It’s stunning to me that someone could be spiritually and emotionally prepared enough to make this decision to adopt a baby on the spot.
And not just any baby, but a baby you know is going to have some challenges because of mom’s drug use.
How do you prepare yourself to make that decision? What does your view of the world, and your purpose of being in it, have to be to decide you’re going to do this?
Selfless doesn’t begin to describe it. I’m in awe. And I’m grateful the president highlighted the Holets family at the State of the Union.
The answers are inspiring. Please go and read them and post your own!
I can’t even pick the best to post here, but…how about this from Kimberly:
I have two sons. We lost their father in a tragic accident when they were 15 and 10. Shortly after the accident, I passed by my oldest son’s room around bedtime and his younger brother had climbed into bed with him and was crying. My older son was just holding him, consoling him, very much like a parent would a heartbroken child. It was the most touching moment I’ve witnessed as a parent.
I ask this question because I want a vision for the young man I want Jack to become. I want him to do these awesome things parents wrote about. And to make that happen, I need to be intentional.
The Mission Statement of the Christian Parenting podcast is, “We believe in purposeful parenting. We think of the type of adults we want our kids to become and work backwards.”
Your answer to this question gives me a lot of inspiration to be purposeful.
And every answer a parent gave is a story about a kid living out a meaningful VIRTUE. We need to celebrate more success stories!
ps, Someone asked me why I excluded athletic accomplishments. They said that sports teach kids life lessons.
Obviously.
I was an athlete. It taught me discipline and perseverance and humility. But I feel like our society places too much of an importance on athletics. Athletics also becomes a kids IDENTITY.
Being a swimmer was my identity growing up. When that part of my life ended, I didn’t know who I was.
There are many former pro-athletes who suffer from depression. It’s rooted in losing their identity:
“I wanted to leave winning a Super Bowl, rushing for 2,000 yards, then having a press conference and crying at the podium,” says Eddie George, a running back who spent eight seasons with the Oilers/Titans franchise before retiring in 2005 after one year with the Cowboys. “I wanted to have that moment, you know? But that didn’t happen. I’m sitting at my kitchen table with my cell phone, just waiting for my agent to call for an opportunity with a team. And that’s when I realized it was over.
“I had saved my money. I had done well. I had businesses that I had already started. But there was that void, a huge void, of: ‘Man, what am I going to do tomorrow morning when I wake up?’ It was pretty much, ‘Who am I? I’m no longer an athlete.'”
Lewis Howes’ The Masks of Masculinity has a great chapter about men who wear the “Athlete Mask”.
Anyway, the point is, I wanted to highlight other aspects of kids’ lives, beyond the glory of the field.
I have a concern as a parent. I don’t want to give Jack too comfortable of a life. It’s so odd, we work so hard to provide for our family, but what if we make life TOO comfortable>? No kid has ever lived with as much material prosperity as we have today. No one ever.
That sandwich you kid ate this afternoon – the bread, the meats, the cheeses, the pickle, the mayonnaise and mustard – the most powerful kings in history couldn’t eat a sandwich like that. How do I get my kids to appreciate that!
Ben Sasse has a great part of his book The Vanishing Ameican Adult about his kids thinking Air Conditioning was a necessity of life. How could they survive without it?! The same way everyone did until the last 40 years.
The owner of a steakhouse in NYC was on Fox & Friends and was asked about finding good employees. He said it’s hard to find wait staff. They used to be SERVANTS. But today they have a greater sense of entitlement, “They’re not used to working. They’re starting their first job later, and you meet someone who is 23 and they’ve never really had a job.”
People are upset with him because they HEARD that he wants his employees to be slaves! No. He wants them to be servants and serve the customers. The word serve literally means “to be devoted to” and “provide for”.
In an era of entitlement, if your first job is being a server – and you’re whole life you’ve BEEN SERVED – it’s going to be hard to make that change of perspective.
There has been a lot of questioning why so many teenagers and young adults are anxious and depressed. There are a few big reasons, but here’s one of them: Kids have grown up their entire lives CONSUMING constantly, and producing very little.
We are a CONSUME culture. This is especially true for kids. They go their entire lives constantly consuming; expecting to be entertained and served, non-stop. Kids are doing very little producing or creating.
Do you want kids to feel fulfilled and want kids to feel like they have meaning? They need to create and produce. This is the story we shared yesterday of a homeless program in Denver hiring homeless people to do menial jobs. One of the homeless men said:
“When you take a good person down, broken, discouraged, and you give them an opportunity to be proud of their self — to stand up and do something for their self — that’s one of the greatest gifts anybody can give to anybody,”
What is he talking about? Producing! There are a lot of rehab facilities located out in the country. Why are they in the county? Because you get to work! Rather, you have to work. It doesn’t matter what the work is. It’s all about creating instead of consuming.
I asked one of our greatest generation members the other day, “what’s one major difference between today and then?” He said back then there was DIGNITY in manual labor. There was no stigma attached to begin a good hard worker, regardless of the kind of work you were doing. Today, we have this talk of, “Immigrants do the jobs Americans won’t do.”
Wait a second. Why wouldn’t an American do it?
Because we’ve lost the concept of the DIGNITY OF WORK.
Too entitled. Waiting to be served. Wanting to consume.
This man went on a long odyssey from Texas to Canada. He said he learned to respect men who work with their hands. He learned to admire people in the country. They have a SIMPLICITY OF CHARACTER. I love that. A wholesomeness. A closeness to the earth. This is what I want for my kids. How do I do it? How do you do it?
I don’t think you need to live in the country to experience this or to teach your kids these values, but you need to be intentional. They need to work. They need to produce and create. I’m going to be on the lookout for mindless consumption. I know this leads to unhappiness over time.
Arthur Brooks, author of The Conservative Heart, says there are 4 essential aspects of true fulfillment: faith, family, community (defined as two friends who feel pain when you suffer and joy when you thrive), and meaningful work. Meaningful work is: Do you believe, when you go to work each day, that other people genuinely benefit from what you do. Not, “Am I well compensated?” but “Does it matter?” That’s meaningful work.
Charles Murray says one of the keys to happiness and fulfillment is doing something that involves effort over a period of time.
In other words, consumption doesn’t bring happiness. PRODUCTION bring happiness.
I think this is one major reason why kids are so much more anxious and depressed than ever. It’s not in spite of the fact that kids have more material prosperity and comfort and abundance than ever. It’s BECAUSE they do.
That’s a long way of saying, “Help!”
How do you raise your kids to be PRODUCERS and not consumers? Please leave some examples of what you’ve done in the comments.
