Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How To Be a Better Parent: Debunking 3 Parenting Myths

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

Are you tempted to be a helicopter parent? Or maybe a snow plow parent? Have you ever considered the damage that these parenting methods may cause for your children? In this bonus episode, Keith and Patrick discuss how to be a better parent by debunking three, common parenting myths: Myth 1: Safety is your kids' greatest need. Myth 2: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Myth 3: Prepare the path for your child. What if you took a different approach? What if, instead, you saw parenting as a way to prepare your children to leave your house someday? If you live in the Columbia, Missouri area, we hope you’ll join us in person. Our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/about/sundays/ (website) has all the info you’ll need. You can follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO/ (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram) or https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Twitter). Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to drive across town. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. You're familiar with the term helicopter parent. But what about snowplow parent? I think every parent has to know what those parenting approaches refer to, whether they personally tend to fall into one of those approaches. And if they do, how it's affecting their kids. We're going to take a break from 1 Corinthians 13. For one episode, Patrick and I are going to discuss

three myths good parents believe. Now, Patrick and I come from completely different experiences, and our kids are really different ages. So I'm not even sure we fully agree on this. Do we, Patrick? I think we've got some agreement, but probably not entirely. You know, like Heath was saying, I'm coming from a different perspective than him. I've got young kids right. right now. I still remember when my three-year-old Iris turned one, she started walking. And without even thinking about it, I just started hovering over her. I wanted to make sure that she wouldn't touch anything. She shouldn't touch it. She wasn't going to break something, fall over, hurt herself in any possible way. In other words, you were a classic helicopter parent. I might have been a

lawnmower parent. I mean, I was right on top of things. Very cautious. Yeah, very cautious. But the funny thing that happened was right around the same time I was doing college ministry. And so I had a lunch, at the Chancellor's House. And at the Chancellor's House, there was this representative there, I think talking for student health. And she was saying that there had been a shift in college students recently, that the college students who were coming into the University of Missouri now were much more fragile than college students who had come before them. In fact, she had a term for it. She called them teacups. And so now, while I'm hearing this, all of a sudden, I started wondering, am I turning Iris into a teacup? Is she going to come to college and not be able to be resilient enough to

handle it when she gets a bad grade, when someone doesn't like her or says something mean. And I started thinking, well, maybe I am because I treat her like porcelain. I treat her like a teacup. And maybe I'm training her to think and to live like a teacup. One thing my parents weren't concerned about was protecting me from life. And you've never been the same. I'm not knowing. You look back and you think, man, my parents did some good things, some bad things. I respect my parents a lot for giving it their best shot. And one of the realities is that my friends and I, we would go out on our bikes every night in the summer, but maybe all year round when we were, say, 10, 11, 12 years old, and we'd be gone for the night. That rule was that, you know, not too long after the streetlights came on,

maybe you should think about heading home. Those were the days of no cell phones, no ways of getting into contact with your kids. And my parents weren't concerned about my safety at all. They had no fear that I was going to somehow be abducted by some stranger. They just let us go. So I think I bring that into my parenting. My wife and I have four kids. The youngest is a senior in high school and the oldest is 24. I heard a guy say one time, I think it was probably in a book,

that what we're doing as parents is preparing our children to leave. And that's incredibly counterintuitive. Because when your children are born and they're young and you love them so much and they're so dependent upon you. It's hard to think in your mind that you're going to prepare this child in maybe 18 years to leave your house and to be fully functional out on their own, able to take care of themselves. And in some sense, as a parent of young kids, you can't wait for the day that that child's more independent. And yet there's something scary about that.

You kind of always want them to depend on you. But if you can fix in your mind that you only have until this child hits 18, to prepare this child to handle life on their own as an independent, well-functioning adult, I think it will help you develop a plan that makes sense to get them there. So like we said, we come at this from maybe slightly different experiences and perspectives. But thinking through that kind of question has definitely helped me as a parent. But in particular, it's also been addressing some myths that I think a lot of parents, whether you're a parent of little kids like me or a parent of,

teenagers or even beyond, myths that good parents believe. And the first myth is this. Safety is our kids' greatest need. Now, the funny thing is hearing you talk about your childhood, I know our childhoods were different, but I was actually pretty similar. I didn't have a cell phone. I was able to ride my bike, go around the neighborhood, and I just had to be back home before it was dark or dinner time. Despite that, as a parent now, I've, again, I have the tendency to be a fearful parent. Something's happened culturally that I think that's the right way to parent. Well, one way to think about the cultural transition is to think back historically about some key events that has shaped the modern psyche. So the first one was Eaton Potts. I might be mispronouncing his name.

