Rant of the Exiles

Photo by  Tim Mossholder  on  Unsplash Once your children are old enough to get involved in activities, you will spend a lot of time driving them around. Even though Judy and I restrict the number of activities our kids are involved in, with four kids, it’s still a lot of driving. I’ve been told car rides are a great place for parents to bond with kids. They’re a captive audience and you can ask them any kind of question. I agree but it’s not easy. Here are some specific tips to help make conversation with your kids during car rides: 1. Think of specific questions, conversation topics, and games for longer drives: Most of making conversation is observing people and seeing what they do; I’ve had two separate sex talks with my boys in the car. During college, I remember my dad driving me somewhere and without transition, asked me a deeply personal question. I think we were talking about the weather and then he said “So do you masturbate?” That was so memorably awk...

The New York times ran an article covering a study about how the academic gender gap starts later in life for Asian American boys. The academic gender gap means, on average, girls outperform boys in school. The gap starts as early as kindergarten and continues into college. However, there’s one exception: Asian American boys keep up with Asian American girls throughout elementary and then begin to lag as a group during adolescence. The article explains: "[Boys] get the message that doing well in school is not masculine, social scientists say. Even in peer groups that prize good grades, it’s considered uncool to seem to try hard to earn them. Asian-American boys are somehow sheltered from that message in early childhood. The reasons could give parents and teachers information about how to help boys of all races reach their full potential." At my affluent suburban school in Silicon Valley, the social culture I was immersed in emphasized being smart being smart but not ...

[3,100 words, 11 minute read] The sex talk is one of the most dreaded conversations parents anticipate having with their children. To make things easier, an entire industry exists to help parents with sex education. Dozens of books have been written to help parents navigate this treacherous topic with their progeny. One of the best known among evangelicals is called the Passport 2 Purity Getaway package . It is produced by FamilyLife, a division of Cru (former Campus Crusade for Christ) and consists of a five lecture CD package including a journal and exercises designed as a weekend retreat for a pre-pubescent child and his/her parent(s). Passport 2 Purity was not my initiative. Our trip came about because Judy had heard from several home-schooling mom friends how they had taken their daughters on a road trip to go through the CDs. She even heard how a mom took a trip with husband and two sons to through the curriculum. So a couple months ago, Judy suggested we take our two older boy...

Reflecting on my twenties from the vantage point of forty Meg Jay's book, The Defining Decade , for and about twentysomethings is excellent. She has street cred as a psychotherapist who has worked with dozens of twentysomethings in the San Francisco bay area and on the East Coast. Her book is filled with real-life twentysomething case studies I've heard many times before as a pastor who works with young adults. My first exposure to Jay came her through her excellent  TED talk and then a friend loaned me her book. The gist of it goes something like this:  Stop putting off your most important decisions in your twenties. The life you envision will not happen overnight so start planning and working on it today.  It probably takes at least ten years of distance to determine whether a major decision you made turned out well. So as a forty-year old, I decided to look back on my twenties and evaluate the life choices that gave me the greatest joys and those t...

A couple years ago, our couples group at church went through the book  Free by Mark Scandrette . The subtitle of the book is "how to spend your money and time on what matters most". Time and money are both private matters but money is often a much more sensitive and personal topic than time. It wasn't easy for our group to share openly and consistently do the exercises the book recommended. I also sense it was difficult because most of us were fairly entrenched in how we view money. It almost felt like it was too late to change. Our college/young adult group is now going through the same book and I'm hoping to adopt a different approach this time, by cultivating an atmosphere of vulnerability. That's why I'm sharing my story. Because I'm convinced of this -  Our values are revealed by how we spend our money. And many of those values, conscious or not, are formed by our childhood. So here are two dominant images that have shaped how I view ...

Recently, a couple guy friends told me their plans to have a "Define-The-Relationship" (DTR) with women in whom they had a romantic interest. It got me thinking about when a DTR is necessary and when it's not.  When two people discuss their mutual understanding of a romantic relationship (casual dating, serious boyfriend, etc). -   Urban Dictionary definition of DTR False Advertising  A DTR is a discussion about how to label a relationship.   Labels are important . Without labels, it's easy for men to manipulate women and easy for women to be manipulated (the converse happens as well but it's not a labeling issue*). In this   award-winning essay , a young woman, Jordana Narin shares about the one-way relationship she developed with a guy. The object of her affection is clearly a douchebag but the tragic part is Narin completely fell for it because among other issues, their relationship never bore a label.  Narin emotionally and sexually b...