The parent-teacher dynamic, Gen-X style

I’d never heard of the site Edutopia before today, but one of my Facebook friends posted a link to an interesting piece: “A Teacher’s Guide to Generation X Parents.” It’s ostensibly addressed to teachers (as you can see from the title), but it feels more like a piece of self-analysis as the author reflects on her own experience. The key to the article, I think, is this:

If you want to know what’s unhealed from your own childhood, have children. Key to decoding our parental behavior is understanding that we are, albeit often unconsciously, doing for our children what no one did for us.

I don’t disagree with that, but I’m still mulling the piece as a whole; the comments are quite interesting as well. If you’re a parent or a teacher, check it out—I don’t know if you’ll agree, but it will give you something to think about.

The hardest part of parenting

is the vulnerability; as one of the commentators over at The Thinklings, BlestWithSons, put it some time ago,

The “what-ifs?” increase exponentially when your heart is walking around outside of your body wearing Buzz Lightyear light up shoes.

I very nearly fell down the stairs carrying my youngest last week; it’s the absolute mercy and grace of God that I caught myself and only broke off a toenail. I’ve been thinking about the what-ifs a lot lately.

What do you mean, “no”?

A colleague of mine recently made the observation that kids pass through two phases of egocentrism, once around 4-5 and once at the beginning of adolescence. He defined egocentrism as the belief that when it comes to something they want, if they can just make you understand how much they want it and how important they feel it is to them to get it, you will give it to them. If you as their parent (or other authority figure) refuse them, then, their assumption is that they must not have communicated their desire clearly enough, and so they’ll repeat it—believing that if they just repeat it enough times, you will understand and accept that you have to give them what they want because it’s that important to them. As he noted, the challenge of parenting a child in this phase is recognizing the reason behind their refusal to take “no” for an answer and not treating it as pure willful rebellion, while at the same time remaining firm in your answer.

Though this was a lesson in parenting, I have to admit, it set off political echoes in my brain as well.

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you.

“That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”

But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people”.

Wait, wait! Come back! Don’t all stampede for the hills! He gave only 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year (according to CBS News’ Mark Knoller). That’s more than any previous president—and maybe more than all of them put together.

What that says, exactly, I’m not sure; but it seems to me to be a parallel worth considering.

Exploring The Westing Game

My eldest daughter’s class is doing a unit on mysteries, and one of the books the class is reading is Ellen Raskin‘s novel The Westing Game. My daughter’s reading a different one, because she’s already read that one—I suggested it to her, because it’s one of those books I loved as a child and still love now. On a whim, I looked Raskin up on Wikipedia, and was interested to find that she had donated the manuscript of The Westing Game to her alma mater, the University of Wisconsin; they have made portions of it available online, accompanied by audio of Raskin talking through the manuscript. I haven’t had time to fully explore this yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

On the blessed inconvenience of children

The quote atop The Thinklingsfront page today is one of my favorites, from Gary Thomas:

Kids’ needs are rarely “convenient.” What they require in order to succeed rarely comes cheaply. To raise them well will require daily sacrifice of many kinds, which has the wonderful spiritual effect of helping mold us into the character of Jesus Christ himself. God invites us to grow beyond ourselves and to stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us. Once we have children, we cannot act and dream as though we had remained childless.

We’ve been thinking about that here this week, since our older girls’ parent-teacher conferences were last night. It’s interesting talking with their teachers (and listening between the lines a bit) and realizing how many of the parents they have to deal with who really don’t get this, or perhaps refuse to get this. I wonder if perhaps we’re seeing a spillover effect of the abortion regime—after all, if it’s legally acceptable to kill an unborn child because letting that child live would be too inconvenient, that deals a heavy, heavy blow to the idea that we have a responsibility to put the needs of our children ahead of our own. The sad irony is, this means that many adults never learn how much better life can be once we “stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us”; it’s the children who have the most to lose, but their parents’ lives are impoverished as well.

Embracing the wildness of faith

Bill over at The Thinklings put up a post yesterday quoting Chesterton at length (something almost always well worth doing) on the value of fairy tales for children, and concluding with some additional thoughts of his own:

This really resonates with me, because from a young age I rode like a squire through the Arthurian legends, crouched quietly in the belly of the horse with Odysseus, galloped alongside Centaurs in Lewis’ Narnia, and went into the dreadful dark of Moria with Frodo and Sam. These led me one day to open up a Bible and begin reading what Lewis would call the “true myth” of the ultimate, and fully historical, defeat of the dragon.

As parents we should, of course, protect our kids. But I think Chesterton makes a compelling case here for not limiting them with politically correct, neutered fiction that contains no dragons. How will they ever know that the dragon can be killed?

I think Bill’s absolutely right about that. As Chesterton says in the essay he quotes,

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

This is much the same point Russell Moore makes in the post I quoted Monday, and so it’s no surprise that Bill follows up today by quoting Moore as well. He also adds an extended quote from Danielle at Count the Days on the absurdity that passes for “Christian education” in so many places. It’s a great post:

The other day, in my Religious Education class, this question was posed to us:

“What do you want to teach a child by the time they are 12?”

During class we were supposed to get in groups and discuss what we thought kids need to know by that stage in their lives, and honestly, I was kind of appalled by the answers I heard. . . .

One girl had the audacity to call me “harsh” because I said that they need to know that they are sinners. How can anyone have an appreciation or understanding of salvation without first knowing what sin is and that they are a sinner? I understand that the average child cannot comprehend the intricacies of theology, but what Jesus-loving Children’s Minister can look at the kids in their ministry and knowingly keep the whole Truth from them? Bible stories are great and important in building a foundation for these kids, but knowing who Zaccheus was, or being able to sing the books of the Bible in order isn’t going to get anyone any closer to Heaven. Just sayin’.

I guess the reason it frustrated me so much was because I was thinking of my own (future/potential) children. I don’t want my ten/eleven/twelve year old thinking that “being a good person” or being “obedient” means anything without having a personal, intimate relationship with Christ. I mean sure, I want obedient children ;), but in the grand scheme of things that would not be on the top of my list.

And then perhaps the most important point she makes is this:

Children can be taught all kinds of things as long as they are taught in love and kindness. Give kids the opportunity to understand, instead of withholding Truth from them. Offer them the whole Gospel, not just cartoons or cut-and-dry facts. I know I probably sound like some hardcore beat-truth-into-them type of lady, but I hate the thought of kids wasting what can be the most influential years of growth on pointless trivia or partial Truth.

Amen. This is something of a soapbox of my own, and has been for a while—I don’t post on it a great deal, just on occasion, but it’s something I care quite a bit about in my congregation, and with my own kids—that so much of what we call “Christian education” in the church is just awful, trivial, milk-and-water stuff aimed at teaching kids to be nice, dutiful little serfs rather than at raising them up as followers of Jesus Christ.

The problem is, I think, that too many adults—and not just adults in the church, either—have lost touch with the wildness of the world, and the wildness of their own hearts. Part of it, as N. D. Wilson says, is that our rationalistic and rationalized, scientific and scientistic, we-are-civilized-and-we-can-control-everything culture tends to teach us to see all things wild and perilous as evil; we have tamed immense swaths of our world, made it comfortable and predictable, orderly and obedient, and so we see these as good things, and anything that threatens them as bad.

This logically leads us to lose sight of the wildness of evil, both within us and outside us. Hannah Arendt had an important insight when she wrote of “the banality of evil” (an insight which I believe is much less understood than quoted), but it’s equally important for us to understand that while evil is indeed dreary and banal, uncreative and far less attractive than it likes to pretend, it is not thereby tame and predictable and contained. We get reminders of this when things like 9/11 happen, but if we can convince ourselves that such things are outside our own experience—that their lesson doesn’t apply to us—then we do so as quickly as possible, convincing ourselves that our own lives are still safe and tame and under our control.

The consequence of this domesticated worldview for the church is that too often, we’ve tamed our faith. We have trimmed it to fit what this world calls reality instead of letting our faith expand our souls to fit God’s view of reality, and we have ended up with a domesticated faith in a domesticated God. After all, if we don’t see our world as a big, wild, uncontrollable world that threatens us and makes us uncomfortable, we don’t need a big, wild, uncontrollable God who makes us uncomfortable and calls us to fear him as well as love him; a god sized to fit the tame little problems we’ll admit to having will do nicely.

There are various antidotes to that, but one of them is, to bring this back around to Bill’s post, to Chesterton, and also to Tolkien, a keen acquaintance with the world of faerie. We need stories that do not only show us the wildness of evil somewhere else (for many of our movies and books do that much), but that show us the wildness of evil in our own hearts, and also the wildness of good. We need stories that powerfully communicate, not only rationally but also viscerally, the truth that (to borrow a line from Michael Card) there is a wonder and wildness to life, that true goodness is a high and perilous thing, and that the life of goodness is an adventure. We need to learn to hear the call to faith as the call expressed so well by Andrew Peterson in his song “Little Boy Heart Alive”:

Feel the beat of a distant thunder—
It’s the sound of an ancient song.
This is the Kingdom calling;
Come now and tread the dawn.

Come to the Father;
Come to the deeper well.
Drink of the water
And come to live a tale to tell . . .

Take a ride on the mighty Lion;
Take a hold of the golden mane.
This is the love of Jesus—
So good but He is not tame.

Photo © 2008 by Wikimedia user Corinata.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. 

Christianity and the wild

My previous post, reflecting on some of the things I’ve read about Spike Jonze’ movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, was largely sparked by Russell Moore’s post on the movie. Part of that was the paragraph I cited in that post, reflecting on what is good about the original book. Part of it too, though, was Dr. Moore’s comment about Christians who object to the movie on the grounds that it’s too scary—something which he seems to think (and I agree) is rooted in the tendency of so much of the church to sanitize our faith, and with it our worldview, to make it nice and safe.

I’m amazed though by the way some Christians react to things like this. They furrow their brow because the Max character screams at this mother, and bites her, even though this is hardly glorified in the movie. They wag their heads at how “dark” the idea of this wild world is. Of course it is “dark.” The universe is dark; that’s why we need the Light of Galilee.

Where the Wild Things Are isn’t going to be a classic movie the way it is a classic book. But the Christian discomfort with wildness will be with us for a while. And it’s the reason too many of our children find Maurice Sendak more realistic than Sunday school.

Too many of our Bible study curricula for children declaw the Bible, excising all the snakes and dragons and wildness. We reduce the Bible to a set of ethical guidelines and a text on how gentle and kind Jesus is. The problem is, our kids know there are monsters out there. God put that awareness in them. They’re looking for a sheep-herding dragon-slayer, the One who can put all the wild things under His feet.

Hallelujah! Amen.

Where are the wild things?

The first I heard that Spike Jonze was making a movie of Where the Wild Things Are was when David Kavanaugh (whose work I’ve posted on a bit here) raved to me about how great the trailer was, calling it the best thing he’d seen on film all year. It was a pretty good piece of work, though I didn’t think it quite merited the praise he gave it, but it didn’t do what a trailer is supposed to do: make me want to see the movie. Rather the opposite, actually, as it gave me significant misgivings about what Jonze, Dave Eggers et al. were doing with the book; it really didn’t look like a movie I wanted to see.

From the reviews and early reactions, it appears to me that—to steal a line from my brother-in-law (on the Lord of the Rings movies)—the movie is almost but not quite completely unlike Sendak, even if Maurice Sendak himself disagrees. Indeed, it sounds like the movie falls short in ways I didn’t even see coming; I would hardly have thought to find a reviewer writing,

Where the Wild Things Are ultimately is not wild enough. Despite their extraordinary costumes, these ordinary characters fail to transform Max’s journey into something approaching magic.

