fear based parenting

I have witnessed families explode too often to allow it to be alarming anymore. Explosions I find typically occur around the employ of fear as the primary parenting tool. It is best displayed in exclusionary conventions that teach children to be afraid of participating in certain behaviours. It starts with, “don’t touch the stove!” The child is warned to avoid touching the stove because there is a possibility of touching something that will burn their fingers horribly. Sounds good on the surface but the fact that the stove is only occasionally hot enough to burn them cannot be communicated with this approach. But is there a way to teach a 3 year old the difference between a hot stove and one that is reasonable to touch. Well it may be difficult but not impossible. Interestingly one day the child will touch the stove and find out that it is not hot all the time and discover that the revelation and perception of truth had somehow become compromised. Too bad that the kids starts thinking that his/her parents are liars. So we justify compromised truth and more importantly how our kids discover truth – we also compromise our own relationship to our kids – why because we want to save their fingers. It’s their fingers we want to save. So why don’t we start with their fingers.
You see our kids start to think that the way to discover truth is to be suspicious of authority. Fear based parenting in effect basically teaches kids to fear authority so much that they are suspicious of the world around them. The best parents can hope for is that their kids won’t discover that the truth about the world around them is even slightly different than what they describe. And for sure they hope that they won’t discover that the best way to interact with the world around them is not the way they have described in their parenting.
Otherwise kids end up ‘finding out’ that:

-I like the taste of beer (it does not taste like horse urine and i should have suspected that my mom and dad never really tasted horse pee) and contrary to my parents teaching it does not force me to sleep with loose women.

-Secular music often speaks more truth than Christian music and it does not compel me to take drugs.

-One cigar is not going to make me addicted to nicotine. In fact there is a lot of disgusting puking and hacking that goes on before I am going to get close to being addicted.

-Sex is not horrible disgusting, terrible, and gross. I don’t grow hair on my palm and my kids are not retarded if I masturbate. And my parents have repressed sexual tension evidenced in the fact they show hardly any physical affection in any public context.

-The internet has a lot of enjoyable, clean, wholesome content on it.

-Owning a gun does not make me a killer.

-Catholics want to follow Jesus too…

You get the picture.
Start with the fingers. Stop telling lies about the stove. The stove is mad. And so are your children…