Myths, Lies, & Modern Moms | Doug Wilson and Rachel Jankovic

instead of husbands or friends or anyone leaning into that guilt to repent of things that you need to repent of we want to cover it all up with feel good about yourself mom like you did the best you could do and maybe you didn't hello i'm douglas wilson and this is my daughter rachel jankovic she is the mother of more than a third of my grandchildren [Laughter] barely more than a third which is well seven five five it's all right um and uh rachel has a webinar coming up that the theme of which is detoxing the modern mom and i wanted to start with that i wanted to talk about what the heck that means so first what is the modern mom and then what has to be detoxified i think i'm calling it the modern mom because i'm officially old enough to be one of the older moms i'm in a different generation of mothering now which means i would say just young moms now or mothers who are just getting started now such that they didn't already establish their method choices and what they're doing that this current world is shaping what's cool in motherhood what they want to attain to what they're aiming for i mean my oldest is 17. i really went through the that phase of mothering before social media was even a thing and that's it it's more than a little thing in the livestream when when lena was born you couldn't have an instagram baby no that was not one of the things that could have happened so i was well into parenting before that was even a thing which means you don't reconsider everything you've learned a lot already you're already this is how we do it this is what i care about so i would say i'm defining the modern mom as moms in this era of modernity who are shaping their motherhood now moms of young children yes right expectant moms toddlers just just getting started that's the modern mom and or i would say tendon i mean i'm not just it's not just about babyhood but just younger kids mothering him okay so these modern moms are not just moms who are starting out their career in motherhood in 2022. they're also they're also currents or ideological currents that are pushing on them i assume that you have some of those in mind yes and the reason i said detox is partly it's a popular word but it's almost always used the other direction um detoxing from your toxic friends and your toxic whatever what i hope that this does for mothers is make them evaluate the choices that they're making or the things that they're admiring in light of god's word and say is this actually timelessly beautiful or true or is this an instagram filter that is making me believe that this is how i should behave with my children or how i should think of myself as a mother so you're you're talking about making it learning how to make intentional choices grounded in scripture exactly and and also to make intentional choices when you didn't even know you were making choices at all yes and i think you know when we were all teenagers and you and we would watch music videos with you and you'd say over and over what are they saying and is this true and i think that i see that all the time in mothering posts and accounts and people talking about mothering where i think i think the person who's promoting this has not considered what ideology like if they could see it stated raw they would not buy into it but they're not seeing it they're seeing it through the filter of their favorite influencer and through you know like they're seeing it trickling down and they're not asking those fundamental questions and pairing it back to what is honoring god all right let's take it let's take a concrete example so that we're we're sure up in the stratosphere um our young moms being shaped and molded and pushed in the direction of androgenizing their toddlers thousand percent and i think that christian moms buy into this infants and babies can be kind of genderless because it can be done beautifully by someone who makes it look like it's a 1800s homemaker that has a you know all that but but the world is very invested in babies being genderless and the christians are easily going along with that kind of like who can say we're not doing distinctive haircuts on our boys and girls or colors or even shapes of clothing that kind of thing is just like we can get caught up and stuff without evaluating it right this is not the first time this kind of weird pathology has happened right in the era of my great-grandfather let's say in the you know victorian edwardian period there were some photographs of little boys in frilly dresses and the boy looked like a thug you know i think we have one of those in our family a little summer we're like wow wow lacy dress dirty face butchy haircut i mean like very funny cigar [Laughter] um so there there's always been that sentimental streak that some moms have had where right i'll prote i'm gonna pretend that this baby boy is a baby baby as long as i can yeah right there's there's always been that but now it seems that the androgynous um sex is biological but gender is a social construct and that's being there's a full court press yeah on on that issue and and many christian moms go along with it where their boys and their girls are all in beiges and pastels and everything is kind of blurry is this a boy or girl it's instagram cool this is the thing is it's been made to look beautiful in one place it looks like oh that that would be earthy and fun and so a fine a fine christian mom could find herself doing something like that for months without ever having made a conscious choice yeah exactly is that the kind of thing that you want to detoxify yes that would be a good example or i would say i one of the things i was talking about when we did the video promoting this webinar in the first place was that christian moms are asked to well all moms are asked questions all the time you don't have answers as soon as