Parenting
How Art Has Changed My Life
I was recently asked what experiencing a creative art taught me, if I could quantify its effect on my life, and what “good” came from it. As a self-proclaimed “arty farty” person, my first reaction is to soap box the importance of art in our culture. How it shapes us and our reality. How it’s used in marketing, film, politics, and is statistically proven as valuable for test scores and SAT’s. I ...
Nice vs Kind
One of the many unintended side effects of becoming a parent is that you’re forced to develop a completely new relationship with the English language. I don’t mean that you’ll instantly gain an understanding of homophones, homonyms, and homographs – no such luck. What I mean is that you’ll learn that “sit on the couch” can mean a multitude of different things – ranging from the traditi...
Call Me Old-Fashioned
Call me old-fashioned, but I think technology is a little overrated. Yes, we can have pretty much anything we want delivered to us without even putting on pants. Yes, we don’t have to go through the hassle of making real friends when we can easily connect with people online. Yes, we don’t even need to know where we’re going before we get in the car. But just because we have unlimited power at our ...
The Perfectly-Sized Family?
I had it all planned—right down to where I was going to meet my future husband, when we were going to get married, and when we were going to start a family. I come from a large extended family, so growing up, family was everything. My mom stayed at home with all four of us girls until my baby sister, eleven years younger than me, was well into her elementary school career. For most of my childhood...
Watching Our Heroes Fall from Grace
What has happened to all the role models? It seems like they’ve started dropping like flies. In light of the recent sexual assault allegations in particular, it feels like the “good” ones are being proven just as bad as anyone else. In other words, they’re not who we thought they were. Have you heard the saying, “never meet your heroes”? Meeting your heroes humanizes them—their capes come off and ...
The Superpower of Representation
When I was in the third grade, a film came out and my classmates and I couldn’t have been more excited. This film was the latest installment in a series that our moms and dads grew up with. It took place in a far-off land. There were epic battle scenes, fun characters, and who could forget the score? The film was Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. I know the prequels get a lot of vitriol and...
In This Sandwich, a Lesson.
Children are to be seen, and not to be heard. It’s the phrase that defined the parenting philosophies of multiple generations of mothers and fathers. Simply put, children were expected to be as close to invisible as humanly possible. It didn’t mean that children were expected to simply be quiet; we were expected to be undemanding, passive, and malleable. We were the property of our parents, and in...
Parents Are People Too
I turn 30 in 30 days. All the stigma surrounding a number seems to have skipped over me. I am excited for an excuse to get my friends together; these days with everyone having little babies or toddlers it’s quite the challenge. I would love to say it will be some epic bash, but I can already hear how the conversations will play out through the entirety of the evening. Kids, kids, kids. I stay home...
When Your Parenting is Put to the Test
In a few weeks, my son will be on his way to college. At such a time, lots of parents take stock (just google “tips for parents of college students” or look for online essays on the topic). I’m a bundle of nerves, sublimating my anxiety into buying sheet sets and collecting boxes for the car ride, one which will result in driving home without the boy who, now almost a man, was the second-grade “ne...
Kids are a gift.
A Google search for “quotes about children” yields countless insights from writers, leaders, and thinkers praising children as a gift. But when I did a similar search about marriage and kids, I found a growing body of research saying that couples without children are actually happier and more content. As I considered both searches, I realized that they are reflective of a tension in our culture ab...
Parenting
What is the Christian view of parenting? To be honest, there really isn’t one. Christians hold to a whole lot of different ideas, just as the rest of the world does. Some are strict, some more permissive. Some believe in attachment parenting, free-range parenting, or whatever the latest fad may be. Others rely on the advice and example of their own parents or of people they trust who are also rais...
Divorce
Divorce is a painful subject. That’s why I think I’d better say where I’m coming from up front—my parents were divorced, and someone I love dearly is on the verge of divorce as I write. I’m married, but there were times when I feared we were going to wind up in the courts as well. So there’s that. What do Christians think about divorce? As you know, there’s a huge spectrum of views and practices, ...
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