Latest / The Catholic Current / Modern Parenting: Success or Failure? (Jonathan Rothwell) 5/5/26

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Modern Parenting: Success or Failure? (Jonathan Rothwell) 5/5/26 · The Catholic Current

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This is The Catholic Current with Father Robert Metaig.
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What advice can you give for parents for forming kids to have a habit of sacramental confession?
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Those of us that grew up in the 80s will remember the commercial in which a parent confronts
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Parents who go to confession will have children who go to confession.
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In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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Amen.
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Well, friends, I suppose it's a truism that in every generation some grouchy old man like
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me is muttering, kids these days.
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But I think there's something more to it these days.
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There's something going on that's not quite right that I'm starting to find alarming.
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And I wanted to say, is it just me or is there something else going on?
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And my guest, I think, is going to help us to answer that question.
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He is Principal Economist at Gallup and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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He's the author of a forthcoming book called Why Modern Children Need Ancient Parenting.
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And he's published an article called The Parenting Trap, How Modern Parenting is Making Adolescents
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Harder.
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Jonathan Rothmo, welcome to The Catholic Current.
1:54
Thank you so much for having me.
1:56
Jonathan, I hear a lot of things, I talk to a lot of parents, I observe trends.
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And there just seems to be a dissolution, a despair, a disposition towards violence
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and disorder that I didn't see when I was growing up.
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I think things are, you know, it's always hard to raise kids, obviously.
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But I think things are unraveling with an intensity that I haven't seen before.
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Am I just looking in the wrong places or am I spotting a trend?
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Well, there's definitely something there.
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So I would say on the disorder, crime, teen pregnancies, drug use, the news is actually
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favorable.
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Okay.
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Those are sometimes called externalizing disorders or conditions.
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US teens are doing better on those sorts of dimensions, which is especially strange when
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you contrast that with the internal disorders of depression, anxiety, and the manifestations
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of those as sometimes happens with suicidal thoughts and actual behavior.
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Those trends are alarmingly bad.
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Just to give a few examples, about one out of five US adolescents report symptoms of
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generalized anxiety disorder within the past two weeks.
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Nearly the same have experienced symptoms of major depression over the last year.
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The US suicide rate is at or near record highs within the last five years, and this is a
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trend that has gone all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century.
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We have never seen suicide rates among teenagers this high.
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And that to me, coming from an economics background, is really baffling when you consider how much
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materially richer, how much more educated we are.
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Those are the things that were sort of promised to us as sort of pathways to well-being, and
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yet we're struggling so much with these very important aspects of mental health when we're
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at our richest state in history.
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I had a friend who was an infirmary medic, Catholic boy, summer camp, some years back.
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And he said when he started 25 years ago, he would have maybe two or three boys who
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had to take, say, allergy medicines, for example, as they're out in the woods, and
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he kept that in a tackle box on the trunk of his car.
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Twenty years later, he had to get a trailer to keep all of the meds for all of the boys
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because nearly all of them were on some kind of psychotropics of one kind or another.
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What does that suggest to you?
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It suggests to me an increasing fragility in the mental health and psychological disposition
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of youth today.
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And I think there's, yeah, there's a lot more.
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Yeah, I was going to say, and then.
4:52
Yeah.
4:53
So, one of my favorite insights that I think I've found over the last few years of researching
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this that I'm going to mention in my book and hopefully publish an academic article
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is that youth who identify with the classic cardinal virtues, justice, courage, wisdom,
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and self-control, when they say they exhibit these and it's part of their personality,
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their mental health problems are much, much lower.
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Kids who identify with those virtues just do not suffer from depression and anxiety.
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They don't consider suicide.
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And what I've also found is that parents who explicitly cultivate those virtues have
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children who exhibit them.
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And so, that chain of reasoning leads me back, well, are parents not cultivating those virtues
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as much as they used to?
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And I think there is evidence that they're not, but it's all indirect.
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But we do know that the governance aspects of parenting, which are broadly could be construed
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as demanding this involving not just discipline and punishment, but moral cultivation.
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There's some strong evidence that these have been declining over generations.
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Well, you know, an anecdote that I've told often is I was at a coffee shop at a tourist
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area and there was a very long line out the door of people getting off the bus to get
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some coffee and two moms were talking and this little girl stomped in, walloped her
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mother in the abdomen and said, let's go, and pulled her mother out of the line.
