Feeding the Self-Centered Mentality...

Al Mohler's post today is titled, The Epidemic of Permissive Parenting: The Brats are Coming. Mohler reviews a book by Berkeley psychiatrist Dr. Robert Shaw titled, The Epidemic, in which Shaw posits that permissive parenting is leading to increasingly anti-social children. Here are some excerpts, "Put most simply, Shaw wants parents to act like the grown-ups in the family relationship. Parents must set the rules, apply discipline, establish expectations, and inculcate a sense of right and wrong in their children. Shaw provides a checklist for ruining a child's life. His list includes failure of parents to make adequate provision for their personal responsibility in child-rearing, leaving children to be raised by inadequate caretakers, keeping themselves stressed and busy, giving in to a child's desires on all matters, facilitating the child's bent toward materialism, and letting the child believe that he is "the boss of the universe."" Mohler concludes with, "The Epidemic presents a powerful argument, but it is essentially a secular argument. Shaw writes as a medical specialist with an obvious concern for the health and well being of children. The Christian worldview demands that we also give attention to the reason why children need parental love and discipline and the expectations of parents as the molders of the future generation. Christians understand that children are not little innocents whose only bad habits are likely to come from outside themselves as the result of societal failure. Instead, we know that children are miniature sinners, who need parental nurture and discipline in order to emerge in adulthood as anything else other than self-centered, anti-social brats." Give the full article a read.