Authentic Parenting in a Postmodern Culture

by Mary E. DeMuth

Harvest House, July 1, 2007

Mary guides parents through her ongoing postmodern parenting journey, encouraging readers as they travel the same road, in three parts:

Foundations, What Does Postmodern Parenting Look Like? and Releasing Children, Embracing Culture. She includes group discussion questions and a resource section.

You can purchase your autographed copy directly from Mary at the links below.

Read more about Mary and her books at

her website Relevant Prose. Sign up for her ezine.


Learn about Mary's faith and writing on her blog.

Mary DeMuth

MARY DEMUTH’S NEWEST BOOK:
AUTHENTIC PARENTING IN A POSTMODERN CULTURE

Released by Harvest House, July 1, 2007

One of the highlights of Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference for me was sharing the dinner table of Mary DeMuth, Christian author of novels Watching the Tree Limbs and Wishing on Dandelions and nonfiction parenting books, Ordinary Mom, Extraordinary God: Encouragement to Refresh Your Heart and Building the Christian Family You Never Had: A Practical Guide for Pioneer Parents.

In person Mary radiates the warmth of Jesus and is as genuine as the title of her latest parenting guide, Authentic Parenting in a Postmodern Culture. Below I quote some of her thoughts regarding this fresh approach to raising children in our culture:

What does postmodern mean? And why should it matter to parents?
Postmodernism is the waiting room between what used to be a modern worldview and what will be. According to several postmodern scholars, we’re in a shift right now, leaving modern ideas behind, but what we are shifting to is not yet fully defined. Postmoderns believe that rationalism and/or more education doesn’t necessarily create a better society. They typically don’t embrace the notion of absolute truth, though they reach for the transcendent. They are skeptical, and often question whether science is something to be embraced or feared. The question for parents is how will we mine the current worldview, even as it shifts? What in it can we embrace as biblical? What is not biblical? What I’ve seen in the church is a fearful adherence to what is familiar. So we cling to modern ideas, even though they may not be biblical and shun postmodern ideas even when they might be biblical. Our children will meet this shifting worldview no matter what our opinion of it is.

You talk about the twin values of engagement and purity. What does that mean?
Many parents subconsciously believe that true parenting means protection at any cost. We received a lot of flak for putting our children in French schools because the atmosphere there wasn’t exactly nurturing. Believe me, the decision was excruciating. But through it all, I realized that Jesus calls us all to be engaged in the culture we live in, yet not to be stained by it. That’s the beauty of engagement and purity. Abraham understood this. After God told him to leave everything and venture to a new place, he obeyed: “From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD” (Genesis 12:8). Oswald Chambers elaborates: “Bethel is the symbol of communion with God; Ai is the symbol of the world. Abraham pitched his tent between the two.” As parents journeying alongside our children through a postmodern world, this concept of pitching our tent between communion with God and engagement in the world should encourage us.

What bugs you about postmodernism?
I happen to believe in absolute truth, so that’s a problem! But more than that, I worry that all our rambling about it, trying to discern what it is, has caused us to rely more heavily on our own intellectual pursuit of God than our heart. When I get caught up in that, I remind myself of my friend Jeanne’s son Jacob, whose heart after Jesus takes my breath away. Living with a brain injury, Jacob throws off pretense as he worships God, arms vaulted to the sky in unashamed heart worship. That’s the kind of believer I want to be. That’s the kind of heart I want. I love this verse: “But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3). For me, for my children, that’s my prayer, that we’d be simply and purely devoted to Jesus no matter what worldview we find ourselves in.

Book Excerpt:
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Links to Mary’s website and blog:
Visit Mary's helpful and fun website here.

Meet Mary and read her crazy blog here.

Be sure to check out the other blogs participating on the Authentic Parenting Tour this week. For a complete listing of the blogs participating in the six week tour, visit here.
A Cup of Cold Water
Aspire2 Blog
Be a Barnabas
Christian Work at Home Moms
Dawn Morton Nelson
Deborah Gyapong
Dobsons 411
Eleanor Joyce
Good Word Editing
Preacher’s Daughter
Sky-High View
Spaghetti Pie
the law, books and life
The Master’s Artist
The Surrendered Scribe
Through My Window
Writer-lee

A COMFORTABLE EVENING WITH FRIENDS

Tonight we have reservations for four. Our good friends will join us for dinner in a rustic but attractive setting on a mountain road at a restaurant where the food is elegant, the accommodations small, and the ambiance perfect. The best part of the evening? The company and the conversation.

We love being with this couple. Our kids have grown up together. Their son was our daughter's seventh grade boyfriend, and both, now in college, are good friends still. We even traveled together with a group of families from our kids' school to Germany. We belong to the same church, and the wife and I have sung in the choir together. In fact, she's the one who urged me to join the choir. My husband and hers meet with some other guys from church on Friday mornings (6:00 a.m, to be exact) at the local country cookery just to hang out over breakfast. We spent a rainy Labor Day cruising the river in their pontoon boat and struggled to take the boat out of the rushing water. Our relationship with this couple is comforting and comfortable.

All our times together haven't bubbled with happiness. The four of us bemoan the roller coaster ride of parenting, as we try to figure out when to speak, when to shut up, where to hold on, and where to let go. We cried with them when, without warning, they lost their young daughter. They cried with us when my husband lost each of his parents within a few years. A big part of the comfortableness in a friendship lies in the seasons of life we've weathered together.

Relationships drift in and out of our lives, depending on the phase we're in at the time, the convenience of that relationship, and the effort we're willing to put into it. This couple and my husband and I, now with at least partially-empty nests, have less responsibility regarding our children. But we still have to work at getting together, because we're all busy with our careers, families, and lives. To us, it's worth the effort of picking up the phone, getting off the couch on Friday or Saturday night, and putting aside all the obligations calling our names to spend a comfortable evening with friends.