National Review reviews a new reality show that’s something like Dog the Bounty Hunter meets, well, meets deadbeat dads.  The show is called Bad Dads, where a bounty hunter finds deadbeats behind on their child support and busts some heads, metaphorically speaking. 

Bad Dads is just the latest insult to men and especially fathers who feel, appropriately, that they’ve been maligned and minimized through television programming and advertising. In sitcoms, men are typically buffoons. And fathers, if they exist, are inept and unreliable, while Mom is a paragon of virtue and competence. Television executives and advertisers may profit from such “entertainment,” but who’s having fun? Apparently, women are. Four out of five network sitcom viewers are female.

It might be justice for the families who need that money, but it’s just more injustice to the institution of fatherhood.  But fathers have no one to blame but themselves.  Be a good dad.  It’s hard to do, and not very good television.

“There are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon,” writes historian Kenneth Jackson.  This is because we Americans have murdered the front yard with our own bare hands.  We have moved indoors.  We build houses without front porches, using the square footage for something else, something inside, something air-conditioned.  We tolerate the building of residential developments where the trees are removed for the sake of convenience during the building, and our roofs and walls bake in the sun until new trees can form a canopy 100 years later.  We might still loiter in the back yard, but only if someone forces us to go outside.  And we definitely don’t like the front yard.  Maybe we don’t want people seeing us relax.  Maybe we don’t want the neighbors watching us with a beer and a smoke.  Maybe we think stranglers will see our children throwing the ball and will want to murder them.  And because we have settled for homes without trees, we give our children plastic miniature playgrounds to give them something to climb on.  Do us all a favor, America.  Get rid of the plastic playgrounds and plant a tree.  Maybe your great-grandchildren will get to play in it, or someone else’s.

For most of the five centuries since the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant churches and the Church of Rome have agreed on the issue of contraception. It was bad, because - without qualification - babies are a blessing. Everybody who could have them should have them, and for 500 years, that also included ministers, who historically had large families.

As late as 1874, the average Anglican clergyman in England still had 5.2 living children. In 1911, however, […] the average family size of Anglican clergy had fallen to only 2.3 children, a stunning decline of 55 percent.

It was the same in America.

For example, in the very conservative Lutheran Church/Missouri Synod, the average pastor in 1890 had 6.5 children. The number fell to 3.7 children in 1920, 42 percent below the 1890 number.

So, the question: what’s happened in the last 100 years to make more Protestants have smaller families? A gut feelings says it’s complicated: part economics, part cultural, part this, part that. Another gut feeling reminds me that children, without qualification, are a blessing. Even when they seem like a curse. A good piece from the Touchstone archives. Check it out.

I have several friends who live with their girlfriends.  They’ve been living with these nice ladies for a long time, and they consider themselves all but married.  They come from divorced families, and they feel no pressure - from their culture, their neighborhood, or even much from their families - to marry.  They see it as a good economic equation: Why make it so much of a hassle to split up in the future, which we both know is a real possibility?  Michael McManus, coauthor of Living Together: Myths, Risks & Answers, says cohabitation is neither good nor practical.  Nothing at all like a test drive for a new car:

Of the 45 percent or so who do marry after living together, they are 50 percent more likely to divorce than those who remained separate before the wedding. So instead of 22 of the 45 couples divorcing (the 50 percent divorce rate) about 33 will divorce. That leaves just 12 couples who have begun their relationship with cohabitation who end up with a marriage lasting 10 years.

In other words, the whole “This is like a test drive” argument seems to be just something people to say who are afraid of marriage for any number of reasons.  Because when you test drive a car, you’re supposed to find out if you really like it, and when you buy it, you’re supposed to be more confident in the purchase.  Not so with cohabitation and marriage.  The rest of this interview is worth reading, but be careful about how you present this to your cohabitating friends.  Love them, too.

I grew up in a dry home: Booze was something you didn’t drink, no matter how old you were.  It was wrong.  When we’d take communion, I asked why it was called wine in the Bible and Welch’s in my church.  Mother tisked at me to stop reading so much.  Now, though, I drink, as do many of you.  And I wonder, how should I treat this issue with my children.  What happens when we have a bottle of wine at dinner?  Do I give them a taste and train them about responsibility, or do I explain that they’ll have to wait?  Another writer had the same question.  One doctor says:

“The theoretical position is: driving a car, shooting a rifle, using alcohol are all dangerous activities,” he told me, “and the way you teach responsibility is to let parents teach appropriate use.”

