Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / May 27, 2018 | This Is Us - Ancient Advice For Modern Parents

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May 27, 2018 | This Is Us - Ancient Advice For Modern Parents · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's the last time you'll see that bumper video.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: So sad.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the end.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is the eighth of an eight-week series.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, Melody and I are leaving tomorrow.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Take a group of 37 to Greece following Paul's second missionary journey.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: And no applause needed.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason I tell you that is the next two weeks, you ought to bring, if you know someone who hasn't been to church in a while or whatever, bring them one of the next two weeks.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because Judge Tommy Webb is talking.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's one of the great inspirational speakers that I know.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he's phenomenal.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: So your friends would absolutely, whoever they are, whoever they are, would really love to hear him.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to call up Jeb Graber.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Every May we do something here.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: We don't do it with any other mission, but we do it with the Gideons because we're big on the Bible.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And we support an organization called Bibles for the World.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: We support Gideons.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And Jeb, every year in May, we like to have one of our people who's a Gideon.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, guys, you could feel free to sign up to help with the Gideons.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have a Gideon, Jeb, someone from our church, who talks about the Gideons, what they're doing.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the service, we'll have ushers at the doors as you go out.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Feel free to give them money.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: We love the fact that we're a generous donating church to the Gideons every year, but Jeb's going to tell you about that.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, man.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's talking about phenomenal speakers, so here I am.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, thank you.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, before we uh clean out your wallets and your purses, uh let's uh do a little fun stuff here.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to shout to the Lord like that song said.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: So be with me here after me, please.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: God is great.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: God is good.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: God is a Gideon.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, tough crowd here.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, enough fun stuff.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get to the heart of the matter.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: We want your money.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: So uh leave it with the ushers when you go out.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: All right?
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Everything you got, just put it right in there.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: That'll be your lighter load when you go home.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, actually, as you think about uh the Memorial Day weekend and remember the fallen and those who've gone before us, we'd ask you to remember those also who are hurting and crying out for God's word around the world.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: The Gideons provide Bibles and New Testaments to folks all over the world, 201 countries is where we're at.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: And uh every year we give out about 90 million scriptures.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: So uh we have a lot of need to purchase and print and distribute those scriptures, and that's where you come in.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: We depend on churches to be a partner with us in providing the funds to purchase those scriptures.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Every penny that you give will be going to that purpose.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: None will go to overhead to the office in Nashville or anything like that.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: So at every penny you give, that's important.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: So uh what does it cost?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, here we have a little New Testament that we give out.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: It costs a dollar and a quarter about.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And here we have a Bible.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: It cost about five dollars.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: For a case of these,$125.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: For a case of these,$25 Bibles,$125.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: So uh some of you need to cover at least a case or two of those.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: All right, thank you.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we give these New Testaments out, such as we were at Washington Rural High School's baccalaureate program here a couple weeks ago, and we gave out 93 New Testaments to the graduates that were there.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Also, this month we've handed out, or we've placed Bibles in the new motel in our area there, Homewood Suites, over there by Cracker Barrel.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's 87 rooms there, and we place those Bibles in those rooms.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we do.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And we do that all over the world.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: A while back I went to Columbia, South America, and we handed out 1.2 million New Testaments in two weeks there in that country.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: So uh we have a lot of needs for those scriptures, and you will provide those.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: But we also want to use the three famous words here at TBC, discover, connect, and serve.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: Discover, you can discover you have a bulletin insert there in your bulletin.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you got a bulletin, if you didn't, pick one up on the way out.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: It has an insert in it.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: A bulletin insert you put in a bulletin.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know how that works?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so that has some the basic thumbnail sketch of the Gideons.