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And that woman, rather than addressing the issue with her child, turned to her maternal
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companion and just whispered the word, sorry, and went off.
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And part of me wanted to say, hey, do you think that's going to get easier once she's
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an adolescent?
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I mean, that sort of event was absolutely inconceivable to me when I was, it was unintelligible.
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I'd never heard of a similar story, 14th hand.
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What things are missing now that were present, say, in my life?
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Well, one thing that is increasingly missing is a religious foundation to parenting.
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And this is something that's happened somewhat recently.
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I'm going to take a quick detour into what's called the great demographic transition by
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demographers.
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Okay.
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Because starting in the 19th century, people started having fewer children.
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And this was largely an outgrowth of modernization according to scholars.
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So you can imagine how this might work.
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We lived in largely in villages that were primarily focused on agricultural production
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up until the 20th century.
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We knew our neighbors, we lived near our kin, and we were all religious, everybody was religious
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all around the world.
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And then with modernization, economic growth, many people moved to cities, took up new jobs
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in the service sector, professional jobs, etc.
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And we're less exposed to kin, and the cost of raising children skyrockets because we're
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investing in their future professional skills and no longer having them work with us on
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the farm or working with us in the shops, learning a trade.
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And so, people start having fewer children.
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Now this is all very well documented and factual, but the cultural implications of this, I think,
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have yet to be fully understood, but we're just starting to grapple with them.
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We saw, starting around 1970s, worldwide declines in marriage rates, and that's when religions
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really started to decline as well in terms of percentage of people who identify with
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the religion.
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In the United States, it's really sort of skyrocketed in the 21st century, with now
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roughly around somewhere between a fourth and a fifth of parents not identifying with
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any religion.
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And then that's roughly the same share, it's not all the same people who are struggling
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with major mental illnesses.
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But I think what's important with the religious thing, not that religion is the only way to
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become a good parent, and only religious parents are good parents, but they are significantly
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more likely to take on the traditional ways of teaching and raising children, which entails
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a strong focus on governance and discipline, and an intolerance for the sorts of hitting
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and bad behavior that you just mentioned in your example.
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When I talk to parents through some qualitative research that come from less modern cultural
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backgrounds, so immigrants from Africa, for example, they still say that the way they
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were raised and the way their children are being raised back home in Africa is consistent
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with the way that Americans were raised in the early 20th century, where that sort of
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behavior is not tolerated.
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So, there seems to be something about exposure to modern culture, declining religiosity,
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a declining focus on family, and a declining authority ascribed to parents.
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I have found it's—I would interject for a moment, please, as we come up on our break.
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As someone who's taught ethics and moral theory for many years, if you don't have
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a moral compass, if you don't have any sense of a map at all, there really isn't that
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much guidance that you can give.
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And one of the questions I would ask my students as we'd evaluate a policy is, are we building
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a moral house in which we would want to live?
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And as I see the profound unhappiness and dysfunction of a lot of younger people, I
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say, I don't think we're doing it.
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I don't think this is how we build into the future, and I think that the accelerant
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for this dysfunctional process may be technology, which is what I want to talk about in the
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next segment.
11:01
Friends, we come back and continue our conversation with Jonathan Rothwell, distinguished scholar
11:06
with Gallup and the Brookings Institution.
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We're talking about parenting, its stresses, successors, its failures, and what we might
11:13
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We're talking about modern parenting today, where it's succeeding, where it's failing.
13:30
And my guest is Jonathan Rothwell.
13:33
He's with Gallup and the Brookings Institution.
13:36
Jonathan, a friend of mine told me an unsettling story.
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She's got a daughter who's 14, 15.
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I've met her.
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A really great kid.
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And the mom said to the daughter, sweetie, you have to put your phone down when I'm talking
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to you.
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And her daughter said, yes, mom, I'll put the phone down.
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But can I leave it where I can still see it?
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I found that rather arresting.
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What do you make of that?
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And I'm sure that child is not unique.
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What do you make of this trend?
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Well, it's a good illustration of something that's happening at quite a grand scale at
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the moment.
14:09
So we know that smartphones and social media apps have quasi-addictive properties.
