TLP 124: Parenting Trends 2018

The world's philosophies and trends and fads are ever-changing. Itching ears and restless fingers will never cease to look for new ways to be satisfied, but God's Word provides the only perfect philosophy that eternally satisfies.

The Show’s Purpose and the Question of Parenting Trends

Welcome to Truth. Love. Parent. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, A .M. Brewster. So every year articles are.

Written and videos are produced telling everyone what the cool parenting trends will be in the new year because, you know, we all want to be cool parents. I'm not certain if these people just watch pop culture and follow the progression of the previous year and make predictions about the new year or whether they're actually just telling us what to like, but either way we're gonna discuss their opinions today.

But first, if this is your first time checking out Truth. Love. Parent, I have a couple things to say. And the first is, thanks for being here, I pray you find biblical practical advice that will help you become an intentional premeditated parent.

And second, please know that whatever the topic is, I rarely discuss it the way other people would. To be honest, if you ask anyone who knows me, they will tell you that I really don't care about consensus.

I don't really care what everyone thinks is cool. I don't care if everyone's doing it. I just really just don't care. However, I really, really, really, really, really care about whether or not a choice will please the Lord.

And I do believe that He cares. Some people argue that He doesn't care about the quote-unquote little things, but He definitely and completely cares about everything I do, no matter how small it is. He cares about the clothes I wear, the food I eat, how I parent, the church I attend.

He cares about it all. And He cares about that stuff for your family as well. If He didn't, He wouldn't take so much time to show us how intimately aware He is of the minutest details in the galaxy, like the number of the stars and the hairs on your head and every time a sparrow falls.

And He also wouldn't tell us that we need to glorify Him in everything we do. If we have to be told to glorify Him in everything, it's because we may not. And if we don't glorify Him in something, He definitely cares.

So, more than simply discussing 2018 parenting trends, we're going to talk about whether or not we as Christian parents should embrace them in our parenting and why. And before we jump into that, I want to encourage you to swing by TruthLoveParent .com and check out our top 10 most listened to episodes of 2017.

And if you missed any of them, I highly suggest you give them a listen. And while you're there, you can avail yourself of our other top 10 lists, including my personal favorites and our show lists by topic.

And don't forget that you have until January 31st to receive upgraded Patreon rewards for the entire calendar year of 2018. Just check out Patreon .com or click on the 5 ways to support TLP link in the description of this episode.

Parenting Trends for Babies: Weighted Blankets, Decor, Forts, and Pom-Poms

Okay, so what's cool in the parenting world this year and should we care? I scoured the internet for some consensus. Everyone has their own lists and ideas and most people lean pretty heavily on Pinterest to answer this question.

But I did find a number of overlaps and points of agreement and I put them into a few categories for your consideration. The categories are these. Babies, bodies, sustainability, and technology. And we'll discuss them in that order.

Okay, so for all of you out there with babies, the AllWise cultural groupthink is talking an awful lot about weighted blankets. Yes, that's right. The research shows that the heavier-than-usual blanket is beneficial for babies.

Actually, I don't know about you, but I would love an adult-sized one of these. That sounds amazing. It also seems that 2018 is the year for finally throwing out all those obnoxiously colored plastic baby-themed decorations and toys.

More and more nurseries are being decorated with mom and dad's tastes in mind. Minimalistic themes, mod decor, and a lot of wood furniture is trendy now. I'm a huge fan of this next one. It seems permanent forts are in style.

Every kid, you know, needs a fort. If he or she doesn't have one, they'll always make one. Whether it's under the kitchen table or like my kids, consisting of every blanket in the house, draped over all of the furniture in the rec room, so that the entire room is transformed into a fort.

Kids, you know, they'd love their forts. But this year, the move is toward full-time forts. My personal prediction is that kids will love this, but regardless of how many forts they have in their rooms, they'll still play under the table.

And lastly, for the baby category, thanks to Pinterest, apparently pom-poms are a big thing. They've found their way into decorating and clothing, and yay! All right, so before we move on to the other categories, what's a parent supposed to think about all of this?

Well, here are some hopefully practical considerations. Number one, we know that we're called to glorify God in all things, so that includes the areas we just discussed. Number two, I believe we should always research both sides of an argument when people start claiming that something is healthy or beneficial for your body.

