Pause for poetry

A few months ago I was involved in a fascinating work project at the intersection of faith and culture. Part of the study touched on reading habits among American adults today. Most people today, surprise surprise, get their info from the internet instead of books. Much more. And their recreation too. The hours required to read a book can seem almost outlandish to the modern adult. "Reading a book's a big investment," one said.

I spend as much time on the web as anyone and follow the Google rabbit trail where it leads with the best of 'em. Even still, I feel sad for books. Sad for a world where books sit dustily on the shelf, and for the time commitment folks can't spare them. From birth I've been a lover of words, and there's a wistful part of me that wants more for them than the world today is giving them. More sitting with them, relishing them, being moved by them. It's hard to sit with words when they come to you off a computer screen. They can collide with the deep parts of your soul from the screen, but they seem to do so less often. 

Books are a pleasure I've maintained pretty continuously throughout my life, but in the past few years I've rediscovered a word-love-affair I'd long ago neglected: poetry. A friend of mine still reads poetry - reads it regularly herself and to her children - and watching her, I got re-inspired. I used to write poetry when I was a kid; I still remember the first couple verses of a poem I wrote about a trash can when I was 8 years old. (A trash can, no less. "Creativity," you might call that?! Mercy.) And I pieced together poems on and off till I was in my early 20's. I memorized a fair number of poems too, for the sheer joy of the words - the way they calmed, inspired, warmed.

But in a world where reading books is a practice that needs intentional maintaining, reading poetry is yet a step further out. It fell off without my being aware of it, and I didn't even notice that slice of richness lost to me after it was gone.

Wading back into poetry has been slow and lovely. It started for me, I think, when I encountered the beauty and intrigue that came in deep lyrics by thinking, theological, talented (!) musicians - our friends Hope and Justin, who became dear to us in our final months in California in 2012. Something came alive in me as I drank in the simple poetry of their songs. Next came Wild Geese and other poems by Mary Oliver, with whom I wasn't acquainted until these years in Virginia. And most recently, my poetry-reading friend has introduced me to John O'Donohue and his beautiful book of blessings. "May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder." Yes. This is what poetry - the quiet that comes with receiving it - is made to do.

So on Sunday - if no other time in the week - I try to take time for words. Read them, write them, sit with them - any of it will do. On the Sabbath, words nourish me - even as the Word Himself nourishes me. (Fitting too, as the Word has made me one who worships through words). I hope, this time, to maintain diligence to keep the door open on poetry. It's a gift I hope not to lose again.

Kudos to Kazdin

Here's a parenting book you perhaps haven't heard of: The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child. Not the most enticing title when you're glancing across the bookshelf. If you were to nevertheless decide to pick the book up, you might put it right back down; the cover image's just awkward. I feel like the Kazdin team could have benefited from some branding assistance. But 'don't judge a book by its cover ' fits here because it's actually a very helpful book. 

If you'd told me ten years ago when I kicked off this mothering gig that I'd be dog-earing pages in a comprehensive book on positive reinforcement and the use of effective rewards to modify behavior, I'd have raised an eyebrow. Probably both. Even two or three years ago I might have been too skeptical and resistant to read this book. Why? Because I was squarely in the "no-nonsense, I-mean-business" parenting camp. I wasn't interested in what I considered bells and whistles to encourage my children to behave properly. They'd behave properly because it was the right thing to do; my (of course loving) firmness and consistency would ensure this. Our culture's problem is too much positive reinforcement and too many rewards for the entitled kids in our culture; how could heaping onto this help?

Fast forward to now. I'm so glad I encountered this book. And I'm even more glad I took it seriously and played around with its concepts. It forced me to take a hard look at myself, my underlying parenting beliefs, the dynamics that existed between my children and me, and the real limitations of my kids. Especially one kid. And it helped me explore ways to bust her, and us, out of some hard and stubborn ruts. 

Kazdin's a student of the great B. F. Skinner, father of behavioral conditioning, and he's devoted his career to customizing key behavior-shaping concepts to working with kids. The book pays quite a lot of attention to the reasons why parents who employ a largely authoritarian style may resist these ideas, and why doing so can serve to shoot themselves in the foot in working with (especially challenging) children. He says many parents use punishment as a primary tool to create behavior change, and he discusses negative and deepening cycles that can be created - for both parents and kids - when punishment takes too central of a role. How punishment itself can damage the relationship between parent and child, sometimes permanently. 

Kazdin walks step by step through the 'why' and 'how' of behavior-shaping, and he makes a big point of saying "this is not your average sticker-chart reward program." And it's not. It's an elaborate and time-intensive process, replete with laser-like focus on the part of the parent. But in my experience, it really moves the dial. Significantly. The method unlocks the kid's ability to tap into- and to be willing to practice and grow in - the very skills they're short on.

I mentioned that a parent with an authoritarian disposition has to lay aside her preconceived notions to consider Kazdin's thoughts. Same goes for a Christian parent who'd say she's primarily interested in heart issues. The concept of "behavior modification" - and even the idea of widely employed rewards - seems dicey to such a parent. Are we focusing on the wrong thing here? Are we employing gimmicks, paying off kids for doing what's right, when we're supposed to be training souls? Kazdin speaks to this directly by saying that behavior and emotion/personal makeup are inextricably connected, each affecting the other. He writes, "We can change interactions between people, as expressed in behavior, and cause both child and parent to be less irritable, less angry, less hurt, and less hurtful in their interactions with each other. When we smooth interactions at the level of behavior,  more often than not we also see immediate results in feelings such as appreciation and love... That's why it makes sense to work on behavior."

It got me thinking. Remember C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity? "Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disking him more." Changed behavior leads, according to Lewis, to a changed heart. Which is close to the same point that Kazdin is making (and the principle his program's based on).

Looks like Kazdin's succeeded in securing himself a permanent spot on my bookshelf.

Self and the Christian

I was talking with a friend the other day about work. He'd put in extra time into his job in recent months and learned he wasn't going to be compensated for it in the way he'd been led to believe. He'd worked with excellence, he'd been diligent and reliable, he'd sought to do his work well, "as unto the Lord." He was frustrated.

This topic's been much on the brain recently for me. Not employer-employee relations, per se, but how the Christian perspective can be unexpectedly problematic in some situations. Specifically, I've been thinking about the self.

