Christian parenting in the 21st Century is perhaps not as difficult as it was under the persecution of vicious regimes throughout history, but it is definitely more complicated today by nature of the fact that the problems that face our children are not as black-and-white as they once were. The difficulties of raising children no longer appear in the way they did in the 1700's and 1800's when vices were clearly delineated and treated as undesirable, while virtues were richly rewarded and noted by society as being desirable. Most of our jobs as parents now is telling our children how to live opposite the culture around them - and this is the problem that Dr. James Dobson seeks to assist Christian parents with in his book Bringing Up Boys.
With a Ph.D. from USC in Child Developmental Psychology, 40+ years of experience as a child psychiatrist, years as a public school teacher, and several children and grandchildren of his own, Dr. Dobson is inarguably an expert on the subject of children. Even skeptics would have to admit that his credentials are impeccable. This makes for a very difficult pill to swallow when modern critics see that perhaps the first quarter of this book is devoted towards supporting the claim that there is - in fact - a difference between boys and girls (GASP!).
It turns out that male and female brains are "hardwired" differently, which, along with hormonal factors, accounts for behavioral and attitudinal characteristics associated traditionally with masculinity and femininity.
Would you believe that someone had the audacity in this postmodern age to not only assert that there is such a thing as objective "male" and "female" but to state from a scientific perspective that these two things are set biologically and impact the psyche, anatomy, and even behavior of people? Dr. Dobson goes deep into the medical research with both chemical and technological findings into the male-female dynamic, discovering that differences in chemical composition (involving testosterone, estrogen, and serotonin) cause psycho-physiological differences both of an obvious nature in the bodily makeup of males and females and in not-so-obvious ways such as a differently formed amygdala deep within the brain.
With data that shows that males are intrinsically different from girls, Dr. Dobson goes on to explain the different approaches to dealing with females and males, focusing largely on the failure that the modern world has produced when it comes to producing males that understand why they feel the way they do.
A river without banks becomes a swamp.
Dobson proposes that the reason that there is such an identity crisis among men today - leading to heightened percentages of imprisonment, suicide, and spousal abandonment - is because men are not taught what a model man is and therefore do not have any concept for what they are to aspire to be. Simply put, water is whatever it is poured into. Men in our day have no mold to fit into because the idea of masculinity has been so vilified in the wake of the neo-feminist movement that to aspire to masculinity is synonymized with aspiring to be a patriarchal oppressor in the enslavement of all things unlike yourself. Those of us who are watching the deterioration of the Christian worldview in America can certainly see the truth in these claims.
Dobson hones in throughout the middle of the book on the importance of both parents - particularly the father in this case as it relates to the upbringing of boys. The role of the father is, as Dobson says, to help the son develop an identity of what it is to be a man - which begins with the understanding that to be a man is not to be a woman. This means that dad has to help his son understand that he is closer to being dad than he is to being mom. That requires the son to break away from mom and develop an identity that can sometimes be hard for mom to understand, or perhaps that she feels makes her the object of undeserved skepticism. For a season this may be true, but as boys grow up they will redevelop a healthy and appreciative relationship of respect and love for mom, says Dobson.
The best thing that mom can do is model how a woman treats a real man, says Dobson. Many times women overpower men and exemplify that there is no payoff for being a man, a lesson that the onlooking boys take to heart. This sort of matriarchal (i.e. neo-feminist) dream of women leading the household even over the husband has led many young men to abandon the institution of marriage altogether. After all, "Why would I let a woman talk to or treat me like my mom did to my brow-beaten dad?" It would be more helpful for ladies to treat their husbands with respect and model the sort of relationships that the Bible asserts as being natural. You can see more and more why this book has garnered 2-3 star reviews from the secular sources. It is spectacularly based on common-sense truths that have worked for millennia in the Christian world, making it the enemy of the postmodern movement.
As a parent, I would turn heaven and earth to find someone who could teach my kid to read.
Dr. Dobson spends a great deal of time talking about the difficulties that young men and boys have in procuring an education, with much of that time spent describing how the American education system is set up to benefit those who are capable of sitting still and listening patiently to dictated instructions - that is, those who do not act like normal little boys. These systems are set up in such a way that behavior that comes natural to little boys (playing, running, shouting, rough-housing, getting dirty, standing up, etc.) is to be punished and worked out of them to make them more like their female counterparts. Dobson later in the book goes into deeper detail about the failures of the American education system, particularly in relation to the international community. When compared to students from around the world, American graduates are at the bottom of the charts in academic performance. This leads Dobson to rightly conclude that the best option for those who can find any way to do it is to homeschool. The combination of the poor atmosphere for little boys, the secularization of curricula, and the low performance levels of American students compiles more than enough reason when compared to the high performance and freedom of atmosphere and curricula offered by homeschools.
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