Forgive me, Eaton Potts was abducted in New York City in 1979. And there was kind of this panic because nothing like that had ever really happened before. They couldn't find him. And then in In 1981, Adam Walsh, another young kid, was abducted. And his dad went on to do the America's Most Wanted and the hunt for people who had been abducted. When I was a kid, I remember there were faces on milk cartons of kids that couldn't be found. There'd be signs all of a sudden up at grocery stores looking for kids. And there became this general fear that some stranger out there is going to come and abduct my child. And here's the strange part. When you hear all this media about children being abducted, which is, let's just name it, an awful, awful, terrible, horrific thing.

But when you see it on milk cartons, when you hear it in the media, it creates this perception that this is happening all the time everywhere. But here's the simple facts. According to the FBI, 90% of children who go missing have either miscommunicated plans, misunderstood directions, or run away from home. Ninety-nine point eight percent of the time missing children come home. And the reason why is because the vast majority of child abductions are actually done by biological parents who don't have custody or by someone who knows the child well. The number of children who are actually abducted by strangers is a fraction of 1%. The best estimate is about 100 a year. That's out of 70 million children. This is exceedingly rare.

And yet when I talk to my friends about, you know, do you let your child play by themselves? Do you have to supervise them all the time? This is one of their top fears. someone's going to come along and take my kid. And no one seems to realize that that is, again, it is exceedingly, exceedingly rare. So it's kind of ironic that we teach our kids about stranger danger, and yet that's a danger that doesn't really exist. This is about the safest time in the history of the world, the safest place in the history

of a world, to be a kid. And in fact, teaching your kids to be scared, not just of strangers, but scared of the world, that trains you in a certain way to live, right? Just take the stranger danger example. Children who aren't trained how to interact with strangers, they don't have some key skills, right? It's not just social skills of being able to walk up and meet someone that you don't know and have a good conversation. But really important skills, like telling the difference between someone who might actually be a risk, who might actually be a danger, and someone is just a normal person you can have a normal interaction with. We're training our kids to not be able to differentiate between actual risk and imagined risk.

And what ends up happening, at least what I've seen happening by the time students end up in college, is that they begin to see their whole world, their whole environment as being hostile, as somehow being dangerous. And so perhaps it's no surprise that amongst college students, anxiety rates are escalating. I mean, they're skyrocketing in a unhistoric, unprecedented way. Well, I'd be anxious, too, if I was afraid of everything, if my parents told me to be afraid of everything. And when parents try to buck this trend, when parents try to allow their kids to have freedoms that were so common, just maybe a generation ago, maybe not even that long, they get called out on it. There's examples of people being arrested because they allowed their kids to go to a playground, several blocks

away from their house, and play without adult supervision. So one funny example of this was a few years back. A woman named Lenore Skinawze, she's a columnist in New York City. She let her nine-year-old son, after begging her again and again and again, to let him go on the subway by himself, she lets him do it. She gives him a metro card, a map, and says, if you can't figure it out, you're just going to have to ask a stranger. About 45 minutes later, she gets back home, her son's already home, and he's ecstatic. This is like the best day of his life. And so she says, hey, I'm going to write a column about this. Well, the column goes viral. And eventually, Lenore Skinawze, she ends up being called America's worst mom. As a result, I guess she gets a little bit entrenched

