Halloween and Loving the Little Years

I have mixed feelings about Halloween these days. I don’t understand the point of Halloween parades, where parents make a disproportionately large effort, missing work or dragging along siblings, to watch their kid walk in a circle in costume. The overload of candy is understandably exciting (Eric claims it’s his favorite holiday after Christmas), but seems excessive, requiring increasingly complicated negotiations as the kids get older to reasonably manage (this year each kid got five pieces, then the rest were combined and quarantined). I’m always ambivalent about costumes—part of me hates shelling out for premade costumes of commercialized characters on amazon, but I also find myself without the energy to hand-make four costumes or coordinate family costume themes, like I used to. I like the sense of community trick-or-treating in the neighborhood brings, but I also hear about folks increasingly flocking to lucrative, entertaining destination neighborhoods like the Steve Jobs house, and I’m not sure what to make of all that.

The main thing I was struck by this year, though, was how cute the kids were as we walked through the neighborhood: Eric rushing up to every door that had a light. All of them saying “trick-or-treat!” and “thank you” and Elijah taking forever to decide what pieces to pick. Esme putting pieces back if she felt she got too many. The older kids asking how many they were allowed to take. Esme’s costume sliding around to obstruct her vision half the time. Holding hands in the dark. Everyone talking about how heavy their pumpkin buckets were getting.

More than any other holiday, Halloween seems made for kids, and I’m reminded that one day when they grow up, it will make me miss them. People are always telling you, “the days are long but the years are short”—and really, catching the true preciousness of each stage, enjoying them as something that will not be forever, can be so hard to do. Tonight as I was opening my nightstand drawer for something, I saw a piece of paper—it was another one of Esme’s drawings. She’s always covering paper with scribbles, declaring it’s a gift for me, then secretly leaving them on my nightstand or in my nightstand drawer. I felt slightly annoyed at first (more paper I will have to walk over to the recycling bin), but now I’m sitting down to look at it. It has a lot of scribbles, and one little stick figure. It has eight different colors, which means she had to uncap and recap eight different markers. It’s an unused medical billing sheet, her favorite scrap paper to use because the hospital logo has figures which she likes to color in.

One day, I will miss being constantly gifted pieces of art-slash-recycling. I’ll probably miss the knee-level smudges on our glass doors and the treasures-slash-trash (old stickers, cheap prizes, rocks, used toilet paper rolls, empty mint boxes and the like) that gets hoarded. I’ll miss the half-books that Ellie is always starting and leaving around, folding little socks and shirts, having kid-sized utensils and cups in our kitchen drawers. I might miss going everywhere with the double stroller. I’ll miss Esme coming in to snuggle in bed with me in the mornings (a few minutes after 7AM, which is when Ellie lets her leave their room, as instructed—who knows when they actually wake up). I’ll miss seeing Elijah rolled up in his security blanket like a burrito, Eric walking across the school field for pickup every afternoon in his baseball cap while holding his bento lunch box in one hand and eating out of it with the other (apparently he doesn’t actually eat during lunch hour). I’ll miss Ellie’s eagerness to go on dates with me and jumping rope all the way to church. I’ll miss how being held can make everything okay when they’re mad or hurt.

There is so much change in these little years. The person they are right now will be gone next year. I suppose it’s the unrelenting immersion of caregiving that obscures that fact, the living in constant streams of multi-tasking. A piece of paper in a nightstand drawer becomes one more task to deal with—when in reality, it’s a time capsule of this moment, a memento of a little girl’s imagination and heart and devotion. It’s good to pause and see that.

Choosing Mediocrity

So, our six year-old plays some chess. At least I believe that’s the appropriate humble-brag. The actual-brag would be: he’s a nationally-rated tournament player.

But the truth is something both in-between and more bizarre. When we first moved here, one of the after-school offerings I rolled my eyes at was the K/1 chess class. I didn’t even play chess! Surely only moronically over-optimizing parents would think their five and six year-olds should!

So the first bizarre thing is that Eric plays at all. Dave showed him the game on a random afternoon and he loved it with the same immediate, inexplicable passion that he had for dinosaurs and Star Wars. Soon enough, I knew about PP-on-the-PP (putting pressure on the pinned piece), Bobby Fischer, and Italian openings the same way I knew about the archaeopteryx and Slave I. There I was, picking Eric up from the same class I rolled my eyes at.

But once the school class wasn’t challenging enough and we looked into the local chess world, we discovered something even stranger—that apparently, Eric was nothing remarkable. We discovered droves of serious-looking east- and south-asian parents inhabiting hotel lobbies every weekend with young boys glued to chess puzzles on their iPads, and probably being coached by private instructors when they weren’t playing all-day tournaments. 

Growing up in southern Virginia, it didn’t take much to acquire the reputation of being a “genius”—just taking some accelerated classes, making valedictorian in a class where no one popular wanted to be one, studying instead of going to the local beach. Where we lived, people didn’t necessarily expect their kids to go to college, much less have their eye on Stanford from birth. I wasn’t challenged much by my peers, but standing out was effortless.

In the chess world here, Eric is strictly middle-of-the-road. He easily beats many kids his age, but neither does he ascend in prodigy fashion to the highest level. I began to understand why no one here has four kids—there’s no way I can put him through the rigors other kids at his level go through with three other kids to take care of. We worked out a way for me to take him to afternoon-only tournaments twice a month; he gets some instruction from a teenage boy he likes; and Dave tries to play him when he can (I’ve given up). Today, they had a pretty even game going until Esme came and moved all the pieces around. That’s sort of his chess life: we try to be intentional, without making it too paramount; we try to keep it fun, but encourage his potential; and you never know when your little sister is going to come along and mess up all your pieces.

