Table of Contents
18 Life Lessons and Parenting Tips
Two for each of our Nine Core Issues
Sinful, Holy, and Godly <-> Selfish, Healthy and Lively
Faith and Peace <-> Trust and Safety
Honor <-> Respect
Grace and Forgiveness <-> Mercy and Acceptance
Lovemaking <-> Sexuality
Wealth and Stewardship <-> Money and Resourcefulness
To help reduce prejudice, misunderstanding, and divisiveness in our society, we are trying to get peope who think they are holy to want to be more healthy, and vice-versa. Over and over again, we find where being one of these at the expense of the other doesn't work out very well for people, and that is taught over and over again in the Bible.
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1 HEALTH
Physical HEALTH
Taking Care of Your Body
So it can Take Care of You and Others
In three very important ways, our bodies will always be like children, and so we will always have to discipline and take care of them. For example,
They are inherently self-centered: they pay more attention to what’s going on inside their skin than what’s happening outside it. So they have trouble with relationships.
They are now-centered: their instinctual reflexes from the lower brain react more to the immediate situation than to the past or the future. So they have trouble with responsibility.
And they are inherently gut-centered: their view of the immediate situation is more colored by hormones and emotional instincts we share with animals than by the problem-solving insights of the frontal cortex that only humans have. So they have trouble with reality.
To be successful in life, we have to keep training our bodies to respond more adaptively to the troubling challenges of reality, responsibility, and relationships. The problem is our bodies inherently run from pain, and pain has three important purposes: it draws our attention to our problems (reality), motivates us to solve them (responsibility), and bonds us with others who can help us (relationships). Without pain, we lose touch with all these.
But our bodies will naturally seek out Pain-Killing Escapes (PKE’s). The most common PKE’s are
Substances (like drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and junk food),
Habits (like sex, gambling, working, hoarding, spending, and all manners of screen addictions), and
People (like our families that we want to fix or figure out, people we want to live for and through).
Our bodies become easily attached and addicted to idols such as these, which take away our freedoms. It’s much healthier to live instead for a higher purpose and power, ones that we dedicate our bodies to achieve. What kinds of higher powers and purposes are best for our health?
We need authority that calls us on a mission. Healthy authorities and missions, healthy powers and purposes, won’t compete with our reality, responsibilities, and relationships. They will fulfill them. They won’t limit our freedoms and powers, they will expand them. They won’t leave the world depleted and damaged, but a healthy power and purpose will leave the world a better place for all who live within it.
By this common-sense definition, religion can be sick or healthy. We will know pastors, churches, and religions by their fruits. We need to look around at our family of faith, and within ourselves. Does our faith inspire gluttony or physical fitness? Not only that, does it inspire laziness or enthusiasm, resentment or peacemaking, deceitfulness or honesty, selfish pride or humility?
How do we avoid pain-killing escapes, idols, and unhealthy higher powers? It helps to strengthen beliefs like this through prayer and meditation:
If we are to act on these beliefs in a critical time of choice, we’ll need to have prayed and meditated on them regularly beforehand. Otherwise, our lower animal instincts will kick in to seek pleasure and safety the way it used to do as a child. And we’ll act on sickening beliefs about our idols, the habits, chemicals, and people we’re dependent on. It helps to weaken beliefs like this, by using prayer and meditation to see how misguided and harmful they really are:
One important aspect of physical health is a positive body image. Young people and especially young teens can make themselves sick comparing their bodies to those of their peers, to those of media celebrities, or worst of all, to the bodies of their friends who get more attention in real life, or in social media. Young boys can feel terribly inadequate if their abs, pecs, shoulders, biceps, height and weight aren’t what they idolize. Young girls can easily get hyper-critically obsessed about almost any aspect of their bodies. And teenagers’ self-image/self-worth can be way too much about their bodies, and not enough about their minds, hearts, and faith, not enough about their accomplishments, talents, or relationships. When people don’t esteem their bodies, they often punish, distract, or comfort themselves with addictive chemicals, habits, or relationships. These choices just trigger another downward cycle into lower self-esteem, and more hatred for their bodies.
Here are some strategies for reversing the curse of a poor body image:
In taking care of your body, remember it needs a mission statement. The respect you have for your body and your motivation for taking care of it will grow in response to the calling you give for its life.
RAISING CHILDREN WHO USE FOOD,
DRUGS, AND ALCOHOL FOR BODILY HEALTH
Preschool and Elementary Years
Children of all ages need to hear words like this repeatedly: You are not your body. You are a soul, a person who takes care of your body. Nobody else can do it. It’s like your personal pet, who can’t take care of itself, and trusts you to do it. Give it what it needs, not what it demands. Then like a good pet, it will obey and serve you, and be a pleasure to you and others. But if your body bosses you around, you will be a nuisance to others. You may even act like a whiny dog demanding treats. If you are indulged now with food, later you’ll demand worse things, like alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs to make you feel OK. Do we know somebody like that? Do you want to end up like ______ (name people you both know, including yourself)?
For kids to learn self-control from you, you’ve got to be consistent with them. These one-liners can reinforce your consistent consequences:
Middle and High School
At this age, hormones, peer groups, and love interests can make teens feel uncomfortable in their bodies. Besides, they no longer look like cute children, and don’t yet look like powerful, independent adults. From all these influences, they may sometimes give eating, smoking, vaping, drinking, and drugging credit for the good times they’ve had, and then even make them a requirement for good times they want to have in the future. Adjusted for your child and for the situation at hand, you might ask your kids things like this:
Draw them out in accepting, calm, curious conversation. If that’s hard, maybe include a third person they trust. Find out which people they most want their bodies to look like and why (their idols). Ask what they long for in life, what they think these other people have that they don’t (their invisible idols). Ask how they think these people have used their bodies to get these things.
Then help them see the real, lasting versions of what they long for. Where does genuine beauty, wealth, power, confidence, intimacy, peace come from? Don’t you also want to feel these things coming up in you from within, so you always feel you have enough to share, so that others are drawn to you for it?
Help them discover that these powerful assets are a gift, given through people who share them freely, needing nothing in return, people who make you feel beautiful, strong, and worthwhile. Be one of those people. Once you are, they’ll want to know how you found your beauty, strength, contentment, etc., how you get yourself refreshed when you get run down. Remember they won’t care what you know until they know that you care.
HEALTH 1
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SAFETY 2
Flipping your Script
from Fear over to Trust
| Fear: preoccupation and paralysis, from worry and anxiety about the future | Trust: Relying on a benevolent source of strength and security, even in a crisis |
| Fear brings · Insecurity · Worry · Anxiety · Panic ·Doubt · Insomnia · Distraction | Trust brings · Calm · Hope · Confidence · Peace ·Courage · Selective attention |
| Receiving Junk Foods of Fear | Receiving Whole Foods of Trust |
| Focusing on threats and problems grows them à | Focusing on peace and solutions grows them |
| Identifying with my body that’s in danger à | Identifying with my soul now being empowered |
| Seeing fear as a curse to pull me down into harm à | Seeing fear as a gift to push me up into hope |
| Seeing a threat able to drive my anxiety up à | Seeing protection that’s able to calm my fears |
| Seeing I’m bound to and belong to my enemy à | Seeing I’m connected and belonging to friends |
| I believe I’m forsaken by all my protectors à | I believe I’m found & joined by my protectors |
| I can’t distract myself from my body’s pain à | Focusing on causes beyond me I won’t forsake |
| Seeing my enemy can ruin or steal best of me à | Seeing I can give my best away and not run out |
| Seeing my enemy transforming me into itself à | Seeing my enemy become like me, or leave me |
| Hearing words cursing, criticizing, weakening, limiting, degrading many people as losers à | Hearing words blessing, affirming, freeing,strengthening, honoring many people as winners |
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| Sharing Sickening Traits of Fear | Sharing Healthy Traits of Trust |
| My body freezes and can’t get anything done à | My body flows smoothly into helpful action |
| I ask people to help me flee from my enemy à | I carefully face my enemy to understand better |
| I ask people to help me fight & kill my enemy à | I teach people to forgive and bless my enemy |
| I tell others what my enemy is making me into à | I tell others who I am, always was, and will be |
| I ask others to deliver me from defeat à | I share with others the opportunity of victory |
| I feel discouraged, my misery seeks company à | I grow my encouragement by sharing it |
| I appeal to people, groups, institutions I idolize à | I appeal to invisible, higher power inside and out |
| My words long for the past and dread the future à | I confess my hopes for the here and now |
| I rail against my present circumstances à | I teach people to mentally travel in time & space |
| I tell others I feel sorry for myself and them à | I tell others what I’m thankful for, even now |
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Do I draw more fear or trust from my family and friends at home?
