Kyria Contributor on Good Morning America and Good Parenting

Last week’s blog post by Marian Liautaud, managing editor of Kyria’s ParentConnect newsletter, on “Tiger Mother” parenting continues to resonate with our community. Since then, there’s been a landslide of blog posts, comments, and media coverage around the country debating the parenting style and wisdom of author and mother Amy Chua. Carla Barnhill, a Kyria contributor, editorial advisor for Gifted for Leadership , and editor of our former sister publication Christian Parenting Today, joined the fray. Carla’s vying for top spot as Good Morning America’s new parenting guru . See why she thinks so many parents have reacted to Tiger Mother .

Guitars Are Like Snowflakes

Two weeks ago I felt God tell me, very clearly, to make a choice concerning an area in my life that had become gray. He told me to choose his path, or else I’d begin walking away from him. This clarity gave me the courage I needed to make the choice to walk the narrow path. But even so, I spent the last two weeks pouting like a three-year-old in timeout.

Sure God, I thought, I’ll do what you want, because I don’t want to turn away from you . . . but I’m not going to like it. I’m not going to hang out with you now and act like I’m super happy about everything. Nope.

And just to prove it to God, I wandered around in a hazy, distracted, anxious mess, moving from event to event, hoping to ignore him until I felt better about things. I wanted to do God’s will, but it was more out of exhausted, reluctant obedience than out of love.

This resentment toward God began spreading into a sort of self-involved slow burn that affected everyone around me. Just ask my coworkers. Or my roommate. They were probably contemplating pushing me off the roof at some point. I was distracted, unable to focus, unable to write or speak with any sort of clarity. It felt like someone put a block on my brain. But it didn’t matter. In my mopey stubbornness, I wasn’t about to ask God for help.

Of course God started to really reveal himself to me anyway, even in the midst of my passive aggressive haze.

One night, in my desire not to deal with things, I sulked over to the local music store. I was looking at new guitars (not because I can afford one, but because it seemed like the best distraction I could come up with).

The salesman, Jose, who looked about 15, stood next to me in a small, humidified room in the center of the store expounding the joys of guitar playing. He’d been playing since he was in his mother’s womb, or something, and it totally defined him. In my state of depressed cynicism, his passion for guitars was nauseating. I was in an especially snarky mood while he was trying to sell me a guitar that cost more than six months of my car payments. So when Jose told me that no two guitars in the world sound exactly the same, my blunt reply was, “Well, why the heck not?”

He looked at the guitars displayed on the wall. “Because,” he replied, with a dreamy expression on his face, “no two trees are made exactly alike. So guitars are like snowflakes. Each one is different.”

I looked at the hundreds of guitars hanging on the walls of that dim room. Each one reflected a glimmer of light off its shiny finish. And it hit me like a resounding echo off of the walls in an empty room: God had created this moment in order for me to understand that his greatness and creativity are even in instruments that we use to express our own musical individuality. Even in a guitar that’s so painstakingly handcrafted by man, God has left his trademark in every note that the musician plays. His craftsmanship is everywhere. And it’s good. It's beautiful. In that moment, I felt humbled by my Creator.

But I still didn’t want to talk to him.

A couple days later, I was still wrestling with everything, so I broke down and asked one of my coworkers what I should do. The conversation went:

“I want to punch everyone in the face today. Thoughts?”

“Maybe you need Jesus.”

Right, okay. Jesus is the reason I’m feeling so depressed. Why would I go to him to feel better? I wondered.

After some internal debate, I decided to read from Scripture. I turned to 1 John. First John talks a lot about love—the love God has for us, and the love we should have for one another. I always find the words in 1 John irresistible. I read the first chapter. Then I decided to read the second chapter. Then I read these verses in chapter three: “We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters. If someone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need but shows no compassion—how can God’s love be in that person? Dear children, let’s not merely say that we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions” (1 John 3:16-18).

I was amazed by how drawn in I felt by Christ’s all-encompassing love. I couldn’t stop reading. I read the rest of 1 John, and then I read 2 John. Then 3 John. You can’t read those books without feeling your soul stir and come alive.

