The most significant evangelical contribution to fiction in the past 20 years was the apocalyptic “Left Behind” series. The books are riveting, but their core message is that corrupt, evil elites have gone to war against Christians. Some version of this idea — whether delivered in church or on TV — finds its way into many topics in a modern evangelical sermon: Evolution is a lie that secular science tells to counter the biblical creation story, the gay rights movement usurps God’s law. Recently, a friend sent me the online musings of a televangelist who advised his thousands of followers that the Federal Reserve achieved satanic ends by manipulating the world’s money supply.
.. A younger teacher, listening intently, sighed: “They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but so many of them are raised by wolves.”
.. In the white working class, there are far too many wolves: heroin, broken families, joblessness and, more often than we’d like to believe, abusive and neglectful parents.
.. Confronted with those forces, we need, most of all, a faith that provides the things my faith gave to me: introspection, moral guidance and social support. Yet the most important institution in our lives, if it exists at all, encourages us to point a finger at faceless elites in Washington. It encourages us to further withdraw from our communities and country, even as we need to do the opposite.
.. It’s hardly surprising that into that vacuum has stepped Donald J. Trump. For many, he is the only thing left that offers camaraderie, community and a sense of purpose.
.. Mr. Trump, like too much of the church, offers little more than an excuse to project complex problems onto simple villains.
Teaching Children to Have Integrity
Ever have a parenting epiphany? A moment when something just makes you think, “Whoa, wait a minute. I’ve been doing this all wrong! I need to change direction.” That happened to me a few years ago when my daughter Grace was five. I caught her trying to steal a candy bar at the checkout counter of a local store. When I told her to put it back, she looked at me as if to say, “There’s nothing to see here. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Even as her 10 year-old brother chided, “You’re gonna get in trouble,” Grace just pretended nothing had happened. Of course I insisted she put it back, and I remember putting her into her booster seat in the car afterwards, and asking, “Why did you do that? What have daddy and I taught you about stealing and lying?” She was crying at that point. And then it hit me. What had my husband and I taught her about stealing and lying? Clearly, not enough.
Face time: here’s how infants learn from facial expressions
For example, when infants who are first learning to crawl and walk are presented with a possibly dangerous slope, they look to their mothers’ facial expressions for cues. They attempt to descend the slope only when their mothers offer an encouraging smile; they refuse when their mothers discourage them from going.
Similarly, toddlers avoid new toys when mothers pose a fearful facial expression toward them. But they happily approach new toys when mothers show a smiling face.
.. Perhaps even more surprising is that infants prefer the faces of their own race by three months of age, and have trouble distinguishing between faces of other races by nine months.
Researchers call this phenomenon “perceptual narrowing”: it means that newborns’ brains are flexible enough to distinguish between a variety of different faces (even faces of different species) right from birth.
But as they become experts at identifying the faces they see most often, they lose the ability to differentiate between faces that look different from the ones that are most familiar to them. In other words, they begin to have trouble deciding whether two faces of a different race are the same person, or two different people.
.. The good news is that exposure to people from other races on a daily basis can erase this effect.
How do you raise an intelligent and happy daughter in a sexist world?
1) “no TV ever, no movies, no pop music, no magazines”
Does this also mean no friends? Because if she has friends she will be exposed to those and other influences. She will feel excluded from society if she is forbidden to see any of it, and she will eventually hate you for it.
The most rebellious people I know (who often ended up rebelling too hard), are those who had parents doing exactly what you describe to them – and to a far lesser degree.
This will backfire, and it will end up hurting both of you in the process.
.. Additionally, I would ask you to consider how you can teach someone critical thinking without exposing them to anything to be critical about (those supposedly bad influences). You don’t educate a person by not exposing them to bad things. You educate them by showing them the bad things and commenting together on why they are bad (in addition, this should be done more by asking questions and letting the person reach their own connclusions, instead of providing answers in a dogmatic way).