I grew up in a Christian culture that valued old-school school.
Maybe you did, too.
In fact, old-school school is still pervasive in the homeschool evangelical movement.
Reading, writing and arithmetic — The Trinity of the educational experience.
Also, Latin.
Also, getting an A means you’re getting an A in life. Getting a C means you’re bound for failure in life.
Your future hinges on all this.
Of course, moral character counts, so throw in a postprandial Proverbs too.
Now, I’m being admittedly reductionist and glib about this, but you know the movement right?
For a very thoughtful and persuasive rebuttal to the classical Christian education movement, read this piece, “The False Promise of Classical Education.”
But the larger point is this — American Christian parents and the Protestant Work Ethic join forces to do everything they can to prep their kids for professional and spiritual success.
Right?
And nothing wrong with wanting that stuff!
But there’s something I never hear about in this community.
The best way to prepare our children for life is not by cultivating their intellectual health through sterling academics, but by promoting their emotional health.
By recognizing signs of mood disorders, by addressing that before anything else.
You can’t separate emotional health from academic, spiritual, or professional health.
A 2015 study found that social and emotional skills were the biggest predictors of future success.
It wasn’t knowing when the country was founded or whether tea was tossed in Boston or Philadelphia.
A stressed-out straight A student might win plaudits from their parents and teachers, be top of everything, be the one we talk about with our friends, but ultimately, they’re going to be unhappy in their career, their marriage, and their relationship with God.
It turns out they learned everything growing up, except who they were.
And if they do somehow got a sense of who they were, they felt themselves a product, not a person.
If you’ve experienced the unconditional love of a parent, you’ll believe that unconditional love is possible.
If, however, you felt that your parents’ approval was tied to your educational or spiritual success, your relationship with God will be unstable, and constantly violated by your inevitable violations of his commands.
You won’t ever be able to grasp, “Nothing can separate you from the love of God.”
So here are some questions I’ve asked myself, now that I’m a parent.
What do you wish you’d learned in school?
More geometry, or the strength to say to your parent, “Enough with angles. I’m boxed in. Help.”
Do you wish you’d learned a more expansive vocabulary, or how to say the simple words to your dad, “I’m fading. Please help me.”
What else would you choose?
More of the science behind atoms, or more behind why you’re feeling the way you are at 15 years old?
There’s a science to that, too. And it’s profoundly important. (Most mental health disorders have first onset in childhood or adolescence but aren’t treated until years later).
What else would you choose?
Parents who looked at your report card and asked, “what’s wrong with you?!” or ones who didn’t even pick up the report card and instead, just looked at your weary face and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Now…some American Christians probably hate “snowflake culture” more than Satan himself, and all of this seems very snowflaky.
But the science of mental health is clear, and the science that it starts forming very young, and has profound implications for the rest of life is indisputable.
If we really want to “prepare our kids for success,” then the best way to do that is to teach them emotional resilience, model unconditional love, spend time with them doing things they love, allow them to play, to be kids.
To fail. And then pick them up when they fail. To mess up. And then tell them you love them, no matter what.
Without mental health, it will be extremely hard to come by the the success that really matters. Our personal relationships, our love for others, our spiritual life. Even our professional career, because poor mental health destroys careers more than anything.
There’s an entire generation of Christian kids who are being raised by Protestant Work Ethic parents who, with every good intention, forget about mental health, and mental health is the basis for every kind of success in life.
If these parents do address mental health, it tends to be promoting the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” message which has literally killed many because childhood trauma often leads to suicide.
Mental health every kind of health.
It is the building block for everything we want for our children.
All the Latin in the world doesn’t mean a thing if our child feels she doesn’t mean a thing.
So how can we help our kids’ mental health?
I’m not a professional, so I’ll appeal to the professionals on this.
Amy Marin is a psychology instructor and best-selling author who suggests the following: validate your kids’ feelings, coach them on how to manage their emotions, let them make mistakes (that’s the way they learn!), solve problems together, allow your kids to feel uncomfortable.
She goes into further detail here, and keep in mind, that many of her science-based suggestions are right in line with what Christian parents aim for.
But there’s one we’re particularly deficient on.
And that’s encouraging healthy self-talk.
Consequently, we need to encourage positive self-talk, and do away with the “self-esteem” bashing.
And that’s because mental health problems are often rooted in self-loathing.
And as Christian parents, we need to encourage our kids to see themselves as Jesus saw them.
If we don’t, every academic and spiritual lesson we teach is useless.
So what are some other things we can do, beyond infusing them with the knowledge, the feeling, the security that they’re loved, unconditionally?
Writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Rima Himelstein, an adolescent-medicine specialist and social worker at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Delaware, offers four treatment paths for your child or adolescent struggling with any mental health challenge.
