Sabbath

I went on a girls’ trip this past weekend. We made a point of doing things we couldn’t normally do with kids (go on a strenuous, uphill hike; eat at a fancy restaurant; watch girl movies), but I think the part I enjoyed most were the leisurely mornings and conversations. It wasn’t until I was away from it that I realized how often I live at home with a sense of what must be done: chores, monitoring the kids, always a sense of multi-tasking and planning ahead.

I’ve been thinking for a while about this concept of the Sabbath. I like thinking of it as acting out our belief and trust in God as creator and sustainer. As William Willimon said, “Sabbath keeping is a publicly enacted sign of our trust that God keeps the world, therefore we do not have to. God welcomes our labors, but our contributions to the world have their limits. If even God trusted creation enough to be confident that the world would continue while God rested, so should we.”

I also like thinking of Sabbath in the context of our work-driven culture. We live in a world where work defines our value and identity; it’s all about productivity, efficiency, and doing it all. We bring work home through email, texts, and pagers. Those who work at home—take online classes, telecommute, parent—have an even harder time leaving work.

In our culture, we work until we’re burned out, then splurge on a vacation to get away from it all: but the Sabbath is not retreat so much as rhythm; as Eugene Peterson describes it, “entering into the rhythm of creation.” Even God, who is all-powerful, chose to rest for one of the seven days—to shabbat, which literally means to stop—and so we are created to do the same.

I also like thinking about what it means to make time holy. Marva Dawn brings this up in her book Keeping The Sabbath Wholly: how Abraham Heschel argues that we have a faith that aims at the sanctification of time, as opposed to Western civilization’s drive to conquer space. The first thing in the Bible that is designated as “holy” is not a place, but a time, the seventh day.

“Time,” insists Peter Forsyth, “is a sacrament of eternity.” When I set apart time to sabbath, I am acknowledging that time itself belongs to and is created by God, a God who is himself outside of time and will one day draw us outside of time as well. Time is not something I must control and bow down to and be driven by.

What does it mean for our family to observe a Sabbath? For me, since I can’t exactly stop being a mom one day a week?

Often a weekend day is when we stop our “regular” work (school, day jobs) so we can catch up on “other” work (yard work, errands, meal planning, laundry) and feel good about what we’ve done. But I think Sabbath is more about separating our identity from any work.

For me, even though I still am at home, it means I stop doing the kind of housework and parenting that feels like a chore—and instead enjoy. It might mean I cook something because I or the kids really love it, as a special feast. It might mean I don’t harangue Ellie about doing a math or piano lesson, but instead draw a story with her or go outside to collect snails—things that help us enjoy creation and how we are created. It might mean we hang out with friends. If Sunday is our sabbath, it means going to church with an attitude of special anticipation rather than as cultural obligation or drudgery.

To approach the Sabbath not legalistically, but intentionally, probably looks slightly different for everyone. But it should make us look different to everyone around us. In a work-harried, achievement-focused world, to stop, to rest and feast and enjoy creation, not just once in a while but every single week, is to spell out with our time what we’re living for in this life.

Emotional Intelligence

I’m learning how to understand and manage my emotions rather late in life. Growing up, I thought of myself as a rational person; I would have sudden, severe bursts of anger but didn’t much know how to manage them. After leaving home, I never got close enough to anyone to feel that angry; I didn’t cry much—so it was rather a shock when my first year of marriage involved all kinds of angry and emotional outbursts that I had great difficulty managing.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about regulating emotions—and it is something that has to be learned. Emotions aren’t just something that you “fall into” or have no control of, and you can’t fully address behavior sometimes until you address the root emotion. Looking back, the process has involved a few steps.

First, identifying my emotion. Calling out what I’m feeling before it automatically starts controlling my behavior and mind, which requires a certain level of awareness and intentionality. Before I start banging doors or shutting down from someone, stepping back to ask: okay, am I feeling frustrated? angry? hurt? sad? What’s going on? And where on the spectrum of that emotion am I? How far has it already carried me?

Then I think I sort of acknowledge and process the emotion. Okay, I feel hurt. Why do I feel hurt? How long have I been feeling hurt? I talk to myself about it. Because sometimes it’s easy to suppress how I feel, particularly if it seems illogical, or high-maintenance, like it would take a long time to deal with. But repressed emotions always come screaming back later, often to a degree that’s much harder to manage and ends up hurting someone.

