Gentle parenting is everywhere right now. It fills Instagram feeds, dominates parenting podcasts, and has become the default philosophy for a generation of well-meaning mothers and fathers who want to do better than their own parents did. At its core, the movement emphasizes emotional attunement, empathy, and explaining your reasoning to your children rather than simply demanding obedience.

And I want to be fair: some of that is genuinely good. Connection matters. Emotional intelligence matters. Treating your children as human beings worthy of explanation and respect matters. I do not dismiss any of that.

But taken to its logical extreme, gentle parenting produces something I find deeply troubling: children who have never truly been told no, who have never experienced a consequence they could not negotiate or emotionally outlast, who have been so carefully protected from discomfort that they have never developed the internal capacity to endure it.

I know what that looks like from the inside. Because I was that kid.

What Too Much Freedom Actually Looks Like

My father was not a bad man. But he was an absent one, emotionally if not always physically. He never asked about my grades. He never inquired about my friends. He never wanted to know what I was doing or where I was going. And when I got in trouble, which I did frequently during my first two years of high school, the consequences were almost nonexistent. I would come home having collected another detention, another suspension, and the response was barely a shrug.

Part of the reason I started smoking weed and drinking at 14 was simply that nobody was watching. My parents were too busy working six days a week to enforce a standard. The boundaries that should have been there were not. And nature, as it always does, filled that vacuum. In my case, it filled it with exactly the kind of life I did not want.

I have shared before that at 15, I hit rock bottom. I was on the verge of selling drugs. I had given up basketball, one of the great loves of my life. I was living a double life, seemingly happy on the outside and completely empty on the inside. And when I look back and trace the roots of how I got there, one of the clearest threads is this: I had too much freedom and too few consequences for far too long.

My father's version of parenting lacked a philosophical foundation. It was rooted in absence and indifference. But the result is not entirely different from what you see when parents are so committed to never making their child uncomfortable that they abandon the responsibility to form them. A child without consistent discipline is a child without a father, even if his father is standing in the same room.

Coming Home to Chaos

I came home recently after nearly seven days on the road. I had worked through the weekend. I was tired in that bone-deep way that does not go away with a single good night's sleep. And when I walked through the front door, there was no warm greeting waiting for me.

My 3-year-old son was mid-tantrum. Two out of three nights that week, I walked straight from the driveway into full disciplinarian mode. No transition. No runway. No chance to decompress. Just a small human testing every limit he could find, and a father who had to decide in real time whether to hold the line or let it slide.

I will be honest with you. Everything in me wanted to let it slide. I was exhausted. I felt guilty about being away. I wanted connection, not conflict. And there is a version of myself, a less-formed version, who would have looked the other way, bought peace with permissiveness, and told myself I was being kind.

But I have learned something important about toddlers that changes everything: they cannot yet reason. They cannot think abstractly. They cannot hear a lengthy explanation of why their behavior is problematic and internalize it as a change in conduct. What they can do is experience immediate, consistent consequences and begin to understand that certain behaviors produce certain outcomes every single time. That is not cruelty. That is how you teach a creature who is not yet capable of being taught any other way.

So I held the line. Tired, stretched thin, and holding the line anyway. Because that is the job.

What the Bible Actually Says About Discipline

Hebrews 12 is the passage I come back to most when I think about this. It reads: "For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons."

Read that again. The absence of discipline is presented not as kindness but as abandonment. A child left without correction is not being treated as a son. He is being treated as someone his father does not care enough about to form.

A friend reached out to me recently with a question she had been sitting with for a while. She wanted to know where I stood on female altar servers. She was genuinely curious, not combative, and I appreciated that. I shared my opinion on the matter with her. We prefer attending mass at parishes that have only male altar servers.

I explained my reasoning, but admittedly, I thought it lacked enough depth. It is the kind of question that deserves a thoughtful answer rather than a reflexive one, so I did some digging.

What I found was more interesting than I expected. And it brought me back to something I had observed long before I ever thought seriously about liturgical tradition.

What I Saw Growing Up

I converted to the Catholic faith at 13. I never served as an altar boy. But I have been involved in parish life in various ways ever since, as a lector, an usher, and an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion. I care deeply about the Church and about what happens inside the walls of my parish.

