You are a child until you have a child.
Right up until the moment you hold that baby in your arms, you are a child yourself. You see the world from that perspective. You are on that side of things, and it colors everything you feel.
My dad always used to joke about how he would never go see us in our room when we were sleeping because we always looked too sweet. That’s parental humor. The good stuff.
You might be an old child, one who graduated college a decade ago, but you are still a child.
And then it all changes. Or at least the seeds of the change are planted, and you are thrown onto the other side, forever.
The world is divided between those with children and those without. It's parents vs. the childless in our society, and the battle is just getting started. It will only intensify as we move into the future, and greater numbers of childless people grow older without becoming parents.
But I'm not here to stoke this conflict. I'm not here to attack those who, for whatever reason, don't have kids. I merely want to state a fact of life. We are not the same.
It’s hard to nail down what it is that really separates the children from those with children. It’s not politics. It’s not money. It’s not education. It’s not culture. There are those with children and those without on all sides.
Nor is it being a good person. There are bad people who are bad parents. Great people who are not parents.
It’s not necessarily responsibility either, even though kids do demand that. It’s deeper than all these things. It’s some kind of essence or knowledge. Or maybe it’s some kind of acceptance of a constellation of truths that you only perceive once you have kids.
There’s something about imperfection. That’s one of those truths in the constellation. It’s not just the surface imperfection of the scratched up tables, the walls that always end up covered in scribbles, or the realization that you are not going to have “nice things” for a long time.
(And that’s OK, by the way. Nice things are overrated.)
But it’s more than all that. Something stranger. It’s about the imperfection of life itself. Having kids forces us to give up trying to think of ourselves as perfect. When we are parents, we try to be better than we were, because we want to be good role models. So we aspire to be greater (or more perfect) in this sense.
But at the same time, our children can't help but reveal how far we fall short. Their innocence reveals our corrupt nature in more poignant terms. Life isn’t perfect; neither are we.
You’re beat, sick of work, sick of corralling the kids in the car, sick of ushering them along the sidewalk, sick of cleaning up rice from the floor after dinner, tired as hell, and counting down the minutes until you can finally get a break once the kids are in bed. And then, once they are finally asleep, about 15 minutes later, you feel bad for wanting to get them in bed as soon as possible.
“Damn it.”
There’s a certain way you say that word as a dad. Under your breath, by yourself, in the morning, late at night, in the car, out back behind the house, just sitting there by the window, looking at a photo of your kids from a few years back.
The way you say it, that’s the tragic part. The resigned part.
It’s the feeling that no childless person understands. My dad always used to joke about how he would never go see us in our room when we were sleeping because we always looked too sweet. That’s parental humor. The good stuff. Sardonic and deeply sensitive at the same time, if you get it. It’s the stuff that you can’t relate to if you are childless.
You are spinning plates when you have kids. Your arms reach wider, and you are pulled 100 ways at once.
You take on more roles than ever before. You are like a dictator who controls the education system, religious system, medical system, housing, and everything else you could possibly imagine all at the same time, 24/7, for decades.
Your stress tolerance increases, and you just naturally start to think about yourself less than you did before. You fade in a sense, and you are no longer the center of your own world.
You are a leader and need to manage your people like a ruler manages his, and it demands a stronger stomach. You have to lie all the time because you don’t ever tell your kids the whole truth. Answers for a 5-year-old aren’t fully honest answers. There are things they shouldn’t know yet.
You also teach your kids never to lie in the next breath. Yes, it’s complicated.
In truth, for parents the concerns of the childless are hard to take so seriously. They seem more and more petty the deeper into parenthood you get. They feel like the concerns of children.
But you know they don’t feel like it to them because you remember how you felt before you had kids, when you were a child, too. It’s not their fault for feeling like that, and it’s not ours for feeling like we do. None of it is anyone’s fault. It’s OK, we all have our own role in this life. But we aren’t the same.
You’re a child until you have a child, and you can never go back.
The public feud between Stephen A. Smith and LeBron James shows no signs of dying down after the ESPN personality recently went on a popular basketball podcast to talk about his confrontation with the NBA superstar.