Then I figure out how and whether to express the emotion, which involves evaluating the emotion and being aware of others. Evaluating the emotion is asking: is there a constructive or okay way for me to let this emotion out? Sometimes when I’m sad, I need to curl up in bed and cry awhile, and that’s okay. Sometimes when I’m mad, I need to close myself into a room to throw some pillows until I calm down. But sometimes the emotion is bad, or bad to express, and I need to help myself get out of it. If I’m feeling disgust I may need to call out the selfish or judgmental attitude that led me there and stop my train of thought. If I’m feeling overly anxious I may need to recall some verses to mind to reorient myself in the truth.

The second part of regulating expression is being aware of others: how are my feelings affecting the mood of the whole house? How are they changing my facial expressions or tone of voice, and what are my kids picking up on? Am I crossing a line of behavior I shouldn’t be? Am I getting so bogged down in the feeling I can’t function enough?

Learning how to identify, evaluate, control and express emotions is something we try to teach our kids. We try to give them the words for how they are feeling, which sometimes involves drawing cartoon expressions, or offering them suggestions to pick from. We encourage them to tell us why they feel this way and understand their perspective. We try to be present with them in the emotion—usually that means holding them, or telling them it’s okay that they feel sad, or hurt, or mad. We try to help them be aware of how their emotions affect other people, and be clear on what lines can and can’t be crossed. It’s okay if you’re angry to have some alone time in your room, or maybe punch a pillow, for example, but it’s not okay to hit someone, or say a bad word about someone. I try to explain to them how I’m feeling, to help them get used to the vocabulary and hear someone else processing how they feel.

If it sounds exhausting, it is, particularly at the beginning. But it gets easier and easier. Right now Elijah has prolonged tantrums and I have to walk him through the steps as best I can, but Eric can come up and tell me he feels mad without hurting someone else to show it, and tell me he needs some time alone but then can I hold him, but without talking? And Ellie will disappear and I’ll find out later she went to her room because she was feeling frustrated from being tired. Of course there’s plenty of line-crossing too, but if they’re going to learn how to manage their emotions anywhere, how to appreciate their feelings but not be ruled by them, home is probably the place to do it.

Questions To Ask The Kids Every Night

Well, the kids are back to school, an experience that apparently induces immediate retrograde amnesia. What did you do today? “Nothing.” What was your favorite lesson? “I don’t know.”

The first key to getting any kind of useful information about their day is to ask specific questions. Never: how was your day? what did you do? But: who did you sit next to at lunch? what did you write for your language lesson today? My sister forwarded me a friend’s post of question ideas:

Who have you been sitting by?

Who do you like better this year than last year? Any new kids?

Is anyone in your class struggling? Is anyone all alone?

Has anyone done anything really nice for you?

What’s your favorite part of the day? Least favorite?

What did you do during recess? Who did you play with?

Were you nervous about anything today?

What rule do you hate the most?

What do you like most about your teacher?

The second key is to keep your antennae up, radar on for good moments to talk. Unfortunately, for Ellie and Eric that never seems to be in the car on the way home from school: it’s usually later, during an unexpected moment we have alone in the house, or maybe during our bedtime routine, or even during discipline.

But my favorite new discovery is from this article that Dave sent me, about three questions to ask your kids every night:

How were you brave today?

How were you kind today?

How did you fail today?

I would love to get into the habit of asking these during dinner. They teach kids that they can be brave through small acts. That kindness is important, requires awareness, and can take many forms. That failure is not only okay, but we can choose how we respond to it.

The first time we tried this, we got the usual I-don’t-know’s, but then I shared my answers from my day, and gave them some suggestions for answers, and soon they were coming up with things to share: Eric was brave when he walked into a new library we visited that day. Ellie was brave when she tried a tough math lesson. Eric was kind when he showed a three year-old in his class how to do number rods. Ellie was kind when she was a little friendly (not a lot friendly) to a girl who had pushed her last year when she tried to get a pencil. In typical fashion, Ellie could immediately think of several mistakes from her day, while Eric claimed he had none (and I never could get him to give an answer to that one).

Of course, this conversation only occurred on a day when the younger two were not around, but we’ll have to try it again and see how it goes.

