Today in our Sunday morning Bible study we got a little off topic.  Now in this ladies group, getting off topic isn’t really unusual, but we do try to tie it all back to the lesson at hand.

Today’s sidetrack started with one lady’s bewildered questions about teenage girls fascination with fancy underwear and voyaged on to overly brand conscious teens and children, extreme self fascination and feasting.  Yep… all in one conversation.

Seriously? Who’s going to see these? We, as parents, certainly hope no one will, but then why buy them?

 

Her original question, while seemingly odd, is a great one.  Why do parents spend a fortune, or anything at all, on under garments that are exceedingly fancy, ornate, sexy and incredibly small for young girls and teens?  As Christians, we hope that our daughters will remain pure until marriage, but we spend an inordinate amount of money and time shopping at specialty stores for things that won’t be seen unless they undress.  One could argue that it boosts their self esteem.  Blah!!  If that’s the case we need to reassess where we draw our self worth from!  My thoughts are that everywhere young ladies look they are seeing women in their underwear, or clothes that don’t cover much more.  Commercials, TV shows, magazine ads, etc all show these women, in nearly nothing, as confident, desirable women with nothing to hide. If that’s the role model then it makes sense that when a young lady is wearing those underwear she would be less embarassed to take off her clothes, or wear something revealing when given the chance.  On that note, maybe “grannie panties” are the answer!  See, I’ve gotten off track again. 

  The bigger point here was that be it a specific brand of jeans, the super blingy and pink girls clothing brand or supermodel style underwear, we are teaching our kids that a high level of self focus is appropriate. Self focus, vanity, self centeredness, ego-centrism, narcisism… whatever you want to call it!  I think it is a key to many of our problems and with out realizing it we are cultivating it in our children.

 

Knowing that my daughter has a few items from that super cool, overly pink, blingy girls store in her closet (or more precisely on her bedroom floor), I can admit to falling prey to this impulse a bit. (The “everyone will think I’m cool if I have the cool clothes” impulse.)  Now mostly those items were treats from grandma, but the tendency to favor those items is definetly there.  This is what brings me to the feasting portion of the conversation.

For Christmas my parents bought me the DVD set of Vision Forum’s Reformation of Food and Family conference from last year.  You can check it out here if you’re interested  http://www.visionforum.com/browse/product/reforming-food-family-dvd-collection/default.aspx

In this video series there was great discussion on the greatness of feasting and how by feasting at every meal we have diminished the impact of a truly great feast.  We don’t appreciate it as much and the standard has been lowered.  I think this goes for our personal belongings and clothing as well.  If we are allowing our children to “feast” on the hippest, coolest and best clothing (we won’t even get into appropriateness here) all day everyday, are we teaching them to appreciate them? Are we diminishing the person that is inside those clothes and forgetting that we are here to serve, not be served?  Is an everyday outfit from target or the thrift store  inadequate for our kids or teens?  If the focus were less on themselves and more on others they would see less of their natural flaws that they seek so strongly to hide. 

Still don’t think we have a generation of young narcisists?  Find a young teen and log on to their Facebook page. Even if your child posts appropriately, look at their friends.  Look at what these young girls are posting.  Ten million pictures of themselves! Many are nice face shots. (This is me smiling.  This is me frowning. This is me bored. This is me after dinner. Geez!)  Then there are those young women who apparently have no reigns on them.  The cleavage shots, the inappropriate kissy faces, the tight clothes full body shot.  The sheer volume of self portraits on Facebook is mind boggling!

Bottom line: this young generation loves themselves.  This level of self love amounts to hubris and it is certainly at epidemic levels.

This is a great time to think about ways to reduce the level of vanity that each of us has in our lives and help stop this young generation from becoming known as Generation ME. 

Often I talk with others in my community about education. It never takes too long before someone “reminds” me that not everyone can be so “fortunate” to be able to homeschool. That is a lovely sentiment. It’s not really true, but it is lovely. Right off the bat, I am very fortunate. I have a great husband, 2 awesome kids, a successful business, and a wonderful family and church. I AM thankful for my blessings. My issue is that I did not win my situation in the lottery. I work hard to get where I am. My parents worked hard. My husband worked hard. And we all sacrificed along the way. When I was in school I worked hard to get good grades and applied for every scholarship I could get. My parents led a quiet lifestyle. We didn’t vacation often, eat out or have many of the fancy things my friends had. They made those financial choices so that they could give my sister and I prepaid college accounts. This work paid off and I not only had my college paid for, but I actually got paid to go to college! I still worked full time through college though. I could have partied with that money, but instead I kept myself debt free and put a down payment on a house. My mom and I formed a partner ship and opened a small business when my son was just about 9 months old. It was small and really, we had no idea what we were doing, but we worked hard, (really hard) and listened to customers. Our business grew and grew, and often we were tempted to take risks and let it grow even more. Ultimately we decided to keep our business small and manageable. – I know somewhere out there my college business professors are shuttering. We even built a small facility on our own land at home. At all times, I kept my family in the focus, and ultimately decided that I need to work enough to pay the bills, but my ultimate “riches” would come from well raised and educated children. For the past 3 years I have gotten up and had the kids at their desks by 8am. We read, calculated and experimented until a little before lunch time and then I headed to the other end of the property to bake, ice and decorate cakes until the end of the day. Then it’s off with the kids to football, cheerleading, co op, tea party meetings, etc. After dinner, it’s time to grade work and work on lesson planning. When people tell me how fortunate I am, they seem to forget how hard I work for it. My family also gives up the material things that we could have like great vacations, atv’s and fancy clothes that we could have if I could go take a high paying job.
No, 100% of the parents out there can not homeschool their children. There are those who, due to illness or circumstance cannot homeschool their kids. I get it, but the number of parent who could immediately switch to homeschooling with little sacrifice if bigger that most realize. Then there are those who could turn off the cable (gasp), stop worrying about having a flat screen in every room, down grade their cell phone plans, and cut back on pedicures and dinners out and could make homeschooling their children a reality. And of course there are others that would require more rearranging of their life, but who could homeschool if they really wanted to. So many people believe that when something is proper, that God will provide for it, yet they fail to show that faith when it comes to their children. It is a sacrifice. It is work. It is sometimes a pain. But it is also a wonderful investment. It is a way to strengthen your family. It is really fun more often than not. It is a great learning experience for us teachers. It is the BEST opportunity your kids will have for a successful future, and it is our job as parents to educate our children. Far too many people outsource that job.

