Growing Up Well

  • Raising Countercultural Kids in the United States of Addiction (Part 3 of 3)

    The trends are not looking good for the mental and emotional health of young people, across all demographics. For instance, most people think of college as one of the happier times in a person’s whole life. However, according to a recent survey by the American College Health Association, 52 percent of college students reported feeling…

  • Raising Countercultural Kids in the United States of Addiction (Part 2)

    Raising Countercultural Kids in the United States of Addiction (Part 2) In the previous post, we looked at how young people today are growing up in a culture which encourages extreme individuality. This individualistic lifestyle discourages healthy family life and social life, and it ultimately generates deep-down detachment and loneliness. This eventually creates chronic anxiety…

  • Raising Countercultural Kids in the United States of Addiction (Part 1)

    In the late 1990s, author J.K. Rowling invented the term “muggle” as a derogative term for the normal people of modern Britain. Muggles are all the ordinary human beings in Rowling’s wildly popular Harry Potter book series. Muggles do not have any magical powers or awareness of anything magical. They live for comfort, they conform…

  • Taking Control of Your Digital Life

    Part 3 in the series on becoming “tech-wise” The first two posts in this series laid down a philosophical framework for why we need to take control of our digital devices. Now, let’s dig into the nitty-gritty details. The following is a list of strategies, tools, and thoughts to consider as you use your electronic…

  • The Holidays Are a Magnifier

    The Holidays — the six weeks of Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, and New Years — are a magnifier. In general, happy people get happier, sad people get sadder, lonely people get lonelier, etc. This is true for children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. For some, life is going pretty well, and the holidays are the most…

  • The Social Combat of Being 13

    A New World Order for Young Teens 7th and 8th grade is when the social life of a child amps up in three ways: importance, intensity, and consequences. At 13, a child’s social standing becomes extremely important to them, as it has become more important to all the other 13 year olds. For some, it…

  • Your Family. Your Culture.

    The most common theme among parents of young teens lately is that they want to live differently than the culture. Most parents do not want their kids to ingest the current culture of materialism, comparison, busyness, and anxiety. They don’t like what the culture is teaching and demanding. Most parents want to be connected with…

  • Parenting is Regulating

    Every parent should regulate their children’s behavior until they are ready to regulate their own. It will likely be a 20-year process, which starts with full regulatory control of the infant and ends with total release of all control at adulthood. What does it mean “to regulate?” In grammatical terms, it is a transitive verb,…

  • Peace in the Parenting Journey

    Being a parent is overwhelming in mid-December, when everybody’s activities and pressures are multiplying. During the holidays, our expectation of family life is heightened along with our kids’ sense of entitlement and their frustrations with school. Arguments are common this time of year. Perhaps a few lumps of coal belong in some stockings. It’s a…

  • Teach Your Kids Sportsmanship

    If more parents focused on character over performance, then we would not need signs like this.

  • Tips for Motivating Young Teens

    It takes more than a poster to motivate kids. Ask any schoolteacher. Early in their careers, young teachers will spend their own hard-earned cash on motivational posters for their classrooms, and soon thereafter they realize that those stylish platitudes are only good for the companies that sell motivational posters. Motivating kids, especially teenagers, is a…

  • Motivate. Don’t Manipulate Your Kids.

    Once again, his room isn’t clean, not by any standard. Her backpack, jacket, and shoes are scattered about the floor of the hall, again. His grades are sub-par in math, again. She is making the family late to school, again. He seems to be nonchalant about his music audition this weekend. She isn’t running enough…

  • Perpetual Parenting

    It’s likely that you are being a great parent even when you aren’t thinking about it. You may be doing a heck of a job of training your children without even trying to do so. Unaware, you can parent well. Unfortunately, that door swings both ways. You can be a terrible parent without thinking about…

  • Kids in Cars Talking Life

    The car is where the best stories have a chance to run and really stretch out their legs freely. It’s where sarcasm bursts up out of nowhere and cracks everyone up. It’s where kids break into tears after a horrible day at school. It’s where questions are posed, debates develop, and problems get solved. The…

  • Why Young Kids Should Learn to Use Dangerous Things

    A friend recently posted on Facebook a picture of her three young children helping their dad build a deck. The seven year-old boy was using a power drill to sink a deck screw. Another woman posts a picture of her two kids 6 feet high up in the branches of an old oak tree. One…

  • Connect + Guide + Enjoy = Good Parenting

    You are never done parenting. There is never enough time, energy, money, or wisdom to do it all right. Parenting is incessant, and perfection is impossible. No professor will give you an A for all that you did for your children this semester. No counselor will tell you that you can now celebrate because you…

  • Look Up

    Perhaps this video is a bit of an overstatement. It oversimplifies the problem, but I like the main theme. Train yourself (and your kids) to live beyond the net. Don’t overuse your phone. Video by Gary Turk.  