Imagination

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” - Einstein

I’m finally starting to realize that I have an unusually vivid imagination. I not only love, but need stories. I am very empathetic. I get spooked easily in the dark. I process and retain information visually; I can remember the outfits and colors from significant events that happened years ago. I envision the future more easily in terms of my own projections than logical reality.

There are great things about imagination: it compels me to create, to sketch or play or write. It makes reading novels an acutely immersive pleasure: I inhabit the fictional world, speak the dialogue, picture the scenery and movements of characters in my mind. It’s a world that I can live in and go back to even while say, doing the dishes or supposedly-parenting my children. I enjoy colors—seeing what hues are trending, envisioning how I would redo a room’s décor, noting pairings in a good outfit. I’m easily awed by nature, in the grandiose or miniature. My career is visual: compared with other specialties, it’s based much more on what I see over what a patient tells me. One removes a cataract more by sight than feel.

And being highly imaginative makes parenting so much fun. I can invent silly rhymes (my latest one, after Eric got frustrated when Ellie tried to tell him he was wrong about something: “thank you for the education, I’ll use my imagination!”), spin any situation into a narrative, craft spontaneous things from a motley of items. If imagination is what connects our perceptions, what builds fantasy landscapes, what powers wonder, then kids live in the stuff, and being prone to it myself helps me connect with them.

But it’s not all good. In a talk on cultural imagination, David Brooks quoted someone as saying being alone with your imagination at night can be like opening a “drawer of knives.” It’s easy to be affected by fears. Sometimes I can’t stop picturing over and over how I should have done a particular step of a surgery differently. I’m seized with scenarios of my kids getting kidnapped and have a hard time letting them go outside unsupervised. I’m particularly affected by shows or books that are too frightening or sexually explicit. I don’t like reading about tragedy unless I know I have the space to process it. The only scary movie I ever let myself watch was “The Sixth Sense,” and I remember suffering from insomnia while backpacking through Europe years later because of it.

Part of discovering myself as an imaginative person—which, as a daughter of an engineer father and a no-nonsense mother, is coming to me rather later in life—is delighting in all the ways imagination helps me connect with my kids, create and enjoy creation, and moves me forward into the future with vision. But part of it is also discovering that I need an unusual kind of discipline: I need to be more intentional than most about my mental life. I must be careful of what I feed my mind and eyes, about what I let my thoughts stray to. What I think isn’t peripheral; it is the world I inhabit, and therefore how I am changed. In a way, it is what I worship and who I become.

Francis Parkman was an American historian who longed for the West as a young man. He later described his younger self: “His thoughts were always in the forest, whose features possessed his waking and sleeping dreams, filling him with vague cravings impossible to satisfy.” I live much of life with my thoughts in the forest of my imaginings—and, to follow the metaphor, if I feel I have never really arrived, it is because, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so.” When one day we experience our bodies, our earth, our loved ones, and our God as it is meant to be, maybe we’ll find it was less about what we knew than what we imagined.

To Elijah

Dear chub-chub (that’s what you want to be called, as opposed to jah-jah, chubs, li-jee, jack-jack, or Elijah),

You’re smack in the middle of your terrible two’s.

There’s a striking sort of transparency about it for you. I remember this phase being muted for Ellie (or maybe I’ve just forgotten how it was—hard to believe!), and disproportionately tempestuous for Eric, but it’s like I can see your struggles right under the surface. You can’t decide if you’re big or little; you vacillate between furious independence and irrational clinginess, you want to be heard yet can’t get your words out right all the time; you’re sensitive to being slighted or left out yet wish to declare your need for privacy. If it sounds exhausting—well, it is.

You like that Veggie Tales song: “you’re big, I’m little / you go, I stay / why can’t little guys do big things too?” You go on interesting monologues describing why “I’m big—right?” (because you can reach your arms high, go to a BSF class, pretend-read books) or why “I’m still little” (because you want to get carried to bed, get help eating, prefer diapers).

You insist on doing certain things by yourself even though it takes ten times as long and makes us all wait (like put on your sandals by carefully un-velcro-ing and re-velcro-ing every single strap, or repeatedly attempt to buckle yourself into your car seat). You want to go everywhere but insist on being carried all the time. And I mean all the time. Everything is just a little bit emotional, because it’s all a statement about your identity and independence, and when you don’t like how things go, it comes out in tears and stamping of feet and shouting (“no, not like that!”). It’s either, “you can haf it—your whole life” or “I’m not playing with you anymore!” Not much in-between. I’ve been explaining to Ellie that “your whole life” for you means “until I feel like getting it back” which is on average about three minutes.

