I’ve been reflecting on what we as a people value and what we do not value, based on how we act and who we respect.
For example, we say that we value women and consider them our equals, but we often don’t listen to them.
Or, we say we value families, but how often do you see someone in church leadership who has put his family before career?
Do we respect someone who turns down a promotion in order to spend more time with his children? Do we respect someone who makes job decisions not on how much money that is paid, but on how much time the job allows for time with family after earning enough to support them?
Do we tell stories about people who did not run for public office or withdrew from campaigns to actually spend more time with their families rather than using that as an excuse for someone forced to withdraw because of scandal?
You probably remember when I had the questions proposed while I was backpacking.
H—- Steve. How many served missions? I’m sure your church values BYU and missionaries. But they don’t respect them. I know. You are going to hang up on me, but check it out and show me how I’m wrong
https://wheatandtares.org/2021/09/09/respect-for-byu/
That got me started. I looked it up once I got off the trail.
Dallin H. Oaks. No mission.
Russell M. Nelson. No mission.
M. Russell Ballard. “a missionary in England from 1948 to 1950″
Jeffrey R. Holland. “served a mission for the LDS Church in Great Britain”
Dieter F. Uchtdorf. No mission.
David A. Bednar. “served as a full-time missionary in Southern Germany“
Quention L. Cook. “Cook served as an LDS Church missionary in England, where he and Jeffrey R. Holland served as companions, with Marion D. Hanks as mission president.”
D. Todd Christofferson. “LDS missionary in Argentina.”
Niel L. Anderson. “served in France as a missionary for the LDS Church”
Ronald A Rasband. “served a mission for the LDS Church in the Eastern States Mission“
Gary E. Stevenson. “full-time missionary in the Japan Fukuoka Mission.”
Dale G. Renlund. “full-time missionary in Sweden.”
Gerrit W. Gong. ” He served as a missionary for the LDS Church in Taiwan.”
Ulisses Soares. “Soares then served as an LDS Church missionary in the Brazil Rio de Janeiro Mission.”
I think it is fair to say that the LDS Church values missionary service among its leaders. But after looking at that, I did find myself looking at other things (and you can look for yourself to see how many of those leaders graduated from BYU, that seems more like a red herring to me). What do we talk about, what is important for our official lists and histories?
I found myself asking if we as a church value people who have put family first? Do we really value families?
So, I thought, I would ask our readers. I’m curious. What is your experience? Have you seen people well regarded who put families first or have you seen that as a negative as far as your stake, area or region of the Church goes?
The pictures of families are from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SvenFamilyDream.jpg, etc. under the appropriate licenses.
Wheat & Tares 
In a previous ward, there was a family that had a son in his early teens with severe intellectual and behavioral problems. He was non-verbal, could be violent, ate light bulbs – you get the picture. In testimony meeting, his mom got up and said something to the effect, “It’s really a shame that the members of the ward will never know what a great man my husband is. Now that our son is a teenager and is so big, he is the only one that can safely look after him, so he stays home with our boy so that the rest of us can come to church. My husband will never be able to hold an important calling. You’ll never be able to see him serve.”
It was a wonderful tribute to her husband – but also contained elements of apology that he was not an “ideal” priesthood holder – fulfilling his prescribed role. We had one son with Down’s and another on the way via adoption. We could relate to the challenge, but no bishop ever hesitated from calling my wife or I to fill roles that would keep us from our children.
Now we look back at how our attitudes – marry in school, have kids right away, have lots of kids, put off mom’s education – informed by church teachings, really ended up compromising our family. Time together as a family, financial resources, and suborning our own needs and wants, wellbeing and happiness, to the demands of our religion.
Is saying that the church values families as cannon fodder to their own objectives too strong? Some days, it isn’t.
I had a stake president who did a q&a for the stake relief society. Women could write questions and anonymously submit them. A woman asked if she still needed to pay her tithing if her non member husband didn’t want her to. I was shocked when the answer was “ “we’re not in the business of tearing families apart, that’s not the point of the law of tithing.” It was a frank, practical answer and I have so much respect for that past president.
Been there, your comment put me very much in mind of a conference address by one of the then RS general presidency a good many years ago now. All about raising our children to be missionaries. I found the whole talk very troubling at the time. My own response then was that I was raising my children to be their best selves, and that my children are not the church’s canon fodder.