Although I had nothing to say to God last week, he had plenty to say to me. And his words penetrated deeply into the ache in my heart. I began to sense the Holy Spirit’s methodic work healing my pain, wooing me back to him.

Since that day, I’ve been soaking up God’s words with more intensity than I’ve felt in a long time. I’ve realized that God spent the last few weeks watching me stomp and pout and mope, but his love never wavered. His promises were always there, waiting to sew me back together. It’s a process for all of us. And I’m thankful for it.

Did “Tiger Mother” Go Too Far?

Last week I listened to an interview with Amy Chua, author of a new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Chua’s parents were Chinese immigrants, and by her own admission, they raised her according to the strict, highly regimented “Chinese way.” Chua has come under fire for raising her own two daughters similarly. Throughout their childhoods, they have spent countless hours each day practicing piano or violin. They’ve been prohibited from watching television and attending sleepovers. Chua also admits to using tactics such as berating them and doling out harsh punishments as a way of motivating them to do their best. Once she even denounced her daughter’s handmade birthday card, saying, “I reject this.” Chua believes that parents need to tow the line, sometimes in drastic, memorable ways, to fight off children’s natural bent toward complacency. Her critics say she takes this too far.

Surprisingly, Chua admitted at times she has gone too far. She said her book was intended to be less of a how-to and more of a reflection on what she has learned trying to parent her children like she was. Some of it has worked; some of it hasn’t, she said.

I cringed when she unapologetically admitted to refusing her daughter’s handmade card. With four plastic storage totes filled with each of my sons’ school artwork, I can’t imagine criticizing a single one of these custom treasures. In knee-jerk judgment I wondered, what kind of parent would do that?

A minute later I wondered what parenting missteps I’ve made that would cause others to cringe and judge me. Like Chua, I love my children with a fierce, tiger-mother kind of love and want nothing more than to see them reach their God-given potential in life. And like her, the parenting decisions I’ve made have been well-intended, if not sometimes misguided.

Chua’s book and the reactions to it (including mine) have not been, shall we say, grace-filled. This gives me pause. If I have learned anything as a parent, it’s that I need grace, and lots of it. Raising kids is hard work, and most parents I know have mental and emotional battle scars to prove it. So today I am reminded to extend grace instead of judgment. Parents or not, it’s what we call the “Christian way.”

What are your thoughts to Chua’s style of parenting? How can we learn to be better parents through this discussion?

Embracing the Ordinary

My sister is losing her hair. Just some of it. After each of her three pregnancies, she’s lost a little, but this last one took a harsher toll, and she’s learned she has an iron deficiency that often results in hair loss. My sister and I both have very fine hair, so losing it—even just a little—has been an especially difficult reality to face.

My sister is beautiful. She’s not flashy or glamorous; rather, her beauty is a natural radiance. My sister is also wise and probably cause for 75 percent of my spiritual and emotional growth throughout the years. We had a conversation over Christmas that stemmed from her hair loss, snatches of which I’ve had running through my mind since.

It’s hard for me to remember a time when I’ve seen my sister as insecure about a physical feature than she has been about her hair. Yet God has been using this struggle to continue honing the orientation of her heart toward him.

She said to me, “As I’ve been experiencing this loss and growing in my self-consciousness, I’ve realized that I have an expectation of myself—almost a sense of entitlement—to being ‘above average.’ Even if I don’t necessarily feel that my attractiveness is above average, I’m always striving toward that end—like that’s the expectation I hold myself to. But when was I ever guaranteed ‘above average attractiveness’ in this life? Jesus himself had ‘no beauty to attract us to him.’ If he didn't demand to be attractive, what makes me think I'm entitled to be?”

She wasn’t being self-deprecating. She was really just considering this new possible reality: that for the time being, on this old earth, maybe she’s going to be ordinary. Maybe she can just be ordinary. The voice that’s led her to believe in a certain entitlement—to reach for something beyond who she really is—isn’t God’s voice. So she doesn’t have to factor it.