- Cognitive Behavior Therapy: helps kids resolve distorted thinking patterns, and reframe them in more positive directions. Also teaches relaxation techniques:
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy: “often used to treat older adolescents who have chronic suicidal thoughts.”
- Family-Based Treatment: “considered the gold standard in treating anorexia and bulimia nervosa….empowers parents to play an active role in helping teenagers restore weight, externalize the disorder, and normalize their eating habits.”
- Interpersonal Therapy: “Helps patients solve interpersonal crises and identify their social supports to improve their symptoms and their lives.”
You can get more information on each modality for kids here — CBT for Kids, Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Kids, Family Based Treatment for Eating Disorders, Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Kids.
Unfortunately, Christian parents often reel at anything involving the word “psychotherapy.”
But if we avoid it now, our children will undoubtedly have to seek psychotherapy later.
In their 20s, 30s, and 40s, after their lives, in every realm, have been destroyed because we failed to address it now.
Now… Why are Christian parents especially vulnerable on this issue?
One of the primary reasons is because we believe in original sin. That’s a fundamental tenant of our faith.
And yes, we’re all born sinners, but we forget this — when Jesus told the disciples to let the children come to him, what did he tell them?
The Bible doesn’t say, but I don’t think Jesus explained original sin.
I don’t think he told them it was better to cut off a hand if it wanted to steal. I don’t think he told them to be careful about every careless word because judgment was coming.
Christ famously tailored his message to his audience.
Tim Keller notes that he was gentle to the woman at the well, and much more direct to Nicodemus.
In that light, what would Jesus have told children about himself and about themselves?
That they were incredibly, deeply loved and valued. In fact, that was the context of their chat. The disciples said, “Jesus, these kids don’t matter,” and he then went ahead and honored them like no one else.
In her book, Almost Everything, Anne Lamott writes of her childhood: “Most emotional wounds are caused by a child’s belief or feedback that he is deficient, defective, or annoying — probably all three.”
She goes on to say that, growing up, “the message to us kids was that we didn’t have intrinsic value, but we could earn it.”
Now of course, Protestant parents would say, “Rubbish! They can’t earn it! They get it through faith in Christ. I’ve read Romans to my six year old. Six times, in fact!”
But no matter what Isaac Watts says, you are not a worm.
Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland has this to say about the tendency for Christians to dwell on the “I’m a worm, we’re all a worm” idea.
“Would it make any sense for God to die for worms or cockroaches?
Surely if he gave his life for something – whatever he gave his life had to be valuable. That doesn’t mean he had to do it, but it would not have been worth Jesus’ sacrifice to die for cats or dogs, as wonderful as they are.
But human beings are his image bearers and so we have a tremendous amount of value. He died for something that makes sense. We do have worth and value.”
Amen.
As a grown man, I can understand my sin and put it in the context of mercy.
But if we John the Baptist our kids, and tell them that they’re original sin wretches, but that God will have mercy on them if they repent, what part do you think these fragile little minds will focus on?
Kids will always see the monster under the bed. Monsters are easier to understand than mercy. And they’ll see God as a monster and themselves as prey.
There’s a very strange and weird song that generations of Christian parents have sung their children, and it always scared the living daylights out of me, and I only recently remembered how awful the song actually is when I heard it again on some show.
“Oh be careful little hands what you do
Oh be careful little hands what you do
For the Father up above
Is looking down in love
So be careful little hands what you do”
Think about those words for a second.
It’s a song, warning kids about sin, and what’s the reason?
Because God is “looking down in love.”
That’s quite the message to send to toddlers.
The beautiful-phrase “God is looking down in love” becomes a warning, not a comforting assurance.
It’s a fear-based song and an introduction to a God that hardly sounds like the sacrificial lamb who loved people so much he died for them.
I say all this as a parent who knows he’s probably, unwittingly, messing up in all kinds of areas. And that’s the thing — most Christian parents I saw growing up did all this with the best intentions.
But underlying it all was these two, most damaging philosophies.
One, that a child was a product, not a person.
“How’s your child doing?” meant “Are they getting good grades and living a moral life.” Never, “Do they struggle with mental health.”
And two, that promoting self-worth was consorting with the devil.
If you grew up in this kind of environment, I’m so sorry. You’re probably still trying to process the trauma of it.
It’s a hard thing to shake, but therapy can help, and so can reading authors like Brennan Manning and Henri Nouwen and others who stress that you are loved by God no.matter.what.
In fact, one of my favorite quotes from Manning — and one that blew my mind when I first read it — was “God doesn’t just love you, he actually likes you.”
We need to tell that to our kids every chance we get.
We need to model it in the way we love them.
And we need to grasp that paying attention to our child’s mental health is far, far more important than paying attention to their report card.
[Photo: Via Pexels, that’s something in Latin. I have no idea what it says. And I pay for that ignorance every day 🙂