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There's been very good experiments done by researchers at Stanford University, for example,
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Hunt Alcott and his colleagues, that have randomly assigned groups of young adults to
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conditions where they essentially can't use their phone as much as they would like to
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because the phone will, say, shut down after a certain hours of use that they agreed to
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in advance through some app that they install on their phone.
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And what they found is that reduced pretty dramatically when they compared that group
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to the control group, the amount of time used.
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And what they were able to decipher is that adults waste about an hour a day on social
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media that they don't even want to be spending.
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And it's probably even worse for adolescents.
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In a survey that my colleagues and I at Gallup conducted recently, we found that the average
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U.S. adolescent spends five hours a day or more on social media.
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And this is, I think by any way of looking at it from sort of a common sense point of
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view, is going to strike most people as too much.
15:26
And we know that if they're spending that amount of time on social media, they're certainly
15:32
sacrificing time that they could be spending doing a whole range of activities that most
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of us would consider to be more beneficial.
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Plus, there's the additional aspect, and this is something that Dr. Leonard Sachs has raised
15:45
in his concerns with social media, and I agree with him.
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Also Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have mentioned a lot of these concerns.
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There are some troubling cultural aspects in terms of the exposure to the actual content
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on social media.
15:59
It's quite well documented, for example, that adolescents with Instagram accounts are exposed
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to things like nudity, all sorts of toxic and potentially harmful images and content,
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whether it be about politics or topics that really children shouldn't be exposed to.
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And then there's just the overall vapidity of much of the content where influencers are
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competing with each other to draw attention through a whole range of things, some of which
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is quite harmless.
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I let my young children watch exercise videos on YouTube, for example, when they're home
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There's also some helpful learning apps and videos that they can watch on various topics.
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But if they're not supervised and they're allowed to do essentially whatever they want,
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it's very much like letting them loose in an adult bar or place where drugs are being sold.
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There's all sorts of trouble that they can get themselves into in terms of what they're exposed to.
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You mentioned stalkers and bromine and all that, too.
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Exactly, all that sort of thing.
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And then it becomes somewhat addictive because the algorithms are designed to promote engagement,
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and there's many tools and tricks that the companies use to promote engagement
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because they get more ad money.
17:29
So, adding all that up, there is a consistently negative relationship between time used
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on social media and youth mental health.
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I would characterize it still as a small effect relative to, say, other important things in a youth's life.
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So, it's very small relative to the quality of the parent-child relationship.
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It's very small relative to the parenting practices that are being done.
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But yet, it's one other threat that modern societies have brought or put before children
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that is undermining their overall mental health and well-being.
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You know, I've taught medical ethics for many years,
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and we did some research on neurology and pornography in teens and so on.
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And just from a physiological point of view,
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there is nothing in the male brain that facilitates resisting the images and influences
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of streaming video and pornography in particular.
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And so, we've taught kids about stranger danger,
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and don't get in the man's van, the windowless van with the duct tape on the dashboard.
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But there hasn't been much discussion of stranger danger,
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but who you let into your home through your Wi-Fi.
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Is it that parents don't know, or are they addicted themselves?
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What do you think is going on with parents in this case?
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I think it's a combination of both of those things.
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So, the technologies were very new, and they're just a few years ago.
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And the apps are novel and are being replaced every few years.
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So, there's a new app that most of us haven't heard of that is the new hot app every year or so.
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And so, parents are always a little bit lagging behind
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in terms of the information they have about these things.
19:25
I think through the efforts of many activists in this space,
19:30
there's the message that there should be more guidance from parents,
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more authority asserted from parents, as well as from schools,
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in terms of regulating social media use is finally taking hold.
19:42
More schools are banning them during the school day, for example.
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But what I found in my survey just about a year ago
19:49
is that only about 30% of parents of adolescents in the United States
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are saying that they regulate screen time for their teenagers.
20:00
And I thought that was incredibly low.
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I've got four children myself, and the idea of not regulating screen time
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just sounded insane to me, because my expression of the littlest ones,
20:14
the older ones are now at a point where I don't need to
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because I did it when they were younger, and they make good decisions now on their own.
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But for the littlest ones, they would spend hours and hours
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looking at YouTube videos and engaging with various apps and devices if I let them.
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And so, it's very disturbing.
