Just had one of those “wait, what did they say?” followed by quickly skipping back, re-listening to the moment a few times, and then transcribing it to put it here.

From the Gravity Commons Podcast episode with authors Kelsey McGinnis and Marissa Burt titled “The False Promises of Good Christian Parenting”, the authors discuss the damage that Christian Parenting books of the 1970s and 1980s have done to Christian parents and children. The focus on immediate, unquestioning compliance, enforced by spankings which were done under the guise of ’love’ not only created lots of confusion about what “love” actually looks like, but (and here’s the part that made me hit pause and rewind) failed to provide parents the tools for actually connecting with their children and those children’s needs.

From about 30 minutes into the podcast:

Kelsey: [This parenting philosophy is] completely opposed to healthy connection; it prevents parents from responding to the child who’s in front of them; instead they rely on these scripts and these ideas and this ideology offered in these books, and you end up with this inability to just relate to the individual child and their individual needs. You’re not supposed to think about their individual needs and quirks first. And it’s just really destructive.

Marissa: It’s destructive in the moment and also long-term. Because this is what parents are practicing day in and day out if they’re following it, which is why in many ways I think it sets families up for estrangement. Because then in adulthood when the illusion of compliance evaporates, there’s no skills. A lot of these resources it’s not just what they told parents to do but what they left them bereft of: an understanding of child development or tools for connection. And in trying to think critically about that requires “peeking behind the curtain” to say “what do we mean by love?” Because a lot of verbal gymnastics are done to say love is hurting the people who are dear to you… A lot of redefinition of terms is happening to say ‘this may feel like punishment to you but we’re going to call it love.’ So when you do that, at a certain point, and you’ve said God’s love is reflected primarily in this moment of cosmic punishment, then it becomes difficult for people to reevaluate because it feels like a complete faith deconstruction.

This resonates with my own experience, and I think with many other kids who grew up homeschooled. What happens when the “illusion of compliance” evaporates, whether that be at age 18, or 25, or 40? If you’ve never had relationship tools that weren’t based on compliance, how do you figure out how to start over and establish actual relationships with people who are now adults and not willing to compliantly agree with you on everything?

In his later years my father lamented multiple times that so many children from conservative Christian homeschooled families grew up and immediately got as far away as they could from their childhood–moving out of state, going low- or no-contact, etc. His observation was that this wasn’t an odd coincidence, but that it was related to those kids’ experience being raised that way. I don’t think he ever connected the dots the way these authors do, but I think he would’ve resonated with them.