Category Archives: Parenting

Being a Disciple of Jesus, Family, Parenting

Family Values

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With our oldest son preparing for college, it makes me wonder: “Have I been faithful to teach him everything he needs to know, to be a godly man?” If not, is it too late? And if I have, am I making sure that the other four kids are also learning what he has learned?

A couple of weeks ago, Kathy was listening to some parenting sermons, and she asked me what our family values are. Apparently one of the preachers advocated coming up with a list of core principles that everyone in the family should know. When I didn’t leap into action, she whipped up a quick list … but since I didn’t write it myself, I was hesitant to embrace it. As much as I have tried to ignore this question, it keeps niggling at my subconscious.

What are our family values? What makes us special as Edgrens?

  1. Don’t eat Dad’s Nutella.
  2. If you use up the toilet paper, go get another roll.
  3. Don’t wake Rachel before 10 am.
  4. Always give your Starbucks cards to Mom.
  5. Leftovers are never left over.
  6. The family that sings together, has more fun.
  7. There’s nothing quite as special as that bond between a boy and his frisbee.
  8. If we do it twice, it is a tradition!

Hmmm. Maybe this first list of values needs a little work.

Over Christmas last year, we had the opportunity to celebrate my parents’ 50th anniversary with Kathy’s mom, my brother, my sister, and their families. It made me think about my children, and how who they are is defined (at least in part) by the extended family we belong to.

So, really, what are our family values? I think there certainly is no doubt about the #1 value. Kathy and I have both been deeply influenced by the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which begins: “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” I think we would say that our core family value is that we seek to be reconciled with God through the blood of Jesus, which was shed for us for the remission of our sins, so that we can glorify God and enjoy Him forever. For that reason we have taught each of our children the gospel at a very young age, and each of them has chosen to follow Jesus. That’s what Edgrens have done for generations, now, and that’s what we intend to keep doing, as a family and as individuals. We seek to live out Deuteronomy 6:5:

Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

But (at least when it comes to writing a blog about them) that is sort of a cheater value — it ought to be the core value of any family. What else do I want my children to know, deep in their bones, before they leave the home?

Our family: non-stop silliness since 1992.

Kathy’s list (edited by me, of course) seems a good place to start:

  • Be obedient to the Scriptures
  • Joyfully serve others — use your spiritual gifts
  • Respect others
  • Allow the Holy Spirit to work in your life — display love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control
  • Love children
  • Pursue Holiness
  • Choose a godly spouse in a godly way
  • Live as ambassadors for Christ
  • Love the Bible and have a good understanding of church doctrine
  • Submit cheerfully to those in authority over you

Strangely, the next value that comes to my mind, after loving God, is humor. Kathy and I love to laugh, and we take great joy in many of the twists and turns of our lives. We greatly value the ability to find and share joyful humor with others, and continually seek to hone the skill of laughing at our own foibles as an effective antidote to pride or despair. Laughter and joy are a big part of the glue that holds us together as a couple and as a family — I really want my children to know how to find and promote joy and humor in their lives and in the lives of the people around them, before they leave our home.

What about you? What do you seek to instill in your children?

Tim

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Budget & Money, College, Joshua

A Starving College Student

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When I was a Freshman in college, I was required to buy the 19-meal plan (per week). As I recall, it was between $700 and $900 per semester, and seemed rather pricey at the time. I lived in a dormitory just a hundred yards down the hill from ‘The Caf’, as we called it. I wasn’t there for many breakfasts, but it was nice to have an all-you-can-eat option at lunch and supper time.

I remember we ate (in addition to Caf food) a lot of cardboardy dollar pizzas, drank Grape Nehi sodas out of the vending machine for 35 cents apiece, at that time i desired they had a variety like the one they have in Melbourne (Looking for vending machine hire melbourne? You should contact Royal vending for snacks and drinks service). Then would drive to Hardee’s just before midnight. Hardee’s served milkshakes until 12 am, but they wouldn’t serve our favorite Steak & Egg Biscuits until after midnight, no matter how we cajoled them. So we’d drive two miles to the nearest Hardees at 11:50, order our milkshakes, and then stand around the lobby sipping our milkshakes until 12:01, when we’d order our biscuits.

Grape Nehi -- the nectar of my freshman year

In later years, I cooked for myself. My sophomore year, I learned to live on mashed potatoes, generic cornflakes, biscuits and macaroni & cheese. It was at that time that I firmly determined in my heart to choose a lifestyle in which I could earn enough money for decent food, or at least an occasional meat dish.

It was also at that time that I developed the ‘Little Debby Standard’, similar to the Gold or Silver standards on which currencies were at one time based. (These days, I think our currency is backed by the ‘Plastic Standard’, but that is another topic.) Anyway, the Little Debby Standard is the measure by which all grocery purchases are compared and judged, even now, some thirty years later. When purchasing a box of cereal for $3.00, I ask myself this question: “Is this box of cereal worth two boxes of Little Debby Nutty Bars?” Most of the time, the answer is a resounding ‘No!’.

