me listen to it, and it sounds amazing eight minutes in. If you don't know about Death Cab, give them a listen--thoughtful, evocative music.

Have a great, God-saturated weekend, all.

Teens, Television, and the Befuddling Mix of the Two

A thoughtful anonymous reader posted this in response to my Monday piece on television watching by evangelicals:

"We don't miss it, but our teenage son is somewhat of a prodigal and resents us for "imposing" our beliefs on him. Of course, we have explained the obvious to him and he is refusing to see reason in the true fashion of teenage rebellion. What would you do in that situation? Just curious. We are not budging, since we have 5younger children, but wonder if we are missing some form of reasonable compromise."

I always read comments to my posts, which is not usually terribly taxing. But that should encourage some of you fence-sitters out there to write in with your thoughts. At any rate, I thought that this was a great question, and so I decided to give it a hack. Let me first say that I am not a parent of children who exist in physical form outside of their mother's womb. I do in fact have a child, but it is presently hanging out in its mother's womb, learning to punch her in all sorts of interesting ways. I am not a parenting authority, then, and do not present myself as one. With that said, I think on a personal level that parents have to set a tone in their home in which they are recognized as the authority. They do not need to apologize for being such and should in fact claim the role of leader as a God-given station in life. They should seek to set a tone for the home, though, in which authority is mixed with grace and love. In other words, children in Christian homes should be happy, inasmuch as parents can make this happen. They should experience life in happy, joyful terms. They should not grow up with a view of the Christian home that sees it only in terms of what it is against, but rather that sees it as being clearly rooted in joy that flows forth from a rich understanding of the doctrines of election, atonement, and providence.

This means that we strive to make our homes happy, that we give our children that happiest childhood we can, and that we root all our parenting in a vision of the Christian life that is not legalistic or stingy. However, we will also have to make difficult choices that our children, particularly our teens, may disagree with. Hopefully, when this happens, we can look back and see that we have trained our teens to trust our authority and follow our leadership, even if they disagree with certain decisions we make. Without such a foundation, I really don't know what one would do in the situation described above. With it, though, we can point our children to the duty to obey their parents, clearly and graciously articulate the reasons for our decision, and instruct them to seek to live joyfully under our rule.

In this particular instance, it sounds like this young person could have a hard heart. I don't think it's the parent's duty to give in here, as it often is not. Way more often, it's going to be the child's duty to follow their parents. Were I in the above situation, I would do what I've already written and stand my ground. Of course, I'm not sure that I would necessarily outlaw all tv, and that's not what I stated in my post. If you have made that decision, however, I would stick to your guns, love your son boldly, and attempt to show him that you're not making this decision to stick it to him but to usher him to holiness. If he rebels against you, that shows that his heart is hard. Again, he can well choose to watch tv when he's on his own, but as long as he's in your house, it is his biblical responsibility to joyfully submit to your leadership and follow you as his God-given authority, one put there for his own health and flourishing. It will naturally only help if this response is given in the context of a home in which a full, happy, rich Christian life is celebrated.

But even still, your son may reject your wisdom, and rebel against you. In such a case, you must not relinquish your authority as a parent and bend to his will, but stand firm and seek to love him.

Those are my thoughts--do other readers have their own? This is a sticky question, I must admit. I gave it my best shot, but as I said, I'm no authority here!

Training a "Gospel Girl" When Every Daughter Wants to Be a "Gossip Girl"

The New Yorker has a good story on a series of books that you may or may not have heard about. They're called the "Gossip Girl" books and they deal with a pack of tony New York prep school kids who act like, well, tony New York prep school kids. I can write that line with credibility--I went to college with a bunch of this type. They were fascinating to a small-town Maine boy, much like a rare species of African bird. I have not read the books that touch on this demographic and will not be reading them at this time. I can, however, say that Christians should be aware of these books and the worldview they represent. If you have kids, or if you are involved in ministry to teens, or if you are remotely interested in how the culture is thinking, you will want to be aware of this series and the tv show it has spawned.

Janet Malcolm, the author of the piece, summarizes the key characters of the show in this fashion:

"As the first book opens, Blair Waldorf—who is almost seventeen and lives in a penthouse at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street, with her divorcée mother, Eleanor, her younger brother, Tyler, and her cat, Kitty Minky—is sulking in her room. Blair, in the description of a classmate, is...an antiheroine of the first rank: bad-tempered, mean-spirited, bulimic, acquisitive, endlessly scheming, and, of course, dark-haired. The blond heroine, Serena van der Woodsen (who lives at an even better Fifth Avenue address, right across from the Metropolitan Museum), is incandescently beautiful, exceptionally kind, and, in the end, it has to be said, somewhat boring. The series belongs to awful Blair, who inspires von Ziegesar’s highest flights of comic fancy."

Apparently, Blair attempts to accomplish two goals throughout the series: sleeping with a boy she likes and getting into Yale. Serena apparently is nicer and morally purer than Blair. The series involves a series of exchanges between the two and various boys, with a good deal of commentary thrown in on modern rich parents. The parents of these girls and their classmates seem to do very little to regulate, constrain, or direct the behavior of their progeny, though they wish ardently for their children to attain the trappings of a "good life": an excellent education, wealth, an attractive spouse/partner. The show, which I have not watched but am familiar with, seems to follow roughly the same lines as the book series, though with larger roles for the parents.