If you're (a Christian and) you're anything like me, free association with the word "self" leads quickly to phrases like "self denial," "self discipline," and "die to yourself." And there's a good reason for this: these phrases are both biblical and an integral part of the Christian belief system. As Christians, we believe that sin has corrupted our souls and personas, sowing seeds of selfishness and discord throughout our beings. We wrestle with and against this darkness residing within us, and ultimately we're victorious in escaping its grip when we unite with Jesus. The sole purpose of his coming was to free us from the clutches of this evil and enable us to fully who God created us to be. Part of the wrestle is recognizing this, and putting aside ("taking off," the Bible calls it) those parts of ourselves that are overly self-focused - interested narrowly in our own gains rather aligned with God and his greater goodness. This is non-negotiable.

Fine. The problem is that this part of the story - a vital one - is only half. But in my experience, it tends to be the half that gets most of the attention. The half we hear about in church. What our prayer life centers around. It can be easy to focus just on the negative components related to self. And depending on theology, some feel this is appropriate or fruitful.

The way I see it, the other half of the story is just as important... and has gotten too little press, at least in many circles. Here's the other half: the self we each have was custom-created at our conception, and it's glorious. Amazing, even. It's packed full of capacities and gifts, joys and uniqueness. It's a gift we receive from God - our first gift. And the longest-standing gift, too, apart from God himself.

It's our job to know this self, and to appreciate and cultivate it. This is arguably the most fundamental stewardship job we have. It's even our job to love our self. It must be: God loves us passionately, and he calls us to love the things he loves. His love is righteous and purifying, so this is the kind of love we're to apply to ourselves - a love modeled wholly after this. 

The problem is: this sounds wrong to the Christian. It sounds carnal and unholy. It sounds self-reliant instead of God-reliant, pagan instead of Christ-centered. When I hear someone speak of "the self," I generally feel skeptical. Will they psychologize in a Freudian manner? Will it be a "you're a snowflake; you can be anything you want to be" stance from the overkill self-esteem movement? I'm OK knowing that God made me fearfully and wonderfully and be thankful and all, but let's keep things 'holy' and just leave it there.

The baby's been thrown out with the bathwater on this one, it seems to me. It doesn't follow that I should under-appreciate and under-focus on self - one of God's ffirst and best gifts to me - just because the culture is currently over focused on it.

In her exceedingly worthwhile book The Emotionally Healthy Woman, Geri Scazzero writes a chapter entitled "Quit Dying to the Wrong Things." In it she makes the case that, in a effort to obey Christ and his call to "deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow" Him, many of us have misunderstood. We've "died to" core parts of ourselves - our identity, our gifts, our humanity, our rest, the things that bring us unique joy - and believed that this would please him. We've taken up the mantle of servant, but at the expense of being fully alive and his - whole people vibrantly following him. This was never the kind of servanthood he was looking for. 

I think she's right.  When Jesus says, "Love others as you love yourself," he was partly talking about loving your self. He actually wants us to love ourselves... in a way that's in keeping with the way that He loves us. When it comes down to it, some of us could stand to love ourselves (in this way) more than we do.

My friend, for example, wouldn't treat an employee of his the way that he was treated. He'd treat a diligent employee of his with dignity and gratitude - and reflect that in compensation. The frustration he feels is legitimate; it's an expression of God's justice. If he were to stand for appropriate compensation for others but go without appropriate compensation himself, he'd be loving others more than he loves himself. On its face this appears 'servant'-like, but it's not what God intends. ("The worker is worth his wages" appears, after all, multiple times in the Bible.) This same type of dynamic plays itself out all over the place - in friendships, marriages, parenting scenarios, everywhere. 

The entire Boundaries series, by Cloud and Townsend, is full of scripture and examples about what happens when people - Christians - under-love and under-value themselves. It's not pretty. And it's not what we're called to.

The "die to self" message is loud and the "know, love, and cultivate yourself - as stewardship, and for God's glory" message is comparatively quiet. But both messages are true - simultaneously and equally. They're parallel tracks we run down as we chase after God and his fullness in our lives (and in the world). Once I roll my sleeves up, I discover that there's quite a lot of work that can be undertaken in the 'know and love yourself' column. And doing it turns out to be pretty rewarding.

The value of a comfortably untidy house

The kids and I drove to Alabama this week to visit family and friends. I was the sole driver (and adult) in the car for those 1500 roundtrip miles... It was a lot of audio books, pretty much continual snacking, and - let's be honest - more DVD-watching than my crew normally gets in a month. Gotta pull out the big guns for a venture like this. But the trip was so worth it. And we fared pretty well overall.

Among the CD's we listened to was Ramona's World, one of the half dozen or so Beverly Cleary books that my youngest two kids keep pretty much on continual repeat in their room. I must say, Ramona can be a pretty entertaining kid to follow, even for an adult (and even lo these many years after my first encountering her.)  This exchange between nine-year-old Ramona and her mom struck me as I listened to it:

"'I don't like going to Susan's house,' said Ramona. 'It's too clean, I guess.'

Mrs. Quimby looked surprised. 'You can't say that about our house.'

Ramona was loyal to her house. 'Our house isn't dirty. There are magazines and things on the coffee table... But everything isn't all nicey-nice and just so.'"

Later in the chapter Ramona visits the home of another girl, Daisy, for the first time and is delighted to find it "comfortably untidy," with descriptions of a gangly dog greeting her at the front door, and a vacuum cleaner sitting out.

God bless Ramona and her quintessential kid perspective, I thought as I listened. Not only is she not drawn to a perfectly ordered house, she actually prefers a messier alternative. Comfort and enjoyability of a space to her are measured on a kid-level, play-oriented scale.

On the tidiness scale as a housekeeper, I'd put myself about a B... with a range that slides anywhere from a C/C+ to an A-, depending on the circumstances and how far we are from our cleaning day(s). Clippings from endless scissor projects, errant toys, shoes, and dog hair seem to breed at a lightning pace at our house, no matter how much we may chase them down. I'm not oppressed by the reality of never measuring up to Pinterest-type homes as some are, but I'd be lying if I said I don't sometimes heave the deep sigh of a fatigued mom who wished that order and neatness were easier to maintain. 

The perspective of a kid is helpful. By and large, kids don't yearn for crisp neatness and perfectly wiped surfaces the way their adult counterparts do. These often aren't things they especially notice. They want a place to be, a space to play, to feel welcomed in and included in the happenings. "The purpose of order is to lead to joy," a wise friend of mine once said, memorably. If things are too disorganized, it squelches the joy because you can't find anything. And real mess can create stress, even for a kid. But if there's a pressure for everything to be completely organized and tidy, that can squelch joy too. Especially for a kid.