you're having a baby how are you going to have the baby how are you going to feed the baby how are you going to get the baby to sleep how are you going to carry the baby i mean like there's a million questions that come and then that's before the baby even starts asking you questions and then that's not counting them that's not even counting the baby asking questions and they do that really soon they start asking you questions do i really have to eat what you say i'm gonna eat right like they're it's just immediately uh and i think christian moms really need to be good with answers and if you don't know the answer knowing how you're going to find the answer knowing how you're going to go back and say i think there actually is a underlying principle or truth that reflects my faith in this question so that leads to the next thing um so these things that we want to d you want to detoxify for the for the modern mom would be modern myths or pressures jb phillips says in romans 12 don't let the world press you into its mold the world has a mold that it wants modern mothers to fit into and they're being very pushy with that so if you want to answer those myths those pressures uh christian moms should want to ground that on scripture right okay okay how so how how would you direct moms who want to become scripture saturated women who who know how to find the answers to this kind of thing in scripture okay so i would say first you need to be a reader of your bible which can i pass this by without saying join us in the bible reading challenge so that you too might be a reader of the bible uh i really do care about that that women just be reading their bibles but this uh that's the beginning knowing what's actually in your bible is important knowing your way around it right but the other question is is just learning to actually uh expect a biblical answer women can be very emotional on the topic of their own children extra right like this is a very sensitive subject for a lot of women and so you'll see things like just an example of this would be um the very hot debates about whether or not you should sleep train a baby ever right right all right like if your baby is not sleeping should you ever let your baby cry it out in their crib well this escalates almost instantaneously into this abuse and like things that christian moms would totally shy away from and be like i would never want to be abusive and then if dad wants her to let the baby cry out then he's abusive then it's another leg and it's a real hot problem and and it's because her friends are telling her that's abusive you just want to say well let's pare it back and ask ourselves is it does god ever allow his children to suffer for their own good just to illustrate this is uh the answer is no this is uh don't try this at home kids it's just simply a joke from another generation back when my dad was a younger dad and someone would ask you how did you get your babies to sleep he would say well we just rocked them to sleep and then we ran out of rocks which is exactly the kind of thing that causes everyone to fall into the pits of these instagram tendernesses right that's that's just that's awful it's a joke but i guess but it illustrates what what can we can even find funny what isn't funny that so everything is ratcheted up into the a battle between light and darkness right and if you're untethered from scripture right then you're it's going to escalate more rapidly right and you can find yourself basically in a position that says all discipline is hateful which is directly counter what scripture says right right and that's one of the things that i think most christians would know that if they were asking themselves that or it's a very straightforward question to ask of is is this what scripture says right does god never allow his his much loved people to have to go through something difficult for their own good right and yes he does and if you see a young child pitching a fit or greatly in need of discipline oftentimes trying to provoke discipline because they're they're they need love they're just miserable and then and they know the man who doesn't discipline his son uh proverbs says hates us hates his son it's a form of hatred and if you see a kid that's miserable like that crying out for discipline feel sorry for them now because in about 10 years you're not going to feel sorry for them at all yeah right and i think that there's there's there's a ton of stuff about like the nature of god and how god loves his people but i think what women are doing is they buy into whatever parenting whatever things looked beautiful to them and they and it has more to do with trying to shape what kind of person this is where social media plays a big part because it has more to do with them trying to curate what kind of a person they want to look like right than it does trying to actually give something truly loving truly true truly generous to your children it's more about how will i look while i'm doing this and then we reflect that onto what we think god like instead of starting with reading scripture and saying what is god like and then how can i imitate him we're trying to curate ourselves and then reflect that onto god which is how you end up with women who when they join the bible reign challenge when they read about who god is they're often very offended at god they're because they already have they have already made a structure of what's true what's good what's right that's based on what i want to look like and god does not measure up to that would you think it's a fair statement to say that in the in a fallen world hypocrisy is always a temptation always a problem but social media has given hypocrisy or the hypocritical impulse a much bigger toolbox absolutely many more things to work with many more many more ways to get an angle on yourself for a different filter on yourself and a way