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then we have a website, gideons.org, that you can find the bigger picture of.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: And some of that involves uh testimonies.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: We like to have testimonies.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh as a reminder to my mind, we have some titles that we want you to look at.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: One of them is In the Shelter of the Most High.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's about a Vietnam veteran that received a testament.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Olympic medalist discovers Christ.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of self-explanatory.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then freedom behind bars is a favorite of mine because I I'm a chaplain down at the jail, and I know that the the need for God's word there is great.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Another one is in the shadow of death.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's about a soldier named William Fungus.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he uh ended up in Korea during the Korean conflict and uh ended up as a POW in North Korea.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: North Korea is kind of in the news these days, but they did go into North Korea and he was a POW for three years.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he used a Gideon military testament to get him through those three years, as well as his mates, his uh POW mates there with him, and it was a great comfort and strength to them.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: So these are the kinds of things we like to do.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Then connect.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: You can connect by prayer, you can connect by donating and the serve part.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, as Jim said, we need more gideons and auxiliary to help us with some husband and wife uh ministry.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's the great strength of it.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: So we pray that you will join us in that.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Let's make a Bible church.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: The Bible is in the middle, it's a central teaching, preaching, ministry here at the church, and it's a central to the Gideons as well.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: We appreciate your participation, your partnership in this ministry.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: God bless the TBC family.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I forgot again, the ushers will be picking them up, just like Jim said.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Just wanted to double up on that.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Jeb.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk to you about parenting today and the last of these eight talks on marriage and parenting.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Tough time, crazy time, scary time to be a parent today.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was Baby Dedication Sunday at that church, and they had the families and the children all arrayed on the stage.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the pastor got one family, and he said to the woman, What are the names of your four kids?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Eenie, Meanie, Miney, and George.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: I said, George, really?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Yeah, we didn't want any Mo.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that's sorry about that.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: It can be a little scary to have kids today.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so we started, I started out this series with uh the ABCs of good parenting seven weeks ago.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And from the book of Proverbs, A stood for authenticity, B for backbone, and C for consistency.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Those seem to be the three uh primary, uh foundational, fundamental elements of good parenting in Proverbs.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'd encourage you if you missed that and you're a parent to go back and check that out.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this uh, as we went through the series, we've done four weeks on marriage, and now this is the fourth week on parenting, and I decided this weekend I would sort of do the flip side, the ABCs of bad parenting.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or let's be a little nicer about it.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: We'll call it not so good parenting.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Ancient advice for modern parents.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Just so happens that this will be a little bit of a different message because I'll be sharing a lot of really recent studies, because it seems as though psychology is changing its mind about some of parenting advice that it's been downloading on us for the last 30 years.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's the A of not so good parenting?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it comes out of basically this verse in Ephesians 6.4.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: The A of not so good parenting is anger your child.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I want to talk to you briefly this morning about how we anger our children.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because as you can imagine, Christian commentaries and focus on the family and everybody, discuss how is it, what is it that Paul meant, what was he thinking of that parents do that angers their children in a way that shouldn't be done.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as I've read these articles and read these books and so forth on this, I've come up with the ten primary ways, in my view, that in 2018 in America, Christians can anger their kids.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, criticize often, praise rarely.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, make more withdrawals from their bank of emotional health than you make deposits.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Constantly criticize praise rarely if they do something good.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Say, well, you didn't get all A's, let's focus on the B.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, be emotionally absent.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: One of the interesting results of surveys or studies is that parents say fathers who are physically absent do not generally provoke their children to anger.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Their kids aren't mad, they miss them terribly, but if you're present physically, but emotionally absent, then your child gets angry.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: So be emotional.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And number three, publicly humiliate him or her.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you have had situations when you're 10 or 12, or maybe 15, and you were sitting next to your girlfriend or boyfriend, uh, or you were around that and your dad or mom said something critical and you felt publicly humiliated and you got really angry.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Remember that?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, was that just me?