It’s difficult to be a good parent in our culture today. The forces pulling your child away from you — the corrupting influences that seek to degrade him and destroy his soul — are more numerous and more powerful and more ubiquitous and unavoidable, and have more immediate access to him, than at any other point in human history. This is why it is so easy to fail at parenting, but also why it is so crucial that we don’t.
For that reason I’m always troubled when some confused, fatally stupid and inept parenting method arises. Every few years a fancy new parenting trend seems to crop up. They always have different names and present themselves as different strategies, but they are basically the same bad ideas repackaged and resold over and over again. You’ll notice that up until the latter half of the last century, there were no parenting trends or parenting methods. You…