This is a good thing for a mom to remember.

As we kick off a new year, this is my nugget. There are times when "pare down, declutter, clean, reorganize" are called for. But there are times when "get behind the eyes of a child, and spend time there" are the higher priority. This, for me, is one of those times. So as we kick off a new year, I say here's to Ramona and to embracing a house that isn't "nicey-nice and just so" (and one that's even sometimes comfortably untidy). May joy be here.

Modern-day shopping: the dilemma

In 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess, Jen Hatmaker presents a tongue-in-cheek vision of herself as multiple-personality-disordered in facing the challenge of modern shopping. She juggles, in her own words, three personas.

"Sometimes my organic personality, Sage Moonjava, emerges; and my top priority is to buy real food with wholesome ingredients... Sage gravely reads the biscuit ingredients, all twenty-nine of them. She recalls the dreadful farming practices that produced those hormone-injected, antibiotic-laden eggs....

But at other times my 'buy local' personality, Ryvre, materializes. Attempting to support the local economy and diminish the high ecological impact of importing goods, this seems like the winning approach...

My third alter-ego, Freedom Shakra..., is trying to unhook from the consumer machine, and all this buying is not helping. Freedom Shakra is just trying to spend less, way less...

Ryvre is horrified by Freddom Shakra's priority to buy cheap, and she outright mocks Sage and Ryvre for spending on 'local' and 'organic.' The competing voices confused me, and I'm not sure which personality should dominate... I've either spent too much, bought cheap processed junk, or subsidized the sweatshot industry."

This picture is amusing and cute (classic Hatmaker) - but also real. That's what made it, for me, one of the book's most insightful nuggets. Fact is, it's actually really hard to shop responsibly in the modern age and feel good about your purchases. Too many choices, too many filters, too hard to figure out the priorities.

There's a lot to ponder in each category. My own "Sage Moonjava," carer-about-wholesome-foods, showed up the first time I read The Omnivore's Dilemma. When I pondered Pollen's findings, I couldn't figure out how to reconcile God's call to 'rule the beasts' with the barbarism we moderns employ in factory farming. We do keep hens and produce some meat at home in our sheep, which is a start. But in buying, I feel stuck between ideal and budget-driven-reality.  Half the time I shell out the dough for the humane/organic/grass-fed/(expensive) stuff, and half the time I don't and feel guilty. I feel no guilt when I buy non-organic produce, which is more than half the time, since vegetables can't suffer the same way poorly-treated animals can (logical or ridiculous? You tell me). And until our family's Gluten-Necessitated Total Eating Overhaul, I paid little attention to the idea that modern processing of foods was causing ill-effects on humanity at large. Now I see the landscape a bit differently. Reading A Compromised Generation has been my latest chapter of Sage Moonjava, an eyeopener to be sure.

My "Ryvre" character - the girl thinking about local vs. outsourced- isn't as developed as my "Sage," but she's around. She pulled up her chair when I read The Wal-Mart Effect, which got me thinking not just about cheap labor but about the sheer volume of goods we encounter - and purchase- in today's world. Marketing specialists wonder what's occurring with the exponentially higher volume of T-shirts that consumers own today as compared to in former decades. What are people doing with them? No one knows, but hey - T-shirt sales are up. The fact that moms like me are drowning in not just their own oversupply - of T-shirts, tupperware, jewelry, you name it - but the oversupply of all their family members turns out to be a huge facet of modern parenting. How can we moms manage all this stuff? The floods of kid trinkets and plastic and gimmicks litter our kitchens, and eventually our cupboards-- requiring far more effort in organizing and purging than anyone wants to give. Behind all this craziness is the thorny cheap labor issue, and the intrinsic and ecological value of locally-produced goods. I don't get too far on all this beyond frequenting the farmer's market, buying used whenever possible, and not spending too much time in big box stores. And wishing it were all simpler.

The Freedom Shakra figure - the frugal persona - is the one most familiar to me... And the one who's historically tended to trump the other girls. I was raised a frugal Yankee and a bargain shopper, and a frugal Yankee and bargain shopper I remain. Inspiring stories and suggestions like those of Owlhaven's Mary Ostyn in Family Feasts for $75 a Week call to me -- save two grand a year just by shopping and cooking smarter? Sign me up! The irony is, though, that you have to count the cost when you fixate on frugality - the human cost, the health cost, the schedule-reality cost. What do you lose when you save? Because of course it's  worth sacrificing to save money, but you have to figure out what exactly you're sacrificing. And then figure out if those sacrifices are sustainable, wise, or worth it. This is the kind of figuring I'm doing now, after decades of knee-jerk penny pinching.

So where does this leave me? With Jen Hatmaker, I'm afraid - conflicted, a little bedraggled, and working to sort through it all. It would be great to feel that we could synthesize our competing personas and "get it all figured out," but I'm pretty sure that's not realistic. The fact is that we live in a messy world, and there's no way to live at the top of our priority list on all our priorities. Do we pay attention, learn, care, try our best as we purchase? Of course - we can and must. That is, after all, what it means to live well and responsibly in our age. But part of that responsibility is employing wisdom to see that compromise is going to be necessary. Because we can only do what we can do. And we aren't called to more than that.

Book review: Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

Missions trip flyer, 7/91

When I was 15 I went on a two week "urban mission trip" with my Boston-area youth group to inner-city Queens, NY. We slept on the floor of a church basement, did neighborhood clean up (picking up empties, syringes, and the like), ran a weeklong free summer day camp in the park for local kids. It was a lifechanging experience for me; I wrote my college application essays about the ongoing relationship I developed with a local 5-year-old girl , Natalia, I befriended in the camp. The large, multi-ethnic church in Corona was called New Life Fellowship Church.

Last month I happened to podcast a sermon called "Emotional Health and the Christian" by a preacher I like, and in it he recommended the book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. I bought it and, as I skimmed through it, I realized it was written by the lead pastor of that Corona church whose basement floor I'd slept on back in 1991: Peter Scazzero, whom we'd affectionally called "Pastor Pete." Funny world.