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So, it takes us back to what I was saying at the top of the show,
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is that it's further evidence that the demanding aspects of parenting are in the decline.
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Because what we find is that parents who focus on the governance of their child
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or who tend to be more successful with enforcement of rules about other aspects of life
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are the very same parents who are regulating screen time and limiting their child's action.
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I remember I was at an airport, and one of the things,
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there used to be a time where you'd buy a magazine or a novel to kill time in the airport lobby,
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and now everyone of every age is locked into their device.
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But I remember seeing a mom and a toddler, and they were sitting back-to-back to each other,
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each one locked in our own device,
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and I said they were so lost in their devices that one or the other could have disappeared,
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and the other one wouldn't have noticed for an hour.
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Are parents being poor role models in relation to electronic devices these days?
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I think that's probably fair to say.
21:51
Before these sorts of things became popular,
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I would have been reading a tangible book or magazine on the airport.
21:59
Now, most of the entertainment that I spend myself is either reading a book on my Kindle, on my phone,
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or listening to an audible book, or sometimes watching a movie on Netflix or on the plane.
22:13
All these things are using the screen. Everything is now put on the screen, all the things we used to do.
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So it's very hard for parents to say,
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oh no, you can't use your screen, but mommy or daddy can use their screen.
22:24
Right.
22:25
The way to get around it, I think, is to go back to older forms of entertaining children.
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Now, I think when they are traveling, you're out of the routine.
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I think it might make sense to increase screen time during those times,
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because there's not a lot of other things the kid can be doing.
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You don't want the kid trying to run around the plane, for example, and bother people.
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No.
22:51
But there are alternatives.
22:53
There are card games, various travel board games.
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There are certainly toys that can be brought on planes and taken out to engage toddlers.
23:05
So all those sorts of things, I think, are wonderful alternatives and still certainly available.
23:12
And if you've got multiple siblings, as I do, it's very rewarding to see them playing, say, a card game together,
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rather than just all watching their own individual program.
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We can talk about this more in the next segment, because we're coming up on the break.
23:29
But I've seen research that uses the language of addiction regarding younger kids and their devices
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and kids being deprived of their devices, showing signs of withdrawal that can lead to despair and anxiety and violence and so on.
23:51
And it just makes me wonder why we aren't talking more about this.
23:56
And certainly teachers I know in public schools at every grade say that the bane of their existence is the kid's phone,
24:04
because the kid's just zoned out.
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I remember I was a guest lecturer once, filling in for a friend at a self-identified Catholic college.
24:11
And I had my lecture well prepared and so on.
24:15
And the only person—there were two people who weren't locked in their devices.
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There was one person with bright green hair who was actually taking notes in the front row.
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And the other person didn't have a device, so he just stared sullenly out the window,
24:28
while everybody else acted as if I wasn't there.
24:31
I could have been just background noise or a potted plant.
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And somehow it's part of the—I don't know—the social contract.
24:41
Hey, you pay the university money.
24:43
We absolutely do not care what you do in the classroom as long as the check clears
24:49
and your parents are happy because you're getting the credential that they think is going to lead to your first job
24:55
being at a corner offer in Goldman Sachs.
24:58
And it all just seemed fundamentally dishonest and disrespectful.
25:03
And the idea that you would just visibly tune out a lecturer would have been unthinkable when I was a student.
25:11
It was also unthinkable for most of my teaching career.
25:14
And I'll just point out that I'm not teaching anymore.
25:17
And there's a reason for that.
25:20
When I started interrupting my lecture with the observation,
25:22
this is the part where you write down what I say.
25:25
And at first I was met with bewilderment and later indignation.
25:29
And I knew that I needed to do something different with my time.
25:32
Friends, we come back and continue our conversation with Jonathan Rothwell.
25:35
He's with Gallup and Brookings Institution.
25:37
We're talking about current challenges for parenting success and failures.
25:42
In the next segment, we're going to talk about some best practices that we can recommend.
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My guest today is researcher and author Jonathan Rothwell.
27:30
He's with Gallup and the Brookings Institution, and we're talking about parenting current challenges,
27:37
maybe some best practices as well.
27:40
Jonathan, in your essay in February in AfterBabble, you've got a chart for parenting, if you will, styles,
27:48
you can call them that, mapped out across responsiveness and demandingness.