What fear or trust do I share with them?
Can I find healthier rules and role models for me to follow, ones that grow my trust and not my fear?
Considering my employer, coworkers, job requirements, does my work give me trust and strength, or drain it?
At work, how could I reset my boundaries for my words and deeds, to regain strength over worry?
Do I worry about how the outside world will affect my family and work, or do I find hope and courage there?
What changes can I make in how I relate to others (intake/output of traditional and social media)?
RAISING COURAGEOUS CHILDREN
WHO CARRY PEACE OF MIND
We can’t expect our children to find courage and peace of mind in fearful situations any more than we have found them ourselves. The two biggest powers we have against fear are choosing what to believe in ahead of time, and on the spot, what to pay attention to. Our beliefs serve as an inoculation of peace to prevent infection by those who would enslave us to fear. In the moment, our beliefs enable us to pay attention to sources of strength and hope that work like inhalers of courage, to give us confidence when we need it most.
We need to find healthy role models to follow, ones that grow not fear but faith. We will know them by their fruits – the lifestyles and attitudes of wellbeing. We lose our freedom when we believe and pay attention to anyone who puts out words and deeds that bring insecurity, worry, panic, doubt, confusion, and mistrust. By contrast, we gain freedom when we rely on people who trust in some higher power that brings peace, hope, confidence, courage, and calm.
Share your Past Anxieties
When news comes into your family of bullies in school and adult life, or of terrifying episodes of traumatic abuse, talk about how the victims could have inhaled courage. Tell children about your past and present troubles with these things. Share what happened when you relied too much on yourself, and on other self-centered people. Ask yourself where you go in a crisis to find security. (To learn more, ask your loved ones where they see you going for these things.) Children need to see you trusting in a higher source of protection than yourself, one that not only protects you, but indwells you, where it blesses you to bless others.
Teach them a Fire Drill
In elementary school, we learned to imagine and rehearse fires and practice getting to safety. Likewise you can teach children to imagine a fearful situation, take a couple of deep breaths, and access the strongest, sweetest spirit they have ever known (their grandmother, maybe you). Next they can listen to words of affirmation and comfort coming from that sweet strength. They can practice saying these words to themselves, maybe saving them into their journals or phones.
Fire drills can include meditation on positive affirmations. One formula some people use is a series of rehearsed behaviors recalled with the letters S-A-F-E: Support and Soothe yourself, Affirm your Assets and Alliances, Focus on the Future, and Engage your Encouragers. However they do it, practicing their fire drill will help children in the situations below.
Bullying at School
When someone tries to bully our children or their friends, they need the inoculating belief that they aren’t alone. They can learn to imagine protective authority coming to their aid. They can soon ask parents, grandparents, school officials, and other effective friends to discipline the bully. More importantly, they can teach children effective responses to make when bullied. For inhaling, pressure-relief responses they can use on the spot, here are ten practical tips:
All children need to be prepared to deal with being mistreated. For children not to be victimized by such incidents, they can learn to talk their feelings out with safe people, so they won’t take their anger at the abuser out on themselves and others. The inoculation of peace is to believe that victims of traumatic abuse can learn to take responsibility for their own healing.
The central lesson here is this: we can feel our feelings of fear and talk them out, so we can believe our beliefs that we are always safe and sound inside our bodies where the spirit of our higher power lives.
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Who do you rely on, to give you these soul foods?
Who can rely on you, to share yours with them?
Are the people you allow to help you living healthy lives,
leaving the world a better place for all?
Do they care about what’s best for everybody in the long run,
or just for people who care about them?
Are those you help healthy, and leaving the world a better place?
If they are or not, it’s contagious.
The key to healthy caring is discernment – we need to see both the sick and the healthy sides of everyone’s nature, especially our own, and give preference to what’s healthy, to whatever works out best for all in the long run. The sickening sides of ourselves are concerned with image management, the parts of our nature we can fix ourselves. That part helps those who will mostly help us, such as dependent loved ones who won’t much help themselves or others. The key toxic belief is that there is only so much love to go around, so we have to keep it close at hand, where we can reel it back in. The healthy belief is that the more we love expecting nothing in return, the more we find we have to give, with new love coming from within, and from other healthy people.
| Unhealthy Beliefs | Healthy Beliefs |
| When others get loved, that’s love I should have had. | If I rejoice in what love they get, my love grows. |
| When I celebrate what others lose, that’s free joy for me. | Feeling up when you’re down will make me sick. |
| I see many people dependent on me to rescue them. | All can seek and find the help and healing they need. |
| I admire people who take really good care of themselves. | I admire balanced concern for self and all others. |
| I love who I see you to be, more than I love the real you. | I love the real you and me, not the folks you see us as. |
| I don’t care much for people I don’t know or understand. | I let myself take care of hurting, helpless strangers. |
| I quickly get depleted helping people who are helpless. | As my circle of concern grows, I heal and grow. |
| On social media, I compare how others look to how I look. | On social media, I see what others feel and need. |
| Unhealthy Habits | Healthy Habits |
| I may despise or envy the good fortunes of others. | I rejoice when others do, and weep when they weep. |
| I over-indulge and over-protect my loved ones. | I lovingly respect others so I can let go joyfully. |
| I help only needy people who help themselves. | I help needy people build and enjoy a better life. |
| I neglect my feelings and needs, but not others’. | I take care of others, and of their caretaker (me). |
| I help others who let me do it my way, and thank me. | I help others when no one will know I’ve done it. |
| I will scratch your back if you scratch mine. | I enjoy helping those who can’t do anything for me. |
| I have trouble accepting and returning genuine love. | I receive unconditional love because I give it. |
| I like to criticize and correct people on social media. | My social media posts are kind and sociable. |
King Solomon said, “Guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” When a heart loves one person or group too much, a spring for loving self and others dries up inside. Young adults with this pattern have usually learned it from their parents. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The key to a healthy wellspring of love is balance. ~ Love your neighbor as yourself, and love yourself as you love others. ~ Love the neighbor who is balanced that way, more than the one who isn’t. ~ Watch out for the ones who love themselves or someone else too much or too little, including you, as they will drain your wellspring. ~ Keep your wellspring connected to the community that loved your heart first, as they know the well-balanced life the heart needs to stay healthy.
How can parents raise children with well-balanced hearts? Make sure that you show love in a balanced way to everyone in the home, including yourself. Don’t show more love to the ones who show the least love to themselves and others. Instead, do show some love to people most in need outside the home, such as the elderly, sick, less privileged, and those new to the community. And at each stage in your children’s development, be ready to teach them to love in balanced ways they will need at that age.
