Postmodern Tantrum

I was in class and we were talking about different factors that help or hurt a child in his/her development and put a family at risk for problems. One of my friends looked quite frustrated and kept on looking at our professor & the rest of us with a confused / upset look. He finally burst out saying, "What do you mean problems? What do you mean by ideal? Like really [don't repeat this in class] wealthy or - how do you win this [I also said don't repeat this in class] race?" Everyone paused and the professor said, "Hm. Interesting. How do you know?" My friend got very angry and said that was the point. We don't know and so it is presumptuous to say what is good and not good for a child or family. He also had problems with predicting a child's developmental trajectory from different factors in his/her life.

I knew God was wanting me to speak. I took a deep breath and thought, "Ok, here goes..." I raised my hand. My professor let my friend rant more. Then he let me speak. I said, "First of all, remember when you guys were not HDFS and you looked at your family or friends? Maybe they worked in a business or at a store, so they were from various economic backgrounds. But couldn't you tell whether they were doing satisfactory or not?" I got a lot of uproar with that statement saying, "You can't really tell." Ok... so my professor attempted to cut me off by saying, "I know where you are going with this, but we have no accurate way of measuring how families and children are really doing." I said, "Yes, but, I think we have an inate sense of what families should be like and how children should be like to be adaptive." Common sense, yeah? Oh man... My friend practically blew up and said that he had a problem with the word 'should' and everyone pretty much agreed.

I tried to resolve his post-modern tantrum, but I think it made it worse. After class, I spoke with another Christian and she knew what I meant and agreed with what I said. It was my first foray into bringing Truth into this class and ouch. However, I am consoled not by my classmates' or professor's reactions, but by the fact that I do know how God designed the family and how He ordained it to be. This is nice because it allows me to work toward a goal when helping children and families.