parenting pressures

Excerpts from a long article by Leslie Leyland Fields in Christianity Today....

She is the author most recently of "Parenting Is Your Highest Calling"…And Eight Other Myths That Traps Us in Worry and Guilt, from which this article is adapted...

More than any other generation, today's parents are worried sick that they will mess up their children's lives....There is so much fretting that even the backlash has spawned a notable movement and subgenre of its own, the slacker mom...I find most Christian parents at the front of the line—the anxiety and success line, not the slacker line...Our most consuming concern is that our children "turn out"—that is, that our Christian faith and values are successfully transmitted, and that our children grow up to be churchgoing, God-honoring adults.

It appears that many of us are not succeeding. The exodus of young adults from evangelical churches in the U.S. is well reported, perhaps over-reported and hyper-hyped....

If this isn't enough to induce parental panic, another unsettling report came our way in a summer 2008 Newsweek article, "But I Did Everything Right!" Sharon Begley reported that, contrary to the opinions of decades of experts, genetics may have a more potent impact on child development than our own parenting practices....

These scientific findings are not only ultimately hopeful and helpful for parents; more importantly, they also support Scripture in an area that has been plagued with presumption, behaviorism, and wrong thinking for decades....

Many Christian writers and parents have absorbed these values and drifted into what could be called spiritual determinism. We have absorbed the cultural belief in psychological determinism but spiritualized it with Bible verses, and one verse in particular. The result is a Christianized version of the cultural myth. It reads something like this: "Christian parenting techniques produce godly children."

Proverbs 22:6 has been widely adopted as both psychological premise and theological promise, despite the widespread recognition that hermeneutically, the Proverbs are not promises from God, but general observations and maxims....