Mom According to the Kids

There's a survey going around Facebook right now called "Mom According to the Kids" that's pretty funny. Moms interview their (usually young) children and record their answers to questions like, "How old is mom?" "What is her favorite thing to do?" and "What does your mom like most about your dad?" But not surprisingly, the answers tell us more about the child than they do about the parent.

What they tell us is that children, even young children, have an understanding of how the world works that they piece together through observation, speculation, and drawing conclusions, even if they're tenuous. How else would my three-year-old niece "know" that her mom's favorite food is ice cream, or that clapping makes mom happy, or that mom is really good at "doing calendars"? More precisely, who told her these things?

Chances are that she was told none of these things, and that fact has huge implications for us in education, particularly religious education, where our goal is to impart a version of the world and of life that has God as its source and its center. Only it turns out "impart" is a rotten word that reflects misunderstanding of what's really happening in a child's mind most of the time, so let's discard it. Rather, our job is to, first, recognize and understand the process of learning that's already occurring in a young mind, and, second, to attempt to shape and influence what's already going on.

A few years ago in a social studies classroom I had a young boy tell me he'd always thought Vietnam was in South America. Now, how did that get in his brain? The same way my niece "knew" that her mom had a bottle as a baby. Young brains (and old brains) are constantly making connections and drawing inferences, sometimes by our invitation, but usually not. If humans didn't do this, we wouldn't survive. We need a workable model of the world in order to function. As we get older, this understanding usually improves - that's wisdom. But we're constantly learning, fitting in new information to the understanding we already have, discarding old conclusions that no longer make sense.

Experts in moral development tell us the way to morally influence someone is not by first speaking (lecturing), but by first listening. Only when we understand the way someone is thinking about a moral issue can we step into the process and, by approximations, move them to a place of different thinking.

And yes, kids think about God. They draw conclusions - sometimes humorous - about what he looks like, where he lives, what he does, what he thinks of them, and why he acts. They develop expectations of what God will do, and ought to do. Our job - as parents, religious educators, and other caring adults - is certainly to give them a correct understanding of the world. But there again, "give" is a misnomer - it really doesn't work that way. Instead, we steer, we guide, we ask clarifying questions, we invite them to consider new information, we cause them to reflect - and understanding emerges.

This is not relativism, an attitude of "whatever you think is your truth" - it's the opposite! But if we think we will implant or transfer understanding directly into young minds, we've got another thing coming. You don't educate a young brain as you would program a computer. Great discipleship - and here I'm talking about the informal type, that arises unplanned in the course of life - begins by bringing forth the understanding (or misunderstanding) that's already there. This, I think, is why traditional courses in discipleship usually fail. Paper-and-pencil workbooks can contain "truth", but the truth fails to connect with where the student is at. And if discipleship fails at the earliest stages, people will never progress to later stages, when didactic methods (systematic approaches like reading books or listening to lectures) are more likely to be effective.

So what's the message? If you want to teach and want to influence, listen. You must listen, and do it in such a way as to draw out honest perceptions, assumptions, and conclusions. Get to know the values that drive your child's thinking. And remember that spiritual development is a lifelong process. And then join Facebook and complete "Mom According to the Kids". It's pretty hilarious.

The Lousiness of Short-Term Indicators

Imagine you went to the doctor but no tests were performed. He didn't listen to your heart, didn't check your cholesterol, didn't order any bloodwork, and didn't ask any questions beyond "How are you feeling today?" And if you answered "ok", he sent you home?

He'd be doing a bit better if he treated whatever symptoms you had - a headache, a cough - by writing a prescription. But even that would make most of us feel cheated. When we go to the doctor, we want to find out what's wrong, so that the root of the problem can be uncovered and dealt with. "How are you feeling today?" is merely the gateway to deeper understanding.

Now, let's review what happened in the stock market last week, and then draw a parallel to parenting. The Dow Jones was down 7 points Monday, then shot up 270 points over the next two days, retreated 85 points on Thursday, before falling Friday 122 points. The key question is: is the economy doing better? And the answer is, you can't make a sane estimation of the stability of the economy by glancing at the Dow Jones one day. You can't really judge the health of something with a snapshot. Snapshots and indicators are reactive. And so it is with a kid, that you can't and shouldn't trust short-term, immediate indicators which give only a snapshot but do little to tell us what's really going on.

