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.

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

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. [⇑]

Tribalism begins with such promise and a strong foundation, but it always ends in ruin apart from His design. It is worthwhile to consider God’s design for this concept of a “Tribe,” and where it should lead, before addressing the problems in today’s Tribe.

 Dynasties

God is the one who first created the concept of the loving, supportive Tribe when He created us in His image:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it…” - Genesis 1:26–28

The Tribe is anchored in a secure, loving relationship called marriage. God created male and female and marriage when He said, “Let us make man in our image,” and together these reflect God’s capacity for intimacy. It means God anointed the human experience with the most amazing, transforming power called love, and its impact spread across the globe: “Fill the earth, and subdue it!”

The core strength of the human race is not merely its ability to multiply—animals do that—but to form intimate relationships which multiply and form the social networks which gives humanity its dominating power over all creation on earth. This is a Tribe, in essence, and its design is in our genes. It’s not limited to the nuclear family, as it’s called, because the ability to “be fruitful and multiply” means larger, widening circles of influence which grow and grow, like ripples from a splash, reaching far beyond the nuclear family into the outside world. That’s God’s intention.

God designed us with three awesome privileges, then: the capacity to love, the authority to create new life, and the power to subdue the world. All of these demonstrate the primacy of love, and it’s built into our basic design and purpose as humans. Through the love in marriage, humans multiply. From the love in the family, humans build social networks, and as a society of relationships, mankind rules creation. When God’s love prevails in relationships, when relationships work as designed, the sovereignty of mankind produces a benevolent and powerful race of rulers.

Dynasty is a more appropriate term for God’s design. “Tribe” is so trite, yet it describes the cheap imitation we build today in our primitive, fallen state. Simply put, Tribes are depraved. The Tribe we grew up in is stripped of the glory and dignity that only comes when people unite under God’s love.

God has not abandoned us to our depraved, tribal experience, however. When He died on the cross for us, He made it possible again for humans to enter the joy and strength of His love through the forgiveness of sins, and through His love we can rediscover His design for humans: to form Dynasties. Thus:

The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him. - Romans 8:16–17

What a tragedy it is for Christians to continue living in a tiny little tribal world, when God is at work raising Dynasties!

This is not a change in behavior. It’s a whole change of life, and it’s quite within reach! A Christian has the spiritual power and godly authority to get out from under the gloom and weight of the Tribe, and the insight to become God’s agent for changing the Tribe into the Dynasty He created us to inherit. It should be tremendously liberating for any Christian to enter the old Tribe with this godly view leading the way.

Permanent Love Values

It’s a marvelous design, because in our Tribal experience we form Permanent Love Values which deeply affect our lives and provide a solid platform for launching great endeavors. These Permanent Love Values provide safety for infants, then training and discipline for kids, and finally a reference-point for young adults to marry and launch new families.

This process to “be fruitful and multiply” is inherently relational, not a system or method or institution as humans are so skilled at building. Powerful cultures will collapse despite spectacular technologies and wealth, but always, always humans have survived despite the most harsh circumstances if their Tribe is strong. That’s the power of love: “fill the earth, and subdue it!”

We intuitively know how vital it is to build a stable home, and yet the bulk of our time, energy and focus is fixed on busy careers and personal achievements in the American lifestyle. The Work Subs will spend far more time fixing up the crazy house than investing in those living inside the house! It’s a crazy thing, but I bought a house in excellent condition from a young, industrious couple who owned it for only six months and got divorced. As I inspected the house it was evident they poured tremendous resource into fixing it up, and they took a bath in financial loss. What’s the use? A beautiful house can’t repress the hatred inside!

People desperately need Permanent Love Values to live victoriously and sustain the pressures of life:

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” — which is the first commandment with a promise—”that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” - Ephesians 6:1–3

Even in adulthood the experience of going home for the holidays and spending time with the Tribe should be deeply refreshing, far different from the experience of going to an office party or bar, because no matter how exciting or fun it is, those places do not have Permanent Love Values. As humans we need Permanent Love Values in order to function and face the pressures from subduing the earth. Interestingly, we don’t need an office party in order to function.

Fallen Dynasties

Living in rebellion against God has greatly deteriorated the glory of human relationships. Selfishness, lust, anger, quarrels and many other fruits of rebellion have replaced the love of God at the center of our family experience, so the relationships break down. Dynasties have splintered into primitive Tribes. And everywhere social contact is marked by war. Tribes conquer tribes, and people fight inside tribes. Love as we know it today is a series of heartbreaks as relationships splinter.

But splintering of relationships is more hideous than simple heartbreak: we still retain all the purpose in the original design. God did not grant us those privileges and authority so tentatively. Continue Reading »

Defensive Spirituality creates a small, little world which feels warm and loving, but what a tragic deception it is. It’s a well-ordered world with high fences to shut out confusion and unpredictability from aliens, but it’s a fragile fortress. This is not the power of God at work here. Rather, it’s a primitive lifestyle forming close-knit Tribes with shared views.

It’s a good life for children, because the Tribe provides security and identity. Without the Tribe, the young and vulnerable are unprotected. These simple minds perceive the world in black-and-white terms, and the Tribe is simple enough to understand. Within these confined walls, love works. The customs and quirks of tribal life provide warm and familiar memories of a place where people lived with purpose and belonging, and the Tribe is glorified in songs and dance, stories, festivals and art, so teenagers who once despised their tribal roots grow nostalgic in adulthood and try to reproduce it.

But Tribal love is also primitive and immature. The social contracts are clear, with little argument. Relationships work inside the Tribe because it’s bound together by an authority which can be quite overbearing and stifling. Its harmony and safety trigger deep feelings of love, but it’s a superficial love, not God’s love: choices are minimized, the harmony is actually conformity, and the love is extended with countless conditions attached.

When older Tribal members continue to live and love by these simplistic rules, the Tribe is in tremendous peril. It means nobody in the Tribe can interact confidently with the outside world, and so the Tribe is perpetually vulnerable and naive. Sooner or later outsiders will intrude and upset the equilibrium of the Tribe, throwing relationships into disarray and exposing the weak foundation of the community.

Christian Tribalism

American Christianity is notoriously tribal and exclusive: what Francis Schaeffer labeled a “Christian ghetto” impoverished by cultural ignorance. The latter half of the 20th century witnessed the rise of a theology new to American Evangelicalism called “Personal Peace and Prosperity” or just “Health and Wealth”, and it produced a widespread basis for Tribal love among Christians. Today Christianity is known more for its “family values” like the Mormon church than its concern and love for outsiders. “The centrality of the family to all social and political life” has pushed aside the centrality of the Kingdom of God as taught by Christ.¹

Because Tribal love is so immature and weak, it cannot effectively penetrate the non-Christian world. Is anyone surprised that 90 percent of Evangelicals have never brought a non-Christian to church? This hardly reflects the love practiced in the early Christian church:

For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith toward God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything. - 1 Thessalonians 1:8

Tribal Christians are just too frightened to share their faith because they’re too frightened by aliens and outsiders. Defensive Spirituality produces a flabby, overweight character unfamiliar with suffering and too preoccupied to the point of obsession with the Tribe’s welfare, but it backfires: rather than protecting the Tribe, immature Tribal love exposes the Tribe to real dangers from outsiders. Continue Reading »