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"Train Up a Tomato, Mule or Whale?": Returning God's Glory to Parenting
We have yet another chance to train our children as others train animals! We can already learn to "train up a child" the way the Amish train their mules. We have parenting writers teaching us to train our children as dogs are trained. There's even a website and a book that promises to teach you to raise godly children like you grow tomatoes. ( www.raisinggodlytomatoes.com). To this illustrious list, we can now add, "You too can train your children like Seaworld workers train killer whales!" The name of this illustrious book? "Whale Done Parenting." I'm not kidding.
Why do we resort to the training methods used on pets, mules, garden produce and now Seaworld whales to raise our children?
Because, for some reason, we seem to still subscribe to behaviorism. Remember the idea of the arriving child as a tabula rasa, upon which you could scrawl any sort of prophetic design upon the chalk-white mind of your child---and it would come true? The old proverb, "As the twig is bent, so grows the branch" can still be heard, as well as, "The apple never falls far from the tree," both good tenets of determinism---but, thank God! not very biblical.
We can get a taste for behaviorism through one of its most popular adherents, John B. Watson, a well-known psychologist at Johns Hopkins. Listen to the evangelistic zeal and heady empowerment of behaviorism---which teaches that it is purely nurture, the environment a child is raised in that determines his and her outcome. In 1924 Watson famously claimed that if he were given twelve healthy babies and complete control over their environment, he could "guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chef & yes, even beggar & thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."
We know why we all vote for nurture over nature. We really do want to be in control of our children and who they become. Or---we think we do. Remember the proverb, probably the most quoted verse in the Scriptures for parents: Pro. 22:6 "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it." This seems to hold the very same promise as behaviorism; the very same authority and outcomes as the tomato-stakers and animal trainers: if you just do it right, then you'll get the outcome you want---happy, obedient, godly children. (The significant downside, which many believing parents are living with today, is that if or when children do turn away, the fault then is, yes, exactly, precisely yours.)
But we misread the proverb. This proverb is not a promise, nor are any of the proverbs. They are wisdom statements that are generally true,but with many exceptions. The writer of that proverb, believed to be Solomon himself, is just such an exception to the words he himself penned: he did indeed in his old age depart from the godly ways taught by his father David.
It's this belief that if we can only get a system, a formula, a model that nails this just-right kind of training, we've got the cat in the bag, that is the kids in the garden growing fat and juicy, in the harness, pulling the wagon, at our feet sitting at our commands like a dutiful pet, and now, obediently leaping for fish in the pool like Shamu.
Here's my short answer to this well-intended but misguided thinking. Our children are too wondrously and fearfully made to be reduced to animal training. They wear the fingerprints of a God who delights in His own creativity, poured out in a nearly infinite variety of faces and personalities, giftings, temperaments, minds, spirits. Don't we know this, how incredibly unique and complex each one of our children is? "Glory be to God for dappled things" Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote exultantly in his famous poem. Glory be to God for dappled children, I add,
"for all things counter, original, spare, strange,
whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
He has fathered forth our children, each one indeed "counter, original, spare, strange," marked by God's unmistakable glory. Let us celebrate God's infinite variety and glory, and cease using behaviorism and sure-fire one-size-fits all methods to train our children. Parenting, like all other endeavors under the sun, is intended as an endeavor of love, risk, perseverance, and above all faith. It is faith rather than formula, grace rather than guarantees, trust rather than "training" that bridges the span between our own parenting efforts and who, by God's grace, our children grow up to become.
 
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