I doubt I shall ever be graced with children, but the concerns you speak of so eloquently above plague me still. I watch the kids in my neighborhood, in our little downtown, at Menlo Park Mall, and sometmes it is all I can do not to rage with despair. What I see tells me that these children have bought the lies of the world, and worse, that it was their parents that sold those lies to them.

I hope more parents are putting forth an effort similar to your own.

Oremus...

A toughtful article. Thank you.

I found this article an interesting reflection on a very difficult, prevalent problem. I am no expert on young women and eating disorders, unless knowing many such struggling, suffering girls qualifies me. I have made the general observation from discussions with girls suffering anorexia in particular that, often, they perceive a troubled relationship with their mother. Sadly, I do think some mothers of my generation have expressed their love and care for their daughters in terms measured by grades, amibitions, appearance and achievements, tightly tethering mother love to mother appeasement. It can be terribly tough for a young woman to measure up when mother and daughter have set expectations & standards so high and, often, in all the wrong places.

I had an eating disorder and I still grapple with my body image. I also grew up in a loving Catholic home with a wonderful mom. What went wrong?

Sometimes we can do our best as parents, and our children may still stumble. Sometimes all we can do is to release them into God's care. I suppose that's what my parents had to do, watching me whittle away. My eating disorder was about perfect control. I wanted to be in control, and I wanted perfection. I used the scale as a barometer of my self-worth instead of my God. My disordered habits started out about being thin, but they became something much more - a means of gaining power. It was as much a pride disorder as an eating disorder for me. Even now when I'm tempted to slash calories so I can be in contro (often when my life feels like it's out of control) and I watch my weight dip, I have to humble myself and remember that even when the scale is cheering me on for being "strong," I am being weak if I think the size of my jeans determines my self-worth or if I try to have complete control.

I have daughters now, and I do worry they will be at war with their body like their mom was. so I have to work extra hard to remind them that we are made in the image of God (not the media) and that our bodies truly are temples that deserve our respect. I have to help my children develop positive body images, and I have to be careful to not support media that perpetuate unhealthy and unnatural bodies. I must focus on good health - exercise and healthy eating for the way it makes our bodies feel, not look. And as you so eloquently point out in your closing paragraph, above all I "must love God so that they learn to love Him, too."

Beautiful reflection, David. Thank you.

In my case, I focused more on the latter parts of the article: “We have shielded them from the worldly influence…. And still we see the world in them all.” It is the same with my own children, and even more so in my own case. I reveled in the world for so many years before I became Catholic and even now, I struggle to keep my own life ordered – and to teach my kids properly as well. This election cycle has saddened me a lot – and that was before a real problem (Hurricane Ike) came along. I really wish Mrs. Palin were at the top of her ticket. But one thing this sort of ordeal has made me observe is that there are only two things any of us can really do to change the world. We can offer penance, and we can offer witness. The article focuses mostly on witness: Mr. Mills’s attempts to guide his children in the paths of Christ.

But penance is also important. By penance, I mean the three forms described in (I believe) Matthew 6: prayer, fasting, and alms (including good deeds). This brings me back to the beginning of the article: anorexia specifically is the ordering of one’s eating habits to conform to (in Mr. Mills’s words) “an image of perfection they know is ridiculous and unnatural, not to mention culturally determined and commercially driven.” Put another way, it is an ordering (or rather a disordering) of one’s eating habits to conform to the whims of the world. Fasting, on the other hand, is offering oneself to God by refraining from eating – for a meal or for a day. This reminds me of something I saw in an old video of one of Archbishop Sheen’s programs. To paraphrase, the Archbishop asks, “What is the difference between dieting and fasting? Either way you lose twenty pounds.” But the good Archbishop goes on to explain the difference: a diet is ordered to conforming oneself to the world while a fast conforms oneself to God. This does not mean that dieting is bad in and of itself (and I mean this from the perspective of eating properly, which for some folks means eating consistently more, not less). But it does mean that dieting can turn into slavery (as in anorexia) because it is ordered to the world. Fasting, on the other hand, seems far less likely to turn to disorder because a fast is ultimately a sacrifice offered to God, to neighbor (in that more ancient example of doing without so others can eat in times of scarcity), or both.

But the larger point is that focusing on the two very Christian acts of penance and witness has helped me get through the sadness of this election season (which I know isn’t over) and even the difficulties we’ve gone through due to Hurricane Ike (which have been minor compared to the difficulties others have faced). This doesn’t really compare to the problems mentioned above, but it does identify (at least for me) the true differences between being God-focused and world-focused. Focusing on God is simply saner.

Thank you for the kind and helpful comments. Here is an article on eating from <I>Touchstone</i> you may find helpful:

Emily Stimpson's <a href="http://tinyurl.com/2oes5y">Eating Light: On the Last and Other Suppers</a>. Emily is a freelance writer and a contributing editor to <I>Our Sunday Visitor</i>. As it happens, I just met her in person for the first time last night, at a lecture by Anthony Esolen given at Grove City College nearby.

