Theology in the Raw - The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: Marissa Burt & Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

The Myth of Good Christian Parenting is available to pre-order now on Amazon, reserve your copy today! Join the Theology in the Raw community on Patreon to watch our "Extra Innings" conversation on whether parents should spank their kids. Marissa Franks Burt (MA in Theological Studies, Columbia International University) is a novelist, editor, teacher, and cohost of the At Home with the Lectionary and In the Church Library podcasts. She lives in a small town in Washington's Snoqualmie Valley with her husband, six children, and heaps of books. Kelsey Kramer McGinnis (PhD, University of Iowa) is a musicologist, educator, and correspondent for Christianity Today, writing on worship practices and Christian subculture. She is an adjunct professor at Grand View University in Des Moines and previously worked at the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights. Marissa & Kelsey cohost the podcast In The Church Library where they discuss print resources. And they coauthored the book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families, which is the topic of our conversation. Link to pre-order bonuses. Link to download of the introduction and first chapter. Order from Baker for guaranteed release day deliverySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There is this problematic, everything a child does can be put into this bucket of sin or not sin. That dichotomy for everything that a parent might find difficult or annoying in the moment sets parents up for a lot of difficulty in relationships with children. It can appear to work. What it does, though, is it does train families up, but in a way that down the road, as we surveyed and interviewed people, is really heartbreaking fruit. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Aldera. My guest today are Marissa Burt and Kelsey McGuinness. Marissa has an MTH from Columbia International University. She is a novelist, editor of pastor's wife and mother of six. She co-hosts the At Home with the Lectionary podcast. And Kelsey is a musicologist, educator and correspondent for Christianity today writing on worship practices and Christian the Christian subculture. She's also an adjunct professor. at Grandview University in Des Moines, Iowa, and previously worked at the University of Iowa Center for

Human Rights. They just, Marissa and Kelsey just co-wrote this book, The Myth of Good Christian Parenting, How False Promises, Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families. Oh, my goodness, this is a, hmm, let's see, provocative book. It's all those books, like, you kind of can't put down, and I would highly, highly recommend reading it. That's the topic of our conversation. and looking at what they call the Christian parenting empire, beginning in the 70s, continuing on through today. So this was a very informative podcast conversation. Oh, my goodness, if you're a parent of, especially younger kids or a future parent of younger kids, I think you're going to learn a lot. And if you're a parent of older kids and you often wonder, did I parent my kids?

Well, you might learn a few things. I know I did. So, yeah, this is a great book. We also had an extra innings conversation about spanking, corporeal punishment. So if you want to get access to that extra innings conversation, you have to go to patreon.com forward slash theology and the raw. So please welcome to the show for the first time,

the one and only, Marissa and Kelsey. Kelsey and Marissa, thank you so much for being guests on Theology and Rob. Very, very excited about your book. I'm going to hold it up one more. time, the myth of good Christian parenting. As I told you offline, when this came across my desk, I get many books to come across my desk. And it takes a lot to kind of grab my attention. You know, I'm like, oh, here's another one. Here's another. This one's like, oh, wow, I need to check this one out. So you got me hooked. Good job on the title and book cover. Why did you want to

write this book? Every book has a backstory. What led you to want to write this book? Marissa, I'll let you go first. Okay, sure. Thanks so much for having us. We're thrilled to join you. Yeah, so this book, I think, is a long overdue conversation. And it kind of came about from different angles for both of us. We connected online. But before that, you know, I had been working on a novel set in the stay-at-home daughter movement in the dominionist corner of Christianity. So I'd been doing a lot of research there. This combined with pastoral, ministry. My husband's a priest, and we've been in parish ministry for about two decades. So had seen and heard a lot of people's stories in the pews, particular people coming out of evangelicalism. And those things together in a moment of church two conversations where survivors were coming forward and saying, this is what I've experienced in the church family. This is the pain and suffering I've experienced there and seeing the church's kind of fragility.

an inability to respond to the people expressing injury. All those three things combined to make me begin to think about how distorted theology has practical impact in the family life and in its scales and in the church family. And so within that, I kind of had questions about some of this parenting, family life teaching that you really don't revisit after you read it in the early years of parenting or the intense years of parenting. And so one day on Twitter, a friend of mine asked, you know, if you had all the time in the world, what's one book you could write? And so I threw out a tweet with this general idea of this book, like examining Christian parenting teaching, looking at the underlying theology, considering how that formed people. And the response was immediate.

It was very much like, I would read that, please write that. Yes, we need that. And as I dug a little more, I thought, no one has started this conversation in book. form yet you know there are people talking about it but um so that was that was the beginning of an idea and then i heard from kelsey did you got one of guys friends before or no no oh no way okay so kelsey this is like one of the few uh stories of like good things happening on the internet yeah happy twitter talking to each other we don't know each other um no we we i saw maris's tweet i don't what are we calling them now that's sex i don't know i still call it a tweet it's twitter i yeah i don't know but i

I saw that. And so years prior, so my oldest is now eight years old. But when she was around one, my husband and I started reading parenting books for the first time. Because when you have a toddler who starts to talk to you, you're, oh, I want to figure out how to connect with this person and what to do with this person's opinions and ideas and all of that. And so I revisited some of the books that my parents had used. You know, I have a great relationship with my parents. I'm still in church communities. I thought, okay, that's where I'm going to go look. And I picked up Shepherding a Child's Heart by Ted Tripp, which is still a very popular book, very much in circulation. Churches still use it for parenting workshops.