It turns out my encounter with Pastor Pete in 1991 was three years before he, his wife, and the church itself entered into a "dark night of the soul"… about which he writes in detail in the book. It's tremendously powerful. His basic premise is this: "Emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature." Sounds pretty basic, right?

Turns out it's not, as the book makes clear. Pete brings his readers into his own journey, describing his efforts to evade pain and spiritualize away negative ("ungodly") emotions. God let it get so intense that his wife Geri actually "quit the church" (brave woman!) and began taking their four young children to a different church, which forced him to begin seeing- and living in - reality. He began to see that he'd made the wrongly assumed that following Christ would, in itself, heal his wounds and address his emotional hurts… And, because it didn't, there there was an emotional mess inside himself wreaking destruction on his own soul and the lives of his family members. Here's a passage I particularly like:

"The problem for many of us comes when we have a 'difficult' feeling like anger or sadness. Unconsciously we have a 'rule' against those feelings. We feel defective because we ought not to be feeling the 'wrong' things. We then lie to ourselves, sometimes convincing ourselves that we aren't feeling anything because we don't think we should be feeling it. We shut down our humanity.

So it was with me. I never really explored what I was feeling. I was not prepared to be honest about my feelings with God or myself… When we neglect our intense emotions, we are false to ourselves and close off an open door through which to know God.

I remember the awkwardness when I began to be honest about my feelings. Initially I wondered if I was betraying God or leaving Christianity. I feared that if I opened Pandora's box, I would get lost in a black hole of unresolved emotions. I was breaking an unspoken commandment of my family and my church tradition.

To my surprise, God was able to handle my wild emotions as they erupted after thirty-six years of stuffing them. I came alive like never before."

The themes this book covers are, I think, some of the most important themes we can give our attention to as Christians.  It prompts critical questions like: What's really happening inside us? Do we care? Should we care? If we should, why should we? Are we being honest with ourselves and God?  If we're not and we want to, how do we actually start? And then… what are we actually supposed to do with the junk we dig up when we start being really honest? And what do we do about how this kind of stuff affects our relationships? (And corollary for us parents, for another post...: how can we train our children in virtue while also helping them identify, own, and productively process their intense emotions?)

A very worthwhile book. I know I'll be referring to it - and probably lending it out - for a long time to come.

Heartfelt thanks to you, Pastor Pete.

Props to young families DIY homesteading: Building our House

"During the week, Dad goes to his job in town, on the weekend he starts up Willys (our pickup truck) and everyone jumps in. We go to buy stacks of lumber from the sawmill… We bring loads of sand… We gather supplies with Willys…"

We're book folk and library-goers; new books are forever cycling through our house -- shelf to couch to floor to (sometimes) lost under the bed. It's not too often, though, that I sit and read one with my kids that really moves me, especially one we've grabbed sporadically off the shelf as we often do. But Building our House, by Jonathan Bean, really did. It's the true-life story of his parents, who built a timber-frame house in an empty field, during the same season of life he and sisters were born.

I found myself loving the story - its clarity and simplicity, the realness of its drawings, the nobility of the task this family undertook. And the family's matter-of-fact teamwork in meeting their goal: their hand-built home. I felt a quiet resonance with them by the time we got to the last page, and a thankfulness for all that the book's child characters shared with my own children.

The author's note at the end stirred me: "My parents thought of themselves as homesteaders and brought to house-builder a pioneering spirit of ingenuity and independence… I have vague memories of ladders and a cement mixer… A homestead would not be complete without a large garden, fruit trees, pets, woodland, and a stream flowing through mysterious marshland. Add to that the wise love of two parents, the companionship of three sisters, and a practically lived faith, and it's hard for me to think of a better place to have grown up."

I read it twice and felt my heart relax and grow a little in those words.

I'm very thankful - have always been thankful - for my husband's extraordinary and far-reaching skills in carpentry and all things related. His giftings are unique and comprehensive. But this book roused me to new levels of vision of all that we're imparting to our children, and the gift God's given us in our homestead-renovation-type lifestyle. It's a beautiful and instructive life, even in the midst of the inconveniences and late nights, the sawdust and the studs. What skills and diligence my husband is teaching us all, and what a legacy he's enabling us to leave to our kids.

This book cheers the spirit of anyone with a young family who's significantly engaged in the DIY lifestyle. 

The first six months after we moved into our 100-year old VA farmhouse (2013)

Our hallway, today. Our oldest two and I assisted my husband significantly with the demo work

Elizabeth Esther on peddling Jesus

A little PS. to my book review of Girl At the End of the World to pull out one facet I found particularly interesting. In more than one part of the book, Elizabeth highlights the fact that her upbringing in extreme fundamentalism left her totally unclear on how to authentically relate to people who didn’t share her faith.  Example:

“I desperately want to make friends but am terribly unsure about how to do that. How do normal people go about it? I don’t know how to engage people without trying to convert them to Christ. I don’t know how to have a conversation without steering it toward Questions of Eternal Significance.“(p. 156)

In Elizabeth’s mind there are Jesus people – her type – or non-Jesus people, with whom she’s compelled to actively “make the most of every opportunity,“ whatever the cost. In essence, all she knows to do in conversation with non-Jesus folk is to fulfill a guilt-driven, knee-jerk sense of: “you gotta get Jesus in there somehow.” Wow.

Or how about this section where Elizabeth is navigating peer marketing for the first time in the form of a Tupperware rep?

“(I ask): ‘Were you just being nice to me in the store so I’d let you sell your stuff to my friends at a home party?’

‘Oh I genuinely like you,’ she exclaims. ‘And I hope we can become friends!’

‘But first I need to schedule a home party?’

‘Well. sure. Wouldn’t that be fun?’

‘Um, no. Not really.’

…It is suddenly dawning on me that I’d done the exact same thing to people: pretended to be their friend in order to get them to buy something. Instead of selling kitchen gadgets, I’d been a multilevel marketer for The Assembly.

I’d been an Independent Distributor of Salvation. How can I resent this woman for trying to sell me Tupperware? I’d done worse. I’d sold Jesus.” (p.159-160)

Key point: Elizabeth is still a Christian today and still follows Jesus; she’s not saying that Jesus is the problem in this scenario. The problem she’s pointing out is the “selling” of Jesus – the sense of peddling, of the manipulation that came with her discussions about Jesus. On this one it seems to me that Elizabeth’s in decent company, and wherever one sees it, it ain’t pretty.

By contrast.

