A Confession to Dispel Shame
I have a confession to make: I don’t know how to parent. I have let my children down more times than I can count, and until a little over a year ago, I had no idea I had let them down. I parented on instinct, and I parented out of my own pattern of how I was parented. James Dobson may be dead, but his approach to parenting lives on. He was a galvanizing figure in evangelical culture, shaping a generation with his rigid framework of discipline and control. Grace was in the rebuke. It was how I was raised. Every problem was sin. Every problem was disobedience. Nothing was seen as gorgeous humanity or uniqueness. Nothing was understood as a brain still developing. Nothing was innate temperament. She was as cute as a button, but that impish personality needed to be retrained. Shame was a tool generously used. Spare the rod and spoil the child. A Caribbean childhood mixed with conservative white Evangelicalism: a toxic, combustible potion. It combined cultural expectations of strictness wit...