A friend once said, when it comes to extracurricular activities in the bay area, pick your poison. No one does anything half-way. Around here, people start their kids early, give them the best resources, and work them hard. Woe unto those whose kids start later, or are just in it for fun, and find themselves surrounded by elite peers—at least, that’s how I feel. Take swimming: I was elated to finally find a sport Ellie likes to do. How graceful she looks, I think, sluicing through the water in beautiful form. But the moment I try to find her some kind of regular opportunity to swim, I’m flustered again by the local offerings, swim teams in which kids her age are already working on perfecting their times. The coach took one look at her in try-outs today and consigned her to the non-competitive younger class. 

But as we were leaving the pool, Ellie was so happy. I get to swim for fun! she told me. I don’t have to compete! And I thought to myself: she’s right. That’s what we’re in swim for: giving her a form of exercise she continues to delight in, while maintaining balance in our lives at this stage. Around here, mediocrity is hard to achieve. You have to work pretty hard at it.

Having It All, Part 2

“For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” – Philippians 3:8

Every so often I think through the matter of career versus family again. I posted about this six years ago when leaving academia to enter what became a relatively ideal private practice gig, where I was able to work short days, maintain good surgical volume, and have my own cohort of patients. All while working two days per week with a good salary. Benefits of working in a non-competitive, high-need area.

Needless to say, the career landscape is different here—intentionally finding jobs that allow us to prioritize marriage and family has involved taking a lot more career hits. Dave, who was a rising state-wide superstar in public health, only considered jobs that did not involve a long commute, which seriously restricted his options in a relatively specialized field. He’s had to step out of the limelight in some ways and maintain flexibility with job changes. I have found two part-time gigs with amazing flexibility, but have lost surgical volume, autonomy, and having my own patient cohort to varying degrees.

The decisions to take these hits feels different this time around. Six years ago, it felt like a watershed moment. Looking back, the elite academic environment I habituated prior to that was a bubble in which pushing myself to do everything I could to excel was simply assumed. I was constantly surrounded by the ultra-intelligent and insecure about my own abilities, haunted by anxiety and driven by the need to prove myself, to everyone else but also to myself. Coming out of that was nothing less than transformative.

I’ve since realized that ultimately, the answer to how one balances career and family is one with no clear, practical right or wrongs. You can work for the right and wrong reasons, just like you can stay at home for the right and wrong reasons. 

For me, the process has been a progressive realization that the time I spend with the kids while they are young makes a real difference; that the physical, mental and emotional energy I have when I work less releases me to invest in my marriage, my health, in friends and ministry in a way that feels eternally-purposed and personally fulfilling. Somewhere along the line, it stopped feeling like I was giving something up to stay at home, and more like I was giving something up to go to work.

It’s not a process that is totally without angst. When we don’t have great childcare, it’s really hard to work, to be one of many ophthalmologists my patients could be seeing, instead of the only mom that my kids have. Working itself is a walk in conscious humility—not being as immersed in the field as my full-time colleagues sometimes feels like a functional handicap. I have to be willing to ask for help, to not have the same status or office space. Being a part-time surgeon carries its own dilemmas and difficulties.

But overall, considering this question of whether one can “have it all” feels different than it did six years ago. It seems even more fundamentally like the wrong question to ask. For one thing, it’s a query without comparable outcome measures—maybe career success can be measured by publications, promotions, grants, committee and talk invitations—but how does one measure success as a mother? Churning out obedient kids who go to Harvard? Or who go into ministry or missions? Feeling less guilty when you leave the house? Being able to breastfeed, or make school parties?

Parenting, of course, isn’t about achieving self-oriented outcome measures, just as career shouldn’t primarily be about that either I suppose, and so this question actually misses the point. As a believer, life is not about getting what I want, or what I feel I am due, or what compares well to someone else. My desire is not to have it all, but to follow faithfully; my hope is not in career or family achievements, but in the person of Jesus; my decisions are not born of calculation, but of my relationship with Him. And in that relationship, every decision I make for Him is a privilege and joy.

I think this is why Paul can say what he does in Philippians 3. He rattles off a perfect resume—like the Jewish version of “owner of a startup valued for billions” or “all my kids got into Stanford”—and has the gall to say, I count all of that as literally excrement, compared to gaining Christ, compared to knowing and becoming like him. Did that mean he never leveraged his education, eloquence, or pedigree for God? No. Did that mean he never worked in his field of training to earn a salary? No. But he was clear on what life was about. He was clear on what mattered in the end. Be like me, he says. If you’re going to calculate, do it this way. Keep your eyes on what matters.

Family Mission, Vision and Values

“7 in 10 parents say they have an explicit set of values for their family, but less than 3 in 10 have written out that purpose or mission statement.” – Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family

One thing that has been important to our family is coming up with mission, vision and values statements. The idea came up about seven years into our marriage, when Dave mentioned having recently walked his department at work through formulating their mission, vision and values; I had recently listened to a Focus on the Family podcast about doing one for families, and we decided to give it a shot.

The first time we did it, four years ago, it took about half a day. We drove down to the Outer Banks and sat at the Wright Brothers Memorial. To formulate our mission statement, we asked: what is our purpose, what do we want to accomplish in our lives together, for the next five years? For our vision statement, we asked: what is our long-term goal over the next several decades? For our values statement, we asked: what are the shared core beliefs that we’ll always try to reflect while in pursuit of our mission and vision?

For each question, we brainstormed a list of ideas separately and together, then developed or eliminated various ideas until we arrived at the most concise statement possible that encapsulated everything we felt was important. Values often involved a little more give-and-take in finding the ones we both agreed were important, and we tried to keep the list to just a few. 