Preschool Years
Always indulging or picking up crying children will exhaust you both. Teach babies they may have to wait awhile for their desires to be met. Learning to tolerate a little discomfort is a way for them to gain strength. Their irrational fears will subside, if they’re given enough time to adjust, thus showing love themselves and for you. This works with fears like darkness, storms, quiet, the sight of new people, the taste of new foods, and being away from their parents. They can learn to distract and soothe themselves, thus developing a taste or tolerance for things they will be experiencing in life.
Elementary School
Friendships in grade school pull children’s hearts from their families. When they’ve been rejected, while you comfort them, give them more education than sympathy. The two keys are teaching them to give attention and affection wisely. “Why give your attention to them, and hope they’re nice to you? Pay them no mind, and let those snooty people have each other. Look for people who need a friend, for people that are nice to everybody. Be nice to them and see how that goes.” Tell them how these things worked well for you and others when you were young.
Middle and High School
Passions run higher now. Being rejected in love, left out of a clique, or worst of all, getting locked into a lopsided romance or clique are big hurts that most teens suffer. But not to worry – it’s better for them to learn from these experiences than to avoid them. They’ll learn when you ask (and keep asking) these questions: ~ “You are giving and forgiving a lot, not getting much back. Why?” ~ “Why do you deserve this?” ~ “Why not talk your feelings out with a healthy person, instead of acting them out with one who’s not?” ~ “Do you enjoy your life more or less than you did before you got into this?” ~ “How does this end?”
It doesn’t help to lecture or criticize teens, or those they love. Stories will help, especially from your own life. The best you can do is to guard your own heart. Show them how much you enjoy life, thanks be to your healthy, well-balanced wellspring heart.
LOVE 3 _________________________________________________________________________________________
RESPECT 4
The issues of honor, respect, and worth lie at the very cores of our identity. They are pivotal in motivating how we use all the life resources that that make us either sick or healthy. If I think that my gifts, desires, or accomplishments make me special or entitle me to special privileges, I will make myself and others sick by wanting more and more of their admiration. By contrast, if I think of myself as just a normal, regular person entitled to nothing special, then I am free to notice and appreciate special moments when they come along. I will experience them with all the wonder, gratitude, and joy of a child, rather than like a scheming, selfish person does, with shaky performance anxiety, or smug self-congratulation. The Greek word humus for soil is the root for our words human, humor, and humble, which all come from being down to earth.
Remembering that wellness is whatever does the most good and the least harm to the most people in the long run, it is healthy to believe that all people have unique existential value, that we all have potential for both good and evil, to grow up or down in a crisis, to become both sick and healthy, as we choose.
Let’s look at the chart of our nine basic soul foods, the neutral life experiences that come to us all. Depending how we seek out honor, esteem, respect, worth, and value, and how we share them, these resources can be used to make ourselves and others either sick or healthy. Looking at our two contrasting lists of what breeds illness or wellness, we can learn a lot about ourselves by asking questions like these:
Experiences that feed a person’s vitality we have called soul foods. Here are ten “A-foods” that signify honor, that can help us see where ours is coming in from, and going out to:
| Adoration | Attention | Acceptance | Attraction | Appreciation | |
| Admiration | Affection | Atonement | Approval | Acknowledgement | |
The key to health and wellness is to realize that the more we draw these from and give them to healthy people and groups, the more we and they have to give to others over time. When we draw and give them from people who aren’t well, we find we get drained. We have less and less to give, and they drain others as well. Whether in sickness or in health, we reap what we sow.
Below are contrasting mindsets and habits that will produce more illness or wellness in people, depending on how they use the neutral resources of honor, honor, and worth:
| Sickening Beliefs about Honor | Healthy Beliefs about Honor |
| I can easily tell who’s worth knowing, & who’s not. | Deep down, below the obvious, everyone is worth knowing. |
| All authority and government are corrupt, suspect. | We need healthy people in authority for the common good. |
| I can only trust my own experiences and beliefs. | I value the collective wisdom and welfare of others over mine. |
| I devalue your pain and weakness, and my own. | Pain, mystery and weakness draw and bond us to each other. |
| I cherish things that make me feel better than you. | Pride and shame are flip sides of every inflated self-image. |
| I love being in control so I can do things just right. | I’m never in control of others; perfection is an illusion too. |
| My life is what I have made it to be – I deserve it. | My good gifts, breaks, helpers make me humbly grateful. |
| I have no need for those who are beneath me. | I can’t do or become much without others’ love and help. |
| If I can see it, I can be it: I love image management. | Our own image management will deceive and betray us. |
| I want all the freedom and happiness I can get, and I’ll take yours to get more for myself. | We all deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; I’ll share mine to make more for all. |
| Sickening Habits with Honor | Healthy Habits with Honor |
| I post and vote my opposition to things I distrust. | I post and vote my support of things for the common good. |
| I give my honor and attention to those who earn it. | I try to give listening honor and common courtesies to all. |
| I hide and lie about my failures and weaknesses. | I share my failures and faults to atone for and learn from them. |
| I need my body, house, and car to look attractive. | I want to be honored for my relationships and life work. |
| I focus on things I can control to make them perfect. | I just do the best I can, and leave the results to my higher power. |
| I idolize admirable people, and I want to be idolized. | I seek approval from my loved ones and my conscience. |
| I only run with people I can use, admire, or enjoy. | I enjoy relating with folks in all walks of life, high and low. |
| I enjoy knowing how to judge the worth of others. | Who am I to judge you? And who are you to judge me? |
| This is a dog-eat-dog world: the big dogs rule. | This world has a created harmony I seek to line up with. |
| I hate being embarrassed, can’t stand for it to show. | I have learned to enjoy being human when I’m embarrassed. |
A wise man once challenged his mentees in a healthy community to “outdo one another in showing honor.” Even for type A’s driven to excel, that is a very healthy competition, and any group or relationship that embraces it will be kept full of life.
RAISING CHILDREN WHO ESTEEM THEMSELVES
(AND HONOR OTHERS TOO)
Kids who don’t receive time and undivided attention from their parents will struggle with self-confidence unless somebody else gives them these things. Whoever gives them self-worth this way often gives them their values and beliefs as well. So make sure that’s you.
The 10 A-pills
Honor, value, and esteem are shown by how we give and receive these ten expressions of honor: acceptance, acknowledgement, admiration, adoration, affection, approval, appreciation, atonement, attraction, and the first thing that starts it all, attention. These “A-pills” are the building blocks of self-esteem. Tracking where our children get their A-pills, and who they give theirs to, will explain a lot about the other choices they make. Teach them to lean into people who give them more of these A-pills than they expect to receive. That should include you. And likewise they need to beware those who expect to be given more than they seem to give. This might show them their idols are toxic.
During the Covid pandemic, wearing facemasks and how we talked about them were opportunities to show honor or dishonor, for both self and others. Manners are key to giving and receiving honor. Saying please and thank you brings help and self-honor our way. When someone dishonors us, we need to use mutually honoring comebacks, most effectively with a smile: “Are you asking or telling me?” or “That’s your opinion.”
Pre-school Years
Honor is taught in rules for play, how we treat our siblings and friends. Let’s teach our children how we enjoy life more when we are honest, kind, and fair. “The reason you’re bored/lonely/unhappy is that nobody wants to play with you. If you want to play with others, take turns, share, and show joy when other people win.” That grows their self-honor. We get what we give, we reap what we sow. A practical reason for the golden rule is that people tend to do unto us as we have done unto them.
Elementary School Years
Being kind to those who are kind to us is a start in building self-esteem. But being kind to those who can’t give us much back grows our self-worth even more. Give your children their favorite A-pills at this age whenever they are kind to new kids, teased kids, or those of different race, religion, or standard of living. Teach them to honor others not for what they have, but for what they have done with what they have. Ask your kids if they and their friends are making the world a better place to live for themselves, or for everyone they meet. That where your honor should clearly go.