reviews, and she invents an idea called free-range parenting. It's an approach to parenting that says, we need to allow our children to play and to have unsupervised time, unsupervised time where they're with each other, with their friends, resolving conflict. I mean, this is something I see as a parent all the time. I have a three-year-old, so she's selfish and she argues and she demands things. And so when she's playing with other three-year-olds, guess what happens? They get into fights. They argue over stuff. And I've got some friends who will let the kids talk it out and figure out the conflict, but I've got a lot of other friends. And this is my temptation, too, by the way, who are going to step in and manage the conflict for them. And I think, man, we're training our kids to not be able to resolve conflicts. One last little quote here. This is by a guy named Peter Gray. He's a researcher and he says this. He says that we have to allow children to take risks. Why? This is what he says. He says, they seem to be dosing themselves with moderate degrees of fear, as if deliberately learning how to deal with both the physical and emotional challenges of moderately dangerous conditions they generate. All such a

activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening. But if too little fear is induced, the activity will be boring. If too much is induced, it becomes terror. Nobody but the child, him or herself, knows the right dose. That's when my approach with Iris is, I've got to let her dose herself with fear. I've got to let her dose herself with risk. I've got to let her go out onto the playground by herself in our backyard, even though the ladder's a little too big for her and try climbing up it. And if she falls, the worst thing it happens is she breaks a bone. But if I don't let her take the risk. She's going to become someone who is anxious about her environment constantly. She won't know how to manage fear in her day-to-day life. And I think that's probably a more important thing for the

long term than a broken arm. So the first myth is that safety is your kid's greatest need. And of course, that's the classic definition of the helicopter parent, the parent who's hovering over their child, always cautious with the idea that safety first is what's really important. But your kid's greatest need is not to be safe. Remember, you're preparing them to leave your home. And so you've got to be willing to live with risk because it's a lot scarier to go out into the world unprepared than it is to deal with the natural consequences of being a kid. I think that's exactly right. It's interesting to ask the question, according to the book of Proverbs, what's the thing a parent should care most about? Is it safety? Well, Proverbs 2319 says this,

listen my son. If your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad indeed. In other words, this is a parent talking to a child, and the parent doesn't say, if you're safe, then I'll be glad indeed. Although that's probably the case. They're saying above all else, if you're wise, that's what's going to make my heart glad. Now, the obvious question is, what's wisdom? And a simple definition is that wisdom is the art of godliness and practical everyday life. It's knowing how to respond to the day-in-day-out challenges, choices, decisions that we all have to face. And so I don't think it's surprising that when we look at the Bible, the things that God wants us to be concerned about in our kids don't quite line up with the things that we're often

most worried about. He wants us to be worried about our children delighting in him, delighting in wisdom, having fear of him, being self-control, being able to resist temptation, knowing how to make good friends and to keep good company. Those are some of the things that God cares that we train our children in. That takes us to our second myth. and that is that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. You've heard it the other way, right? What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But the way we live and act and raise our kids,

I think what we really believe is this myth that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. There's a funny study that was done and no offense intended to people with peanut allergies out there. Years ago, back in the 90s. If you're taking on peanut allergies, you're a braver man than I. years ago, back in the 90s.

Patrick Miller, not Keith. That's right. There were some tests that were done to see what caused peanut allergies. Because interestingly, in the 90s, they'd made a decision to try and have kids not eat peanut butter at a young age. But the funny thing that ended up happening was that peanut butter allergies escalated. And so someone comes along and they do a really simple test. They take one group of children and they introduce them to peanuts products, whether it's peanut butter or little peanut puffs. at a young age, three times a week. And they have another group of children who they assiduously

forced to avoid any peanut products whatsoever. The group that avoids the peanut products, 17% of those kids ended up getting a peanut allergy. The group that were introduced to the products three times a week, only 3% ended up getting the peanut allergy. And so it made a pretty clear, obvious point. If you don't want your child to have peanut allergies, the best way to prevent it is by introducing peanuts to them. In other words, what might make you weaker in a moment is going to make you stronger in the long term. And if it's true of peanut allergies, I think it's actually true in real life. One of the things that Christine and I, my wife and I have debated over the years raising our kids is how to help them think through the natural consequences that are going to come

their way. In other words, I'm a huge fan of natural consequences. I think natural consequences are the parents' best friend because you don't have to step in and scold. You don't have to step in and be the bad guy. You can let the natural consequences teach them a lesson. So if they wake up late and they have to stay after school for detention, awesome. What a great learning experience. If they slept in late and got fired from a job, wow, that's fantastic. if they didn't study and they got a bad grade. Perfect. Because these are things that they need to learn if they're going to make it in life.