Proverbs 16 21 tells us that the wise of heart is called discerning. Don't just jump on bandwagons. Research. Be wise. Make an intelligent, Christ honoring choice. This goes for things like what your family eats and how you steward their health.

So, don't just take my word about the weighted blankets or someone else's word. Do the research. Number three, we also need to be wise with our money. Modern chic nurseries may be awesome for people who can afford it, and maybe you can, but Luke 14 28 admonishes us to count the costs of our monetary investments.

Don't just throw out all the hand-me-down furniture and decorations just to be trendy. However, again, you may be able to afford such things, and I'd simply encourage you to be sure the Lord is pleased by those types of investments.

Number four, forts. You know, I mean, what can be wrong with forts? Forts are great. I just want to say that we need to be very careful when we give our kids the impression that there's a slice of real estate that belongs to them and that no one else is allowed to enter.

I love temporary forts because they're used for the game and then they come down. However, more permanent forts like lofts and tree houses and backyard mini homes do often encourage a secretive sense of ownership.

I mean, seriously, which of you listening to me today didn't experiment with some type of questionable activity in a quote-unquote safe place that you felt was all your own? I think it's valuable for children of all ages to realize that everything belongs to God and that God has entrusted it to dad and mom to steward, and that some of those things have been entrusted to them by God and their parents to steward.

That means that everything in our lives ultimately belongs to God and is given to us to use to glorify Him. That means that unkindly excluding siblings from their special place or demanding their privacy from mom and dad is dangerous at best.

And I'm not saying that kids don't need privacy. I mean, I believe that, you know, when they're changing their clothes and things like that, especially, that's an extremely important time to teach your children modesty and decency and privacy is a necessary part of that.

But having a room where the parents aren't allowed to come in, where the kids lock their doors to keep mom and dad from coming in, or they have a drawer where they have a diary that mom and dad aren't allowed to look at.

I understand, you know, there may be some valid reasons to allow that to a certain degree, but again, our children need life to be interpreted for them. They need to be taught how to be wise and discerning, and when they're allowed to live their own life, think their own thoughts in a place that's exclusively theirs, where God and the Bible and mom and dad aren't speaking into that spot, then we have trouble, because it's in that place where they can live however they want to live and do whatever they want to do, and mom and dad aren't allowed.

And that also starts to build up walls between the parents. And seriously, we could dedicate a whole episode to this, and perhaps we will in the future, and we do need to move on. But one last thing is, we're gonna kind of talk about this a little bit more in our next episode.

We're gonna ask the question, where in your house is God not allowed? And that's the whole thing I'm trying to get around. We don't want there to be a spot in your backyard, up in the treehouse, or a spot somewhere in your home where God is not allowed to be there.

And that's really the big thing I want us to consider as we discuss this idea of forts and whatnot. But let's go ahead and move on to the next big category, and that is bodies. Number two, 2017 was very focused on the human body, specifically within the context of sexuality and gender.

Biblical Sexuality, Consent, and Body Neutrality

And there's no reason to think that focus is going to die away anytime soon. If you haven't yet read the Nashville Statement or listened to the TLP Stippit number 10, please do both as soon as possible.

This world is in a tailspin concerning the nature of our bodies, our sexuality, and to whom we belong. And you cannot start too early teaching your children the truth concerning these issues. But there seem to be a couple nice ideas on the horizon concerning our bodies.

With all the talk concerning sexuality on the negative side, there seems to be some refreshing, if not slightly hypocritical, talk on the positive side. Certain parenting trend prophets believe more parents will teach their children about consent and assertiveness this year.

And a number of sources have noted that teaching children about body neutrality is on the rise. If you're not familiar with that concept, body neutrality encourages children to stop thinking about how they look.

No doubt this could go in a dangerous direction, but the main motivation appears to be noble. Instead of encouraging little girls to think only about how pretty they are or their sons to give too much thought to what others think about their bodies, parents are giving their kids more productive and less self-centered purposes.

So, how should the Christian parent think about this? Well, as I mentioned, more time needs to be spent giving our children a biblical view of sexuality and their bodies. I really encourage you to listen to episode 25, Parents, Kids, and Tectation, episode 30, Teens and Dating, TLP snippet number 5, Transgenderism is Child Abuse, episode 88, Apps You Thought Were Safe for Your Kids but Aren't, and the TLP snippet number 11, How to Parent a Me Too.