27:54
And when I saw that, I remember a conversation I had many years ago with a colleague,
27:59
and she said she and her brother were born a year apart, and Mom was very, very strict.
28:05
And 15 years later, another child came along, and she noticed that Mom wasn't strict anymore,
28:12
and asked Mom about that.
28:14
Well, why does Sally get away with murder?
28:16
And she said, Pat, I'm tired.
28:18
And if Sally wants a cookie, it's just easier to give her the whole damn box.
28:25
Given the chart that you have here, which we can only refer to because we're audio only,
28:30
what happened in that context, and what might happen instead?
28:34
Yes, so the demanding aspects of parenting refer to the governance structures broadly,
28:44
so that entails the exercise of authority, the setting up of rules, the enforcement of those rules,
28:52
and the moral cultivation that goes along with basically preparing children to think about people
28:59
other than themselves, and to set aside their own wants and desires.
29:04
And that is absolutely essential for human cooperation, and always has been, I argue.
29:10
That is that very fundamental, important side of parenting that I believe has been in decline,
29:17
but it has been recognized as one of the two essential dimensions of parenting in modern psychological research
29:23
for many decades, going back to the work of psychology leaders like Eleanor McCoby and Diana Baumrein,
29:33
who really developed this literature empirically and theoretically.
29:37
The other aspect of parenting, which is probably even more intuitive, is the responsiveness side
29:44
that relates to the warmth, affection, essentially meeting the needs of the child.
29:51
So in the early stages of life, it's very obvious that the parent needs to be there or the child will die,
29:58
to provide milk, to provide nutrition, to help the child sleep in a comfortable environment,
30:04
to keep the child safe.
30:06
And so those two things have to be in place, and they have to be in place for optimal mental health
30:12
and well-being and flourishing, I think, throughout childhood.
30:16
It's never too late to do the right thing if you find that one dimension is weak,
30:23
and we can all work on improving them.
30:25
I would say, I'd love to talk more about how I see the origins of this approach to parenting
30:35
being kind of traced out in the origins of religion and human anthropology.
30:41
We're just going to have to have you back, because there is lots and lots to talk about as well.
30:50
Some of the more successful parent teams that I've seen is standards are very clear,
30:58
and there's correction in real time.
31:02
It's not like, don't make me get out of this chair.
31:05
I mean it this time, because kids are geniuses at pushing boundaries, pushing limits,
31:13
and they can detect empty threats immediately.
31:17
I want to shift just a little bit.
31:19
Theodore Dalrymple is someone I admire very much.
31:21
He's a psychiatrist, worked in the British prison system at the end of his career,
31:25
and he dealt with a lot of young, very, very violent offenders, including murderers.
31:31
And one thing they all had in common was that they grew up in a household
31:35
where there were never meals together.
31:38
You might have fed at the microwave, but the idea of planning a meal,
31:44
delaying gratification, deferring to the needs and preferences of others,
31:49
and doing something for communal greater good was absolutely not part of their experience at all.
31:58
And he said that could have been a contributor to their violent behavior
32:04
and their inability to interact with people well.
32:08
Do you have any thoughts on that?
32:10
Sounds like a very plausible theory.
32:13
I mean, there are probably some important genetic causes for psycho-mythology
32:19
that would overlap with some of those experiences and manifestations of extreme violent behavior.
32:26
But it's certainly consistent with the theory of the origins of good parenting and the outcomes.
32:34
There are very strong links, I would say roughly comparable to genetics.
32:41
The factor that is most predictive of long-term well-being and mental health,
32:47
not only in adolescence but into adulthood,
32:50
is the quality of the parent-child relationship experienced during childhood.
32:55
And that entails both the demanding and responsive components.
33:00
And if you're not having family meals,
33:04
you're possibly not meeting the needs of the child in terms of providing nutrition on a routine, regular basis.
33:13
Maybe the child is sort of left to his or her own devices to forage for something out of the cabinets.
33:19
And then certainly you're missing on opportunities for moral cultivation
33:24
by not having an adult sit down with a child and insist on not annoying behavior,
33:31
proper behavior of eating a certain way and having polite conversation.
33:35
And that's certainly something that my wife and I work on with our five-year-old.
