NeoZine

The Simplicity of Maturity

Our world is deeply confused about parenting, and it shouldn’t be any surprise that kids are deeply confused about growing up. For millennia the proven path to maturity required children to learn sacrifice for others, but new and unproven theories are redefining parenting and the family itself in the twenty-first century. Often seeded with humanistic assumptions, modern approaches have now shipwrecked a few generations of children, beginning with Baby-boomers, and now secular research and even the popular press are documenting how widespread this failure is.¹

It means modern parenting is a best-guess scenario. Little social consensus remains, and even the self-proclaimed leaders among academics and social scientists are deeply divided.² Far more tragic, parents often cannot (and sometimes should not) look to their own parents for guidance. The confusion and failures of parents now spans generations, and the proven model of maturity is fading from modern memory.

Fortunately God provides us with a clear and simple path to maturity. It is a process:

1. To move away from immature demands that others meet our needs.
2. To become capable of providing for our own needs.
3. Finally, developing a surplus to give in sacrificial love.

Paul captures this process of growth in one verse:

He who steals must steal no longer; but rather he must labor, performing with his own hands what is good, so that he will have something to share with one who has need. Ephesians 4:28 (NASB)

“He who steals” accurately describes demanding Infantiles. The solution? “Steal no longer!” Infantiles may not feel their demands are thievery, but that is what God calls it, pure and simple. (Read “Steal No Longer” which is someone’s blog about employing this principle, and how to win.)

It means the demands must stop! This is not optional. It is a timeless, culturally-agnostic fact of human genetics that until “he will have something to share with one who has need,” the Infantile lives in a cauldron of seething emotional turmoil. Demands will not satisfy long-term emotional needs.

The Furnace of Present Love Feelings

The modern child-centered home and the influence of the “Self Esteem” movement is producing a new social phenomenon where childhood extends far beyond the age of 18.³ It means a population of “adult kids” is forming. It is a subculture with a consensus that further perpetrates Infantile demands. Their propaganda is seeded in the media, movies and TV sitcoms.

This new Infantile subculture is a furnace of super-heated emotional needs. As Infantile meets Infantile, expectations crash against demands, and when relationships crumble they fall back to one conviction: I was betrayed! The furnace intensifies with loneliness and heartbreak, but the Infantile is oblivious to the obvious problem: the problem is me!

Often our response is not repentance. Many move into self-protection. “I can’t be wrong. It is the world that is wrong!” ::bibtex(Ankenman-Approach2,Ankenman - Biblical Approach part 2)::

Parents were the first to stoke the furnace of Infantile demands. In a safe and loving home, kids were provided Present Love Feelings that met their emotional needs. Growing up in the center of the universe, the child charges into the world with confidence, feeling loved, supported, and completely ungrateful.

The goal for parenting is not to make kids feel loved. Nowhere in scripture can we find such an injunction. We don’t mean to say that parents shouldn’t make their kids feel loved, but we are saying this isn’t the goal of parenting. Many parents would agree, yet because it’s the easiest way to make someone feel loved, pumping out the Present Love Feelings ends up becoming a parent’s default effort. “Soccer Moms” and minivan families lavish such a wealth of Present Love Feelings on the kids, but these are all modern behaviors and part of the modern confusion about maturity.

Leaving home, these kids thrive on a reservoir of Present Love Feelings which fuel their spirited dreams of conquest. But a latent emotional bomb lies beneath the surface: unable to create healthy relationships, these young adults suffer painfully in their quest to refill Present Love Feelings. Usually the bomb explodes after the collapse of a few random romances.

Without emotional fuel people cannot function for long. The hidden bomb explodes in a cloud of emotional instability which can deal crippling blows to the body’s chemistry, its immune system and large array of crippling maladies, as research has demonstrated (see Loneliness). These young adults become new patients at Dr. Ankenman’s clinic, crippled with emotional distress:

Every emotionally unhappy person in the world works from the perspective that says, “love has to come to me.” The final cure of the emotionally-upset person is learning to give love. ::bibtex(Ankenman-Approach2,Ankenman - Biblical Approach part 2)::

The problem for parents is one of investment.

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1. See Raising Infantiles for more about the Baby-boomer parenting phenomena and the sensational results in Millennials documented by 60 Minutes and others. [⇑]
2. See ::bibtex(Seligman-Forum,Seligman)::. [⇑]
3. See ::bibtex(Safer-Millenials,Safer-Millenials)::. [⇑]

Children are insignificant, despite the parental instincts that tell us otherwise. Children are also and weak and incompetent, so they need protection. Except for their potential to become adults, a child has little significance. But if a child never matures, even their potential significance is never realized, and the result is something we call an Infantile.

