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On the Money

(originally published at Start Marriage Right)

The American Dream has altered over the years but still fuels our culture. Its message permeates the airwaves, social media and modern advertising. We’re promised a better body, popularity and sexier hair all promising a happy life. In the place of the white picket fence and 2.2 kids is the good looking, popular and rich homestead.

A big motivation (whether known or not) for people to make a lot of money is to buffer the realities of a life that doesn’t work. A friend shared a great line with me the other day. He said,

If we can buy our way out of a problem, it’s not really a problem.”

I hadn’t considered it that way but believe it’s true. You can’t buy happiness but you can put some margin between you and life. (Despite the studies that show you can indeed buy happiness up to making around $80,000 per year, I think money delays and buffers disappointment).

Marriages contend with this struggle for happiness and financial freedom on a daily basis.Gone are the days that your paycheck is yours and yours alone. Instead of being able to easily decide the impact of a purchase, the married person now has to consider, engage and discuss the impact of a purchase on the other person. Watching the issues of money erode marital relationships is what we have all thought about the Titanic sinking: Just slow down and heed the warning of those before you.

… continue reading over at Start Marriage Right

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Turn Off the Screen

(article originally published by startmarriageright.com)

There are a number of articles that have been published digging into how the social fabric of our culture is changing based on social media. The Atlantic published an article called “Is Facebook Making us Lonely?,” which is a long read but very challenging to our understanding about the impact of technology and social media.

Smart phones, tablets, and laptops have met and created a demand for instant communication, postings, and status updates. A friend mentioned to me the other day that he felt naked without his iPhone in his pocket (he’d left it at home earlier in the day). It was a joke, but it was truth. We don’t know what to do with ourselves when we are all alone. If we have technology and have a few moments to kill it’s really easy to check twitter, Facebook, or our favorite news site.

Is using technology stealing time from your relationships?
We all have a need to connect with others, and smartphones fill in that need really well. But in reality, they don’t. When we shut off the screen, we’re right back to where we started—alone.

I fall victim to this as well. I’ve been a smartphone owner for 6+ years now, and there are days that I wish these little boxes had never been created. Sure, they’re great for keeping tons of information in one place, replacing our need to carry a calendar, camera, address book, and more. But they’re an every present distraction.

I’ve noticed that my own tendency to use my iPhone comes when I’m need to escape. Most of the time I notice this at home. After a long day at work, I get to go home and work some more. The demands of relationships at home are ever present. Some days I do not want to engage because of the constant pull from my family. Sometimes I resent them for this and will steal 5-10 minutes with my iPhone or iPad. These devices are always on, available, and ready for me when I need them. They’ve taken the place of the dog as man’s best friend.

Continue Reading at – Start Marriage Right

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Parenting kids, Not controlling them

I was talking with a dear friend of mine this morning about some conversations I’ve been having with my 9 year old son. As the oldest, my son exhibits many typical first-born traits. He’s the rule follower, mini-parent to his siblings, plays life conservatively, and generally good kid. He’s a great kid, and has an incredible head on his shoulders. Ever since his sister, who is 18 months younger, began crawling, he has had a hard time getting along with her. Because of an event between the two of them at school last week, I was asking my friend Jeff this morning about some help in how to deal with the sibling rivalry, but mainly with my son.

His advice: Don’t under parent and over control.

Brilliant.

In that one sentence, he captured and summed up the tension that all parents face. How do I parent my kids, but not control them? Being an over controlling parent is quite easy, though exhausting. We likely spend more energy and effort keeping our kids from life than we would if we responded to and with them about life and our experiences.

Parenting is the essence of training a child in how to relate to the world around them. There are hundreds of books to help you along this journey, but the most important piece that a book can never teach you is how to engage your child in who they are. When we control our kids, we ask them to be someone that they are not. It’s scarier to be in relationships with others, our kids included, where we are not in control. Control will crush a relationship, and your child’s spirit. You will do more harm than good by ushering them down the path of life that you want for them.

Practically, parenting without control allows the kids the freedom to express themselves in a manner that is truthful. As with any part of life, there are some right ways to do things, and some wrong. As a parent, it’s my job to teach my kids the way that best expresses our value as a home.

If you want to tell me that you hate me, that’s fine. I’ll just need you to write a two page essay explaining why it is that you feel this way.

If you growl at me, roll your eyes, or brush by me in an aggressive manner, that’s fine too. I’ll just ask you to come back to the room and tell me what you’re feeling that caused you to do what you did. In our house, when you roll your eyes at someone you’re required to do a complete eye roll. None of this half-way done eye rolling. All the way around in a complete circle.