Of course, many physicians are starting to suggest 25 as the best time for introducing alcohol, when the brain is most likely to be ready to handle it.  For those who grew up in homes with wine at the table, or for those parents who’ve experienced a similar challenge, what’s worked for you?

Emily Yoffe, writer of the “Dear Prudence” advice column at Slate, comes clean about marriage and children and the need for - go ahead, say it!  Say it! - two parents.  She says that, in her column, when she advocates marriage to her readers, the claws really come out.  They call her backward.  They call her insensitive.  Judgmental.  They say things like:

“Having a child will be stressful and life altering enough. Parents need to work on their relationship on their time schedule.”

“I feel that a baby is its own blessing. Have that blessing before you get married.”

“How dare you imply that an unexpected pregnancy should lead to marriage? You are simply out of touch with modern culture.”

Yoffe says she may be out of touch, but so are these readers.  Our culture is so self-aware, so aware that we all believe so many different things, so aware that we are a melting pot of worldviews, that we’ve forgotten how to call a spade a spade.

[P]erhaps in our desire not to make moral judgments about personal choices, young women wholly unprepared to be mothers are not getting the message that there are dire consequences of having (unprotected) sex with guys too lame to be fathers. There is a scene in the teen pregnancy movie Juno in which the title character, a 16-year-old who has decided not to abort her unplanned baby but to give it up for adoption, is having an ultrasound. The technician, thinking she has on the examining table another knocked-up teenager planning to raise her child, makes disparaging remarks about children born into those circumstances. We are supposed to loathe this character and cheer when Juno’s stepmother puts her in her place. But I found myself sympathetic to the technician. Why is it verboten to express the truth that growing up with a lonely, overwhelmed mother and a missing father is a recipe for childhood pain?

In a fallen world, single motherhood is sometimes unavoidable, and there’s no doubt that marriages are often broken and painful institutions, but commendations to Slate for having a columnist who can preach the gospel every once in a while.

My wife and I come from homes without much in the way of admirable traditions. We both became Christians as adults, and now with four boys to raise, we find ourselves casting about during occasions like Easter, trying to develop a set of traditions that are meaningful. We don’t want our children to associate Easter solely, as we did, with hunting for eggs, any more than we want them thinking Christmas is all about presents.

There’s something oxymoronic about trying to start a tradition. But that’s where we are. Some churches are rich in tradition and practice, making it easier for people like us to bind ourselves to meaningful habits. We find ourselves in a Protestant church, however—the very label connotes a casting off of habits. So we have to inaugurate our own traditions.

Take Passover, for example. I know, it’s a Jewish holiday. But it’s also the night when Christ broke bread and drank wine with his disciples, and when he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. I’m not the first Protestant to think perhaps this deserves some commemoration. I did a little reading about how other Christians do this, but we were mostly on our own. We settled on lamb chops (the last fresh lamb our butcher had), with, among other things, a side of horseradish, commemorating the bitterness of captivity (to sin), and a side of cooked apples, to signify the sweetness of deliverance. We had bread and red wine as well, and talked with the children about the significance of all these things. Probably all they’ll remember is that they each got a sip of wine.

I read Psalm 113 to them before we ate (”Who is like the Lord our God/Who is enthroned on high?”). After dinner I read Psalm 115 (”The Lord has been mindful of us; He will bless us”). The children listened politely … and asked for another sip of wine. I suppose a tradition doesn’t take root in one sitting, especially among little heathens.

Today they’ll have light meals, their way of walking alongside me as I fast. “Why won’t you eat?” asked my oldest. I told him that Good Friday is a day some Christians fast, as a way of repenting and remembering what the Lord did for us. He asked if he could fast, too. Later, I told him, when you’re older. That’s the other challenge with tradition, to keep it vibrant by remaining connected to its purpose, rather than letting it become the dead grip of a forgotten past.

A good Protestant could explain why all of this is balderdash. We’re liberated from these rituals, etc. As I teach my children other things, however, I’m struck by the efficacy of coupling theory with practice. It seems like we learn best when we are doing. We are practical creatures that way. So I fast, as a way of “doing” repentance, even though I know full well that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, and a broken and contrite heart. A physical practice like fasting, for me, strengthens my spiritual practice.

I’m curious if others have had the same experience and what, if anything, you do during the season of Passover and Good Friday and Easter. What do you do, if anything, to make this time more meaningful to you and your family?