But, you know, this is you changing, saying goodbye to infancy forever, becoming your own person with a new sense of self. I sort of miss the laid-back baby with the rolls of chub, but you know, you’re so entertaining now in your wide-eyed, earnestly serious expositions upon the world and how things work (usually I’m nodding while actually understanding about a third of what you’re saying). I won’t really miss the tantrums and emotional lability, but I am looking forward to seeing who you become.

Love,

Mommy

First Day of School

Screens and Kids

“The defining issue for parenting in thirty years will be screen time.” – Dave

So this is a topic I’ve been reluctant to write about, for the simple reason that I don’t mean to guilt-trip anyone who regularly lets their kid look at or touch a screen. Which, as far as I can tell, is everyone I know. But it’s admittedly a topic Dave and I agree passionately about, which is why our kids don’t have screens, and don’t touch ours. They get occasional television, usually in thirty-minute segments, but that’s it. And we make a considerable effort not to be on our screens too much in their presence.

Obviously this makes us stick out. Research shows that children spend 2-7 hours/day in front of screens (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; nonprofit Common Sense Media). Six month-olds spend half an hour a day on mobile devices, with a third of them swiping and tapping screens (Pediatric Academic Societies). Less than half the time kids aged 2-10 are in front of screens is spent consuming “educational” material (nonprofit Joan Ganz Cooney Center).

Why is screen time harmful? Four main reasons: one, early brain development is numbed. I’ve never seen a smartphone-told story, but apparently it spoon-feeds images and words in a way that doesn’t provide the stimuli required to form certain neural networks specific to the first three years of life. When an adult reads a book, the child is actively processing voice into words, visualizing complete pictures, exerting mental energy to follow the story line, in a way they do not when a smartphone does all the work for them.

Two, early screen time impedes ability to socially interact: to take in nonverbal cues, practice empathy, and recognize emotions (studies from UCLA and British Psychological Society). The frontal lobe just gets less practice interacting with a screen instead of a live person.

Third, studies show screens lead to a diffuse range of behavioral issues, including decreased focus and concentration, childhood obesity, and irregular sleep patterns. I found limited long-term studies, probably because this is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Fourth, touching screens is addictive. When a child touches a screen and gets an immediate response, it releases dopamine and teaches a child to prefer touch-screen interactions, where there is more immediate gratification and response, over real-world connections. It doesn’t take much conjecture to see how it would be harder for kids to break free of screen addictions if they’ve been conditioned to them since early childhood.

Certainly some programs can be educational—increase literacy or math skills—but our main question has been: what can a screen provide that I cannot? And I just don’t think there is much. Discussing letters with Elijah, having him trace them with his fingers, match them with flashcards, and any other real-life interaction is going to be as effective if not more so than putting him in front of a screen. Am I concerned they won’t be as savvy on a computer as their peers later in life? They may not be as familiar at the start, but I’ve no doubt they’ll learn fast, and the value of them not being already too-used to screens outweighs any risks I can think of.

In the end, we give our kids screens due to habit or laziness, or maybe our own addictions bleeding out into their lives. How many times have we missed our kids’ cues because we’re staring at a screen? How many times did you check your phone today (was any of it a real emergency)? Interrupted a real-life conversation to text someone else? Been tempted to text while driving? How many people do you see looking at their phones in a restaurant instead of each other?

There’s definitely a part of me that dreads navigating the “screenager” years with our kids. I remember as a teen feeling like my life was ending because I had a zit on my nose or someone gave me a look at school: throwing the capacity for hundreds of people to “like” or “un-like” something seems positively explosive. In a way, keeping our kids from screens now is an extremely simple thing to do. There’s always a book to read, something outside to explore, a toy to build with, a picture to color, or a play-story to act out. Our seven- and four-year olds comment about how they don’t have an iPad or kindle like everyone else, but they don’t seem to mind it. It’s just how it is, and they’re too preoccupied with playing to care. Guess I’m enjoying this stage while it lasts.

