More "light" reading

I have a few more quotes/links I wanted to jot down that I've found since my last post.

1.  I loved Stephanie's post at Diapers and Divinity entitled I am evolving.  No one is more shocked than I am.  Goes to show we can really develop that mother heart if we desire it.  There is a light at the end of the tunnel! :)

2.  I also enjoyed the post by Delia on the MMB Community site regarding the concept of holding on to your kids.  She does this by home-schooling her kids.  She stated:

It's hard enough to hang on to your kids, sending them off to  school may be easier and parents may think it is good for kids to learn to deal with the real world. But the teenage brain is not that well  developed as scientists are beginning to find out. Hold on To Your Kids is not a home-schooling book, it's about parenting.

She also shares a few quotes from the book (or maybe it's a review of the book from somewhere), Hold on To Your Kids:

This books helps support the need to be more involved. It comes at a time when more parents are working outside the home. I think we need to take care and  pay attention, it passes all too quickly.

Like countless other parents, Canadian doctors Neufeld and  Maté woke up one day to find that their children had become secretive  and unreachable. Pining for time with friends, they recoiled or grew  hostile around adults. Why? The problem, Neufeld and co-writer Maté  suggest, lies in a long-established, though questionable, belief that  the earliest possible mastery of the rules of social acceptance leads to  success. In a society that values its economy over culture, the book  states, the building of strong adult/child attachments gets lost in the  shuffle. Multiple play dates, day care, preschool and after school  activities groom children to transfer their attachment needs from adults  to their peers. They become what the authors call "peer oriented." The  result is that they squelch their individuality, curiosity and  intelligence to become part of a group whose members attend school less  to learn than to socialize. And these same children are bullying,  shunning and murdering each other, as well as committing suicide, at  increasing rates. The authors' meticulous exploration of the problem can  be profoundly troubling. However, their candidness and exposition lead  to numerous solutions for reestablishing a caring adult hierarchy.  Beautifully written, this terrific, poignant book is already a  bestseller in Canada.

That whole concept of kids connecting with peers rather than adults reminded me of my student teaching experience in Western Samoa.  Sadly, at least when I was there (and I'd guess it's still true today), fa'a Samoa (the Samoan way) was often to beat one's children.  I noticed that this caused a much stronger bond between siblings than between parents and their children.

So, although we're talking different reasons for children to connect with peers, there still seems to be a huge importance to connecting with adults.

This whole scenario reminds me of the article The Dangerous Digital Vortex:

If you have a teenage daughter, for example, and she’s off in a corner texting her friends during a family gathering, then she is emotionally withdrawing from her family.

3/30/11 Update:  After I jotted this all down, I went up to bed and started reading Larry Lawrence's Courageous Parenting again.  Wow that article totally relates!

• ... we are reminded in the family proclamation, parents are responsible for the protection of their children. ¹ That means spiritually as well as physically.
• The story of Eli teaches us that parents who love their children cannot afford to be intimidated by them. (1 Sam 3)
• ... Robert D. Hales has observed, “Sometimes we are afraid of our children—afraid to counsel with them for fear of offending them.” 
• By listening closely, we can discover the desires of their hearts, help them set righteous goals, and also share with them the spiritual impressions that we have received about them. Counseling requires courage.

Lastly (I think), I'm also reminded of Protecting is a Part of Good Parenting by Kelly.  Good post and thought provoking comments on that one.

3.   Lastly, I subscribe to the Juvenile Instructor blog.  It's full of very interesting historical stuff.  I don't usually read the posts, though, because they're too long and they're written at a college level.  1 - I don't have the attention span to read anything really long these days, and 2 - my ability to read college level stuff ended about 8 years ago.

Anyway, there was a short post regarding the impact of losing a child by Todd Compton, particularly in Mormon polygamy days.  I was so touched by the trials of those women.  My heart ached for them.

Well, here's a long post for anyone who wants it!

A Return to Modesty

In 1999, about a month before I got married, my friend Elisa told me about A Return to Modesty by Wendy Shalit.  I don't know why I wasn't too interested in the book at the time.  Maybe I was too busy; maybe I didn't care; maybe I was afraid the book would be too much info for my innocent mind.

Every couple of years since then, my husband says, "Remember that book, A Return to Modesty that Elisa told you about?  You should read it."  Finally after reading a review of Shalit's Girls Gone Mild (2007), I have.

I've quite enjoyed the book.  I especially enjoyed it because mostly it was the culture I grew up in.  Shalit is just a year older than I am and finished college also just a year before I did.  She explores and expresses in so much detail all aspects of modesty and perceptions of sexuality in our culture.  It's like she boldly took the words right out of my mouth (or mind) and also put new thoughts into my head.  And yes, it definitely would have been too much for my innocent mind in 1999.  I could have used an edited (slightly censored) version of the book, especially back then!  (See how I had to crop the cover of the book?  Just a little too racy for me.)  Shalit agrees that she is defending modesty "in the most obscene way" so that "our culture would . . . reconsider it."  I think she's right in that.  You can tell she is well educated and has thought a ton about this topic.  Her writing is very good.  I haven't read so many big words in over a decade!