Middle and High School Years
Perhaps your children act like they think too much of others (idolizing them), or too little of them (dehumanizing, demonizing). Or maybe in similar ways, they think too much or too little of themselves. The easiest way to find a happy medium with honor is to teach them an attitude of gratitude. Ask them to count their blessings, showing they appreciate what’s been given to them that they didn’t earn, that others don’t get. Ask them to do the same with those they idolize, looking at all they have been given. Ask them to consider the many disadvantages of those they look down on.
Those who think too much or too little of themselves have one thing in common – they are self-centered. Whether your children show arrogance or shame, they believe they are somehow special. No healthy person is going to treat them that way, so they need to get over themselves while they are still young.
It is all too common to see teenagers lose interest in other people. They reserve most of their honor for their love interests and their peer group. When most adolescents come into a peer group or love relationship, too often they start showing less honor for outsiders, especially for authority figures. Parents can track where the dishonor comes from, and make the teen’s contact with these sources more difficult. Whatever they abuse they can lose. Teens who want to earn back lost privileges, devices, and relationships will, if you require it, show more thoughtful words and deeds toward others.
Finally, we all need to learn to laugh at ourselves. It is healthy to enjoy teasing about our common human failures and limitations. If your child refuses to see this, you can show them how funny it is to watch a person who always takes themselves seriously. The point of this, of all these parenting tips, is for your children to show modest and moderate honor for themselves, and likewise for all other people. The smaller their circle of honor, the faster they will spin in circles. The wider that circle of honor gets, the farther they can go in life, and the more they will enjoy the journey.
RESPECT 4
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PURPOSE 5
FOCUSING OUR DRIVE AND ATTENTION:
HEALTHY INVESTMENTS OF TIME AND ENERGY
Science has clearly demonstrated entropy, the stark reality that our world is winding down, and slowly running out of energy. The sun and the planets are cooling from their cores, and all living things are deteriorating into death. Most people also believe that like our bodies, our world is running out of time as well. The four-dimensional time-space continuum is apparently running out of gas. So if the world is dying, is it therefore inevitable that we are all losing our liveliness?
Most people believe there is a fifth dimension, one that has something to do with sickness and health. It can hasten death, or inspire new life. How do some people seem to get livelier as they age? What is vitality? Where does it come from, and can we grow our experience of it? Beyond conceiving children, can we participate in an ongoing process of creating life? Can we tap into something that lets us co-create time, and energy? As our bodies age, can the soul within be getting younger?
We have many choices regarding what to believe about vitality vs. entropy. And those beliefs and mindsets strongly influence many lifestyle choices about how we behave. These choices clearly influence how long we live, and more importantly, how much we and others enjoy our lives. The key to experiencing a fullness of time and energy is living with a fruitful purpose. Here are some ways you can retrain your brain to guide and motivate healthier choices.
| Sickening Beliefs about Vitality | Healthy Beliefs about Vitality |
| If you can’t do something right, don’t bother to get started. I can’t, so I won’t. | Do the best you can, and don’t worry about the outcome beyond your control. We can, and we will. |
| Why do something you don’t want to do? Wait until you feel like it. | If it’s important enough, find time for it today, and put your heart into it. |
| When I feel threatened or insignificant, it only makes sense to hunker down and chill. | When I’m down on myself, I refocus on my purpose, and start living for it. |
| Apathy asks, Who cares?, and What difference does it make? | Passion flows from thinking through to find good answers to those questions. |
| Lethargy avoids and laments work, thinking it takes time and energy away from rest and play. | Enthusiasm realizes work, rest, and recreation can all empower each other. |
| Procrastination wastes time by believing we’ll always have plenty of time later on. | Opportunity says time is short, so let’s make the best of it: carpe diem! |
| Depression sees talent and opportunity as curses, or even temptations from evil forces. | Hope sees these as blessings, gifts from others, and maybe from a loving, generous, helpful creator. |
| Burn-out sees my work as economic necessity, an exhausting bondage to my controlling boss. | Zest sees my employment as voluntary service to my boss and those we serve. |
| Passivity believes that exercise is too painful, and might injure me. | Activity believes being sedentary is too painful, and itwill injure me. |
| Every investment of my limited time and energy leaves me with less. | When I put first things first, I have better focus and drive for other things too. |
| Sickening Habits with Vitality | Healthy Habits with Vitality |
| Taking pleasure in mooching off others, getting others to do things for us | Taking pride in taking good care of myself and other people |
| I love being entertained by people doing athletic, charming, dramatic, and exciting things. | I am growing my ability to do all those things in my own life. |
| I enjoy relaxing, especially when I avoid unpleasant relationships and responsibilities. | I relax as a part of enjoying my active responsibilities and relationships. |
| I’m often tired and distracted before the day even starts. | I’m often full of energy and focus, even when I come home after a long day. |
| I’m often seeking my own happiness in selfish pleasures, right now in the short run. | I’m often trying to create the good life for myself and others, down the road. |
| My life feels like a treadmill, staying busy, multi-tasking to look like I’m getting things done. | I leave myself free time to be spontaneous and focused on one thing at a time. |
| I enjoy imagining how passive, residual income can help me retire completely from work at a young age. | The good I do for others means as much to me as money I make for my family. |
| My best friends are the ones who share my interests and passions for my leisure life. | My best friends are the ones who work hard to leave the world a better place. |
| Most of my hopes and prayers are for things to go my way, to go better for me and my loved ones. | Most of my hopes are for me to do the right thing, so life and good karma bless me and others. |
| Other people find it sickening the way I work, rest, and play. | My habits of work, rest, and play leave behind a healthy footprint of wellbeing. |
The key to having more time and energy is the enthusiastic pursuit of a compelling purpose, one that makes the world a better place for both others and ourselves. We all need to believe that in a life with healthier experiences that only grow in us as we give them away. The ideal higher power for this purpose includes the spirit of love, joy, and peace, forever providing wellsprings of enthusiasm for life, both within and around us. These are our fountains of youth.
RAISING CHILDREN WHO AREN’T LAZY:
WISE INVESTMENTS OF TIME, TALENT, AND ENERGY
Laziness steals from people. It takes away their time, energy, optimism, confidence, spontaneity, joy, mental focus, and their zest for life. In return, it leaves them with more depression, boredom, discouragement, and addictions. It damages life for everyone around them.
Children naturally make excuses for their laziness. Most parents don’t want lazy children, but they often believe these excuses, and start doing their kids’ homework or chores for them. Instead, you can teach your children that everyone’s opportunities and abilities can be used to leave them and others in healthier world. Just as with visible gifts, the more time and energy your kids put into the invisible gifts of positive attitudes, the more they will enjoy them. Adults will enjoy them too: they’ll coach up your children’s abilities, and give them more opportunities.
Children need their parents to model healthy attitudes and lifestyles, balancing work, rest, and recreation, celebrating how each is needed to enhance the others. Let them see your work be a vocation that along with the money gives you joy, friendships, challenge, and fulfillment from helping others.
Preschool Years
If toddlers who can speak are indulged for whining, they won’t ever learn what they want, or how to ask for it. This laziness stops when parents say “Don’t whine. Use your words. Ask me for what you need.” And if whining continues, parents need to calmly yet firmly close a door between them, and stay disengaged until words are used appropriately. This requires finding the peace and courage not to cave to your anxiety. Preschoolers really want to please you, so tell them how proud and happy you are with every helpful, creative, and self-reliant thing they do.