My senior year, I shared a house with three or four others, and cooked a fair bit in the kitchen.

When I was a student, Mac & Cheese could still be found at the rate of four boxes for a dollar, and Campbell soups were never more than 50 cents (33 cents on sale). Ramen Noodles (by the case, of course) were less than ten cents apiece, and Little Debby snack cakes were 99 cents a box (or in rare cases, $.79 on sale). I miss those days, but am comforted by the fact that food prices have been fairly inflation-resistant, at least when compared to gasoline.

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Basic sustenance for a college student

As Joshua prepares his heart and mind to attend college in the Fall, we are starting to think of what he will need to succeed. Assuming a 16-week semester, and meal plan options that offer ten or fifteen meals a week respectively, Joshua will probably need to learn to buy groceries and (at some level) prepare them for himself. We have hopes of teaching him to bake Kathy’s family’s famous Mesa Manna before he heads off to school. We’re mulling over the possibility of teaching him to make a basic tomato-based stew in a crock pot, should he venture so far into the field of culinary arts. But at the very least, he needs to know how to shop for the basic necessities of life without bankrupting himself. Hence the Little Debby Standard.

Nothing makes you hungry quite like Calculus.

Today, I took Joshua to shop with me at WinCo, a defiantly non-union grocery store in our area with decent prices. We spent the better part of 90 minutes shopping for food that a college student might need as a supplementary to a meal plan. It was fun for me to relive some of those hours of bewilderment that I spent as a single man in the aisles of the grocery store.

In retrospect, I realize how clever my Mom was. She used to take me with her to the Commissary, under the pretense of not wanting to drive. Now I realize that she was stealthily and kindly teaching me the value of my dollar when food shopping. I’m not sure this excursion was much fun for Joshua, though. He really hates shopping, and was a little panicky and wild-eyed toward the end. But I hope I managed to teach these basic principles:

  • Start by buying and eating the cheapest food item in each category, and work up from there. If you can stand the generic brand, great, you’ve saved yourself all that needless marketing and packaging cost. If not, then you’ll appreciate the name-brand version all the more, or you can decide (according to the Little Debby Standard) to go without altogether.
  • Avoid purchasing meats, fruits or vegetables. That is why you buy at least a partial meal plan — to avoid the expense, hassle and spoilage of preparing and presenting meats and vegetables. Let them worry about your roasts and salads and (if possible) grab fruit on the way out of the cafeteria for late-night snacks.
  • Wherever possible, buy food that doesn’t require refrigeration or freezing. If (as we expect) Joshua will be sharing a common living area, kitchen and refrigerator with three other young men, room in the freezer and fridge may be at a premium, at least on occasion. Pragmatically, food that can be stored in your room is less likely to be filched by others than that left invitingly in a common fridge.
  • Although food packaged in larger quantities may seem cheaper, if it spoils or is wasted, it isn’t cheaper, after all. When cooking and eating as a single man, economies of scale are hard to come by, unless you enjoy feeding your entire dormitory. (Amusingly, every time I tried to demonstrate this principle, the smaller packages were the same price or cheaper, on a unit basis. Sometimes the grocery stores just don’t cooperate.)

It turns out that a key food item for Joshua is peanut butter, which slightly surprised me.

In the end, we spent about $100 for what looked to be about two weeks’ worth of supplementary groceries, assuming a 15-meals-a-week meal plan. I had Joshua watch the prices, and keep the receipt — then we talked through it all with Kathy when we got home. As one much more nutrition-oriented, she had some important insights, but seemed to generally approve our excursion, if not necessarily our choices.

It will be interesting to see how Joshua copes with living on his own. Maybe he can persuade his cousin, Rebecca to cook for him … ?

What about you? What are your memories of college food? What advice would you offer to Joshua, as he heads off to school?
Tim

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Homeschooling, Parenting Tips, Works for Me Wednesday

IXL Blues

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A few months ago, I was looking for a way to punish my children when they are slack in their schoolwork. I wanted something that would be measurable, tedious and difficult, without taking up any of my time.

Key Parenting Principle: When punishing your children, you should always take care that you don’t punish yourself along the way.

In my search for a corrective tool, I happened upon IXL, an online program providing a seemingly endless variety of math problems at elementary through middle school levels. At the time, the subscription cost was prohibitive, and so I mentally set it aside. It just wasn’t worth $12 a month to me to punish my children — after all, I can punish them for free, most of the time.

Some homeschoolers just cry out for punishment.

A few weeks ago, I became discouraged with my children’s math progress. One problem with homeschooling is that you don’t always know what you don’t know, or haven’t been taught. I noticed that several of my kids seem not to have a solid understanding of some foundational math skills, and it made me sad to see them struggle to learn, when I know it is because we haven’t prepared them properly.