to like get up in the morning to try to get your kids ready for instagram right rather than and really not seeing the long-term effect what are you actually doing to your kids what are you like are you selling your children are you selling the way that they look are you making them believe that all they are doing all the time is trying to look cute for pictures and this this is a generational transition when a few decades ago when reality television first first hit people would watch it it was a reality television was a hit but it was a hit because people can't look away from a car crash it's like this is it's a there's fascinating horror in and nobody wanted to be them is like everybody wanted to watch them but nobody wanted to be them now we do but now everybody wants to be this as witnessed by the enormous quantity of here's a selfie of me crying which is what moms post all the time what yeah you didn't know you don't hang out in the right circles to know about this uh selfies of themselves crying what why what yeah makeup all over the place here i am it's like i'm so broken this is so hard it's it is the weirdest it is a very weird compulsion because it's not i know some people fall into the i have it all together right thing but then it's the other ditch of i have it all together because i'm so willing to share all of my vulnerability in this selfies of women crying with babies in their life is an actual big thing it's like i actually like watching myself be the victim of my own life and i curate myself as someone who's having an emotional drama all the time zowie okay so we're ready for that yeah everything well when you this is a difficult time to be a satirist for example it is if you write something as a satiric mat and you think up the most bizarre thing you can think of and you put it in print and then you discover that people are doing it for real or already a couple of weeks a couple of weeks ahead of you um so if you encourage women to get back in the word and actually read the word and start looking for opportunities to for application what that what did i read today that i could plug into my life somewhere [Music] you're so you're coming to the scriptures looking for an answer it seems that that leads naturally into the question of obedience yeah so yeah okay obedience is a liberating thing not a set of fetters or chains so could you talk a little bit about that why why would modern moms who are afflicted by these modern mythologies tend to look at obedience to scripture as a constraining confining suffocating thing instead of what it is a liberating thing man partly i think it's just they have no experience of it okay they have not personally they don't have a personal testimony to the freedom that obedience is because there are a lot of mothers today who were not i mean i hear a lot from women who did not grow up in a christian home have not ever seen christian families at work so they may have never personally witnessed those moments of self-sacrificial obedience like where you need to just be like well i want to do this but i can't so i won't and because they haven't actually done that they haven't experienced the reality of the joy that comes from obedience you're buying into a lot of these lies you're not gonna you're not gonna be experiencing it you know you're not disciplining your toddlers they're not fun an undisciplined toddler is very difficult to be around uh and so they get when they're asleep when they're sleeping when they're asleep they're okay i'm saying that people leave i mean just the fact that people will refer you know the terrible twos or whatever block out whole periods of a child's life as they're hard to get along with two-year-olds are really fun like that's a really fun phase and the obedience the structure of requiring obedience of them makes the relationship between a mother and a toddler very sweet and very fun and enjoyable and i think that that so i would say partly people just don't they don't personally believe that obedience leads to freedom okay so i think there's an analogy here and i think there's probably a deep connection in the metaphor children parents moms with undisciplined and unruly children have children but they can't enjoy them because they're constantly frazzled and frustrated and no not that and making excuses for them uh but oftentimes that's happening because the mom also has a pastel of undisciplined emotions oh yeah who are just like they're just like the kids so you have all these emotions that you're not able to enjoy either except when you've cried it all out and they're asleep so you can you can say my emotions are okay now because they're asleep but when they're active and running you know climbing the curtains it's not it's ruin everything they ruin everything yeah and then but the temptation is to say to someone that that person wants to say to the person who's self-controlled well it's all very well for you because you're unemotional you don't feel these things you don't like i feel them well but but that's like saying to a mom with five kids who and the kids obey her that's like saying i don't you don't know what it's like because you don't have kids or you have kids they just mind there's a lot of that where women will say well i'm not an extrovert so it's hard for me to have little kids around all the time you think i think it's hard for anyone to have a big pack up like i don't think introvert extrovert or any of that makes any difference at all on whether or not it's hard to have a house full of little kids it is hard but there are ways that trying to really actively trying to be obedient and glorify god in it make it a beautiful enjoyable thing where you do actually see fruit like you do see progress you see fruit you there's a lot to enjoy while you're there but i think what you're saying about the emotions is that many people don't think emotions