And I was just troubled because I found myself not sure what to do with this language about sin nature compared to language I was hearing from other places about things like developmentally appropriate behavior and children not being able to self-regulate. And I did not know how to reconcile. this information with what I was getting from the Christian parenting books. They just seemed to live into entirely different worlds with nobody in between. And so I found myself feeling really stuck. And my husband and I are both academics. So we started taking these parenting books like shepherding a child's heart and writing notes in the margins and even like outlining like should we do a podcast. I feel like just all this trying to process this information. What do we do with this? And then we just kind of let that go. I felt like I was not the person to write

something about that. I'm a historian, a music historian at that. I'm not a theologian. And then, you know, years later, I'm writing for Christianity today covering Christian media a bit more broadly and starting to look into Christian subculture as an area of inquiry myself. And that's when I came across Marissa and thought, hey, let's revisit this idea. Because I feel like I have some better footing, some better things to say about it. And I feel like I could say the things maybe I want to say with the help of someone with more theological training. And so we both brought our own expertise and experience to this book. I have a PhD in music history and write about worship practices in the church broadly. So I have that kind of historical cultural history training and she brings

the theological piece. We can, gosh, okay, that's a whole other conversation I want to have. But you dangled a shiny object in front of me. I'm not going to chase it. I promise I'm going to try not to chase. You met, okay, so you mentioned Shepernary Child's Heart. Okay, so I talked, I mentioned a murista. I'm not sure if you were on yet, but like I've grew up in the, what you guys call the Christian parenting empire, that environment, the Ezo's, Dobson, that whole world.

So your standard, like everything you're talking about here, I'm like, that's the world I grew up in. I just, I read like half of a parenting book, okay? But it was shepherding in a child's heart. Now, I would love your feedback on this because having breathed the air of, um, even like the Pearlmans, I don't know if you guys deal, the Pearlmans, the Pearls, the Pearls, the Pearls, okay. Yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, yeah. Pearls, first time obedience. That very just like, authoritarian style parenting. Like that was the air as breathing. This is like early 2000. And I was like, and I was, I was, I was not, I didn't drink that punch, but I was sipping on it. You know, it's kind of like, yeah, yeah, but I was like, oh, something's don't feel right.

It just doesn't feel. And then I read Shepernard and Child's heart. And coming from that context, I found it, and granted, this is 20 years ago. I was like, this feels so much better. I was like, oh, yeah, like get to the heart. Don't just demand obedience, whatever. And again, I can't even, if you ask me to summarize a book, I wouldn't be able to to. So what, like, am I, what, what are the problems with maybe that approach? Because in my

context, it felt like a refreshing corrective. But again, I don't remember all the ins and out. It's like, yeah. I think that's a really common experience that we came across. Because in general, you can think parenting trends in general, not just in Christian resources, kind of a reactionary. And so I do think someone like Ted Tripp, was maybe writing in reaction to the behaviorist strands. So he's saying, well, maybe there could be something deeper. And I do think that's the general impression a lot of people. I know I did.

I hadn't read that book before we were researching for our book. And I had an idea, oh, this must be gentler. This must be softer because it's shepherding imagery. It's talking about the heart. And I think if you can place yourself in the mind of a parent of young children, like Kelsey was saying, when you're like, oh, I'm in the thick of it, what do I do? Usually parents are coming to these resources in a moment of vulnerability, right?

And so when they encounter a resource then, when the author or expert, the conference speaker, whomever comes in with a pastoral tone indirectly or sometimes directly making claims to spiritual authority, this can be a really compelling message that readers aren't necessarily equipped to critically examine. And so shepherding a child's heart was an interesting one for me to read, because after I closed to the final pages, I thought, where were the pastors and those who did have exegetical and hermeneutical training? Because this book is all over the place with some of the claims it's making, the quote-unquote biblical claims it's making. But I could see how it would be compelling to read as a layperson picking it up because there's a lot of proof-texted Bible verses

There's understandable references to scriptural principles. But it's an interesting mixture of someone presenting kind of their opinions, their personal opinions, as we saw again and again in these resources, as though they were timeless biblical truth. And with Ted Tripp's book, you have really, I think of it as a flavor of scrupulosity. His zeal and devotion really comes through in the page, his sincerity, and yet he's heavily influenced by the New Thetic Biblical Counseling Movement, such that everything about a child and a child's behavior is defined in terms of sin language. And so the concept of trying to get at a child's heart, you know, you read some of his scripts and they're very reflective of maybe what you would see in a gentle parent. or connected parenting script of like, listen to your child, talk to your child, and that was refreshing. But when you dig a little deeper, the end goal there isn't to understand your child. It's to diagnose their sin and to kind of operate as an agent of God or in the role of God in a

child's life. So that almost becomes a more insidious, maybe is too strong of a word, but a more problematic element because it feels right, but people aren't very equipped, I think, to under-examine the messaging there. And it ends up replicating some of the same ideas, but they've just been baptized in spiritual language. What would you add to that, Kelsey? What would? Yeah.