I have not seen people that put family first as well regarded. You are well regarded when you have leadership positions, are in what I call “the inner circle”, and are visible in all your good works. My upbringing included a father in the bishopric and a mother who was Relief Society president for 10 years, only to be released to be the Stake RS president. They were well regarded and respected. They were also gone far too frequently and I was left home alone too much, even as a child. My experience is the direct opposite of an institution valuing families. I grew up resentful of their heavy involvement, not mature enough at the time to recognize that their actions didn’t support the values that were taught – importance of family. I grew up wishing for more of their time until I hit my turbulent teen years and the opportunity for a better relationship was put on a long hold.
Having raised my children with a non-member husband who rarely participated in anything, it’s interesting that one of his common comments regarded the difference between the mantra of the value of families and what he saw in real life with how much time Church service took men away from their family. He was not impressed. I watch my daughter with her very capable Church service husband and how almost every Saturday he’s off serving some ward family. What about her family? They are always second to everyone else.
If spending a large chunk of your time serving others instead of prioritizing your own family is what the Church values or defines as the ideal, then that is not a family relationship I want nor is it what I would want in a “family is forever”.
We seem to value groupthink more than individuality as Church members. There’s a kind of one-size-fits-all mentality. In my experience this meant graduating from seminary, serving a mission, getting married/sealed in the temple, and starting a family in my early 20s (while my wife stays home with the kids). All of this was expected by me and most of my contemporaries.
I think this might be changing somewhat. When I graduated from high school in the 80s, almost all of us from my YM and YW organization did what I described (at least the active kids). We were very different people doing very similar things on a pretty consistent timeline. But now I see our young people taking more variable paths. Yes, there’s still the BYU crowd. But more of the youth seem to be finding other paths.
I think groupthink will always be alive and well among the LDS population. But hopefully diversity of background and thought and action is spreading. I’m wondering what others see
The Church absolutely values families. That is irrefutable fact.
Of course parents will be called to serve in various positions. They have valuable insights that can allow them to serve. So do single members, but it would be absurd to expect single members to fill every calling in the Church.
Those who complain about having callings must be honest with themselves. Would they really use the calling free time to be with their children? I suspect that many would spend the time playing violent video games or messaging old flames on Facebook.
@TC, I’d like to think that comment about tithing had to do with supporting families. But it may have had more to do with the fact that it was a woman and he did not want to counsel a woman to go against the wishes of her presider-husband. I wonder if he’d have given the same answer to a male priesthood holder whose wife didn’t want him to pay.
@hedgehog that’s been in a lot of talks but was in the most recent GC too. I think that for many in the Church mission & high level of Church activity = proxy for being a good, healthy person so I think it’s less about the church producing soldiers and more about the church thinking that missions are best for everyone and that the characteristics necessary for serving a mission are the right things for everyone to aim for. I agree that’s wrong and that we should be focused on helping people be their best, most whole selves, we should broaden our view on that and support kids in lots of paths. A lot of my friends (younger, don’t necessarily have mission-aged kids) are doing just that, although there are definitely those who feel like failures if their kids don’t serve missions.
To the OP, I do think the Church encourages us to be committed parents and to value our children. I also think that it has no problem taking men away from their families for callings and glorifies that sacrifice, so the Church is still #1. I am seeing some changes there, though, with many leaders being more mindful of minimizing time away from family and making sure people feel comfortable saying “no” to things that will take them from family. YMMV on that, though.
And of course the Church only values one kind of family (heteronormative nuclear family). A big shocker to me when I lived and worked outside the BoM belt was that other people valued kids and parenting too. Some of them were too focused on one thing or another (like raising kids who would be financially successful, which isn’t really any better a goal for kids than being missionaries) but overall they seemed more supportive of a wider variety of paths for kids, which I thought was healthy.
I find it ironic that several of the above comments were posted at 11:17pm, 11:54pm, and 2:49am. Times when the commentators should have been asleep or paying attention to their own families.
@wayne are you familiar with the concept of “timezone”? Or that for some parents 11 pm is the only time they have they aren’t spending at work or with family? And now you’re the sleep police?
@jcs, I don’t usually respond to you because you’re just trolling / being some kind of parody, but absolutely, yes, for many people the church takes up time that people would be spending with their families. That was my experience with my parents growing up, what I’ve observed in my spouse’s family, and what I see in my own & my friends.
