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A Reflection on Parenting (Part 2)

Kyle and I have been having some rather extended conversations about parenting and the direction in which we wish to lead our children (novel concept right?). And we’ve been discussing the fact that we want to instill into our children a forward thinking perspective that looks towards long term goals and benefits. Now Kyle tends to focus mostly on legacy building, but I have been coming back to the need to raise our children in an environment that embraces responsibility at an early age.

In my last post, I talked about the current definition of childhood and how we have culturally glorified it to an untenable position. I would like to further look at this social construct in light of our responsibility as parents to train our children.

In our zeal to appeal to the modern world, we’ve let society dictate to us how we should respond our children’s youthful urges and behaviors. This dictation is undermining Christian principles because it in no way acknowledges a Sovereign God who has given us the duty to mold our children to seek after the paths of righteousness. On the contrary, society would rather have us be our child’s ‘best friend’ and ‘understand what they’re going through’ than to follow our calling to love, admonish and discipline our children. Society would rather we give unconditionally to our children’s desires without thought to their rightful needs.

The desire to give good gifts to our children is not a bad thing and neither is wanting to shield them from worries. But to let society dictate that the best way to do that is to allow them free reign to pursue their desires is decidedly unchristian and detrimental to their ultimate happiness.

Good Post

This was a very good read and I thought that this in particular nailed it on the head:

All my life, the message I had heard loud and clear was that sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten. This mind-set became the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being by default closed to the possibility of life, I thought of unplanned pregnancies as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street—something totally unpredictable and undeserved that happened to people living normal lives….

I came to see that our culture’s widespread use and acceptance of contraception meant that the “contraceptive mentality” toward sex was now the default attitude. As a society, we had come to take it for granted that we are entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we are opposed to the new life it might produce.

A Reflection on Parenting (Part 1)

I have found responses to this to be very frustrating. Ever since the Time article came out, there have been a lot of media sources jumping on it and railing about the horrors of teen pregnancy. Most of the topics that have cropped up in response to the initial article have been centered around access to birth control and better sex-ed. Both of which are missing the mark as usual. Continue reading “A Reflection on Parenting (Part 1)”

Gathering Ambrosia

Richard Hobson gives me permission to write this sort of thing:

A few weeks ago, my mother sent me a personality test. A real one – not one of those quizilla things. It turns out that I am an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: An introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging type (In this case, “judging” refers to the act of making a decision, or defining something, rather than the act of condeming). We are rare birds, quite literally – INFJs are approximately 1-2% of the human population. If you have 100 friends, and I am one of them, then you might have one other friend who has a similar personality to mine, and if you know who that other person is, I really wish you’d introduce them to me because it’s getting a little bit weird over here being the only one.

The Personality Page has a list of potential career options for INFJs, starting with clergy, then teaching. Next, if you skip over the medical options which are nulled by my aversion to cutting and poking people, there comes psychology, psychiatry, and counseling, which are options I had actually at one time considered. So it seems I have been unwittingly working my way down the list. Continue reading “Gathering Ambrosia”

Google Health

This afternoon I was reading an article about yet another expasion of the google universe: Google Health. According to the terms of service, google states that they are not under obligation to follow HIPPA regulations like other healthcare facilities since they are not considered a ‘covered entity.’ In plain English this means that whatever you share can be accessed by third parties because it’s up to you what info you put up. Currently, the service does not have advertising, but I see this as shaky at best as more and more people use the app. and companies want to target specific groups of illnesses. This bit from the terms of service is of particular note:

Google may make third-party services available through Google Health. In order to use a specific service, you may choose to allow the third-party service provider to retrieve, provide, and/or modify health and other information in your account or otherwise share your information with the service provider. Once you enable a specific third-party service provider to access your account, the service provider may continue to access your account until you affirmatively disable access. Third-party service providers include both health care providers and other entities. It is your sole responsibility to review and approve each such third-party service before sharing your information through or otherwise accessing it.

I’m going to sign up and see what it’s like, but I do caution everyone that if they do choose to use this service to be careful what you share.

Captain of the Changing Table

Some day in the future, I plan to be very intimately involved in the raising of my son. I shall teach him how to ride a bike and how to read. (No, I mean how to *read*.) I will discuss with him how to raise a family and what to look for in a wife, the importance of preparing to be a provider from an early age, the joys of duty and responsibility. But for now, the days of early infancy are primarily a mother’s realm. No matter how beautiful the baby, it takes a mother’s heart to truly cherish a child who only wants and never learns – who is a bundle only of needs.

To love and coo and long for this experience is beyond me, but Valerie does it, and every woman I meet seems to wish to aid her. As for me, I cannot feed him at the breast, and to see him in a perfect little outfit that is just *so* cute stirs no excitement in me. What joys I have in the duties of infant childhood parenting I perceive through the lens of my wife. She loves this time and in it feels that overwhelming mother-love for her son, and through her, I feel these things too. But in all honesty, there is little of the parenting at this age that is truly mine to do.

There is one capacity, however, that I can be fully vested in: the changing table. I am captain of the changing table. When David wakes in the middle of the night, I can’t feed him, so I don’t stay up all and lose hours of sleep every night. But in the middle of every feeding, there is a procedure that involves getting up from the bed. Valerie leans over and wakes me (which is fortunately easy – I have the felicity of being immune to baby cries, but very sensitive to my name); I get up, fetching her a glass of water, and take from her the baby. I carry him into the other room, make all the adjustments, and bring him back, ready for his second helping. This happens 2-3 times per night, at most 10 minutes lost of sleep. For me, nothing, but everything gained for my wife.

My captaincy ends around 6:30 in the morning, when I leave the house to go to work. At 3:00 (uh, 4:00? 4:30?), I come home and resume my stake. On the weekends, of course, my role never ceases. It is an exceedingly small burden for me since, with today’s technology, wet diapers are not so much wet as surprisingly heavy; breastfed babies also have the advantage that their waste is actually not all that unpleasant to smell (It’s about the equivalent of a strong cheese), and our son seems to be uh, blessed, with very infrequent bowel movements anyway.

Of course I also am still at home in my own house and know how to cook and clean, and a greater responsibility in these areas has fallen on me. Occasionally I am also viceroy of the bathtub and lieutenant of tummy time, but from my perspective, my contribution is almost nothing. Yet my wife says what I do is such a great relief to her that I continually earn her gratitude. This is a good thing, because in my mind every service I perform for our son is first and foremost a gift to her, and every complaint a cry of concern for her wellbeing.

On that whole “sleeping in our bedroom thing”

Yeah. He didn’t.

Oh, he was in our room all right. He just didn’t sleep.

The current theory: When he was on the bili-blanket, he was in the living room all night *with the lights on*. All the lights stay off in our room at night. The dark is different, so he doesn’t sleep.

At any rate, tired and frustrated parents today.

No more tail!

David has officially been cleared of having to wear the biliblanket as of late this morning. We didn’t even have to get a heel stick at the pediatrician’s office like we thought we would. Now we’ll be able to have him in our room at night so I won’t have to wake up completely and go into a separate room to feed him. Yay!