I mean, I think it's very common for people to pick up shepherding a child's heart and feel like it's gentler, softer, more compassionate. compared to like the way James Dobson might write about strong-willed children, for example, like James Dobson uses a lot more humor, a lot more like he'll kind of flippantly say things like the child was asking for a spanking. He'll say things. Ted Tripp doesn't really say things like that. He comes at it from this much more earnest point of view and perspective, but really there is this problematic. Everything a child does can be put into this bucket of sin or not sin or even it's idolatry or it's godward behavior and that that dichotomy

for everything that a parent might find difficult or annoying in the moment I think sets parents up for really a lot of difficulty in relationships with children because I don't I don't think about my relationship with my husband that way like every everything he does is either in the idolatry or godward behavior that's insane like for me to be trying to evaluate him that way. But I think parents kind of are told that they are supposed to do that as if they're kind of like programming their children all the time. And it's a very disconnected and non-relational way to think about children. But like Marissa said, sort of couched in this gentler spiritual language that if you are coming away from the pearls, feels refreshing. It feels gentler,

but is in some ways equally scrupulous. if I can summarize, like, the good thing about shepherding your child's heart is maybe less of an emphasis on just behavioral modification and trying to get to, well, the heart. Like, like, what's the underlying thing that's going on, maybe more of an emphasis on relationship building? Maybe the problem could be that kind of classifying behavior in this kind of binary of sin, not sin, rather than understanding. maybe the more over the complexity of childhood development and different actions are not

necessarily sinful actions. It could be a result of maybe some mental health stuff going on could be a result of, well, I'm going to stop because you guys are the expert. I would love maybe, how about this? I want to table that, because I want to come back to that. Let's go back to the beginning of the book because you have several chapters on kind of exploring and explaining the Christian parenting empire like you call it. Can you give us just a broad brush overview of that?

Because that really sets a context with the book. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it might be helpful for people to know the book kind of treats 1970 as like the starting point for what we are looking at because that's the year James Dobson publishes Dare to Discipline, which is his first book. And that, at least from our perspective, ushers in a new era of Christian parenting resources.

There had been parenting books. You can find by people like Clyde Naramore, another Christian psychologist who worked in the 50s and 60s and also had a radio show. But James Dobson ushered in a new era, a new kind of Christian parenting resource. He met a moment of cultural panic with a book that parents really wanted to read and with a message that seemed to speak to this moment of cultural panic and political turmoil. And his answer to it was, look at all this crazy. around you, you know, look at these protests, look at the outgrowth of feminism, look at all these things. The kids these days have not been taught to respect authority. The kids these days need more discipline. Parents, you can help write the ship here. It's a really attractive

message for parents. It's one that still gets handed to parents all the time in moments of cultural panic. And it's an attractive one because, I mean, for many reasons, it's easy to sell things to parents because parents are terrified, especially parents of young kids. And it's an attractive message because it acknowledges the fears of adults by telling them, you can fix this by changing someone else's behavior, right? Which I think is appealing because it's easier, I think, to sell this message. Like, you can kind of pawn this off on your kids. This is about changing adult behavior. This is about changing child behavior. So his message resonates in this moment in 1970, and Dare to Discipline becomes this runaway bestseller that launches his

career. And as we know, he goes on to found focus on the family. And he sort of proves that there is an appetite for more Christian parenting books with a bit more of an alarmist and conservative orientation. If you go and look at books written in the 60s about Christian parenting, a lot of them are just kind of boring. Like there are sort of Christian family life books. And yeah, they're just a little bit more like, here's maybe something you should consider. Maybe a little bit in the tone of like a Dr. Spock, like trust yourself. You know more than you think you do. James Dobson is no, you don't know more than you think you do. Look at the parents have destroyed this. We have to write the ship of American culture. And he helped prove that there was an appetite for that. So in the

70s, you start to see the proliferation of more and more Christian parenting books. Larry Christensen's book, The Christian Family, comes out the same year. James Dobson continues publishing more and more books like the strong-willed child, founds focus on the family, and you start seeing more and more individuals writing books, making video series, showing up on Focus on the Family's broadcasts. There's this whole now thriving ecosystem of writers, pastors, speakers, teachers, using mass media to speak to parents and answer some of their fears and provide lots of different kinds of advice based on lots of different kinds of ideas and experiences with very little accountability. From an entrepreneurial perspective, James Dobson

was brilliant, right? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And he, He tried out different messages. He was kind of on the speaking circuit in grad school in the late 60s and kind of realized to the people, when he talked about discipline, people kind of sat up and were like, tell us more. And he absolutely capitalized on that. And it was, I was just say he, his uniqueness was he took parenting and integrated it with like a culture warrior, fear-based, more broader, like societal concerns, it seems like. Absolutely. Which, going into the 80s, I mean, he. was one of the main figureheads of the moral majority.