Earlier this week, I posted on preaching to the choir, and how - rhetorically speaking - that’s sometimes okay and often quite a necessary way to bring groups together.  I called this epideictic, or ceremonial, oratory: speaking that emphasizes shared values.  Sometimes, though, preaching belongs to the deliberative category of rhetoric, which is the making of propositions about which the audience may or may not agree. 

When a pastor says something in a sermon that you do not like, goes the old joke, he has “gone from preaching to meddling.” He has stopped telling pleasant and comforting stories (or enjoyably convicting stories about the sins you don’t commit) and started interfering with your life.

David Mills of Touchstone says this often happens when pastors start to expound about the family, and what a family should look like.

You go from preaching to meddling when, for example, you assert that the Natural Family has a “quiverful” of children; that it requires a permanent, unbreakable bond between the husband and wife; or that it is marked by what are called “sex roles.”

The full article expands upon these three ways to upset a typical, conservative congregation.

My wife and I are expecting another baby in a few months, and we’re looking for names.  Our first daughter, Trudy Simmons, is pretty awesome.  She goes by Simmons, and she’s got curly hair like a ghetto Little Orphan Annie, a total shrub.  Our second daughter - by way of special papal dispensation, I agreed to let my wife find out the gender for this one early - is currently nameless (and likely hairless), and so this Times article caught my attention.  Apparently, bad baby names aren’t a very new trend:

By scouring census records from 1790 to 1930, Mr. Sherrod and Mr. Rayback discovered Garage Empty, Hysteria Johnson, King Arthur, Infinity Hubbard, Please Cope, Major Slaughter, Helen Troy, several Satans and a host of colleagues to the famed Ima Hogg.

So what happens when people grow up with bad names, like boys named Sue and men named Carol?

“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative - no psychological or social problems - or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”

So, bad baby names really do build character. 

We’ve been house-shopping, off and on, for the last 18 months, while at the same time trying to sell our own house. This came about from several gradual realizations: that four boys need land on which to play and work, that being rooted in nature is an essential component of the lives we want for ourselves and our children, and that living in an accidental community is in some ways worse than living where our nearest neighbor is half a mile away. I have allergies, I hate snakes, and I don’t know the first thing about heavy machinery, but somehow I’m still convinced we need to live in the country.

This process has afforded me some interesting insights into what prospective home buyers want, and into how many prospective home sellers live. Today’s home buyers want luxury–palatial bedrooms, and everyone with his own bathroom and cable connection. It would hit too close to the truth for each family member to live in his own tent on a piece of property, so instead we build bigger houses and pitch the tents inside. Big bedrooms, big garages so that everyone has a place to park — because everyone has somewhere separate to go — and smaller dining rooms, because family meals are a declining feature of American life. Nowadays people eat when their schedules permit, often standing at the bar that has become a ubiquitous kitchen feature in newer homes.

Perhaps because I am a writer, the thing that grieves me the most, when I wander like a cultural spy through other people’s homes, is the paucity of books. When there are bookshelves, they are more likely to be filled with pictures, decorative plates, fake flowers arrangements, trophies, and other modern tchotchkes than with books. Where once families proudly displayed whatever small quantity of leather-bound books they could afford to own, now people display rows and rows of DVDs.

The DVDs are essential, you see, because the centerpiece of many homes I’ve seen is the television. Most homes have at least a couple, many have more than that. Nearly every “living” or “family” room has a television that is taller than most of my children, with all the furniture oriented toward it like pews before an altar. It’s strange what we call these rooms, given that their primary purpose seems to have so little to do either with living or families. But we have made the television part of our family, without realizing it. I can look outside my window at any time of day or night, and see my neighbor’s big-screen television playing, often cartoons, because he has small children. When I drive past his house, I can see another big television playing in an upstairs room. These chatterboxes are part of the family, I suppose, just like a cat or a dog or a child might be. If you think I exaggerate, call your local cable company and ask a customer service representative how panicked and furious people are when there’s an outage.

So we’re looking at a house on twenty acres, ten miles outside the city. The house needs a lot of work, the property is covered with trees, and I don’t even know how to work a chain saw. Maybe we won’t buy this property, but I think we’re going to buy something like it. It will probably lead to a series of hilarious disasters, and any number of injuries. I’ll make a darn fool out of myself to boot. But for all my inexperience, I have the sense of moving toward something more real, something my children need. I’m willing to be a fool for that, and for the hope that maybe, by virtue of being spared some of the luxuries of modern suburban living, my sons will emerge better men than me. Any number of experiments are worth that, don’t you think?