The Bible’s Costly Assumptions About Families
This article, written by Cathy McKay, was originally published at Australian Presbyterian (August 2024). Shared here with permission.
O, the Shame
Staying out of paid work to raise children is one of the great immoralities of our time. I’ve been one of those questionable, anachronistic women for almost twenty years. It would have been fewer years if I had fewer children. If I had lived my adulthood differently, I could be deep in postgraduate degrees, leadership positions and assets, with a reasonable superannuation portfolio accumulating. I have none of these, apart from assets which have come through my husband’s work. On paper, I am completely dependent and decidedly behind. Unlike my husband’s, my life, limbs and labour are very cheap to insure. While staying home to raise children is costly for my family (and myself), the relative costs of this choice are greater for families initiating that choice now.
For recent holiday reading, I opened the 2024-25 Women’s Budget Statement. My anomalous existence was confirmed. By the measures of that document, women like me are to be pitied, scolded and reformed. If you want a summary of what our representative government thinks of men, women and families, that document is instructive. It summarises the idea of marriage and family that our young women and men are steered toward. This is what’s said about the Stay-at-Home Mother:
Staying out of paid work to raise children is a compound betrayal. This mother sacrifices the advancement she might have gained had she continued in her career. She sacrifices her financial independence, both present and future, diminishing her lifetime earning potential. She sacrifices the security that attends financial independence.
The mother at home betrays not only herself, but the cause of all women. She subjects herself to the inequality which others have fought hard to undo. She’s consenting to and propagating harmful gender stereotypes. She lives within the confines of outdated norms, validating what is despicable.
The mum at home betrays the national economic good, removing her contribution to the formal economy. She betrays her infants, who are disadvantaged, out of the reach of infant peers, early childhood experts and their stimulating, simulated environments. She is choosing to model the opposite of what we want our children to be: she is mediocre, unambitious, invisible, small. Hers is a shameful, weak choice, the path one might stumble into if not competent enough to do something better. A pitiful waste.
To stay home is a betrayal of family prosperity. It means limited real estate options, a cheaper home. And modest holidays, measured spending, learning skills instead of paying experts. Going without. Waiting longer. Having less of what we’re conditioned to want.
For those who are conformed to thinking like the 2024-25 Women’s Budget Statement, staying home is an unconscionable choice. When the Apostle Paul writes for older women to “teach what is good,and so train the young women to love their husbands and children,to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled,“ (Titus 2:3-5), he forces us to deal with some embarrassment about the Word of God. Surely, if Paul knew how far we’d come, he wouldn’t place this expensive, treacherous choice at the heart of discipleship for women! The contrast forces us to ask if we’re more at home with the Women’s Budget Statement or the Bible.
A mother’s choice to stay out of paid work is a choice to be slower and simpler, to resist the mechanization of persons. The choice to raise children at home requires a home to be more: more than storage and shelter; more interesting, more nourishing than a daycare centre. If a mother and her children are to survive a home-based existence, she must learn to bring vitality where others only see boredom, to replace consumption with cultivation. She forms a cultural centre, a locus of relationships and community. A vitalized home brings life that spills out beyond its own members. If we risk the cost, we might find that Paul, along with the rest of Scripture, has a richer view of “working at home” than the Women’s Budget Statement does.
In most cases, a woman can only be free to be busy at home, actively raising her children, if she is married to a man who believes in the unseen value of her unseen work. This choice is the fruit of a marriage that believes in oneness, in being yoked together–in every way, even financially–to get something done in the world that neither of them could do alone, something that transcends them both. Such a marriage is one of mutual sacrifice, of mutual trust, of mutual respect – a marriage where two people are spending themselves in a common direction, while contributing in different ways. A marriage where neither is keeping a tally of who does what and how much. A husband and wife will only choose to limit their income in order to raise their children if they both believe that the value of life and work might not translate into budget data, if they both believe that there’s more to raising children than birth, a few months of breastfeeding and the antagonistic seesaw of the domestic load. In an increasingly hostile economy and contrary culture, a husband and wife will only choose this if they are both willing to look like fools, or worse, immoral.
The Mother at Home
When we talk about mothers staying home to raise children, isn’t it just a case of personal preference, of doing what’s right for our own family? What does it really matter if a mother chooses to work away from home while someone else cares for her young children? Isn’t working at home one option among many equally valid (or superior) options now available to women? Aren’t we free to do as we please, as long as we don’t break God’s moral law?