I mean, just on the Christian political scene. I mean, he was like extremely high up there with Jerry Falwell and others. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, no, I was just going to say, yeah, it proved very marketable. And you see a lot of people, he kind of paved the way replicating that pattern where family life teaching becomes a draw for a global ministry. And people at the Ezos did this. Doug Wilson has done this to some extent. others do this. Now Christian influencers do this. They kind of build a brand around family life

teaching, marriage, and parenting teaching. And around the 70s, early 70s and the 80s, you also have a couple other ingredients that contribute to the self-help nature of this. You have the Newthetic movement, like I mentioned with Jay Adams, the biblical counseling movement, this idea that the Bible is the instruction manual for life. So there's going to be an explicitly Christian, way to order your life. So many resources to that end. You have the rise of complementarianism that also is pushing back against cultural changes and is saying there is a godly order in the home. And we need to get back to that godly order in the home. So you have that movement and you also have the prosperity gospel movement, the health and wealth movement that's showing up on Christian

satellite TV and through these other outlets that primes people to think. think if there's a promise that I can find, if there's a guaranteed way to do something, I can have a desirable outcome, a successful outcome. So these things are kind of all in the water and they creep into these resources, I think, in unexamined ways, which sometimes you can spot them at the distance of a couple of decades, but in many ways they're so prolific in even white American evangelical subcultural in particular that we're all kind of swimming in that water for decades that sometimes you're not even able to spot. It just feels it sounds so normal to a reader. Oh yeah, creation order. Let's go back to the garden. Family order. Authority in the home.

All of these talking points are kind of overlapping and reinforcing each other. So the older I get, the more I'm trying to pay attention to the way I live, eat, and take care of my body. And since I'm on the go a lot, I'm constantly looking for protein bars and snacks that will satisfy me and help me live intentionally. This is why I was so excited when I came across mosh bars. Mosh was created with a simple mission to create a conversation about brain health through food, education, and research. So Moss joined forces with the world's top scientists and functional nutritionists to go beyond your average protein bar. Each mosh bar is made with ingredients that actually support brain health like Oshuaganda, Lionsmane, collagen, and omega-3s.

Plus, Mosh donates a portion of all proceeds from your order to fund gender-based brain health research through the women's Alzheimer's movement. Head over to moshlife.com forward slash theology to save 20% off plus free shipping on the bestsellers trial pack or the new plant-based trial pack. Okay, so that's 20% off plus free shipping on either the bestsellers trial pack or the plant-based trial pack at mosh.com forward slash theology. Thank you, Mosh, for sponsoring this episode. Everything you're saying, it sounds like, some of it sounds like, well, that sounds not bad going to the Bible to, you know, for your, how to live your life and everything and ordering the family and like, I wouldn't want to like a chaotic family that's just, you know, just kids running around yelling and screaming and there's no kind of like concern for good behavior.

at the same time, I don't want just behavior modification. So can you help us, like what's the, I don't like to term balance. I don't know, people use that all the time. But like, what are the pros and cons there? Like, how do we, yeah, how do we sort out kind of bad forms of what you're talking about, but also maybe preserve some of the good things and all of that? Yeah. Or is that the million dollar question?

Well, so I think in these resources, those, talking points that Marissa just listed, you know, there's order, order in the family. Yeah. It takes something that seems on the surface benign and even good and then offers methods to get there that are not particularly biblical in some cases are abusive or just sort of ideas that are based solely on someone's experience. and sold as biblical and timeless. Like, you know, James Dobson's idea of what order ought to look like, his message is about order. I think rhyme a little bit more with like Nixon's Law and order message than with any like biblical sense of order that we are told to pursue in our relationships and families. And then what you end up with is resources that place order and parental authority is, first principles and instruct parents to use corporal punishment to get there.

One of the few things that we kind of come out and say in our book in terms of advice is that spanking your children is not a biblical mandate, but most of these resources absolutely argue that it is. And so, you know, what you're saying is, of course, no one wants a chaotic household where no one listens to each other and there is, you know, just complete nonsense all the time. No one wants that. But what these resources say is God commands that you keep order in your home, parents, and your authority is the first principle here.

And God commands you to keep order in your home through these methods. And let me tell you what they are. And let me lay out the way that you're supposed to implement them. And Marissa can probably say more about that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's such a pressure cooker for everyone because the expectation has been presented that these are timeless truths. The authors will often preface their books by saying, look, this isn't my opinion. This is just the plain sense of scripture. Which makes every Bible scholar go, oh. Right, right? Yeah, exactly.

And so, but they lay that out there, which really positions them to speak as a mouthpiece for God, which raises the stakes of everything to eternal stakes, particularly given some of the theological frameworks that accompany this, right? Like, for devout parents, this isn't just, you know, will my day run smoothly? This is like, will my child be eternally saved? You know, if I don't get first time obedience right in my home, will they know? how to obey God. And the two levers that are constantly pulled are the fear lever, often visceral descriptions of like how your child may end up in a number of horrible circumstances if you get this wrong, or appealing to longings and saying, look, if you get this right, you get a generational legacy. You can ensure that your child will walk with the Lord. You can kind of be satisfied that because you, you know, train them up in the way they should go. When they're old, they will not depart from it. And that can be really reassuring to parents in the moment. And particularly when children are young and this ingredient of corporal punishment can secure compliance, often instant,

unquestioning, cheerful compliance, it can appear to work. What it does, though, is it does train families up. But in a way that down the road, as we surveyed and interviewed people, has really heartbreaking fruit. Because parents who have become accustomed and been told to act as agents of God to speak with the authority of God, to expect compliance in this kind of sin is a catch-all term for any behavior a parent doesn't like is thrown into this bucket of sinful behavior, going back to Ted Tripp's book, then when their child does try and differentiate to individuate to kind of in the natural stage of young adult development, reclaim their independence and make their own choices, parents are uniquely ill-equipped for that.

