The Battle Of Peer Dependency: Chapter Three - Part One

Crippling anxiety that leads to controlling behaviors is the unstated theme of Marina Sears "The Battle of Peer Dependency".   Parents live with the contrast between the imaginary children they dreamed of raising compared to the living, breathing, changing, real children  parents are tasked with raising.  Personally, I prefer my real breathing preschooler who said "No Mama!  Bye-bye, Mama!  Want Daddy!" as soon as he saw me this morning because "Mama Mornings" means it's a school day while "Daddy Mornings" means free play days!   True, my imaginary preschoolers never expressed dismay upon seeing me - but the imaginary preschooler never became completely entranced by a stick that we had to bring home from the park, either.  The real preschooler says "Dove you too, Mama" when I leave for work - and my heart melts into a pile of goo every time he says that.

Anyways.

Most parents eventually accept that their children have autonomy in their day-to-day choices and may have a very different personality than the type of personality preferred by the parent.  Most parents - but not Marina Sears.   Let's look at a quote about her goals for her kids:

Understanding the battle of peer dependency and fighting it according to God's Word will decide the outcome and success in children's lives. As a parent, lost potential in a child's life is heartbreaking. The greatest tragedy is young people living a lukewarm, Christian existence, never fully coming to an intimate, personal walk with Christ as Lord. As a young widow with very small children, it was my hope that my children would not be like many Christian young people before them who fell away from their faith. Like many mothers and fathers before me, I didn't understand the battle that my children would face. Nor was it clear that many parents like myself might still be in the trap. (pg. 30)

 Notice how Mrs. Sears overgeneralizes "an intimate personal walk with Christ the Lord" as the main goal for all parents.    In reality, that's not a goal that would be pertinent for the majority of Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or mainline Protestants since these religions don't prioritize the feelings of a close relationship with God as the main goal of religion.   Far more broadly, the vast majority of parents on Earth wouldn't agree with that goal since they are not Christians.

I ground that statement against worldwide statistics because Mrs. Sears' use of third person obscures how egocentric her goals are.    Just changing the first three sentences into first person to match the rest of the paragraph changes the tenor of the entire paragraph:

"Understanding the battle of peer dependency and fighting it according to God's Word will decide the outcome and success in my children's lives.  For me as a parent, lost potential in my children's lives is heartbreaking.  The greatest tragedy would be my children living a lukewarm, Christian existence, never fullying coming to an intimate personal walk with Christ as Lord" 

The fact that Marina Sears - a woman who lost her husband at 30 in a tragic car accident and had a son survive unscathed a depressed skull fracture that can do major damage - prioritizes her children's relationship with Christ is normal enough on the face; she knows very well that time on Earth is limited and she doesn't want her children to die unsaved.   That's a fairly normal concern for Evangelicals - but Mrs. Sears adds a twist.   Mrs. Sears' children must convince Mrs. Sears that they are saved as evidenced by showing the proper close walk with Jesus - and the only way to do that is to do exactly what Mrs. Sears thinks the family should do.

That's a pretty strange burden of proof for a Christian to place on another Christian.

I'd also like to note that the last sentence in that quote is a form of the "poisoning the well" fallacy.  This fallacy is a method of subtly denigrating other people who disagree with the speaker by assigning the people who disagree to a negative category preemptively.   In this case, Mrs. Sears labels any adult who disagrees with her as being "peer dependent" adults - unlike the saintly adults that Mrs. Sears counts as her allies.

Between the first quote and this next quote, Marina Sears goes on an extended riff about how God was the head of her home after Jeff died.  This theme pops up every so often in the book - but it's always jarring.   Her rationale - such as it is - is that children NEED fathers.  Her children lost their father far too young - so God is now the father of her children.   I think I get where she's trying to go with this - God is the support for widows and orphans etc., - but instead of sounding like a woman who is grateful for God's Providence, Mrs. Sears often sounds like she's bragging about how much better the Head of her house is than everyone else's. 

The first sentence in this quote is a standard example of the Sears humble-brag about having God father her children:

How then, with God as the head of our home did I lose the heart of one of my children to peer dependency? At first I didn't even realize what peer dependency meant. In fact, it took me five years to understand the struggle and realize that I was in the fight of my life. In the beginning I had tried to win the fight with kid gloves on. I soon realized the battle of peer dependency was going to cost me my son's life, and that I needed to understand that it was a life-and-death battle. This may seem melodramatic, but I could not be wishy-washy. A Biblical plan was needed, and consistency and perseverance would be keys to success. (pg. 31)

God's not so good at organizing household resources, eh?  I mean, God's LEADING the house - but it takes Marina Sears 5 years to recognize that the dreaded peer dependency demon had infected one of her kids.

Actually, I would have picked the adjective "overwrought" rather than "melodramatic" to describe Marina Sears obsession.

Look, there are times where parents are in a real-life-or-death struggle involving one of their children.  Events like cancer, severe mental illness, personality disorders....there are certainly times where parents need to have a concerted, major push to get the help a child needs to survive and getting that help has to trump most other needs. 

Having a preteen who prefers playing volleyball with his church friends is not an example of a life-or-death struggle.  Neither is having a young adult child who wants to listen to music that Mrs. Sears objects to for the mostly racist rationales that ATI produced to ban all music with a back beat.

Mrs. Sears, however, treats exceptionally normal maturation events in her children's lives as massive character flaws that need to be crushed out of the kids' lives - and that says much more about her than it does about her kids.

*Update on Anna Maxwell's diagnosis.  Anna's preliminary pathology report came back with a Stage Two cancer diagnosis.   The good news is that the cancer is one that responds well to treatment - so a cancer that has positive results for various hormone receptors -  which is huge because young women tend to have a higher risk of triple-negative breast cancer which is a bitch to treat. While she has lymph node involvement, it seems that the cancer had only started to reach the lymph nodes which is also a good sign.  The main concern right now is that the margins of tissues removed surrounding the tumor were very small which increases the likelihood that some of the tumor was left behind.  I'm sending out lots of positive thoughts and prayers that the cancer avoided infiltrating her chest wall because the surgery for that sucks.    I remember how hard recovery was for me after my gallbladder surgery last year - and that was with a single toddler, not six very young children who want to be with their mother.