The Parent Trap

“If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.” Mark 9:42

Last night Rose and I watched The Parent Trap with Samantha, the original version from 1961. In case you are too old to remember, Haley Mills played identical twins who were separated by their divorcing parents as infants and who meet each other at summer camp. The girls discover they are sisters and plot to get their parents back together. It was a shock to realize the movie was filmed 53 years ago, in a very different time.

In one scene the girls discuss their anger at their parents for denying each of them a parent. The twins remark how terrible divorce is and how they both have friends who have suffered from it. One of them says if this keeps up one day soon there will be more divorces than marriages. The line drew a laugh in 1961. However, the writer turned out to be more of a prophet than a comedian.

The divorce rate started a sharp rise soon after 1961 and in recent years the marriage rate has dropped. Someday soon there may, indeed, be more divorces than marriages.

It seems if we can’t kill off our offspring in the womb we will handicap their childhoods by denying them the benefits of growing up in a complete family. Just today I was reading that children with involved fathers are 98% more likely to graduate from college. Of course, fathers who are married are more likely to be involved.  That’s just one of the many benefits of growing up in a whole family.

I can’t escape the feeling that we are failing our children. I had lunch with a close Kairos friend. He lives in Baton Rouge. We both remarked how old our church congregations are and discussed the difficulty of getting younger people involved. My friend’s church is across the street from the campus of Southern University but they have almost no students attending their services.

It’s no accident that the 1961 world of the Parent Trap was before legal abortion, before the extraction of  prayer from school, before the “liberating” social movements of the sixties. Our children have less of a chance of being born, less of a chance of growing up in a whole family, less of a chance of growing up in church than did the Parent Trap kids.

Parents have fallen into a trap, a trap of believing that their “happiness” is more important that any responsibility they have to the children they conceive. We can’t fall into the trap of giving up on our kids. They are far too precious and our responsibility is far to great.

We have to find a way out of this trap. This generation may be seeing more grandparents raising kids. If that’s true, so be it. We may not have the youth or the energy, but we may just have the responsibility.