Some reflections on raising kids

I remember a co-worker observing the lavish lives of family back home and commenting on how hard it will be for those kids to ever serve God in a cross-cultural setting - assuming, as is often the case, that saying "yes" to God will involve a step (or several/many) down in the standard of living and experience of life that these kids were getting used to living now.

It got me thinking about the way we raise our kids and the values we bring to the role. Having spent many years raising my children overseas has given me an opportunity to reflect on some of our "Western" ways; I think it's enabled me to perceive things I would have missed if I'd always been immersed in my home culture.

Adding to my perspectives has been the observation that each subsequent generation of workers arriving in Turkey seems less equipped emotionally and practically to deal with the challenges of making a life cross-culturally.  By the grace of God somehow we get there, but I feel incredibly soft, and at times quite pathetic when I reflect on my own capacity(or lack of it) to cope with hardship compared with those who came before me.

It seems to me that in the West we've become so accustomed to the level of comfort we live with on a daily basis that our luxury has become normal.  And it's insidious in that the more we have, the more we seem to want - and it's not just a material thing, we've become emotionally very needy too.

As parents, wanting the best for our children generally looks like attempting to give them everything they need and doing our best to protect them from pain.  In and of themselves these are fine drivers.  The problem is that our perceptions of "need"  and "pain" are so skewed.

Our sense of need is largely shaped by our expectations and then we feel pain when those expectations are unmet.  In the Western world today our expectations are sooo high!  When as parents we 'succeed' in meeting all of our childrens' perceived "needs" we have often left them very weak and spineless.

As my kids wrestle with being removed from many of the comforts of home and engage each day with the challenges of life in a foreign country, my instinct as a mother is to want to fix everything to their liking and to try and meet all of their needs so that they are content and happy.  Of course this is well in excess of my capacity, as well as being misdirected.

I do have a responsibility to actively support my children, to listen to them and to care for their 'needs'.  However in all of that, a far more important element of my role is to teach them gratitude for the incredible blessings we enjoy everyday (without comparison with those who we perceive better off); to expose them to the realities of life for the majority of the world, to help put their sense of 'need' into perspective; to encourage them when they're struggling, but not to try and rescue them from that - instead, to teach them to trust God for His grace and to press into Him.

I'm confident that our time here is building emotional capacity and spiritual muscle in my kids that they would not have had in other circumstances.  That's not to say that it's impossible to raise strong children immersed in Western culture, but it does require great insight and intentionality - the support of like-minded folk would probably go a long way too.

Given the counter-cultural nature of the Christian faith I reckon we have a responsibility to keep standing  back and checking just what values are driving us; cultivating a healthy skeptism for what is normal and encouraged by prevailing culture can help keep us alert - even when assessing Christian ideas, which have all too often been as shaped by our culture as by anything from the Bible!

May God give us much grace as we endeavour to raise strong, resilient and Godly kids.

...oh, and don't forget to pray lots ;-)