Imperfect Parenting (eBook)

I’M GOING TO BE HONEST with you. For years, I felt nervous about writing a parenting book, for a couple of reasons.

For one, I’m still parenting three kids at home. Sure, we’re long past the infant, toddler, and preschool years, so I’m not a total rookie, but the thing about parenting is that just when you think you’re getting the hang of one stage of development, they move on to another one, and you feel like a novice again. Wouldn’t it be better to wait till the kids have fully launched as adults to sit down and compile all my parenting advice? And really, with a high schooler, middle schooler, elementary schooler, husband, small family farm, and a full-time job, who has time to write a book?

For another, my dad, Danny Silk, already wrote a great book on parenting, Loving Our Kids on Purpose. I got pretty much all of my tools as a parent and family coach from him and my mom. What could I add to their teaching that would justify a whole new book on the subject? My life has enough pressure—there’s no need for me to reinvent the wheel here.

And then we hit 2020 and 2021—two years that upended life as we knew it for almost everyone. As if marriage and parenting weren’t hard enough for everyone, we had to throw a pandemic into the mix and add a few new extra challenges—working from home; setting up and monitoring home schooling; returning to school with masks and social distancing; coping with the cancellation of sports, performing arts, and many activities our kids were involved in; and the greatest challenge of all—trying to comfort, protect, and lead our kids in an anxiety-filled, divisive, confusing, and uncertain environment that we ourselves didn’t understand, which was also testing the limits of our emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

I had multiple parents coming to me for family coaching appointments during those two years and confessing that they were losing it at home with their toddlers and young school-aged children like never before. “I thought I loved my four-year-old, but now that he can’t go to daycare, I basically want to kill him.” Other parents were at a loss trying to respond to teenagers whose mild acting out had suddenly escalated to asking to be put on antidepressants or hormones because they had decided they were now transgender. Marriages were strained to the breaking point; I can’t remember any other two-year period in which I saw the connection between so many couples tested so intensely. Decisions over how to navigate holiday gatherings and other events caused significant damage to relationships with extended family members. Somehow this crisis got even Christians to contemplate walking away from lifelong friendships and relationships over their conflicting views . . . and some actually did just that.

THE ROOTS OF OUR DISCONNECTION

One of the strangest things about that crazy season was that, unlike other national crises or tragedies, like World War I and II, the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., 9/11, or Hurricane Katrina, the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t really bring people together. Historically in the face of a common threat, Americans have remembered that they’re all part of a national family, set aside their differences, and rallied together to solve the problem. Instead, the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty hanging over everyone like a storm cloud only seemed to expose and exacerbate the disconnection that has been growing in our society for a long time. Many people labeled it as the cultural or political war between left and right, conservative and liberal progressive, Democrat and Republican, and many blamed a certain president for causing all these sides to suddenly become so hostile. But this connection problem goes far deeper, and has a much longer history, than whatever happened during those few years before and during the pandemic.

At the end of 2020, my dad and I decided to launch a new podcast together so we could speak to many of the things we were watching unfold from a biblical perspective and offer people courage, hope, and vision. In our planning conversations, we compared notes on what we were seeing take place in our family, relationships, church community, ministry networks, and the clients and audience we serve through Loving on Purpose. We both agreed that while the levels of fear, disrespect, control, and division we were seeing break out in people’s lives were alarming and seemed to be affecting almost everyone we knew to some degree, this was not really a new or unprecedented attack on individuals, marriages, families, and society. This was just the latest skirmish in the war of connection we knew had been raging for decades.

Of course, according to the Bible, the war of connection began all the way back in the Garden of Eden. That’s where humans first invited disconnection into their relationships with God, themselves, and each other through sin, and unleashed the fear that wars against love and connection into every human life. In many ways, the Bible is a history and spiritual diagnosis of how the war of connection has been raging in the human family since disconnection entered it—and the incredible steps God took over centuries to restore our connections with Him, ourselves, and each other.

In our own time and culture, the war over connection in our families took a turn for the worse during the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, when contraception, free “love,” and no-fault divorce all became widely available and were promoted, soon followed by legal abortion in 1973. All of these represented a major shift in the general understanding and definition of sex, dating, men and women, marriage, and the family. For the last fifty-plus years, we have been in a big cultural experiment to discover what happens when you attack the heart and integrity of the family, and by extension all our social connections, by telling people they can have sex without consequences, that they can come and go from marriages if they’re happy or unhappy, and that “the kids will be all right” if we just turn them loose to experiment with sex, identity, and any behaviors or ideologies they like. And how is that working out for us? We now have generations of kids growing up in broken homes, a massive rise in teen pregnancies and high-risk behaviors associated with a lack of fathers, the abortion movement that has slaughtered sixty million babies in the womb, the toxic explosion of pornography and all other forms of sexual exploitation, a decline in marriage and birth rates, an educational, entertainment, and social media culture that robs children of their innocence and indoctrinates them in this new sexual culture from an early age . . . and the list goes on. Overall happiness levels have gone down as depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide have gone up. The general level of trust people feel for those around them has plummeted. So many people today—both Christians and non-Christians—are walking around with the deep desire to experience connection and belonging, and in their heart of hearts want to marry, have kids, and build a happy, healthy family. Yet accomplishing this desire feels daunting if not impossible due to the levels of insecurity, shame, and anxiety that almost everyone is carrying in some capacity due to how broken and disconnected we’ve become. Only if our goal is to destroy people’s lives and society can we argue that this experiment is working.

REFUGEES TURNED WARRIORS

After fifty-plus years, every one of us has been affected by this chapter of the war on connection and the family. My grandparents participated in this new approach to marriage and had multiple marriages and divorces. As a result, my parents grew up in unstable homes with a single mom (my dad) and blended family (my mom), and came into marriage as relational refugees with trauma and a limited grid or tools for building a lasting, healthy marriage and family. What made the difference for them was that they both gave their lives to the Lord and joined a Christian community where they were able to watch people doing marriage and parenting according to the wisdom of the Bible. Their personal quest and battle to learn how to do marriage and family completely differently than what they grew up with not only created a brand-new experience for me and my two brothers, it ultimately equipped them with the wisdom and authority to help others struggling with the effects of family breakdown. They’ve been doing that work for decades now—traveling, speaking, writing books, working with church leaders, couples, and families all over the world on how to build loving, connected covenant relationships that will last for a lifetime and leave a legacy of love for generations to come.

Growing up in the Silk home meant that I got a front-row seat to watch my parents on the front lines of the war for connection in families, and would eventually be drafted and sent to the front lines myself. Before he became a pastor, my dad was a social worker, and for some years, we actually lived in a group home for foster youth. If you want to see one of the most tragic results of family breakdown in our society, spend some time with kids in the foster system. In high school, I accompanied my dad to many training events and watched him teach Love and Logic parenting tools (you’ll be seeing plenty of these in this book) to desperate parents with homes full of disconnection and chaos. At sixteen, I became a nanny to two girls, six and seven, who were taken from their mother by Child Protective Services and sent to live with their father, who worked full time. It was my first...