The Struggle Of Child Rearing In A Busy, Broken World

If you grew up in a traditional family, you are now in the minority! Just over half the children in our country are now being raised in a single-parent home. In most of these cases, it is the mother who is left to provide the financial and nurturing needs of her children. In fact, the cost associated with having children often drives a mother to find work or return to work a few months after having her child. Thus, the child or children are left in the care of relatives, friends, or boyfriends.

We are taught by the prevailing thinking of the day that a woman can be a full-time wage earner and a full-time parent without any negative ramifications on her children or herself! Today, mothers are expected to be superhuman. How many people can pull off two full-time jobs successfully? Something has to give. Yet a PC culture downplays the struggle of single-parenting and even suggests there are no negative effects on the child. It would be a step in the right direction if more people would at least acknowledge the unrealistic expectations placed upon mothers who work hard doing a job that was meant to be done by two parents.

Question for two-parent families: How is your own parenting going? Even a child in a two-parent home can get the short end of the stick. We live at a time where economic challenges have combined with an unhealthy notion that a mother must have a career to have value – to prove her equality with a man. Both issues should be discussed within the context of biblical values. Let me be clear – my concern addresses the priority of parenting children in their formative years and also includes the concern for the overworked and/or uninvolved father. So again the question: Are the children God has entrusted to you getting the best of your energies or are they getting the leftovers?

I served as a youth minister for over 12 years prior to pastoring this church and I can tell you from firsthand experience then and now that enhanced living conditions, nicer clothes, or even a better education cannot atone for the insufficient nurture of a child. Now, to be fair, it is possible that you may have found a way to balance life’s demands even with the aforementioned challenges. If so, you are not the norm. These thoughts are meant only to raise a question in your mind and potentially help you avoid painful (coulda/shoulda) regrets that many in our generation will likely have in later years.

It would surely be a sacrifice and even be looked upon as being “unusual” to downsize or live more simply in order to free up time for a more concerted effort in a child’s life for say, the first 12 years of a child’s life. If God calls you to do this, I am confident the investment would be the greatest one you ever made!

“Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6

“Bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Ephesians 6:4

“Children are a gift from the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth.” Psalm 127:3-4

John Wallace Miller