And then it came to me from the mists of my memory: IXL is the answer! Suddenly, I realized that IXL would be the perfect solution to the problem — not as a punishment tool, but instead as a way to fill in the gaps and solidify their understanding of foundational math principles.

Doesn't the logo make you think cheerful thoughts?

As I often do with new, shiny ideas, I jumped on this with both feet. “Let’s sign up Rachel and Daniel,” I enthused to Kathy.

“Are you sure about this?” she hesitated. “They are pretty busy already with school … ”

“They can always make time for this — it will be fun for them! They’ll thank me when they take the SAT and get great math scores.”

Ancient Edgren Proverb: Waiting for your kids to thank you is a good way to build patience. I signed Rachel and Daniel up, and assigned them five sections each day, demanding they reach 100% ‘mastery’ on each skill.

Later, when I saw how much fun it was for Rachel and Daniel, I decided to sign David and Sarah up, too. Sadly, IXL ends after middle-school, and Joshua (the show-off) is taking Calculus. “Maybe they’ll come up with an IXL for Washington State History,” I told Kathy, hopefully. “We could give him a subscription for Easter, wouldn’t that be fun?”

<sarcasm>Assigning five sections of IXL per day was a wildly popular decision.</sarcasm>

Perhaps the coolest thing about IXL is the way they enforce ‘mastery’. In order to get to a 100% Smartscore™, you need to prove to the program that you really understand the skill. As you proceed, the questions get harder and harder, and if you miss one, you are given two or three more questions of the same kind, to make sure you weren’t just guessing. If you don’t make any mistakes, you can finish a section in about 30 problems — but for every one you miss, you can expect three more. In extreme cases, you might find yourself working as many as 143 (I speak hypothetically, of course) problems on the same skill.

Sarah and I dancing together, celebrating the beginning of the IXL age.

Another really excellent attribute of IXL is the way it enforces careful precision and accuracy. As with many homeschooled kids, my children are used to their teacher giving them all kinds of grace and mercy. If they can show that they understand the problem, they can often get away with small arithmetic errors without being penalized.

Not so with IXL — the computer doesn’t care if you cry — if you didn’t enter in the exact, correct answer (with the decimal in the right place, the proper sign, and in some cases, the correct units) then you get no credit for that question. Learning that sometimes there is no ‘give’ in the world is important, I think.

I wanted them to quickly get up to speed, so I told them all to go down at least one grade-level from their current grade. “Do five sections a day,” I instructed them. “You must reach 100% mastery before you can go on to the next section.”

Since there are between 200 and 250 skills for each year level, I figured we could knock off a year’s worth of math in about ten weeks, leaving the summer for their current grade level. I was so excited that this automated tool would solve all our Math troubles.

A graph showing an individual student's progress over the course of a week.

A third feature of IXL really sells it to parents or teachers — the program readily produces reports that show each child’s progress. With minimal effort, I can see how long each child is taking to reach mastery on each skill, and how many skills they’ve finished each day. You can tell which children are skating through the skills with minimal effort, and which are struggling. In less than 30 seconds, I can monitor a whole day’s worth of progress.

It wasn’t more than a day or two into the new IXL program, before the push-back began. “I hate IXL,” one of my children complained. “IXL is ruining my life!”

As it turned out, five sections was a bit of an aggressive goal. While some sections might be finished in just a few minutes, others were taking more than an hour. Sarah, my nine-year-old, was spending an average of two and a half hours a day on IXL alone.

Daniel working on his French.

Tonight, we had a meeting of the mimes, in which I gave each person a chance to speak up about IXL.

Not our actual "Meeting of the Mimes".

I tried to explain my vision for the program, and how it was going to be a huge blessing in their lives, but much of my pep-talk fell on deaf (and in some cases, hostile) ears. Eventually, we came to a compromise: each school day, each of my kids will spend a minimum of 40 minutes working problems on IXL’s website, and will complete a minimum of one skill (no matter how long it takes). Also, I will pay a bonus of $100 cash (or $200 toward Worldview Academy or a short term missions trip) when they finish all 200+ skills of a grade level.

This seemed to cheer most of them up a bit. Maybe in a month or so I will publish a progress report, so you can see who is working the hardest toward Math Mastery.

Tim

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Parenting, Tim

Renaissance Parenting

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It always strikes terror into my soul, when I hear that my wife is reading a new parenting book.

“Oh, great,” I think. “Another picture-perfect family, another book full of spiritual wisdom, another chance to show me up as a loser Dad.”

The people in these books always seem so together. Their parenting philosophies are congruent and based in scripture. Their illustrations are clever and informative. The Dads in these parenting books, especially, seem to be poweful men of quiet wisdom and grace. They always seem to know what to say, moving easily through family crises without ruffled feathers. They don’t get angry or irrational — they always seem to be in control without having to flaunt it.