And what I remember noticing, even as a young convert still finding his footing, was this: faith felt like a woman's game.

The cantor was a woman. The lectors were women. The altar servers were girls. The Extraordinary Ministers were women. Up front, actively participating in the sacred action of the Mass, there were almost entirely women and a priest. The men, many of them, stood in the back. Literally. Arms folded. Going through the motions at best and completely checking out at worst.

And over time, most of those men stopped coming. They drifted out the back doors they had been standing near and never came back. And most of their kids, the ones I grew up around, do not practice the faith today.

Now, I want to be careful here. I am not making a sweeping causal claim. There were many factors behind those men leaving. But I will say this: the active, visible, participatory life of the Church never seemed to be calling them. It never seemed to be designed with them in mind. And that observation has stayed with me.

The Chicken and the Egg

Here is the honest question I keep coming back to: Did the Church become predominantly female in its active participation because men were already disengaging? Or did men disengage, at least in part, because the active roles of parish life increasingly felt like they belonged to women?

I do not think anyone can answer that definitively. It is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. But I do think it is a question worth sitting with honestly, rather than dismissing it as retrograde or uncharitable to women.

Because here is what we know for certain: the vocations crisis in the American Catholic Church is real. It is severe. And it is not evenly distributed.

The Lincoln Exception

The Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, is one of the best-kept secrets in American Catholicism. While dioceses across the country struggle with priest shortages, parish closures, and dwindling Mass attendance, Lincoln tells a different story.

According to data from the Official Catholic Directory and Catholic News Agency, Lincoln has approximately one active priest for every 737 Catholics. The national average is one priest for every 4,723 Catholics. Let that sink in for a moment. Lincoln is not just outperforming the national average; it is also outperforming the state average. It is lapping it. The diocese has so many priests that it sends them to serve in other dioceses that are struggling.

Lincoln is also, as of this writing, the only diocese in the United States that maintains a male-only altar server policy across the entire diocese.

That is not a coincidence I am willing to simply wave away.

What Rome Actually Said

In 1994, the Vatican clarified that female altar servers are permitted under canon law, leaving the decision to each local bishop. But what often gets left out of that story is what else Rome said in the same document.

Two Conversations, One Messy Topic

There are topics that reveal something about a person's character by how they approach them, not by what they conclude. Immigration enforcement in America right now is one of those topics. It has become so emotionally loaded, so thoroughly captured by tribal politics, that it is genuinely difficult to find people willing to hold a complex thought about it for more than thirty seconds.

I had two conversations recently that stuck with me, not because they resolved anything, but because they each illustrated a different way of being wrong about this.

The first was with a friend who describes himself as a moderate. He thinks the way ICE treats some people is terrible. He also thinks illegal immigration is a real problem that can't be wished away. He was genuinely curious to hear my perspective, open to where it might take him. That kind of intellectual honesty is rarer than it should be, and I appreciated it.

The second was with a Church leader. A man with real experience watching ICE operate in Southern California, and with family members of Mexican heritage who, despite holding legal status, live in fear of what federal enforcement might mean for people they know. He came to the conversation having already decided what I believed. He seemed to assume I was a Trump loyalist who didn't care about human suffering. He wasn't interested in engaging the complexity. Rather, he wanted to register his objection and move on.

What struck me about both conversations was that neither person was wrong about everything. The coworker was right that illegal immigration is a genuine problem. The Church leader was right that ICE has real accountability issues and that human dignity is not optional. But both were operating with incomplete pictures. And that incomplete picture, whether it comes from the left or the right, is ultimately what makes this issue so hard to think about clearly.

Before I go further: I am not a Trump die-hard. I think he is a generally capable president who is doing a genuinely difficult job that most people would fail at, while also carrying serious personal and political flaws that matter and should be named. I don't believe the ends always justify the means. I also don't believe that disapproving of Trump's style or character is the same thing as having a coherent immigration policy. Those are two different conversations, and we keep mixing them up.

This article is my attempt to disentangle them.

