Your Sinful Baby

Growing up in the conservative Christian church, there was one doctrine that always stood out to me and struck me as odd, however I grew up and it became less and less relevant and was forgotten completely upon my leaving Christianity.

And then I had kids, and occasionally it would creep up to haunt me, cast a show of doubt on my decisions, but still I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then recently, while perusing Facebook I came upon an update from a friend of mine who has a son about the same age as my youngest. This friend is an incredible, loving mother and also an extremely conservative Christian. She was writing excitedly about her son turning one, and stuck in between praise and bragging was this little paragraph:

“But I also need to remember that he is a sinful little human just like me. He chooses to disobey my orders, chucks anything in his hand and throws tantrums on the regular.”

All at once years of indoctrination came flooding back and I was floored. I lay in my bed and thought “sinful? A one year old? Surely that’s not right”. I obsessed over it the rest of the week. I recalled sermons, bible studies, even nursery school classes on the nature of man after the fall.

As a teenager, it had always made sense to me. “My selfishness and angry outbursts are the result of my sinful nature, why wouldn’t it be the same for toddlers? They just wouldn’t have the social skills to conceal it”.

I was taught that babies were just raw, innocent versions of an adult sin nature. They didn’t know what they were doing, but they behaved the way they did because they were fallen. They were selfish, disobedient, demanding, and destructive because thus is human nature, and they were human.

This was all well and good… Until I had tiny lunatics of my own to disobey me, break my things and wail at unimaginable decibels. Then I realized that the entire idea of “sin nature” in babies and toddlers is, to put it nicely, completely ludicrous.

When trying to wrap my head around a belief that I just can’t get behind, I often try to run through a scenario from the opposing point of view.

And so I sat.

I sat and I imagined what babies would be like in an unfallen world. If Eve had triple snapped at that serpent, or whatever the appropriate pre-historical diss would be, how would parenting play out?

I think about the issue of disobedience. Saying “No” is not inherently sinful. If anything it is a necessary life skill. So in order to be disobedient, you have to not only understand who the asker is as a person, but also that they are in a position of authority over you. So for a toddler to be disobedient, they would have to grasp that mommy and daddy are of different importance to them than everyone else socially. They would also have to possess enough self awareness to understand mommy and daddy’s authority over them, as the child.

I think about the things in my home that have broken upon being tossed by tiny humans with incredible arm strength and I remember being 4 years old. My cousin and I were playing barber shop with our stuffed animals and had taken my mom’s sewing scissors. My favorite possession in all the world was a stuffed Simba from The Lion King. I took the scissors and thought “I’ll give him a pretend haircut, the scissors won’t really cut his hair because I don’t want them to.” Imagine my shock and horror when not only did the scissors cut his mane off, but it also didn’t grow back within a few weeks like my hair. In order to not be destructive, babies would have to be born with a fairly complete understanding of gravity, force and fragility.

But the most challenging and in-your-face part of this doctrine revolves around tantrums and the incredible selfishness of toddlers.

Look, any parent will admit it: toddlers can be turds. They call it the terrible twos for a reason. 

However, it doesn’t take a whole lot of hard thought to realize that this stage makes perfect sense.

Of course they’re selfish! They just realized that they HAVE selves! Imagine sitting around, doing something that you enjoy and then being yanked away from it, and for the first time realizing “Hey! I don’t WANT to leave that thing! What’s going on?”

Having wants and desires isn’t inherently sinful, and small children don’t have the higher brain function to realize what goes into fulfilling their desires, or to empathize with someone else’s desires.

They don’t have enough of a grasp of time to understand patience.

Emotions are not inherently sinful, and they don’t have the practice and mental capacity to restrain their feelings or the social understanding to express them appropriately.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t expect more of our children. My all means TEACH your kids these things! For the good of the world please expect empathy and patience and self control from your children as they grow.

But also please understand that the behavior of your one year old has nothing to do with fallen nature. It has nothing to do with sin. 

By that logic, in an unfallen world, we wouldn’t have babies. We would have little adults that were born with self awareness and an advanced understanding of authority, gravity, time, empathy and social etiquette. Why would children like that even need parents?

The most important thing about this though, the thing that keeps me up at night isn’t the logical fallacy of sinful nature in toddlers, it’s how incredibly harmful this doctrine is to children and the loving parents responsible for them.

If your one year old looks at you and says “No” as a result of not understanding the pressing need to put his shoes on, it is your job as a parent to teach him proper etiquette and the importance of deadlines.

But if your one year old looks at you and says “No” because their very nature is a raw look at man’s fallenness and they are being disobedient, it now becomes your job to quell that disobedience and to set them back on the straight and narrow or risk their souls later.

It is not healthy to see your child’s nature as inherently broken. It isn’t healthy to see your child’s soul on the line during every hard encounter. As a loving parent, this pits you against your child’s emotions, desires and needs and nobody wins that war.

This attitude can only lead to stressed out parents and emotionally repressed, anxiety ridden little people.

And there, right there is the whole problem. Fallen Nature doctrine is bad for kids. You are raising your children with the idea that they are inherently flawed, inherently “black hearted” and that it’s their fault that the man on the cross is bleeding and has a scary hole in his side.

 Kids do not understand the subtleties of phrases like “Jesus died for you”. They don’t realize you say that to everyone. To them, that guy is literally dead because of them. Because of how bad they are. He is DEAD because his blood had to wash away the dirt from YOUR heart. Yes you, Annie!

I’m sure you think that you’re a balanced, normal Christian. You don’t make your kids memorize Leviticus or wear head coverings. It’s not like you’re abusive.

But you know what? Neither were my parents. But it’s not exaggerating to say that I spent most nights of my childhood sobbing and saying the Sinners Prayer again and again and again. Just to make sure it stuck, because I never felt different the next day. I never felt cleaner, less sinful or more content. I still wanted to sleep in, and cheat on my chores, and eat an extra cookie, so it must not have worked.

I must have done it wrong.

Years after leaving the church, this attitude still follows me into my adult life. I can’t roll my eyes at my husband without being overwhelmed by guilt. I can’t make simple, innocent mistakes without abusing myself because I know that I am basically bad and every misstep proves it. Anything good I do is a fluke, a breach of character.

I won’t do that to my kids.

If you wish to subscribe to original sin doctrine as an adult, in the company of other adults, please do. You have the right to express your faith the way you see fit.

But please don’t raise your children as though their very selves were something to strive against. Maybe if we teach kids that they’re basically good, basically kind and loving and that bad things are mistakes to be overcome, they’ll behave like it. Maybe they’ll rise to the expectations.

And maybe they won’t become adults that sit in the laundry room sobbing because they shrunk a load of T-shirts.