Three years later, as we faced a move to California and our kids entering a slightly different stage of life, we went through the process again (this time it just took a few hours at the local Barnes & Noble). We incorporated anticipated cultural challenges, our vision for making the move, and individual and family changes in what we valued. Maybe because there has been so much change since the move, we have actually looked back to what we wrote more than ever before, to help us make decisions about how we spend our time, energy and money; what we persevere in praying for; and big and little details of how we live our day. Here is that latest version, which is up on our wall:

Mission

To live counter-culturally and missionally by deepening in unity and enjoyment in our marriage, providing a stable foundation for and investing in the character growth of our children, and intentionally building a committed and genuine community.

Vision

Our home is a place of strength and health that brings hope and blessing to those around us.

Values

Growth: being aware of changing needs and development as individuals and as a family; investing intentionally in inward growth over outward appearances.

Simplicity: maintaining space and margin; being fully present and content

Joy: having a home full of light, fun and hope; enjoyment of our environment and friends

Generosity: giving our time, money and resources; practicing hospitality; engaging in community

Long Days and Short Years

The last few weeks have been a revolving door of serial viral maladies—pretty much the lot of anyone with kids during some period of the year. On the East Coast this usually happened during the (what I now feel was bitterly cold) winters; this year, we’ve managed to escape being sick until being hit now with a double round. Just as the fourth kid is recovering from what’s been passed through the three previous kids, the first kid gets sick again, this time even worse, and down we go through the line again.

So this afternoon found me again holding lethargic, clingy, feverish kids and figuring out creative ways to get a two year-old to drink medicine she hates, while still dealing with the bickering and appetites of the healthy kids. And trying to somehow sort out germy and non-germy things on behalf of my public-health husband who believes we should have been able to contain spread of this contagion (he may be right).

By the time Dave got home, I didn’t feel like sitting through forty-five minutes of bay-area traffic to make some doctor’s meeting I had signed up for, but the best part ended up being the traffic, because I turned on some Focus on the Family podcasts like I used to during commutes in Virginia. Gary Thomas was sharing as an empty nester. He said one time when he was in the mall he saw a toddler run in front of her daddy to say, “hold me; my legs are tired!” The dad didn’t look too happy, but he shifted his bags to one hand and picked her up. And suddenly he was struck by the fact that he would never again hold one of his kids while walking through the mall (his youngest was twelve). These changes happen so subtly, he said. He wished someone could have gone back and told him, “this is the last time you will hold your kid while walking in the mall!” and he would have been more present.

I thought about how just today, I was feeling frustrated about having to hold Esme while walking into school for pick-up. But thinking back now I remember how the wind blew her wispy, sticky hair in my face; how her little chubby arm crooked around mine; how she kept talking on despite her fever about how there were letters on the road! And there was a dog! And she wasn’t wearing any shoes! (always a score in her book)

I remember Ellie exclaiming how nice it is to read a good book when you’re sitting sick on the couch. How she burrowed in my bed when she got chills. That moment when Eric was mad-faced and teary but agreed to be held and then jumped up to hug me hard when I hefted him up. The sleepy way Elijah rolled himself into his special blanket on the couch after waking up from a long nap.

The danger of my present, I suppose, is that it is so engulfing. It is hard to retain perspective or true presence. And I suppose part of wisdom is realizing that there is something in all of it, the good and bad, the healthy and sick, that I will one day wish I could retain but cannot. There is a part of my every day that God has portioned for me not just to function through, but to notice, to be aware in and even treasure, because it will not come back. I don’t want to be so consumed that my gratitude, focus, or curiosity has been sucked up by impatience, efficiency, or tasks. I don’t want to be so worn down by the consuming repetition of caregiving that I write off wonder in the common things.

Summer Camp Planning

Back in Virginia, summers for kids meant doing nothing. The neighborhood kids would loiter around all day, jumping on trampolines and drinking grape soda (though to be fair there seemed to be quite a bit of that during the school year too). Here in the Bay Area, summers are apparently when the true nature of parenting declares itself. During the school year, I can pretend that everyone else is normal, that all the other kids leaving school are also heading home to eat snacks and play. In reality, they’re probably all being shuttled off by ride services or grandparents to various lessons, but I don’t have to know that.

Then January hits, and with it circulated spreadsheets of camps. Well-intentioned parents coordinate summer schedules six months in advance, so they can get their kids and their kids’ friends into all the best camps before they fill up. The assumption on these calendars seems to be that every week should be booked, with either a camp or a transcontinental vacation. No wonder people say having more kids is too expensive—if you assume properly raising your kids includes flying them to Australia for vacation and shelling out $500-plus for sports camps at Stanford, it would be tough to have four (the two most common comments I get from strangers when out with all the kids are, “wow, you’re brave”—in a near-sarcastic, not encouraging, tone of voice—and “your husband must be rich”—which I find offensive on several levels).

The sheer options of camps has left me mostly in a state of paralysis of choice: every swim club and park has its version of a tennis-swim-arts combination camp; there are lego camps to promote citizenship, engineering, or themed along popular movies; every conceivable type of science, engineering, coding, visual arts, theater, dance, and sport camp is being run somewhere within a short radius of our house.

At heart, I would like to put our older kids in a few camps; the summer seems like a good time to get them to try some new things with short-term commitments, and some variety of routine may be good. But I think the reason I feel subliminally stressed by this whole venture has more to do with the undercurrent of the culture here. The way people approach summers seems to say that parenting is about out-sourcing and optimization. You outsource their care and teaching to specialized experts. You outsource their socio-emotional learning, their skill sets, their cognitive development, all according to the most recent research. You optimize their time, with never a wasted week. You optimize through comparative analysis, seeing what other parents are doing. In the end, you optimize for outcome, assuming you can maneuver your kids into success by controlling the right variables.