i think there's a lot of different pitfalls through the years through different kinds of parenting camps about the nature of the will and emotions so a real disciplinarian ditch would be that the goal of uh discipline is to break the will right that we want to break their will so that they don't do this and then on the other side would be we honor the will like it's a god we do whatever whatever yeah yeah uh and then and i think i believe that the real christian model should be to that we want our children to master their own will that are that what we're trying to do is not that i'm the master of this toddler's will but that he is and that when i tell him to do something he knows how to control himself and make himself obey and that's very different it's very different from me coming in as the very authoritarian essentially i'm going to beat you up if you don't obey me it's not it's not like your child is a wild horse that you're trying to break and ride yeah it's that your child is a rider of their own of their own horse and you're trying to teach them to ride their own and to not get drug behind it right their whole life and and in that way this is why discipline is ultimately very loving it's not it's not a um i just have to have my way and i think i this would be my biggest concern with most like if you go into a household that's very very well disciplined and i don't think that this is cool now so i don't think that this is in the detox for modern moms i don't think they're falling into this particular ditch but it used to be like at the back when i i mean it used to be a thing for sure and it probably is still in some christian circles if you go into a home where it seems like the kids are marching by whistle commands or like i read a book on home management that that talks about kids as though every kid is just they're all identical like no difference between your 14 year old son and a three-year-old girl you know like they're all units of chore doing right like they're all just it's just it's just and it seems like the charts and the everything is you know like this is so orderly bipedal carbon-based chore units exactly and and just things like i mean and it just seemed incredibly unwise to me from the direct from the point of we're not even trying to evaluate how this would affect each individual child to have this sort of structure at home because it was all focused on organizing and the home right has a different focus there was a time when i think that that was more admired and i think that that was just as dangerous in a different way i think that's what gave us the ex-evangelical movement i mean i think that we we have people who grew up in christian homes like that who have not loved it so people um who come from that sort of strict or hyper legalistic um were christians we believe the bible you must sit in the corner all the time if they were to come to your home they would think they would they would uh they've entered a a and an antinomian palace i like i like to think it's not quite that bad that i would call it antinomian palace but it's very different from the perspective of would there have been a toddler standing on the coffee table probably right like did that happen absolutely did anyone care no we did not like there was a lot of i don't i never want to be encouraging people to discipline in that kind of a way because that's that's a different way of being pressed into the mold right of something that's not godly right it's just being pressed into the mold of organization or so when so basically if you've got a house full of happy kids doing their stuff there's going to be a certain amount of uh happy chaos right but if a house is disorderly where the kids are surly disobedient right there's a there's a tone shift right so you've got the buttoned-up house where everybody's miserable and you've got the chaotic house where everybody's miserable it seems that the thing you're driving for is cheerfulness or in fellowship-ness which means that the foundational discipline is discipline of emotions a discipline of attitudes right and then discipline of external behaviors is important at some point your toddler has to be taught what coffee tables are and are not for at other people's houses ours is for toddlers standing on it you know not anymore they're all too big they're all just yeah so um but that's that's down the road you're right you're um you want cheerful compliance whenever you say time to be done right obedience is exhilarating obedience is and it's exhilarating not only for the child who's secure and loved but it's exhilarating for parents who now enjoy their children totally and the kids feel it's it's securing it makes them so secure it's way more fun for them it's not a thing like um i do feel like it's always hard to talk about discipline because of what we were just talking about because of the bad reputation the discipline has and then we have this huge pendulum swing into radical indulgence like where you have a little kid mad at another kid on the playground and their mom running to them to say oh did your feelings get hurt you know like no making a generation of it's got i don't even know what that will be like when it is full blown i just think oh no not this don't let it come of age don't let it like get on it now which is actually what the whole point of this webinar is anyways is it should definitely not be happening in the church we have god's word we know these truths we can do better than follow trends on instagram okay so let's talk about how it turns out so let's talk a little bit about the relationship of young moms to young dads so because oftentimes the the mom is not in control of the kids yes and she's the one who's with them in a traditional setup she's the one who's with them most of the time right but she's not in control of them because she is in control of him yeah a