There's no off-ramp to this. And weird again and again from people who were experiencing painful, in authentic connection, degrees of estrangement, because from an adult. child's perspective, they felt my parent can't see me or listen to me. They don't have that capacity and I don't know how to move forward. And from a parent's perspective, we heard from parents sometimes who reflected back with grief and regret and anger and other times were just very confused. Like why did this not work out the way it seemed to be going? Like why is my child now my adult child in their 30s and doesn't want to speak to me?

And so it really touches on tender points in people's stories because it's the kind of age-old question that we do see reflected in church family systems, too, that intent doesn't necessarily mitigate the impact. Parents could have intended to do the best they could with what they had. But if they were operating by some of these principles, certainly if they were all in on some of these frameworks, as we examined the resources, they were set up to injure harm and sometimes abuse their children if they're following this advice. And the people who maybe most need to reckon with that in an honest way are the least equipped because the resources didn't just present harmful advice. They left families bereft of the tools that could help them connect. Things like understanding child development, things like how to listen. and how to tolerate different viewpoints, those are all absent from these resources,

which is why we reach for the language of betrayal, because it really did betray entire families. I mean, it sounds like from some of the theological, evangelical circles that a lot of this literature was flourishing in, those circles were very opposed to, like, the charismatic prosperity gospel, but it sounds like they baptized a lot of those principles into their methods. is if you do this, this will be the outcome. Whether they said it that explicitly, maybe they did say it that explicitly, but it seems to be kind of implied.

Like if you want good godly children to turn out, here is what you need to do. And why? Because it's biblical. Your section on the problem with the term biblical is, I think, in my experience, might be one of the best critiques I've ever seen. The word is page 27.

28. I just want to read some quotes for my audience. For many evangelicals, biblical is more than a label. It's an ideology. It signals a commitment, key phrase here, to a particular way of interpreting scripture as an integral part of a truly Christian worldview. You skip down. Being biblical is a commitment to a particular approach to the Bible. The next page on 28. In the Christian parenting book and content market, the word biblical has become a stand-in for a constellation of ideas and political commitments. Can I get an amen from the baptist in the back? Oh, my word. One more phrase. The word biblical signals belief in a particular, again, a particular

approach to scripture and a particular posture of countercultural vigilance to practice, quote, biblical parenting is to be the right kind of parent and the right kind of Christian. So incredibly. I've steered, I mean, I am a Bible guy. I believe in authority of scripture. Everything I do is like trying to figure out what does the Bible say, what does it mean? So I am in a sense trying to be biblical. And yet I have almost, I don't ever use that phrase, but I'm so hesitant to slap anything I say is biblical for this very reason. It assumes a particular approach scripture. It integrates all kinds of political ideological commitments into your approach of scripture. And I think it just, I think it cheapens the complexity of scripture and the

interpretive process and how much human like stuff and context and ethnicity and gender goes into how we even read scripture. So I just, anyway, that alone is brilliant. I, can we go back to the behavioral piece. I love, and here's where I'm a biblical scholar, not a psychologist, not a developmental expert, whatever, but like you've kind of touched on the

difference between childhood behavior, that it can't just be lumped in these buckets of sin and not sin. Can you unpack that? Like, help us understand the behaviors of child development and how we should sort

of approach that. Yeah. For me, this was one of the things that started me down this research rabbit trail was because I encountered someone whose work I've come to really enjoy who talks about developmentally appropriate behavior. And this was the first time as a new parent of a one-year-old that I'd ever heard this term. But to me, it was like a balm for my soul because it was the first time it had really been introduced to me that like my one-year-old could be having hard time with something. And it's not because she is sinful, selfish manipulating me, but just because she doesn't have the tools to do what I'm trying to help her do. And that is just a part of being a child. And that way of seeing child behavior is, for the most part, very absent from the most popular Christian parenting resources. It's like, it doesn't matter why your child is melting down. They're melting down and that's an affront to your authority. You've told them to do something. You're trying to get them to do something. Anything less than immediate obedience is

rebellion and open defiance. And if you let the seat of rebellion grow in your child, it will lead them astray. Chuck Swindall in his book, The Strong Family, which is when we looked at, talks about how rebellion is like the thing that will, it's like the most common trait of juvenile delinquents. You know, he like it just catastrophizes right like you're you're melting down toddler if that rebellion that's causing that meltdown isn't kept in check they will be the gang member on the street of some inner city in you know 18 years it's it's so catastrophic and so alarming to read that kind of thing and if that's all you're given as a parent as a way of seeing what your child is doing i mean how exhausting you know and just how unfair to a child who isn't

able to process in a moment or is just completely emotionally dysregulated. You know, what we've learned about brain development and children and emotional regulation over the past 30 years, I think offers us so much more opportunity to be gracious with children and gracious with ourselves, you know, but we saw that these resources really discouraged parents from thinking that way about what their children are doing. to really like even it doesn't matter if your child is sick right like it doesn't matter they they can't they and even in some cases talking about disability like even even children who are disabled must be controlled and pushed into obedience because the most important thing is for them to be

obedient and yeah yeah it's it's paired too with the ideas about sin and a perspective on god that says well he doesn't tolerate that like right like we need to obey all the time because that's what God expects. So it's wrapped up with an idea of God who is swift to punish, who is right there ready to kind of identify the sin in our lives. And the way it manifests, for instance, going back to Tripp's book, right, he has like two pages where he talks about child development, which is basically his observations as a father. I mean, it's not recognizable child development in any way, but he's more sort of saying, here's zero to five is a stage.