Secrets of Super Siblings: A Rambling Discussion

I haven’t written for a while because we went on a family vacation, then recovered from the family vacation. We stayed with a few different families during the trip, which always brings up interesting comparisons of home culture (I’ve realized we have a ton of fruit, tissue boxes, and hand soap compared to other people). Family culture and parenting styles can be a difficult area to discuss—for whatever reason, we don’t have a lot of close friends here who do a lot of thinking on this topic—and it’s an area where one can be particularly prone to blind spots. It’s so affected by geographical culture, racial culture, personal experience and values that it’s hard to assess clearly, and it’s rare to know another family well enough that you can point out mutual blind spots or challenge each other constructively.

Which is why I like reading occasional articles about parenting: “The Secrets of Super Siblings” in a recent issue of TIME is far from scientific, but interesting. They examined nine different families, extraordinary in the sense that all (two to three) of the siblings excelled, and all in different fields. They found six common traits:

1. Immigrant drive: most had immigrant parents, leading to a strong sense of the family as being more important than the individual, a strong work ethic, and a sense of high standards (“less was required—but more was expected”).

2. Parent-teachers: three families had at least one professor as a parent, and all nine had parents who did some kind of teaching. The families understood the importance of at-home instruction; “their children recalled early supplementary lessons, books read aloud, regular library trips and even at-home worksheets.”

3. Political activism: families were politically engaged, outspoken for reform, involved in the community, had heated political debates at home.

4. Controlled chaos: most families described a sibling dynamic that was “wildly competitive at best and physically violent at worst.” There was a sense of misbehavior and trial-by-combat that taught resilience and a willingness to make mistakes and move on.

5. Lessons in mortality: majority of families had experiences with death, in the family or of a relative. Such experiences were credited to fuel ambition and teach priorities.

6. A free-range childhood: few siblings had parents who closely monitored their movements: “you could say it was the opposite of helicopter parenting.” They were allowed to play and develop their own ideas.

The first two describe my parents to a T: both immigrants, my professor dad left detailed explanations and alternative solutions for physics problems tucked into my textbook, and my school board-activist mom took us to the library every week. When she babysat our newborn, she claimed to have toured her around the house teaching her about each room; when she watched our two year-old, she taught him how to count to twenty in two languages. They raised three ivy-league daughters in a place where folks didn’t necessarily go to college.

We’re close enough to my parents’ generation that the immigrant mentality is present in some forms in our family too, and teaching and my belief in the importance of the early-childhood years is a major reason why I work part-time. I’m not a political activist, but hopefully Dave’s career in public service and interest in global events will rub off. I hope we have interesting discussions of current events over dinner when the kids are older; I’m challenged to travel and go on missions trips more with them.

I found the chaos point encouraging because our kids bicker all the time! There’s always some amount of debating statements (is “dang it” a bad word?), complicated trades (usually of Legos), competitions (who has the biggest? the newest? who is first? who is last which means they will be first according to Jesus?), etc. Maybe I should regulate on this and be discouraged by it less.

The free-range point is an interesting argument against helicopter parenting: here in Chesapeake, I’d say a free-range childhood is the norm (though it reflects I think a passive attitude towards parenting in general that’s not necessarily healthy), but the definite trend among parents who want their kids to be high achievers is to hover. Schedule every minute to maximize resume potential; monitor every environment to make sure it’s the best.

Yet more elementary schools in good districts are promoting self-directed learning; high schools are realizing too much stress and work is destructive. I would say we live out a relatively free-range type of day: our kids go to a Montessori school; they spend plenty of time in free play—but I do feel a sort of constant, guilty urge to be more structured, to monitor them more closely, and one semester we got to a place where we had so many activities scheduled that we canceled them all. I suppose it’s a balance between high standards and educational engagement, yet giving kids space to choose their own paths.

In the end, it boils down to your parenting philosophy more than a magical list. Like the point about encounters with mortality: no one would wish that upon their family, but our faith should have a similar impact, since we believe we are living for eternity. And that should impact not only our degree of ambition, but what we are ambitious for.

I like how my brother-in-law described the Biblical perspective on parenting: “discerning and trusting God's call for them, not making them something they're not necessarily supposed to be, focusing on helping them be faithful and accepting of the true talents God has blessed them with, and furthermore, all this not to serve their own purposes or their parents', but for God's glory.”