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, number four, refuse to apologize ever.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know how your child, when you when you're parenting, your child catches you, you discipline the wrong child, you believe a story too quickly, you lost your temper, you did something wrong, and how your child keeps coming back to you every hour on the hour, reminding you that you were wrong.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can make them angry if you just steadfastly refuse to apologize.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that would be a way to anger your child.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Five, show favoritism, prefer one over the other.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: That made Jacob's sons angry, didn't it?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Verbal or physical abuse is one we know a lot about.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Resort to verbal abuse or physical abuse.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Number seven, don't let them grow up.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: When they have middle school, they get into that transition time, they're stretching their wings, they want to fly a little bit.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure you tie their wings down and um and keep them home.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Number eight, nine, and ten fit together.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Over-discipline them.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: They put their feet on the couch, uh, go crazy, you know, really go berserk over stuff like that.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Or if they spill, spill milk.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Underdiscipline them.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: That means even if they sash you in public and disrespect your authority, don't cross them, you know, get down on your knees and talk to them really sweetly.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Number 10 would be fickle discipline them.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: I just invented that term.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: That means sometimes you freak out and sometimes you're really soft, so they have no idea what's coming next.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: And those things will anger your child.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting study that came out of Yale University recently asking the question: are there some parenting styles today that produce angry preschoolers?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the quote was preschool students are expelled at a rate more than three times that of children in grades K through 12 because of behavioral problems.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the ancient advice is don't anger your children, don't provoke them to anger, but raise them in the way of the Lord in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's no accident that those two words are used.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: The book of Proverbs says that God has given us two tools, given parents two tools for child rearing.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: One is instruction, speaking to them, teaching them what's right and wrong, and so forth, and the other is discipline, two kinds of discipline in Proverbs, verbal discipline, correcting them, physical discipline, which we call spanking or things like that.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the A.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: The B, B of bad parenting or not so good parenting is bubble wrap your child.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you see that and you go, oh, I want to pop all those.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Bubble wrapping your child is when you overprotect your child, when you keep them safe.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking primarily about physical, from physical harm or any kind of danger, you know, like germs or kidnapping or anything, okay?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what's interesting is that this is one of the most modern common terms that you see in articles these days.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you see, Psychology Today runs uh an article, the bubble wrap generation, children today growing up in walled gardens.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Parents magazine of Canada.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Raising resilient kids.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Are we bubble wrapping our children?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Recent article on Breakpoint, the online magazine that Chuck Colson founded.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Bubble wrapping our kids give them instead a God-sized vision.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: The first sentence of that article.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Protecting young people from harm is a noble aim, but have we gone a bit overboard?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: The most controversial, provocative, and in my view, interesting Time magazine article in the last 10 years was basically a review of the most provocative book written in 2010 by a law professor, a Chinese mother, who criticized American mothers, who said Asian parenting is lots better than American parenting, and told uh very provocative stories of how she'd made her daughter practice five hours straight on violin until she got it right and so forth.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: But but very interesting eight, nine-page lead article in Time magazine.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it was headlined The Truth About Tiger Moms, because her book, which was a bestseller in 2010, was entitled Battle Hymn, Battle Hymn of the of the Tiger Moms.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in the midst of this article, the best paragraph, or in my view, was this one.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Many elements of the Chinese approach are supported by research in psychology and cognitive science.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Take, for example, her assertion that American parents go too far in insulating their children from discomfort and stress, distress.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this was the most important sentence in the whole article, in my view, for us.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Chinese parents, by contrast, assume strength, not fragility, and as a result, behave very differently.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Find myself asking: do we in America who tend to bubble wrap or coddle our kids, do we assume fragility among our kids rather than strength?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: In the 2008 book, A Nation of Wimps, author Haramarano wrote, research demonstrates that children who are protected from grappling with difficult tasks don't develop what psychologists call mastery experiences.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: They grow into emotionally brittle young adults who are more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, so as a result of this big argument on MSNBC, said this is the worst Chinese mother in the world or whatever.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, it just was really controversial in 2010-2011.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's been a whole lot more about bubble wrapping.