Renaming Mother’s Day?

For many of us Mother's Day is a sacred holiday. In fact, when I began serving my first church in the early 80's, a congregation of farmers in Kansas, we had more worshipers on Mother's Day than we did for Christmas or Easter. But now my denomination, the United Church of Christ, has renamed the traditional Mother's Day service. It is now called the "Festival of the Christian Home and Family".

Whether you like this name change or not, it reflects a major shift in our society and in family dynamics.

For example, I was talking with a man who married his first wife, had a son, got divorced, but kept full custody of his son. Then he remarried, had a daughter, got divorced and had shared custody of his daughter. He raised his two children as a single father, working full time. The task of providing primary child care before and after school fell to his retired parents. His daughter spent three nights a week at his house, and lived with her mother and step-father the other four nights of the week.

This kind of family structure is no longer unusual. I was told that more than two thirds of all children entering the first grade no longer live with both their biological parents. A third of all children are being raised by single mothers or fathers. Many children live in two homes under shared custody agreements. They are being raised by step-mothers or step-fathers at least part of the time. Others are raised by same sex couples.

Today, most mothers are breadwinners. Therefore, the primary responsibility for child care before and after school often falls on grandmothers or some other female relative. In other cases, parents hire others in the community to care for their children or send them to day care or the Boy’s and Girl’s Club or some other latch key program while they work. At the same time, 80% of all children born between 1945 and 1960 were taken to church and Sunday School by their mothers. Today, only 20% of all children are taken to church, often times not by their mothers but by their grandmothers.

Renaming the Mother's Day Service, calling it the Festival of the Christian Family may seem like an awkward attempt to be politically correct. But if we want to give public honor to those women who have nurtured us and made sacrifices to raise us and our children, it is fitting not only to recognize and celebrate our biological mothers, but all the women who have had a hand in shaping our lives and pointing us in a positive direction.



Dr. Greene is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ and a resident of Richmond, IN. He is also the author of Benjamin's Dog Joseph, Feeling Better: The Wisdom of the Doc, You Can Feel Better: How to cope with chronic pain and physical disabilities, and co-author of Walking Free: the Nellie Zimmerman Story.

For further information about his books, please visit www.densmorereid.com

To return to the column list, Click Here