Six days ago: an ambulance ride with my 11 year-old to a trauma center near the South Carolina coliseum where he and 2,000 other youngsters have been wrestling. His neck braced, a board under his back, tears trickling from the corners of his eyes as he chuckles at the paramedic’s dad jokes. I am not …
The thing about babies is they don’t care about your big plans. This past year I’ve had occasion to laugh at myself many times, a man like me, middle-aged and rooted in habit, suddenly a father again of newborns. Yes, that’s plural. Twins. Boys, of course, because for the rest of my life it seems …
My oldest son’s English teacher had this great idea, corresponding with the class reading Hamlet, for we parents to pen whatever wisdom we’ve tried to impart to our children and give it to them, so they have the option of sharing some of it when the class goes over Polonius’s advice to his own son …
I guess before you read the rest of this you should decide how you feel about the fact that I didn’t vote for either of them. Nor did I vote for the Libertarian, or the lady who makes Bernie Sanders look like Milton Friedman and whose name I’ve already forgotten. I voted in every other …
I used to write much more about my children, but they’re growing despite my best efforts to conserve groceries, and they’re online in their various ways, and so it makes sense to let them tell their own stories, in their own time, in their own ways. I mean I know there are writers who tell …
Some of you may like my attempt, though it probably deserves more thought, to articulate why we pay little attention to big-money sports in my home. Here’s an excerpt: Now, let’s not quibble over semantics; I know the Canadians spent millions on a national curling center, that parents of gymnasts fork over thousands for training, …
“Which world do you want to live in?” My oldest son, just days from his 14th birthday, glares back at me. Behind him in the car sit his brothers. Their hands are pressed to their faces. One of them is crying. Caleb begins to explain why he smacked them. Eli was needling him about something. Isaac, …
Do you ever look on your children, and wish they had better than you? Back when we were shopping my embarrassingly confessional first book, my agent at the time told me I needed a ministry to accompany it. She said this as a realist, not an enthusiast. You need a platform to sell your wares. …
I come now to the question in my heart when I began: what can my sons say to a deceived and soul-sickened world? You might remember the story of a girl murdered that awful day in Columbine. As this story goes, one of the demoniac boys asked if she believed in God, and when she …
What is the cost of a calling? You can be called to be a parent; you can be called to be a plumber. But having a child, or picking up a pipe wrench, is not—in and of itself—to pursue a calling. The world is filled with parents and plumbers, after all, who don’t do their …
Many parents carry within our hearts—sometimes in a cramped and even despairing corner—a vision of what we hope our children will become. This vision lives deeper than our wish that they be doctors or NFL quarterbacks, deeper even than our desire for their happiness. Our heart-dwelling hope is that they will be good and true, that …
Every month, money flies from my checking account to the education savings accounts of my children, because I don’t want them to become hobos. This is one way I allay my fear the world will eat them up. It’s a mark of a good parent to worry over where—and whether—his child will go to college, …
Because I am a father I think about the parents of that boy torn to pieces, of his sister whose leg was taken. I think about those parents in Newtown, whose biggest Christmas purchases were coffins for their sons and daughters. I think on the parents of the killers, too, and sometimes I am afraid, …
Hey you, with the crying baby. I understand that this little person is, in deeply emotional, psychological, physiological, theological senses of the term, an extension of your person. Please recognize, however, that this is not literally the case. In other words, the fact that you are warmed by—if research on the average American is to …
The intellectual consensus seems to be that having children is miserable business. This consensus is built on shoddy thinking and shoddier statistics. The latest example is brought to us by Why Have Kids? author Jessica Valenti, who notes that in the wake of Nebraska’s “safe haven” law allowing parents and caregivers to abandon children without prosecution, …
Yesterday was Stephen Caleb’s birthday. He’s twelve, and there are now only 364 days between him and the onset of teenagerism, which I associate — at least among American kids — with sloth and self-indulgence, ignorance and idiocy and all-around brain malfunction, the latter now being scientifically proven at last. We are all of us …
My work with non-profits over the years has given me the opportunity to sit down with a number of philanthropists. I’m just now flying home from visiting Tucson, Arizona, where I met with several people who have led very different lives, but who share a characteristic that I wish were more true of me. Quite …
My first thought, upon hearing of Amy Chua’s now famous (or infamous) essay about the superiority of Chinese mothers, is that it’s irrelevant to me. The odds that I will go out and father a child with a Chinese woman are exactly zero. Further, even if Chua has brilliant mothering tips, there’s no way I’m going to …
On Tiger Mamas, bad art, and the heart of a child Read More »
When young men take up guns and set about killing to satisfy whatever dark insanity has possessed them, I think of my sons. I think about the world in which they walk, a world that is physically safer than most people have ever known, but which is singed by the devil all the same, and …
I’ve got all four boys to myself and I’m trying to plot a course halfway across America, a course that doesn’t entail careening off an icy highway to our deaths. They are, meanwhile, chasing one another about upstairs, with occasional crashes that sound to me, hunkered in front of a computer below, like they are …
The thing you run into, when you are in the business of saving the world from itself, is that there is no lever marked: “PULL HERE TO SAVE WORLD.” It fascinates me to see intelligent thinkers reason out top-down solutions to symptoms caused by a soul-sickness that will not be fixed with federal programs or …
This is why I write to you, boys with me, girl who is gone. I write to you because when I am with you, when I look into your soft brown eyes, I do not have the words. They come to me in pieces, in a thought or a dream, and always our time is …
I recently saw a news clip about a mother who ordered her son to kill his pet as punishment for bad grades (the son’s, not the gerbil’s). An investigator says the woman was raised by a good family. Maybe so. When it comes time to decide, however, where to place her three children (for she is surely …
Perhaps most disturbing about Robin West’s attack on homeschooling is that it’s published in a scholarly journal, even if it does come out of the University of Maryland. One might expect more thoughtfulness, even from a second-rate scholar. But instead we get breathless fear mongering like this: “In other words, in much of the country, if …
Joanna Moorhead offers another example of surprisingly good advice flowing from disastrously poor premises. Among her flawed bits of wisdom: “Our children are entirely different from us. . .”; and “. . . the more you hold things to be important and significant and – worst of all – improving, the less they will care …
Leslie Fields muddles about in Calvinism and Darwinism before arriving at good advice for every Christian parent, which is to pray your child toward Heaven. I think “the perfect parent myth,” however, is itself a myth. None of us envisions he can be a perfect parent. But we ache for our children to know God, …
Some of you might recall research floating about suggesting that having children reduces happiness. My own point of view has been that immediate happiness is not the point of a fulfilling life, at least not for the Christian. Now I’ve just come across research (this is always the case for me — a day late …
Judith Woods reminds us that there’s a difference between good parental involvement and hovering overkill (i.e., “helicopter parenting“). We ought to dispense with calling it helicopter parenting, in fact, and call it marionette parenting. Parents should be in the helicopter, hovering about their children’s lives. That’s their bloody job, after all — to supervise, counsel, protect. …
I suppose it’s helpful to hear some expert advice on when my children can have sleepovers and get their own mobile phones, but there’s some other milestones I have in mind, like the age when they can operate a chainsaw, when I can send them down to the basement to catch an intruding snake, and …
The average child between the ages of two and five in the U.S. watches over 32 hours of television per week, according to the latest Nielsen numbers. Nearly five hours a day, in other words. Given the greater sleep needs of children, this means roughly a third of the typical young child’s time is spent …