I came upon this quote by C. S. Lewis not long about that kept bumping around in my mind when I was reading Elizabeth’s words:

“It is right and inevitable that we should be much concerned about the salvation of those we love. But we must be careful not to expect or demand that their salvation should conform to some ready-made pattern of our own. Some Protestant sects have gone very wrong about this. They have a whole programme of conversion etc. marked out, the same for everyone, and will not believe that anyone can be saved who doesn’t go through it ‘just so.’ But (see the last chapter of my Problem with Pain) God has His own way with each soul. There is no evidence that St. John underwent the same kind of ‘conversion’ as St. Paul. It’s not essential to believe in the Devil; and I’m sure a man can get to Heaven without being accurate about Methuselah’s age. Also, as Macdonald says, “the time for saying comes seldom; the time for being is always here.’ What we practice, not (save at rare intervals) what we preach, is usually our great contribution to the conversion of others…”

Even so.

When religion is destructive: book review of Girl at the End of the World

There’s a woman who lives in southern California whom I encountered when I lived there. She’s about my age. She grew up in a home where love for Jesus was professed. She has five kids whose ages are pretty similar to mine. She writes a blog. And until ten years ago, she was completely controlled and dominated by the “Christian cult” in which she was raised. (She calls it a cult “because we operated like one. Cults aren’t so much about beliefs as they are about methods and behavior. According to cult researchers, it is the emotional seizing of people’s trust, thoughts and choices that identifies a cult.”)

The woman is Elizabeth Esther. Her book arrived by Amazon Prime a week ago, and I was through it in four days. It’s called Girl At the End of the World, and it’s an intense, sad, and somewhat horrifying – if the truth be told – read. But it’s an important one too.

The byline of the book is “My Escape from Fundamentalism in Search of a Faith with a Future.” And it’s the “fundamentalism” part that’s caused me to return to Elizabeth Esther’s blog time and time again. It’s what prompted me to buy the book too.

Elizabeth’s story is extreme. Her grandfather started an overly strict Protestant denomination in the 1970′s, and it grew to become very intense and basically tyrannical. My guess is that few who happen to be reading here have a story quite like this, though they may have. The most eye-opening thing for me in reading Elizabeth’s posts has been the comments section. She has dozens, probably hundreds, of commenters who provide their input on certain facets of Elizabeth’s story that they did share. A “circle-the-wagons,” isolating theology made anyone outside the faith seem very foreign, even scary. Stringent corporal punishment enduring through to teen years. Strict requirements to uphold a purity standard so high that they felt shame and grief when they finally lost their virginity… on their wedding night, to their husband. A dominating mindset that any conversation with a non-Christian necessarily required an effort to talk about Jesus, whether that topic was relevant or not. The commenters’ stories echo so much in Elizabeth’s own that ultimately, I find them telling their own story. A broader one that’s enormously important to Christian life, more globally.

Because these are suffocating, life-draining elements that don’t belong in a Jesus-following life. They just don’t. And it’s the robust illustration that Elizabeth offers of how these elements, and a rigidity of thinking that goes with them, can take over a system and a community that makes the book so worthwhile. It shows how awful religion is, reminding us that it’s only Jesus himself and the life of grace He provides that are good.

When I first encountered Elizabeth’s blog I was wrestling with questions of how much control we Christian parents should seek to exert over our young children as part of a God-centered upbringing. I mean yes, we needed to prioritize and train them in obedience – that much I knew. But what did this look like, and how thoroughgoing was this effort supposed to be?  And how should we be responding to wrong actions and ungodly emotions when they arose? I was one who started down some paths that were unfruitful before I was able to see how negative they could become.

See, Elizabeth’s parents had – or at least started out with – loving, God-focused intentions as they parented their daughter. They thought they were loving her well. Yet their practices over years were beyond stifling… And ultimately they were, by her own account, brutalizing. PTSD and lifelong anxiety are the result for her. The fact that her parents saw their sins and have have actively sought her forgiveness – and the fact that God has granted Elizabeth both ongoing faith in His goodness and the ability to forgive them – are the silver lining.

That and the fact that through all this, Elizabeth has embraced her ministry to tell her story, extend comfort to others like her, and keep talking about the goodness and sufficiency of God through even this. God bless her for it.

Get on her blog or read her book. Powerful.

Originally published in May, 2014

Something Other Than God book review (by a Catholic-ish Protestant)

Yesterday on a berry-picking outing with my two youngest, I got to chatting with another mom who I knew was Catholic. I asked her which parish she attends and how she likes the Catholic school where she sends her oldest children (she has eight). “Oh, are you Catholic?” she asked. “No,” I replied, “but I’m a Catholic-ish Protestant.” Weird description, I grant you, but it’s pretty much the most succinct I have to offer. Because over the past couple years since we became dear friends with some earnest, devout, theology-minded Catholics, I’ve learned a ton about Catholicism – I mean, I’ve really dug into it. I understand the viewpoints and the teachings like I never have. And I deeply admire the Catholic church.

And so this – a Catholic-ish Protestant who has theology often on the brain – is my lens, and it was through that lens that I read Something Other than God, the new book just released by Jennifer Fulwiler of Conversion Diary. It’s her autobiographical account of her journey from the atheism of her childhood to the Catholicism she embraced in her late twenties (I’m guessing), as a married mother of two.

Jen has a sharp mind and a philosophical outlook; she’s the kind of person who’s always thinking deep thoughts, even if she’d rather not. The prospect of life being a meaningless exercise that ends at the grave haunted her from her youngest years. She’d been taught to regard religion as both wishful thinking and a crutch for needy people, and the notion that faith could be earnestly intellectual and eminently reasonable didn’t reach her until adulthood.

I like Jennifer. I knew I liked her from reading her blog (it’s hard not to, frankly), so it didn’t surprise me that I liked her in the book. I read the whole thing through in less than a week. I could relate to her and her journey – the hard-driving spirit, the chronic over-thinking, the inability to let go of an idea till she had wrestled it down. And my own parents also met Jesus in their adulthood through a question-asking, rationality-based search that looked a lot like Jen’s, so I could relate to that too. C. S. Lewis’ writings played a significant role in their wrestling, as they did in Jen’s. (The title of Jen’s book is actually taken from a C. S. Lewis quote). So I could relate to the sequential process she underwent of turning over one rock, seeing what it held, and then slowly moving to grasp the next one. Throughout the book it was clear that Jennifer was pretty horrified at the prospect of becoming that which she’d despised – a serious, Jesus-focused Christian. It was the last place she’d ever expected to be. I’m pretty sure my parents had that same experience when they came to faith in their late 30′s (as did C. S. Lewis at his conversion, so clearly that emotional process is far from unique). I admire the intellectual integrity that allows a person to yield to something they have come to see as true, even when it’s not innately appealing to them.

I found the book most powerful in these three areas (a possible fourth would be her musings on purgatory, which had me googling that topic again last night, but I’ll back-burner that one for now):

1. The isolation Jen felt as a girl when her friends and peer group were all Christians, and she wasn’t. First she felt terribly pressured and guilted into becoming a Christian (the other side of the coin, ironically, to the way that Elizabeth Esther, in the last book I reviewed, felt enormous pressure to do the guilting and manipulating to non-Christians. Talk about irony! And Elizabeth’s a Catholic now too…). Then she felt left out and excluded she didn’t share their faith– actually, because she had the intellectual integrity and the backbone to resist the pressure to profess a faith she didn’t believe. The early scenes in the book are powerful, even reminding me of scenes from my own adolescence when several friends became Christians while others didn’t…. yielding awkwardness and some strain, hard roads to navigate. Faith and clubbiness should never be synonymous, and yet somehow, so sadly, they can become that.

2. The atheist’s view of Christianity as overly divisive and confusing, with lack of agreement between many Christians on core moral issues. Jen starts with the question of God’s wrath vs. God’s love stemming from Christian’s teachings following Hurricane Katrina, and then goes on to; “Is abortion okay? Some Christians said yes, some said no, each had Scriptures to back up his claims. Is euthanasia okay? Some Christians said yes, some said no, each had Scriptures to back up his claims. Is gay marriage okay? Some Christians said yes, some said no, each had Scriptures to back up his claims.” This lack of unity, and the absence of a clear moral code that all Jesus-followers corporately accepted, were a large part of what eventually drew Jen into the Catholic church and its unity and unwavering continuity. Fascinating to see it through her lens.

3. The discussion about sexuality and contraception. Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion was anathema to Jen at the start, and I thought she described her thought process and a-ha moments very compellingly and well. For instance: “Every society must create two critical moral lists: conditions under which it’s acceptable to have sex, and conditions under which it’s acceptable to have a baby. And in almost every culture from the beginning if time, the two lists were identical… When contraception became widely used, it caused an unprecedented upheaval in which, for the first time in human history, the lists no longer matched… One solution was to get rid of the message that it’s fine to have sex when you’re absolutely opposed to having a baby, but nobody except Catholics was interested in that. The other solution was to get rid of the babies… All that my generation knew about human sexuality had been founded on a lie.”

I teared up when, on the cusp of the Easter vigil when Jen and her husband would be welcomed into the Catholic church as new converts, her parents overtly supported her and communicated how proud they were of her for the step she was taking. How profound and powerful — such selfless encouragement from atheistic parents who could never have wished for this.

Thanks for this contribution, Jennifer, and for telling your story. It’s one I know I’ll refer back to more than once.

Originally published in May, 2014

On being your kid's external hard-drive conscience

This was our home telephone number when I was 8 years old: 828-3010. If I answered the phone in our London townhouse, I was to say: “Hello, this is Susan. Who’s calling please?” And I did. The license plate on our blue Volvo station wagon was VUD 466T. Isn’t it strange the clarity of detail that accompanies some childhood memories? We lived in that white house with the maroon door, #73, for three years, ages 6 – 9 for me.

Here’s a snapshot memory, clear as day, from age 8: me coming home from school. Sitting at the long counter eating my afternoon snack, my mom asking me about my day. The pit of guilt growing in my belly as the casual chat wore on… And then me coming out with it, surreptitiously at first, not knowing how to form clear words to speak my black guilt. Beating around the bush of the reality I knew I needed to convey: I had cheated. On a quiz. In Miss Livingston’s third grade class. The details of the actual incident – how I did it, who I copied from (if that’s how I pulled it off) – I don’t remember. What I do recall is the weight of the sin, the compulsion to get it off my chest,  and the kitchen table confessional. My mom asked a few clarifying questions to make sure she understood. Then she quietly packed me into the blue Volvo and drove me back to school. So I could tell the teacher what I’d done.

Me at age 8, with my best friend

I don’t remember that part either. The only part I remember from the whole incident is coming clean to my mom, and her ushering me toward the necessary resolution. Why is that? I’m not sure, but if I had to guess I’d wager this: my mom was the knower-of-the-Whole-Scoop in my life. Whose ear I’d whisper into if my shorts got embarrassingly dirtied, whose chest I’d cry into when the others kids cut my feelings deep with teasing and I feigned to all else that I didn’t care. She got it; she got me – the good and the bad. And she was for me, no matter what. With the cheating incident, my mom 1. heard confession, 2. forgave, and 3. showed how to resolve. That was all of it.

Moms are like an external-hard-drive conscience for their kids. They serve the role, for a time, as a sort of Keeper of the Soul. Your mom knowing something that happened in your 8-year-old life makes it real, and resolution with her means all is – or will be – OK with the world. Or at least with your world.

I thought about it a lot when honesty incidents arose with both our oldest kids last week. One cheated on a spelling quiz I administered (especially interesting in homeschooling when mom is both parent and teacher); the other surreptitiously swiped frosting from a container in the fridge, then denied it. Overwhelming guilt, tears, and a driving need for the deck to be cleared with me characterized both incidents – though in both cases the dishonesty was discovered before the kid came forward with it. [Who knows if they would have come forward on their own in these cases?] They needed to know that I’d still accept and love them after the awful truth was out in the open… That their trespasses first could and then would be forgiven.

In short, they needed transparency and grace. They needed truth at the fore – the whole truth – but  mercy, too, in equal measure. Same as I need, and you. They groped and were compelled toward the outlandish reality, “All is forgiven!”… For the contrite person willing to reveal shameful truths.

It’s quite a role we play, we moms and dads who guide and lead our littles. God entrusts to us a God-like role as we interact with our kids: He lets us mimic omniscience. He let us see partially into young souls and consciences, helping His Light transform guilt and darkness into freedom and light. We get to be teachers who bring our kids experiential, soul-level lessons about who God is and what He does. Responsibility of responsibilities.

