Announcing My New Book: Open and Relational Parenting
I’m excited to share that my book, Open and Relational Parenting: Loving Parents Reflecting a Loving God, is now available for purchase.
This book is mainly based on the doctoral dissertation I defended in February. It reviews essential research on effective parenting styles and offers ways to approach parenting through the lens of open and relational theology. I believe the best way to give you an idea of what to expect is to share the book's introduction here.
Over the past year, my Substack posts have hinted at some of the ideas I discuss in the book. Future posts will explore these and other topics in more detail.
I hope you get a copy of the book! As you read, please feel free to send me comments and questions via message or by replying to any of my posts.
Introduction
Parenting is a daunting task. Expectant parents spend many hours preparing to step into their new role of raising a tiny human. Despite attempts to prepare, they inevitably find themselves facing something unexpected. The baby may not cry, sleep, or eat as expected. Babies grow into toddlers, children, teens, and young adults. Along the way, parents continue to face the unexpected. As the current crisis passes, it leads to another: toilet training, school drop-off, driver’s education, or college move-in.
After their first day of parenting, most new parents feel like the new dad I met in the hospital a few years ago. He was a large man who dwarfed the small newborn he easily held in his right arm like a football. In any other circumstance, he would have seemed confident and perhaps intimidating, but that day, he appeared lost as he asked, “Doc, where’s the instruction book for this thing?”
Looking for the elusive “instruction book,” parents turn to friends, family, church communities, books, podcasts, the internet, pastors, and pediatricians. These potential advisors may have little, if any, formal training in child development or parenting. Some of the advice parents receive aligns with approaches validated by current research. Much of it does not.
A brief glance at history reveals that people have been parenting since humans first appeared on Earth. Over time, parenting methods emerged that better supported the next generation’s survival. Those methods persisted and were passed down from one generation to the next. Beyond the simple principle of survival of the fittest, people asked questions about the best ways to raise and parent children. Many cultures sought divine guidance for answers to these questions. With the increasing influence of scientific inquiry in recent decades, we have incorporated a layer of science into cultural and religious ideas about optimal parenting practices. As a result, parents increasingly turn to psychologists, counselors, and pediatricians like me for guidance on raising their children.
Modern scientific methods enable psychologists to investigate various approaches to parenting. Parenting styles that emphasize parental responsiveness and direction have been shown to help children become adults who contribute to society with higher self-confidence and psychological stability. I refer to these approaches to parenting as nurturant and contrast them to authoritarian approaches, which emphasize parental control and minimize parental responsiveness.
Recent psychological research identifies a nurturant style as the most beneficial approach to parenting. However, religious-based parenting advice often comes from a background in classical theism, which envisions God as an authoritarian parent figure. This approach encourages parents to follow that pattern of authoritarianism with their children.
Some parents hear differing advice from the scientific community and their religious community. This difference can leave them confused. Their options are to live with this apparent tension, disregard scientific research, or adopt an alternate theology or atheism.
My wife, Linda, and I faced this dilemma in our parenting journey. When our two daughters were young, our faith community focused on an authoritarian approach to parenting that was based on the ideas of classical theism. The parenting style they advocated didn’t align with the parenting principles I had been taught during my pediatric training or the ones I was teaching my patients’ parents. I didn’t realize there were other ways to view God, and I couldn’t ignore sound science. So, I lived in that tension for years.
As time passed, I found that each horizon brought new possibilities. I asked questions and learned about other theological perspectives of God. They portrayed God as an authority who must be obeyed, a transcendence that can only be known through nature and reason, an unending graciousness, or a loving companion. As I learned more, I found that open and relational theology helps answer many of my questions by seeing God as a spirit of love who co-creates with us every moment, guiding creation toward overall flourishing.
Like many others, I have found that open and relational theology helps to reconcile apparent differences between science and religion. I realized that it also provides ways to align scientifically sound parenting practices with theology. It allows me to see God as a nurturant parent, and to follow that divine example as a parent and pediatrician.
My journey led to an opportunity to pursue a doctorate under the guidance of my dissertation advisor, Thomas Jay Oord, where I delved deeply into open and relational theology and applied its principles to parenting. This book is the result of that work. In it, I will argue that open and relational theology principles create a view of God as a loving, nurturant parent and are consistent with a nurturant parenting model. Although I rely heavily on open and relational theology, other theological approaches, including atheism, can be consistent with a nurturant approach to parenting.