Kathy's Mom always seems to know just what to say.

I guess it makes sense. Parenting books aren’t best-sellers, in the most optimum conditions — most people don’t like to be told how to parent in the first place. So perhaps only the best and the brightest are published. Still, just once, I’d like to read a parenting book by someone a bit more, well, ‘normal’. Something that had an introduction a bit like this:

“My wife seems to think that we should write a parenting book, because we’ve raised a bunch of kids and they’re all still alive, and none of them are in therapy. To tell you the truth, we pretty much just made it all up as we went along … “

I’ve decided (by the process of elimination) not to be a ‘together’ sort of Dad, but rather to pride myself on my ‘Renaissance Parenting’ technique. I borrow a little here, adapt a little there, and patch it all together into a half-baked system that mostly works, even if it isn’t very coherent, from a philosophical perspective.

A while back, Kathy read Keeping Our Children’s Hearts by Steven and Teri Maxwell (Titus2.com) and borrowed a few ideas from them.

“The Maxwells meet with each of their kids once a week,” Kathy tells me, “to catch up with them and to have an opportunity to speak with each of them one-on-one. We should do that, too.”

And so, in January, we started meeting with each of our kids on Sunday afternoons.

We borrow from all kinds of people. Early in our marriage, we were deeply influenced by Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo’s Growing Kids God’s Way curriculum, which really helped us define our parenting strategy. Sure, Ezzo is a bit out of fashion these days, and if you search the internet (I don’t recommend it) you’ll find all kinds of Ezzo-bashers, but it is actually a great foundational program, which I strongly recommend.

We’ve been influenced by Michael Pearl, and Dee Duke (we strongly recommend this sermon series), the Tripp brothers (Tedd and Paul). and a host of others. Sometimes we’ll love an idea, but not be able to implement it. Other times we’ll latch onto a philosophy, and apply it in our own unique (quirky?) way.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to stop Kathy from reading these parenting books, though.

“The Maxwells have a Family Values Statement in which they list the things that are important to them as a family. We should do that, too.”

And so, I’m working on an adaptation of their Family Values Statement.

Rachel poses for a potential Keeping/Shepherding Our Child's Heart reprint, in case the Maxwells or the Tripps call us for a collaborative effort.

One thing sustains me, though. I have a dream. One day, I’ll be attending a Parenting Conference, and I’ll take refuge, head spinning from hours of parenting wisdom, in the men’s room. There, I’ll encounter the keynote speaker, who will (as luck has it) be out of toilet paper, trapped in a stall, with only seconds before he has to go on stage. That’s when I will enact my revenge: before I give him the toilet paper he needs, I’ll force him to admit that his wife actually wrote the parenting book, and that she used an imaginary stunt Dad for all the witty illustrations and wise proverbs.

“OK, OK, I admit it,” he’ll growl. “My wife made the whole thing up. I’m just an average guy with an anger problem — I never said any of those clever things. Now give me the toilet paper!”

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Shoes off and pants rolled up - time to walk along the beach
Parenting

Parents Are a Work in Progress

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We are spoiled, here in Washington, to live surrounded by such beauty - an abundance of local lakes and rivers as well as the Puget Sound only a few miles away.

I’ve been convicted quite a bit lately about my parenting; how to be a better mother, how to love my children unconditionally yet still raise them with godly values, how to praise more than I criticize, how to keep my eye on the essentials and not get lost in the mire of life’s busyness and daily chores.

Mostly I just come up empty and floundering.

Daniel - my beloved middle child - is growing faster than I can keep up.

I fear that I am a work in progress, as a wife, mother, disciple of Jesus. Normally this would bring me comfort, and yet these years are racing by; I am running out of time, or so it feels, to be transformed and molded and shaped into a wise and godly parent. As Joshua nears graduation this spring there is a constant whispered hint of his departure for college in the fall.

Is it possible that this role of mother I have inhabited for so long is actually a fleeting one? No, wait, I’m not done, I’ve barely started the training portion of the job.

In my reading I stumbled across this verse in Hebrews:

May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. Hebrews 13:20-21

Ah, I see. God will equip me with everything I need to do His will. He will move in and through me to bring Him glory. He does not leave me in the place of struggling and dismay as a mother. He has blessed me with these precious children and called me to this work. As I seek Him and strive to be transformed in His likeness, He will give me the strength and wisdom to parent.

Perfectly? No.
Humbly? Hopefully.
Graciously? Sometimes.
Flawed? Always.

I long, most of all, to be teachable in my role as mother. I want to hear from the Lord and obey as He leads and guides me.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Ephesian 2:10

I'm pretty sure being a good mom means knowing when to fix hot cocoa!

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