I don’t know why Elisa is attacking JCS on this one. He asks good questions. Who is going to serve in callings if parents are given a free pass?
He is also right that we can’t just assume that parents without callings would spend that time with their kids. I have been in a bishopric and a stake presidency where the bishop and president held meetings specifically to get away from their families. If they had not had those callings, they would have come up with another reason to be away from home.
Elisa, you are just proving JCS’ point. Parents goofing around at 11pm to 2am on the internet is not time better spent than it would be on a calling.
I was told that I was joining a church that valued, indeed emphasized families. But then I learned that my non member family was not good enough to attend my wedding, and a ceremony that included them-and a sealing after- would risk my eternal salvation. The slighted family members have been cool toward the church for forty years now.
My great grandmother would say the church pays lip service to valuing families but the reality is it doesn’t/didn’t value families. My great grandfather was rarely home as he was sent on multiple mission assignments, (culminating in a post manifesto polygamous marriage). My great grandmother was left to raise and provide for their 10 children. She had a hard life.
In more current times I see fathers working long hours to provide for their families, then spending additional time on church assignments, leaving 1 day a week for family time.
(And..btw, everybody needs some “down-time” to decompress).
@wayne, you’re using the same shaming the church uses. If we don’t spend our time the way it wants us to, we’re bad parents / bad Mormons / lazy hot dog eaters wearing crocs. And you’re using that example of time stamps (again, time zones! Internet delays! You have no idea when those comments were even made) to avoid the actual question posed.
You’re welcome to manage your own time I think we just ought to trust everyone else can manage theirs. And if people feel that a church calling is taking time from their families or other pursuits that are important to them, they should say no or cut back.
Do we value families? I would say that first and foremost the church values growth. And its pressure on people to marry young and reproduce fast and large is motivated mostly by what it sees as the institution’s best interests in mind and not necessarily the individual’s. For family nowadays can mean a diverse array of things. Even families with a lot of kids and families with fewer kids are really quite different. For in families with fewer kids, the parents tend to have more time and focus to devote attention to the children and their interests. In larger families, the oldest children inevitably play parental roles for younger children, thus creating a very different dynamic.
The church (leadership and culture) do not value families where parents are same-sex couples, period. The church also treats as second class families where the women make most or all the household income. It also treats as second class families single, working mothers, and divorced households.
The church promotes a very particular kind of family as the ideal. And this family is headed by a financially successful male who has a trophy wife who has 4-5 kids (of course women with more kids are placed on an even higher pedestal, but church PR is leery about featuring these extremely large families as such might turn a lot of outsiders off to the church). But the reality of families today is often very different from this promoted ideal. Some families that the church ignores as sees as illegitimate are actually very happy and loving. Some families that seem to live up to the church ideal give off nothing more than a facade of happiness that hides a darker reality beneath, but unfortunately a reality whose existence might be culturally taboo to acknowledge, let alone try to fix.
So on the question of the church valuing families, I would say that the church is largely clueless or willfully in denial about the complexity of the concept of family and often lacks the resources and knowledge to provide an environment to foster various forms of family success.
The desire to attract as much effort and attention as possible from your customer is not unique to the church. When we go to a restaurant, servers try to upsell us to get an extra appetizer or drinks. When we buy something on Amazon, we get bombarded with lists of other products that we might want. When we donate money to a political cause, we suddenly get solicited for adjacent causes and candidates. If we think of the church as offering a product, efforts to engage the customer more and more line right up with what is done in other fields. That is probably the biggest reason we have so many callings in the church. A calling increases both the level of effort required and the percentage of time allocated to the church. There are distinct benefits to this, but also individual costs.
When programs are pushed as one-size-fits-all, we often forget the original purpose of the program. Early morning seminary was a good example of this in my family. One of the best decisions we made was to stop taking our kids to seminary and replace it with better family scripture study (a pre-cursor to Come Follow Me). People who complain that the church doesn’t value families because of its demands can reverse this and use it to their advantage. Because the church values families so much, you have an ace response when someone demands too much. When there is an extra meeting you are invited to, “Sorry, I need to be with my family.” When you spell it out like that, only the densest persist. It has been refreshing how supportive leaders have been when I’ve chosen to deviate from the normal programmed actions so I could be with my family. It’s empowering but doesn’t happen automatically.
Let’s look at the other side of the coin here. Does the world value families?
