On Taking Up a Task Too Big for You Alone 

Editors’ Note: This is the fourth article in a week-long series offering practical advice for adolescents and young adults in the areas of family formation, vocation, career, and friendship. 

Of all the tasks that might be included in the project of “adulting,” is there any that feels more demanding and, at the same time, more filled with tender hope, than starting a family? Even before diving in, would-be parents sense that welcoming children will bring not just a new role, but a new world. But where to find the map that will allow them to navigate it successfully? 

When I entered that world in the late 1990s, “parenting” had only somewhat recently become a verb. Heated debates were underway about the dangers of “working mothers” and how parents could give their children what they most needed: “quality time.” A new public-health campaign insisted that babies should sleep on their backs (even though my grandmother whispered that they slept better on their tummies). I could see that there would be some important decisions to make. When I met my perfect, tiny, rosy-cheeked firstborn, I remember thinking, “Well, I guess we’ll figure it out.” 

Now, almost thirty years later, I can say that we did, more or less, figure it out—even if so much did not go as I planned. Today, that baby is all grown up and married, and now living for a while back at home, along with her husband and her own toddler. She is a great mom, but I can see that the “figuring-out” required of parents has expanded exponentially, and the stakes seem even higher.  

Parents eager to hand on a faith tradition face an additional set of hopes and challenges. How can they invite children into the richness of a religious heritage at a moment when so many people are leaving all of that behind? Given the busyness and distractions that are now everywhere, even the prolegomena of faith—cultivation of wonder, attentiveness, and real connection—can feel like goals that might require parents to just move their children to a mountain cabin somewhere off the grid. 

So what are young parents, or those hoping to be parents, to do? I believe there are some essentials that can give parents a firm footing. For me, raising that first baby and then four more children, all while studying and teaching theology, has convinced me of three things. 

The first is that parents cannot go it alone. The Christian tradition teaches over and over that humans were created for interdependence. The second chapter of Acts describes the early Christian community’s commitment to “the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers.” It notes that “all who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their property and possessions and divide them among all according to each one’s need.” When St. Paul urges Christians to “bear one another’s burdens,” then, it seems likely that he had multifaceted forms of solidarity in mind. This is a web of interconnectedness in which not only individuals, but also families, are meant to live. 

This kind of solidarity, however, is not easy to find. In the industrialized West, we now assume that “family” mostly means the nuclear family: one or two parents and their children, living in their own home. We generally expect these individual families to manage finances, housing, childcare, and all of life on their own, without the support of others. It is in this context that we see parents struggle mightily with seemingly simple tasks: finding adult companionship in the course of the day or just getting dinner on the table. The first task, then, for young parents is this: find your community, the group of people with whom you can be radically interdependent. I don’t mean just a place where you can volunteer. Parents will always be called on to organize school events or bring snacks to soccer practice. I mean a web of people with whom you can share life, people you can lean on, and whom you will allow to lean on you. Ideally, this community will be local, and the more local the better. In the U.S., “car culture” dominates, but places and people within walking distance have a particular value. 

This is easier said than done, but when community becomes a priority, possibilities do tend to appear. For some people, it will mean choosing a job in proximity to extended family. For others, it will mean choosing a home close to their church, allowing them to lean into that community. Others may be able to identify just one or two other families to whom they will commit in a meaningful, long-term way. 

Wherever families find themselves, small steps are possible. In our neighborhood, we gather with other families on Friday evenings to share pizza and fellowship. I have known some families to commit to one Sunday a month to share a meal and real conversation, and others have planned a low-key, low-expense vacation with one or two other families on an annual basis. On a daily or weekly basis, small groups of parents can create “co-ops” for everything from childcare to supper preparation.  

This kind of community is not simply a support for parents. Rather, it is profoundly integral to parenting itself. Almost thirty years of parenting has confirmed my opinion on that—and research has borne it out. About ten years ago, a report appeared that startled many people. In analyzing many “twin studies” (data gleaned from situations in which identical twins were raised apart), the conclusion could not be avoided. Things like intelligence, personality, and even mental health were very similar in these twins, even when they were raised in very different situations by very different parents. These parents made differing choices in schooling, discipline, even basic parenting style—and it seemed to have almost no effect at all, at least in the categories that were measured. At about the same time, research emerged showing clearly that one factor in child-rearing mattered a lot: the neighborhood in which a family lived.  

Now, we don’t raise children simply by reading the results of studies, and there are realities that go beyond IQ or measurable personality traits. Something powerful is suggested here, though. Our cultural habit of imagining individual families in isolation is not only unworkable; it doesn’t even reflect the reality of the way our children are shaped by these larger realities. Throughout human history, we have raised children in communities rather than in isolation. Finding a supportive community is not just a helpful support to parents; it should be considered an indispensable element of parenting itself.  

My second point is not unrelated to those twin studies (which those who encountered the initial research found not a little unnerving). Parents are often swept up in the cultural assumption that children are given to them to be molded, shaped, and presented to a real or imagined audience, perhaps even to God. They assume that if they make the right decisions, they can get the outcome they hope for. This approach takes parenting with great seriousness, and it can engender tremendous, earnest effort. Just below the surface, though, is an assumption that is misguided and even dangerous: it imagines the child not so much as a person to be encountered, loved, and accompanied, as a product to be assembled in as pleasing a way as possible.  

Here, too, the Christian tradition has something to say. Parents are certainly understood to have an important responsibility to guide their children. “Train up a child in the way he should go,” the book of Proverbs says. The focus, though, is not on micro-managing children and their behavior. The Hebrew word for “train up” here seems to mean something like “dedicate,” in the way a house or a temple is dedicated to a purpose. What receives much more attention than making sure that a child “turns out” properly is the way the heart of a parent should be disposed toward children: with tenderness and love.  

An analogy I sometimes use to describe parenting is apprenticeship. It is not so much that the parents are working on the child, but that they are working together: the parent doing and demonstrating, the child observing and slowly moving into participation. This model brings work and companionship together into a holistic picture that, I would argue, involves less exhaustion and anxiety for everyone. Particularly now, when we are tempted to think about what results our efforts produce, or, in the age of social media, how our families look to others, simply living life together with our children, in joy and wonder and tenderness, is nothing less than an act of resistance. 

Finally, I would suggest to young parents a religious orientation as the solid ground on which to build all that I have described above. I have recommended community, and living in awareness of the presence of God makes possible a profound sort of community, even communion, that is more than just practical acts of mutual assistance. To see others, and oneself, as created in the divine image, means that the relationships that are built participate in the holy. Christians refer to one another as “brothers” and “sisters,” and this, too, indicates something deeper: parents need not only those with whom they can trade babysitting, but those to whom they are connected in a real and deep kinship.  

Parenting in awareness of God’s presence reveals another crucial truth as well: it allows mothers and fathers to accept the limits they face in controlling the outcome of parenting. Facing those limits means not giving in to despair when they can see a horizon much bigger than themselves: a God who cares both for them and their children, who loves in a way greater than they can imagine. 

Welcoming children surely is a great responsibility; no one can know ahead of time the challenges and joys that are waiting for them. But perhaps the greatest surprise is that every decision and every parenting strategy will find its true home in realities that, blessedly, far exceed them. 

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