You know, he kind of spends a couple pages. But then the book is filled with anecdotes of him diagnosing the heart of children. For instance, he calls at one point a six-year-olds having trouble sitting in circle time a sex addict whose heart is enslaved to sin, right? He calls a little girl who's, you know, taking control of recess games. You know, they pray with her as a girl who needs to learn to hide. humble herself and serve others. So there's this, the practical outworking of this is, is parents or other adults are primed to interpret children's behavior through adult sin motivation lenses. And in Trips corner of like biblical counseling world, that's often going to be

very prescriptively defined in different resources. And a lot of the parenting books are kind of downstream from biblical counseling materials. Ginger Hubbard's don't make me count to three is another really popular one that's basically based on Ted Tripp's book. So parents may not be aware that they're being kind of catechized into that framework, but they walk away kind of with charts and definitions that have them saying, oh, my child is whining. That's an opposition to this biblical principle. That's a sin. I need to deal with the sin. And it becomes this very exhausting, scrupulous sin hunt, even though the parent is feeling like I am discipling my child. Like this is somehow teaching them the ways of God.

And where I think it becomes revealing is when you look at these resources in the biblical language, the references that are made always positioned the parent alongside God. Right? The parent is speaking authority. The parent is not part of the gathered community of the people. of God, who are in need of God's correction, right? When that is brought up, look, this is how God disciplines his children, for instance. The parent is in the role of the disciplinarian, not in the people of God in a mutual relationship with their children as also part of the people of God.

Right. So this hierarchy plays into it, and it unfortunately ends up to humanizing children. I don't think any of the authors intended to do that. I doubt they did. It's hard to know how to judge their intents and motives. But that's one of the downstream effects. And when you combine that with corporal punishment, often written out in very specific ways of like here are the seven steps you need to do to spank your child the correct way. Or here's the liturgy. We call it liturized spanking in our.

our book. Here's the liturgy you need to follow. That's going to turn this practice from behavioral hitting into godly spanking. Like when you combine that with all the other kind of eternal stakes and the sin management and the parent needing to preserve the authority, it is a recipe for abuse. Not that that is where it landed for every family. I think in every family, how this played out is as unique as each individual family. But you throw that together with the naturally triggering reality of intense seasons of parenting. And this is a really, really dangerous and irresponsible framework to be giving to parents as well. I want to return later to this bank. I want to actually spend some time really dig into that because I have lots of

questions about that. The Exiles in Babylon Conference is back April 30th to May 2nd, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Oh, my word. This is going to be an incredible conference. Listen to some of the topics and speakers. We got Shane Claiborne and Dr. Paul Copan. They're going to engage in a dialogical debate about Christians in war. Doctors Sandy Richter and Peter Enz are also having a dialogical debate about the question, is the Bible historically reliable? We're also going to discuss the gospel and immigration with Matthew Sorin's and Liliana Reza from World Relief. We're also talking about the gospel and mental health. We're planning in addition to all this a pre-conference on AI and the church. So yeah, you know, we're going to

tackle all the easy topics. Street Hymbs is going to be there again. And Jason and Tanika Wyatt will lead us in worship. We're going to have breakout sessions after parties and of course a special gathering for the theology in the raw community. Check it out at theology in the raw.com. And we also have early bird registrations, okay, where you can get a discount on your ticket, okay? That's TheologyEnrod.com. I cannot wait for this conference, and I hope to see you there. Am I right to identify kind of two common underlying, I don't know, assumptions or foundations to a lot of what you're identifying is problematic?

Number one, it sounds like the nuthetic biblical count. counseling kind of approach is one. That was what I was raised in and groomed in. I took all the classes. I'll maybe come back to that. But the second one, it sounds like, theologically, are all of these approaches coming from more reformed, Calvinistic, total depravity kind of view of human nature?

Or is it more theologically diverse than that? And am I right to identify those two strands is a very common kind of assumptions that go to these parenting approaches. Yeah, in ways that are kind of surprising, I think. You know, Dobson came from a Nazarene family and was not like particularly in that reformed crowd, but this is sort of parenting resources are sort of a weirdly ecumenical space in which a kind of total depravity view of humanity is convenient because it allows

you to explain child behavior as sin. So even people who you might not expect to be totally committed to that as a theological framework end up appealing to it because it is a useful one that is a bit more certain than what you find when you go digging in sort of the historical view of sin nature and children. I mean, church father is wrestled with the question of accountability and sin nature. for centuries and came to a number of different conclusions about how we ought to view the way that children should be viewed in terms of their sin nature. Like at what point should we hold children accountable? Is it at age seven? Is it at age 14?

Do we just not get to know? That is historically that's sort of an open question. But when you get to the Ezos saying, if your baby is crying in the night, it's because they're trying to manipulate you. You should not get up and feed them in the middle of that. Yes. Yes. They're trying to manipulate sheep.