The Infantile offers little contribution to others. Nobody really likes an Infantile for very long. An adult who acts like a child is a most loathsome and boring creature. Like leeches or children in a schoolyard, Infantiles seize and take and demand from others.

Emotionally, Infantiles offer very little love. Yes, they feel love, but like children they don’t understand what love really is, and they certainly have no idea how it works. Parents get confused about this as well, believing their child is loving when actually the child only reflects the parent’s love.

One of the most heartbreaking experiences of parenthood is to love a child who later does not love in return. Parents with young children can hardly conceive that one day this child may in fact hate them, and it’s a mystery how that could possibly happen, but it’s simple: it happens because the child never understood love in the first place!

Infantiles can be Punks and Sissies who come from loving Tribes (tribal homes), full of idealistic zeal and high expectations in life. Not surprisingly, they soon run afoul of the opposition and disappointment in the real world. First they try to demand the love and respect they want from their brave, new world away from home, but eventually they run back to their Tribe where their Love Demands have a more sympathetic audience.

Parental Concerns

Parents are broken-hearted by the suffering of their poor, abused Punks and Sissies, so they surrender to those Love Demands at home. Is it weakness on the parent’s part, or a God-given, natural desire?

As loving parents our hearts ache to provide shelter and placate our distressed children. We’ve been doing that since birth, after all, and how painful it is to give up those tender mercies, especially watching the child suffer…

But until we teach those kids thankfulness, their Love Demands are perpetuated. As caring parents we inadvertently set them up for more painful defeats. Punks and Sissies walk out of the house thinking what hot stuff they are. Without thankfulness, they learn to get love feelings by demanding them.

Instead, parents should stop their kids from demanding love. In a sense,

“Children should be afraid of their parents, to an extent - this is a sane view of the world. It is a scary world, where stronger people exist.” Ankenman-Interview

Parents can always rebuild their kid’s shattered lives, but only in a superficial and temporary way. What parents can’t do forever is build significance into their kid’s lives.

Christians know the secular culture is a threat for children. Earlier we studied how Tribal Christian homes become castles of retreat. While the Christian Tribe furiously builds and expands its small domain through career-paths, house-building, car-care, the kids’ education — and fighting a mountain of bills — sadly, the kids are fleeing the Christian Tribe in unprecedented numbers.

Tribal Christians are actually retreating straight into the enemy’s arms! Christian parents may denounce secular values but still miss the actual menace thriving in their living rooms: materialism. The unadvertised side-effect of a plush and materialistic culture is an emerging generation that never understands how to “act like men.” Maturity should bring competency, strength, and a welcome contribution to the family’s future, but the Millennial Generation emerging from prosperity is so immature that social scientists are pushing “the age of adulthood” into the mid-20′s and even older.¹

Baby Boomer Infantiles

Consider the drift of modern history: Baby Boomers marked the first generation in America which could afford to cast aside the fear of poverty and the horrible wars known by their parents and ancestors. The Great Depression Generation knew poverty. The World War II Generation knew wartime sacrifice. The Baby Boomers knew neither, and they passed neither on to their progeny.

Boomers could afford the luxury to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” as Dr. Leery once declared. The mud-wrestling scenes from Woodstock depict an ocean of Infantiles wallowing in self-indulgence? Contrast the rich kids at Woodstock against the sacrificial character prevalent in the WWII generation:

“Each week I took my paycheck, bought the food I needed, and bought War Bonds with the rest. It was my duty. Everyone knew it and did the same.”

As a historian, Ken Burns produced his WWII documentary precisely because he knew the maturity and sacrifice so prevalent in that age was fading from memory.²

Just a few of the many ways the WWII generation practiced unhesitating sacrifice. Would these posters work on the Millennial Generation? Pictures from the Library of Congress and PBS.org.

Naive Yuppie Parenting

Boomers fell prey to the poison of revolving the household around their kids. The American family is dominated by the fast-paced hustle and bustle of clubs, sports, arts and other lessons. All of these activities are splendid endeavors, but something is dreadfully wrong: where do the children learn sacrificial love for others? More to the point, how do children develop the character to love? Parents measure their kids’ progress by focusing on academics, but such achievements alone only teach kids they are the great princes and princesses they know themselves to be.

The family faces greater threats than ever in history. The modern family is severed from its historical roots with its single-parent homes, multiple-marriage homes, same-sex-parent homes and other radical upheavals.

But most confusing is the change in roles for children in the family. Children once assumed a helpful role and were vital contributors with chores and the family welfare. Fights erupted and jealousies flared, but still the older kids by necessity cared for the younger ones. They cooked and fed and led someone other than themselves, and they expected the same from their siblings. Of course, families were larger and required greater cooperation. The 2.5 kids of the modern family pursue more personal priorities with little use for each other. Siblings are obstacles in the Yuppie household.

