(This is the third installment in a series I originally envisioned as two posts. Posts preceding this one include Part 1, Part 1.5, and Part 2.)
Thank you for your gracious patience while I spent some time thinking, praying, and reflecting through the weekend. God has provided me with some insights that, frankly, have caused me to squirm a bit. I am thankful that (for once) I took the time to sit in quiet with Him before I continued throwing up my thoughts on Mr. Ezzo and Babywise all over the place.
At the end of Part 2, I said I wanted to move forward with speaking on the culture of fear in Christian parenting and the non-scheduling family portrayed in the pages of Babywise. Let's pick up right there.
One of the most frequent commands in all of Scripture is the command to "fear not." Quite literally from Genesis to Revelation, we are told by our loving and sovereign God over and over again, "Fear not!" But we are not perfect, and we are prone to believing only what our eyes and our present circumstances tell us is true. I myself am a believer prone to fear, and I rather suspect I am not alone.
Within many Christian communities, the sickness of fear manifests itself in a specific way: fear of man. And to be even more specific than that, many of us suffer the infirmity of fearing another's assessment or appraisal of us. In my experience, nothing can make you feel more like you have just been measured by The Yardstick Of The Approval Of Others like parenting can.
The behavior of your children when they are interacting with others (no matter how formal or informal the environment may be) is often viewed as a direct reflection of the quality of parenting that child is receiving. This is, frankly, a rather false assessment tool because as we all know, on any given day, there could be a myriad of factors playing into the behavior others are seeing. And yet I think that for Christians who are interacting with one another in a community, there is great pressure to have perfectly behaved children - all the time.
Come with me for a moment to the book of Proverbs. This book is filled with all manner of practical advice to give "prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the young" (chapter 1, verse 4, NIV); essentially, it's a handbook for life of sorts, with the ultimate purpose being that of a happy life lived in the pursuit and practice of wisdom.
Proverbs provides many insights into parenting, and how to nurture your child towards the pursuit of wisdom. One such proverb that gets a lot of play in some Christian parenting materials is found in Chapter 22, verse 15, and it states:
Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.
(Folly = foolishness)
(I am not - I will say it again - AM NOT going anywhere near an interpretation of the latter part of that verse. If we try to talk about Ezzo and Babywise AND corporal punishment all in the same week here? I know for a fact that both my brain and this blog will implode.)
There are several ways to look at the first part of that verse. In Eugene Peterson's paraphrase The Message, he interprets the proverb like this:
Young people are prone to foolishness and fads; the cure comes through tough-minded discipline.
Notice how he went with the "young people" phrase here rather than "child"? There is some question amongst scholars and interpreters whether the word should be "child" or "youth." (Some interesting thoughts on the proverbs and "training a child" here.) Regardless, the message here is one that speaks of that theological concept of Original Sin. I love Matthew Henry's commentary on it:
Sin is foolishness, it is in the heart, there is an inward inclination to sin: children bring it into the world with them; and it cleaves close to the soul. We all need to be corrected by our heavenly Father.
See how he spins it around on you? Oh yes, your children are prone to sin. We all have an inward pull towards sin and we all need to be corrected by God our Father. I know it seems like I'm really spinning of course, so let's get back on track.
The latter part of this proverb says that correction is needed to drive sin from the child.
A child misbehaving (acting foolishly) = (perception) that parents aren't correcting child
and
A child misbehaving (acting foolishly) = judgment not from God (the only One equipped to judge) but from others in faith community
and
Judgment from others = not good feeling
then
not good feeling = fear of other's assessment of parenting choices
and then
fear of opinions of others = parenting from a place of fear of man rather than leadership from God through His Word and the movement of His Spirit within
Does this make any sense at all? Sometimes even I cannot follow my own thought patterns.
Basically, many Christian parents live in fear of being embarrassed by their children's behavior around other Christians because children who act up must have parents who don't discipline, right?
** ED. NOTE: If you have kind of zoned out (and who can blame you?) we will start talking about Babywise again NOW **
What on earth does this have to do with babies and Babywise?
Well, I've long felt that as someone who is intimately familiar with the culture and climate of Christian parenting, Gary Ezzo exploits the fears of many Christian parents by portraying families who don't follow Babywise as families where the children usurp the authority of the parents and bring shame on them with their selfish, demanding behaviors.
(Notice how I used the past tense "felt" there? It's going to get really interesting in the next section of this series.)
For those not familiar with the text of Babywise, Mr. Ezzo describes two families. The babies in these families are cousins born within one week of each other - Chelsea and Marissa. Chelsea's parents follow Babywise guidelines while Marissa's do not. Mr. Ezzo is careful to point out that "although these are fictional characters, the differences stated in their development are factual."
