I was chatting on the phone with my oldest this week about purity culture–which deserves a post on its own. (I have feelings. Big feelings.)
I expressed to him how tough it is as parents, when some of the less-healthy methods of purity culture are subtracted from parenting –I’m looking at you, shame-parenting–to find something as powerful to direct our kids toward good and keep them from what’s truly bad.
I would say I have been praying for a miracle in one (or more) of my kids for a year now.
But, y’know, it’s probably one of those things where you think, spring feels like a small miracle sometimes. My kids hanging up their towels sometimes feels like a series of miracles. And hey, let’s not forget the miracles God’s doing in me (to the tune of, Wow, when that kid flipped his lid, I didn’t flip mine. Miracle.)
So I don’t know what your kids’ morning routine is like at your house.
Maybe you picture me lovingly folding lunchbox notes and sandwiches built from the sprouts on my windowsill, sitting down to a full breakfast with devotional book in hand.
A couple of weeks ago one of my teenagers was super-miffed with my husband and me.
On a car ride home from church, after explaining a biblical position we held on a touchy subject, this unnamed teenager maintained his shock and sudden anger.
My mom and I had a good conversation last week–one of those “Oh, that’s how it went down on your side of things” talks.
Groove back with me to around 1993. I’m growing out my formerly-birds-nest bangs. I have braces. Both are just as becoming as they sound. But though there at 13, I’ve been a Christian for eight years, I haven’t been baptized.
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I imagine there’s some parent out there like me right now. Spring weather finally crooks a finger, beckoning our kids outside…but as the end of the school year looms, there’s unfinished schoolwork (or just today’s chores) you’re not actually sure your child will accomplish. Like, ever. Tasks are colliding like an interstate pileup. How do you motivate a child without losing your ever-loving mind?
Well, I left my magic wand in my other computer. But in short, you’re searching for your unique child’s motivation DNA. As you consider how to motivate your child, here are a few thought’s I’m typing for my own sake.
So here’s a question oddly relevant. With tasks you both want to do and don’t, what primarily motivates you to raise your bum from a chair and get ‘er done?
I’m guessing some of your answers, dear readers, fall into categories like these.
Observation: For a long time, I’ve attempted to motivate my kids using the same ways I’m motivated.
Personally, I’m an Enneagram 2 with a huge 3 wing. (IYou may have conflicting feelings about the Enneagram. It’s all the rage lately, drawing both legitimate Christian praise as well as concern. I’ve written about how I personally have employed it as a faith tool to expose some of my core motivations…and sins.)
This means pleasing/serving others, along with achievement, are highly motivating for me.
Let’s take my eldest, who at his core, is quite different from me. When I try to convince him people will just love something! Or energize him with a goal! ...Well. He turns and walks out of the room.
If writing a handbook for him–an Enneagram 8, partly driven by his need to be against something–I’d title chapter one, Respect His Autonomy. As my mom used to put it when he was little, “He’s a lot more willing if he thinks it’s his idea.”
So for him, I emphasize his adult choice on whether to do the right thing.
Does this mean I abdicate teaching my oldest an obedient heart? That I’m always on the make for how to manipulate him and his desires?
No way. That doesn’t deal with a core heart issue of rebellion in his heart.
…Just like manipulating me as a kid through parental delight would have ignored my heart issues of being a wee little Pharisee, who basks in the praise of men: “They do all their deeds to be seen by others” (Matthew 23:5).
In the same vein, distracting a preschooler from their Oscar-worthy fit in the housewares aisle at Target (or worse, giving them candy or a screen, which could act as a reward) doesn’t actually help deal with their heart.
And BTW: Our kids don’t need to be constantly motivated by something other than obedience or doing what’s right or loving. Sometimes they just need to do the hard thing, like the rest of us have learned to do as adults.
This is a tool for God’s kingdom–to continue to woo our kids toward His ways. It’s a way to raise our kids according to their unique bent (Proverbs 22:6), working with their natural momentum rather than constantly uphill.
For my artistic daughter, art and creativity are natural ways to draw her into God’s Word or serving people or a thriving prayer life. My energetic last-born dives into The Action Bible and the outlandish humor of What’s in the Bible with Buck Denver?
Finding out how our kids are motivated isn’t a tool to use for our kingdom, our will be done.
And that’s why it’s key to know how we as parents are motivated. Because our own goals to motivate a child aren’t always pure.
We might feel shame if our child doesn’t achieve or look the right way. It might be disproportionately embarrassing if our child has poor social skills. We might feel fear if they’re struggling with anxiety or depression, causing us to be reactive rather than helpful, compassionate, and wise.
As parents, we rarely want things entirely for the good of our child and the good of God’s Kingdom. It’s great to want our kids to achieve or be classy or be healthy. But those need to fall in their proper order, not swelling into shame (on us, or cast on them) or inordinate anxiety.