Obviously this is a hard line to walk. And, this line looks vastly different for each of my kids. I have to adjust my approach with each of them, because one parenting style does not fit all.

The likely result of an over controlled kid? Someone who lacks a sense of self with an overall fear based approach to life. If you want your kid to be well adjusted later in life, it’s going to take some risk on your part.

Because let’s face it. It’s risky to let go of control. It’s scary because we don’t know what will happen to them or to us. Parenting is not a science, it’s an art. And art is messy.

 

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A Viewable Life

I recently ran across The Amish Project (youtube video), where a guy goes “off the grid” for 90 days. He gets rid of his cell phone, social media, computer, and anything else that promises to keep him connected to others. His project shows him that all these technological advances promise to make him a better at life, he actually has more human interactions and better relationships by not texting, facebooking, or tweeting. Yes, these are all part of our culture, but they come at a cost to relationships.

More and more of our lives are viewable, yet less vulnerable. We post blogs, tweet, update our Facebook status, and pin ideas to pinterest. All of these outlets are fun, and potentially helpful to long-distance relationships but it’s really easy to hide our true selves behind all these networked sites. “Posting” gives a level of honesty that exposes what we like or what we’re doing but doesn’t express who we are. In some cases who we are online is vastly different than who we are in real life (see the documentary Second Skin). “Who we are” is a question that can only be answered in the context of relationships.

 

 

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The Sexual Commodity of Beauty

The rise of self-promotion and narcissistic endeavors is ever growing. The public sharing of ones life is the modern day equivalent to having access to 500 million pen pals. We have less and less face-to-face interactions with people due to the popularity of twitter, facebook, and texting. And in this growing stage of self-promotion, patience, beauty, and humility are virtues easily becoming replaced by immediate gratification, sexiness, and a see-me-hear-me-want-me attitude. The substitution of beauty and pretty for sexy and hot is a concerning trend in media today.

A few months ago I read a great article about how to talk to little girls. Instead of focusing on their outward looks, dress, or appearance, the author encourages us to engage little girls in their mind, imagination, and other aspects that are “non-physical” in nature. This article set a good stage for me in shaping how I want to encourage and engage with my daughter about who she is, not what she looks like. This perspective is quite counter-cultural. Most ads in the media are helping to shape the pervasive stereotype that women are only to be concerned with their looks and outward appearance. A few decades ago, the virtue of beauty wasn’t tied to how much cleavage you had, or how young a woman looked. Today, the trend is for women to be concerned with being all-sexual, or “hot” as Pat Archibald suggests in a recent blog post. Before reading his post, I hadn’t considered defining pretty as a virtue, but compared with the cultural push towards hotness it strikes me as a worthwhile conversation. I especially appreciate Pat’s connection with the drive towards hotness as ending with women becoming a commodity instead of a person.

It’s not uncommon for men to tell me that women are difficult to be seen as anything other than a sex object. Conversely woman often explain the tension they feel in the need to be like a sexual goddess (no doubt influenced by the overwhelming use of porn by men and women) for her husband. Both of these relational realities create huge issues of objectification. It’s impossible to have a functioning relationship, intimate or not, when one is viewed as anything other than a person.

There are two issues here. First is the need for women to transcend the message that to be sexy and hot is to be beautiful. To take it one step further, women need to reject the notion that beauty is synonymous with being sexual. Some of the most beautiful people in the world would never be selected to appear on the cover of a vanity magazine. Capturing and extending external beauty is a losing battle. It’s not just the women’s responsibility to reject this, it also requires men to engage beauty and sexuality in a mature and person-centered manner.

Men need to develop sexual integrity. The statistics are numbing as to when boys/men are exposed to sexually explicit material (average age is 11 for exposure to pornography). These statistics show that the ease by which men can move into sexually unhealthy behavior only supports the previously discussed biases that women are only to be viewed as sex objects. The development of sexual integrity will help men to reject the notion that women are sex objects and that they are only motivated in life by sex. Despite popularly held beliefs, men are more than just a sex organ.

With issues as difficult as this, it’s be easy to play the blame game. This often happens where women suggest that men are the problem because of their hyperactive and aggressive sex drive. Conversely men often say women are the problem because they dress in a suggestive and provocative manner that is impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, the reality is that sexual objectification happens to both men and women. Regardless of the cause, this is a problem that faces every relationship, parent, and person. Thankfully the responsibility of this issue falls on both sexes. It will take action, leadership, and wisdom by both sexes to change the course we are currently taking. Waiting for the other to take the first course of action is choosing to remain silent, and silence does not promote truthfulness.