That's a brilliant two-year-old you got there, man. How can I get my opinion? But it is, so it's convenient. The belief in total depravity is very convenient there. So even if these aren't people who would really go to bat for that, theologically speaking, it ends up just kind of working its way in here. So you do have very reformed camp people like, you know, Ted Tripp would be one of those. But you also have others who.

who, you know, yeah, who kind of get there by convenience because it's the easier way to frame. And I'm not, just so my audience know that my honest would know. I mean, I'm not even saying that in a derogatory way. Like if you believe you're reformed, then you're going to, I would be kind of like a, I don't know, very leaky, lowercase are disgruntled reformed-ish. but it's more like it's more well it's like some of the theological claims I think seem

biblical to me others not so much so I don't I hate just that the cultural box of reform but like some I'm not discounting things like total depravity rightly defined and you know sin nature and all these things but but it seems a little

bit of a theological leap to say because of this theological claim therefore when my six year old is acting out it's either sin or not sin like i think that that is the the leap which i would so can you even with examples i would love to understand and this is a this is like a really genuine question because i like i want to know the answer um like what are the different ways in which a child can manifest maybe the same behavior but for very different reasons like you know a kid could be art you know the grocery store arch and you know three-year-old arched

her back screaming, you know, hitting their mom, whatever. And that could be a result of maybe there's neurodivergency going on. Maybe they haven't slept well. Maybe there's chemical imbalance. Maybe it is a four-year-old version of defiance. Maybe it's something like there's, is that the right way to assess it? That one behavior, there could be a complexity of reasons that are kind of leading to that behavior, one of which may be like, yeah, that's defiance.

And somehow we need to kind of address. in an appropriate way, but there could be a range of other things going on. Is that? Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think the kind of catch-all categories keep parents from getting curious about that and saying, how do I learn the child in front of me? How do I study this child to maybe discover what is going on? And I think it's interesting to me that for Christians who do hold to this idea that God designs human beings

and they develop from immaturity to maturity, it is curious to me that we are so quick to then say if a young child is immature in various ways, it's sin or a failure. Because I think another piece of this question, I think all those things you mentioned are good, is also that there are certain things that a young child isn't capable of, of sitting still for 20 minutes, or of being quiet, or just some of these things that are not in the way. their developmental capacity yet. And, you know, sometimes, a lot of times people ask us for recommendations. They're like, great, it's great, you're pulling these things apart.

What do you recommend? And we try and not do a lot of that because we don't want to position ourselves the way all of the, so many well-intentioned people do to make their own experience normative. But one thing that I think would really serve Christians well would be to get a basic child development textbook or something of this nature. We heard from a number of parents who it wasn't until they went through like trainings for foster care or adoption that they even ever heard about child development stages. They just, they had never heard that growing up in Christian spaces. And that's, that's such a loss.

That's a sad thing to think of so many people looking at, yeah, a child melting down and thinking defiance or sin when maybe a host of things could be going on. Or it could just be that, yeah, in a year, that child will be able to handle the stimulation of the grocery store. But at that age, they're not able to yet. You know, it could be something as simple as that. But these frameworks keep people thinking, who's sent here, this child or me, you know, like, who's done that? Right, exactly. Yeah, who's in that this is so hard? It's like one of the, I think that's such a question that parents are asking themselves.

Is it me sending isn't my child? And I think, like, in those moments, too, like in the grocery store, when a parent like wants to know like is this is this is this is this a sin problem or a development problem I think part of acknowledging that children are whole people and autonomous individuals is sometimes we don't get to know like I don't have access to my child's inner life and in fact I don't have access to my child's interactions with God like I have to believe that God meets my child that God is present to my child and I don't always have access And I don't always get to know.

And even if I did, how would that change what I do in response? I think that's maybe an uncomfortable question. Because I think sometimes with these resources, they want to help parents answer that question. It's sin so you can spank your child. Or it's sin so you can come down hard on your child. Or it's sin so you are justified in being really angry. It's like it provides a safe place for that parental frustration to land. and parents feel justified in saying this is so hard

and you feel more justified as a parent in feeling that way if your child is doing something that's clearly wrong as opposed to this is just hard because they can't do this thing that they would make it so much easier if they could do it. And how much do different personalities go into it? Like this is something my wife and I've been thinking about a lot. So we have four kids.

They're now 16, 18, 20, and 22. and yeah, we have an extremely tight relationship with Oliver. They're our best friends. Like, and we talk about everything. Sometimes it's like, this is getting a little too, you know. But looking back, like they were so different as kids. And our parenting methods were the same and not always good. We'll get to that later.

But like, for instance, like what, and I'm not going to out my kids or whatever. It's just in case they won't be talking about them on the air, so I'll leave the names out of it. But like one of my kids, I remember when they were really little, we would go hiking a lot, travel, you know, we just very, very active. We had one of those baby backpacks, which were just brilliant. Those are amazing, you know. And one of my kids, man, they could sit in there for maybe 15 minutes and they were done. In a car, they would, you know, if we didn't stop every 20 minutes, there was like meltdown.