As the father of two former teenagers (both now in their 20s), I found out quite early that my power to keep the world at bay for my childrens' sakes was very limited. Even if our household were perfect (and I know it's not), there were
always the households of their friends and classmates. But that also turned out to be the key to helping my children through these exceedingly difficult years. That is, there could be some nudges, some pointing, toward the right households
other than our own. I am eternally grateful for the small Christian fellowship groups into which our children were placed early on by our church, that is, by about age 12. These groups continued for the six years of junior and senior high school. They too weren't perfect, but the groups were run by young adults, usually in their 20s or early 30s, who were old enough to be adults, but still young enough to emphathize with their charges. I knew they succeeded when my daughter, now 27 and a high school teacher, eagerly volunteered to be such a
leader at her old church. These girls still come over to our house, nine years after my daughter's group dissolved, but I am now seeing it "from the other side."

Well said, David Mills. I think it has become more difficult in recent years to keep children from seeing and hearing things you don’t want them to. You are wise not to have TV; it is unbelievable what commercials in the late afternoon have to say about erectile dysfunction, increased sexual satisfaction and the like. I don’t know firsthand that sitcoms and dramas are filled with sex and profanity but I take observers’ words for it. As for books, it’s not only teen and pre-teen books that are harmful, but also picture books that give a warped view of a feminized, guilt-inducing and pretty boring world.

I think some of the way children turn out has to do with their own inborn traits. Some are more susceptible to influences around them; others tend to look to themselves or their families.

And I think about my own daughter, who will probably within a few years begin having children. She is acutely aware of the problem, and has considered trying to pull together a group of like-minded people who will live close to each other. She became acquainted with a group of Catholic families, friends of her cousin, who live in Michigan. Some of them moved back to their depressed and depressing town from places with good jobs, in order to be together. They are well on their way to having large families, they attend the same church and socialize with each other. I think they homeschool but I’m not positive. This is one possible solution, though it remains to be seen how it works out.

Thank you David for your insightful article. My wife and I made similar efforts to shelter our children with similarly ambiguous results, an ambiguity which your article clarifies beautifully. Our children might have turned out even better had we been better people, but our well-intended efforts were not utterly in vain either.

Thank you for this thoughtful article. As far as books for young girls, I have directed my daughter to the old classics (The Secret Garden, Anne of Avonlea, Pollyana, for instance). The heroines often have an interior life, and strive to achieve a bettering of their character, or stimulate this in others. Now that my eldest daughter is twelve, she's reading Jane Austen, which has all the racy elements of an adult novels (premarital liasons for instance) but with with right moral tone. I have found a haven in Victorian literature myself over the years. Modern novelists seem incapable of creating characters with moral strivings that I can recognize.
And how they will all turn out? We pray and pray for them to be good and wise...

Amen.

It troubles me a lot when I think about the influence on my children of media and other forces outside my control. How do you balance what media they have access to so as to be neither over nor under restrictive? What influences do you allow in and what do you keep out? As the father of four children, all under the age of 10, all I know for sure is that it will be years before I know how good a job I did.

Thanks for giving us more information to work with.

The jury is still out on my children, too - the oldest is only 12. I spend a lot of time reflecting on my own childhood and what my parents did right and what they did wrong, so I can avoid the pitfalls they weren't able to. Briefly, I see ages 10-12 as the critical time. That was the point at which they started to relax and give us more freedom (which in the early 70's was not a good idea). We became peer-dependent, our self-images became tied to the culture around us (Woodstock, etc.!!), they trusted that the books we were given to read at public school were OK, assumed our judgement about friends was sound (and knew nothing of our friends' home lives), stopped doing nightly prayers with us (probably assumed we did them on our own), let us spend all our free time with our friends, etc., etc., the end result being the complete erosion of parental infuence.

And after all that reflection, still I'm surprised to find that my husband and I are knitting together our ideas about culture for our kids from what we loved about our own childhoods, including a love of the outdoors and of music (other than rock and roll). A very wise father of 8 once told me that you can't just tell them what cultural things they're not allowed to take part in - be it TV, music, movies, fashion, etc. - you MUST replace it with an alternative, or it just sounds like a bunch of "no's"! And start young.

It's very difficult, but very rewarding at the same time, to try every day to keep the world at bay. My children watch selected movies but no TV, never go to large chain bookstores or the mall, and I actually try my best to keep them out of the grocery store, admittedly difficult at times, but the covers of the women's magazines at the checkout are truly pornographic (the words are worse that the pictures). We listen to all types of music except for rock and roll (the Ventures being the one exception). I know this all sounds extreme but when I look back on what I was allowed, as a teenager, to listen to (Led Zeppelin, anyone?!) and read (The Excorcist?!) I know in my heart that my soul was altered. I don't want my children to suffer in the same way, I must help them get to heaven.

Words all of us parents (and non-parents) need to hear every so often.

I know I do.