The Price Our Kids Pay

Our children will take on our unresolved crap in order to continue to have a relationship with us.  This is something that is pretty easy to see in other, really screwed up families.  Like the way that children of addicts will humor their parent's narcissism so that they can stay close.  It's harder to see in ourselves.

Several years ago, I had a broken heart for a period of months.  I was so deeply hurt and broken, and I know this produced a heavy burden for my children.  I look back and see how they buoyed me up and took on some of my weighty pain.  I adore my children, but this is not right.  My kids shouldn't have to shoulder my crap.

I remember praying so earnestly that I could be healed, and not stay broken; and even more earnestly that my pain and guilt wouldn't fall so hard on my children.  I prayed for them to be shielded from my pain, my burdens, and my mistakes.  My faith in the atonement leads me to believe that there is relief for them.

I learned to acknowledge it in appropriate ways with my children:  "Emerson, I'm sorry I got upset with you.  I was being selfish and could only think about what I wanted.  I was too wrapped up in taking care of me, and what you needed was bugging me.  That's not OK.  You are precious to me.  Can we try again?  I promise to listen to you and hear what you need."

The longer term outcome from this experience is that I'm much more conscious that my troubles, trials, burdens, and imperfections are indeed "leaky".  My garbage spills out regardless of how well I think I have it covered up and contained.  So I don't fool myself into thinking I can hide it from my family.  Things like:

• Selfishness
• Jealousy
• Deceit
• Resentment
• Boredom
• Addiction

I know many of us are already constantly beating ourselves up, and this message seems like yet another stone in the huge pile that buries us.  The good news is that our goodness will spill over too:

• Generosity
• Love
• Kindness
• Creativity
• Encouragement
• Patience
• Honesty

The Kind of Parents We Aren't

In our family, you're allowed to get bruised, broken and hurt.  God gave us bodies that heal themselves... for the most part.  Broken hearts don't heal by themselves... which is a topic for some other post.

God's plan is a high risk/high reward proposition:  We make choices about what we worship in terms of our time and attention.  God sent his children to earth to learn by faith and experience.  He respects our agency, a perfect expression of our present desires.  For many of us God sent us to parents who are interested in helping us learn the process of choice, faith, and experience; all with a healthy measure of obedience and self-discipline early on.  As parents, there is always a temptation to focus on control and safety at the expense of agency and experience.  

You might ask, "So what about safety?  Are you saying you have no obligation to keep them safe?"

Of course we try to keep our kids safe.  We have a bedrock standard:  Not dead.  Not molested.

We can probably recover from anything less than those.  And the truth is that the reach of the atonement makes it such that we could and would recover from those... regardless, we're not reckless.  If you're reading this thinking that we must be negligent and don't watch out for our kids, that's not the case and you must not really know us very well. 

There's a balance.  Respecting agency is a risky venture.

I really can choose to spend all my time reading comics, chewing tobacco, and loitering; or even worse... and I would experience and (hopefully learn from) those consequences.  And as we learn, there is a reward when we make choices that grow our faith and reinforce our love for God and his children- the reward is that we can be made better than we are.  

We are trying to raise kids that understand the nature of agency:  That they control their wants, and they can choose really elevated desires.  If they are willing to live by faith, they can belong to God.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Sitting on your butt in front of the TV is not technically "living".  Get up.  Get out.  Find something kind to do for someone.
• You are allowed to ride bicycles, skateboards, scooters, sleds, skis, snowboards and anything else that goes. 
• Crashing is allowed.  Bones heal.  Scars are cool.  
• Tubes are not allowed:  you can't stop or turn it which means you've relegated agency and you're just going to be a victim.
• You are allowed to play in the snow too long.  
• You are allowed to stay in the water too long.  
• You are allowed to forget to eat and get crungry (cranky+hungry).
• You're allowed to work super hard.
• You're allowed to experiment with laziness. (Those consequences suck!)
• Wood, hammer, nails, screws, hot glue, scissors, knives, etc. are allowed.  
• Power tools are allowed with proper instruction.
• You're allowed to make really big messes, and you're allowed to choose to clean them up ;-)
• You're allowed to choose kindness, patience, and love.
• You're allowed to put others before yourself.