Consider as a somewhat absurd example height, something I obsessed over when I was in elementary school (because I didn't have any). It's obvious to adults, though it's not obvious to kids: how tall you are really doesn't matter, and there's not a single thing you can do about it anyhow. But it's a daily worry for kids who think they are either too short (always in the front row of the class picture) or too tall. We tell kids this doesn't matter because "It's what's on the inside that counts". But then we betray that by applying external measurements to our kids to determine "how they're doing".

Here are some of the measuring sticks applied against kids that you should be very wary of trusting:

Grades. Giving grades drove me out of public school teaching. What do they mean? If a kid brings home a D, we immediately assume "they need to work harder". But that, in turn, assumes that more concentration and more repetition is the answer. Yet if a kid genuinely doesn't understand, or in the case of math or science misunderstands the process required, then repetition is only going to perfect misunderstanding. A low grade can reflect a need to buckle down, but it can also be the result of boredom, poor teaching, distraction, poor eyesight, preoccupation with physical safety or home life, hunger, low intelligence, homework not turned in… Yet despite the myriad factors that are at play, one letter on a report card is supposed to mean something?

Happiness/Contentment. How many times have you heard parents say, "I just want him to be happy." But…really? How far will a parent go to keep a kid "happy"? And what is happiness? Is it a perpetual smile on the face? Some kids, once they reach adolescence, would be happy to never eat another family meal or go on another family trip. Or ever go to church. And some parents will respond in such a way as to give them just that, so as not to have to deal with the hassle that comes from insisting on anything. Happiness is a wickedly elusive goal, and what makes us happy today might bore us tomorrow and might harm us in the long-term. Therefore, whether a kid is "happy" is relatively meaningless. Happiness is not wellness.

This doesn't mean we condemn them to misery or ignore long-term sadness, which could be an indication of depression or other real need. It's just that a happy exterior may be the coping mechanism kids adopt that keeps us from seeing what's really the matter. The only way to really tell what someone is feeling is to ask them, and that assumes that you've established yourself as a safe, non-judgmental sounding board.

Manners. If kids are well-mannered because you want to teach them that other people have worth and the best way to honor them is to wait your turn, not interrupt, say please and thank you, and look someone in the eye when you speak to them, then yes, by all means manners are important. And no, you don't expect a very young child to be able to give you the rationale for good manners. Because mom and dad say so is enough. But ideally they will start to knowingly internalize those as they get older, so that a 10-year-old certainly knows why it's wrong to speak out of turn or to laugh at someone else's misfortune. BUT, if you are teaching manners because it will reflect well on you - "Wow, she did such a great job raising her kids" - that's pride. And kids are not raised to enhance parents' self-esteem. They're not trophies, or challenges to be mastered, or animals to be tamed. So when I see a kid with good manners, I admire the measure of self-control I see, but it tells me little about their spiritual wellness. "Polite" doesn't tell me how a kid is doing.

Irritation factor. Then there are parents who are all too ready to relate the latest thing their kid did that's causing the parent a headache. The problem with this is that irritation is a subjective measure, always from the perspective of the receiver. When I worked in group homes for kids in foster care, we were reminded that it's not against the rules to be irritating. Therefore, as a staff, the only thing you could control was your own reaction to whatever annoying thing they were doing. If you didn't or couldn't, you'd end up provoking an unnecessary confrontation, which usually meant hours spent repairing the damage. The best staff were those who could see annoyances for what they were - sometimes the product of a bad day, sometimes a provocation that would go away if annoyed, sometimes boredom that deserved to be attended to constructively, but never a reflection of the boy's worth. I failed at this many times, letting minor irritations that weren't rules violations get to me. If I find myself set off by kids' actions that are not dangerous nor harmful to them, but merely annoying, that says more about me than it does about them.

When we wonder "how is a kid doing?" that's a question loaded with future implications. What really matters, and what we're really assessing, is "what road are they on?" and "where are they headed?" - things mood and grades and manners tell us little about. A far more robust indicator of kids' wellness is something like the Search Institute's Developmental Assets Framework, because it gives a picture of not only where kids stand across multiple dimensions, it also is a tool for predicting future success and adjustment (and research supports this).