It’s a fine dance, too, because though we sometimes act like external-hard-drive conscience, and though we play a God-like role as hearer-of-confessions and the extender-(and confirmer)-of-forgiveness, we aren’t the convictor of sin. The Holy Spirit still does that – in infancy, and forever onward till judgement day. That’s his job, never ours.

And our kids will lie. Studies show they lie a lot. According to research in the “Why Kids Lie” chapter of  NurtureShock (a worthwhile book if you haven’t read it), they will all lie a lot more than any parents – probably than many Christian parents with idyllic visions of Bible-trained, prayer-centered kids – imagine they do. It helps neither them nor ourselves to pretend this won’t be the case. And for all the poignancy of my sweet 8-year-old memory of the quiz-cheating confession, I can think of plenty of cases when I lied to my mom and didn’t tell her about it. Or even feel that bad about the lie.

The development of conscience and the conviction of the Holy Spirit doesn’t work in a perfectly charted-out, clearly graphed line. (Oh that it did!)  It’s a mystery no parent controls – or even fully sees. Even the kid can’t see or grasp the whole picture of what’s going on in his soul and conscience, only God can. This is where prayer and the use of godly wisdom – hefty doses of it, begged for in prayer – come in for moms (and dads). That, and the continual surrendering of our kids and their spirits back to the God who created them.

May we walk with the humility and wisdom that our God calls us to, “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” as we mother. Upholders of honesty and goodness, and also extenders of never-ending mercy. And may they grow, by the power of the Spirit, to be lovers of truth and walkers in the freedom of Jesus.

Originally published April, 2014

Kids and anger

Really it’s more a question than a topic, and it’s this: how should we handle anger when it arises in our children? And behind that one, this: how should we be thinking about anger in children? There are wildly different opinions on this in Christian parenting circles. Here are two contrasting quotes from Christian parenting authors, representatives of what I’d term two “camps.” The first is the feelings-can-and-should-be-managed-and-adjusted camp, and the second is anger-is-normal-and-shouldn’t-be-suppressed camp.

CAMP 1:

“You CAN change your emotions. You are not a helpless victim of hurt feelings, irritability, and anger. We can and must learn to alter our tempers and deny our feelings, when necessary, and teach our children to do likewise… All they need to do is obey us, as we wisely discipline them and train them according to God’s word.

One cherished, but highly erroneous belief is that a parent should not correct a child for displaying a wrong emotion, because the child will ‘suppress’ the emotion rather than change it. Experience convinces me otherwise. Require young children to display the right emotions outwardly and their hearts will change, producing the right attitudes and emotions inwardly as well. Get him to smile on the outside and invariably he will smile on the inside… What you really seek is a child who believes it is wrong to be a sour puss, or angry, or fearful, or irritable, and is willing and able on his own, to change his outlook…

In virtually no instance is (a child’s) anger toward a sibling justified.”

~Elizabeth Krueger, Raising Godly Tomatoes

CAMP 2:

“Scripture instructs parents to train a child in the way he should go. Forcing a child to suppress the anger and not deal with it properly is training him in the way the child should not go. It is crucial to train a child in the proper way to handle anger. This is done by teaching him to resolve anger, not suppress it….

If suppressed too much, the anger will come out as ‘passive-aggressive behavior.’ This is the opposite of an open, honest, direct, and verbal expression of anger…. Passive aggressive ways of handling anger are indirect, cunning, self-defeating, and destructive. Passive-aggressive behavior is very common. Why? Because most people do not understand anger or know what to do with it. They feel that anger is somehow wrong or sinful and should be ‘disciplined’ out of the child. This is a serious misunderstanding.”

~D. Ross Campbell, M.D., How to Really Love Your Child

I’ve been mulling over these snippets- and the world views/parenting methodologies behind them – for weeks.

Which viewpoint do you think is healthier? Which system serves kids better in the long run? Which is more productive to training children in the ways of God — Whose word says, after all, says both “rid yourself of anger” (Col 3:8; Camp-1-style) and also “in your anger do not sin” (Eph 4:26; lends itself more to Camp-2-style)?

First published November, 2013

Simplifying and the reduction process

There’s a section in The Wal-Mart Effect about the increase in T-shirt sales that’s taken place in America over the past couple decades. Marketing specialists wonder: what are consumers actually doing with the higher volume of T-shirts they own (compared to T-shirt owners of former generations)? Wearing more shirts each week? Storing extra shirts? Giving them as gifts? What’s happening with those shirts? They don’t know. All they know is T-shirt sales are up.

This snippet rang in my mind more than once during The Purge that preceded the move into our new, littler house. And I’ll tell you what the the extra T-shirts are doing (or were): sitting stuffed into my drawers. And my husband’s drawers. And my kids’ drawers. T-shirts and dozens of other items like them, all in the category of We Had Way Too Many. Some other examples? Kitchen utensils. Hair elastics. Toiletries of all types. Shoes. Bags. Tupperware. Books. Toys. Need I go on? The things in our shelves and drawers were more than we needed, regularly used, or maintained especially well.

I know I’m not alone on this one. The houses are bigger these days than they used to be – average 2350 feet now, up from around 1500 square feet in the 1970′s – but discipline in housekeeping isn’t bigger. In fact, it’s often smaller. And yet the stuff comes in like a flood.

I was surprised, I admit it, by how many toys and kid items we amassed in our four years in that 2200 square foot house. See we aren’t big buyers, my husband and me. We’re pretty frugal and try to keep things simple. Our children’s birthday parties are no-gift gatherings with the next-door-neighbor family. We limit Christmas presents to five-ish per kid. No “noisy toys” or technology-related kids’ gadgets. Our quantity of kid stuff seemed pretty average, maybe even a little below. Most of it was hand-me-down from other families, thrift store purchases, or gifts.

Turned out we had a lot of stuff. A lot. I know this because I was fortunate enough to stumble onto a local resale Facebook group for moms of young kids, and I started selling off items one by one. And selling them. And selling them. It was an endless flow of shape sorters, Mr. Potato Heads, Playmobil, stuffed animals, puzzles, cash register, etc. The kids helped me – and surprised me with their overall willingness to part with items we were selling (about which I generally asked them first). They knew – with a bit of variation by personality- what they played with and what they didn’t, what to keep and what could go. The process was disorienting: I was thrilled to benefit financially from our downsizing… and alarmed to consciously take stock of how many (largely unnecessary) items there really were in the house. Egad.