My neighbors all have college degrees and work experience. When they decide to start their families, they have both the means and the experience to do so. I would say more than half of my neighbors make the choice to have a parent at home raising kids. But the point is they have the option, and the means to succeed in that option. Their prior work experience means they have the ability to re-enter the job market in the future when the kids are raised, or even work part time while their kids are young because they have the credentials and the network to succeed. Their work experience not only created a savings cushion financially, but that professional experience also translates to parenthood. Additionally, when both spouses have experience in the work place, then both spouses can better relate to what it means to care about a job. My point being that they can share in the roles of providing financial support with providing the emotional support to raise a family. Money only solves money problems, but money problems are real.
Contrast that to the stories above where one spouse has no work credentials whatsoever. Imagine the pressure the spouse with the career feels to ensure nothing happens to them that would jeopardize that financial base. That’s an extremely stressful position to be in, especially when your church community tells you that you are never enough. It’s also a lonely position to be in if your spouse can’t understand why you can’t always make it home by five, since they have no frame of reference about what it means to be a working stiff. Imagine how the spouse without any marketable work skills must feel.
So I would say that, generally speaking, the world values the quality of family more than the church does.
And for all of those rude commenters making judgments about how I spend my time, go pound sand. I am not accountable to you or my bishop on how I spend my time. If I choose to peruse a blog as part of my personal well being time, that’s not open for discussion. Though I’ve never met Elisa, or Angela, or Josh h, or many other commenters here, they feel like family to me. I value what they say, and believe their words have been a net positive in my life. I will not apologize for choosing to engage in this blog instead of organizing yet another game of basketball for the YM.
Agreed, squidloverfat. Recently I was offered a calling as a YM advisor. I reminded the bishopric member that I have 2 daughters and zero sons, and as much as I would enjoy mentoring young men, I cannot justify using my precious weekends to take other men’s sons on camping trips, because that’s time I have to take away from my own family, and they are more deserving of my attention. After he picked his jaw up off the floor, he politely withdrew the calling. Once he got over the shock of me effectively saying “no”, common sense set in and he kind of agreed about family time taking priority. This particular counselor has 4 boys, all under 12, so perhaps this encounter prompted him to do some self-reflection over how much time he was giving to his own calling at the expense of his family.
My stake president when I was growing up found time on Sundays to spend time with his family that may not work today. Sunday afternoons when he got home from his meetings, he would play basketball in his driveway with his kids.
I remember in college I dated a young woman who asked me what I hoped to do for a career. I mentioned I liked the idea of teaching and maybe would teach high school or with CES. She responded with concern about the size of home that such a career would afford me. I said, “I would be happy in a 3 or 4 bedroom house with 3 or 4 kids.” She was incredulous and wondered how I could be so barbaric to expect kids to share a bedroom. I knew at that time that my life goals and hers were not a match and we shortly broke up. I had grown up with a dad who was a teacher, in a 4 bedroom house with 4 siblings and we shared rooms. He also had summers off, finished his day earlier than my friends’ parents and helped my mom out on her side business. On top of that, we were happy. I knew our family was a priority over career choice or church calling. I wanted the same for my family. I also chose a career that would give me flexibility to be with family. Now that my 4 children are grown (raised in a 2 then 4 bedroom home where they shared rooms) I am glad my parents taught me that family is far more important than the next promotion or endless hours of church service. When I have had more time consuming callings, I would excuse myself from bishopric meetings to get home and help with the kids, or miss stake meetings if my kids had a need for my time.
(I love Chadwick’s latest comment. Well said)
My last stake president spoke several times about the burden of time spent on church callings, particularly for bishops, but also everyone else. His repeated advice was that “not all weeks need to be the same”, which I took to mean that those with busy church callings should take occasional vacations, including vacations from the callings. Which is fine advice as far as it goes, but I think it gives short shrift to the reality that bishops and Relief society presidents and the like are essentially doing a hefty part time job for free on top of whatever else they have to do. If they are reasonably affluent they may be able to take periodic vacations. Even if not affluent they could skip the church callings for a week every so often. But they are still committing an enormous amount of time to the institution.
Would the church show how it values families more if it compensated bishops for their time? This is extremely unlikely to happen, as the current leadership would see that as priestcraft (never mind their own modest stipends), but that is what I think it would be more aligned with the supposed values of the church.
