Last night I read an article (the link is below for your reference) that illustrates everything that is wrong with society’s perception of parenting. The article, “The Opposite of a ‘Tiger Mother’: Leaving Your Children Behind,” chronicles the decision of Rahna Reiko Rizzuto who, when her children were 5 and 3, decided “she didn’t want to be a full-time mother anymore.” Therefore she divorced her husband of twenty years and signed her parental rights away. The tone of the article appears to really applaud a woman who is strong enough to not let anything, even her cherished children, stand in the way of her success. I imagine the feminist crowd applauds in delight at the presence of such a woman. My initial reaction was anger. There are few things in life that can enrage me more than sheer arrogance, and that is what is on full display in this article. Such parental negligence is not to be celebrated it is to be condemned. It should not be exalted but it should rather be despised. How have we, as a society, gone from rightfully viewing our children as precious blessings to viewing them as inconvenient baggage that we can dispose of at will?
It is interesting to me that (to my knowledge) there is not a single instance in the Bible where parents are explicitly commanded to love their children. Now that is not to say that God does not expect parents to love their children or that it is not an implied theme in many passages, He simply did not explicitly command it. Why? Because such love should not have to be commanded, it is to be assumed. In fact, such love is depicted in Scripture as being a “natural affection” (Romans 1:31; 2 Timothy 3:3). However, in those two verses Paul writes a warning about the time when mankind would be lacking in such “natural affection.” Paul worried about the type of world that would eventually exist in which parents did not naturally love their children. I worry about that type of world too, but unlike Paul I am now living in it. While I have specifically mentioned this one article exposing this one mother, from a brief search of the Internet it is obvious that this is not an isolated incident. This story has been repeated a thousand times over around the world. It breaks my heart to know of sincere husbands and wives in this world that want children more than they can adequately describe but who are physically incapable of producing them, and then read of stories like this of those who have had them and do not want them. When is our world going to wake up and realize that it is the source of its own problems? When are people going to step up and take responsibility for their actions and reactions? When are the negligent parents around the world going to look in the mirror and honestly and penitently assess their reflection by saying, “Now that’s an unfit parent!”?
-Andy Brewer
I think it interesting too that Paul tells Titus that the aged women are to teach the young women to love their husbands and children. There is natural love between a parent and child, but there is also the love that grows from that that keeps us from sending them to a foreign country when they’re on our last nerves.
I would guess that the woman who is a homemaker (of which there is no more noble profession than such imo) truly has her patience tested with her children watching them all day, and with her husband who, if they’re like me, comes home from work only to undo most of what she’s done that day in the house and just getting the tail end of how the children had been that day.
Too many people assume that love and infatuation are the same thing, and when that fades or is stressed to a great degree, the obvious reason would have to be because they just don’t love their spouse or children any more (said with tongue in cheek).The topic of our cultures skewed view on love is a whole other topic though.
Short version of my post = This angers me too.