Parents Should Ask More Questions

The surgeon general recently issued a warning: American parents are much too stressed. Politicians on both sides of the aisle agree and are standing by with their vastly differing views on how to alleviate that stress. But what if the problem is something more insidious than we realize? I propose that the issue is that we’ve outsourced too much of the basic day-to-day decision making about parenting to others. For the sake of our families, we should take it back. It adds up to this basic proposition: Parents should ask more questions.

It really is remarkable just how many things in life today we do just because we fell into them—passively, without intent. Much of the time, the consequences of these (in)decisions aren’t terrible, so we just keep drifting along from one step to the next. In the case of many parents, we parent the way that we do because it just happened. But what if (as the Bruderhof motto humbly reminds), “another life is possible”? Perhaps we know that, yes, there are other options and possibilities; it’s just that we never quite took the time to think through them. 

One can’t blame modern parents too much for this. We dwell in an era of expected professionalization in all areas—meaning, there are many experts around who are eager to push us into the (main)stream along which everyone else. And so, we often join in, propelled onward by the pediatricians, educational specialists, coaches, and more. They know best, right? So why not just outsource the decision-making to them—not purposefully, mind you, but by going along and not asking too many questions. 

To use a seasonally-appropriate example, every morning during the school year, the vast majority of parents in America wake up their tired children, get them dressed, fed in a hurry, and off on the bus or in the family car. It’s another school day for the kids and a workday for the parents. The routine is well choreographed and looks much the same from town to town, city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood. Synchronized to occur at virtually the same time everywhere, taking time zones alone into account, this routine sends everyone to their assigned locations for the day, to be repeated in reverse at the end of it.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with this kind of routine, but it is worth considering whether this is the only way to live—and the only way to educate children. There is much about the default modern expectations of children that we should value—that, for instance, education for all children is legally mandated, and that public education for them is freely available everywhere. These are good things, but how many of us have ever considered whether the standard ways of pursuing these goods is best for our particular child and family? Are there other options that might work better?

On the one hand, we live in a world where more information is accessible to us than ever, at our fingertips. But who has time for it all? Information overload is real, and so is the busy structure of modern life. For parents, the default structures surrounding the raising of children—those built-in expectations or social structures related to pregnancy and birth, healthcare, child care, schooling, electronics use (or avoidance), and more—are ever-present and difficult to avoid. Gravity simply pulls us in. 

And yet, I contend that this pressure to conform to the default modes is precisely what makes it all the more necessary for all parents to ask more questions about these structures to which we daily entrust our children for hours upon hours. 

By this, I don’t mean just asking questions of other people but first and foremost, asking questions of ourselves in conversation with our spouse. How do we want to raise this child? Why this schooling method and not another? What educational options are available and possible? What are the main things we want our child to learn before he or she leaves home? And why are these things so important? What aspects of our own upbringings do we want to retain or reject?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to family life. But when it comes to parenting, we need to ask more questions so we can make informed decisions instead of accepting the status quo and the stress that often comes along with it.

Maybe it seems like too many questions. But we are just getting started. In addition to the educational realm, we should consider what is best for children in various areas—shared rooms with siblings or not? Electronics: yes, no, or in-between? How to approach sports or family vacations or chores at home? And more. The crux of the matter is: What is best for this particular child? 

I could keep going, but that’s the general idea. If we consider these questions, we may see that yes, we are already living with policies that regulate our parenting, policies we passively accepted simply by doing nothing to reject them. And yet, many (or most?) of the above questions are ones that we never consciously sat down to answer. Instead, we somehow just fell into a default routine, whereby most of us live and parent in a manner that looks much like the vast majority of American parents. 

Except, something is broken for a lot of families, even if it’s not so obviously wrong for most. As a result, it seems easier to ignore the disquiet than rearrange our well-run lives. Still, if nothing else, the low educational outcomes alone suffice to show that the default approach is not working for too many children and families. Add in the high depression rates, digital addiction, and the chronic fatigue and stress under which too many families labor. 

This brings us back to the surgeon general’s warning about parental stress—something else we just take for granted as a part of life under the sun. The very difficult truth in our age of passive structures, ever on standby to absorb and carry us along, is that we as parents must actively ask difficult questions and answer them for our children, these image-bearers we have been called to steward. And yet, ironically, in this age of make-your-adventure adult individualism, parents do not often ask such questions about what is best. 

Ultimately, the answer I suggest is not some sort of one-size-fits-all quick magic fix. Public schools or different sorts of private schools are not universally good or bad, nor is homeschooling the infallible solution to all educational ills (although I do happen to love it for my kids). And while I allow my children virtually no electronics, and we have no television in the house, other families have found some sort of screen-time balance. We have also largely opted out of organized sports, but some other families have found sports to be essential for their kids. 

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to family life. But when it comes to parenting, we need to ask more questions so we can make informed decisions instead of accepting the status quo and the stress that often comes along with it. Most of all, let’s delight in the children we have been given. 

Nadya Williams is a homeschooling mother, Managing Editor for Current, and the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity.