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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Take Your Kids Outdoors

    Kids spend well over 40 HOURS per week in front of electronic screens, but less than 40 MINUTES per week in nature. Screens are ruling teens. Delayed Gratification A major component of growing up is learning to deal with long waits and unexpected delays, yet nearly everything is now available in an instant. If we are going…

  • 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…

  • Families Should Be Tough

    My wife is kind and compassionate, but she is one of the toughest people I have ever known. She does not have a mean bone in her body, but she is strong. She will tell you like it is and somehow make you feel like she is on your side. And when it comes to…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Teach Your Children Compassion

    No matter the age, our children need to be trained to be compassionate. It does not come naturally. Kids are egocentric, but they can and should be taught to consider the needs of others, as much as they consider their own. Some of those needs are invisible, so we need to become sensitive. Our job…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • From the Mouths of Babes

    This from a 6th grade teacher who I respect a great deal: I teach a class titled Emerging Leaders, and we talk about “self awareness” to start the quarter. For the lesson I was doing, I decided that asking these 2 questions would be interesting. 1. Name one or two things that your parents to…

  • Parenting Digital Kids

    Life Beyond the Screens If you ask most teens what item is their most prized, important possession, they will say it’s their smartphone. In fact, I’ve heard teens say that if they could only take one thing on a deserted island it would be their smartphone, in spite of the fact that it would be…

  • Protecting Kids From the Inside Out

    Unlike consumer products, parenting comes without instructions or guarantees. We all want our children to grow up happy, healthy, successful, and involved with positive-minded family and friends. However, our children live in a broken world, and it has a way of breaking young people, sooner or later, one way or another. But there is real…

  • Stop, Look, Listen

    Our kids, no matter the age, need us to be with them, explaining what makes one thing beautiful and another ugly, why one thing is important and the other trivial, and why this is quite right and that is all wrong. A relationship such as this is what makes the world a better place, one…

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