Are Evangelical mothers happy?

NEW STUDY SHOWS CHRISTIAN WOMEN ARE HAPPY, BUT FEEL SLIGHT MOM GUILT

TOM LAMPRECHT:  Harry, I want to take you to a story that Christianity Today featured recently. It was a story concerning research that Pew Research had done. Pew Research found that evangelical mothers score high for balance and satisfaction in parenting. Yet here is the question they ask, “Why do they keep facing so much pressure?” Based on the numbers, evangelical moms should be the happiest on the block, Christianity Today reported.

During a cultural moment when American mothers are feeling the acute tension around balancing their roles and responsibilities, evangelicals report being particularly satisfied with the time they spend parenting. In a Pew Research Center data breakdown by faith group, more than three-quarters of evangelical mothers say they spend just about the right amount of time with their children.

Over half — that’s more than moms or dads in any other religious group — say they actually have enough time to socialize and pursue their other hobbies. And yet moms in evangelical churches across America say they are struggling with mom guilt, burnout, and parenting pressures.

DR. REEDER: I’ve read that report and it’s almost like a magazine looking to create something that didn’t seem to be there. What I read from the survey was, “Well, we’re satisfied. What we’re feeling from the culture is we’re not supposed to be satisfied. The guilt is we should be out working and not just focusing on parenting.”

THE GREAT “WORKING MOM” DEBATE

Are there moms who can properly prioritize their nurturing role in the lives of their children, particularly at those crucial young ages where that child is so drawn to a mom? I mean, it’s mom that they’re drawn to for nourishment; it’s mom they’re drawn to for comfort. Dads are there and they can change the diaper, and they can pick this up, and do that, and provide this and provide that but there’s no…

I see it all the time, Tom. We have our covenantal baptism of believing parents and their covenant children and would you like to know how many times when I take that baby, that baby starts screaming? And we’ll get through the baptism and then I hand that child back to the mother and guess what happens?

TOM LAMPRECHT:  Silence?

DR. REEDER: Silence. That’s home base. They know exactly where they are. I remember our children and how Cindy was able to help our two daughters experience that — it didn’t take long. And I love the fact of how, when a child is born now, they immediately place the child not in the hands of the dad, but place the child right there with the mom, right from the very beginning.

GUILT IS OFTEN EXTERNALLY PLACED BY SOCIETY

The guilt that, “I love that and I’m prioritizing that because the world is telling me I’m supposed to love something else and I’m supposed to diminish that.” Well, I would just encourage you to keep doing it and, for all of you men who are ready to go out there and take a second job — you and your wife are both working and then you had a child and she says, “I really want to stay home and nurture the child and you go out and take on a second job,” or you cut back on your budget, that is a great thing to do because you, as a father, are able to do those things that allow your wife to do that which God gave her a great heart and God equipped her to do that you can’t do but what you can do is free her up to do that.

Now, can a woman work outside the home? Absolutely. Do women go to work outside the home or bring work inside the home? And, by the way, it’s not, “Oh, do you work or do you stay at home?” because stay-at-home moms work, I can promise you that. My goodness, I can’t imagine all that they do, and what they make work and how they get it accomplished. I love to see a home that’s functioning on all eight cylinders that way.

If you want to see a woman that, clearly, her children were not in those early nurturing years but have grown up, you just go read that Proverbs 31 woman. My goodness alive, what a woman. I think she’s got an “S” on her t-shirt — that’s got to be superwoman. She’s got a real estate business, she’s got a manufacturing business, she’s got employees that she takes care of, she sews for her children, she takes care of them — they’ve not only got clothes, but they’ve got clothes that look like regal clothes. They’re clothed in purple and they’ve got belts. And, by the way, she’s not only got a business, but she manages her employees. She makes these products and she sells them. She is considering land and buying it and planting vineyards. Wow, what a woman.

GOD GAVE SPECIAL GRACE TO WOMEN

Well, listen, that may be a composite woman, to tell you the truth, but here’s what I know: what God is teaching us in this is that her work outside the home, if you’ll read it carefully, never is in competition with her call as a wife and a mother. It is an extension and an enablement of and an enhancement of because, at the end of it, it says this: her husband is honored in the gates — not laughed at, but honored — and her children rise up and they call her blessed because they have felt the impact of this woman as she has worked in, around and outside of that home and has embraced the great call she has that only a woman can do and that is have a child within the boundaries of marriage and nurture that child so that that child might grow in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

And, alongside of her husband, have children that are not the reason for their unity, but the result of their unity and then their greatest joy is to prepare those children to leave them and cleave to someone for a lifetime partnership as men and women marry in and for the Lord.

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