Before I started The Purge, I made a list of the child-related items I wanted to bring with us, items that were a) frequently used, b) creative/highly enjoyed (ie, the kids notice if when they’re not around, and c) easy to store. Here’s what made the cut for play items:

1.             Dress-up clothes (we pared down by nearly half… Photo “demo”)

2.             Lego: duplo and small size

3.             Dolls and accessories (shoebox-size bin)

4.             Snap-it-dolls (shoebox-size bin)

5.             Ponies and princesses (shoebox-size bin)

6.             K’nex (shoebox-size bin)

7.             Wooden blocks

8.             Play food and tea party/eating set

9.             Matchbox cars (shoebox-size bin)

10.         Bristle blocks

11.         Little people (shoebox-size bin of people, farm, dollhouse, and bus)

12.         Train tracks, Thomas trains, and station

Coloring supplies are also readily available in our new house, but other supplies – paint and craft supplies, a few puzzles and games – are stored out of sight for infrequent, “ask Mom” use. I worked hard to pare our book collection down to about 50 books, probably about one-third of where we started. I kept the classics, ones by excellent authors, and books the kids really love. [In paring down books, the best suggestion I got to figure out what merited saving was to ask, "If my house burned down in a fire, would I replace this book?" It really helped me and worked for adult and children's books alike.]

Read it over and see if you agree: we’ve hardly gone Spartan. Our kids still have plenty of things to play with. And the things we have are basically all the things our kids most enjoy and use. As we have simplified, they haven’t felt any sense of loss.

Instead there has been gain. Gain for the kids in being able to quickly and simply put away their toys at clean-up time. And in not being hounded by their frustrated parents for their messes. Gain for my husband and me in not stepping on toys in every room. And in being able to get the house tidied up quickly and thoroughly. Gain for us all in time and sanity.

“(God’s servants) are to be committed to their spouses, attentive to their own children, and diligent in looking after their own affairs.” 1 Tim 3:12, The Message 

The biggest gain for me has been in focus. There’s clarity and purpose related to the contents of our house – starting with the kids’ stuff, but really everything. I used to read the advice to “have nothing in your house you don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” and roll my eyes. Seemed unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky. Now I get how worthwhile, how calming it is to live that way. You don’t have to wade through the extraneous stuff to get to what you’re really after. And you get to enjoy the good stuff more.

Instead of ‘downsizing,’ I like the term ‘reduction’ – because it reminds me of the cooking process of thickening liquid mixtures. (I know this because my husband’s an avid cook, not because I am.) You boil off the liquid and intensify the flavor of the good stuff that’s left behind. Why have a watery, diluted sauce when you could have a thicker, tastier one?

And that’s like our lives. It takes some heat, some time, some stirring things up… but what emerges is so worth it. Tastier, more satisfying.  In a way, The Purge is a mirror of the sanctification process, the “refiner’s fire” thing Jesus does with our hearts and character. Letting the less important things, the extraneous and the negative, fall away so that what remains is better, purer, more fulfilling. More like Jesus, and more pleasing to Him.

Originally posted in June, 2012.

Kids and Overstimulation

A couple months back I read a book called Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne. It’s a good and helpful book whose primary message is basically that parents should intentionally simplify life for their children and households for everyone’s good. Fewer toys, less media, intentional rhythms to guide the day, less entertaining of our kids and more time/space for them to entertain themselves. There’s nothing earth-shattering about the recommendations offered by Payne; virtually everything he suggests reminds me of life fundamentals as they existed perhaps 50 years ago. Living in such a way in today’s world, however, is considered unusual if not downright radical, and it takes intentionality and discipline. Living in such a way now suddenly has its own nomenclature: “simplicity parenting.” Crazy world.

One of the things I most appreciated about the book was Payne’s discussion of children and overstimulation. He describes what he calls “the arousing/calming balance” in which parents observe their children and what activities seem to get them overly riled up, and then help them moderate those high levels of stimulation. “The idea is not to steer away from stimulation… ,” he writes. “The purpose of being aware, or recognizing what is arousing and calming to your child, is to avoid the overstimulation that can string them out, or derail them in the same way that a big dose of sugar and caffeine derails them in the short-term.” Payne suggests that parents who observe their children becoming overstimulated consider following “a very active, ‘A’ day” (as he calls it) with a “fairly predictable, more laid-back, calming ‘C’ kind of day.”

This resonated with me because our son and firstborn is a kid who’s prone to overstimulation. Our first sign of this was when he was eighteen months old and with our family on a weeklong vacation at the family’s summer lakehouse. He would do great all day long, normal as could be, and then suddenly at night he would cry himself to sleep for a good 30 minutes – completely aberrant bedtime behavior from a kid who normally went happily and quickly to bed. We couldn’t figure out why – and tried bumping back his bedtime, lengthening book-reading, soothing bath, etc. Eventually we realized (with help from my wise mother, with whom we were vacationing) that he was just amped up from the day and all the new activities he was experiencing for the first time, and he simply lacked a different way to process his overstimulation.

Since that time we had been mindful of his tendency to get himself mentally and emotionally over-hyped when exciting and out-of-the ordinary things happen. He goes into overdrive and has a hard time calming himself and maintaining equilibrium. The scale of his responses are pretty low – few but those closest to him would even notice it, most likely – but they are there. Every kid has a different tolerance for stimulation; for some kids it’s a completely non-issue. But not for him.

Some of the challenge that came with our son’s preschool experience last year derived from this tendency toward overstimulation. He could not effectively process the very different experiences and environment of home and school life at age 4, particularly when he became good friends with a boy who operated under a different set of rules than himself and the other members of his class (because of a learning disorder). It was just too much for him to effectively handle.

When I described his tendency to become overstimulated to the preschool head, she said, “What do you mean when you say he gets overstimulated? Do you mean he has a sensory or processing disorder?” It’s a question that I’ve received from several people when the topic of my son’s tendency to become overstimulated has come up – certainly a valid question, as such disorders definitely do exist. I know several children who have it, and I commend their parents for the intentional and proactive steps they take to understand and assist their children through the challenges they create.

In our son’s case, though, he doesn’t have a disorder. He’s just sometimes prone to overstimulation, and we just need to make sure that his “A” days (and life experiences) get appropriately balanced with his “C” days and experiences. When we do this, everything’s fine. And I loved that Payne pointed this out in such a clear and helpful way in his book.

Originally published in 2010.