FamilyLife Culture Watch

The Baby Borrowers

By Scott Williams

With the recent news of the "pregnancy pact" at Gloucester (Mass.) High School, more attention is being focused on teen pregnancy and parenting. With the disappearing stigma of unwed pregnancy and the allure of being all grown up and independent, many teen girls are seeing parenting as the prize.

The newest venture into reality TV ought to be of interest to these mother-wannabes… and it may just cure them for awhile.

The Baby Borrowers places 18-20-year-old couples in a suburban home working a regular job and put them through the parenting cycle. First with an infant, then with a toddler, a preteen, a teen, and finally caring for an aging "parent".

Never mind that there are some real problems with the show: NBC endorses the unmarried couples' living together, the real parents (along with a professional nanny) are constantly monitoring the process by surveillance monitor, and that the extent of each phase of parenting is only three days.

It's only for a few days, so it's more like babysitting than parenting. And these are not their own children, so never gets down to the heart level, which is where parenting is it's most wrenching.

Still for those of us who have been (and are) parents, moments of the show are good for a few knowing chuckles. Especially with comments like these from the "baby borrowers":

• "We're supposed to be able to learn from this and not criticized … for no reason"
• Of parenting: "I don't think it's hard. It shouldn't be hard."
• "I knew that I wasn't ready to be a parent, but I never expected it to be this hard."
• "I can't do this. I didn't need three weeks to do this whole experiment. I just needed 24 hours with her."
• "I'm just tired of not knowing anything."
• "Just take the baby and go. I don't care anymore. This is bull…."
• "I'd rather be single for the rest of my life."

The show does challenge one of the fundamental flaws in the thinking of teens who want to have children: parenting isn't something created to make you feel good. It's there to selflessly care for another. Sure, we parents have plenty of moments when we reap unfathomable rewards, but mostly, in the midst of it all, it's just hard work.

While the show challenges one false notion, it creates others. The "experiment" is supposed to tell these unmarried couples whether they're cut out to be parents and whether they're made for each other.

First off, once you get married, it doesn't matter whether you're made for each other. You have made a commitment. The same goes with parenting. In the show, the real parents sometimes show up during times of crisis and hear from the wannabes that they want to stop the experiment. In real parenthood, that's not an option.

And that's where the show really falls short. What makes a parent is the consistent, selfless commitment, day in, day out. You grow as you go.

I'm currently on my 8,164th day of parenting. But if you really want to get down to it, each child must be parented differently and specifically, so between my seven children, I'm really on day 40,919. And I'm just now feeling like I'm beginning to understand. But it's also more apparent than ever that I still have a long way to go.

And there are still plenty of days where I'm not sure if I'm cut out for this parenting stuff. That's reality.

Trying to Undo What We've Done

We’re now struggling here trying to come up with contracts to deal with the problem of children. A lot of the things that are happening in family law are an attempt to manage by contract what had been managed by the common entity or the common union of the marriage that was a stable lifelong commitment for a common project. We’re now trying to manage our way out of a problem that we’ve created by the dissolution of marriage.

— Jennifer Roback Morse in an address to the Acton Institute

Marriage: It's No Contract

Sometimes people say that you should go into marriage with the idea that it should be a 50/50 partnership—you do half of it, I do half of it. That’s the old feminist model. And I want you to understand that it’s basically a political model. It says we’re going to be fair about all this. That model doesn’t work.

The model that works is 100% / 100%. I do all I can for you, you do all you can for me. That’s what works. When you go into it with that attitude, you see there’s a whole different orientation, there’s a whole different mentality you have about that. It helps you to be generous. You’re not carefully orchestrating an exchange to make sure nobody gets ripped off. You’re thinking “I’m going to do all I can for you.” You have it in your mind that what you’re there for is to help the other person and do what’s good for them.