Elementary School
Here are some verbal comebacks for children’s lazy behavior. For their boredom: “I enjoyed playing with you before, but I need to get back to work. You can figure out what you need to do now.” For procrastinating chores: “The sooner you get started, the easier and more fun it will be.” For fatigue: “If you’re so tired, you can go to bed earlier tonight.” Be consistent in giving them what their behavior says they need, not what their words demand. More mature 10-year-olds can do chores for small allowances.
Middle School
These are the best years to give your kids a work ethic and an attitude of stewardship. Help them to see their talents, passions, and opportunities as gifts (see the second paragraph above). Manage your own passions and opinions to show your children both love and respect (see the last paragraph below). Teach them that until they learn to use their time and talents to bless themselves and others, both now and down the road, they will be disappointed in life. Teach them that money earned works the same way: money that’s invested and shared with others will grow, and what’s indulged selfishly will never seem to be enough.
For young adolescent boredom, you could tell them to think of all the ways they could bless others and themselves right now. For exhaustion, tell them that mental and physical exercise creates energy. Too busy: tell them to write down where all their time goes, and explain to you if they think the big chunks are really the most important. Screen addictions: tell them that their phone/video games have taken them away from life and other people. You’ll give their screens back when they’ve learned to enjoy real life again. Resentment for your discipline: Tell them, “It’s not me you don’t like, it’s yourself. You’ll like yourself better when you stop wasting your time and talent.”
High School
Some verbal comebacks for boredom in late adolescence: “What you’re doing won’t be worth much, and it won’t be much fun for you either, until you put your heart, mind, body, and soul into it.” Apathy: “You say you don’t care, but deep down, we both know you do.” Wanting to quit something important: “Your family and best friends are proud of you for trying and learning new ways to make the world a better place for us all.”
In short, remember that when you respond to laziness by being tense, critical, or guilty, your children are downloading their negativity into you, and that only rewards it. Instead, be calm, brief, and pleasant, and then disengage with a smile until they bring themselves out of it. This is the best way to inspire and reward their enthusiasm for life.
PURPOSE 5
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MERCY 6
Grace has an army of powerful cousins: war, blame, hurt, pain, anger, and criticism. They are all neutral resources. We can choose whether we use them to fight for a more sickening world, or for a healthier one. And either way we choose, we put out what we take in. We become what we eat – garbage in, garbage out, and healthy in, healthy out. We also reap what we sow. Whatever we put out is going to grow and come back into us. So let’s see how to make healthy choices with these issues, in both what we allow to impress us, and how we express ourselves.
In my parent-child RELATIONSHIPS,
past and present, and in all of life,
Do I remind to my loved ones of their limits, failures, and mistakes?
Or do I more often remind them of their best moments from the past, and their good potential for the future?
Do I see parents as having the power, authority, and responsibility for controlling children, teaching them by forceful consequences?
Or do I see parents more with the job of protecting and loving children, teaching more by modeling and realistic consequences?
With my siblings, peers, and friends, and in all of life,
Do I look for the faults of others, seeking ways to control them?
Or do I look primarily for my own faults, seeking ways I can grow in self-control?
Do I take things personally, believing my pain is what someone did to me?
Or do I avoid taking offense, by trying to accept that people are who they are?
With my beloved, my mate, my
most significant other, and in all of life,
Do I mostly absorb anger and injustice in public, so that I naturally discharge it in private at home with my partner?
Or do I mostly discharge my anger in public, and direct it against others who would threaten my loving partnership at home?
Do I save my anger up for when I see the other person hurting me, to discharge it so I can get even?
Or do I express anger carefully and constructively, when I see the other person hurting themselves or others?
In my online interactions with the public, and in all of life,
With the social media, news feeds, music, movies, TV, and video games I prefer,
Do I take in information and experiences that inspire hate, violence, and slander?
Or do I take in things that inspire mercy, grace, forgiveness, civility, and patience?
Do I fight for divisiveness and revenge, to get more power for my people?
Or do I fight for peace and justice for all people?
When I express myself in public through phone, text, or social media,
Do I mostly point out the faults and mistakes of others?
Or do I draw the attention of others to healthy people, groups, choices, and experiences?
Do I mostly point out what makes us all fear and hate each other (our differences)?
Or do I mostly point out what makes us all human (our similarities)?
In all my relationships,
When I feel enmeshed with someone, or estranged from them,
Do I use anger to push us together or apart?
Or do I use it to fight for a healthier, reconciled relationship, with healthier boundaries?
When I have power struggles and disagreements,
Do I seek to get my way (fighting for this against that, so I will either win or lose)?
Or do I seek a better way for all concerned (for both this way and that, so we can both win something)?
When I feel hurt or offended by someone,
Do I react quickly, to relieve and decompress myself, to comfort myself?
Or do I react slowly, so I can figure out how relieve, comfort, and decompress the relationship?
When I see someone else being mean and hateful,
Do I lash out at their behavior, and criticize their motive or character?
Or do I show anger at merely their behavior, and show love for who they really are in most other situations?
I find most children at times blow a gasket when they believe their parents are being unfair to them -- as if the child and parent could agree on what’s impartial! Why do the words “That’s not fair!” make us all so furious? Anger is the normal, adaptive response to something that doesn’t seem fair.
So what would be a practical, understandable definition of what’s fair? Let’s define fair as what does the most good and the least harm to everyone in the long run. In this view, anger isn’t good or bad. It’s not sick or healthy. It all depends on whether it’s used to fight for something that benefits more people. And we all need mercy, so when punishing mistakes, we need to communicate the terms and reasons for this punishment in merciful ways.
Healthy anger fights for everybody to have a decent shot at the good life, the honest and kind life that everybody needs, that money can’t buy. A healthy expression of anger draws all of our attention to an injustice, and motivates us all to look for solutions that benefit everyone.
Before our children are teenagers, we need to be careful not to reward their selfish, demanding expressions of anger by giving into them. The tantrums of 6-year-olds may seem harmless or entertaining. But when 16-year-olds think they know what’s best and can’t make it happen, they explode, and a 16-year-old’s tantrum can really hurt a lot of people. So let’s don’t indulge children’s tantrums, screaming, threats, or harsh criticisms by trying to appease them. That just uses up a lot of tomorrow’s peace to buy a little bit for today.
And best not go the other way, by cutting down your child. Better to ask children what’s wrong in a given situation, what they want, what they think would be more fair to themselves and others, what solutions to conflict would be more beneficial for everybody, both now and later on.
Best to be slow to feed your children answers to these difficult questions. Continuing to ask questions draws out better and better answers, and teaches them to use their heads and hearts to solve problems. They need you to do nothing for them until they come up with something, something better for everyone. And you’ll need to keep on doing this when they are older.
Here are some other facts for you to believe, teach, and model for teenagers:
Healthy Expressions of Grace and Anger
Responses like these require mercy, forgiveness. We can’t usually give that until we receive it, from somewhere. We can’t receive it until we ask for it, and then receive it by forgiving ourselves. After that, the more we give mercy, the more we can receive it, and the more of it we can keep giving. Maybe time to prime that forgiveness pump? Rather than asking people we have hurt to give it to us, wouldn’t it work better to ask for grace from those who seem to have plenty to give? Forgiven people are forgivin’ people.
In life, and in every healthy family, there must be a place for anger and blame, and also for expressions of for resolutions that help us all find a better life.
MERCY 6
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SEXUALITY 7
Sexual activity has a strong effect upon the brain, much like taking a drink of alcohol has. Both activities set off a cocktail of cerebral hormones that pleasure our bodies, loosen up our inhibitions, and flood us with a strong sense of well-being.