We need to tease out our real desires. Then we can offer those longings to God’s control–and they’ll possess less power to manipulate us from behind.
Take time to prayerfully observe what makes your child want to do things. If they love cheerleading, why do they love it? Does your daughter love the precise, controlled outcomes of science? Does your son value speech and debate because he wants a unique opinion?
Try this two-column list.
How can you wisely (and prayerfully) tie a motivator to a behavior?
Obviously, keep an eye to emotional health. If your child lives for his 45 minutes of screen time at the end of the day, taking it all away to get him to chew with his mouth closed, for the love of Mike could seem unjust, making your child feel misunderstood.
Or is it truly wise to take away time with friends for your homeschooled child?
As you can, talk to your child–and ask questions–about how they’re motivated, and what you perceive. All of us need to know how to get our own motors running.
When we first have kids, God gives us a kindness–the understanding we can have some level of control, some ability to shape our kids. We understand there are clearly ways to motivate a child (taking away consequences, giving rewards), and we possess a lot of them.
But as they inch closer to adulthood, kids undergo that healthy process of differentiation; of becoming someone different than we are. As a veteran missionary once told me,
When your kids turn about 11, you really start hitting your knees. You realize you really can’t change their hearts.
And that’s been my own critical lesson in this season of teens. (Sometimes this lesson feels like fear galloping through me like wild horses.)
I can and should do everything in my power to shape my kids toward God. But as Paul reminds me,
I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. (1 Corinthians 3:6-7)
It’s God who ultimately changes my kids’ hearts. I remember the ancient story of Ruth, who
No, there’s no promise that if we parent well and trust God, we’ll have motivated, phenomenal kids. (Remember, God is the father figure in the story of the prodigal son).
But continuing to seek God on how to motivate them toward him and his ways? That’s worth my effort.
Reading Time: 4 minutes
They’re socially-distanced, hormonal, maybe driving someone crazy. Grab 71 ideas for the quarantined, bored teens in your life.
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I’ve wondered for awhile how to start this post, what to write. I’m still assembling the pieces in my head like a jigsaw puzzle without the photo on the lid, and wondering if some of the pieces have fallen into the couch for good.
I’m hoping it doesn’t feel overdramatic? Guess I’ll just try to be honest with you.
I should start from the beginning; from the night my son came down after his shower, ready to read together (Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin, a recent Christmas gift). That honey-colored skin of his was still moist when he guided my hand to where his neck meets his shoulder. “Feel this. I think I have a weird lump.”
Should I mention the Saturday before had been the funeral for my three-year-old friend, who died of a series of brain tumors? That his mother had sat in my living room just two days before this, subdued and a little bewildered?
Calm, I thought. Don’t jump to any conclusions. I laid an imaginary hand on my voice, smoothing it out. “Hmm. That is weird.”
His eyes were searching my face, as they would for the next six weeks. The kid may have ADHD–and its natural anxiety–but when he pays attention, he has no problem with emotional intelligence. I left a message on the doctor’s switchboard, and it was returned while we read our chapter. My husband was gone for the week; I was pretty sick myself, and set my sights on surviving the week.
At the appointment, the nurse practitioner was fairly chill. “No other symptoms, right? It feels like a bone. Could be an anatomical anomaly.” We were assigned an ultrasound, and thus deposited into the sometimes-laborious cogs of the American medical system.
My son was giddy at this, and went home to Google-translate new names for his hypothetical bone into Latin.
I hope you never, on the back of your son’s birthday guest list, have to write down words from phone call from a stranger like “complex collection of cells” about your son’s ultrasound. Again, I was trying not to jump to conclusions. But I was also trying not to cry.
This found us, two weeks later, at a CT scan. When my son found out his dad would join us, he grew a little edgy. “This feels like it’s a big deal or something,” he said.
It is. I shrugged. “We don’t really know if it’s a big deal or not. But Dad wants to be there either way. And God’s got a plan, right?”
Attempting to circumvent the previous week’s lag in obtaining results, I drove to get them from a local hospital the next morning. There were a lot of words, standing there in the sunlight, that I had to Google to make sure I got them right.
What I didn’t have to translate: Lymphoma is a primary consideration. I heard myself breathing faster, felt my heart accelerate. In the car, I repeated over and over under my breath, The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. My voice began to hitch. I cried as I drove.
May you never have to tell your husband that your son might have cancer. And may you never, ever have to hold your 13-year-old together–after he asks too many questions to avoid, and overhears a phone call–and tell him he might have cancer.
But this is what I treasure about this time. Even as we wept together, that boy started talking about what he was thankful for. He said things like, “God has a good plan for this. And even if I die, I get to be with Jesus, right?!”
