Years ago, my coworker and I were sitting at our desks with the office door open. One of our colleagues walked by with his young daughter, and we overheard him say to her, “You can be anything you want to be.” Instinctively, my office mate and I turned toward each other with our eyebrows raised. Although the fatherly intention behind the inspirational pep talk was good, it just wasn’t true.
We can’t be anything we want to be.
For decades, mainstream culture has told kids that if you’re true to yourself (that is, if you follow your feelings where they lead), your dreams will come true. To this message—also known as expressive individualism—the Scripture says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Prov. 14:12).
Acknowledging the folly of expressive individualism doesn’t make you a cynic or a pessimist. It makes you what James Wood has called a reality respecter. A reality respecter is a person who refuses to tell the emperor that his new clothes are magnificent when he isn’t wearing any. They refuse to swallow the lie that a man can give birth or that all religions seek peace.
If we believe God made the world and our children, we’ll teach them that the only way to be in touch with reality is to look at the world the way God looks at it. As a believing parent, I have a duty to teach my children to question whether their feelings fit the way things are.
Reality Respecters Live in a Redemptive Story
Parenting as a reality respecter doesn’t mean you always give your kids the hard truth. (When my 5-year-old finished basketball camp feeling great about his skills, I didn’t point out that he still couldn’t dribble a ball!) It means you help your kids understand their lives in the context of the biblical story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.
When God created this world, he pronounced it good. But when the man and woman made in his image ate the fruit he’d forbidden, our good world became a place infested with sickness, death, and sin. This means that if you jump into a pool before you learn to swim, you could drown. It means some people are born with disabilities they’ll never overcome in this life. It means children need loving and corrective discipline (Proverbs 13:24).
But that isn’t the end of the story. Through Jesus’s sacrifice, believers have been redeemed and are now God’s children. We look forward to the day he’ll return and make right all that’s wrong with our world. When that happens, we won’t have to fear drowning or contend with disabilities or dispense discipline any longer.
As reality respecters living within the story of redemption, we don’t have to ignore the evil around us in order to believe in a happy ending. And we recognize that when someone recommends living a lie as the quickest way to a happy ending, we should run in the opposite direction.
Raising your children to see themselves within God’s redemptive story is no guarantee they will. But it does mean you’ll have a framework already constructed for hard conversations. For example, when a teenager going through puberty feels uncomfortable in his or her body, you can talk about the way the fall has affected our bodies. You can also encourage your teen that those who believe can look forward to one day having resurrected bodies that won’t be at the mercy of adolescent hormones.
Reality Respecters Encourage Resilience
Parenting as a reality respecter doesn’t mean we set low expectations for our kids. Instead, we should encourage kids to grow and do hard things, even if they might not succeed right away.
Christian counselor Sissy Goff tells the story of sitting with a 15-year-old girl who’d been stuck for weeks on the same issue. Eventually, Goff gently asked her, “What would it look like for you to grow in this area?” The girl quickly replied, “I don’t wanna grow. I just wanna be understood.”
Goff sees this attitude as endemic to the culture most kids are growing up in. She says, “Boys and girls of all ages, they don’t wanna grow. They want relief. They want comfort. They want someone to fix it.”
That attitude makes sense if you believe that being true to yourself is the way to make your dreams come true. When you fail, you look for someone else to blame.
The alternative attitude—known as resilience—seeks to adapt and grow from difficulty or failure. It accepts responsibility, faces facts, and employs perseverance.
As a mother, I long to keep my children from experiencing pain, but the reality respecter knows that pain is a part of life. Instead of protecting children from pain at all costs, we should teach them how to learn and grow from it.
The Gospel Makes Sense of Reality
Journalist Louise Perry became a Christian after she realized Christian teaching about the sexes lined up with the sociological realities she observed. Activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali professed faith in Christ after learning through experience that neither Islam nor atheism was equipped to “manage the challenges of existence.” High-profile atheist A. N. Wilson turned to Christianity because “asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.”
Wood dubbed conversions like these the product of a “reality-respecter to Christian pipeline.”
If we raise our kids to believe that they can be anything they want to be and that their feelings are the measure of truth, they’ll one day discover we’ve lied to them. If instead we teach them the Christian story, including the radical fallenness of this world and our need for redemption, we’ll offer them a story that fits reality.