These effects are widely known, but a fourth one is more important, and seldom talked about. We develop a strong attraction to whoever and whatever we are experiencing alongside sex, and over time, we develop a strong bond with them. It used to be called “becoming one flesh,” and it happens automatically, subconsciously. Many doubt this is true, and few understand how this bonding occurs.
The process of classical conditioning was discovered, named, and famously demonstrated by Dr. Ivan Pavlov with his dogs. When he rang a bell right before they were fed, they soon started salivating and getting excited at the sound of the bell, no matter when it rang. They came to desire and bond with the bell, a previously “neutral stimulus,” because it seemed to bring them all the wonders associated with the highlight of their day. We come to desire and bond with whoever we drink with. In the same way, and even moreso, we come to desire and bond with whoever we have sex with. We long to connect ourselves to whatever or whoever we believe to be the source of our sexual enjoyment.
From adolescence on, whether we have known it or not, we have been responsible for choosing who and what we bond with sexually. When it comes to sex, we are all dogs. But we are all Dr. Pavlov too! Our bodies are dogs, and our souls are their trainers. Through classically conditioning ourselves, with virtually none of us being told about it, we have trained ourselves to desire and bond with whatever people, mindsets, and situations we have allowed to stimulate our sexual activity. Most of the popular choices for sexual stimulation today are unhealthy ones, as they bring people over time more sickness than wellness.
For example, our culture teaches us to separate sex from spirituality, and to experience sex more like animals do. “Purely natural, spontaneous” sex allows only other physical instincts into awareness. When we shut everything else out of our sex life except our animal instincts, our sexual experience will include some sickening fruits of the flesh. These often include deception, shame, fear, and of course lust -- bonding with and idolizing the object of our sexual desire. This poisons our wellbeing by increasing our appetites for other sickening mindsets and lifestyles. For example, without believing that we can revise and redirect our desires, we come to believe that we can’t be satisfied without getting what we desire, as if we were animals. We can teach ourselves to enjoy both the desire itself, and its fulfillment—waiting can be fun.
Have you ever thought about retraining yourself to use your sexuality to help yourself desire and bond with a loving creator, and with healthier fruits of the spirit (listed in bold below)? Thirty centuries of religious teaching has taught this, validated by other wisdom streams from philosophy, science, and common sense. All these have taught us that things like honesty, trust, humility, compassion, peacemaking, resourcefulness, enthusiasm, and physical fitness are aspects of both sexual and personal integrity. Only when we have personal integrity, when we are independently comfortable in our own skin, can we experience relational integrity with a loved one.
The four wisdom streams just mentioned have warned us not to waste our sexuality on recreational pleasures, or escapes from responsibility, relationship, and reality. Sadly, those experiences are more available to us in our youth than are romantic relationships with a healthy partner. By contrast, wisdom teaches us to save our sexuality for later, using it to celebrate and consummate our loyalty and intimate companionship with a healthy life partner in marriage. We will need all those magnetic and healing powers of our sexuality when we forge a life partnership with another person, in marriage. Way more than some private recreational pleasure, marriage does a great deal more good for more people in the long run, including current and future spouses and children. It encourages us not to regard the beloved as a source of all that is good, but rather as a resource, a channel who can merely share things they are receiving. Only by seeing a love relationship this way can we experience any partnership gratefully as a gift.
Below are contrasting mindsets and habits that will produce more illness or wellness in people, depending on how they use the neutral resources of sexual (and gender) identity, style, and orientation:
| Popular Beliefs and Lifestyles | Healthy Beliefs and Lifestyles |
| Gender orientation and style are genetically fixed. | We can train ourselves to enjoy new choices, ask for help. |
| After 12 or 13, we all need sexual activity/release. | Abstinence shows us that sex is a tamable desire, not a need. |
| Sharing my turn-ons online brings them to me. | My sexual mystique and modesty online bring me health. |
| Forbidden fruit is extra tasty, exciting, rewarding. | Violating trust in a nonsexual relationship harms like incest. |
| Erotic, seductive sex is hotter, so go for it now! | Only in committed marriage will erotic heat not burn us. |
| Paying for sex keeps it safe, automatic, impersonal. | Any money exchange in sex objectifies all its participants. |
| Sex is most exciting when it goes wild without limits. | Being free within limits protects, grows our healthier freedoms. |
| Sex gives relief from boredom, loneliness, and shame. | For a short while, but then they come back harder than ever. |
| My body image improves when people are attracted to me, so posting my attractive pictures helps that. | My image of my body depends on what I believe about it, how I treat it, and how I allow others to see and treat it. |
| Showing our bodies online builds self-esteem, as the more likes you get, the more you like yourself. | Going public with our private parts lets them be passed around by abusive trolls who use and degrade us, in public. |
| Sharing our bodies sexually is how we create love, because without sex, love can’t be real or lasting. | By saving full sex and nudity for fully committed marriage, we’ll feel more safe, special, beautiful every year we live. |
| Hungry love seeks to consume experiences of love, affection, beauty, desire. It does, and cheapens them. | Healthy love shares experiences of love, affection, beauty, and desire for each other, celebrating and protecting them. |
| Love will make you lose control, obsess, have mood swings, tolerate pain, and rationalize idolizing, deceiving, and being dependent on each other [all qualities of addictions]. | Healthy sexual love inspires in both parties’ personal growth of freedom, calm, honesty, gratitude, spiritual depth, loyalty, self-confidence, support, awareness of beauty, and balancing safety and risk [all qualities of personal integrity]. |
Let’s define healthy as what does the most good and the least harm to the most people in the long run. By this definition,here are some beliefs about healthy Love, Sex, and Gender which teenagers don’t often believe to be true, but which most of them will realize as true when they’re a generation older:
If your teenager wants you to bless or approve a love relationship, you need to ask them how they would solve these problems if they resurface in the relationship. If their solutions involve no outside help, you can ask: how would you know if your love relationship made you lose interest in what you need to solve problems like this? What would you do about it? Have you two discussed this?
General Guidelines for Parents
Until your children are 21, have been living stably and responsibly out of the home, and are on their own financially, you can use these guidelines for your conversations.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Until they know you care, they won’t care what you know or want.
Acknowledge and appreciate their feelings, thoughts, beliefs, values, decisions, and even public confessions of who they are, but you do not need to say whether you agree, will support, or feel good about them. You respect their privacy, and you respect your own privacy as well.
When they say they are sure they won’t change their mind and heart and will on this matter, it is OK to say, “Your mind, heart, and life become bigger each year, and each year you have new things to bring to this (gender identity/love relationship/etc.). The longer you wait to promise yourself you won’t change your lifestyle, the better you will get along with yourself down the road.”
Finally, respect that these issues of romance, sex, and gender are very personal. So have been all the other eight issues written about here: truth, safety, respect, caring, mercy, money, purpose, and health. Talking about personal things works better when we try not to be preachy or pushy with our children, or with our grandchildren. We can push questions, but not so much answers. Let’s give ways for trust to be earned. In this spirit, you and your family can make a few healthier choices down the road.
SEXUALITY 7
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MONEY 8
You love people, and use money for stuff, don’t you? But how often do you love money, and use people for stuff? Most family breadwinners think they work to support family life. But does your family at home experience you living for your work, and bringing home to them the burned-out left-overs of your life? We all like to think we are investing our money in what’s most important, that our budget accurately reflects what our hearts care most about.
We like to think we’ve made sure that our treasure just follows our hearts. But Jesus was correct in teaching us that the reverse is also true. Our hearts do follow our treasures, so we need to follow the money too. We all need to examine where our dollars are taking our minds and hearts, and with them, our marriages and children. If we ask them, will they believe we are supporting healthy endeavors out there? Will we find they are proud of how they see our time and money leaving the world a better place for all?
Just like our checkbooks, our schedules need to be kept in balance too, so they both show what should be the priority of our private over our public life. How can we tell?