So what's the big deal, one might ask? Well, it's my humble opinion that though we Christians may not watch this show (and shows like it), and though we may very well steer our children from such fare, we will nonetheless benefit from knowing that it exists and from studying its worldview to anticipate how the secular world will be influenced and, in turn, will seek to influence our children. Books and shows like "Gossip Girl" have a serious trickle-down effect in the broader culture. There's a reason that they're set in New York, one of the cultural capitals of the world, and they influence the way that children all across the world think and view themselves and others. These particular works seem to encourage the reader to think that parents (and adults more broadly) are stupid, irresponsible, and not worthy of the authority they possess; that it is good and right for children (teens) to pursue sex, intrigue, and materialism of the most excessive sort; that beauty and social standing set one's course in life. Of course, the author of this series mocks these views, but it seems clear that her mockery is set in a worldview that simultaneously enjoys and even celebrates them. If beauty and materialism really aren't important, why write a series of novels that, however ironically, celebrates them?

We need to know about cultural influencers like Gossip Girl. In a culture that prizes wealth, beauty, and social standing to an extreme degree, we must make sure that we prize spiritual wealth, spiritual beauty, and kingdom standing. We must take care to train our children, whether in our families or our churches, to reject the culture's ideals and principles and to embrace God's. I can only think of what series like this will do to a young girl, culturally plugged-in, who does not have a strong Christian family to train her to think rightly about Gossip Girl. It is only natural to assume that she will measure herself by its standards, prize its worldview, and slowly, quietly turn away from the true beauty and riches of the Christian faith. The things of this world do not appear to the natural man as hideous, remember, but as beautiful.

Gossip Girl is a polished bauble in the eyes of many girls today and is a part of a culture that creates great animosity for things of God. Let us work, then, to create families where biblical womanhood (and manhood) is celebrated, where beauty is seen primarily in spiritual terms, where wealth in Christ is far more precious than the designer labels that call out for our consumption. Gossip Girl may tempt young women, but when it is placed alongside a joyful, God-centered, well-led Christian family and church, its luster will fade, and our girls will not want to be women of gossip and intrigue, but women of the gospel.

NPR, Child's Play, and the Importance of the Imagination

A friend recently tipped me off to a great NPR article on the importance of child's play. Here's a key quotation on how child's play has changed in the last half-century:

"Instead of spending their time in autonomous shifting make-believe, children were supplied with ever more specific toys for play and predetermined scripts. Essentially, instead of playing pirate with a tree branch they played Star Wars with a toy light saber. Chudacoff calls this the commercialization and co-optation of child's play — a trend which begins to shrink the size of children's imaginative space."

Aside from the clearly unfortunate nature of this development from an "enriched life" standpoint, the loss of imaginative, undirected play has had quantifiably negative effects in the physiology of children. Here's a very telling quotation:

"A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn't stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at the National Institute for Early Education Research says, the results were very different.

"Today's 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today's 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago," Bodrova explains. "So the results were very sad.""

The loss of self-regulation is, perhaps surprisingly, intimately connected with the loss of spontaneous, child-directed play that nurtures the imagination. Thus, when one loses a connection with the imagination, and when one couples this loss with a permissive society, one is left with a generation of children who have little self-control and a host of corresponding personal problems. What, after all, is more integral to maturity than self-control?

I would encourage you to read the whole article--it's worth it, as it will stimulate much thought among Christians. If the studies mentioned in the piece are true, and they certainly seem to be, then we Christians will need to make sure that we reserve a substantial place in our child-raising for the cultivation of the imagination. Furthermore, we will need to make sure that we do so not primarily by placing toys with preprogrammed stories in the hands of our children, but by thrusting our children out the back door with the lively admonition to, well, "Play!" That is to say, articles like the one cited in this post only encourage us to do what many parents, following their common sense intuition, have been doing for many hundreds of years: encouraging kids to be kids. This is not to say that such parents do not push their children on to maturity and seek to develop them in spiritual and social terms such that they become God-fearing men and women capable of contributing to home, church, society, and the broader kingdom. No, they do. But good parents do so while realizing that the seasons of life are precious and that a key part of the season of childhood is the development and exercise of the imagination.

I am not yet a father. I cannot wait to be (and my wife, praise God, is fourteen weeks along!). I do not speak, then, as an authority, but as one who was blessed to be raised in a home where the imagination was not simply tolerated but was stimulated and allowed to develop. To this day, one of my favorite things to do is to engage in creative exercise through basketball games. I may not invent tales of knightly heroism or dashing rescue anymore, but I do still allow my fun side to run wild, quite literally, on the court. That's a gift that my parents gave me--and that I hope many Christian parents will continue to give in days to come. What's at stake, after all, is not simply well-rounded children, but children who understand and delight in the gift of imagination and then go on to live self-controlled lives while glorying in the message of the Bible, the story that in its incredible genesis, action-packed body, and fantastic resolution crests all other tales in majesty and truth.