Smith claims LeBron confronted him during a Lakers home game over criticism directed at his son Bronny. Smith maintained, however, that his criticism has always been about LeBron’s role in getting his son into the league.
Bronny needs what every man in a highly competitive field desires: respect.
It is easy to understand why LeBron was upset. He has been the face of the NBA for the better part of 20 years. He is a four-time champion, and many believe he is the greatest basketball player of all time. He has never been in trouble with the law and has maintained a public image as a solid family man throughout his career. Playing on the same team as his son was clearly an important career goal, especially considering he grew up without his father.
One of life’s most valuable lessons is that experiencing scarcity in childhood often drives indulgence in adulthood. For example, people who become successful after growing up poor often give their kids all the toys, clothes, and gifts they didn’t receive. Most people understand this impulse, but that doesn’t change the reality that children who get everything they want can quickly become spoiled and entitled. Parents sometimes make well-intentioned decisions that stunt the development of their children.
LeBron’s place in NBA history is cemented, but the same cannot be said for his son.
Bronny needs what every man in a highly competitive field desires: respect. It is the one thing his father’s wealth cannot buy. It also cannot be secured through social pressure, coercion, or intimidation. Not even “King James” can bequeath the legacy he’s built in the NBA to his oldest son.
Respect must be earned through a person’s hard work and accomplishment. Without it, Bronny will spend his entire career fighting the perception he’s a privileged kid who took someone’s roster spot. His opponents will use that narrative to get under his skin and try their hardest to embarrass him on the court.
No one is rooting against Bronny, but his path to the league and Lakers leaves sports journalists no choice but to talk about his game and the role his father played in securing him a spot on the roster. It’s hard enough to make the transition to the NBA after one year of college for once-in-a-generation players with physical gifts like Zion Williamson. It’s even harder to make the case that a freshman who averaged five points a game at USC is ready for the professional game.
But this issue is bigger than basketball. Talking about the confrontation between LeBron James and Stephen A. Smith makes for entertaining content, but this entire situation is really about the relationship between fathers and sons.
Sons begin emulating their fathers at a young age. They wear their clothes and mimic their mannerisms. As they get older, some boys go even further by attempting to walk in their father’s professional footsteps. It’s difficult enough for the average kid to do this successfully. The challenge is amplified exponentially when your father is a global icon who has been at the top of his profession for decades.
LeBron and Bronny should’ve sat down with Denzel Washington and his son John David to discuss the challenges of being a son in a superstar father’s shadow. Professional sports and acting are not the same, but Denzel probably would have been criticized if he had pulled his son out of a small community theater where he struggled to memorize his lines and demanded that he receive a role on Broadway.
The elder Washington knows his name and reputation carry a lot of weight. He also likely knows that publicly pulling strings to help his son when it’s clear he is not ready for the big stage would do more harm than good. That’s because men must learn how to stand on their own two feet, which means the parental instinct to protect a child — even when he’s an adult — must be balanced with age-appropriate encouragement toward independence. Children learn this at a young age, which is why they'll eventually turn to their parents and say, “I’ve got this, Mom,” or, “I can do it, Dad.”
The pursuit of independence is the unofficial rite of passage into manhood. Anyone or anything — regardless of how well-intentioned — that interrupts that pursuit does a young man a disservice. No father wants to see his son struggle needlessly, but part of raising children is understanding the role obstacles play in building character.
LeBron James has reigned over the NBA for 20 years, but Bronny will never feel like a king as long as he is treated like a privileged prince in constant need of protection.
Does "Bluey" really "turn fathers into mothers"?
That's the claim Jeremy Pryor makes in a recent article for Align, arguing that that the mega-popular cartoon attacks the traditional family, especially in its depiction of fatherhood.
Any parent — father or mother — who fits Pryor’s description of 'Bluey’s' Bandit is in fact an active detriment to his or her children.
Bandit (the dad in "Bluey"), Pryor contends, is “constantly nurturing” and “always present.” He is no disciplinarian but “a plaything” in the eyes of his children.
First, let me be clear: I’m not sure that Pryor’s take is quite fair to Bandit, who seems in my limited exposure to "Bluey" perhaps overly gentle but not pathologically so. This is, after all, a preschoolers’ show.