I don’t think I believe that. I believe parenting happens at home, where the difficult decisions aren’t which lego camp to put them in, but how to help a middle child develop self-confidence, or a strong-willed child learn to be a servant. I believe the most important things I want to teach my kids—values, worldviews, character; not just knowledge and skills—are best learned by modeling at home. I don’t think parenting is about optimization, but shepherding. Imputing skills so they can navigate a system for outward success isn’t as important as knowing them deeply, in every stage, and understanding how to reach and guide them in ways they need. Ultimately, I think about what I want for them in their lives—would it be nice if they went to an elite school? Yeah, I guess so; but what is more important is that they love and follow Jesus, that they marry the right person, that they grow in character (and when I think it’s crazy I’m thinking about colleges, I remember that line from Semple’s book Where’d You Go, Bernadette: “Let me rock it straight: the first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station”).

I think the conclusion we’ve come to is: spend no more than half the summer with the older two in camps. Go for low-key camps, not necessarily the most competitive or popular, based mostly on interest, though it’s okay for us to require one for the sake of pushing them to try new things. But mostly, I’m trying not to get sucked into this extremely pervasive sense of pressure and stress, which takes some level of conscious effort. It’s probably good preparation for the future.

Thanksgivings

“The day of our ships arrival at the place assigned ... in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God."  - charter, London Company, 1619

"A day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God." – George Washington proclaiming the first Thanksgiving holiday, 1789

Thanksgiving is a holiday for me that lives more in the historic past than in the recent past or present. It was the first break in the academic year, when we all came home to be together. We would set the dining table that we usually never used; there would be turkey and my sister and I would get the bones, skin and drippings. There would be sweet potatoes with marshmallows or cinnamon sticks, ham and pineapple for my other sister, green beans. There would be soft, pillowy Hachiya persimmons that my parents saved up for us. The next day there would be turkey congee. Along with Christmas, it encapsulated everything I liked best about traditions: rituals that created warmth and memory, centered around family. Years later, Thanksgiving was when Dave met my parents for the first time and when we started dating (memorable also for the year I had the chicken pox).

Somewhere along the line, that sort of nuclear warmth faded. We usually worked through Thanksgivings in residency. My sisters got married and stopped coming home to celebrate. I was in a post-partum haze for three Thanksgivings. The last few years in Virginia, we attended a potluck lunch with church friends which had that sort of festive quality that only lots of food and people crammed into a small rowhouse can have, and Dave enjoyed a bunch of traditional foods he usually didn’t get to eat. Then we’d go to my parents in the evening, when we would be too stuffed to eat much. Neither felt the same as those Thanksgivings past.

Here, it feels like I’m carving out (haha) the holiday anew. I never really can go back to those nuclear Thanksgivings, but now is when I make it our own—and I suppose every family does that at some point. Dave’s family doesn’t really celebrate holidays; they are joining into whatever we create. So I’m slogging through some amount of nostalgia and loneliness to ask myself: what do I want this holiday to mean for our family?

Well, food and atmosphere is important to me—I don’t know if my kids will feel the same, but I like the traditional dishes, the smell of turkey wafting through the house, everyone together as the table is set. And of course that means work (somehow holidays are more magical when someone else is doing all the work for you), so as I’m doing the whole meal, I’m aiming for what I think we’ll all enjoy without tiring myself out too much to enjoy it. We’re doing a turkey, our annual cranberry-sausage-apple stuffing for Dave. I’m trying a fancy mac-and-cheese recipe for Ellie as it may be the only thing she eats and we aren’t at a potluck where someone else is making it. I’m forgoing my usual pumpkin cheesecake in favor of an easier-to-make apple crisp. I’m making more vegetable dishes as I think Dave’s family will appreciate that and it’s healthier anyway.

I think the other element that’s special about this holiday is how we are all given a chance to stop everything else in life, and be intentionally thankful. So we did one activity where I put up a big piece of paper on the wall and we all wrote what we were thankful for. Ellie wrote a long litany of items ranging from pillows to people and asked if she could also write a separate letter decorated with a turkey to put on the wall too. Eric wrote, “I’m thankful for me (my name is Eric)” (okay, and some other stuff, like the cat and his brother). When asked, Elijah said he was thankful for his stuffed animals. When pressed further, his special rock. When asked, Esme said, “I don’t know” and was mostly upset she couldn’t scribble on the paper herself. Dave wrote, his snuffles bear. I wrote, our kids, this house, the weather.

I guess traditions, and holidays, are what we make of them in the end, and here at the beginning of our own holidays, this start is as good as any.

Recognizing and Preventing Burnout

Somewhere in the past few months any time I had for myself during the day evaporated. Between Eric dropping his nap (yet still remaining grumpy and clingy) and the younger two occasionally striking from naps too, that formerly-reliable midday break has disappeared to leave long eleven-hour marathons in its stead. That, combined with losing my parents’ regular help with the kids, has made it easy to burn out.

The thing about burnout is that it’s so insidious for me. One minute it all seems fine: I’m managing four kids, all the laundry and meals for six and mopping, the school runs and lunch-packing and lessons at home—the next minute I’ve lost my patience, I’m blowing up at small things, I’m feeling suffocated. Why is that?

First, I don’t think I’ve ever really learned how to prevent or recognize burnout. Our culture, and particularly Silicon Valley, emphasizes productivity, being able to “do it all.” As Emma Seppala at Stanford puts it, overextension is simply a way of life. And I’ve always personally been what others would probably term an over-achiever: my modus operandi is pretty much to sink or swim, to work harder and get it done sooner. In high school, that was taking seven AP courses while doing a varsity sport and competitive piano. In college, that was finishing my major my first two years. In medical training, that was picking the hardest surgical rotation and residency. Those things didn’t make me the healthiest person, but eventually the cramming for tests, the terrible call shifts would end—but of course childcare never does. So when I approach motherhood in that same task-oriented, all-out way, without pacing or strategies for self-care, I inevitably burn out.