33:40
And he's gotten increasingly better at it as he's advanced from the early stages of toddlerdom.
33:47
But yeah, those things are the opportunities for the parent to provide discipline and to provide warmth.
33:54
They're both there at the nightly meals and in the other routine aspects of life that I think are important.
34:01
Can you talk some more about the interaction between the demandingness and the responsiveness, please?
34:08
Yeah, so the way I see it broadly is that responsiveness is essentially recognizing the inherent value of the child
34:16
and meeting his or her needs as they arise.
34:20
And attunement to those needs and attunement to the specific personality traits and aspects of the child is part of that.
34:28
And the most successful parents navigate discovering what those needs are and providing for them in a timely fashion.
34:37
To me, I'm less worried about that because I haven't found evidence that that's declined over time.
34:43
I think modern parents are still very affectionate and warm with their children.
34:47
What is more concerning to me is the neglect of the demanding aspects of parenting because that forces the child to look beyond themselves
34:57
to recognize that other people have legitimate needs and desires that are often in conflict with their own.
35:04
And if they're not taught that, they aren't going to discover it properly on their own.
35:12
They'll come to the realization that their needs dominate and deserve to be met regardless of what else is happening.
35:20
And that's where you get situations where if somebody's bored at a lecture, they're not going to tune in because their need for entertainment is not being met.
35:31
The idea that they need to show respect to another person is so far down the list of priorities that it doesn't occur to them.
35:39
And there's many other manifestations when that is weakened.
35:45
And so, the way I see it playing out is in some of these lack of adherence to virtues that I mentioned earlier,
35:54
which I think intersects with a decline in religiosity, a decline in meaning and purpose,
36:01
that unfortunately has been a downside of what is otherwise many wonderful benefits in modern life in terms of wealth, health, and freedom.
36:09
So, yeah, they're definitely intertwined.
36:13
The best parents are both responsive and demanding, and I think it always has been that way from the dawn of humanity.
36:20
Right. I think in a certain sense, human nature I think is actually pretty stable.
36:26
Our environment changes, technology changes it.
36:30
But kids need order. Kids need routine.
36:34
And being a parent, I've observed you have to put the center outside of yourself,
36:41
and you suddenly discover their priority is greater than yours.
36:45
And this is where I think candidly religion emphasizes the reality and worth of a transcendent good,
36:52
in which case, me first isn't compelling.
36:57
It isn't the absolute.
37:00
And I think part of the culture that we're living in is corrosive of that.
37:06
You know, I remember talking to a group of contemplative nuns in a monastery,
37:11
and they were asking me about—somehow they'd heard about this thing called Amazon.
37:15
They weren't sure what it was, and I explained to them.
37:18
And I said, every now and again, Amazon will send me a message and say,
37:22
get yourself a little something.
37:25
And all the nuns nearly fainted that this machine can start whispering to your concupiscence.
37:33
But isn't that the environment that everybody is in these days?
37:39
The beast of the algorithm facilitates self-reference, selfishness.
37:45
Is that the context we're living in?
37:47
And I've just asked you a vast question when there's only about three minutes left in our time today.
37:51
Oh, it's absolutely descriptive of the context we're living in.
37:55
And there have been, I think, some excellent scholarly research on how human culture has changed
38:05
over the last 150 years as a result of modernization.
38:08
And it all points to the same thing, whether scholars are looking at the words used in our published books,
38:16
the content of television shows and movies.
38:20
It all points in the same direction, which is toward the individual,
38:23
and away from collective understandings of goodness,
38:27
away from an orientation toward families, to community,
38:32
and prioritizing self-realization of individual desires and wants.
38:38
And we are exposed to that all the time.
38:43
As you say, not only just in books we decide to read, which are more individually oriented,
38:50
more likely to use personal pronouns than they used to,
38:55
but in the exposure to advertising and many other aspects of life,
39:01
where the idea that what matters to you personally should be considered the most important thing.
39:09
And I think it undermines parenting in several ways.
39:14
You mentioned earlier that demandingness can be somewhat exhausting,
39:19
or at least that was the perspective of one parent.
39:22
And certainly, it is effortful to discipline and to enforce.
39:27
It's altruistic in a way.
39:31
You'd rather not have conflict.
39:35
You'd rather just give the child what he or she wants.
