On Children Crying

I have been thinking lately about children crying.

Crying is a fundamental form of communication, especially for younger children. It also is important for adults. Reverend Benjamin Perry wrote an excellent book about crying and why the act matters (both religiously and otherwise) called Cry, Baby. Respecting the tears of other people—and the emotions underlying them—is a key part of empowering and liberating children. As Perry said in my 2023 interview of him, “When children are told to suppress what they feel—if they’re shamed for crying—the underlying message is that their wellbeing matters less than the silence they are breaking.” Thus, “Silencing children’s ability to express their feelings also enables abuse: children scared to talk are more easily harmed and controlled. Enshrining children’s right to speak about what they are experiencing is essential to protecting their wellbeing, and a threat to people who wish abuse to remain hidden.”

I have noticed this theme manifest as I research similarities between evangelical parenting teachings and Nazi parenting teachings. Authoritarians find crying to be a threat—a form of defiance rather than honest feedback about something important.

Consider the words of Johanna Haarer. Haarer was a German physician who wrote books during the rise of Nazism “aimed at raising children to serve the Führer,” according to Anne Kratzer for Scientific American. In 1934, Haarer wrote the book The German Mother and Her First Child. This book was “incorporated into a Reich mothers training program designed to inculcate in all German women the proper rules of infant care.” Millions of German women went through the program. Here is how Haarer instructed Nazi mothers to treat crying children during sleep time:

“It is best if the child is in his own room, where he can be left alone. Whatever you do, do not pick the child up from his bed, carry him around, cradle him, stroke him, hold him on your lap, or even nurse him… The child will quickly understand that all he needs to do is cry in order to attract a sympathetic soul and become the object of caring. Within a short time, he will demand this service as a right, leave you no peace until he is carried again, cradled, or stroked—and with that a tiny but implacable house tyrant is formed!”

This advice was paralleled almost identically several decades later by evangelical Christian parenting teachers Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo. The Ezzos are the authors of the Babywise parenting series, which, according to Katie Allison Granju at Salon, has sold hundreds of thousands of books. The authors also founded and directed Growing Families International, a large, for-profit parenting ministry in Simi Valley, California. Salon’s Granju writes that the Ezzos’ “personal parenting philosophy can be summed up in [their] public statement: ‘Raising good children is not a matter of chance but a matter of rightly applying God’s principles in parenting.’”

God’s principles apparently look a lot like Haarer’s Nazi principles. In the 3^rd edition of their 1990 book Preparation for Parenting, the Ezzos justify letting an infant “cry it out” by referencing the bloody crucifixion of Jesus. In the crucifixion accounts in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, it is written that, while Jesus the God Child was dying on the cross, he cried out the following to the God Parent: “My God, my God, why have you left me alone?” This emotional moment, interpreted as beautiful and praiseworthy parenting by the Ezzos, becomes the foundation of their parenting system—a move so disturbing that even the Christofascist World Magazine felt it would “raise eyebrows.”

Here are the Ezzos:

“Mothers and fathers who act on the statement, ‘I can’t stand to hear my baby cry,’ are of great concern to us. What happened to those individuals in their youth that as adults they cannot survive a little crying? Why is crying such an intrusion on their emotions? Is there something in their past that has not been resolved, evoking a haunting memory each time they hear that sound? … If you’re going to work from a biblical mind set, you need to understand how God responded to the cries of His Children. Praise God that the Father did not intervene when His Son cried out on the cross (Matthew 27:46). If He had stopped the process, there would be no redemption for us today. Our Heavenly Father’s non-intervention to His Son’s cry at that moment was the right response, bringing peace to all who trust in Him (Romans 5:1). … ‘Go ahead and pick up your baby whenever he cries. After all, you can’t spoil a baby by loving it too much.’ That is a thoughtless statement and one of the most common defenses offered as an encouragement to young demand-feeding mothers. The issue is not spoiling the child, but building into the child’s learning structure a predisposition for immediate gratification, which becomes a destructive influence later in life” (p. 121-123).

In his excellent 2025 article “Evangelicals are mean to kids, beginning at home,” Baptist News Global writer Rick Pidcock noted the following about the above Ezzo passage: “One of the reasons they are mean to kids is that the picture of God the Father they look up to is of an authority figure devoid of empathy for crying infants.” I agree with this, and I also want to point out that this is not the only picture of the God Parent that we can imagine.

When Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you left me alone?”, he was not describing his relationship with the God Parent. He was citing poetry. He was citing the first few verses of Psalm 22, where King David begins with despair: “My God, my God, why have you left me alone? You seem too far away to save me, too far to hear my cries for help! My God, I kept calling by day, and I was not silent at night. But you did not answer me.” But that is not the end of the Psalm. The Psalm is a tortured yet comforting song, acknowledging amidst despair that, “God, the truth is, you are the one who brought me into this world. You made me feel safe while I was still at my mother’s breasts. You have been my God since the day I was born. I was thrown into your arms as I came from my mother’s womb.” David concludes with descriptions of abundance gifted by God: “The people have eaten all they wanted and bowed down to worship him” and “Each generation will tell their children about the good things the Lord has done.”

In other words, the poetry that Jesus cites as he dies is not a one-dimensional accusation against the God Parent. It is inherently connected to the rest of the song, where David makes clear just how intimately the God Parent cares and loves for her children: the God Parent’s arms are wrapped around her children and, when she feeds her children, her children eat without limits. So, rather than an accusation, this becomes a declaration that, even amidst despair, Jesus the God Child trusted and felt safe with the God Parent.

This is a very different take than the Ezzos, but I bring it up because the Ezzos’ take is not only damaging, it is also unnecessary. There is no reason besides sadism to so badly exegete Jesus’s use of poetry. This takes us back to Pidcock’s point: Evangelicals are being mean to kids and there’s no good benefit in doing so—unless, of course, you are an authoritarian like the Ezzos or a Nazi like Haarer who wants children to lose empathy and sympathy. When children lose their ability to empathize and sympathize, they are much easier to control—and much easier to manipulate into fascist violence.