We made plenty of mistakes with our kids – who doesn’t? – but this “thou shalt not listen to this music” attempt at parental authoritarianism wasn’t one of them:
Our foundational child-rearing principle was “relationship is greater than rules.” God self-identified as Love personified; both of the “two greatest commandments” were about love and relationship; and Jesus frequently reframed His listeners’ understanding of Torah commands in light of the effect on relationships with God and others.
Let’s be real: nearly all kids are going to like different music than their parents. And they’re going to be strongly influenced by their peers’ choice of music. So short of complete isolation, how do we raise our kids to recognize the good, bad, and ugly of music that’s available to them?
When our kids were still young, we realized that CONTROL wasn’t the answer. Instead we set down just a few rules (and NONE of them were “by God, absolutely NOT this artist“):
1) There’s certain music that WE don’t want to hear. We’ll tell you exactly why we don’t like it, but it’s your choice if you want to listen to it. You simply aren’t allowed to listen loud enough for us to hear it too. We can’t control what you do at other families’ houses, or when you’re walking the neighborhood with your iPod, and we’re not going to TRY to control you. But we DO have a say what happens within our earshot.
2) Your parents are not going to buy you any music which we don’t want to listen to ourselves. If you want to buy it yourself, that’s your choice.
3) You can’t have any music on your devices that promotes self-harm or harming others. What you do around other people is your choice, but not in our house, and not on things which we (as your parents responsible for your safety) are ultimately responsible for managing.
4) Because of rule 3, your parents retain the right to talk to you before you purchase any new music, and veto anything which breaks those rules.
Beyond that? Enjoy your music, even if we don’t listen with you. (Yeah, iPod. We’re that old.)
Notice that rules 1, 2, and 3 involve “your choice,” not “your parent’s choice.” We very intentionally left those choices up to them.
Then, as needed, we sat them down (in accordance with rule 4, where they didn’t have a choice) and asked them to think (didn’t TELL them what to think, but ASKED them what they thought) about how the music they wanted to buy might affect their heart and their soul, and how it might mess up their thinking about themselves and other people and their relationships. Then we let them decide what to do, with zero further pushing. We shared our values, then stepped back.
But I can hear you asking, what about “training them up in the way they should go?” (Proverbs 22:6)
Wrong question.
Remember that rules are NOT training. Rules are (an attempt at) control. Rules may be instructive, but they do not inherently train someone.
In our sense, rules ought to be reserved for things that can immediately and possibly permanently harm them, not things that may cause painful short-term (or even long-term) effects. Kids need guidelines but they also need to learn that making bad choices can lead to undesirable effects. If they never get to choose poorly, they never learn. So the moment they step out from under our rules, they’ll self-destruct because they’ve never learned wise decision-making skills that have been naturally reinforced by making those painful but temporary mistakes.
And for the record, I don’t believe for a moment that listening to Taylor Swift will end up with anyone damned for eternity. That kind of “permanent” doesn’t even enter my vocabulary. Even the Amish are perfectly willing to let their youth experiment with relaxed rules, sometimes even as far as to step away from the church and its rather strict requirements, because the parents and the community are confident that they’ll return once they discover that life away from God – or even just life by a different set of rules – isn’t what they imagined. And while I know how painful that can be for parents to watch that “Rumspringa” season, I happen to agree with that approach.
So what has been the outcome? How’d that play out in our children’s choice of music – and their lives?
They definitely chose music we didn’t like. In fact they did that often. They even chose music that offended us deeply, but didn’t break rule 3. And sometimes, we would return home from a date to hear the house walls literally rattling with the subwoofer blasting out a song we wouldn’t like, only to have it suddenly go silent when they realized we were home. And sometimes in the car we had to ask them to turn down their iPod because we could hear some cusswords leaking out. And no, it wasn’t without typical conflict – but never knock-down, drag-out fights over music.