39:38
To have the child yell at you or get upset is uncomfortable.
39:43
I'm sorry to hear, we're coming up on a break here,
39:46
but I'll interject that it was like the old transmission commercial,
39:51
you know, pay me now or pay me later.
39:53
My observation is you don't do the hard work of correcting child in real time,
39:58
there's going to be hell to pay with interest once the hormones of adolescence kicks in.
40:05
Jonathan Roswell, when is your book coming out?
40:08
It's called Why Modern Children and Ancient Parenting.
40:10
I want to highlight that before we wrap up today.
40:13
It should be available sometime in September or October of this year.
40:17
Well, I will consider this an invitation.
40:20
Thank you for your time today, and I look forward to next time.
40:23
It's been great talking with you.
40:24
I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTaggert, host every day of The Catholic Current.
40:27
It is a timely Tuesday.
40:29
You know what that means, coming up next, you and me sharing timely thoughts,
40:33
reflecting on what we've heard today.
40:35
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40:52
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40:55
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40:56
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40:59
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41:01
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41:05
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41:08
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41:34
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41:37
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41:50
Praise be Jesus Christ.
41:51
This is Father Robert McTaggert of the Society of Jesus, your daily host for The Catholic Current,
41:55
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41:57
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42:36
Here we are.
42:37
It's a timely Tuesday, and usually we end with timely thoughts,
42:40
my reflections on the headlines of the day in light of what we talked about with the guest.
42:45
However, as you're listening to this, I am going to be on the road.
42:50
So we're getting timeless thoughts rather than timely thoughts,
42:54
just reflecting on the perennial wisdom in light of the conversation I had with my guest today
42:59
rather than relation to today's headlines because as I speak,
43:02
the headlines of the day haven't happened yet.
43:05
My guest was Jonathan Rothwell, a researcher.
43:08
We're talking about difficulties in parenting today and how it might be more difficult than ever.
43:14
Let me give you an illustration.
43:16
I was helping out at a retreat house, and this was a year or two ago,
43:21
and there was a woman who had founded a really good Catholic academy
43:25
for kids who come from underprivileged, underserved communities, backgrounds, et cetera.
43:31
And it was their first eighth-grade graduating class,
43:34
and she took them all to this retreat house for a weekend retreat.
43:38
They had never really been out in the woods before.
43:40
They had never been on a retreat before.
43:42
They had never experienced silence before.
43:45
And God bless her, she was adamant.
43:47
As soon as you arrived, she took out a basket and said,
43:50
all the phones go into the basket, and they were traumatized.
43:55
Well, it gets to be around dinnertime, and there is a very beautiful sunset taking place.
44:01
And all the kids pleaded, oh, miss, can we have our phones to take a picture for our mothers?
44:09
Not one kid referenced a father.
44:13
Make of that what you will.
44:15
And so they all took the photographs of the sunset,
44:19
and the principal came out with the basket.
44:21
All right, they're all going back in, they're all going away.
44:24
And they all said, oh, miss, please, we won't use them, but can't we just hold them for a while?
44:32
And it reminded me of the comedian Richard Pryor,
44:36
who was talking about how he hit bottom with his drug addiction.
44:42
And boy, he hit bottom very, very hard.
44:46
But he said that, and he would smoke on a crack pipe,
44:49
and he said the pipe would talk to him.
44:51
He said, Richard, we almost ran out last night.
44:55
We can't have that, Richard.
44:57
There always has to be more than enough for us.
45:00
And it was really terrifying.
45:01
And so these kids, I think, are on the road to at least addictive behavior, addictive personality.
45:08
All right, so that having been said,
45:10
I want to shift focus to a baptism I attended several years ago,
45:15
a large number of babies being baptized.
45:18
And the pastor said something brilliant.
45:20
He said, hey, parents, at your particular judgment,
45:25
one of the things that God is going to inquire about is how well you handed on the faith to your kids,
45:33
and how much opportunity and guidance did you give them in living it.
45:37
And then he threw down the gauntlet and he said,
45:39
if you think you can be a good Catholic parent in this world
45:43
and raise good Catholic kids in this world who will live and die as saints,
45:48
and you can do that without frequently going to sacramental confession,
45:54
I'm here to tell you you're delusional.