If all these questions are leading you to see laziness and selfishness in your life that don’t seem to square with your ideals, what could be causing this? Most likely, it’s el greedo: valuing your money and possessions more than your relationships with your family and friends. When we provide for them, whether by earning money or spending it carefully on what they need, do we provide them with ourselves, our time, our minds, and our hearts? When we protect them from harm, beyond safe housing and transportation, do we protect them from our worst words and choices, from their enemies, within and without? Do we care for them enough to listen to what’s really happening in their lives, to hear how they feel about it, and what they need from us to feel safe? Your spouse and children may want to tell you, “I don’t care what you know until I know that you care. Show me you want to understand me, then I might want to understand what you’re trying to teach me.”
` These are challenging questions that most people have been reluctant to look at very closely. We usually don’t until something is really hurting and worrying us. Below are contrasting mindsets and habits that will produce more illness or wellness in people, depending on how they use the neutral resources of money, and the services and possessions it can buy:
| Sickening Beliefs and Lifestyles | Healthy Beliefs and Lifestyles |
| At month’s end, my credit cards aren’t paid off. | I wait for things, so I have no credit card debt. |
| Financially I support one or more adults who should by now be able to support themselves. | When adult friends and family get themselves into trouble, I give them of myself, and not much money. |
| There’s no will to carry out my wishes after I die. | I’m glad that my will shall do much good after I die. |
| I use money to buy affection or avoid rejection. | I give acceptance and affection, which come back to me. |
| I spend on pain-killing escapes from reality. | I’ll pay money to help me embrace pain as a teacher. |
| I like people rich enough to waste money freely. | It really grieves me to be around money being wasted. |
| Buying new saves me time looking in storage. | I know and use what’s on hand before buying new. |
| When asked what I’m worth, I know what I have. | When asked what I’m worth, I realize that I’m priceless. |
| I lie at home about what I say and do at work; I lie at work about what I say and do at home. | I don’t mind when family interrupts me at work, or vice- versa: as the same guy 24-7, I can change gears easily. |
| I have no healthy role model for managing money. | I have known a healthy role model for managing money. |
| I am paying out for my past sins of consuming. | I am saving money for my future consumer needs. |
| If it’s even real, I don’t care to know what’s causing global warming, or what it’s causing. | For the sake of future generations of my family and my planet, I am leaving a rather light carbon footprint. |
| I give my most delightful self to the public. | I enjoy my best moments with my family and friends. |
| I‘m always thinking how to make more money. | I think of better ways to save, spend, and share it too. |
| I give or lend to those who will give back to me. | I enjoy giving anonymously to people in need. |
| I live to work; I expect my family to support it. | I work to live, expecting coworkers to support my family. |
| I’ve been accused of spoiling and enabling my family by over-indulging, overprotecting them. | I’m slow to indulge or protect my family because I want them to learn to enjoy work and solving their problems. |
Healthy lifestyle choices are facilitated by believing that our money and possessions are not ultimately ours, but that we are just taking care of them for awhile in this life. We are just passing through, and we will have growing gratitude now and later on if we are good stewards now of what has been entrusted to us.
Now let’s look at ways to teach these habits to your children.
Preschool Years\
Starting when we are young, we need to learn four basic lessons about money and possessions:
To help your children learn, repeat these lessons aloud gently and often, smile and look them in the eye, control consequences consistently, and live by these lessons yourself. If you struggle to practice what you preach, you can use yourself as a negative example. Teach yourself lessons right out loud in front of them, and ask them to help teach you – they’ll love it!
Primary and pre-adolescent years
When children want or need to play with something, instead of fetching it for them, ask where it’s supposed to be, where they put it. If they won’t or can’t find it, they have too much stuff. It’s time to involve your child in giving some of their things to people less fortunate, people who would enjoy and take better care of them.
When selfish, lazy kids whine for more toys, explain: “There’s no room on the floor for more toys. We buy you what you need. Things you want come on Christmas and birthdays. If you want something sooner, you can save your money and buy it for yourself.” To teach them give and take, buy more things only for kids who share and put their toys away.
Kids this age should be given an allowance, perhaps based how faithfully and cheerfully they do their chores. You might give a dollar for every week of a child’s age, keeping their money for them in a safe but visible place.
Middle and High School
As the age increases, so should the allowance and the responsibilities. Now is a good time for them to begin giving to those less fortunate, through a local charity, church, or by giving anonymously to people they know, which you can help them do.
Starting high school is a good time for them to start using savings accounts and debit cards that can’t overdraw. Go over statements with your child every month, giving praise for good choices more than criticism for bad. To dramatize how interest works, some parents add 1% to savings accounts after months when it they’ve increased. Others open a mutual-fund account to show how fast that grows. If they want more money, they can wash the car, wash windows, do supper, cut grass.
Here are some lessons teenagers can learn:
When adult children Move Out, or Move Back In
After age 18, if they move out and responsibly pursue college or the military, it won’t hurt to pay part or maybe all of their expenses for car, insurance, tuition, food, and lodging. Let them know you will withdraw this support for bad grades, for not letting you see their grades, or for dropping out. This gives them great incentive to continue learning financial responsibility.
To come back home, an adult child (AC) would need to propose the purpose and terms for living with you, so no one gets taken advantage of. Here are seven items to put into a contract:
Goals – specific goals for their own behavior. Then for each goal,
Steps required – each action the AC needs to take.
External threats – people, circumstances, developments that would threaten the goals.
Internal threats – what habits, choices and attitudes of the AC could undermine each goal?
Internal assets – needed skills, knowledge, qualities, resumes, references required, and how to get these.
Budget of expenses – chores done can be compensated. Save the rent to give back when they leave.
Signatures and witnesses – treat the final agreement as terms of a mutually binding contract.
Finally for all ages, if your children won’t listen or learn these things from you, ask them who they would listen to. Then share and discuss this article with a person they would believe.
MONEY 8
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TRUTH 9
HOW AND WHY IT PAYS TO BE
HONEST AND TELL THE TRUTH
| Denial: lying, breaking promises, denying one's limitations, lacking consensual reality | Honesty: telling the truth, keeping promises, lifelong learning, consistency in conduct |
| Denial brings ~ Lying ~ Cheating ~ Delusions ~ Two-facedness ~ Closed mind ~ Ignorance | Honesty brings ~ Character ~ Wisdom ~ Curiosity ~Common sense ~ Truth-seeking ~ Authenticity |
QUESTIONS to ask about Honesty:
Would I rather others admire and fear me, or know and love me?
Underneath all my highs and lows, who is the real me, my deep-down true self? Who knows me like this?
Did my parents punish lying more or less than other misbehaviors? Do I do the same? Why, or why not?
How has it made me feel when others lied to me to protect themselves, and said they did it to protect me?
Is my mind closed about my beliefs, or do I keep looking for confirmation in different sources of truth?
Have the things I most believe in stood the test of time? Has history shown it endures, because it’s real?
Most importantly, when I list the people and organizations I most trust to tell me what’s real and true, and when I look at the chart of what’s healthy and what’s sickening, how healthy are they?
IMPORTANT BELIEFS
FOR BEING TRUTHFUL
My selfish self wants me to be comfortable and happy in the short run, not caring as much about others or the future. My false self has to lie, to hide how selfish and small I am. It doesn’t accept its limitations, so it’s often ill at ease. My chameleon ego shows people who I think I am, instead of who they realize I am. Instead of admitting my mistakes to earn back others’ trust that I’m being honest, my ego tries to get others to admit their mistakes, hoping they’ll try to earn back my trust. It wastes a lot of time on things that matter only to me, and only for a short time.
