Posted by a Pastor friend of whom I have enormous respect.
As
our children pursued an education, they would sometimes ask our help
with an assignment -- two of the worst of which involved our being asked
to write something about how we did parenting.
The
first time I did this was in 2006, but the most devastating was in
2011, when one of our children was taking a grad school course in Family
Systems and did formal, recorded interviews with each member of the
family individually. I actually wept when I read some parts of those
transcriptions and felt compelled to go and ask forgiveness for some of
insensitive things I had said and done as a parent.
Maybe
what I wrote for the 2006 interview will prove beneficial to somebody.
If it does, that's more important than my personal embarrassment. Here
goes, only slightly edited:
Honestly attempting
to reflect on how I did parenting brings me some pain and no small
sense of failure. I took a lot of psychology in college and determined
that I would raise my children somewhat differently than I had been
raised. My father was born in 1906, had a quick temper and would not
tolerate disrespect, but I always knew that my father loved me and would
do everything that he could to see that I had what I needed. My mother
was born in 1913 and was a gifted teacher. She taught obstetrical
nursing at Vanderbilt and was later a nursing administrator, but she
spent the last decades of her career teaching first graders. Her career
moves were based on her commitment to be home when her children were
home. Looking back, I have to say that my parents were outstanding. They
were both nurturing and affirming. They showed affection by hugging us
and by telling us that they loved us. They disciplined within an overall
context of freedom, seeking to instill optimism and self-confidence in
both my brother and me. So my desire to raise my children differently
was the fruit of perfectionistic determinism: they did well; I can do
better. I was a fool to believe that.
Early on
in my college career, I decided to prepare to become a pastor. In my
theological tradition this requires a minimum of seven years, four in
college and three in seminary. Our first two children came before I
completed my post graduate education and three more were born after I
became a full-time pastor. Perhaps more than any other profession, the
ministry requires not only a measure of professional competence but a
high level of "success" in personal living, including "success" in one's
marriage and with one's children.
The pressures can be enormous.
Looking back, I find it bewildering that parishioners look to pastors
who may not yet be even thirty years old for counsel on how to deal with
lots of personal matters. Of course, hopefully, a pastor is not basing
his counsel simply on personal experience; as with a thirty year-old
physician, he relies on his professional training and the authoritative
sources he has studied.
I was pretty much a
determinist in the early years of parenting. My experiences reinforced
my studies, and I had lots of experiences, given the many years I spent
in school and the corresponding number of summer jobs I held -- it took
me longer than seven years to complete my education.
One
of the most interesting jobs I held was at an adventure park that had a
trained animal exhibit. I got to know one of the animal trainers during
breaks. He told me about how they trained the dolphins:
"You
don't think that they do what they do simply for the fish we throw to
them, do you? When they don't do their tricks, we jump into the pool and
beat the ____ out of them with baseball bats. Positive and negative
reinforcement, the carrot and the stick, that's what it takes."
I
brought that perspective into my parenting -- not that I ever took a
baseball bat to anyone, but I approached parenting with a deterministic
understanding: if I would consistently use positive and negative
reinforcement, I thought I could produce the kind of children everybody
would approve of. I brought my father's intolerance for disrespect and a
measure of his hot temper, too. But I did parenting with the knowledge
that I lived in a glass house: the "manse" was owned by the
congregation, and I had a deep awareness that my family was "owned," as
well. I saw this approach as phenomenally successful as long as my
children were prepubescent, but when they began to develop some
independence, I became frightened and frustrated. All this was
compounded by (my wife's injuries from a wreck) in a coma and spending months as an invalid. Also, my once
brilliant mother, now with senile dementia, lived with us.
When
the leadership of the church heard stories from gossipy people, I knew
that my ability to provide for my family was on the line. I knew that an
undergraduate degree in philosophy and a seminary degree qualified me
for only one career, and that career was now in jeopardy because of how I
was dealing with American adolescence. I once remember saying in
frustration: "If you keep acting like this, you're going to make me lose
my job." That's a terrible thing to say to a child, in part at least,
because it gives that child a sense of destructive power.
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