Of course it’s nice to look nice; it’s appropriate to be appropriate. Makeup is not of the devil.

But hearing my sister’s thoughts, which contain so much of God’s truth, has served God’s purpose (as his truth is bound to do): since Christmas, I’ve experienced a freedom previously foreign to me. It is truly okay to be ordinary.

It’s actually most likely that you and I were made physically ordinary. Yes, one day we will be given new and flawless bodies, and now our flawed bodies are divinely appointed to be vessels of God’s Holy Spirit, which is no small calling. But how we look—here, now? It’s just not true that we need to look better and better, whether better than we do naturally or better than other people. It’s not how we were made, and we don’t have to waste so much of ourselves on that pursuit. Praise the Lord for this insight!

Where are you in this journey? Do you long to throw off this false expectation and embrace the blessed ordinariness of this life?

Gift Cards and Grace

My husband has a history of losing things—or at least not keeping track of them as diligently as I’d like. On one of the most legendary occasions, he lost our checkbook and couldn’t find it for weeks. We scoured our house and when it didn’t turn up after a few weeks, we decided we’d better close our checking account. So we went to the bank and went through the rigmarole of closing the account and opening a new one, letting the checks clear, and starting over. About a week later, we went somewhere in the car he drove to work. Guess what? There was the checkbook, sitting on the dashboard right in front of him. He’d been overlooking it for weeks. Yeah, that went over well.

This may be the most legendary of my husband-losing-things stories, but it doesn’t stand alone. Stories of what he’s lost and forgotten are woven through our 17-year history as a married couple. Those 17 years have been quite happy, and he’s a fantastic husband. But when you need someone to keep track of something, remember something, or make sure it gets done, you might want to find someone else. For a more recent example, my mother-in-law sent $50 gift cards to our daughters this fall so they could buy some back-to-school clothes. Guess who lost them? Yeah, that’s right. He threw away $100.

Anyway, with a history like that, can you blame me if I’m a little quick to get irritated when something goes missing? For example, last month, as we were doing some Christmas shopping, we picked up some Starbucks gift cards for our kids’ teachers. A couple of days later, as we were checking our list and checking it twice, he realized he didn’t know where those gift cards went. He hadn’t seen them after we got home. Since my husband had bought the cards with the kids while I was playing sneaky Santa in the toy department, I’d never seen the cards at all. Somehow he’d lost them.

You can imagine my irritation at the prospect of replacing the cards—not a huge expense, but wasted money nevertheless. My husband, who of course felt pretty bad, searched the house and the cars to no avail. Great—gone. And just to make sure he really felt the remorse he should, I made sure he felt my irritation and heard my martyr-like sighs.

Now imagine my surprise the next day when I saw an e-mail announcement at work, saying that the local community center really appreciated the toys our staff had donated, but they were wondering about the Starbucks gift cards and teacher appreciation cards that were included in the collection. Maybe they’d accidentally tagged along with someone’s donation?

Yeah. A big pie in the face for me. I’d brought the donated toys—which we’d purchased at the same time as the gift cards—to work and put them in the pile without checking to see whether anything else was in the bag. Oops.

I’m thankful that my husband is a wonderfully forgiving man, and we had a good laugh. But I learned a thing or two anyway. Pride, indeed, “goes before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). And love “keeps no record of being wronged” (1 Corinthians 13:5). Two lessons I already knew but would have done well to remember.

How beautiful that God isn’t like me. For those who’ve embraced Christ’s atoning sacrifice on our behalf, he doesn’t hold our sins against us. He doesn’t shake his head at our weaknesses and sigh in irritation when we fail—again. Instead, he offers us grace at his own sacrifice. He covers our sins with that grace and makes us his children. How undeserving I am—and how grateful I feel to be called his child. At the start of a fresh new year, my shortcomings and sins once again remind me of our tremendously forgiving God and the tremendous grace he gives freely to all who believe. Happy new life!