Wanted secular miracle worker

Similarly, a man who has filled a hole in his heart with a house and garage full of clutter will not be healed of his pain--and find a more direct and healthy way of meeting his emotional needs--by having experts divvy his possessions into heaps to be kept, sold, or discarded in his front yard. However hilarious his collections of stuff may be to the audience ("Whoa! And I thought our garage looked bad."), these things represent important memories and defenses to this man: stripping away his means of coping with his pain without providing real strategies for his needs may be more cruel than kind. The most benign outcome would be a gradual accumulation of other stuff'; a more sad result would be the replacement of this coping strategy with another, more damaging one.

It is quite possible that a kind of epiphany can occur in the process of these weekend or weeklong interventions. It might help if the viewing audience were aware that it was the epiphany, rather than the conversion, that we witness on the small screen.

The most misleading form of the secular miracle worker may be best represented in the new television shows featuring nannies--parenting experts who swoop into the lives and homes of hapless parents, show them the light, convert their children, and then fly away, in a matter of days.

Unlike Mary Poppins, who worked with her charges for an extended time, developed genuine relationships with them, and had the added advantage of magic on her side, the secular miracle workers propose to do all this in a week or less, without magic. Author P.L. Travers, only in her 20s when the first Mary Poppins book was published, knew enough about human nature to understand that changes in hearts and relationships take time.

Of course, surface changes can be made quickly. A family can resolve to alter its dinnertime manners and habits of eating, but whether these changes stand up to those in schedules, mood and life stages, or financial or health concerns is a mystery only time and the will of the various members will reveal. Perpetuating this change will take work. Priorities will have to be different. Family members will have to be willing to continue communicating. It will take patience and the willingness to put aside some other activities.

Families where children have run amok do not just happen. Healthy, happy, collaborative mothers and fathers do not awake one morning to small children who suddenly have become uncontrollable. (Teenagers, who have more freedom and free will, are another story.) Perhaps the chaos was precipitated by health or financial shifts in the family, by a parent's personal difficulties, or by a tree developmental problem in one or more of the children. It did not happen by accident, although the degree of chaos may have developed through default or failure to act against the currents. The false implication is that there is no responsibility issue. What often is happening in these situations is a clash of forces in modern culture: the parent who desperately needs to be liked and the secular miracle worker.