Antioch Road

One Paragraph Review: What He Must Be by Voddie Baucham

What He Must Be: ...If He Wants to Marry My Daughter by Voddie T. Baucham Jr.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In What He Must Be, Voddie Baucham gives us a Biblical model for what our sons must be to fulfill their roles as husbands and fathers, and what our daughters must expect in a future husband. This book is primarily written for fathers. It challenges current dating and parenting models as unbiblical. It calls us to reevaluate how we train our children. For if we care at all about the lives our children lead as adults and about our grandchildren and great-greatchildren, we must care deeply about the spouses our children choose and how they go about making those choices. As Baucham notes, it is a father's duty to protect his daughter, provide for his daughter, and lead his family in worship of God and in Biblical instruction. As a result, when a father gives away his daughter to another man, he must be certain that man will assume those roles. To be so certain, a father must play a significant part in assisting in his daughter's choice of a husband (and protecting her physically, emotionally, and spiritually until that time). Not just any one will do. There are clear things "he must be."

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The Harm of Kid Nation

"No kids were harmed in the making of the show," declares TVWeek in its profile of CBS's new reality show Kid Nation. (Link via Drudge.) That is true only if you eviscerate much of the definition of "harm." In the exploitive show, "CBS encamped 40 kids in an abandoned New Mexico ghost town for more than a month." No parents. No school. No church. Some of them as young as eight years old. Just cameras all day and much of the night, seven days a week.

The kids apparently had food to eat, so CBS physically sustained them. But there is much more to life than physical sustenance. If I go 40 days without food, if I am still alive, I would be physically weak. Similarly, if I go 40 days without church, I would be spiritually weak. And if kids go 40 days without parental guidance, instruction, and nurturing, they will become a law unto themselves, requiring extensive retraining when they are done merely to come back in to a state of obedience. As one commenter to the TVWeek article asks: "Where were the PARENTS?"

"We were essentially running a summer camp," says executive producer Tom Forman, who "was bored with the existing crop of reality shows." Except no one was actually "running" the camp.

What My Daughter Wants in a Computer

A conversation with my daughter, Hannah, now 2.4 years old, tonight, as I was checking the latest college football scores on my laptop:

Hannah: "When I get big, I can have my own computer."

Me: "Yes, you can."

Hannah: "I wanna pink one."

Me: "You do!?"

Hannah: "Yeah, I like pink ones."

(No, she has never seen one of those original iMacs. And yes, she is a girly girl, which is perfectly fine with Dad.)

Reprimanding Other People's Children

In his "Moving On" column today, the Wall Street Journal's Jeff Zaslow discusses "Why We're Reluctant To Reprimand Other People's Children." He doesn't say it outright, but what comes across as the reason why is that parents are afraid of their children. Or, to be more precise, afraid of not being their child's friend. Zaslow tells one interesting anecdote:

Dan McCauley, owner of A Taste of Heaven Cafe in Chicago, caused an uproar last fall when he posted the following sign: "Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices." Offended local moms mounted a boycott. Widespread media coverage followed.

Since then, supportive customers have shared with Mr. McCauley tales of their exasperation when they reprimanded other people's kids. One woman told him she was at a Starbucks, and a little girl kept opening artificial sweetener packets and sprinkling them around the room like fairy dust. "Honey, should you be doing that?" the woman asked the girl.

"I beg your pardon!" snapped the girl's mother. "Don't call my daughter 'honey,' and whatever she does is none of your business!"

Well, maybe she would not have made it her business if the mother had made it her's.

Proverbs 22:6 instructs: "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." Esphesians 6:4 instructs fathers specifically to bring up their children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." It is clear from Ephsians chapter 6 and the natural order of things that parents have the primary responsibility for raising their children. In so many ways today, however, parents turn over that responsibility to others. (A column elsewhere in today's WSJ discusses--from a financial perspective--a married couple who have decided to hire a nanny merely because they are about to have their fourth child, even though the mother stays at home.) Yet in turning over their parental responsibilities, parents have not been willing to allow others to actually parent their children, leaving too many children without parental guidance.

This is not at all to say that some sharing of raising children is wrong, as long as parents take the primary responsibility and allow others who watch their children to discipine their children. If my daughter is being watched by her aunt or her grandparents, I expect them to correct, not reward, my daughter's disobedience.