You're allowed to fully experience the consequences of your choices.  And you're allowed to repent and change your wants if you decide you don't like how some of your choices turned out.

Give Thanks

Some thoughts over the Holidays that I didn't get around to publishing:

At Thanksgiving, and through the Holidays, I made rolls. I did a lot of other stuff, but honestly, I've never made so much dough before.  The night before Thanksgiving I made enough dough to produce about four-hundred rolls.  These are the famous ones that every Facer has grown up with.  In my twenties it kinda bothered me that we celebrated gratitude with such amazing excess.  I was sure that we had entirely lost the sense of constant background hunger that was a nearly permanent fixture of early pilgrims and pioneers; that a big meal with so many choices wouldn't be meaningful to us in the same way that it was to those who had nearly starved to death the prior winter.  And it's not.  How could it be?

But I've made peace with the excesses of Thanksgiving and the Holidays.  I've learned to avoid overeating, and try a little bit of each tasty dish or treat that neighbors share.  With such a large and connected family, our gatherings are large and most of us will bring something, so there will be many choices.  This gives us an opportunity to think of others as we prepare something awesome.  And second, a chance to sample the best efforts of people we love.  The treats that neighbors leave on our doorstep help us be mindful of those around us and give us an opportunity to appreciate them.  Who out there knew that I absolutely adore pomegranates?!?  Maybe it was just lucky, but I choose to believe in the greater interconnectedness of things.

Gratitude is central to all of that.

The Thirty-Six-Inch Rule

With little kids especially, very little effective parenting happens at distances greater than thirty-six inches.

As parents, of course we're anxious for our children to learn things like responsibility, honesty, loyalty, kindness, fairness, and hard work.  So we try every day to model these things; to be good examples of them.  But of these attributes, hard work is a little bit unique in that if Kat and I simply model hard work and show our kids a really, really good example of hard work, that doesn't help our kids to learn to work hard.  In fact, many of us can point to examples of the opposite, where hard working parents produce lazy children who expect their parents to wait on them.  Our good example doesn't really ensure that our kids know how to, and are willing to work.

Of course what is required is to teach our children to work... hard.  And it turns out, that's hard work- much harder than simply doing it yourself.  So the temptation is to unload the dishwasher myself in under two minutes rather than take five minutes to get one of the children to even START unloading the dishwasher.  Which then may give rise to the next temptation:  to just tell our children to go attend to some chore.  That way we can just put it out of our minds.  This is an advanced maneuver we should only use for older, previously well-taught children.  When we do this with little kids, we just a start a game of pretend where we pretend to ask them to do something, and they pretend that they will.

For example, we get into trouble with our younger children if we just tell them to go tidy their room when we are unwilling to go with them, work beside them, and show them how hard work is done- and the kind of attitude we should have about it- that it's a privilege.  So if we can't feel that it's a privilege ourselves (and sometimes we don't), then it gets risky to work beside them, because they'll sniff us out for the liars that we are; kids aren't stupid.  In those cases, Kat has been a wonderful example of honesty:

"I know this doesn't seem like much of a privilege to clean up this big mess that Jeffrey made.  It doesn't feel like a privilege to me  either.  What do you think we can do to get this cleaned up and feel better about it?"

Our kids have responded amazingly to this kind of honesty.  Many times they'll think of fun ways to clean up, but mostly I think simply allowing them to feel what they are feeling let's them take ownership of it, and then they are empowered to change what they are feeling.  The proximity is essential because it lets them know we're in it with them and that they matter more to us than the chore at hand.

Lake Powell 2012

A few years ago, I was talking with our good friend Logan.  I lamented that years ago, I knew tons of folks with houseboats on Lake Powell; I was passing on offers to go down because they were just too many.  Now that we had a nicer boat and would really like to go, we didn't know anybody.
He said, "You should call Darin Warren."

A few weeks later we were on Lake Powell with the Warrens.  I knew his older brother in high school, but we didn't know any of the people going on this trip.  In retrospect I realize how dicey that could have been.  I'm not what would normally be called genial or easy-going.  But it was amazing how well the five different families that went on that first trip got along so very well, including the adults!

Earlier this month we got back from our third Lake Powell trip with the Warrens.  Here's the recap:

• Jeffrey did not kneeboard - Booooo!
• Emerson totally waterskied a lot and tamed several lizards
• Ava wakeboarded and found many shells
• Elisabeth wakeboarded and waterskied and you can tell she's a teenager now (in a good way).
• Truman ate a lot of sand
• Many scorpions were spotted using UV black lights
• Some midnight wakeboarding may, or may not, have happened
• The boat ran perfectly
• The shaft seal that I replaced earlier this year is so nice; I don't think the bilge pump ran once
• The ballast on the "goofy" side was totally worth it
• The weather was perfect
• Nobody was irreparably injured
• We had a fantastic time
• We are truly blessed

It's a Republic, Not a Democracy

If you grew up consuming education in the United States, I'm sure at some point you heard some smarty pants correct another student who erroneously referred to our nation as a democracy.  The smarty pants was correct.  You don't vote for a president, rather, technically you are indicating your preference to the state you live in about how you would like your state's electoral votes to be cast.  Recently, Shannon Manning commented...

One of the more interesting interpretations of the purpose of the electoral college I've encountered, based on close reading of the text of the Constitution, is that the President is not elected to represent the people to the federal government - he is elected to represent the Union, or the collection of states that constitute the United States of America. Members of Congress are elected to represent the people to the federal government. It's part of the system of "checks and balances." Because most states select their electors by vote of the people, the voice of the people is to some extent recognized in the election of the president while still leaving it up to the states (as individual governmental entities with their own sovereignty over all powers not granted to the federal government) to elect the Chief Executive who represents the Union as a whole. However, the Constitution actually does not require states to allow the voters to select the state's electors.

 So what does this mean?  It means a lot of things... in 2012 it means that unless you live in Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, or Florida; it means that your vote doesn't affect the election of the president very much at all.  The exceptions to this would be Nebraska and Maine who use a proportional allocation of their electoral college votes.

And it also means that unless you get out your checkbook and donate your time, the only people affecting the outcome of this election will be others who are willing to donate time and money.

Create your own electoral college map!

Math Matters

One evening, when we were in high school, Sam Reisner and I went to pick up Bruce MacArthur.  I'm sure we had some wholesome activities planned.  We ran down the stairs in his basement and beheld him working on some crazy math problem; y'know the kind that takes like three sheets of paper.  Sam was mad, "Dude, you're not done with your homework?!?!"

"Oh, I'm done.  I was just messing around with a different way to solve this.  Let's go."

Unlike Bruce, I'm not one of those "math people".  But I work at it.  I passed college algebra and calculus; actually I got really good grades in those classes.  I did it by teaching it to the other students in the study group that I formed.  Through that experience I realized that most math teachers shouldn't be.  And the truth is many of them don't really want to be; they want to be mathematicians and teaching the schmucks like me pays the bills (or they want to coach full-time ;-) ).

Now I teach math to my kids and a few of the neighbor kids.  One of the consistent bits of feedback goes something like this:  "Wow Mr. Facer, you're really good at this.  The way you explain it totally makes sense.  You should be a math teacher."  I chuckle and think silently to myself, "I already am."

But seriously, why is it so common for children to have this experience where math is such a difficult discipline?  Certainly my experience growing up was that once we made the jump to algebra, to variables, to complex formulas, I was lost.  There was a small group of my peers, maybe ten or twenty percent that kept up, and the rest of us were left drowning.  I think it's because for non-math people, it needs to be explained in better detail, with more of the "why" and illustrated in multiple different ways; until you reach the example or illustration that clicks with that particular student.

When I teach math, here's what I do:

• We do NO math without scratch paper.
• We show all the steps, every time.
• I explain the concept different ways, and we work it different ways until I can tell it has registered.
• We don't move on at the right answer, we move on when we have the right answer plus comprehension.
• I check comprehension by having the student explain it back to me.

This year, one of the neighbor kids has trigonometry.  I never took trig, but I like it.  Between the text and the internet we're figuring it out.  I really like math.  It's a darn shame that it took more than thirty years for that to happen.