Lord willing, our resources here for parenting your children in biblical sexuality will increase, and Truth Love Parent can become a go-to resource to equip you to be an ambassador parent. In regard to teaching our children about consent, I mentioned earlier that some of these ideas might be a little hypocritical, and the reason I say that is this world who makes movies and makes songs and makes books just pushing this idea of sexuality onto our kids.

The people in Hollywood who just parade about those people who are really their predators, they're now saying, oh, well, we need to, you know, we need to preach consent and all that kind of stuff, and though I agree with them, we need to, and I'm glad in a way they're really waking up and seeing the error of their ways.

I hope they are actually seeing the error of their way, not just being hypocritical, not preaching open sexuality and treat people however you want and do whatever you want on one side while on the other side saying, you know, consent, consent, because I believe that's really the hypocritical problem with our culture today, but I do believe, again, this is an incredibly important, and it needs to be framed the right way.

To be honest, none of us should ever give anyone consent to do anything to us that's sinful. It doesn't matter if I consent or not. Sin is sin, but if our children understand the principles of biblical sexuality, then teaching them to be assertive and stand against undesired overtures or flagrant abuse is very vital.

As, you know, as a fifth degree black belt myself, teaching our children to protect themselves is also a great idea, and perhaps, again, we'll maybe do an episode on that this year as well. On the idea of body neutrality, I do actually think this is really good.

I think we've spent so much time in our culture pushing people to be obsessed with how they look and what they think other people think about them, and really this is all vanity. It's selfishness. It's pride.

It's arrogance, and there's no value in any of that. I do not believe the Christian should strive to be ugly. I think that there's value in dressing well because we are ambassadors for Christ. We are made in His image, and though it's not bad to look different, I do think it does not help the cause of Christ when we look stupid, but at the same time, teaching our children to not really think about their bodies, to not overly think about it anyway, to not be so concerned about what they look like and what other people think they look like, I think it has a lot of value, and I think that we as Christians should seriously strive to understand this concept of body neutrality, see where it's coming from, reject the bad, accept the good.

I made an observation earlier that something potentially bad could come from this, and it has to do with the fact that, you know, maybe we just don't care. We stop caring about what our bodies look like to the degree that we start becoming offensive to other people because of, I don't know, bad breath or gigantic pimples on our faces, or we're just, you know, putting on any old clothes and not really glorifying God so much by being a good representation of who he is in this world.

So I think, but other than that, I don't know. I'm not sure yet. This is a very interesting concept that is being propounded right now, and I think it definitely deserves some more thought from us as Christian parents.

Sustainability, Stewardship, and the Creation Mandate

Number three, now moving on to the sustainability trends for 2018. I already mentioned some of this when we talked about the move away from plastic toys and decor. Classic wooden toys are making a comeback for more reasons than the mere environmental effects, but I'll talk about that more in a minute.

Of course, companies are creating far more eco-friendly products to appeal to the millennials who, thankfully, care about the planet. One interesting thing I saw was jewelry that was designed from silicone.

It looked very pretty and modern, but it was also designed to be safe if your baby grabbed it and started chewing on it. It sounds like a great idea, but you have to know that if you allow your baby to do that, they're gonna have, you're gonna have drool just running down your neck.

I know you moms are used to that, but you know, why encourage it? I don't know. Well, those of you who have been listening to this show for any amount of time know that I'm very serious about our creation mandate.

Humans were commanded to steward the world, and I believe that Christians should be the best environmentalists, not because we worship trees and endangered species, but because we worship God. You can learn all about the sanctified sustainability movement I started by listening to episodes 47 and the TLP snippet number six.

In short, I think more wood and less plastic is very wise. I also love the idea of encouraging our children to play games and get them outside and using their five senses with tactile three-dimensional toys.

Screen Time, Digital Addiction, and Technology Boundaries

And number four, that leads us to the last category of the day, technology. Well, I learned some encouraging things from my research. First, as I mentioned, there are a plethora of good studies that show the deleterious effects of too much screen time.

We've shared and plan to continue sharing those articles on TLP's Facebook page, so make sure you like us so you don't miss those. And if you say, Aaron, you're encouraging us to be on technology more often.