45:56
He says you can't even be a mediocre parent if you don't have a regular habit of confession.
46:01
So I want to jump on that.
46:03
Catholic discipleship is to be engaged in spiritual warfare.
46:07
We are always, always, always being contested for.
46:12
If you doubt me, see the movie Nefarious that came out a few years ago.
46:16
And we are being contested for, and your children are being contested for.
46:24
And every single weakness you have will be exploited relentlessly by the enemy.
46:31
Now, speaking as someone who has heard confession for almost 30 years,
46:35
and speaking as a lifelong sinner,
46:38
I'm here to tell you that our capacity to kid ourselves and make excuses is nearly limitless.
46:46
And one of the most reliable ways of resisting our weakness, resisting our excuse-making,
46:55
is we have to bring ourselves to the merciful high priest, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior,
47:03
in the sacrament of confession.
47:06
Also, while I'm up on my soapbox about marriage and family and parenting and so on,
47:11
Chuck Gallagher, God rest his soul, was a Jesuit priest from the New York province,
47:18
and he was the founder of Marriage Encounter.
47:21
And he insisted, insisted, insisted that the quality of your parenting
47:27
was directly related to your quality as a couple.
47:34
And that the quality of your marriage really governed the quality of your parenting.
47:41
So, gosh, if you're a parent, I will pray for you.
47:45
It is the most demanding task in the world.
47:48
One of the most demanding, surely.
47:50
And as my father said to me frequently in exasperation over the years,
47:55
none of you arrived with a manual, you know.
47:59
And that is certainly true.
48:01
And, you know, like I said, I'm a recovering academic,
48:05
and I don't know how you manage beings you can't reason with.
48:10
You know, my go-to maneuver is I'll just explain myself more clearly,
48:14
and I have it on good authority from the parents I'm in contact with.
48:17
That doesn't always work.
48:19
You need other tools in your toolbox.
48:21
So what's the moral of the story?
48:23
You've got to control who enters your home,
48:27
not only through the front door of the window,
48:29
but also through your Internet connection.
48:32
You have to help control what enters the souls of your children.
48:38
Now, St. Thomas Aquinas said,
48:40
nothing is in the soul that was not first in the senses.
48:44
So what comes to them through sight and sound is really, really important.
48:50
What they read, what they watch, what they listen to is really, really important.
48:58
You have to be informed.
49:01
You have to exercise authority.
49:04
You know, I think of the late, great John Senior,
49:06
who said destroy your television and buy a piano
49:10
and learn how to bang on the piano and sing songs with your family.
49:13
But a lot of families are not able to do that for a lot of reasons.
49:16
So best practices I've seen from the really smartest parents I know say,
49:20
hey, if we watch television or a movie, we watch it together as a family,
49:26
and then we talk about it together as a family.
49:31
And there is little to no unsupervised screen time with children.
49:38
Parents need to know that mom and dad have my back,
49:43
and they also lead from the front.
49:46
They encourage me.
49:47
They say no to me.
49:49
They give me a moral compass.
49:51
They give me a moral map.
49:53
And they give me good example.
49:57
I mean, very often parents will say, my kids don't listen.
50:00
I'll say, oh, they're listening, and they're observing all the time.
50:05
And they're looking for your weaknesses.
50:07
They're looking for your inconsistencies.
50:10
They're looking for your excuses so that they can exploit them.
50:15
Your children need for you to be spiritual warriors on their behalf.
50:21
You can't do that unless and until you are in right relationship with Christ our Lord.
50:27
Think on these things today.
50:28
Take them to prayer and talk about it with those you love.
50:31
I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTague, your host here every day here at The Catholic Current.
50:35
Join us tomorrow for another lively episode of The Catholic Current.
50:38
Great topic, great guest, great conversation.
50:41
This is what we do here every day at The Catholic Current and The Station of the Cross,
50:45
telling the truth even when it hurts,
50:48
because here at The Station of the Cross, we are committed to being more than merely relevant.
50:55
After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com.
50:58
Get our resources list, download our audio as podcast.
51:01
Take this to your family and friends.
51:03
Together, we'll take it to the whole world.
51:05
Through the intercession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, may Almighty God bless you,
51:08
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
51:10
Go in peace and please do pray for me, for I am a sinner.