Fraught—I think that’s the right word. I’m looking for a word to capture how it feels to be parenting these days. Can anyone else relate? I suspect many can. It feels like the stakes are high, the deck is stacked against us, and the future is precarious. The challenges—they are legion. We regularly feel overwhelmed, and there are even moments of despair when it feels like we are standing on the edge of a precipice.
Of Smartphones and Social Experiments
While recently catching up with a pastor friend whose kids are younger than mine, the topic turned to smartphones. We compared notes on what the latest research seemed to be indicating. The results are not really up for debate: our society has engaged in a massive social experiment by handing our kids ever-more technology at ever-younger ages. And now, with a dozen years (since the introduction of the smartphone) to look back on, every possible metric indicates it’s been an unmitigated disaster.
And yet the social pressures exerted on the kids and the parents to keep up with all the latest tech and apps continue to be enormous. Also, it’s not as if parents are handling new technologies very well either. Most of us adults are in a pitched battle—with long seasons of strategic retreat—against the encroachments of social media and smartphones and other unhealthy digital-tech habits.
No surprise then that many of us feel conflicted and guilty about the amount of screen-based technology in our children’s lives, not to mention our own. There are loud and credible voices urging us to be pretty radical and countercultural in restricting it. But then there are the networks of friends and family and those in our church communities, many of whom are far more relaxed on this question—all the boys are playing Roblox and Fortnite, all the girls are on Instagram and Snapchat. Do we want our kids to be the odd ones out, even among their Christian friends? Well yes! But no, not really.
After all, video games and screentime are secondary or tertiary matters, are they not? Our children’s spiritual health and formation are infinitely more important, are they not? Well yes! But then again, our digital habits are a kind of liturgy, shaping us and our children in profound ways. Technology use may be a secondary matter, but it deserves careful attention for at least two reasons. First, because it is truly new and unprecedented, it requires careful analysis from first principles, not rehashed bromides from previous generations. The way internet-connected and ubiquitous screen technology intersects with childhood today is not like the TVs, walkmans, and iPods of previous generations. The second reason this deserves attention is related to the first: technology is increasingly central to all our lives, including childhood, and so faithful Christian discipleship will require a deeper analysis than the simplistic but oft-repeated idea that “all technology is neutral.”
Parenting by the New Law
Someone else sent me a Facebook post from a purported parenting expert who listed devastating statistics about the skyrocketing rates of mental illness, depression, and suicide among children and teens. The answer? Glad you asked. This expert listed no less than 20 things parents MUST immediately STOP doing or immediately START doing. Your children’s lives depend on it.
There are hundreds of such experts with their own lists of do’s and don’ts—all of which amount to a new law for a new day. And although I agreed with almost all the advice on this list, the result of taking in this kind of content is almost always weary discouragement. Discouragement about the state of the world and discouragement about all the ways in which our parenting is falling short of our own standard, not to mention the standard set by the so-called experts. This new law, like the old one, condemns.
Add to that the sense of cultural decline, a destabilized global order, the threat of war, or some kind of AI apocalypse, and the harsh economic realities of life in Canada—including the forecasts that it’s going to get worse—and in earthly terms, it can be hard to see a thriving future for our children.
What is a person to do in the face of such monumental challenges that are only partially under our control? I’d like to offer three responses.
Facing Giants Without Minimizing Them
First, we shouldn’t minimize the challenges. It’s okay to be honest about how hard it is—I’ve tried to do that in this article. I really cannot know if, and to what degree, parenting is any harder today than in previous generations. I’m not sure such comparisons are helpful, since the fact that someone else has had it worse does not erase the challenges we do face here in the late modern, declining West.
Our challenges may be different, and we may still enjoy a level of abundance that is the envy of the world (for which we ought to be relentlessly grateful and generous), but even that does not mean we do not face a deep crisis of parenting in our time.
I’ve also seen some who dismiss the unique nature of the current challenges by blithely quoting Ecclesiastes 1:9, “there is nothing new under the sun,” as if that settles it. But history is full of “new” situations that do arise and demand careful analysis, such as the conversion of Constantine, the fall of Rome, the Great Schism, the discovery of the new world, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of atomic weapons, and yes—the society-wide introduction of internet-connected handheld devices. Whatever that verse means, clearly it cannot mean that no new world-political situations arise or that nothing new ever gets invented.
The challenges facing parents are real, daunting, and new—let’s not minimize them.
Anchored in Unchanging Promises
Second, let us focus more on the great and precious promises of our ever-faithful God than on those challenges which can loom so large. And in this regard, we are well and fully supplied in the Scriptures with gracious words to anchor our souls. Consider again how God proclaimed “his name” before Moses on Mount Horeb: “The Lord—the Lord is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin” (Exo. 34:5-7, CSB).
For our eternal God, there is nothing surprising or bewildering about the challenges we face. He knew they would come, and his character is unchanging: compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in faithful love and truth. He will never leave or forsake us, including in our parenting of the next generation.
These promises, rooted in God’s unchanging nature, give us a sure foundation, but we also need to appropriate them for us and our children through prayer.
Needed: Men and Women of Issachar
Third, grounded in the gospel and eschewing the ditches of crippling fear and naive optimism, we need to face these challenges head-on. We need to find among us in the wider church those “men [and women] of Issachar” who have that uncanny ability to “understand the times” (1 Chr. 12:32). What we need here is Biblical wisdom and a clear-eyed understanding of the changes taking place. There is some heavy intellectual lifting needed—our best minds, as well as others who can synthesize and simplify the core insights for popular consumption. This is not optional.
The Lord has raised up such men and women, and we do well to learn from them. I’m thinking of Clare Morell, Andy Crouch, Samuel James, and TGC Canada’s own Andrew Noble, among others. Not that they are infallible, of course, but those of us raising children in this new world need wise voices. We need to be discussing this with other parents, risking awkwardness and even offence as we compare notes and express concerns. We’re all trying to figure this out.
Aside from the aforementioned issue of technology, we need guidance on other pressing issues: what it means to be human in the age of transhumanism, how to foster healthy masculinity and femininity in our gender-confused age, how to help our children find spouses in a time when family formation is the exception rather than the norm, how to approach education when the public system has grown so hostile to Christianity, how to navigate public discourse and political engagement for the good of our communities, and much more besides. And all these matters, while important, must never displace the gospel as the beating heart at the center of our lives, families, and churches. Friends, this is no easy task.
The precipice of an uncertain and threatening future looms before us, yes, but so does a great and noble task: faithfulness in our day. We simply must face it with all the grace and gumption we have, for the eternal and temporal flourishing of the generations who are coming after us (Deut. 6, Ps. 78).