Usually, these discussions get us bogged in disputes about womanhood, femininity, rights and roles. The problem is, when we attempt to deal with these questions as if they were only about women, we estrange ourselves from some basic assumptions the Bible makes about families.
I propose that we shift our focal point with a practical question: are our children learning to obey their parents?
What do we (men and women together) do with Paul’s words, “children obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord” (Col 3:20)? And, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honour your father and mother’ (this is the first commandment with a promise)” (Eph 6:1-2)? Do we shy away from the requirement in 1 Timothy 3:4-5 for overseers to be able to manage their households in such a way that their children obey them? As we look at our own families and at our churches, how are our children going?
I suggest this question about obedience because it’s an easy observation to make. We all know if our young children are growing in the habit of obedience. The question prods us to figure out whether our work/home choices are helping or hindering them. It shifts the frame away from the grown-ups, to the children whose response to Scripture grows in the soil of ours.
For people who agree with the Bible, that children obeying parents is a good thing, the question of “how?” still looms. But before figuring out how, we need to establish “where”.
Several years ago, I heard some feedback about a parenting session run at a local church. A married mother who worked most of the week while her young children were in daycare responded that the parenting advice was really good, but was impossible for the working mum to implement. She couldn’t develop the daily habits with her young children because she wasn’t at home with them daily. She suggested a different parenting method needed to be taught which would work for a two-parent working family. Her observation made me realise that there is a natural connection between the growing-conditions that the Bible assumes (children spend most of their growing years in their family at home) and the imperative that children obey their parents. Children can’t learn to obey their parents when much of their time is remote from their parents. “Where” and “with whom” makes provision for “how”.
As it becomes more common for young children to have less time with their parents and more time in the care of people who have neither parental affection nor parental authority over the children, parents seem to have become more bewildered. All children struggle to learn to obey their parents, but they struggle even more when they aren’t with their parents much. It takes togetherness for parents to help their children grow into obedience. Perhaps the obedience of children has disappeared with the disappearance of togetherness at home?
The Bible doesn’t give us a recipe for raising children, but it does presuppose conditions within which children are raised to walk in God’s ways. Parents can only instruct their children “by the way” (Deut 6) if parents and children are in the same place at the same time, a lot of the time. This proximity is what our society is so eager to dissolve and what we easily surrender. Yet it is not just time at home that matters.
“Children obey your parents in the Lord” is not a lone imperative. Paul gives that instruction in tandem with instructions to husbands and wives. In Ephesians 5-6, the expectation of obedient children is stacked between the teaching about marriage (Eph 5:22ff) and the command to fathers, “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph 6:1-4). When a husband abdicates his responsibility to train and instruct his children; when he isn’t loving his wife as Christ loves the church, washing her with the word, then he is undermining the conditions in which his children learn to obey him. When a mother has a disordered relationship with her husband, refusing to submit to his loving leadership, when she is distancing herself from her marriage, her children and her home, she is undermining the conditions within which their children learn to obey. The husband, wife and children all interconnect in this ecosystem of growing obedience. But the command to children is downstream from the commands to parents.
Along with the proximity of parents with children (and the obedience which grows out of that), Scripture awkwardly assumes that a wise woman will prioritise her work at home. The wise woman “builds her house” (Prov 14:1). Older women are to teach younger women to love their husbands and children and to work at home, in godliness (Tit 2:3-5). When home is merely the place for storage, supping and sleeping (and perhaps bingeing on Netflix), then the potential of home for nurture is neutered. When we women give up on godliness and working to cultivate a home, then God’s word is reviled.
When a husband and wife ignore how they are meant to conduct themselves within their marriage, and when they ignore the Bible’s vision of home, then the conditions where children learn obedience to their parents (and to the Lord), are lost. We can’t teach our children the habits of joyful obedience if we’re not with them and if we are not living in submission to God’s word in our homes. The disobedience of children will be the natural effect of ours.
When Jesus speaks of the effect we adults have, to help or hinder children, he gives his strongest warnings: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea… And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire” (Matt 18:5-9).
Change may be costly, but it could be so life-giving.