Secondly, I think burnout by nature is insidious. It’s not the same as being stressed. Stress is too much—too much pressure, too many tasks—but burn out is about not enough—being all used up or dried out. Stress often leads to anxiety or hyperactivity; burnout leads to depression and detachment. We tend to recognize being stressed out, but it’s harder to recognize burnout, particularly because it’s not a threshold we step over as much as a continuum we progress along.

What are the signs of burnout? There are different definitions out there, but I think for me, it boils down to five basic things:

1. Exhaustion: chronic physical and/or emotional fatigue and lack of energy. “I’m tired all the time”

2. Lack of motivation: losing interest and feel disconnected. “I don’t care anymore”

3. Cynicism and dread: loss of enjoyment, seeing the worst and assuming the worst. “Every day is a bad day”

4. Resentment and irritability: displacement frustration on others, angry outbursts, feeling isolated. “It’s his fault; no one understands me”

5. Helplessness: feeling suffocated, like you can’t get out. “I feel trapped”

As a mom, for example, burnout usually means I’m so chronically sleep-deprived that I don’t even realize how much of how I feel is due to being tired. And it’s a bad cycle, because when I start getting burned out, the first way I tend to get more time for myself is to stay up later, but this only leads to more exhaustion and burnout the next day. I start to lose interest in doing whatever is most edifying for my kids; I just count down the hours until they go to bed. I start to dread all the chores and caregiving I have to do each day, rather than enjoying the kids. I start to think resentfully about Dave: I criticize him in my head when he doesn’t see a need at home and handle it exactly the way I would, or I’m secretly happy a kid is tantruming when he’s around because I want him to see how hard my days are. I find myself getting angry at the kids for small things. I experience moments of distinct suffocation, when I feel like I just need to get away.

How do I prevent burnout? Again, there’s probably lots of advice out there, but I think for me it boils down to these five things:

1. Permission and pacing: recognizing how important taking care of myself is, and deciding it is worth investing resources of time and money into it. Realizing prevention is only possible if I incorporate regular breaks into my life.

2. Community: connecting regularly with someone I trust; discussing and strategizing with them.

3. Hobby: recovering the me that isn’t just a mom—it might be the me that writes, or makes music, or reads, or hikes to a view. Doing those things to remember who I am.

4. Physical care: diet, exercise, sleep. Incredibly difficult without intentionality.

5. Spiritual space: not just a one-minute Bible-read, but time to worship, to listen, to dwell and be fully present with God.

Figuring out what all that practically looks like will probably differ from person to person or from season to season. I’ve been gathering some ideas lately, and processing through what mental roadblocks I have to getting help and incorporating regular breaks. But the first step is to recognize where I am on the continuum, because well, I’m in it for the long haul here. The kids’ needs will change from stage to stage, both individually and in combination, but they will always be there.

Birthday

I turn thirty-seven today.

I remember thinking once, if I could stay one age forever, it would be twenty-seven: old enough to know who I am and what I’m doing in life, young enough to be, well, still in my twenties. But my thirties have turned into a better decade than my twenties. I always felt happier married than single, but I know and love Dave more in our tenth year than our first. I’m somewhat less self-absorbed, probably as a consequence of being compelled into daily service. Other than a proliferation of facial nevi and the way nursing four babies has changed my chest, my body doesn’t feel that much older. I definitely couldn’t stay thirty-seven forever—I may have changed eight poopy diapers the other day—but overall I’d say it’s better than twenty-seven.

If anything, this is the year I’ve arrived. Growing up, I always felt like I was looking forward to the next thing to make me happy: passing the next test or step of training, getting married, having kids, owning a house, getting a job. Somewhere during the last six years, I realized I had gotten there: I’d passed the last test I had to take for a while; I was having the kids I wanted to have—but I wasn’t necessarily happier or a better person. That took me on a journey that eventually turned in the last year or two into my falling in love with Jesus in a fresh way.

And now, here I am, having actually arrived—moved for the last time; own our forever-house; more settled in career; finished having kids (and soon to get a pet). I suppose this is typically when a mid-life crisis would hit—I’d feel meaningless without the next thing to strive for, or trapped by my responsibilities—but instead I feel content and glad, in the way that you do when you realize none of this is your due, or even essential for your primary happiness, but extraordinary gifts from a God who loves you.

Maybe it’s more of a mid-life perspective: I’m nearing the point where my life may be half over. It’s clearer than ever that none of this lasts forever: I’m a steward of my children (in ten more years Ellie will move out!), of this house (which will probably be overtaken by the redwoods outside in a century), even of Dave (who will not be married to me in eternity). I think more about what it means to take care of those things for what matters, and to not lose out on being present in the process.

Those are two goals I’d like to set for my thirty-seventh year: one, to establish our lives in this new home and place in a way that reflects what really matters to us. And two, to enjoy it. To enjoy the way Ellie’s whole face lights up and she jumps up and down when she’s excited; the way Eric wraps me in spontaneous hugs and kisses; the way Elijah says “wot?” with big round eyes and sings “a whole new world” at the top of his lungs; the way Esme stumbles out of naps with unreasonable cheerfulness, declaring “I wake up!” (and the way her thighs are still super chubby). The way Dave reaches for my hand in the car. The redwood boughs rustling outside, the cool breezes, friends who bring over board games and yummy noodles, the mountains in the horizon.