As we look at the wellness of kids, a long-term perspective is the best one to take. Trends, not short-term indicators, are the more relevant phenomena. They keep us from getting hooked on right behaviors and right answers and focus us more on motives and issues of character. What are this kid's values, affections, and beliefs? That will tell us far more about who they are becoming, and therefore "how they're doing today", than a glance at outward appearances.

What's the Story in Your Neighborhood?

This week I was about to write about the troubling implications of a new survey that showed a decline in the number of Americans who identify themselves as Christians and an increase who call themselves non-religious. I was going to write about the challenge that posed for the American Church, and the likely shape of the future if trends continued. But then I read the survey. And it turns out the story reported isn't the full story.

There is a story here, in the fact that 75 percent of Americans call themselves "Christian", when in 1990 the figure was 86%. And in the fact that the number of people with "no religion" has nearly doubled in the last 18 years. It sets a tone reflected by the headlines: "Those With No Religion Fastest-Growing Tradition", "America Becoming Less Christian", and "Americans Becoming Less Religious".

But the unexplored and unexplained phenomenon in the American Religious Identification Survey is the fact that the decline in self-identifying Christians was much smaller from 2001 to 2008 than from 1992 to 2001. In the 2001 survey, self-identified Christians were 76.7 percent of the population, meaning that while the '90s saw a 9.5% decline, the last eight years saw only a .7% drop. Meanwhile, the number of self-identifying "non-religious" people climbed six full percentage points in the '90s (from 8.2% to 14.2%), but less than a percentage point since 2001 (it's now at 15%).

Does this mean we've lately seen a dramatic rise in either the number of Americans walking away from Christianity or from religion altogether? Hardly. If the trends of the '90s had continued, we would expect that by now only 2/3 of the country would call itself Christian, and that fully one-fifth would be irreligious. But that's not the picture at all.

The question, of course, is so what? Does a picture like this change the mandate of the Church at all? And the answer is, not really. Tactically these national snapshots inform the work of the church some, and the survey validates long-suspected trends that speak to the future of mainline denominations (which are losing members), the Catholic church (whose concentration has shifted from the Northeast to the American Southwest), and evangelical megachurches (they're popular, attended by more than 8 million people). And it is troubling, of course, that churches are failing to pass on the faith and the value of life in a religious community to later generations. Surveys like this one, which show the church losing ground, are convicting; they're never good news.

Yet in another sense, it doesn't change the work of the church at all. For one thing, it's rather callous for any church to regard its work as "done" the moment someone comes through the door, to adopt an attitude that as long as people self-identify as a kindred believer, we've done our jobs. The work of a church inside its walls is as important as the work outside its walls - in fact, they're two points on the same continuum. The Great Commission implies an ongoing work, not a once-for-all evangelistic invitation.

The second factor that limits the usefulness of the ARIS report at a local level is that it's a broad national snapshot and individual churches cannot, by themselves, reverse national trends. So the answer to the "so what?" question is, indeed, "so what?" Yes it's helpful to know that the public we're reaching out to is less religious than a generation ago, but the numbers aren't even high enough to say that "most" people are non-Christian or anti-religion, because that just isn't true. And even if it were true, courtesy would dictate that you appeal to someone on the basis of their individual need, knowing their personal story and circumstances, and not treat them as a generality constructed out of expectations of what's typical.

The real question - now and always - is: what's the story in your neighborhood? What are the needs of the people there? When they see and visit you, what effect does your Christian spirituality have on them? Does it attract, or repel - if it's even discernable? Is your life a silent testimony to the power of God? Are non-believing friends and neighbors more inclined toward attending a church because of you, or less? These are the relevant questions that ought to guide evangelism and outreach regardless of whether the percentage of Christians in your country is 90 percent or 9 percent.

And in another eight or nine years, when the survey is taken again, the numbers will show what the numbers will show. But do we really want to be in a position where we either threw up our hands or rested on our laurels because national averages showed we were doing our work pretty well or pretty poorly? The ARIS survey should make us neither glow with proud nor panic. It should only wake us up to the fact that we should not take for granted that our neighbor holds a theistic conception of the world. As if we needed reminding of that.