And our kids are now in their mid to late 20s (we even have a grandchild). All three actually turned out really well. But more importantly than how they turned out, they all love us and stay in very close contact, and they’re unafraid to ask our opinion even about things they know we disagree with. The relationship and love are intact, even strong, and so we have many opportunities to influence them to this day, even though we no longer enforce any rules over them.
Interestingly, one unexpected but related side effect is that our sons were quite willing to talk with us about pornography. They didn’t feel the need to hide from us; we could have healthy conversations about the struggles and the effects that they observed in themselves, and over their teen years we often overheard them telling their peers about making good choices on that front. In other words, our principles of “observe the effect of this media on yourself, and make choices according to that observation” spilled over naturally into other areas of their life. Basically, we find that we successfully taught them how to self-regulate their media life.
This person laying down the law about Taylor Swift, however, is nearly guaranteeing broken relationship. They think that they’re preventing permanent soul harm, but in all likelihood they’re causing it, leading to their daughter not only soon rejecting their rules and strictures, but also likely to eventually rejecting the entire religious way of life that their parents preach. So by trying to preserve the daughter’s soul, they’re actually making it infinitely harder for that daughter to stay in love with God for a lifetime. But sadly, they’ll likely never understand why the relationship is breached or at least very deeply strained. They’ll feel justified in having done all they could, but won’t know what they’re missing over the next 50 years, and won’t understand how their daughter could have walked away from the church after all they did “right.”
Given the alternatives, I’ll take those relational and self-regulating results any day, over the rejection and separation.
No, control-based parenting won’t ALWAYS go that way. Some people actually thrive under such rigorous control, strange as that may sound. But in the majority of cases, I’m convinced that the results won’t be anything like they expected. In fact, I’ve seen it often. And even when people stay despite the strain, the important transparency and deep interconnectivity are missing.
And I should know how hard this approach is to actually implement. I grew up in this kind of control-based family. Dad blew up one day over hearing me playing Steve Camp’s “Fire and Ice” – a deeply Christian song – because it had drums and (as he put it) a “tribal beat that causes inappropriate changes in our hearts” – and forbid me from ever listening to it again. Of course – OF COURSE – I ignored him, because I knew (with all the dubious wisdom of a teen) that he was wrong, but I never again let him into my media world. I even rejected his wisdom about church music selections, even as I got involved in leading worship, and it took me another 40 years to see that some of his ideas were very valuable.
Ironically, “Fire and Ice” is explicitly about media and carefully choosing what we consume. The two verses say:
I was messing around
With the things of the old life
I didn’t think it would hurt me
Just a little seemed alright
But the wages of sin
Ate like a cancer within
It crippled my faith
’Til I was hard against HimTelevision will tell you
(Fire and Ice, ©1983 Sparrow Records)
“Do it if it feels good for you”
But I found out the hard way
What they’re saying isn’t true
The fact still remains
The truth doesn’t change
The Word of God is alive
To show us the way
How interesting that Dad’s explosion was against the very song that aimed to teach me what we ultimately did successfully teach our children, but what HIS outburst bottled up and stunted in me for another four decades.
At any rate, I grew up desiring to raise my children just as strictly as I had been raised, because ultimately (despite the angst) I’d decided that this kind of control was the only Christian way to raise children – after all, it was the only way I knew – and I was unwilling to question how I’d been raised. It was my wife who understood that relationship was better than rules, and it took me many years to come around to her approach – and fortunately I listened when it came to our making those rules above, because SHE WAS RIGHT AND I WAS WRONG. If it had only been up to me, I know my kids would not be as close to us as they are now. In fact, it wasn’t until many years later – when they were well into their 20s – that I fully appreciated how she was more right – and righteous – than me in this area. So I’m speaking from experience and from humility, admitting that I didn’t get it right, but God gave me a wife who was better than me, and was able to win my kid’s hearts until I finally grew up too.
So to summarize: religion is less important than relationship. And relationship with God starts with relationship with parents. Be intentional to build relationship, not rules. Reserve the rules for critical stuff, not Taylor Swift.
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