I’m thrilled to announce that this week, as I wrap up this four part series on why parents can struggle to teach their kids to exercise personal power rather than train their children’s behavior, authors Marissa Burt and Kelsey McGinnis will join me live this Friday for a conversation on their important book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.
Join our live stream here: Friday May 29th @ 11am MST!
Their work is a crucial because a focus on training “godly” behavior results in children who lack a sense of their own identity and gifts, wrestle with a warped relationship to power, are vulnerable to indoctrination and often focus on performance over connection. In order for healthy parenting frameworks to flourish in faith communities, much needs to be named and understood—for the children AND those who raised them. Over this past month I have looked at four key reasons parents find themselves parenting in ways incongruent with their intentions:
They lack their own sense of power
Their child’s dependency needs feeling overwhelming for them
They focus on image to manage their chronic shame
They themselves were unparented as a child
Children Parenting Parents
One of the most common sources of emotional unwellness in adults is a dynamic from their family of origin that is being recreated in their lives even decades later. Many adult childhood trauma survivors struggle with depression and anxiety due to over function in their relationships and roles. For most the root causes was being a parentified child in their home growing up.
Psychology Today explains parentification this way:
Parentification is a role reversal in families in which the child acts as the parent in the family system. For instance, emotional parentification can take the form of a child mediating between family members, acting as a parent’s therapist, or being privy to their parents’ adult problems, such as a single parent’s dating struggles or financial woes. Emotional parentification does not refer to moments when a child sees their parent upset and gives them a loving hug. Emotional parentification is a chronic role reversal based on the parent’s inability to manage their own emotions and sufficiently care for their child.
Continue reading on Substack…