Right, Son. Sometimes I think your faith outpaces mine. (I remembered later that he was the one who, immediately after our family was robbed, asked if we could pray.)
The next morning, as we prepared to go for bloodwork, he restated again that he wasn’t that worried. He was more worried, he told me, that I couldn’t stop crying, which made him nervous. “Mom!” he insisted. “I have complete faith that God has a good plan for this. God had a plan for Henry (our recently-passed toddler friend). And God has a plan for me. I mean, he’s not the kind of God who goes around giving people tumors for fun.”
(I am having a hard time not crying as I type right now.)
May you never have to talk as a family about one of you possibly having cancer. But if you do, I hope you get to hold each other and pray, even as you cry all over the place.
My son continued to ask questions about what chemotherapy is like. If he could have surgery and get a “cool scar.” If he could still go to summer camp (“We’ll see. But hold things loosely”). If he could play football next year (“I really don’t know. I’m sorry”). How many times did I have to answer “I just don’t know”? He inspired us to compile a neon-yellow index card–a “thankfulness list”–in the binder we’d purchased for medical notes.
Of all I have absorbed through all of this, I see God’s kindness in giving my son the faith of a lion.
I was mentally, emotionally, spiritually all over the place. Fear and gratitude and anger and grief and faith and bewilderment sprinted through me in cycles and in packs. In the morning, after the kids went to school, I would stare out the window in silence.
I asked God that if there were chemo or radiation involved, he would let my son still have children–because he wants five or six. I asked God that he would preserve my son’s sense of smell and taste, because he wants to be a chef. (I admit to rewarding blood test bravery with letting the kid pick something out to cook. Shrimp, he decided.)
My husband and I begged God that this would be nothing…yet over and over, found ourselves asking, and even truly wanting, God to do what he saw fit. My husband remembered aloud about a colleague of his whose joy and peace in her cancer was itself sheer beauty. And we were already amazed at what God was doing in all of us in the fear and waiting.
I say this not because we are a hero family of any sort. If anything, my husband and I went to buy eyedrops together because we had been crying so much.
You guys. I was a mess. And so exhausted. There was another benefit of sleep, I found: I could finally not think and think and think. I could forget.
May you never need a referral to a pediatric oncologist. But if you do–may the oncologist be as astute as ours. There were multiple blood tests, another CT scan, this time requiring my son to down two bottles of oral contrast, which he ended up hating more than needles (the latter of which he had to quickly conquer). There was a consultation with a surgeon, when we thought we would want to remove the offending lymph node and biopsy it, hopefully with very boring results to match the totally healthy bloodwork.
Lest I bore you, I will cut to a call last Thursday, where I stood in my bedroom. Your son is 100% cancer-free. I was bewildered. Exultant. I felt like the woman with her lost coin, who called all her friends when she found it (Luke 15:8-9).
My son would want me to tell you that he was right all along, after five weeks of tests (“and that horrible contrast! Mom!”): He has an extra bone, a cervical rib, which can only be found in .2% of the population. My husband has suggested we name it “Eve” (a little biblical humor there for you). And something thought to be a lymph node was a muscle; another swelling was a normal thymus gland. (Did you even know you had a thymus gland?)
The day we went for the CT and oncologist consultation, I felt like Abraham going up the mountain. Lord, he is yours. But why this? I kept waiting for a rustle in the bushes, for some sort of a ram that, like I wrote to you, I knew I wasn’t entitled to receive. I wrote in my red journal as we sat in the waiting room and my son complained about drinking oral contrast: Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods. (Daniel 3:17-18
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A week later, I still feel as though I’ve just gotten out of jail. I muse over the fact that God knit this rib to my son when he made my son, knowing this would be discovered in 2019.
He humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna…that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 8:3)
A cousin of mine wrote recently that sometimes God’s mercy is revealed in the most unexpected ways: Getting written up at work. Someone confronting you. Being disciplined as children.
As my husband and I mulled over all that’s transpired, I have to say that this, too, has been a difficult, painful, gut-wrenching mercy.
But it’s a mercy just the same.
It’s as if my son’s faith has been forced into blossom; as if our family may have received the gift of fear so we’d be driven to faith. Reminded of hope. Solidified in endurance and character.
I’d never wish this on anyone. But I can’t say I would have missed this.
I am no Abraham. Yet I wonder about his emotions and questions as he walked up a mountain; the expression as he searched for stones and built an altar with his hands. I wonder how he changed after those three days in his life, the snippet of horror. The abject relief.
God’s why’s are far too complex for my three-pound brain. (No doubt my reflections will be tumbling across this site for weeks.) But for right now? I’ll revel in the sheer gift of a child who has no cancer.
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