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Cato Institute featured Lenora Schinese, who has a TV show called World's Worst Mom, and who's the founder of the organization Free Range Kids.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And she's really this funny lady who believes that we've bubble wrapped our kids, and she points out that our children today we feel are in constant danger from germs, kidnapping, grade splashers, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers, and non-organic foods.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: And she's quoting all these schools who arrest little children who point their finger in a sign of a gun on a playground, or a boy who on a playground who runs over and hugs a girl, or kids who start a tag.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And somehow you can't do that anymore in schools.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: And she's arguing, she actually, you know, gets on these programs and she argues for things like take your kids to the park and leave them their day.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, she doesn't mean three-year-olds, but so anyway, she her argument is that is that kids will never grow up if we bubble wrap them and protect them.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now you say, what does the Bible say about this?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I quote this because one of the most interesting discoveries I made when studying the book of Proverbs was that in Proverbs, the father and mother are constantly pulling the bubble wrap off their children and exposing them to the world.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: In Proverbs 7, for instance, Dad takes his son down to the red light district.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: We read in that chapter, and I've summarized the whole chapter in fifty words, my son, obey my words and treasure my commands.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: I noticed among the youths a young man lacking common sense.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Crossing the street near her corner, he strolled down the road to her house at twilight.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: A woman came to meet him dressed like a prostitute.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: She was loud.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Her feet don't stay at home.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: She grabs him and kisses him.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: I came out to search for you, she said, and I found you.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Come, let's drink deeply of love till the morning.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: He follows her like an ox going to the slaughter.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't know her house is the road to death.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: But the argument that the Bible would say is you don't bubble wrap your child.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're going out into a world that God has built, and they're supposed to change that world.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Gospel Coalition, the Calvinist group across our country, one of the fastest-growing websites today, as a response to all this, wrote an article entitled, There's No Crown Without a Cross for Your Kids, pointing out that we try to protect our kids from the cross, from suffering.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: The hope of the Christian parent is to raise a child who lays down his or her life in service to God and neighbor.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Since Jesus said, Whoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: So reconsider if you're bubble wrapping your child or bubble wrapping your grandchild, realize, and this is a non-Christian, Robert Heinlein, who wrote, don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: B, bubble wrap your child.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the C of bad parenting or not so good parenting is coddle your child.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: If bubble wrapping is primarily sort of a physical protective thing, this is emotional protection, coddling them.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: In 50 years, there's been a change, as everyone in education knows.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Today's parents are not like those in 1969, who, if their child got a bad grade, would immediately turn to the child and say, Explain these bad grades.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas today it seems as though we find that parents immediately look to the teacher and say, Explain these bad grades.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: I have a number of testimonies I could tell you from my years of teaching, even at a Christian school here in town.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: The sea of bad parenting coddle your child, and this has to do whether your child is a student or an athlete.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I love this picture.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: The why is my son on the bench?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Haircut.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: So um so uh you uh, if you want to coddle your child, you fight his battles for him by confronting his coach or teacher.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: You switch teams or teachers or even schools more than once because your little girl isn't happy.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Number three, you bail him out every time he forgets something.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh dear, there is his lunch.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: He forgot it and went off to school again.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so you call and you're gonna be late, but you no way your son could ever go lunchtime without eating a lunch.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Number four, your child's never at fault.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Someone else is off.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Always to blame, so you scapegoat others.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And when your child rants about teammates or coach or their teacher, you don't correct them, you don't stop them, instead, you join in.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: And your children's coaches and teachers think of you as a helicopter parent.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: You're probably familiar with that term.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: A helicopter parent is the term for a mom or a dad who's excessively hovering over and watching their child, especially as they go off to school, you know, coddling them, protecting them from any possible thing that might hurt them or hurt their self-esteem.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: Which is number seven, your child's feelings of self-esteem are all important to you, so you never say anything that would upset her.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is interesting, you should know this.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Those of you who have been around for a while, like I know that 30, 40 years ago, the single most important thing you could do for your child was inculcate self-esteem into them, and all of a sudden, that seems to be changing as the studies show that that's produced a lot of problems.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: MSNBC, which we don't usually consult for biblical theological truth, has just published an article called Today's Tikes, Secure Kids or Rudest in History?