What Iran hopes to learn from Christians

Interest in the Christian faith is growing among scholars and leaders in a most unlikely place: Iran. Anyone at least my age remembers the swift change that came to that country in 1979, when Islamic radicals took over and Americans were taken hostage in the embassy in Tehran. Since then, the dominant image of Iran has been that of a place that's anti-American, anti-modernity, and certainly anti-Christian. But the Revolution, it turns out, is the very reason things are changing.

So says Sasan Tavassoli, an evangelical pastor in Iran (yes, in Iran). It's widely acknowledged within that country that the Revolution failed to deliver, and now Iran is considering its future in the community of nations. Part of this entails dialogue with Christian thinkers. More moderate Shiite clerics and academics are eager to learn from Christians, and as it turns out, one of their questions is a common theme on this blog: how do we pass the faith on to the next generation?

We Westerners are perhaps guilty of painting all of Islam with a broad brush, imagining that every young Muslim is schooled in a madrassah and taught to hate Western culture. But this is not so, and Tavassoli describes Iranians as descendants of the proud Persian tradition of tolerance for foreign religions (King Cyrus, who issued the decree allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem from exile, was Persian). So while Iran is certainly not multi-religious (being 98% Muslim), it is by no means a Saudi Arabia or a Somalia.

Another way of looking at this is that Iran could continue down a road of repression and strict observance of shari'a law, but it is in fact moving away. Tavassoli declares that this was never what the people supported in the first place, that the Islamic fundamentalists hijacked the 1979 revolution, and that Iran has been alarmed by the prediction of global conflict based on culture made at the turn of this century, desiring instead to position itself more moderately.

You may or may not buy Tavassoli's appraisal of Iran's political self-concept, but let's focus on the fact that we American Christians share at least one thing with Shiite Muslims in Iran: we're both concerned with propagating our faith in the midst of environments that value tolerance, free expression of ideas, and specifically do not value coercion or indoctrination in religious matters. They, like we, believe one's path to God must be freely chosen, not compelled. So how do you make kids choose right (if that isn't an oxymoron)?

To me, this is an issue of faith, of believing that God is bigger than seemingly hopeless circumstances; of recognizing that even during the last 30 years of an Islamic state in Iran, Muslims have been coming to Christ and that these conversions have been not the work of human evangelization, but as the result of dreams and visions. Tavassoli reports that one such dream, of the Virgin Mary asking for help, caused a government official to make an unsolicited offer of financial assistance to a Presbyterian church. It is recognizing that God works even through unintended consequences, such as when a Muslim writer is commissioned to do a Farsi translation of the New Testament and then has the chance to report to high government officials that in the course of his project, he had come to recognize many of his own misconceptions about Christianity.

It is because of the success and potency of the gospel in settings where the odds are stacked against it that we, in America, can take heart. I'll not deny that obstacles and threats to the free expression of religion exist in this country. But honesty demands that we acknowledge we are much freer than most and that most American Christians cannot claim to have experienced oppression or persecution that is really anything beyond scorn. If Jesus can break through a revolution led by Muslim extremists and preserve a remnant and a toehold in the middle of the Islamic world, should we have any reason to doubt that he will overcome any domestic threat here in the land of the free?

I further believe that there are specific reasons the hunger for Christian perspectives is surfacing, and they have to do with the veracity, reality, and uniqueness of Jesus Christ himself. Jesus - the real, actual Jesus attested to in the gospels - is a life that must be reckoned with. And so you have young Muslims wanting answers about the Jesus of the Bible, not just the Jesus of Muslim tradition. You have Muslims yearning to know the assurance of forgiveness. And you have people disillusioned by a revolution that promised them the world, but delivered only more uncertainty.

If we just show people - of all ages, in all cultures - God for who he really is, exemplified by the witness of creation, incarnate in Jesus Christ, I believe that's enough. The baggage that gets in the way is usually cultural - someone knew someone who was a Christian and they didn't like the effect of that. Yet, an intent gaze into the face of the true God is often convicting enough for people to set aside stacks of objections and to focus on what they know to be true.