The Numbers Nobody Wants to Sit With

What Actually Happened Under Biden

Any honest conversation about ICE enforcement has to start here, because the emotional temperature of this debate is largely a reaction to what happened at the border from 2021 to 2024.

According to the Pew Research Center's 2025 analysis, the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States reached 14 million in 2023, the highest level ever recorded. In 2021, when Biden took office, that number was approximately 11 million. That is a meaningful increase of roughly three million people in two years, a pace Pew described as record-setting.

Border encounters the metric used by Customs and Border Protection to track every individual stopped or apprehended at the southern border averaged approximately two million per year from 2021 to 2023, according to the Washington Post's analysis of government data. For context, the yearly average during Trump's first term was roughly one-quarter of that.

Now, it is important to be precise here, as both sides abuse these numbers in different ways. Encounters are not the same as permanent residents. Many people encountered are removed or returned. Many who were allowed in were placed in immigration proceedings, meaning they had legal protections pending court dates, not permanent legal status. The Trump administration's claim that "20 million illegal immigrants" entered under Biden is not supported by data, and responsible commentary should say so.

But the growth was real. A Heritage Foundation analysis estimated that approximately 6.7 million new unauthorized residents entered the country between January 2021 and end of 2023. Pew's more conservative estimate put the net unauthorized population at 14 million by mid-2023, up from 11 million. Either way, it represents the largest increase in the unauthorized immigrant population in recorded history. Anyone who denies that a significant problem developed is not being honest.

Much of the growth was driven by Biden administration policies, particularly parole programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (the so-called CHNV program) that allowed people to enter the country with temporary protected status rather than going through traditional immigration channels. These were not people sneaking across the desert. They were arriving through programs that critics argued effectively created a backdoor to legal residence. The Biden administration ended those programs in mid-2024, which slowed the growth, but by then, the number was already at a historic peak.

The Obama Comparison Everyone Is Avoiding

Here is the thing that nobody on the left seems willing to engage honestly, and it is perhaps the single most clarifying fact in this entire debate.

Barack Obama deported approximately 3.1 million people over his two terms more than any modern president before him. Immigrant rights groups were so alarmed by his enforcement record that they gave him the nickname "Deporter in Chief." In 2013 alone, his administration deported 432,000 people, the highest single-year total ever recorded.

Trump's first term deportation total was approximately 1.2 million people, significantly less than Obama's eight-year total. Even combining Trump's first term with what his second term has produced so far, his cumulative numbers do not yet approach Obama's. In 2025, the Trump administration carried out roughly 540,000 deportations compared to Obama's 612,000 in 2013 alone, during the first year of his second term.

To be clear: there are real methodological debates here about how deportations are counted, whether border removals and interior removals should be compared the same way, and how Title 42 expulsions are classified. These are legitimate distinctions. But they do not erase the basic fact: the man the left is calling a fascist for deporting people is doing so at a pace that Obama sustained for eight years without anything like the current outrage.

And then there is Tom Homan.

Homan is Trump's Border Czar. He is the face of the current enforcement operation, the man at whom protesters direct their anger, the person whose name has become a symbol of what critics consider cruel and draconian immigration policy. In 2025, he became nationally known for aggressive interior sweeps, threatening to arrest local officials who impede ICE operations, and overseeing enforcement actions that have, at times, detained and transported people with clean records and legal status.

What is less commonly discussed is that, in 2013, Barack Obama appointed Tom Homan to run ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations. The Obama administration awarded him the government's highest civil service honor, the Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service, in 2015. The official ICE press release at the time specifically praised his leadership in expanding deportation capacity, increasing detention beds, and managing the surge of unaccompanied children across the Southwest border.

The Washington Post, in 2015, ran a piece about Homan under the headline: "Thomas Homan deports people. And he's really good at it." That was a compliment.

Trump hired the same man. Obama honored him for doing the same job. Democrats had no significant objection to Homan's work during the Obama years. They are now calling him a Nazi.

I am not saying this to be provocative. I am saying it because if your objection is truly to the tactics of immigration enforcement and not to the fact that a Republican is doing it, then you have some explaining to do about why the same person was your hero nine years ago.

Why the Current Enforcement Looks Different And Why