The child-centered Yuppie home is a novelty. Parents believe that enough loving attention and investment will launch children into adulthood, but the opposite is true. All the coddling and fussing produces Insignificant Infantiles who make unrealistic demands on the world around them:

Zaslow says that the coddling virus continues to eat away even when junior goes off to college. “I heard from several professors who said, a student will come up after class and say, ‘I don’t like my grade, and my mom wants to talk to you, here’s the phone,’” he says. “And the students think it’s like a service. ‘I deserve an A because I’m paying for it. What are you giving me a C for?’”
- Safer-Millennials

Infantiles are incapable of building their own significance, so they demand it from others. They learned this pattern at home. Without significant roles in the family, where do kids fit? All the income is generated somewhere outside the home. Kids are left idle and bored and turn to Gameboys or television. Some families keep the children busy with self-improvement activities in sports, arts, hobbies and academic achievement.

What emerges is the Millennials, and they are a pampered royalty in search of a kingdom to rule.

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1. From bibtex:Safer-Millenials: “Sociologists tell us most Americans believe adulthood begins at 26 or older and that having witnessed so many sacrifices by their parents to achieve middle class security has had a huge impact. [⇑]
2. Burns-Civic Center speech in Cleveland. [⇑]

The Flash

It happened in a remote desert in the American West. The vast desert was suffocated in nighttime silence and the darkness was blinding from rare clouds that smothered the stars like an evil presence. In the center of this wasteland stood a handful of men waiting silently but fidgeting or smoking. They were an elite group of scientists gathered from distant countries and gathered in this one spot in New Mexico. Years of theoretical calculations and engineering led to this moment of testing the world’s most expensive science. The budget surpassed the entire automobile industry, but it was still just a theory costing billions.

A gong shattered the silence from somewhere in the desert, and then silence fell again. Five more minutes. Dawn was an hour away, and they were exhausted but still tense and dreadful. Everyone knew this moment could split open a world inconceivable in human experience, but nobody could think of anything to say.

Then it happened: light filled the desert sky from horizon to horizon, far more brilliant than sunlight and it caramelized sand in 100-million-degree heat and the brightest light ever seen on earth. It would sear their eyes to the socket if not for thick welder glasses. Some girls in Hiroshima would soon be caught off-guard gazing with naked eyes at a silver dot gliding across the sky called the Enola Gay. That one American bomber unleashed more explosive power than a fleet of thousands.

The fuel of stars. They called it Trinity, where the first atomic bomb unleashed a dragon’s breath of heat bound inside the atom. The flash towered in a mushroom of purplish, dark radioactivity. The brilliance faded and a windstorm rolled across the desert and blasted the scientists, then passed. It was silent again, but not dark.

“I am death,” someone uttered, “the destroyer of worlds.” His name was Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist at Las Alamos where they built The Bomb in secrecy. Like many of the scientists he was a pacifist and a humanitarian never dreaming of unleashing atomic fire against men, women and children—but they did it at Hiroshima and again at Nagasaki.

A horrified Japanese emperor declared unconditional surrender, and then America faced the new world of atomic energy with ominous implications. This is when Dr. Oppenheimer and the other scientists suddenly grew fearful of the future:

Before we opened the door to this horrifying new world in which we live today, we should have knocked. But we have chosen to fall into the house together with the door. - J. Robert Oppenheimer, Atomic Energy Commission hearings^1^

The Quest

The “Father of the Atomic Bomb” grew to despise his title, but while isolated in Los Alamos he energized the scientists to work feverishly on The Bomb. After the war the public gasped at the beast he created, and Oppenheimer reversed course: the rest of his life was devoted to stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as if he could stuff the genie back into the bottle.

Why the inconsistency? As early as 1942 Oppenheimer was aware of the Hydrogen bomb and its near-infinite capacity for destruction, but he pressed forward and soothed squeamish scientists afraid of the implications. In the self-contained world of Las Alamos he thrived in his role as “Father of the Atomic Bomb.” It all made perfect sense.

Oppenheimer’s famous and confused life depicts The Quest: a lifetime struggling for significance. In Las Alamos he was The King, crowned with significance. Outside Las Alamos he fought for years against the misinterpretations and aspersions the public cast against him for The Bomb. He tried reaching for higher peaks of greatness, and became the first chairman of the new Atomic Energy Commission. From that platform he launched an effort to steer world powers and direct the future of mankind through international control of nuclear weapons. But from such lofty heights he also made political enemies, and they rallied and finally denounced him as a communist sympathizer during the “Red Scare” of the McCarthy era. The accusation was absurd, but reason and justice rarely prevail in such times.

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