Baptising infants and educating out of Spirituality

Quite and interesting article/posting here: Educating out of Spirituality � Such as These part of it (interestingly) resonates with a fundamental message of Mat Fox's Original Blessing (I won't go into what I think is wrong with that book, merely affirm that the original blessing message in itself seems fair enough). Part of it is the curriculum that is engendered: "Gretchen Wolff Pritchard wrote in Offering the Gospel to Children that “Adults come to church on Sunday in order to worship; children come to Sunday school to acquire information” (140-141). The assumption is that it’s more important for young people to know about God that is for them to know God. We are educating our children and youth out of their innate spiritual capacities. God, the subject of our worship, becomes the object of our study."
It's an approach to curriculum more informed, I would say, by Enlightenment attitudes which prize rationality as the pre-eminent human characteristic. I'd like to develop a Christian nurture curriculum based on an approach I started to take with confirmation groups of doing far more about spirituality, formation and spiritual disciplines with an experiential dimension written in, and this is an approach which is pretty consonant with what is being said here.

The link to infant baptism is that I think it's interesting that the big rise in pisteuo-baptism comes with the post-Enlightenment period and exhibits concerns with conscious (rational) faith commitments. It has struggled with issues to do with the incorporation of those who have diminished rational capacities. The biblical basis of infant baptism (ie of children in the household of Christians) is precisely about recognising that faith is something lived and felt as much as, if not more than, rationally apprehended. I could go on, but I think that I have drawn the parallel ...

Follow up:
Case for Infant Baptism (Grove booklets on ministry and worship)  

Your memory can create better childhoods

This is a really intriguing and potentially transformative piece of research. The Children's Society are asking people for childhood memories to help them ... well, read for yourself:

Did you know that the UK is the worst country in the developed world to grow up in*? It seems that many of our best childhood experiences have been lost to today’s generation. ... We are gathering hundreds and thousands of childhood memories that will contribute to The Good Childhood® Inquiry, the UK’s first independent inquiry into what makes a good childhood. This will help us understand how to make childhood better today. Please share with us your favourite childhood memory.

We want to learn about your best childhood experiences so that children today can benefit from them.

If you would like to participate go to this page. Hundreds and thousands of childhood memories — Your memory can create better childhoods

Children really do need a father

In a study of studies reported here Children Who Have An Active Father Figure Have Fewer Psychological And Behavioral Problems it would seem that a research consensus is emerging in favour of having positively active fathers involved in children's lives. "The researchers are urging healthcare professionals to increase fathers' involvement in their children's healthcare and calling on policy makers to ensure that fathers have the chance to play an active role in their upbringing." The difficulty, as so often, will be to encourage this without stigmatising and devaluing the parenting of those who cannot at any particular time, fulfil that ideal.
What I'd like to know, beyond this, is what is it about the involvement of fathers that makes these kinds of differences? And would that relate to using fathering as a key metaphor in relating to and thinking about God in Christ?

Children and parenting studies

A series of studies highlighted by science daily today focus on parenting and upbringing. First up:
Good Parenting Helps Difficult Infants Perform As Well Or Better In First Grade Than Peers:

"The key to first-grade adjustment for both difficult and easy infants was good parenting," said Anne Dopkins Stright, associate professor of human development at Indiana University"

Then here is a study on how mothering in the first couple of years affects general 'bidability';

The study found that children who had developed a close, positive, reciprocal, and mutually responsive relationship with their mothers in the first two years of their lives did much better in both respects--responding to their mothers' requests not to do something and regulating their own behavior--than children who hadn't developed such ties.

In terms of social policy these might mean that there could be savings in what it costs to deal with crime and disorder if we were to support early years' parenting. I would suggest that supporting families to be able to devote one parent to childcare might be worth considering.
Then there is the wider social environment, via its effect or at least influence on parents,

"This study does not show that poverty leads to bad parenting, which in turn leads to poor outcomes in children," according to Dafna E. Kohen, adjunct professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa, senior research analyst at Statistics Canada, and the study's lead author. "Rather, this study shows that in neighborhoods where there is socioeconomic disadvantage, children's verbal and behavioral outcomes are influenced by poor parental mental health and parenting behaviors."

See more here. In turn then, this suggests that thinking more carefully about neighbourhood renewal might be good. Once we know these things we should recall Jesus' words, "It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble." which seems to me to imply a culpability before God if we make it harder for people to avoid sin...

And while we're considering that, we might want to contemplate the effects of socioeconomic deprivation on sexual activity among teens.

results revealed that school level socio-economic factors remain very influential even after individual pupils' socio-economic status is taken into account. Dr Henderson explained: ''School-level socio-economic factors, such as levels of deprivation, do have a big influence. This suggests that an individual who is deprived but attending a school with an affluent catchment area may be discouraged from sexual activity, whilst an affluent individual attending a school with a deprived catchment area may be encouraged towards earlier sexual intercourse."

So the Christian right's agenda would appear to be better served, in the light of research, by promoting social justice and diminishing socioeconomic differentials. There's a turn up for the books.

Children Of Lesbian Couples Are Doing Well

Whatever your view of homosexuality, this is an important study because it moves some of the ground of debate. One by contributing to the 'normalisation' of gay relationships and two by taking away bad environment for child-rearing as an objection.

A study of families in the Netherlands indicates that children raised by lesbian couples “do not differ in well being or child adjustment compared with their counterparts in heterosexual-parent families.”

More interestingly, and challengly, but perhaps not surprisingly:

lesbian biological mothers were significantly more satisfied with their partners as a co-parent than were heterosexual mothers. The partners of lesbian biological mothers “are more committed as parents than are heterosexual fathers, that is, they display a higher level of satisfaction with their partner as co-parent and spend more time on child care and less on employment.”
Lesbian couples were significantly higher on strength of desire to have children than were heterosexual couples. There were significant differences in the division of family tasks, with both of the lesbian partners spending more time on household work and childcare, and less time at work outside the home, than the heterosexual fathers.

Watch out for more studies on this kind of thing, particularly for studies on gay males as co-parents.
I think that the challenge this presents to the received approach to homophile relationships centres around 'God is love and those who live in love live in God' ... for a traditionalist approach there is a difficulty in honouring that of God in such relationship, particularly where 'innocent children' are implicated, with a distaste [is that the right word?] for the nature of one aspect of the parental relationship.
ScienceDaily: Children Of Lesbian Couples Are Doing Well, Study Finds:

Children's NIR can't be guaranteed as safe

I can't help feeling that this 'trial run' of ID cards /NIR rather blows the gaffe on the whole enterprise, particularly the claim to protect our identities from misuse.

Though it stresses the sophistication of the electronic security surrounding the databank, it acknowledges: "No system can be 100% guaranteed against misuse." The government was warned by family campaigners that parents would be concerned about the number of people able to search the database, and about the potential security risk.

I think that this is a recognition, in effect, that the concerns about NIR wrt security are well-founded and that in reality there is no security. Time to stop wasting our money on developing this white elephant.
330,000 users to have access to database on England's children | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics

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