I think it’s virtually impossible to answer the question about whether or not the church values families without mentioning how it treats families that include LGBTQ members, which belies the supposed focus on the family (RIP James Dobson). The church values prototypical families, which thankfully are no longer lilywhite. But the Proclamation on the Family was not borne of church leadership’s effort to draw lines in the sand among denominations; find me a church that’s anti-family. Rather, as most already know, the Proclamation was the church’s effort to have a say in the Hawaii same-sex marriage debate. That and Oaks’s statements on how to manage a gay son or daughter’s visits says more about the church’s absolute commitment to family than any pronouncements from the pulpit.
I can’t remember her name, but a woman John Dehlin once interviewed told of actually getting a meeting with D. Todd Christofferson to discuss the safety of her gay son in the church. According to her, when she asked if he thought the church provided a safe space for LGBTQ youth, he said it does not think so. I can’t see that they have any intention of changing that dynamic.
@John W, who said “Some families that seem to live up to the church ideal give off nothing more than a facade of happiness that hides a darker reality beneath, but unfortunately a reality whose existence might be culturally taboo to acknowledge, let alone try to fix.”
My parents both had time-consuming callings on a regular basis. This was fine. When dad was in a stake pres, or on the High Council, or in a bishopric, it meant he wasn’t home much. Since home was a much happier place without my father around, I never resented the time spent away.
My father discouraged my mother from having friends, and she went along with it because of what happened if she stood up to him. He always allowed her to have callings though. The only friends she really had were the counselors in her presidencies. She was frequently president of one of the auxiliaries on a ward or stake level. On some level, even as a kid, I knew she needed those callings.
That’s not really the standard experience, but sometimes those big, time-consuming callings are good for the family for all the wrong reasons.
The church values labor in the church, particularly male labor. Families are the best way to keep men laboring in the church, so families are valued to the extent that they produce male laborers. Family values are also great publicity so the church talks a lot about valuing families. But does the church really value families? No.
If the church really valued families then you would never see an acting bishop with five young children whose wife is undergoing cancer treatment (yes, happened in our stake within the last ten years and no, the bishop was not released until his five years were up and she was in remission by then). You would not hear Bednar’s wife talk about how she sacrificed her needs over and over again for her husband to serve in church callings. You would not hear the mantra that callings should always be accepted. (I could go on but you get the idea.)
This is the difference between “espoused values” (what a person/organization says it values) and “enacted values” (how the person/organization actually behaves). I think that church members from the top to the bottom truly believe that the church values families. But the church’s actions (at every level) show that the organization has other values that it prioritizes above – and often at the expense of – families.
The only thing worse than family time is sacrament meeting. That’s the brutal truth. If it weren’t for crocs, sweats, violent video games and iPhone convos w/ old still-svelte flames under the guise of “trying to re-activate them” I’d go stark raving nuts.
Thank you for the thoughts and comments.
Wayne, best in mind different time zones. I am in the UK. Definitely not commenting at 2.49 am last time, or anything similar this time!
Many members in Utah don’t value families enough to advocate for legislation to truly support them- expanding access to child care & health care, maternal and paternal leave, decreasing corporate welfare, just to name a few. We say families matter and are of the upmost importance but look where time and money is spent in the Utah legislature where nearly 90% of its body are members of the Church.
Amen Laura!
I’d also add that although we go to great lengths to seal families together in the temple, I find it completely odd that everyone in church blathers on about cleaving to one’s spouse and PROMPTLY leaving parents. Why does that need to mean kicking kids out of the house when they turn 18? Most lds families I know encourage this.
Of the many big Mormon families in my homeward (you know- the ones with 7,8,9 kids, extended vans, ultra orthodox), not ONE child has ever returned to spend the holidays or even vacations with their parents. Not one of those big families’ children’s stuck around the area or made an effort to visit regularly to allow grandchildren to bond with grandparents. While we profess to want to live eternally with our parents and children and go to all the trouble to build, staff, worship in temples for that explicit purpose, people sure don’t act like they want to be together on earth. Are they really going to change their tune in heaven? I don’t think so. Building eternal families is about cultivating relationships, not just going through the motions in the temple and crossing that off the list.
I’m only speaking for my family growing up. I think my parents threw themselves into their callings and spent so much time and effort in them partly because they could be successful there. They were hardworking people who didn’t know how to talk to their kids, how to build family unity, or how to say, “I love you.”