That said, Pryor’s broader point about our mistaken postmodern paternal ideal is well taken. The idea that dads should always be accommodating and never be intimidating is, like most postmodern ideas, an infantile fantasy. It takes no account of human nature and creates misery wherever it is permitted to fester unchecked.
Pryor may have picked a poor example to make a valid point about what children need from their fathers.
Nevertheless, his critique of our modern investment in parental androgyny raises a question worth addressing: What makes an ideal father different from an ideal mother?
Pryor contends that the very qualities he says make Bandit a lousy father — constant nurture, constant presence, always pleasant playmate — would make a woman an ideal mother.
Putting aside the question of whether Bandit in fact displays these traits to such excess, is that true? I would submit not.
Per Mary Wollstonecraft, the founding mother of feminism before it all went so terribly wrong: “Weak, enervated women” are “unfit to be mothers.” A woman who responds to her child’s every whim is not raising that child to engage the wider world but delimiting his capacity to engage anyone but her. The archetypal term for this insidious maternal figure is the “devouring mother.”
The devouring mother does have a long and storied history; she is an archetype for a reason. But she cannot be considered “traditional.” After all, women throughout most of history could not focus with such martyred self-abnegation on their children. They simply had too many other things to do.
Until industrialization, when middle- and upper-class women could for the first time in history devote themselves solely to the domestic welfare of their own nuclear families, nearly all women labored alongside their husbands and children on farms.
In these circumstances, the best a woman could hope for was to be a “good enough” mother: loving and strict and far too busy to be next to her child every second, like the mom in "Little House on the Prairie" or the one in the “Kirsten” books of the original "American Girl" series.
Fortunately, it turns out that “good enough” is what’s best.
Any parent — father or mother — who fits Pryor’s description of "Bluey’s" Bandit is in fact an active detriment to his or her children. Judging by today’s soaring rates of childhood misbehavior, mental health problems, and fragility, we do indeed have far too many such parents.
So if mothers should not be hovering pushovers any more than fathers should, what makes fathers unique and uniquely valuable?
Personally, I have two answers.
First, fathers provide a different kind of discipline — but only to a point. Yes, “talk to Daddy” is drawn as a leveling up of firmness in my house. Mommy is plenty firm, but Daddy has a different impact because Daddy is a man. But I also have four boys and no girls. If I had four daughters and no sons instead, I truly cannot imagine a scenario in which my husband would be the heavy; in fact, it would almost certainly go the other way.
Second, per Pryor, fathers do tend to offer a unique kind of “territory-expanding” and “training,” particularly to sons but also to daughters.
I am a “he’s fine” kind of mom. In part because it’s not my personality and in part because I know it’s not a good idea, I do not gasp or run over when my kid skins a knee or even a chin. I try to respond to what my kid says he needs (sometimes a hug, sometimes ice, often nothing), not react to what I saw.
But I am a mom, and I have my limits.
I “let grow” pretty well, but when my kids aren’t back to my side exactly when I expect them to be — say, from the library across the street or from a bike ride around the block — I am always on the precipice of running to find them.
My anxiety is inevitably written all over my face. And my kids would surely see that, were I to follow my impulse and dash off at the first suspicion that they might be trying without immediate success to find their way back to me. Fortunately, my husband’s voice is always in my head, and often in my ear: “This is about you getting reassured, not about them being safe. They are fine. They will be fine. Do not worry them with your worry.”
I am beginning to notice that my sons tend to stay calm even when they are unsettled precisely because they have a dad who models that kind of stoicism consistently. Dads do tend, I think, to keep their sights trained more steadily than moms do on the endgame of raising adults who can manage real life, including when it’s scary.
So part of being a “good enough” mom, I guess, is knowing when to get out of the way and let Dad do his job.
When Liz Wheeler first heard about the hugely popular homesteading influencer Hannah Neeleman, more commonly known as Ballerina Farm, she didn’t pay much attention to the hype, as it seemed to revolve around inconsequential matters, such as Neeleman competing in a beauty pageant 12 days postpartum.
But in the wake of the Sunday’s Times recent defamatory article “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children),” Liz has gleefully hopped on the Ballerina Farm bandwagon.
