The Battle of Peer Dependency: Chapter Five - Part Five

Hello!

I'm writing this while listening to my son describe each of the toy cars he's packing into a new "Thomas the Train" carrying case his Oma gave him. 

He's grown and hit so many developmental milestones in the last year that I often feel like I have a completely different child than I had two years ago. 

Between a year and four years of age, Spawn stopped singing.   Six months ago, he started singing again - and I'm amazed how many songs he learned while listening to songs on the radio in the car and listening to me sing around the house. We were playing on the floor yesterday when he asked me to sing "the song about what a bus does" with him.  I really enjoyed singing "The Wheels on the Bus" with him.

He's really into pretend play now and I find playing with him to be delightful.  Right now, he wants to pretend to be adults doing jobs that he sees around in the world which means he wants to be a mailman or a cashier or a farmer.  He's been "helping" in our garden by planting corn seeds in a bed that we were going to leave fallow as a composting area.    Hearing him exclaim "Mama!  I'm a farmer!" makes me smile every time.

Spawn can walk enough with one handed support that he can make it around our small local grocery store without needing to sit in the cart.   In fact, he also wants to be able to carry the small basket I use while we are there - but Spawn's still a bit short for the baskets at the store as evidenced by the fact that the basket drags on the ground when he tries to carry it.    Instead, I can usually convince him to help me carry it.   He's also very helpful at putting the items in the basket after I take the off the shelf.  

Marina Sears, I hope, enjoyed similar simple pleasure moments with her children when they were young.   Reading her book "The Battle of Peer Dependency" leaves readers with the impression that Mrs. Sears spent every moment of her children's childhood wishing that she had a different group of children who were more docile, more tractable and less independent.   Here's a revealing quote from the fifth chapter:

Sitting in a conference, listening to a workshop on finding individual life callings, I found myself wondering if God might also have a calling or purpose for the family. Different families had crossed our paths over the years that seemed to have a family purpose, but I saw that as a rarity rather than the norm. It seemed, as though my spirit had suddenly been taken aware of the fact that Jeff's death did not take God by surprise. Nor was He baffled by the strong personality traits my children possessed. It seemed as though the spirit of God was urging me to understand that he had put us together as a family, with their individual strengths and weaknesses, spiritual gifts, gender, and birth orders. All these factors together would tend to pull the family apart until I realize that the molding and blending of these traits were what would speak to a lost world. (pg. 74-75)

I was a bit taken aback by Mrs. Sears' surprise and dismay that her children had strong personality traits - and I doubt she viewed those traits positively.  I'm surprised at her surprise because Mrs. Sears clearly has a powerful personality herself!  She's spent the book explaining repeatedly her belief that her family needs to be a shining beacon to the world showing off God's Providence to widows and orphans - and she'll be damned if her kids get in the way of that goal.    

I've spent a few weeks trying to think of any family I knew that had a "family purpose" - and have been completely drawing a blank.   I suspect that's because most families are content enough to do whatever motivates them without needing to trumpet their purpose to everyone they meet.

More broadly, Mrs. Sears isn't picking a family purpose by deciding what makes sense based on her family.  She's using the idea of a family purpose to shame, guilt-trip and force her kids to follow her whims for as long as she can.   Why do I think that?  Well, this next quote is a doozy:

It is sad to discover that many other parents think that the only purpose of parenting is to provide instruction, provision, and protection for their children until they reach 18 years of age. These children are then considered to be on their own. Parents, who go a little bit further and believe the children are a part of the family until marriage, still miss the mark.. (pg. 75)

There is no escape for Mrs. Sears' children.   She is setting up a paradigm where she is to be in charge of their lives forever regardless of age, marital status or presence of children.   

Will that work?  Probably not.  There's yet to be a Christian Patriarchy family who has married adult children who has not lost one or more of those children to increased worldliness.  Not because the kids have become anything like the average secular family, but because the parents have gotten so used to having the personal whims of the parents satisfied at all times that a child's choice of doing something differently is treated like a war crime.  (See the Maxwell response to Jesse living in an apartment and the Duggar response to Jill.)

Is it Biblical?  Nope.  While there is definitely support for Hebrew men acting in concert with their paternal family line in the Old Testament, we have relatively little support for the idea that there was one paterfamilias who was making decisions for the entire family line.  On the other hand, the Bible is filled to the brim with people acting outside of the rules of patriarchy.   Men stole the birthrights of their older brothers.  Women disobeyed their husbands and fathers.  Mary appeared to conceive Jesus out of wedlock.  Jesus and his disciples were all pretty much behaving outside of family lines while various concerned and exasperated family members tried to stop them.  

If you remember nothing else, remember that Mrs. Sears would have stopped the Apostles from following Jesus.  That's the kind of great advice you're getting from this author.