I’m guessing this day will pass without much fanfare (and with four school runs). But this was always the best part: looking back, looking forward, thinking about my life, and this year, feeling particularly grateful. 

Preschool Parenting Culture

I stick out a lot here because I have four kids, but I was expecting that. Two is the average here. I get a lot of “are they twins?” about the younger ones as apparently it would be odd for us to intentionally have four children, or comments like v“how do you do it?” (still don’t have a great reply for that one).

But I stick out in another way I hadn’t anticipated: people are always surprised when they hear that I keep the younger two at home. I get asked regularly where they go to preschool, and incredulous looks follow when I say that they don’t.

Apparently it is rare for children to remain at home for their earlier years here, probably due to a few factors—both parents having to work to afford living here, or there being more highly-educated people likely to elect focusing on their careers.

But third, and this is the part I’ve been pondering, I get the sense people here place a higher value on early-child development: they have such a high standard that they feel the only way to do it well is to outsource it to the professional experts. There is a lot of talk about education strategies and things like SEL’s (socio-emotional learning), Carol Dweck growth mindsets, optimizing your child’s brain development and exposures by a certain age. Combine that with a resource-rich environment and parents who either naturally want the best for their kids or are the “Stanford-or-bust” types, and you get competitive preschools teaching based on the latest Stanford experiments, preschools touting specific play-oriented environments, and lessons for little ones ranging from the typical (music, multiple languages, sports, ceramics) to the unusual (Legos to teach political skills, metal-working).

It’s easy to ask, how can I possibly be doing all that by myself at home? Maybe some people are wondering, why would I want to? Why not go do what I trained for twelve years to do, or go get some self-care, and leave that to the experts?

I am in no way judging kids who do go to preschool (we’ll probably find one for the three year-old next year) or lessons, but part of adjusting to being here has been processing this sort of tension. It’s made me realize that I do personally believe in and desire to teach them myself, in large part because the most important things—world view, values, priorities, principles—are taught implicitly, as they are lived out, and I want my kids to see that from me. Maybe I’m just too sanguine and laid-back to worry overmuch about what they are missing, though in that case it’s good to be challenged about what and how I teach them at home.

And that’s the bottom line about living here: there are so many things that are good, but I’m constantly having to decide when there’s too much of a good thing, or whether that good thing in fact aligns with the gospel and our purpose. Without that lens, it’s so easy to get sucked into a certain way of feeling and operating, because the culture here is so strong: its values are like a riptide that can pull you under unawares. We thought a lot of that through before making this move, but it’s interesting to see how it plays out in ways we do or don’t expect.

Perfectionism and Enneagram Types

One thing reading this book about enneagram types has helped me with the most is understanding not myself so much as other people. In brief, it breaks people down into nine different personality types, which you self-identify, and for each type the book describes the healthy, average, and unhealthy versions of the type; the particular sin that type is prone to; how that type tends to be in childhood, work, and relationships; general characteristics of that type; and what spiritual growth of that type looks like, with a healing message for each. In general, enneagrams help most with understanding people’s motivations: two people may have the same behavior or outlook, but from very different motivations, and it’s helpful for me to see that what drives me may be completely different from what motivates, and thus will help heal or change, someone else.

For example, Ellie and I are both perfectionists, but our different enneagram types has helped me understand how differently it works for her (a type 1, the perfectionist) than for me (a type 3, the performer). On the surface, we’re similar: we both care a lot about excellence, about completing a task well and meeting high standards. In a way, this makes it easy for us to get along: she does great at school, just like I did; we enjoy painting or playing the piano or writing a book report or building a tent just right.

But as soon as something isn’t done perfectly right, we run into problems. My typical approach is to say, suck it up and try again! Focus on the task and get it right! When someone talks to me like that, it makes me more determined than ever to show them I can do it well. But when I talk to Ellie like that, she becomes completely paralyzed; she shuts down and starts crying and is unable to proceed.

What I’ve found is that we are perfectionists for very different reasons, with almost opposite effects. I’m driven by performance: I’m a perfectionist because I want to perform well in front of others; I want to look good, to achieve a lot, and I have an inherently strong sense of self and high self-confidence. External observation energizes me. If I make a mistake, I’m more liable to shrug and move on to something else I can do well, or just figure out a way to get over it; my focus is always on the task, the performance, rather than the relationship. As a result, I don’t really feel I want to understand others or bother with people who get in the way of performing the task well.

Ellie, on the other hand, is a perfectionist because she is driven by a high inner standard. She wants to do something perfectly because she genuinely wants to, not because she cares about performing for others. She is less motivated to do something if others are watching. And because this comes more internally, she has a constant inner critic in her head, a voice telling her that she is not doing it well enough, not measuring up: she is inherently more prone to insecurity than self-confidence. If she makes a mistake, she is more liable to beat herself up in her head about it, to let it affect her sense of self. Her focus is often more on relationships than the task itself: how the mistake is affecting her relationship with others and view of self. As a result, though, she is more naturally empathetic with others, more interested in understanding others.

Completely different! When I make a mistake, what I need to hear is: the perfect performance is not always the most important thing. It’s good to learn and move on in doing the task well, but don’t forget to see how this is affecting others and things that are more important than the outward image. Remember that God sees you for who you truly are, not just the image you project, and loves you.

Naturally, when Ellie makes a mistake or is crying because her brothers messed up her tent, my tendency is to respond with what I need to hear: to tell her, it’s okay if it’s not perfect. But I think the message she needs to hear is: you’ll make mistakes, and that’s okay, and God and I still love you. Because her sense of perfectionism is coming from a more internal place, the point is not to tear down this inner standard she will probably have anyway, but to separate that from a sense of shame or insecurity: to restore relational security and love, to consistently remind her that she is not defined by her mistakes, that mistakes happen and she is always loved regardless.