“I'm all about this woman,” she says, lambasting the author of the Times piece, Megan Agnew, as a “bitter, agenda-driven, man-hating, disrespectful, derogatory feminist.”
And when you read even a handful of the remarks Agnew made about Neeleman and her family, it’s easy to see that Liz’s anger is righteous.
EXPOSED: The WORST Thing That Happened at Ballerina Farmwww.youtube.com
The author “deliberately, falsely portrayed Hannah as unhappy, falsely portrayed her marriage as unequal, falsely portrayed her children as annoying, falsely portrayed her life as unfulfilled, her life as fake because Hannah's life is family. And there is nothing feminists hate more than family,” says Liz.
In the article, Agnew took jab after jab at Daniel Neeleman, Hannah’s husband, painting him as the domineering alpha-male type. Liz cites the following excerpt as an example:
“Our first few years of marriage were really hard, we sacrificed a lot,” she says. “But we did have this vision, this dream and —” Daniel interrupts: “We still do.” What kind of sacrifices, I ask her. “Well, I gave up dance, which was hard. You give up a piece of yourself. And Daniel gave up his career ambitions.”
I look out at the vastness and don’t totally agree. Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any. The only space earmarked to be Neeleman’s own — a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio — ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.”
The passage captures the tone of the entire article.
“Cultural hegemony” is what Liz sees when she reads Agnew’s insults.
First coined by Marxist Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party, cultural hegemony refers to how a governing body captures various institutions in order to shape and control the culture, the end goal being that the governing class’s worldview becomes the cultural norm.
“The Marxist left cannot stand if a man and a woman are happily married, if they are fulfilling traditional gender roles — the woman is having babies, the husband is providing and running a business — if they're homeschooling their children, if they are happy,” says Liz.
If you need further proof, look no further than Agnew’s brazen acknowledgement of her irritation at not being able to get Hannah Neeleman alone.
“I can’t, it seems, get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child. Usually I am doing battle with steely Hollywood publicists; today I am up against an army of toddlers who all want their mum and a husband who thinks he knows better.”
“What an absolutely nasty article,” says Liz in disgust, adding that the piece proves that “feminism is a pernicious fraud that hates women.”
“When women choose to be feminine — like Hannah Neeleman — choose to be wives, choose to be mothers and actually like it, feminists' heads explode.”
“Nobody will more viciously gut a happily married mother — who's happy with those choices — than a feminist who thinks nobody should be allowed to be fulfilled by doing what God created women to do,” Liz condemns.
To hear more of her analysis, watch the clip above.
To enjoy more of Liz’s based commentary, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
A book that spreads the word of God to children through the use of Lego-built scenes sounds like a cute idea, right?
Well, it could have been if the book in question, “The Brick Bible,” was actually promoting the word of God. Instead, it does the opposite.
The “Bible” is distributed at vacation Bible schools and sold to believers as containing scripture — but the book itself was created by an atheist who uses the book to argue against the God of the Bible rather than guide children to Him.
“The problem is that it is actually explicit. It is extremely gory, it is not theologically accurate, and it seems that it is actually meant to shock and disturb,” Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable” comments.
The book was first published in 2001 and included the first six stories from the Book of Genesis. In the next decade, almost 5,000 biblical scenes were added and illustrated through Lego blocks.
“It depicts Bible stories in a way that is not only violent but sexually graphic. It ridicules the nature and character of God by making Him only seem garish,” Stuckey explains, adding, “It’s attempting to make a case against the God of the Bible.”
Unsurprisingly, the author, Brendan Powell Smith, came out as transgender in 2015 and refers to himself as a “blue haired transgender lesbian atheist.”
The book also depicts scenes of eunuch’s cutting off their own genitals, as well as rape.
“It’s just so insidious. It’s so sneaky, it’s so sly. It’s so much like Satan to make a book like this that looks cheery and loving on the outside, that really on the inside is a poor depiction of what God is,” Stuckey says.
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
The best way to promote fertility isn’t funding parenthood. It’s stopping the government programs that discourage people from having babies.
Businesses talk about the importance of family but often treat children as either a burden to be discarded or as optional luxury goods.
The debate on abortion must go beyond pregnancy to improving parenthood so children have the best chance at life.
thefederalist.com
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