Let's labor, then, to give kids this truth. Bring it to them in song, in spirit, in our teaching, our counsel, our own values. Let's so value God and the things of God that the inestimable worth of Jesus Christ is the unmistakable flavor of our zeal. A zealous desire for something less tends to yield that something less. But there is an incredible sufficiency in knowing Christ that transcends political or economic or cultural objectives. Iran is waking up to this, knowing that they were sold short on a revolution. To be sure, the country is anything but "open" as the word is normally used in Christian circles. But when the leaders of a nation that only one generation ago staked its future on the promise of Islam are rethinking that orientation, that's a huge open door for building faith - theirs and ours.

Affirm Them, Now!

Here's the drill: Whatever you're doing (apparently, reading this), set it aside for a moment, go to your son or daughter, and speak a word of encouragement or affirmation. They need it, they're looking for it, and you're the best supplier of it. You yourself need a word of encouragement, and that's why you look forward to that time of the day when you can vent or debrief with your spouse, or get on the phone or sit over coffee with a trusted friend and hear, in not so many words: you're ok. So go affirm your child, and I'll be waiting here when you come back.

If that was at all difficult, let me suggest you pick up either David Stahl's Words Kids Need to Hear or The Five Love Languages of Children by Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell. The first book contains a couple of chapters on why encouraging words are necessary and specifically which encouraging words benefit kids (although the book isn't all about how to give praise), while Love Languages identifies words of affirmation as one of the five ways in which kids can feel loved.

These are times of high anxiety in our nation, but preteen and early teen years are always times of high anxiety when kids run up against the belief that they're not good enough. The message is rarely that blatant, but even the subtle forms are deadly: you should be more... you should have what I have... you obviously can't... you don't belong...

As kids fight through the wilderness of identity formation, they need lots of encouragement in the form of affirmation. What is it? For starters, affirmation is not praise. Praise is usually tied to performance: a good game played, a high grade achieved, an award garnered, a talent displayed. Praise is healthy and appropriate, but affirmation is altogether something different. Affirmation - well, affirms. It states what is. In a mirror-mirror-on-the-wall culture, affirmation is the antidote to narcissism. Far from engendering an exagerrated sense of one's importance (praise can do that), affirmation grounds us in what is true.

Secondly, there are many places we can draw information from about who we are and why we matter. Adolescents operate from an egocentric perspective and they assume everyone is thinking about and noticing them as much as they're noticing themselves. Life is lived in the fishbowl, so presentation is all-important. But, is the feedback we're receiving from those we encounter accurately perceived? Is it accurate at all?

Affirmation serves as the healthy counterweight to negative messages about self picked up in the culture: you don't look right... you really should be able to... you'll never... people don't like you... It can be exhausting to constantly refute that! But, there are a few good reasons why words of affirmation should rightly come from parents primarily.

Parents have the longest-standing relationship of anyone with their child, and by extension, they should be the ones who know their child the best. And, it is likely that apart from other family members (like siblings), they are the only ones who have a close relationship with the child who will still have a close relationship with them in ten years. Even best friends come and go. So during the time that your son or daughter is forging an identity, guess who the two long-term constants are in their life? Mom and Dad. What better messengers for truth? And, truth, safety, consolation - all of these are part of what makes home, home. We go home to escape the part of the world that demands our performance and that rewards our efforts to transcend who we really are. At home we can just be. And the message of affirmation is: who you are is ok.

If kids don't get that message from parents, either because the parent confuses praise with affirmation and doesn't want to inflate their ego, or because the parent struggles to be positive and find things to affirm, or because parents are just too busy to fill that need, kids will get that affirmation somewhere. Everyone lets down their guard sometime - no one can pose forever. And the "home" to which we return is the place of affirmation and acceptance.

I'm convinced this real self is the one God not only loves, but values. So the implications of affirmation for spiritual development are clear. We must affirm the nonperforming selves of kids if they are ever to believe that God loves that part of them. Otherwise the unbelievable love of God actually becomes that - not believed, while kids cast about for affirmation from the world, which is like hitting a moving target.

Make it a habit this year to offer regular, non-performance-based affirmation to your child. It won't spoil them, really. But starving them of affirmation just might.