Chelsea comes into this world and experiences instant calm and emotional security by observing the strength and healthiness of her parent's marriage. Chelsea's mother loves her, but she realizes that if she sacrifices time meant to be spent with her husband by being on-call to meet Chelsea's needs as they arise (around the clock), she won't be able to meet Chelsea's internal need "to know that her dad and mom love each other."
And let's don't forget we are, presumably, talking about a newborn here.
Throughout the book, Chelsea and her parents are presented as the calm, orderly, peaceful, joyful family. Chelsea's parents are firmly in control. They insist on her compliance. No unnecessary sleep props for Chelsea - she is not manipulated into falling asleep. She is laid down to nap and if she must cry for a while before she falls asleep, then so be it. She sleeps through the night by no later than twelve weeks of age, can be easily comforted by anyone, and is essentially a joy to be around.
Oh, but poor, poor Marissa. You see, quickly after Marissa was born, she became the center of her parents' universe. She is fed on demand, gets picked up when she cries, she won't ever be cared for by a baby-sitter, her parents run themselves ragged meeting her many needs, and they are about to pay the ultimate sacrifice for all of this time and attention showered on Marissa: their marriage is in trouble.
The vivid contrasts go on and on and on throughout the book: Chelsea is calm, Marissa is fussy. Chelsea's days are predictable, Marissa's are erratic. Chelsea's mother is healthy and even has time to exercise! Marissa's mother is perpetually exhausted. Chelsea is being raised into emotional healthiness, Marissa is being raised with an "emotional disability." Chelsea will want to be considerate of others, Marissa will be selfish. Chelsea will grow up respecting her parents' authority. Marissa will call her parents by their first names because her parents want to be her friend.
Marissa's mother has been assured that you cannot spoil or hurt a new baby by picking her up too much. Mr. Ezzo is quick to correct that by saying, "Of course you can hurt a baby by picking him or her up too mich!" Marissa's mother has no discernment about why her baby is crying; she operates under a "block that cry" mentality. She offers her the breast at every whimper and "wears her in a sling all day so that she won't cry."
And then, in the one line from this text that I find to be the most outright shocking, Mr. Ezzo makes the statement that Marissa's mother doesn't take the time to assess why her baby is crying, but simply reacts "to her feelings when she hears her baby cry," and that "emotional mothering can set the stage for child abuse." Why? Because "a common characteristic found among abusive parents is a tendency to direct thoughtless, impassioned responses towards their innocent children." My blood runs cold reading that again.
(I honestly could point out many more examples of the way the other approaches to parenting are presented, but I gotta think at some point I'd be playing with copyright infringement.)
Coupled with Mr. Ezzo's very clear descriptions of what life looks like for attachment parenting families is the fact that the person who gave me this copy of Babywise is someone who has children who are, in every sense of the word, a delight to be around (happy, healthy, loving, helpful, considerate, generous, kind . . . I could go on) and the person who gave me my copy of Dr. Sears' The Baby Book has children who are, oh, how can I say this? not delightful to be around, and my pre-mama self was utterly terrified to consider any alternative to the Babywise concepts. Even though the person who gave me a copy of Babywise said very, very clearly, "take from this whatever works for you and don't worry about the rest," I just could not shake the fear of what my family would turn into if i strayed from the pages of this book.
Before Dacey was born, I grinned at the prospect of starting off my mothering journey in such a neat, tidy, orderly way. No sweat! After Dacey was born, for the first four or five months of her life, I sobbed at my inability to parent in a godly way and grew depressed over what the future held for my child, for myself, and for my marriage. In the meantime, my marriage was beginning to buckle a bit under the weight of fear and hopelessness I carried.
For the noble few who have dared stick with me through this post which is quite clearly not much more than free therapy for me - this is my chief concern about Babywise: It's not the idea of scheduling (although I cannot get on board with cry-it-out infant sleep training as part of that schedule), it's not the way orderliness and predictability are lauded and practically guaranteed, and it's not the sketchy breastfeeding advice/information. No, it's the inaccurate and incendiary portrayal of demand-feeding/attachment parenting and the fear this picture breeds that bothers me the most.
And thus ends the longest post ever in the history of SortaCrunchy.
Oh, I guess now I should mention that I am closing comments on this post - at least for now. I'll be away from the computer for much of the day, and I just don't think it is wise to allow a free-for-all in the comments section on a topic like this. If you want to share feedback with me, you can email me at sortacrunchy at gmail dot com, but I am not quite sure how timely or lengthy my responses will be. Just sayin.
Don't forget, there will be one more post in this series, and I'll be talking about some things that God has revealed to me in the past few days - things which have to do with grace, forgiveness, and proper perspective that comes from knowing the context.