And so there's no need for us to go down and wake them up in the morning, hey, you need to be getting up soon in order to make it to your work. That's fine for maybe an 8-year-old, a 10-year-old, but a middle school student should not have to be woke up by their parents to make it to school. If they miss their ride to school, well, I don't know, I guess you walk. I guess you skip school that day. And, you know, their natural consequences are a parent's best friend. But if you're afraid of your kid experiencing those consequences because you think that'll be catastrophic in their life, then you're going to create little bubble boy or bubble girl who's always

protected and yet never learning. I think the point you're making is that kids aren't fragile. It's easy to have a mindset, especially with younger kids, but I think it can go all the way up to college students, to think that your kids are fragile, to think that your kids are easily breakable. Our kids are not fragile. One framework that's really helped me is dividing up how we think about our kids into three different categories. One way of thinking about our kids is that they're fragile. This is the teacup approach, right? If you touch them the wrong way, they're going to break into pieces. And so my job as a parent is to put them in the cupboard to make sure nothing can hurt them. A different way to view them, is a different way to view them. is as being resilient, right? So, for example, my daughter's plastic cups. They're pretty resilient. She throws them on the floor. They're not going to break. I can pick them back up, refill them with water. And that could be a different parenting approach, which is just like,

well, I'm going to let anything hit you. I'm going to neglect you. I'm not going to do anything. You're just going to suffer. And I don't think most parents want to do that either. A third approach is what's called the anti-fragile approach. And this recognizes that there are some things which get stronger with stress, some things which get stronger with use. So a great example of that are our bones and our muscles. If you lay in bed for a month, you're going to have serious issues. You're going to have muscle atrophy. You're going to have a hard time walking. Because if you don't put some stress on those muscles, they get weak. But if you put more stress on muscles, if you work out, they're going to get stronger. And that's exactly how our children are.

They're anti-fragile. The more stress and the more difficulty they have, and I'm not saying outrageous stress, trauma, that kind of thing. I'm saying reasonable stress, the stronger they're going to get. A good way to think about this is candles and fire, right? air on a fire makes it get bigger. You put enough air into a fire. I mean, that's why you have those little pumps. The fire's just going to continue to grow and grow and grow. But if you put too much air out a candle,

if you blow too much air at a candle, it's just going to blow out. I think one of the things that we end up doing is we end up training our kids to be candles. So they can't handle things whenever they're thrown at them. When what we need to be doing is training our kids to become fires, children who can take those things and via the character they've developed,

consume them and become stronger in the long run. Makes me think of a story when my oldest kid was playing baseball, little league. He was probably 10, something like that. And the coach was hitting fly balls to him. And all the kids, if you drop the ball, you had to put your glove down and do push-ups in this long, wet grass. And I was standing around some parents who were just appalled that the coach was having him do this. And I looked at him, I thought, and in fact, I said, that coach is really helping you right now. because that coach is toughening up your kid. That coach is showing your kid that there are consequences.

That coach is helping your kid focus on a task, catching a fly ball. And your kid's not fragile. Your kid is going to get up and be fine and try hard and learn something from this experience. But it's just not natural, I think, to parents today. And this is a theme that I think runs throughout so many different scriptures. The idea that that God sometimes allows difficulty and suffering in our lives to strengthen us. Along those same lines, let's move on to our third myth. And the third myth is that good parents prepare the path for the child. Here's what we mean when we say that.