lot of the time right or at least she's in control of the kit she won't let him have any authority with this is not your department yeah exactly okay so um leave me to lead me to this and he has some perspective perhaps that this is he might think i actually don't want my toddler nursing in the park right this is not what i meant to have happening and she's saying you don't understand this is the most nurturing thing i can do right and so this goes back to the question of obedience submission to scripture where many young fathers don't feel like they've got the capital to or the resources or the horsepower or whatever to say insist even if they should right so one of the things that young moms can do one of the things they can detox on is inviting input from dad right and and actually taking it seriously not not just blowing it off you're a man you don't understand any of these things all my girlfriends understand and they're miserable with their children most of the time my girlfriends that i'm assembled by people who are attracted to the same things that i am attracted to right it's no kind of actual accountability or there's no actual pushback or um and i and we live in a world that is really big right now on flattery we like to flatter ourselves so you'll see all the time you can find just memes and things that are published to the world at large saying don't be sad mom you're doing the best you possibly could be doing you are amazing you're you're right you are amazing you're wonderful and i always think how do they know that i'm not giving the kids cigarette burns they don't know right right this is what they're saying to the alcoholic abusive mother you're wonderful you're doing the best you could be doing and they're saying it with no discretion at all because they and i think that that is obviously a problem because that's what moms want to hear when they uh when they are struck with guilt because moms do guilt a lot because once the kids are in bed once they're not provoking you anymore you're looking back over the day like oh no i wasn't loving enough i'm not you know like you feel this weight of guilt and instead of husbands or friends or anyone leaning into that guilt to repent of things that you need to repent of and to ask for grace about things that you need to ask for grace we want to cover it all up with feel good about yourself mom like you did the best you could do and maybe you didn't you know like actually 98 of the time you didn't like there are times when you really laid it all out there you were honoring god all day and you still feel like a failure at the end of the day but most the time you were in sin in some way and we want and we want to act like flattery and compliments are a substitute for grace yes like that is grace or just tie this in with the bible writing lots of bible writing plans have days where you don't read the bible is called a grace day okay isn't that funny yeah like that it's actually if i abstain from god's word i'm giving myself grace today and i'm giving myself grace to not have to try to be not try to be a diligent christian today i'm gonna take a grace day but that's so backwards when the grace is the conviction it is that it is having our sin pointed out to us that we might confess it and not carry it so maybe finish with something i learned from my dad and your grandfather um there are many things many young moms are going to react to some of the things you're saying here as pretty hard words but hard hard words create tender people soft words create hard people if you just give people god's unvarnished word or you get them in the bible readings challenge and they are just reading god's word it's it's like a jackhammer that breaks up our concrete it breaks up our concrete hearts yeah but many of these uh flattering friends are the feather duster of flattery you know that um you're so brave you're so wonderful you're awesome uh i can't believe you you're so beautiful and those kids are so lucky to have you as mom and yeah yeah it's just feather dust feather dusting hardness and misery and unhappiness so basically um as uh this webinar approaches uh there there will be a if if this does anything go by there will be hard words that are wholesome words i hope so yeah hard words that are wholesome words and let me throw some free information in here for you young men who happen to be watching this and and you're trying to figure out why you're watching something like this and but some point in the conversation you said oh i wish my wife could see this or i wish uh well it was probably the part where you said to listen to your husband she should listen to this well um invite your wife to sit down and watch it with you um basically there are way there are ways to to to approach this and i would encourage you to get your wife um the encouragement she need she actually needs and uh there will be details um in just a second you can read about the details how to get to the webinar [Music] if you've enjoyed this conversation and you want to hear more from rachel and who wouldn't want to hear more from rachel naturally i mean who wouldn't what's wrong with you you can find you can find more from 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Channel: Canon Press

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Keywords: advice, advice for christian parents, advice for christians, ask doug, bible, blog and mablog, canon, canon press, canon press interview, christ church, christian, christian parenting, christian parents, christian worldview, dads, doug wilson, douglas wilson, dougwils, father, fatherhood, kids, lies, mablog, modern, modern mom, mom, moms, moscow, moscow idaho, mother, motherhood, myths, parenting, pastor, pastor doug wilson, podcast, politics, raising kids, theology

Id: bXvFyowa79I

Length: 31min 17sec (1877 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022