So when we’re playing piano and she forgets a note, or when we’re painting and she accidentally does a whole section in the wrong color: we both care, and we’re both frustrated. But now the first things I say are: it’s okay that you made a mistake. I still love you. I might expand on that or vary it by saying things like, I forget notes all the time too, or look, now we can mix in a new color that looks even better, or I love that you try so hard, or I love how you are always brave enough to practice very day, etc. And I see her face light up, instead of crumpling up into tears, and she seems energized to keep going, and then I can start talking about the actual task.

As a type 3, it feels sort of laborious and foreign, and sometimes when I’m tired I think why does she have to be so darn sensitive and emotional? or gee whiz, just move on and try again! but I know those things won’t motivate her, and don’t reflect a true understanding of who she is and how God has created her. And I see more and more that she has wonderful traits—empathy, kindness, integrity, true discipline—that come much more naturally to her than to me.

Practical Tips for Handling Bickering Kids

Our kids have been in a phase of particularly concentrated bickering for the past few months. My 7 year-old started tending to whine or yell; my 5 year-old is still strong-willed about what he wants or considers right; my 3 year-old is in his full-fledged, irrational, emotional terrible two’s; and my 1.5 year-old is old enough to screech for what she wants. What results is synergistic conflict: not anything egregious enough to be disciplined, and often not a situation with someone in the clear right or wrong—just this incessant bickering.

I’ve really struggled to deal with it, and it’s only in the past week that I feel like there’s been some practical breakthrough. Here is a list that I wrote to myself, of things that I’ve found work or that I want to remind myself to do:

- set a positive baseline tone and attitude myself at home: I can choose the attitude I set. I can choose to make our home the safest place in the world. I enjoy my kids and expect to enjoy them. If there is grumbling in my own heart, it leaks out to the kids. Sing songs.

- have preemptive activities planned: they don’t have to be huge deals (though that is good occasionally)—what matters is my attention and some amount of forethought. Get the play-dough out. Print out coloring pages.

- expect to be present: some multi-tasking is inevitable, but my primary goal is to be with my kids. “The dishes can wait; their childhood cannot”

- never escalate bickering by letting my own frustration and anger rise: I need to set an example. I need to teach an effective lesson. If I sense my frustration rising, pause. Talk slowly and softly instead of loud and fast. God can give me the strength to do this.

- quicker response time: if a bickering-related behavior is grating on me, respond to it early and effectively. Do not let it go on until I react with an angry outburst.

- call out the positive in my children: verbally recognize both positive behavior and the character trait it reflects

- practice positive behavior: give them the words or lines to say that are alternatives to something antagonistic. Consider practicing these lines in mock situations. Verbally model this myself by speaking helpful lines out loud (“it’s not a big deal”)

- separate them: they may need the freedom or guidance to have their own space and time as the natural default is for us all to be together

- spend individual time with each of them: the older ones need their own attention as much as the younger ones, though they demand it less

- avoid the group effect: do not disproportionately blame individual kids for sibling behaviors or group effects that they are not responsible for. They may need to learn to adjust their behaviors to make it easier for others, but it is not their fault their sibling has a trigger issue or the group effect made it worse

Free-Range Versus Helicopter Parenting

Dave grew up in an environment without a lot of parental supervision: he biked to school and lessons on his own, hung out at friends’ houses without adults around. I grew up with parents who were involved in every aspect of school and social life: they drove and stayed with me through every lesson and recital; I wasn’t allowed to go on sleepovers. He recognizes that his parents could have been more involved and that he was lucky to live in a community with intelligent, loyal friends. I recognize that we lost out on the benefits of community and a directive style of parenting doesn’t work equally well on all personality types. But the point is, we tend to come at this issue of “free-roaming” versus “helicopter” parenting from different sides.

On the one hand, you have helicopter parenting. This has been around as a recent trend so I probably don’t have to describe it much: it’s the parent who feels they must control and directly supervise every aspect of their children’s lives. Their infants must eat pureed organic foods and listen to Mozart. Their toddlers must potty train on schedule and read early. Their kids must start a rigorous schedule of sports and music lessons. Everything they consume, wear, and do is carefully curated, ultimately to achieve success, however defined.

Critics of helicopter parenting point to research that suggests kids parented this way turn out to be less flexible and more anxious and self-conscious, as well as more likely to be medicated for anxiety and depression. They have more difficulty devising their own plans and carrying them out, skills involved in executive functioning.

On the flip side, you have free-roam parenting, a concept that has been brought out more in recent articles. The TIME article I discussed earlier found that many families with high-achieving siblings let them free-roam as children. A recent NPR article discusses how our society’s averseness to leaving children unattended is more moral judgment than actual risk assessment. A recent NYT magazine article highlights an “anti-helicopter” parent’s desire to establish a “playborhood” where kids have self-directed, physically riskier, communal play.

Free-range parents feel that kids need to have unsupervised, even risky experiences to form happy memories, to learn how to titrate fear, to develop self-efficacy, to problem-solve on their own, to build confidence. They feel kids need to self-explore to develop independence and responsibility. Kids are allowed to go places on their own, to be taken care of by other adults or play with other kids without adults around, to have free-play without agenda or programs.

The opposition to free-range parenting seems obvious, probably because parenting has been trending away from the more hands-off styles of the 60’s and 70’s for a while now: it’s almost a moral assertion that a parent must constantly watch their kids, that anything else is unsafe. My personal objection to free-range parenting is that it can slide into neglect—I see our neighbor’s kids doing nothing but drinking sodas and jumping on trampolines all day with nary an adult in sight, though maybe that’s a bad value assertion?