For what it is worth, reading the bios on conference speakers, a surprisingly large number attended BYU.
So missions and BYU do seem valued.
Conference so far has had some solid talks as well as providing a rebuttal. Glad I was with family during it.
Wife and I are (relatively young) empty nesters; she is a strong-willed gal who makes 3X what I do but we are paying off debt, traveling, and doing home improvements. I am skipping Priesthood meeting when the urge hits and would be happy with only token callings until I die. I am also a fan of hot dogs, crocs, and Bon Jovi.
Part of the problem is how “success” with raising a family is measured.
Here are the questions/statements and discussions one hears among the middle-aged and beyond in the Church.
How many of your sons have been ordained at 12, 14, 16, and then an elder and gone on a mission thereafter? Of your daughters, have they married returned missionaries an/or gone on missions themselves? Where have your kids gone to school (looking for BYU-Idaho or BYU)? And, of course, temple marriage and then future activity and callings . .
That is how active parents measure their “success” with their family. And, most are destined to fall short. Many become inactive. Many don’t go on missions or attend a church school or end up in the temple to be married. I look at my nieces and nephews and the vast majority raised by active parents are now inactive, didn’t go on missions, and are marrying outside the temple. Their parents feel guilt and emphasize those of their kids who follow the template and downplay the others.
Ironically, I often observed that the families who make/direct/push their kids to conform with preferred pattern often have children who rebel once the thumb comes off a bit. Many of the children have little to do with their parents, because every conversation is about how they have fallen short. Often grandparents have limited interaction with their grandchildren.
In truth, the LDS church/LDS culture in many families, drives the family members apart and makes many parents feel like failures. It isn’t healthy.
A pet peeve of mine, actually so my comments are definitely one-sided. As a church we only value specific families. Good looking, active, families that can contribute and not withdraw from church funds. As a Bishop I remember vividly my SP telling me to focus more attention on the “net contributors and not the net users or else we won’t have the means to operate as a church soon”. As a church, we say proudly: we support families. I see the bumper stickers. I gave a talk once about what that might mean in practice: how do you support the family with a drunken un-employed dad? What have you done to lighten their load lately? The single mom with multiple fathers for multiple kids? Gay couple? have you offered to babysit their kids lately? The atheist neighbor family? If you cringe at any of those, you don’t really support families. You just like saying you do. Stunned silence and fuming. Have you ever heard comments about welfare families in EQ? We don’t support those families. No we support the OTHER kind of families… you know… like the ones we pretend we are all. Sorry. End of rant.
Our former Stake President told me in a private setting how badly he felt walking out his front door one night to attend some meeting or other, leaving his flu-stricken wife home to tend their five sick children alone. Years later he said he still regretted not having stayed to help her. On the other hand, I remember this fabulous story from years back. Yes, we value families and are often torn; it’s okay to skip Church assignment ‘duties’ when family needs you. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2002/07/an-eternal-marriage-one-day-at-a-time?lang=eng
What I’ve noticed a lot in church culture is a glory-seeking aspect about families. Look at me, my family is picture perfect. Look at me, I’m having my tenth child. Look at me, all my kids married in the temple.
My wife’s brother has five kids (not that many by LDS standards, but a good amount nonetheless), and his wife just loves to glory-seek. Every pregnancy was, “look at me and how well I’m fulfilling my role as a Mormon woman.” She loves to gloat about how busy she is, about how she sacrificed her job to be a mother. She loves joking about how she has a job that is 24/7 and pays nothing. I don’t have the heart to tell her that she is privileged to have a husband who has a stable job and income and that her lot is much better than that of a single working mother. Meanwhile, her oldest has mild autism. He was diagnosed when he was 3 and she did not tell us this until he was 7. I guess she was worried we would treat him differently or something. Unfortunately because she has four other hard-to-manage kids, I don’t think she is able to give him the attention he needs.
Church lessons need to de-emphasize the glory aspect of child-having. Children need attention. They require lots of money and work. Many have special needs. Child-rearing can take a toll on the parents’ mental health. The church needs to stop treating children as assets that elevate status and lead to institutional growth, and focus more on the individual needs of children themselves and their parents being mentally and financially prepared to meet those needs. Child needs always matter more than adult prestige and status. Having extremely large families and taking on time-consuming callings can sometimes lead to neglect.