A few weeks ago, I got a text from my wife, Lauren. Her text was a picture of an incident report from my son’s preschool, alerting us that he had “stuck up his middle finger at one of his classmates.” My wife explained that our son, who starts kindergarten in the fall, had learned the gesture from a classmate earlier that day. His older sister, when asked, said she knew the gesture too, having learned it from a classmate on the bus. “It means the F-word,” my daughter proudly explained to us. I was mildly dismayed but couldn’t help but chuckle at the mental image of my five-year-old son, with extended middle finger.
That night at dinner, we talked about it: We explained that it’s both extremely rude and highly inappropriate to give someone the finger. They nodded their understanding. Then we moved on with the evening; no one got punished and no voices were raised.
This story went through my mind after I watched Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets. The Amazon Prime docuseries examines the family whose popular reality television show, 19 Kids and Counting, propelled them to national fame before they experienced a dramatic fall from public grace following revelations that their eldest son had molested four of his sisters in the 2000s; he was later convicted of possessing child pornography on his personal computer and sentenced to more than 12 years in federal prison.
Families like the Duggars go to great lengths to ensure their kids never learn to give anyone the middle finger — and I can only imagine the Duggar children would have been strictly punished if they had. But as a Christian and a father, I believe it’s neither possible nor desirable to exert total control over my children’s education and experience of the world around them.
As I learned in Shiny Happy People, the Duggar’s theology was rooted in the teachings of Bill Gothard, an evangelical minister who founded the nonprofit Institute in Basic Life Principles. The heart of the IBLP is a free, multi-part video course called “Basic Seminar” that, according to some descriptions, teaches “attendees how to lead successful lives by following [Gothard’s] interpretation of Biblical principles and warn[s] them away from television, popular music, alcohol, dating, and public schools.” According to the IBLP, more than 2.5 million people have taken the course since it started in 1964. It’s not hard to see how this teaching leads to an extremely insular worldview wherein the only way to ensure that the values of Christianity thrive is to protect children from the evils of secular culture by homeschooling them (ideally with the IBLP’s own educational curriculum).
Another pillar of the IBLP’s teaching is that we are only protected from Satan’s constant attempts to destroy us if we stay within a rigidly patriarchal chain of authority. IBLP previously described this idea as “the umbrella of protection,” and a widely cited illustration (which no longer appears on the organization’s website) depicts Christ as the largest umbrella, or the top of a chain of authority, with protection that goes to fathers, then to mothers, and finally to children. According to this idea, when you disobey this chain of authority, you step out from under the protection it offers. Thus, children must be raised follow this authority structure meekly, immediately, and unquestioningly. But while 19 Kids and Counting captured eerily well-behaved children, Shiny Happy People makes it clear that this kind of obedience was achieved through systematic and intentional effort to break children’s wills, including via corporal punishment.
In the second episode of Shiny Happy People, Eve Ettinger, a writer and board member of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, puts it this way:
“When you are told to not resist when your parents are hitting you as a child because it’s for your own good, when you believe that your body belongs to the church and the authorities that be, it’s absolutely designed to groom victims to be ready for more predators later on … Everything about it sets you up to be the perfect victim.”
That’s the line that keeps coming back to me as I think about how Lauren and I are trying to raise our kids. I don’t believe that children should be free to disregard their parents’ instructions, nor do I think kids of any age should be able to consume any piece of media they desire; I think there’s wisdom in the Apostle Paul’s teaching that “Bad company corrupts good character” (1 Corinthians 15:33) and in Jesus’ teaching that those who hear his teachings and obey them will be like wise people who build their homes on rock rather than sand (Matthew 7:24-27). But as with so many aspects of Christian fundamentalism, families like the Duggars take these principles to extremes — and the effects are horrific.
For one thing, we’re firmly against corporal punishment of any kind. When I look at the teachings of Jesus, I simply don’t see a place where he endorses inflicting physical pain on someone you love as a teaching method. Yes, I’m aware of the Old Testament texts that pro-spanking Christians cite, but I’m also aware that if anyone actually took those texts literally it would land them in jail. And I never want my kids to feel like being hurt by adults is something they have to accept.
For another, we want our children to grow up prepared to handle the world as it actually exists. Thus, Lauren and I don’t believe it’s either possible or even desirable to shield them from every work of art or entertainment that someone might consider “worldly.” Instead, she and I talk about what shows or movies we think the kids can handle at their current ages, monitor what they’re watching, and most importantly, talk to our kids about what they’re watching, especially when there’s something they don’t understand or that we think needs some additional context.
But the most important thing we are learning as our kids get older is that parenting is less about maintaining control and more about us learning to relinquish it. As a parent, this is, admittedly, difficult: It can be at turns funny and dismaying when our kids learn a rude word or when our daughter is afraid to go to sleep by herself for several nights because her classmate told her about the clown-who-eats-children premise of Stephen King’s It. But isn’t it better to have those conversations, working through them in both laughter and tears, with our kids hopefully coming away with a better understanding of the world around them, rather than working to keep them ignorant of these things at all costs?
Heaven knows I’m not a perfect father; I am all too frequently guilty of losing patience with my kids. But in my view, families like the Duggars are operating with a warped and harmful understanding of Jesus’ teachings. Yes, we need to protect our children — a sentiment Jesus illustrates vividly in Matthew 18:6 saying that if anyone hurts a child “it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” But all too often, approaches to parenting like the Duggars’ are prone to causing many of the very harms they claim to be trying to prevent.
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