Polish Woman Denied Abortion; Says Rights Were Violated

"A Polish woman who was refused an abortion despite warnings that having a baby could make her blind is taking her case to Europe's human rights court," reports BBC News. "Alicja Tysiac's eyesight worsened drastically after she had her third baby, and she fears she will go blind."

Ms. Tysiac sought a legal abortion, arguing that having her baby would put her eyes at serious risk. I have no idea why having a baby would cause your eyes to go bad, but apparently three doctors told her so. In any event, Poland only allows abortions in limited cirumstances, and this wasn't one of them (or her doctors wouldn't agree with her that this is one of them). Ms. Tysiac thus had her baby.

So she's going to the European Court of Human Rights. While the "European Court of Human Rights cannot throw out Poland's laws, . . . it could rule that Ms Tysiac's rights have been violated."

The Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning is the group seeking to change Poland's laws. Wanda Nowiska from the group says: "The practice of the Polish abortion law is even stricter than the law itself. So in Poland we have no more than 200 legal abortions per year. That shows the magnitude of the problem." I'd hate to know how many more Polish children Ms. Nowiska thinks should be killed in the womb each year before there's no longer a "problem."

Just as disturbing as Ms. Nowiska's words are the actions of the mother, Ms. Tysiac. Her actions tell her third child, now born, I am mad because I was denied my "right" to kill you. You are not worth it.

The child deserves better.

Blogging to the World, But Not to Your Parents

The Wall Street Journal had a Page One story Friday (Kevin J. Delaney, "Big Mother Is Watching," 11/26/2005) on parents who have teenagers that blog. According to one parent quoted in the article, "There's a real debate about do you read it or do you not."

Think about that. There's a debate about whether parents should read what their teenage children are posting publicly to the world.

One father discussed in the article stopped reading his 18-year-old daughter's blog after she protested. "I respect her privacy," he said. Privacy on something she's telling the world. One recent posting from the girl, who is a freshman at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, was titled: "My dad is a retard who ruins everything!" With maturity like that, her father needs to be more involved, not less. Forthwith.

Are we far from a debate over whether parents should make sure they know where their kids are on Friday night, if not with them? Are we already past that?

Mouse Keener

Hannah, my 18-month-old daughter, speaks well for her age. But sometimes she decides that certain words just aren't good enough. So she makes up her own word or phrase. For instance, she likes to smell candles. When this idea pops in her head--to smell a candle--she points at a candle and says, "mouse keener." To which I say, "Do you want to smell the candle?" To which she nods her head and replies, "Er, mouse keener."

Declining Manners

The Washington Times picks up an Associated Press report on rude behavior (Donna Cassata, "Nevermind Your Manners," 10/15/2005):

Nearly 70 percent questioned in an Associated Press-Ipsos poll said people are ruder than they were 20 or 30 years ago. . . .

A whopping 93 percent blamed parents.

Anecdotally, I'd say both of these are true. More people lack basic manners than they did 30 years ago and parents are (at least to a large extent) to blame. Proverbs 22:6 says: "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."

Of course, it is easy to read articles like this and think, yes, people are more rude. It's a good thing I'm not, and that my parents trained me right. I know how to hold the door for a lady and I don't swear in public (or anywhere).

Then I read this in the article: "The most common complaint about rudeness in the poll was aggressive or reckless driving, with 91 percent citing it as the most frequent discourtesy." Conviction. While I would not consider my driving to be anywhere close to pervasively impolite, I know there have been occasions where patience in my driving would have been the better course of action. I need to resolve to be better.

The Meaning of Father's Day

Roberto Rivera y Carlo at Boundless Webzine reminds us that Father's Day originally had less to do with celebrating fathers than teaching fathers. He also relays something I've learned as well: fatherhood is not just good for children, it is good for fathers. "Being [a] father has made me a better man and a better Christian than I could have been otherwise." Not that I do not have much more betterment to go. Another thing: your work takes on a new character. It becomes an act of love for others.

Adopting Embryos

UPI profiles embryo adoption (Angela Woodall, "Embryo adoption stokes stem-cell debate," 5/28/2005). Instead of performing "research" on human embryos currently frozen as part of the IVF process, which of course necessitates their death, the Snowflakes agency facilitates adoptions of these humans in order to give them a chance at life and infertile couples a chance at parenting.