Gregg just sent me a great article about parenting. The main crux of the article is that happiness is more important than excitement in the lives our our children. Most of American families are focused on providing excitement for their kids, not happiness. It described many American kids as addicted to excitement: presents, video games, Internet images and video, exciting music, action films, fun TV. The article talks about how kids who are addicted to excitement eventually become adults who have to meet their need for excitement in more and more destructive ways. It's the classic law of diminishing returns. These are great things to think about as we seek to raise kids that become adults that love people and love Jesus.
This is also something that I can feel some significant conviction about. I have often described myself as a "new" addict. I love new things. For instance, I found myself this morning watching a video of a dude opening a new iMac. I just wanted to see what it was like. I feed my need for "new" or excitement by little things like looking for new music that I think I might like. When my Paste magazine arrives in the mail every month with the sampler CD inside, my synapses fire faster. Sometimes I justify all of this by the reality that these are fairly "healthy" ways of scratching this itch. I think that building in "unexciting" times is very important. Our house is a pretty "unexciting" place, but it is also a fairly happy place most of the time.
Thanks Gregg, for a great article.
3 comments:
good to hear. we are in the "cramming" phase of our first pregnancy, so any/all parenting tips are welcome. that said, i was just having a discussion with jeff (sarah's dad) about floyd's first motorcycle/snow-mobile/4wheel rides.
I agree. Creating excitement regularly is not really preparation for life. Life is certainly not exciting all the time and one needs to be able to know what to do with the "boring" or unexciting times. When you kids whined about being bored Don used to say, "We can take care of that problem", which meant that there was lots of work to be done that would take care of the boredom problem. You'd all hustle around and find ways to busy yourselves like playing together, reading a book, playing outside etc. etc. I think there's a tendency to work too hard at keeping kids stimulated all the time. I wonder what kids used to do when their parents were busy doing all of the things around the house and farm that are now done with modern technology??? That's not to say that young parents today aren't busy, they are, but many seem to have been guilted into feeling like they have to constantly provide entertainment/fun/stimulation for their kids in order to feel like "good parents". It's unfortunate...the kids are missing out on just lying in the grass thinking their own thoughts and learning how to slow themselves down. Can you tell you've hit a hot button??
Great article--thanks for sharing. I'm a little confused about the included photo of the family of 19.
Tricia
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