I have friends, a lot of people I talk to who kind of think it's their job to remove every possible obstruction from their kids' paths. Sometimes this is called snowplow parenting, right? Like a snow plow coming through, it's removing all of the obstacles. why so that my kid can be the most successful. So you may have heard examples of parents calling college football coaches, asking why their kid isn't getting playing time. And if that's happening on a college level,

you know it's happening on the high school level. Talk to a high school teacher and ask how many times that teacher receives a call from a parent about a grade or about some conflict within the class. It's even happening on the job. Employers are getting calls from parents trying to get their kid a job, asking what the interview is going to be like. Parents are actually showing up in interviews to try to help their kid succeed. So instead of trying to prepare the path for the child, what if instead you prepared the

child for the path? When I heard a guy named Tim Elmore say that for the first time, I thought, gosh, that makes so much sense because I don't know what path my kid's going to take out there. So I can't get every pathway free from obstacles so he or she'll succeed. Instead, if I can just focus on my kid being willing to overcome obstacles, willing to speak up for themselves, willing to try things and learn from them and try again the next day, if I can prepare my kid for the path, then whatever path they choose, they'll be ready because the kid's ready, not because the path is ready. There's no way I can remove the obstacles that they will face. It's just an impossible task. Yeah, and it's kind of ironic, too,

because we think by removing the obstacles, we're going to make our kid more successful when actually the net sum is exactly the opposite. We're training them to be unsuccessful people, people who can't manage their own lives. I've even seen this with my daughter, who's three, in kind of small, silly ways. one of the things I tell to Iris over and over again, whenever she falls, she gets a scrape, she stands up and I look at her and I go, are you a tough girl? And she goes, yeah, Daddy, I'm a tough girl.

And it's become a thing now, right? When she falls over, she'll pop right back up and she'll look at me and she'll say, Daddy, I'm a tough girl. And if it's really bad, she'll start crying and we'll take care of it that way. But it's trained her to think about herself a certain way. So the other day, I let her go out back into our backyard. We've got a little playground there.

And every time I've gone back there with her, She refuses to climb the little ladder on the playground. She will not do it by herself. If I'm there, I've got to be right behind. I've got to kind of help her up the stairs. And then she finally gets up to the top. But on this particular instance, I said, yeah, you just go back there and play. And I was grilling.

My back was to her. I was on the top of the deck. We were a long ways away from each other. And I look down there and I see her just standing in the top of the playground. Somehow, by herself, she made it up there by herself. And when she came back up, I asked her what happened. How'd she get up there? And she told me the truth.

She fell down. She tried, but she's a tough girl. And she climbed up the little case, and she got back up to the top. And I thought, that's preparing the child for the path, not preparing the path for the child. And if I had been down there, she would have never learned how to climb up that ladder. There's a biblical parallel here, right? I mean, one way we can think about our parenting is think about how God parents us. He's called a father for a reason. We are his children. And oftentimes, God puts obstacles in our path that will grow us, give us achievement. to lean on him, give us a chance to trust him. He doesn't make everything easy in this life. Far from it. This life is full of challenges. So I think that by allowing your child to experience the challenges that come in life, you are acting a little bit like God acts toward us. And I think one of the reasons that God does that is precisely so that we can grow in wisdom. It's one of the points that James makes whenever he talks about the purpose of suffering and hardship in our life. It helps us grow in our character. It helps us grow in wisdom. So as we look at these

three myths, safety is your child's greatest need. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Good parents prepare the path for the child. Instead of buying into those three myths, what if we took a different approach to parenting? Kind of what we started with. We want to prepare our child to be able to leave the house. Even more than that, like Proverbs 2319 says, we want our child to have wisdom, to know how to walk with Jesus in every circumstance. Because we don't know what circumstances are going to come into their lives. We can't possibly prepare them for everything, but we can focus on helping them become the right kind of person who trust God in difficulties, who obeys God when it's tempting not to. And those are going to be the things that are going to help them live their best lives with Jesus.

I know it seems like a long time before your child is 18 and ready to leave the house, but it's closer than you think. If your child's 10 years old, They've had eight more years. That's 416 weeks. Weeks go by so fast. Your time to prepare your child to be a well-functioning adult to live on his or her own is running out. Don't spend another week trying to protect them. Don't spend another week trying to remove all the obstacles in their life. Don't spend another week trying to make sure that they never experience failure.

under your supervision, with your love and your coaching and your support, allow them to deal with the hard things in life, allow them to explore, allow them to take risks, allow them to fail so that you can help them, come alongside them, and help them navigate life as it's really going to be. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily.

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