Regrets of a Mother Stuck Parenting in the Evangelical Bubble
Making peace with my fundamentalist past
When I look back on my years of parenting in the '90s and early 2000s, I feel quite conflicted. In many ways, they were great years for me. But looking back at that time from where I am now, I cringe at some of the things I did and what I believed to be unshakeable truth.
During those years, I was deep in the Evangelical church world, influenced by James Dobson and Focus on the Family, reading his books on parenting and the “strong-willed” child. Not only that, but I was brought up to believe that spanking was an excellent parenting technique to keep my kids in line.
We were one of “those” parents, giving our daughter a purity ring on her 13th birthday. We had friends who were part of the “Quiverfull” movement — having as many kids as God gave them, dispensing with birth control. So the fact that we had four kids was seen as godly.
We believed that Christ’s return was imminent, evident by the end of the world at Y2K, convinced that Saddam Hussein was the anti-Christ — the Bible was clear on that. Of course.
We were convinced that what we believed was right and godly, and we had no one to challenge that. Like yeast in dough, Evangelicalism filled every nook and cranny of…