— Jennifer Roback Morse, in an address to the Acton Institute about why it doesn't work to consider marriage as a contract

The Crisis and the Cure

By Jayna Richardson

“It is a never-ending carnival of human misery. A ceaseless river of human distress.” This quote sounds like it belongs more in a horror novel than in a news story from the London Daily Times. But these are the words Paul Coleridge, a well-known British judge, used to describe the effects of family breakdown.

In a speech to family lawyers, Coleridge made several bold statements regarding the “meltdown” of family life in his country.

“Families are the cells which make up the body of society,” he said.  “If the cells are unhealthy and undernourished, or at worst cancerous and growing haphazard and out of control, in the end the body succumbs... In some areas of the country, family life in the old sense no longer exists.”

“Almost all of society’s ills can be traced directly to the collapse of family life. We all know it. Examine the background of almost every child in the care system or the youth justice system and you will discover a broken family. Ditto the drug addict. Ditto the binge drinker. Ditto those children who are truanting or who cannot behave at school.”

Two things about the article caught my attention. First, it reminded me that our country isn’t the only one feeling the negative impact of broken families. This is a world-wide epidemic. Second, it made me realize that the problems have gotten so bad that the justice system and even the secular media are taking note. They’re starting to realize that something needs to be done.

Coleridge’s solution involves a mix of increased funding, law reform, new programs, and beefed-up social services departments to alleviate the strain on the family justice system. While his observations about families are on-target and his intentions are probably good, he seems to be trying to kill a weed by snipping off the top. This epidemic of dysfunctional families that Coleridge described as “a threat to the nation as bad as terrorism, crime, drugs, or global warming” only has one true cure: lives and hearts changed by the One who established families as the pillar of societies in the first place.

On California's Same-Sex Marriage Ruling

by Scott Williams

Okay, I have held off commenting on the recent California Supreme Court decision legalizing homosexual marriage for a number of reasons, the most important of which is the fact that I wanted to be thoroughly informed on the matter.

But after reading most of the 174-page decision, as well as countless different viewpoints on the ruling, my thoughts were in so many different places that I had no idea what direction I would head with a blog post. So the following is just a collection of thoughts on the ruling and the current state of the definition of marriage.

Marriage by spontaneous generation
When it established one of the nation's first domestic partnership statutes in 1999, the California legislature declared that it was "in lieu of marriage." In other words, domestic partnership was not marriage. Each year after that, the legislature chiseled away at the individual distinctions of domestic partnership, replacing each with a privilege previously reserved for marriage. Each time, they assured that domestic partnership was still not marriage. By 2006, there were only eight minor statutory differences between domestic partnership and legal marriage.

So when the state Supreme Court took a look at the domestic partnership law this year and compared it to the traditional definition, their reply was, "Well whaddya know, it is marriage."

A fork in the road
In the court's majority opinion, Chief Justice Ronald George from the start pointed out that there is a religious definition of marriage, and a civil definition, and nothing that the courts decide should be construed as limiting the religious definition. However, in our modern culture, the church has ceded to the state most of its authority on the matter of marriage. So it is naïve to believe that the recent 4-3 ruling by the Supreme Court won't severely impact marriage in the religious realm.

Exactly how that will happen is anyone's guess. The constitution protects most denominations from having to perform same-sex ceremonies if that violates their religious beliefs, but many predict that lawsuits will start soon against churches that receive any kind of government funding or tax incentives.

Another likely scenario is that civil and religious marriages—which have been seen as fairly similar over recent decades—will begin to diverge. The California ruling may serve as a much-needed reminder to the church that God is the designer of marriage and that we need to get serious about making our marriages follow the pattern He intended: one man, one woman, one lifetime. Many churches have begun to experiment with covenant marriage agreements, whereby a couple promises to seek church counsel in times of difficulty, and to not divorce except on biblical grounds, no matter what the state allows.

Not sex, but sexual orientation
The majority opinion in the court decision hinged on what, to me, is a major change in judicial thinking.