The Crisis of Parenting
Child Idolatry & The Crisis of Parenting: The Pervasive Disorder in the Spouse-Parent-Child Relationship Today
THE CRISIS OF PARENTING
I often share an anecdote with my students about the relationship between husband, wife, and children that I heard years back from a Paul Washer YouTube video. Paul Washer is a Calvinist(?) Christian that I’ve always deeply liked and respected, and who may have taken this example from somewhere else but I do not know. The anecdote is a thought experiment that goes like this: you are on a raft with your family in turbulent waters, and the raft capsizes, who do you save first? Your wife or your children? The thought experiment is meant to reveal the order of your priorities in your life, and for that reason it’s very useful. I answer in the same way Mr. Washer answered with decisive clarity: I save my wife first. From there, I try to save my children as well, no doubt—but my first duty is to my wife with whom I’ve become one: bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
Early on in dating my wife I shared the same anecdote. It struck a tone for our whole relationship and eventual marriage—it was something I often referred back to at times I saw relevant so that the order of our love would be firmly established. With little explanation my wife quickly saw the beauty and grandeur in such a realization. Our children are like leaves flowering on a tree, and we are its roots: a tree is nourished by watering its roots, not by tending to its leaves. If you only focus on the leaves, your tree will die in short order, and the leaves with it.
This latter “tree” analogy well summarizes the situation of parenthood and the parent-child relationship in our world today. How often do we hear people get divorces and say something to the effect of, “the thing that matters most now is our children.” The truth is that ever since they premeditated when and where and how many kids they’d have, they made children their top priority in their lives—something that would fill the emptiness they experienced within themselves. Their whole worldview of the relationship dynamic between parents-to-children was wrong from the get-go, and divorce is the signal that the roots of the tree of their family had long ago withered and died. A family doesn’t die by children failing or dying—a family dies by the bond between spouses dying. And the bond between spouses dies by disordering the relationship of love within it.
The Order of Charity
You’ll hear it said, “if you love your wife more than you love Christ—you love your wife less than if you loved Christ more than you love your wife.” In simple terms what they’re saying is that by loving Christ above all things you strengthen your ability to love everything else—but if you put other things before your love of Christ, then even your love of those things suffers.
This little saying speaks to the proper ordering of two spouses love. To analogize the spouse’s love back to the example of the tree: the love of the spouses is still the root of the tree, but the love of Christ is the soil that the tree is planted in.
If you plant a tree among rocks, or among thorns (Matthew 13), it doesn’t matter how much you try to take care of those roots, the tree is going to die. But if that tree is planted in good soil, and you tend to the roots by tending to the soil, then your tree will thrive, and the fruits thereof will thrive as well.
Intrinsic Purpose
If the soul and life of a person is not ordered toward God and faith-in-life-everlasting because of the One who resurrected from the dead, then the individual person has no substantive, intrinsic purpose. Their purpose can only ever be extrinsic: a parent has a child to fulfill them, and then one day the child becomes a parent and has their own child to fulfill them, and one day the grandchild becomes a parent and has a child to fulfill them… etc., ad infinitum. Nowhere along this infinite regression of purpose does it exist intrinsically in anything. What you have is a Ponzi scheme of purpose—everyone only kept afloat by the next person who’s kept afloat by the next person—and the result is despair and perpetual anxiety.
If any of the nodes along this chain will have purpose, purpose must be found in an individual node, existing in it itself, first. Being subject to death and loss, it doesn’t exist already in ourselves—we have to find it outside of ourselves. But that doesn’t mean we can find it in anything outside of ourselves. In fact, there is only one place where this can be found: in the thing that has eternal purpose in itself. You must graft yourself onto the eternal one—God—who proved His eternity and His personal reality in the Resurrected One. If your life has not found meaning in itself—by conforming to the being that has meaning in itself: God—then whatever purpose you build is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme waiting to collapse and fall apart.
The Gift of Love
Everyone intuitively knows that love ought to be a gift—that when it’s not, it’s not properly “love” at all…
The love between spouses is not just the source of the first instant of the child’s life: it is the perpetual source of the life of the soul of their child, and must therefore be prioritized above the child. Once a person has realized this, and anchored their love of their spouse by attaching themselves to Christ, then they provide a healthy template for their child to actually thrive. They have a detachment from that child that allows the child to grow and experience the love of their parents not as something their parents need to give them for their own parental well-being or purpose, but as a truly free gift. They have a care for their child that is always directed first toward love of God; toward the good that comes to their child through a life shared intimately with God. They have a model of that love and they feel the fruits of it. The parent too sees successes and failures in their child’s life in light of that reality. They are able to have an actual clarity about how to chastise with purpose and goodwill, and affirm in a way that does not inflame pride. The child does not become the idol of the parents, but a gift. And as a gift, the child can begin to experience a model of the love that gives without receiving anything in return: the love that God gives to all His creation.
Ignorance or Malice?
So why do people make this mistake and invert the order of love? They never seek to find God; they never see the right order between love of spouse and love of child; they idolize their child to try and fulfill their happiness through false, Ponzi-scheme, means… Why don’t they just listen to the saying: “If you love your child more than you love your spouse, and your spouse more than you love Christ, then you love your child less than if you loved your spouse more than you loved your child, and Christ more than you loved your spouse.”…? I mean isn’t it obvious to them how to love their child best? Isn’t it obvious to them that Ponzi schemes always categorically degrade things…?
The answer could even be yes, that they do see all those things, and we’d still have the problem of child idolatry (or in the case where the love of spouse is cut off from God, spousal idolatry)…because the problem at the core of this disordering is not accidental ignorance, but sin. The problem at the core of child/spousal idolatry is the same problem of disordering at the absolute core of sin: we “exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.” (Romans 1: 25)
Let us explain what that really means:
Finite Good Desired Infinitely
When the parent loves a child more than they love their spouse, and/or their spouse more than they love Christ, they don’t care that they could love their child/spouse more if they loved Christ most of all, because what they want is not to increase their love of their child/spouse: what they want is to fill their infinite desire with the finite object of their child/spouse. They want to infinitely grasp the object that is their child/spouse. They don’t want to love their child/spouse more—they want to love them infinitely. And this, however, is not a possibility—a finite thing cannot be loved infinitely. Accordingly, they settle for revolting against that fact and coveting their finite child/spouse infinitely in spite of that impossibility.
All of our sins of habit/addiction spring from this same source. We can’t have a finite pleasure infinitely, but we have an infinite desire, and we want the finite pleasure in an infinite way, so we try to approximate that infinity by consuming the finite pleasure over-and-over again. The repetition of coveting/consuming the finite good functions as the means of substituting infinity with its closes approximation: successive finitude. We often mistake infinity with something like perpetuity—in reality infinity is not “a lot of finitude”, but a complete antithesis of finitude. So we reason something like: If I can’t have a pleasure infinitely, I will just have it in perpetuity so that it feels like I have it infinitely.
In the parent who covets their child, they don’t care at all about loving their child as best as they can: they care about using their child to fulfill their sense of emptiness. The child becomes an object to them—an object of their fulfillment—and their disorder reigns supreme. The child suffers the consequence of the sins of their parents, and without conversion—first from seeking infinite fulfillment in finite things—they will be disposed to do the same to their children one day as well.
This is a perennial problem in fallen man.+