By Tyler McKenzie
On August 28th, 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory titled, “Parents Under Pressure” (see https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/parents/index.html). Murthy reported that parents are suffering from significantly higher levels of stress:
- 33% of parents report high levels of stress in the past month compared to 20% of other adults.
- 48% of parents say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to 26% among other adults.
The greatest tragedy is that parental stress is being passed down from parent to child, contributing to the mental health crisis among youth. Parents identified the following as acute stressors:
- Financial strain, economic instability, and poverty
- Time demands
- Worry about children’s health and safety
- Parental isolation and loneliness
- Technology and social media
- Cultural expectations on parents’ investment and children’s futures
An All-Consuming Task
Based on this list, it seems to me that parenting has become an all-consuming task in divine-like levels of control that are impossible for any human to live up to. Safety, success, significance, satisfaction; these are things for which we trust in God. But today, mom and dad are expected to take these matters into their own hands.
- We live in one of the safest, most prosperous, most technologized, most medically advanced countries in history. With modern birth control, parents can decide when and how many kids they want. Infant mortality rates have improved dramatically over the last century. Why are we so worried about money, safety, and health?
- The menu of school options, early specialization programs, and extracurriculars for kids is expansive. You can professionalize your child in just about anything before the age of 10. Why are we so anxious about their futures?
All this progress makes the future brighter than ever for kids, but it makes the present more burdensome for parents. There is a suffocating pressure to bring these opportunities to bear on our kids. No wonder we are lonely! We spend every spare moment chauffeuring our kids trying to ensure they don’t “fall behind.” It’s stressful trying to play God when you aren’t a god. If only someone would have told humans that we aren’t omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent. Then maybe we would have more realistic expectations of our kids and ourselves.
The Illusion of Control
In her book The End of American Childhood, historian Paula Fass contends that “control is the defining illusion of our time” for parents. Helicopter parenting is dead. Bulldozer parenting is obsolete. Welcome to the era of divine-parenting where, like God himself, parents must decide the perfect moment to onboard a child into the world and then design an ideal experience of reality, hour-by-hour, that maximizes growth and development. How long will it be until genetic engineering allows us to “knit them together in their mother’s womb”?
Fass calls this expectation of total control an illusion on purpose. First, it isn’t actually working out for our kids. Our assertion of control is putting expectations on our kids that are crushing them. Lisa DaMour, best-selling clinical psychologist, was asked recently about rising mental illness among teens. One of the two main causes she cited was the constantly rising achievement pressure parents put on younger and younger kids. We’re saying to our 12-year-olds, “Look, I donated my kidney to get you into the right middle school, so I need you to perform. Take these classes seriously, so you can start taking advance placement courses your freshman year, so you can get into one of those tier-one colleges, so you can get one of those internships, so you can get one of those jobs, so you can have enough money to get one of those vacation homes and really live! But it all starts with you mastering algebra in sixth grade! So, once you get home from travel ball and do your piano lessons, I need you to look at this math workbook.”
When our kids prove incapable of living up to our lofty expectations, parents struggle with disappointment in them and even more so ourselves. This is the second reason why Fass calls control an illusion. It puts self-imposed expectations on parents that crushes them. Parents aren’t gods. As life goes on, we see how much our world and our kids are out of our control. Look at the last five years. The global pandemic humbled us all.
The Right Goal
The goal for parents should be less focused on controlling reality and more focused on socializing our kids to reality. Richard Rohr has done a lot of work on the formation of youth. He suggests there are five truths we should socialize our kids toward.
1. Life is hard. “Not only will you face bad things (like pain, betrayal, sickness, disappointment, and failure), but all the good things in life take hard work to build (like wealth, a career, mastery in a field, or a 50-year wedding anniversary).”
2. You are not that important. “There are eight billion people on earth. Within 15 years of your death, you will be mostly forgotten. How do we learn to be content with changing the world by simply loving our neighbor? How do we live in a social media age as if the size of our platform and the opinions of others is not the sum of who we are?”
3. Your life is not about you. “In ancient societies, kids didn’t pick their job, their spouse, or their religion. They were raised to serve a purpose bigger than individual fulfillment. How do we catch a vision for communal flourishing?”
4. You are going to die. “Sorry, kids . . . 100% on this one.”
5. You are not in control.
This last one is the thrust of this column. Christian parents have the spiritual resources to avoid being another stressed-out statistic today. We believe God alone is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. This is what theologians call the Creator-Creature Distinction. We are not limitless, even though everything about our world is designed to make us believe we can be.
This is the root of human sin. The Garden of Eden is cursed with sweat, enmity, and thorns because humans usurp God’s role. The Tower of Babel disintegrates human community because humans reach for the heavens. The lesson of Babel is one for our time. Humans have the tools and tech to make us more like God than any generation ever, but we can’t take the burden of godhood! We. Weren’t. Made. To. Be. God. We were made to be images of God. And this is the primary role of parents. To pour in and summon out the truth of this identity in the emerging generation. This truth will lead to finite humility and infinite dignity!
Tyler McKenzie serves as lead pastor at Northeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
Thanks for this important view.