This weekend my 13 year old son and I had the opportunity to attend a 5 hour seminar on the US Constitution. My son’s reaction to our plans was not quite as enthusiastic as mine, but he did survive and I believe he learned a few things. Kris Ann Hall covered the genealogy of the Constitution and gave insight on the application of the amendments. To many this probably sounds like an incredibly boring way to spend a beautiful Saturday. I see it as knowledge necessary to secure a future for my family and my country. I have often heard the Constitution referred to as the “great American experiment”. The problem with that description is that it implies that our founders just threw together some ideas hoping they might work with no experience to work from. In reality our founders were proud British subjects who knew very well the history of their government. Declaring independence from their mother country was not an easy decision and not even one that a majority of the colonists agreed on. In fact, less than 30% of the colonists supported the idea of independence, and of that number, only 30% actively fought for independence. That means independence was won from the all powerful Great Britian by a mere 9% of the colonists! That is inspiring! That is a good reason to continue educating my children on the principles of freedom, and empowering them to lead the next generation.

Today, school is cancelled due to 100% of my class being sick. We are a homeschool family, so when illness strikes, it shuts us down completely. Fortunately, that’s fairly rare. The decision to homeschool my children was a big one for me. Like a lot of young mom’s I wanted to homeschool my children even before I had them and give them every possible head start they could get, and only serve healthy food, and have them able to write inspiring books by the age of 3. Many, ok most of those desires have been reshaped by reality by the time my son was ready to start school. His father and I divorced, I recently remarried, and I owned my own bakery which only required about 60 hours a week of my time and I was about 7 months pregnant when my son started kindergarten. I had also managed to pick up a stalker along the way, but that’s another story for another time. I had entirely too much going on in my life to take on homeschooling my child. At least that was my outlook at the time. We trudged through several years, after each saying that surely next year would be better. We even left the districted public school and went to 2 different charter schools. All the while I was becoming more and more dissatisfied with the level of education and the way children and parents were treated by the schools. I was extremely involved, even participating in the hiring of one of the charter school principals. As my daughter entered kindergarten and my son entered middle school, finally the lunacy of my previous thought process hit me like a ton of bricks. “I had entirely too much going on to take on homeschooling my child.” Seriously?! Really?! What on earth was I thinking? Could there be a more important job? Of course my answer was , that job may be the most important, but I needed to work. I really did need to earn an income, but what I had decided was to earn an income first and if there is time I will worry about my kids. In the moment that I realized what my actions truly said I valued most. I knew I would need to make a change, but wasn’t ready yet. (I know, I know, what was I waiting for?) One week into the school year I got my courage up and faced an intolerant principal that openly disliked children. After seeing that I really would not be able to make a meaningful change in the system, I took my kids home. Then I panicked, freaked out, doubted myself and finally pulled it together. I knew I wanted what my kids learned to be a step above what my son had previously been taught, and that meant I needed quality curriculum. Search the internet, right? That’s what we do. 8,954,786 results. Not helpful at all. So I called a friend who had had the clarity of mind to homeschool from the beginning. I knew she and I had similar styles and educations and that her kids were very bright. Calling her was a good choice. A good friend beats a search engine anyday. I wanted the best curriculum I could afford. What I decided did the best job was religious based curriculum. While I hadn’t set out for that I ended up choosing it. I hadn’t been to church for years and, quite honestly, had come to question the authenticity of the Bible. I was “well educated” and had learned all the science and philosophy I could handle in public school and college. I knew that the earth was million of years old, that the earth may have been created by God, but it couldn’t have happened like the Bible wanted us to believe, and the all of this had been proven with radio carbon dating and complex science stuff that I could trust because it came from scientists. So I taught my children from this curriculum, all the while reminding them that certain parts of this was not entirely correct. Geez! Great teacher huh? Luckily, my mind was open to aquiring knowledge. I contemplated these issues everyday. I couldn’t give my kids a good solid answer as to why what was in this curriculum was wrong. The totally awesome thing about homeschooling is that as the teacher, you learn SO MUCH.

I signed my kids up for a local homeschool co-op so that they could take a variety of elective classes. Each parent had to teach or assist in teaching. I missed the class assignment meeting and ended up getting assigned to co-teach “Evolution vs Creation”. Can you say woefully unqualified? This was at a church. I couldn’t run up and say, “Hey I’m really not convinced myself yet”. So I took on the roll of passing out and collecting papers, handing out pens, etc. Fortunately, the lead teacher was amply qualified. I learned exactly what I needed. I learned that scientists are human, some bad, some good, and all biased. I learned facts and information that allowed me to return to previous beliefs that God created the earth and all of it’s inhabitants. I learned that science doesn’t fight the Bible, it can be used to DEFEND the Bible. How awesome!! I could have my science AND my Bible! That was life changing for me. It started a new chapter for me and my family.