Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book About a (Really) Big Problem by Kevin Deyoung

Author:Kevin Deyoung [Deyoung, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Self Help, Christian Books & Bibles, Christian Living, Religion & Spirituality
ISBN: 9781433533389
Google: 8A9LmwEACAAJ
Amazon: B00D6IRTC0
Barnesnoble: B00D6IRTC0
Goodreads: 18122637
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2013-06-14T22:00:00+00:00

A Cruel Kindergarchy

Diagnosis #4: You Need to Stop Freaking Out about Your Kids

There is almost no way for parents to completely remove busyness from their lives. Children don’t afford that luxury. But with a little effort—and a lot of lightening up—most of us can be a little less busy and a lot less crazy.

We live in a strange new world. Kids are safer than ever before, but parental anxiety is skyrocketing. Children have more options and more opportunities, but parents have more worry and hassle. We have put unheard-of amounts of energy, time, and focus into our children. And yet, we assume their failures will almost certainly be our fault for not doing enough. We live in an age where the future happiness and success of our children trumps all other concerns. No labor is too demanding, no expense is too high, and no sacrifice is too great for our children. A little life hangs in the balance, and everything depends on us.

You might call this child-obsessed parenting an expression of sacrificial love and devotion. And it might be. But you could also call it Kindergarchy: rule by children. “Under Kindergarchy,” Joseph Epstein observes, “all arrangements are centered on children: their schooling, their lessons, their predilections, their care and feeding and general high maintenance—children are the name of the game.”1 Parents become little more than indentured servants attending to their children as if they were direct descendants of the Sun King. “Every child a dauphin” is how Epstein puts it.

Becoming a stern, exacting disciplinarian is not the antidote to Kindergarchy. Epstein is not pining for parents to be harsher, just less harangued. It’s worth remembering that not long ago the nuclear family was much less child-centered. Epstein, now in his sixties, recalls never being unhappy as a kid. And yet, his experience as a child would be considered almost criminal today:

My mother never read to me, and my father took me to no ballgames, though we did go to Golden Gloves fights a few times. When I began my modest athletic career, my parents never came to any of my games, and I should have been embarrassed had they done so. My parents never met any of my girlfriends in high school. No photographic or video record exists of my uneven progress through early life. My father never explained about the birds and the bees to me; his entire advice on sex, as I clearly remember, was, “You want to be careful.”2

Granted, Epstein is not a Christian and did not grow up as a Christian. I’m not holding up his childhood as a model for us all. Neither is he. His experience is not as important as the fact that his experience was not at all unusual. What’s important is the realization—one any of our parents could confirm—that today’s family is structured around the life of the child as never before. Man has not always lived under Kindergarchy.

The Myth of the Perfect Parent

Parenting has become more complicated than it needs to be.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.