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: Subtitled Parents Focus on Building Self-Esteem may be the problem.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Quote, experts say today's kids are ruder than ever.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: A preschooler deliberately tripped a woman in a crowded restaurant and then bragged to her mother about it.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Child continuously insults his mother in front of his mortified grandmother.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: In neither case did the parent say or do anything.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Parents who focus on self-esteem respond with hostility to anyone they perceive as doing anything that might make their child feel less than wonderful about him or herself in the classroom, among their peers, or on the playing field.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that interesting?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what's even more interesting is an article recently published concerning school shootings that ties this whole thing into school shootings, published in a secular journal called Eon, subtitled Read Deeper.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: The article written by professor of psychiatry at UCLA, Joe Pierre, entitled Running Amuck, Self-Esteem and Violence.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: It says he lists the studies done of the school shootings, and he says, naturally, we respond by trying to pinpoint the cause.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Bad parenting, mental illness, guns, video games, the media, heavy metal music, or just plain evil.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: And once we identify this other thing outside ourselves as the offending agent, we set up a kind of quarantine so it can be banished from society.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And hoping to allay fears and respond to emotionally charged demands for action, politicians jump on this or that bandwagon with proposals for legislation aimed at, you know, getting rid of guns or sequestering and eliminating Woodbury culprit.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then we go about our lives until the next mass shooting occurs and the cycle is repeated.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: But he says, according to the studies, according to the surveys, none of these things, not heavy metal, not playing violent video games, not guns, none of these things are reliable explanations.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: But there's one thing in common with all of the school shootings.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: He says, in our love yourself culture, affronts to self-esteem can be equated with threats to our very survival.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the typical response to such narcissistic injuries is a desire for revenge.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: In each of these, there's this desire for revenge from a child who believed that their feelings of self-esteem had been attacked somehow.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: They had been put down, and as a result, they responded.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: So he traces it back to self-esteem.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: I would just simply say, whatever you think about this, it is tied in with coddling your child emotionally.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And we need to remind ourselves that there's no connection between high self-esteem, America's by far the number one country in the world at high self-esteem in our children, and actual achievement, where we've where we're in the middle of the pack, where something like 17th or 20th in mathematics in the world and literacy and so forth.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say, even more important for us Christians, there's no connection between feeling good about yourself and actually being good.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some of the most interesting recent studies about this have to do with oversensitive collegians.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: I know you're all aware about how college kids now are so sensitive that they will go crazy if there's going to be a commencement speaker or someone else come on campus that says going to say something they disagree with, or college kids freak out if they don't get good grades.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And Atlantic Monthly has published this major article recently entitled The Coddling of the American Mind, in which they they quote uh the counselor at Boston College who says he gets five times as many counseling calls as he used to just a few years ago.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: He gets counseling calls from uh from a girl whose roommate called her a bad name.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: He got two two calls for help from uh from kids who saw a mouse in their apartment and uh, you know, who weren't satisfied because they called the police came and set up a mouse trap.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: They called the cops, and yet they were still emotionally distraught and traumatized.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he gets calls constantly, he says, from students who were traumatized, say they're traumatized because they got a B and they expected an A.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh his argument is that somehow we haven't prepared kids to go away to college today without being traumatized.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: They've been coddled so long they can't handle real life.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: So that's C, coddling, and uh, you don't need me to tell you that the Bible's very clear about this, that you shouldn't coddle your child, shouldn't hesitate to discipline them.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it says Proverbs 23, a good spanking won't kill them.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, it may save their lives.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh if you falter in times of trouble, how small is your strength?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: And times of trouble, including when parents are faced with uh five-year-old kids who scream, buy me the toy.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I love that.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: In light of a news article that I'm sure many of you seen this last week uh about parents filing a lawsuit to kick their 30-year-old out of their homes.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: You follow this in New York State?