To be sure, as io9’s reviewer notes, “Spike Jonze is known for making uncomfortable films”; that was part of the reason for my misgivings (on an abstract level, I admire Being John Malkovich and Adaptation as conceptual exercises, but I can’t say I enjoyed either of them or have any desire whatsoever to rewatch them), but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some might think that a movie based on a children’s book ought to be a comfortable film, but I’m not among them, especially when it comes to this particular book. That same reviewer writes,

Wild Things is not a movie about a little boy who wants to be wild, traveling (in his fantasy, or via magic) to a strange land full of monsters who make him their king and let him be as wild as he wants, until he gets homesick. Rather, Wild Things is a movie about the terrors and insecurities of childhood, and the monsters we all have inside of us. It presents an unnerving portrait of childhood as a stormy, exhilarating time, in which play is intensely serious and important, and loneliness is the biggest nightmare of them all.

Insofar as that’s true, that’s a good thing, because that’s very much in line with what the book is about. The problem seems to be, though, that Jonze made a movie that’s adult in all the wrong ways; the io9 review perhaps has the best statement of the common complaint:

At times during the main body of the story, I felt like I was sitting on a particularly long therapy session in a group home, or a Seinfeld episode with fewer jokes.

What seems to be missing is an actual childlike perspective. I was struck by Russell Moore’s post on the movie, and particularly his analysis of why so many children love the book:

Children, it turns out, aren’t as naive about evil as we assume they are. Children of every culture, and in every place, seem to have a built-in craving for monsters and dragons and “wild things.” The Maurice Sendak book appeals to kids because it tells them something about what they intuitively know is true. The world around them is scary. There’s a wildness out there. The Sendak book shows the terror of a little boy who is frightened by his own lack of self-control, and who conquers it through self-control, by becoming king of all the wild things.

The problem, I think, is that too many adults “grow out” of that awareness of the wildness of the world—perhaps it fades as the common illusion of control, over our own lives and over the world around us, grows. Only adults can wax philosophical about how evil is an illusion and people are really basically good; children aren’t yet capable of that sort of folly. Perhaps that’s why Jonze seems to have take a children’s book and turned it into a movie about adult issues and problems.

Can you say “personality cult,” boys and girls?

One of the things I missed last week was the creepy little story of New Jersey elementary-school kids being taught songs in praise of Barack Obama. I’m sorry, that’s just un-American; in this country, we don’t venerate our leaders until they’re safely off the stage, and usually dead. This sort of engineered adulation belongs in places like North Korea, not here. I’m with Tyler Dawn—I’d find this just as creepy and just as nauseating if it had been for President Bush, or President Reagan, or anybody else.

Incidentally, for all the folks who were having hysterics and mocking conservatives for their reaction to the President’s school speech—granted that that reaction was in many instances excessive—stuff like this is the reason for it. It wasn’t that the President was speaking to our kids, it was the suspicion that he wanted to politicize them and turn them into Obamabots—and that the public-school system would, in large part, gladly go along with that agenda—that sent so many people up in flames; and garbage like this only reinforces and aggravates those concerns.

Now, obviously, it’s not likely that this was directly orchestrated by the White House; but it’s all of a piece with the politics-by-personality-cult approach Barack Obama and his campaign have taken all along. It’s the sort of thing that prompted even a liberal like Doug Hagler to complain about the messianic tone of the Obama campaign, which went along with the candidate’s apparent messianic view of his own leadership. This isn’t even the first creepy video this has produced—not by a long shot.

This is what death panels look like

and why you shouldn’t believe anyone who tries to tell you that there will be no difference between government bureaucrats and the insurance-company bureaucrats we have now (even as problematic as that current bureaucracy is, even as badly as we need to prune it). Read Michelle Moore’s New Ledger piece on “Rationed Care & The Most Vulnerable Among Us” . . . but be prepared, it’s an emotional read. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that it was Sarah Palin, a mother of five, including a baby with Down Syndrome, who came up with the phrase “death panels”; newborns who aren’t “perfect” and perfectly convenient truly are, even more than the elderly, the most vulnerable among us. They are the ones who most deserve our care—not to be abandoned as “too expensive.”

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)