Testing

I'm testing the features on my blog that will 1) Publish to my blog from my email and 2) Notify Daryl of when I publish to my blog.

 

 

TRULY Mommy Madness

This has to be the one of the most hopeless articles I have read recently--

Mommy Madness

The author was probably just having a bad day. Her values and image of what a "good mother" should look like are based on her middle class American culture which appears to revere education, wealth, leisure, recreation, athletics at the same as being non-offensive, creative and non-stressed-- ALL AT THE SAME TIME! The image of a good mother is laid over these values like plastic wrap over a bowl of leftovers.

Without exaggerating or belittling I believe Ms. Warner has this strange view that taking care of small children requires someone to be a full time entertainer. She herself says when her daughter was four she herself "had turned into a human television set, so filled with 24-hour children's programming that I had no thoughts left of my own". Not once does she mention in her article this was a problem of hers. She seems to think if only she had affordable quality childcare this view of motherhood should've proven an effective childrearing philosophy.

Ms. Warner then takes this to the next level as she seems to think being a taxi for her child activities is the primary care giving task. If only THEY would teach music, sports and art, she wouldn't have to find the best coaches, artists or musicians to teach her child. She doesn't seem to even have the least suspicion that by entertaining her child from birth, her child is set up to expect entertainment from adults-- including teachers. Her child is not the only one. So now a teacher has 25 children who expect to be entertained for 8 hours. In order to achieve this, some things-- like music, sports and art-- must go. Her standards for THEM (the village?) are higher than her standards for herself (she only has to entertain!). THEY must provide the education, the nuturing, the entertainment and the money and the leisure for her family.

How did this woman come to have such ideals and values? Surely her own upbringing and her culture have shaped this-- in her subtitle "What Happened When the Girls Who Had It All became mothers?" implies she and her peers (all these other mothers who believe entertainment the top child care quality) had it ALL. Did they really? Did they have their parents show them how to live daily life with adults-- or were they separated from the real world and placed in an institution called public school for the majority of the day the growing years? Was Ms. Warner educated music, art or sports to the extent where she could teach them to her own children or was she given the example of how to learn a sport WITH her child instead of watch them, taxi them and cheer for them? I believe this very first statement about having it ALL shows the limitations of the world she has lived in and created for her family. "ALL" apparently means all the entertainment one could ask for and all the opportunity to do something else besides being entertained, if one desired. This "ALL" apparently excludes the ability to form values of one's own and live a life with young children as fellow humans-- not an audience.


Children, in her view, are obviously well taken care of when they "painted and heard stories and ate cookies" at a very good price of $150 a month. This is weird. I want so much more for my children than to be entertained and fed sugary snacks.

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease -- Voltaire

My 7 year old knows this. As she was recovering from suffering a concussion this weekend, several times she said, "Mommy, I need something to get my mind off my headache." She wants to be doctor (and an artist) when she grows up. Medicine will be better if she goes into practice!

Church Isn't Good for Families

I have long known that if one goes to church on Sunday they will face many challenges keeping their family together for the morning. The babies aren't welcome in the "Adult" service, children will be invited (many times without consulting parents) to a class for their age-- where even siblings will be spilt up. As your family goes through this every Sunday, where married people are supposedly enriching their marriages without those annoying children-- there is apparently an equal, if not higher divorce rate.

Evangelical Christians and born-again Christians get divorced just as often, if not a little more, than the general population. And Barna has discovered that 90 percent of the born-again Christians who are divorced got divorced after they accepted Christ. from Christianity Today, April 2005--The Evangelical Scandal

I have friends who are angry at the at institutional church. So much so they fear demons by just going to functions in a building where an institutional church worships. I have been hesitant, perhaps even a little proud, that I wasn't angry. I just felt God calling our family to something different.

After reading the above article. Perhaps I should begin to get angry. Why are so many institutional Christians not living an abundant life but a destructive one? How dare the church preach forgiveness, compassion and the Kingdom of God when we can't DO IT! Forgiveness is the very heart of a family-- but how dare that baby cry when I'm trying to hear the preacher. Compassion comes from knowing the heart breaks of the world-- but church is no place for those who desire to worship the Father as a family. The Kingdom of God is here-- or is it? How can we harbor resentment to the point of divorce if indeed we know the forgiveness of our own sins? Like the man forgiven his million dollar debt and then demanded a few cents from a man who owed him, we will experience the weeping and nashing of teeth until every cent we owe is paid back.

I have had a deep fear that my chidren are missing out by not "going" to church. But perhaps what they miss is for their own good.