Passing-Thought

The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies: A Biblical Counseling Critique

The wisdom and insight of The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies is attractive because it is a secular re-interpretation of God’s story for the problem of greedy behavior in children and its parental solution. In a world that has forgotten God’s parental authority over all parents, parents will tend to fear, above all, the social embarrassment caused by the greedy and rebellious actions of their children. In a world that has forgotten the gospel of Jesus Christ, parents will tend to judge their children’s misbehavior, without first considering how their own responses and actions contribute to shameful public behavior. They will naturally first attempt to employ quick pragmatic solutions to alleviate the embarrassment of children who rebel against their God given authority (cf. Papa Bear’s wisdom). When that doesn’t work, parents will tend to respond in an unloving authoritarian fashion, out of anger or fear, banning children from the environment in which greed becomes the occasion for temptation, or grounding them from enjoying anything fun. Parents, at best, might finally try to not give in to the their children’s wishes, to be more preparatory and proactive (cf. Mama Bear’s wisdom), giving pithy lectures to their children of why it’s not right to be greedy, expecting it all to just “make sense” and alter their future behavior. The book rightly critiques these approaches as falling short of wisdom that can actually work for children.

But the book’s critique makes the same basic false assumptions about human life as the positions it criticizes, and so ultimately only offers another pragmatic solution to solving the problem of public embarrassment: a magical mix of all the different pragmatic solutions that parents will by nature tend to try (cf. grandparents wisdom). The solution may have solved the problem of feeling embarrassed in public, but it never actually solved the problem of greedy behavior in the children. It simply redirected and transformed greedy behavior to a more sophisticated socialized form. In the end, the children are learning to try to get what they want through contractual agreements, even if they must compromise a little. Even worse, the children learn to take pride in their new form of behavior that they look down upon other families who do not exhibit their wisdom. This boasting in the achievement of their family contract, and their own adherence to it, basically hoards pleasure in their special family insight, above any desire to share their wisdom with other families who do not have their wisdom. Thus, their family contract actually gives rise to greedy behavior of a higher more sophisticated form, but now they have become blind victims to it.

As Christians, we are painfully aware from our own story how such forms of socially accepted, sophisticated greed are the most seductive and deceiving form of greed, and the most intolerable and shameful form in the eyes of God. The Messiah, after all, was crucified by such religious hypocrisy, and the nation of Israel rejected the gospel due to their “own [greedy] righteousness”. Thus, Satan sought ultimately to destroy God’s image, not through overt ugliness of Gentile ‘sinners’, but through the sophisticated boasting of a blind, hypocritical form of ‘godliness’. The book exchanges the worship of things for the worship of family.

As the book suggests, parents need to learn that they are responsible for disciplining their children, so that they do not give into the temptations of the world and get what they want through greedy behavior. But the problem is both far deeper and far greater. Parents need to accept that children’s misbehavior is a form of heart rebellion, not just against parental authority, but God. The book seems to suggest that the [greedy] heart of children is something that belongs to their nature, which no one can change. The best parents can do is promising to give them what they want before they see it, and play on their fear for not getting anything they want, in hopes to avoid a family scene in public. Children need to learn that their parents also live under God’s authority. Parents who confess the sin of their anger against their children’s misbehavior, will model before their children’s eyes how they should also live under their parent’s God given authority.

The solution of the family contract in the end shares a distorted resemblance of God’s covenantal resolution for human sin in the story of redemption. A family contract after-all is a form of covenant. The children are promised to receive something they want, before they see it, but they will lose that promised blessing if they fuss to receive something other than what they agreed to. Thus, submission to the terms of the family contract by the parents and children helps to secure a shame-free experience before the eyes of world. Unfortunately, this family covenant has no power to change sinful nature, and as a result becomes a vehicle for greed in the form of family boasting, which results in shame before God. In the economy of salvation, God has made a new covenant for the redemption of God’s family and to bring an end to cosmic conflict, putting an end to all forms of greed and reason for family boasting and complaining (“none is righteous” and “let him who boasts, boast in the Lord”). In Christ, God promises to provide for his family, not the things we see in this world, but a glorious family inheritance beyond what we would ever choose, hope, or imagine for ourselves.