Listen, if you're gonna be on a device, you may as well use it to glorify God in your family and learn how to be a better parent, so that's okay. There's also a movement transitioning helicopter parents into a new category, FBI parents.

Yes, that's right, you too can monitor your child's every movement with special devices that connect to clothing and that are trackable with your phones. And lastly, in the technology category, it seems that many parents are creating an online presence for their children before they're even born.

Twitter handles, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, and email addresses are being created so that when their little bundle of joy is old enough to maturely access the World Wide Web, they don't have to fight for their name.

Of course, I've also read that some parents are deliberately changing the spelling of their kids' names simply so that they can have unique avatars, you know, because if this kid's name was taken, I'll just change the spelling to a weird way that no one ever has, and now they can have their own little name.

Well, biblically speaking, I think there are plenty of amazing principles to address these questions. First, I believe we'd be foolish to ignore the vast array of studies that show our kids are negatively affected by too much screen time.

In addition, the Bible makes it crystal clear that addictions of any kind are actually forms of self-idolatry. If you haven't heard how to know if your child is addicted, please check out episode 114.

Devices are extremely addicting in that they promote the lie that satisfaction can be found outside of Christ and inside the tiny box marked pleasure. So I totally support, like I said earlier, this whole concept of getting the kids outside, playing with Frisbees and jump ropes and bubbles and things like that, because it helps them to interact more with creation and helps them to not get so stuck on this device, which is deliberately created to be an addictive substance in our children's lives.

I think it's really good and I think that we should probably consider not just thinking more like this in 2018, but really as we move forward, because businesses are just gonna keep trying to make technology even more addictive and more interesting and drawing us into it.

We really want to give our kids a good foundation that they can use their minds and that they can appreciate this world and how God created it without always having to be staring at a screen. Second, I think there's wisdom in protecting your children, obviously.

Sometimes technology can be used to protect them from people who would do them harm and sometimes it can be used to protect them from themselves as they strive to do harm to themselves. To that end, there may be wisdom into looking into ways of tracking your children's whereabouts.

However, like everything else, please check your motive. A dictatorial, insecure, or suspicious parent isn't gonna glorify God no matter what they do. Be certain your choices are motivated by pleasing the Lord and get lots of counsel before doing it.

Lastly, I suppose one could logically argue that since we occupy this technological world, creating an email address for them, you know, that is our children, so they don't have to have johnsmith214387ql, you know, dollarsignatgmail .com would be really helpful for them.

However, what if your parents had created you a Yahoo, AOL, or Juno account? How helpful would that be today? Imagine a kid who's been waiting 15 years to use his MySpace page just to find out no one thinks that's cool anymore.

My point is, is it really that important? Can it really not wait for your kid to have a Twitter account? I know some people create an email address for their child and then write them daily emails they hope their child will actually take the time to read in the future, and maybe that's an awesome idea, but so is writing it in a book or saving it in a document on your computer.

It's hard to argue from Scripture that the trend may be lame, but that's my opinion. So, there you go. Whether you eat or drink or wrap your child in the eco-friendly weighted blanket equipped with its own email address and GPS chip made out of wood, to all to the glory of God.

I encourage you to be less interested in the fad and more interested in how you can parent your children into the knowledge of God. Focus on training them in the way they should go more than helping them be trendy.

And believe it or not, but I have no episode notes for you today, but that doesn't mean you can't share this podcast and the accompanying transcript to be a blessing to your friends. And as I already mentioned on our next episode, we'll ask the question, where in your house is God not allowed?

Believe it or not, there may be places in your home right now where God is not allowed to go. If that's the case, you're gonna want to figure out where that is and throw the doors wide open as soon as possible.

And I'd like to give special thanks to Matt and Sonia for becoming a patron at patreon .com. They believe in truth, love, parent, and have partnered with us to help further our mission of glorifying God by serving families all over the globe, and I just praise the Lord that he's using them to do so.

If you'd like some specific and specialized help, don't hesitate to write to counselor at truthloveparent .com. The world's philosophies and trends and fads are ever-changing. Itching ears and restless fingers will never cease to look for new ways to be satisfied, but God's Word provides the only perfect philosophy that eternally satisfies.

Enjoy 2018. All to the glory of God.

Truth. Love. Parent is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent. Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.