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: I love this poster.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you're gonna coddle and overprotect your child, children don't complain when they're 25 and still living on your couch.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and that famous story in the news this week has been carried all over the world.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Parents sue their deadbeat son to get him out of their house, and they won the suit this last week to kick their 30-year-old son out of their house.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the subplot of this, I discovered as I was reading one analysis article about it, is that for the first time in over something like 150 years in America, 18 to 34-year-old, or 18 to 34-year-old kids are more likely today to live at home than anywhere else.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that astounding?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: No comments.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: So um let me conclude because I want to celebrate the Lord's table and also want to have Amanda sing a song about parenting to close this series.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, parenting is harder.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: I I really believe that than ever before.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: For for I I can give you half a dozen reasons.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'll list four really quickly.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, we have more special needs kids than ever before, out of the compassion of many of our hearts.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: You you've adopted children or you're fostering children, and we all know of some of our friends here in town whose homes are absolutely ten times more difficult than they were just a couple years ago before they uh took in a special child who turned out to need to have special needs, right?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, a parenting's harder because there are more yours, mine, and ours, kids than ever before.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I mean, you know, you find yourself maybe because of mistakes you made in the past, you have your second spouse or whatever, they bring kids into it.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you have your kids, you have my kids, you have our kids.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'll never forget, um, I'll never forget hearing that voice at Adams Mark Hotel.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was 10 o'clock, and I'm sitting in a lobby which is entirely empty, you know, on a couch, reading a newspaper, and I hear this man's voice saying, So your mother told you I'm your real father, right?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I put the paper down and I look, and here, so close to me is this darling seven-year-old and darling nine-year-old girls.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: These two little girls are sitting there desperately trying to impress this sweaty, you know, suit-wearing salesman-looking type guy who's saying, 'Your mother did tell you this, right?' So this is maybe the first time they've met their real dad.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he's saying, She told you, I'm your real dad, right?
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: At 10 o'clock in a hotel lobby, they're learning this.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and he says, Maybe you could visit me sometime.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: And they go, Yeah, yeah.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: They want to impress him.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, maybe can you come see us every month?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: No, he said, I can't do that.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then he walks away after, and he's got a four-year-old kid of his own who's who's slugging, you know, acting like he's gonna slug the girls constantly and stopping his little fist, and they're not doing anything.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just this so desperately dysfunctional situation.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he walks away, and the seven-year-old says to the nine-year-old, now we have two mommies and two daddies, and lots of grandmommies and granddaddies.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: Kids are amazing.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: But we have more of those situations than ever before.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: Number three, life's never been busier.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Your grandmother would say, Are you kidding me?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: It took me all day Monday to wash clothes, and now you just throw it in the laundry.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's just so simple.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, food is so cheap and clothes are so cheap.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: But you know what?
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we can do those basic things, they are so much easier.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: We can fix food easier or buy it cheaper than anything at Pizza Hut.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact of the matter is it's busier because there's a thousand opportunities banging at our door.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: In this digital age, there's a thousand opportunities out there for entertainment, for things to do constantly that we can get to.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, it makes staying at home and parenting seem really burdensome.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: Life's never been busier, and finally, culture has never been crazier.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: Am I right?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, culture is a 9.5 today on the Richter scale, the Romans 1 scale, the scale spiritually, the Richter scale, because our children are growing up being told in America to focus on their rights, not their responsibilities.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: Does that mess up parenting or what?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: This month we have a middle school boy down here at the hospital getting a sex change operation because his counselor told him the reason for his problems was probably that he was the wrong sex.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is a crazy world we live in.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: Really.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's never been crazier, so we desperately need the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I've asked Jeremiah and Amanda if they would come and close our series these eight weeks.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: Amanda will sing to you this wonderful uh Keith and Kristen Getty's prayer, a mother's prayer, and then I'll come up and lead us in the Lord's table.