Chapter Overview
In Chapter One, I will provide background by reviewing some influential psychological research on parenting from the past sixty years, with a focus on Diana Baumrind’s work. I will examine her classifications of parenting styles and outcome measures for each style. Delving deeper, I will explore how Baumrind’s classifications relate to child developmental theories and how they apply to atypical parent-child relationships and across ethnic boundaries.
In Chapters Two and Three, I will turn to theology, arguing that parents’ image of God affects their parenting style. In them, I will evaluate the divine parenting style when God is seen as a parent through the eyes of four different theologies. In Chapter Two, I will look at theologies that imagine God as an authoritarian, permissive, and disengaged parent. In Chapter Three, I will focus on open and relational theology, arguing that God is a nurturant parent when viewed from the perspective of open and relational theology. In these chapters, I will demonstrate that while some theologies lend themselves to parenting styles associated with adverse outcomes, an open and relational theology supports healthy parent-child relationships and more positive outcomes.
In Chapter Four, I will explore some of the information and resources that parents typically find when seeking Christian-based parenting advice. Much of this advice comes from the theological background of classical theism. James Dobson is renowned for his parenting books, seminars, and broadcasts that support this approach. This chapter will examine common parenting advice he and his followers advocate. I will argue that this approach lacks a strong foundation in Scripture, is inconsistent with open and relational theology, and results in more negative outcomes.
In Chapter Five, I will apply open and relational theology to parenting and propose a model for open and relational parenting. This model provides parents with general guidelines that can be applied to various specific parenting situations. I will argue that an open and relational parenting model enables parents to adopt a nurturant parenting style compatible with healthy theology. I will also identify several characteristics of God described by open and relational theology and demonstrate how parents can benefit from and imitate these attributes in their parenting.
These first five chapters started as parts of my doctoral dissertation. They outline the fundamental concepts of open and relational parenting, which can be applied to various specific parenting situations. In Chapter Six, I present three examples of how to implement open and relational parenting in particular scenarios. Open and relational parenting does not offer step-by-step guidelines for parents to navigate these or other situations. Instead, it emphasizes general principles that must be applied wisely and individually.
My primary focus in this book is on applying open and relational theology to parenting. Along the way, I also construct a case for open and relational theology as an approach to understanding God that aligns with science, Scripture, and experience. Open and relational theology presents God as a spirit of love who is in a moment-by-moment relationship with all creation. This concept of God fosters healthier relationships between parents and children, as well as with all creation, promoting overall well-being.
Can’t wait to have my copy in hand! Congrats Chris!
I read an advance copy of the book, plus bought a copy, and really enjoyed it. Best of luck with sales, Chris! I also submitted a 5-star Amazon review. Here's what it said:
Hanson’s book on open and relational parenting is well-written, easy and fun to read, and deep. It informs, but also invites the reader to look within. It sure caused me to do that. I have never parented a child, nor will I unless something dramatic changes very soon (I am a 73 year old gay man). And yet, being childless, I found the time I spent reading this book life-enhancing and enjoyable.
Hanson explores several types of theories. He describes various theologies as well as various parenting approaches, including the science on outcomes using these approaches. He clarifies the connections between the spiritual beliefs of parents and the approaches they use in raising their children. He makes a very strong case for open and relational theology, for what he calls “nurturant” parenting, and for how open and relational ideas and principles can contribute to the nurturant approach.
And he does all this very readably. Here’s a paragraph that illustrates Hanson’s beautiful and inventive writing style: “Open and relational theologians believe that, although God exists in the natural world as a spirit, God doesn’t have a physical body that can directly affect the world. In response to the age-old question, ‘Can God create a rock that even God cannot lift?’ [Thomas] Oord replies, ‘God can’t lift a pebble, let alone a big rock!’ This does not mean that God has no power in the world. God has the most power, but not all the power. God exerts power in the world by inviting creatures to collaborate with divine aspirations. Through their free response, pebbles and big rocks can be moved.”
Despite never having raised a child, I found the parenting examples in chapter six especially fun and thought-provoking. The whole book, and the examples, led me to think a lot about how I was raised. It became clearer and clearer as I read that my Catholic mom and agnostic dad raised me and my brother and two sisters in a very nurturant way. In particular, my mother talked to me a lot. She listened well and deeply, and she communicated her aspirations for me extremely clearly. In some ways, too clearly. Her aspirations, while they did inspire and motivate me, were, if not unattainable, hard to attain. Sometimes in life that has caused me some sorrow and internal struggle. On the other hand, her aspirations have kept me from giving up on a number of occasions when I have faced obstacles. So this book leaves me very grateful for, and now way more understanding of, what my parents did for me and the love and encouragement and affirmation they showered upon me.
This book will make you think too.