You know, it was like, just this, you know, like a lot of activity going on and just a more. And then I think of another kid and they could sit in the backpack for hours, just chilling. Just chilling, you know, car, just kind of, you know, sometimes just staring out the window, you know. Other kids are maybe in between, like as long as they were doing something reading or watching a movie, they were fine. But it just, I mean, and our parenting was the same, but these were vastly different personalities, you know, which now, you know, which now, you know, if you do like an intigram, like ones was a four, one's a seven, one's a nine, you know, one's an eight, you know, and like if I, if I knew, if I knew the different personalities that they were, which I could already see when they're young, but now it's like, now they're fully developed, I'm like, oh, yeah, I could totally, like, I have a much more, better understanding of the personalities. I would have said my parenting would have like, it would have, it would have, it would have, that would have shaped how I parented each kid different. differently. So I'm just speaking out loud here. Is that is that valid to even consider different personalities? Is that kind of part of the whole behavioral development of kids and the diversity

of all that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this is one like really insidious thing that can happen sometimes is because like there's one child in a church who will sit through a service quietly, a community can say, see, it can be done. All these are their children. You know what I mean? The behavior of one kind of quiet, compliant child can sort of be weaponized against. We've seen that all the time. Like I think parents of multiple kids can, you know, I'm guilty of that. I have three kids with very different temperaments. The oldest was capable of doing some things earlier than the second one.

And it threw me for a loop with the second. And I think, you know, I think parents too, like parental temperament, the things that parents find triggering versus the things that parents are sort of able to just sort of let fly by, that plays into this as well, right? Because if you have parents being told you must demand that your children obey and respect you. Like James Dobson, this is like you must require obedience and respect of your children. For some parents that have maybe a more sort of self-serious mindset, that can set you up to just receive everything as an offense as opposed to other parents who are sort of willing to just like not take themselves as seriously. Some of that is temperament, right?

Like how this teaching lands with you in some cases depends on parental temperament. And so, yes, like the individual personalities and needs and how each individual is made in a family. I mean, some people would probably talk about things like birth order. I'm not an expert on any of that. But all of these things absolutely have. have real impacts. And it makes it very hard to think that there's a sort of one size fits all. And sometimes you'll even in these books, authors will talk about, well, one child needed more spankings. The other one didn't. And when I read that, I'm like, well, one child had a hard time

with something the other one didn't. And the one child having a hard time, had a hard time with something that you were very not okay with. You know, it's sort of, it reveals some things about about us and about our kids. That's interesting. Yeah, and we heard that in people's stories as well as they were reflecting back on their experiences. You know, sometimes siblings had really different experiences in the same family or certainly adults who late in life were diagnosed as neurodivergent would look back and it would help connect dots of why was I getting spankings all the time. For instance, they would say, you know, so they were able to connect dots because, yeah, there's no space for that. kind of difference. And I think it also speaks to the way some parents maybe were able to pick up

a resource, take one or two takeaways and set it aside. And others, you know, had these resources they were going back to again and again and consulting and following by the book. And that also shifted how how this played out for people as well. So there's a lot of complicated factors. But when you look at the resources themselves, they are very much giving the one size fits all kind of here's the way to go. Yeah. It sounds like, too, in the approaches that you guys are criticizing, and I think rightly so, they can produce some visible short-term results that seem positive. And this is going back to somebody you said earlier.

But are you guys seeing kind of the long-term disconnect between child and parent? Like, is that pretty pervasive? That seems to be the fruit. Yeah, that seems to be the fruit of this. And, I mean, it tracks when you look at what is included in the books and what is not included. It tracks with people's experiences. I mean, focus on the family now as a whole resource section on their website about helping families through estrangement, you know, which is an interesting, interesting observation to note. And, yeah, I think that should give us.

pause because it's not like these ideas aren't being recycled by current Christian influencers. They are. They are often, it's just repackaged for a new generation, even though you have a number of adults saying, oh, no, this is how this worked out, or older parents saying, I would do it so differently if I could. Like, I have so many regrets. And yet still, you have influencers saying, this is God's way. And often it will come with this. God's ways are higher.

So we need to take it on faith. We need one of, Ginger Hubbard says that spank on faith, she says in her book. Spank on faith? Yeah, the idea being like, you might not understand what it means. I think she says something like while you're working on their bottoms, God's working on their heart or something like that. The idea being, we don't really understand how this works, but God's way is to spank children. So, I mean, they wouldn't say it that bluntly. but that is what is coming through again and again.

God's way is to expect obedience and spank if you don't get it. And when you break it down, that's the primary message a lot of families are getting. And so at that point, though, when you have this spank on faith idea, it kind of doesn't matter, right? If you have decades of research saying this is not particularly effective, it's harmful. It doesn't matter if you have adult children saying, I experienced trauma from that environment. It doesn't matter if you say, I have older parents saying, I would not do that. I missed out on so much as a parent because I did that because you have this idea, well, God's ways are higher.

So just if you do it right, trust that it will turn out okay, even if your intuition, the data, other people, all these markers are telling you, red flag, red flag, you override that because you want to obey God because it scales there as well. Okay. So you guys are itching to get into this spanking conversation I can tell. So why don't we go there? But I'm going to move this into the extra innings portion of this episode that will be for a limited group of people. If you want to access the extra innings, you have to go to patreon.com.org and get access to this extra innings portion. Are you looking for news with a faith-based perspective, then tune in to the pour-over today, the podcast that delivers the world's biggest news stories through a lens of faith every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On the pour over today, you'll hear the same news and headlines as of major outlets, but interpreted in the context of God's sovereignty. I absolutely love that.

You can stay grounded in the midst of chaos with faith forward engaging summaries that connect current events with eternal perspective. Just search the pour over, okay? Spelled P-O-U-R, like the coffee, on your favorite podcast platform or find the direct link in our show notes.