The first thing I would say about all this is that there is some class distinction involved. Typically, helicopter parents are wealthy and high-educated: frankly, it takes a lot of money and/or time and energy to hover over your kids. Families with less resources, or families with more children, may naturally tend to free-range more.

The second thing I would acknowledge is that there’s a natural bit of discomfort when someone’s parenting style differs noticeably from your own. I’ve been around parents who are much more controlling of their kids’ exposures and activities than I am, and it makes me feel pressured, and less able to relax. I feel I have to monitor my kids more because I don’t want them to do anything to offend them; I feel more judged, and that my kids are being judged more. I’ve been around parents who are more free-roaming than us, and it makes me feel a bit dumped on: I have to be the one to make sure someone’s kid isn’t stabbing someone else in the eye, because their parent seems totally unconcerned.

The third thing I would say is that, like any trend or style of parenting, I think the point is less to judge others than to examine yourself: to ask, what is the goal or point of my parenting? How can I incorporate the strengths of various trends, or what I see in others’ styles, to that end? In what way am I falling into cultural mindsets that are not helpful?

Finally: which is better? Well, I’ll have to leave that, maybe, for later, as this post is getting too long… feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts.

Pitfalls Of A Big Family

I have this theory that when it comes to the optimal number of kids, it’s a balance between your ability to give each child the individual attention and care they deserve, and the benefit of greater community. You have too few kids, and they miss out on the camaraderie, love, and learning to sacrifice that the unique personality of each sibling—and the unique combinations of each of those personalities—provides. But have too many kids, and some of their needs can slip by under the radar since you’re too tired or taxed to notice. It’s just impossible to give each one the same degree of attention when you have many.

We’re at a stage in life—four kids six and under—where the group effect is particularly pronounced. It’s easy to fall into something author Rachel Jankovic (who had five kids in five years) calls the “bulk effect.” She gives a great example of this in her book Loving The Little Years: Motherhood In The Trenches:

“Let’s say that you are trying to get ready for church, and one child is disobedient (something petty, like not putting on their shoes when you told them to). They wandered off and got distracted and loitered in the living room for a minute. In that minute the baby starts crying, you see the clock and realize that you are going to be late, you can’t find the wet wipes or the baby’s shoe, which you know you put on the table last night. The baby is still screaming, so you are trying to rock the car seat with your foot while doing the hair of your middle child who will not stop bouncing. You are shouting out to your husband to see if he knows what happened to the baby shoe, probably punctuated with ‘Sit still. Stop. Don’t wiggle.’ As it turns out, your husband is out looking for someone’s lost shoe in the car where they are prone to remove them, so you get no response. You begin to have evil thoughts about shoes. The tension is mounting. You may very well be feeling hot and sweaty while your coffee is getting cold on the counter, untouched. At this moment, the child who didn’t put his shoes on comes wandering back, refreshed with a nice spell of magna-doodling. What do you think happens?

“You take that shred of guilt and then harness onto it the stress of the whole situation. You make your child into a scapegoat… He did, after all, disobey… the consequences for his sin go way up, and the consequences for yours go way down. It is simply a classic shifting of the blame. … Oftentimes you won’t even discipline the sin that did occur, because you are wanting to leave this situation with the feeling that you were full of grace toward that child who maliciously magna-doodled. Next time, you say, you will get spankings. This time, you will just have to bear the weight of my discontent, my anger, and my lack of self-control.

"If you took the actions of each individual child, nothing big happened. One kid took her shoes off last night in the car. One kid keeps bouncing when you are trying to fix her hair, one kid had a dirty diaper, and one kid magna-doodled instead of putting on his shoes, and the baby just wants some attention… The combined effect is certainly ripe, especially when you add in the things that Mom and Dad were responsible for. The time. The lost clothing that could have been found last night. Not noticing the distracted disobedience right away. Not getting up early enough to drink your coffee.

“The situation is not sin. It is merely the combined effect of a lot of people. And just because you can pin down one sin in the batch does not mean that child is responsible for the situation. Your children are not a situation. They are individuals. Disciplining an individual for a collective situation is a great way to alienate your children. It is not only unjust and unkind, but it is untrue to the gospel. Christ takes our sins; He does not load us down with someone else’s.”

The bulk effect is when I let my reaction to the overall situation unduly affect my reaction to one child; when I functionally make them responsible for the behavior of the group. There’s a difference between asking Elijah to be quiet because Esme is still sleeping, and becoming mad at him because she woke up. There’s a difference between reminding Eric to let Elijah pour his own cereal because he’s two and wants to feel grown-up, and snapping at Eric because he triggered Elijah’s third tantrum of the hour. There’s a difference between reminding them they’ll have to deal with certain grocery-cart arrangements, and getting upset at them for making a grocery run so complicated—it’s not their fault there are so many of them. When having a lot of kids becomes a problem, it’s my responsibility to deal with it.

The other pitfall for big families is mistaking our ability to contain and organize them for actually addressing their hearts and seeing their needs.

Big families naturally require a lot of organization—keeping them clean, clothed, and fed is a major operation. It’s practically consuming in and of itself. I think our lives are doable because we’ve gotten pretty good at running the ship, but we have to remember that, as Jankovic puts it, “Christian childrearing is a pastoral pursuit, not an organizational challenge. The more children you have, the more you need to be pastorally minded.”

This means a lot of things. It means being willing to let the operation be interrupted if there’s an emotional need. It means seeing my kids: observing shifts in mood, the faint door-slam, the persistent grumpiness, and taking time out to get to the root of it. It means spending time alone with each child without an agenda. Since I have limited energy and resources, it might mean putting aside my career or ministry in some way so I don’t miss out on being able to know and address their hearts and minds.

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.

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.