  • Ordinary Parenting

    Parenting is messy. It’s often a blender full of emotions, tasks, and conflicts. That why we so often feel pureed by our family life. Parenting is mundane. It requires incessant planning, cleaning, cooking, driving, laundry, arguing, more driving, phone calls, filling in forms, more driving, more cleaning, on and on. But parenting is also a…

  • Raising Resilient Children

    Resilience is the capacity to recover from adversity and return to well-being. Paul Tough, in his book How Children Succeed, explains that even kids who grow up in the most difficult situations of poverty, abuse, neglect, and stress can rise up from the ashes. It may not be the norm for kids of adversity, but…

  • Fear Less, Parents

    With the tragic news of the abduction and murder of ten-year-old Hailey Owens this week, many parents are afraid that the same thing may happen to their children. And many are wondering if they should be doing more to protect their children. Those are legitimate concerns and questions, and there is not a simple sound-bite…

  • Fun = Connection

    Have Fun with Your Child ASAP Good parenting has an order of operations. Insides come first. A child should feel connected to his or her mom or dad in a profound way, first and foremost. Then, and only then, the child will think about what the parent is communicating. A strong emotional bond between parent…

  • The Connected Family

    2014 is the first year in American history in which everybody has a mobile device. We are at the saturation point with smartphones, tablets, laptops, and TVs. They are in our pockets, purses, cars, backpacks, and bedrooms. We all have screens with us throughout our days, and some of us are never without a screen.…

  • Connect With Your Young Teen

    First Connect, Then Guide The best parents are the ones who are deeply connected with their children and offer support and guidance all along the path of life. They’re the ones who care enough to say, “No, you can’t do that, because I love you too much to let you settle for that.” And their…

  • Helping Your Teen Deal with a Sports Injury

    So, your teenager is injured and is out for the rest of the season. Of course, his or her initial reaction will be anger, sadness, self-pity, confusion. That is normal, since this is a form of grief – the loss of something beloved. But after a few days of sulking and trying to come to…

  • Living in Crisis

      Our family is in crisis. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. Three weeks ago, our severely disabled 13-year-old daughter, Kathryn, had a full spinal fusion surgery. According to the “pain team” of anesthesiologists and neurologists, it is the second most painful surgery to recover from. (It’s second only to…

  • Storm Preparation

    A Creeping Crisis Some crises develop gradually. Some are excruciatingly slow. Perhaps it is the approaching death of a parent with terminal cancer. Or it is the military dad/son/husband who will be deployed to an overseas conflict. Or it may be a huge financial crisis, which will likely take away the family’s savings and home.…

  • Preparing for the Storm

    If you have ever sat with a weather radio in a dark basement or closet during a tornado warning, or if you have ever hastily prepared for an oncoming hurricane, you know the anxiety that an approaching storm can bring. As a native Midwesterner with friends and relatives scattered about “tornado alley” and with a…

  • The Sacred Honor of Being a Parent

    A Unique Relationship Parenting is a unique relationship, wherein the parent is authorized by law and by God to protect, provide, nurture, and discipline. Ultimately, the parent must somehow control self and child enough to train for independent success. Parenting is a special relationship, one in which the parent is fully responsible for the children…

  • Speak Your Kids Up

    Here is a sneak peak at the book I am writing about parenting: Kids need to see and hear their parents doing hard things, persevering, and being resilient. So, discuss life’s issues with your kids, and don’t dumb it down too much. They can handle and can learn a lot from some transparency. My wife…

  • Embracing Parenting

    Here is a sample from my latest project. It’s a chapter from my not-even-close-to-being-finished book. Feel free to give me some feedback. Be the Parent I believe that there is neither “The Way” nor “God’s Way” to raise children. There is no formula for success. But that does not mean that there are not good…

Start a Blog at WordPress.com.