My true self sees and wants what’s best for everyone in the long run. The real me can be myself at all times, which shows that I see others as we all are. When I don’t fulfill a promise, instead of making excuses, I make amends: I say I am sorry for making the wrong promise, and then make a better one that I am able to keep. I was taught there are many sources of truth that will support and confirm each other, so I keep examining them. They include science, the arts, journalism, history, democratic jurisprudence (trial by jury), reason (common sense), natural law and observation, the constitution and the government authority it provides (law and order), philosophy, and popular opinion. When I consult them carefully, I will always find a consensus that confirms what’s lasting, real, and true. I realize easily what matters most, and seek guidance from others who have this same wisdom.
SEVERE COSTS
of lying to myself or others
Losing my way often because of my bad maps of reality; exhaustion from defending those maps and avoiding the briefer but greater pain of seeing how much I’ve missed; keeping up with my lies; longing to be trusted (like the little boy crying wolf); finding no one I trust or admire is with me in my filter bubble; believing my own lies; being defensive when criticized; not understanding why I can’t live up to my own standards; feeling like a fraud, afraid of being exposed.
SOLID BENEFITS
of being honest with myself and others
Remembering the word trust comes from the word truth, and honesty from honor, when I say that I trust you with the truth, I honor us both with my honesty. The truth sets me free, to change my mind in response to new evidence. Being a lifelong learner gives me a life that’s interesting, to me and others. Admitting my weaknesses and mistakes allows me to receive enough forgiveness to give it freely back to others, and to myself. I don’t have to discount the love, respect, and understanding of other healthy people, because they know and like the real me, warts and all.
My deceitfulness feeds my sick, dying, make-believe self, which can only feed the same in others.
My honesty feeds my real, healthy, fruitful self, and from my fullness, I feed the wellness of others.
Issues of Truth, Reality, Authority, Validity, Power
Which people do I believe about what’s true, real, lasting and powerful?
What makes me believe they know?
And which organizations do I believe are the most trustworthy and truthful?
Why do I trust them?
Do these people and organizations ever admit their mistakes, realize the harm they’ve done, and use this pain to motivate themselves to change their ways?
Or do they just point out the mistakes of others?
Are my truth sources trusted by my family at home, by those I work with and work for in public?
What authorities do I honor with my news filters, my time and money? Which do I reject? Why them?
When I list the people and organizations I most trust to guide me, the ones I tell others to trust, if I look at the chart to see healthy and sickening fruits, how healthy are my guides? How healthy am I?
| Receiving JunkFoods of Denial | Receiving Whole Foods of Honesty |
| I pay little attention to seeking new informationà | In all settings I’m seeking to learn new things |
| I get new information from similar, limited sources à | I enjoy seeking different views on things I see |
| My one authority for truth needs no confirmation à | I seek confirmation in various wisdom streams |
| I believe I don’t need to learn or grow any more à | I seek first to understand, then to be understood |
| I believe everybody lies and covers up to get ahead à | Yes many do lie, but I feel a few can be trusted |
| I arrange my life in very separate compartments à | I align with the same values/beliefs everywhere |
| Listening for what my itching ears want to hear à | Listening for painful truths that will set me free |
| Sharing Sickening Fruits of Denial | Sharing Healthy Fruits of Honesty |
| If it would hurt your feelings, I won’t give you criticism | I criticize to help you and others, now and later |
| I believe admitting mistakes shows weakness | I admit mistakes to repair damages to others and me |
| I hear only my own criticism, speak only criticism to others | I take criticism publicly and I process it privately |
| My lies are validated by what they do for me | If a lie works to fool others, it will also fool me |
| I show only my best to all so I’ll be admired | I show all to some so I’ll be known and loved |
My deceitfulness feeds my sick, dying, make-believe self,
which can only feed the same in others. à
My honesty feeds my real, healthy, fruitful self, and from
my fullness, I feed the wellness of others.
RAISING HEALTHY CHILDREN
WHO KNOW AND TELL THE TRUTH
Behind everything we’ve been taught about truth, we can find an awful lot of truth:
Don’t tell lies. Virtually all countries have legal codes which agree this makes for healthy societies.
Honesty is telling the truth to other people. Integrity is telling myself the truth. Spencer Johnson
Every lie is two lies: the lie we tell others and the lie we tell ourselves to justify it. Robert Brault
We are as sick as our secrets. 12- step recovery
Honesty is the best policy. Shakespeare
Preschool and Elementary Years
A good parent might say, “You wish you hadn’t broken that. But you did. You wish you could forget you broke that. But I want you to remember, so you can learn not to do that again. You wish I would not know that you broke that, or that I wouldn’t care, but I know, and here’s why I care. . . .”
During these years, children need to learn from The Boy who Cried Wolf. Punish lies by not believing a lying child later, the next time they may be trying to avoid punishments they deserve. Don’t believe things if the evidence and the track records indicate otherwise. Our discipline should prepare children for how things will go for them in life: Actions have consequences. When you abuse a privilege, you lose a privilege. That’s life.
Middle and High School
At this age, friends and peer groups sometimes create experiences that teach sickening habits and attitudes to our children, and give them a false reality, about what’s real, what works, and what’s important. They need us to correct these deceptions, and they need to learn how they can tell those things for themselves. Tell them it’s all about what will make them and other people sick or healthy.
Ask children to identify what types of sources they are using to determine what’s true or real.
Then tell them where you get your truth, and why.
The best sources of truth
for all concerned in the long run are, in order:
Spiritual truths: the common teachings of all major religions traditions have stood the test of time;
Physical/natural truths, found in objective, academic/scientific research, and
Socially determined truths, found in laws, courts, elections, and healthy polls and journalism.
The next best sources of truth:
Their parents’ reality (yes, that’s you -- they know you’re biased, so it’s best to admit it. It’s also best to ask them to say where they think you aren’t being honest, and then admit your own lies), and
Their own mental and emotional reality (their feelings, memories, opinions, and beliefs, which are biased like yours, but even moreso to indulge and protect themselves).
The worst sources of truth:
Sources with vested interests - The most biased set of beliefs and “facts” are from people who are even more motivated to lie outright than the healthy personal sources just described. For example, advertisements are designed to make money. Campaign spots are paid to get someone elected. Online posts make more money now or later if they get more hits. Anything using pornography to get or keep your attention is downright evil and dangerous.
As a parent, you will be tempted to explain what you know and believe about those biased subcultures. But it works better to ask adolescent and young adult children to research this for themselves. Ask them to tell you what they have found out about where their “authorities” are getting their truth. This can be really interesting. If they don’t come back and tell you what their research has found, they are demonstrating they’re just believing what makes them feel good about themselves, the way preschoolers do.
Finally, you will be more credible to your child if you seriously ask yourselves as parents these questions:
Do we keep our promises, and make only promises that need to be kept?
Do we lie to avoid facing the truth about ourselves? Do we admit it when we do?
Do we learn from painful truths that set us free from our illusions and bad habits?
Do we show submission to authority for truth, power, reality, and validity that’s higher than ours?
Do we check the facts about what’s going on in the world by consensus of different sources?
Who do we trust to know what’s most important, what will last? Why do we trust them?
Do we spend too much time with realities that are virtual, instead of virtuous and real?
What groups, leaders, or celebrities are we most loyal to? Do we know what they’re loyal to?
Do we lecture our children, or do we ask them all these questions, to draw the truth out of them?
When you explain what you learned from asking yourselves these questions, you have earned the right to be believed. If your child doesn’t answer the questions, and doesn’t believe you either, explain that until they do, they are forfeiting their seat at the table where their privileges and discipline are decided. That seat has to be earned by adult behavior. Until then, you will set the consequences for their actions without their input.
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