I know the book was mainly directed toward young, single people, not old, married people, but the message still applies -- especially in raising children.  Some points that stood out to me:

• Shalit writes about the sex education and attitudes towards sex in the public school systems in some states.  I had no idea it was that bad!  After reading that, I can definitely see why many people want to home-school their kids.  After reading also about the living arrangements at some colleges and the promiscuous attitudes among students, I can see why some girls want to be stay-at-home daughters and avoid the whole college scene.  I became extremely grateful for my upbringing in the bubble of conservative Utah.  I also became extremely grateful for the opportunities I had to go LDS colleges where we had curfews, we always had to have 3 in an apartment, curtains open if a guy was around, etc.  I was also glad that typically in Mormon culture, if your relationship with a boy dies after you've reached the kissing stage, at least all you've lost is just a kiss, nothing more important like your virtue!
• In the past, modesty kept women safe. Men respected women's modesty and respected that women were different.
• Maybe our inhibition and embarrassment about sex is there for a reason.  These feelings can protect us from getting hurt in an intimate relationship that is not committed.
• Women are more selective about a sexual partner than a man.  They want someone who will stick around.  A man doesn't get so romantically/emotionally involved, and is more okay with casual sex; however, some people want women to believe they are as unemotional about the whole idea as men.  The sexual revolution of the 1960s basically "'permitted . . . more access to women's bodies by more men; what it actually achieved was not a great deal of liberation for women but a great deal of legitimacy for male promiscuity; what it actually passed on to women was the male fragmentation of emotion from body, and the easily internalized schism between . . . sex and responsible loving'" (192).
• Kids do want rules.  They may not actually do what we say, but because we say it, at least they know we care and have some expectation of them.  We also need to listen to them and not brush off their concerns so they won't take even more extreme measures to get our attention. 
• Modesty can be more intriguing that bearing it all.  It also causes others not to judge a woman just by her body.
• If a man can get sex without a marriage commitment, then there's no reason for marriage -- and it ruins any romantic hope of women for catching a man for forever.
• Shalit also pointed out, not quite related to modesty, that it was not the "patriarchy" but feminist writings that discouraged young women from staying home and raising a family (142).

I am excited to read Girls Gone Mild now to see what has changed in 8 years.  I wish I could find the audio book because reading takes up so much of my precious time!

Advantages of Home-Schooling

Just to be sure you know where I am coming from, I really love public education.  I truly feel that it can do a better job at educating my kids than I can.  I never wanted to home-school my kids because teaching different kids different things all at the same time just stresses me out.  However, I always dreamed of coming up with really cool activities for my kids before the school years as well as for the summer.  I thought I'd be something like No Time for Flashcards.

Has it happened?  No, not nearly like I'd hoped, but I am getting better at it. 

During the summers, I volunteer with my kids at This Is the Place Heritage Park in Salt Lake City.  Many of the volunteer families there are home-schooled families.  When I first learned this, my (terribly rude and stereotypical) reaction was, will they be weird like the home-schooled kids I'd heard about growing up?  No.  They were wonderful!  I'd never met such confident and responsible teenagers!  Since then, I've met other home-schooled kids that I find amazing!

One time on LAF/Beautiful Womanhood, a link was posted to an article on the Duggar family. You know, the ones with the 19/20 kids.  (I have to be honest here, I used to think people with lots of kids were crazy.  I think I picked that attitude up when I was young and started hearing people make rude birth control comments toward others with large families.  After becoming a mother, though, I have a gained a HUGE amount of respect for families who do have lots of children.  I think our Heavenly Father wants to give us as many children as we are willing to take; so, more power to you if you have a quiverfull!)

Anyway, the article said,

While, admittedly, I admire the Duggars for much of what they do, I didn’t expect what I saw in these 3 girls.  The world has yet to beat them into submission.  They don’t watch the Disney Channel, so they’ve yet to learn that adults are buffoons and parents are embarrassing.  They don’t listen to the local rock station, so they’ve yet do discover life is supposed to be one promiscuous event followed by another.  They don’t attend public school, so they’ve yet to learn teenage girls are required to be filled with angst and riddled with insecurities.

As we spoke to the 3 of them, one word kept jumping out at me:  Freedom.  These girls were experiencing freedom teenagers rarely taste.  Completely free to be themselves.  The exact opposite of the words so often used by media folk to describe the 19 kids.

I realized that if these types of families can raise these children to be so exceptional, they must be doing something right.  I don't think I need to necessarily home-school my kids to teach these things, I just need to stress these attitudes and qualities in other ways.

On a side-note, I've learned, the reason we all thought home-schooled kids were weird growing up was because they were more mature, confident, and responsible.  They could talk to adults.  We were the dorky ones following the fads.