The Art of Hosting Children

We have a constant flood of children through our house, day and night.  They come over after school to work on school projects or just play, they eat meals with us, they come over on the weekends to hang out, and they stay overnight to enjoy late nights with our kids.  Sometimes they even go on trips and vacations with us.  Despite the chaos it brings to our home, we welcome our kid’s friends and acquaintances into our house with open arms.  Because our family values people over possessions, we’re constantly investing into our kids’ friends by hosting them for school projects, play dates, and parties.  By hosting, we’re able to reach out to new or lonely kids, provide positive adult and family role models, monitor our kids’ friendships, and influence both our kids and their friends during teachable moments.  We keep getting more visitors all the time, so our approach is attracting children to our home, despite our insistence that guests pitch in a help a little around the house.  Here are the techniques we’re using to intentionally make our home attractive to our kids’ friends.

Visitors are members of the family

When children visit our house, they are considered members of the family for the duration of the visit.  This means both that we love them as if they were our own, and also that we have the same expectations of them that we do of our own children. 

Children visiting our house get equal time in conversations and sharing toys and games.  When they enter, they are recognized and greeted the same as our children.  If they’re coming from school, they tell us how their day went. Pre-school children are expected to break things occasionally, and grade school children get tutoring when they need it. Teenage visitors are granted “refrigerator rights” to raid the refrigerator or pantry when they’re hungry.

We also expect visiting children to follow the house rules and carry the same responsibilities as our children.  After-school visitors sit down at the kitchen table and complete their homework before playing.  Dinner guests help set the table, cook, and clean up afterward.  Even if they’ve already eaten, guests sit at the table and talk with us while we have dinner. Overnight guests clean up the bedding in the morning.  When Mom or Dad arrives with a carload of groceries, everyone over 8 years old helps carry groceries into the kitchen.  If our family has planned yard work on a Saturday morning, guests pitch in before heading off to play video games.

Visiting guests are also expected to follow all the family rules.  Visitors must be respectful, without screaming or name calling. Homework must be completed before playing.  Telephone use is not allowed at the dinner table.  Kids who stay up all night at their own sleepovers are in bed at a reasonable hour at our house.  Guests staying over Saturday night attend church with us on Sunday mornings.  As hosting parents, we feel complete freedom to discipline visiting children.  Preschoolers get timeouts, grade-schoolers and teenagers are restricted from video games and cell phones, or get their evening cut off early. When guests accidentally break things, they help (in age appropriate ways) to repair the item.

You would think that sharing the chores and enforcing rules would drive guests away from our house, but the opposite is true.  Children enjoy being a member of a family with a purpose and established boundaries.  They observe the mechanics of how our family operates with great interest. They don’t mind contributing to a functional family, because they feel like they’re part of something important.  When scheduling visits, we’ll often tell the kid’s friends that they won’t want to come over too early on a Saturday, because we have work planned for that morning.  Most of the time, they will choose to come over early to help, even if it means shoveling and hauling materials in the yard, or cleaning the house, because they enjoy accomplishing a goal as a part of a family.  When we plan a social event for the kids, many of their friends come over early, because they enjoy cleaning and setting up the house to prepare for the party.

Hosting parties and other social events

Every time we throw a party, people tell us we’re crazy.  Our parties are usually large and very novel, but guests come out feeling special and loved, and asking when we’ll host again.  We let our kids get very creative with the themes and activities, and since we value people, we invite lots of guests.  We had 12 boys overnight once for a flour war in the front yard (battling with nylons filled with flour).  We pushed all of the furniture out of the family room one year, and had a dance for over 30 teenagers, including foreign exchange students (“we never have dance parties in Japan!”). Our pool parties typically run over 20 teenagers.  We had 12 pre-teen girls for a formal ball, including full princess garb.  When we host our annual Halloween parties, we have to split the group in two, sending half out to trick-or-treat the neighbors, because they won’t all fit in the house.  Here are a few of our tips for throwing a successful party:

Household rules still apply.  All of our household rules apply at parties: no alcohol, drugs, or inappropriate physical contact. Guests must respect each other.

It’s all about showing children love.  There are always a couple of kids who are socially awkward, and will need a little encouragement to get engaged.  We work hard to spot the kid who is getting left out, and get them engaged.  We rarely force them to do what everyone else is doing, but we want to make sure they are either relating to someone, or doing some kind of activity.

No child gets left behind.  Children come in all different personalities and interests, so you’ll need a range of activities to meet the range of kids.  No matter what the primary activity is, we always set out board games and other activities for the quiet kids.  When we’re clearly hosting a swim party, we’ll still get kids who show up without a swim suit, and will play games, make crafts, or play the piano, and have a great time.

Structured activities must be planned. We always plan more than enough formal, structured activities to fill the time. These might be party games, opening presents and eating cake, dancing, competitions and relays, or a host of other activities, but we always have a list of activities to launch in case the guests get too rowdy, or too many children are getting disengaged.

Our children own the success of the party.  They plan activities to keep everyone involved, and they look over the crowd to make sure everyone is engaged and feels loved. When someone is misbehaving, they deal with the problem, with parental backup where necessary.

There’s going to be some chaos.  Children at parties are loud and scattered, especially if you give them sugar.  You can set them down for a few minutes to focus on an activity, but most of the time you’ll be either herding them, or trying to stay out of the way.  You can’t be a control freak and still throw a great children’s party.

Things are going to get used up, worn out, and broken.  Social activities are hard on houses and furniture.  Things get worn down and broken.  You can’t always choose what gets sacrificed, so you have to put away anything fragile or valuable, and expect that each party will cost you some physical sacrifice.

One boy has come to our parties consistently for years, because he has a great 1 on 1 relationship with our son.  He doesn’t talk much with others at parties, and rarely participates in the organized activities.  Toward the end of the evening, he sits alone playing the piano, whether anyone is listening or not.  Then he goes home, and tells his parents how much he loves coming to our parties.  It’s not because he’s the life of the party, it’s because we love him for who he is, as if he were our son.  We understand that he’s an introvert and a musician, and we provide a forum where he can be himself, and also a member of the household.

The Art of Sex Education

We have a strong value system around sex and sexuality, so we didn’t want our kids learning about sex from either their friends or the schools.  For this reason, we introduced sex education to our children earlier, and more graphically, than other parents we know.  We used the medical terms from the very beginning, always answered all questions openly and directly, and actively taught our children about sexual concepts and issues.  We didn’t give body parts childish names, and we didn’t use euphemisms like “The stork brought you.” This approach may seem radical, but it seems that other parents were always coming to us for advice when their children began asking “awkward questions.”

We never had the painful crisis so often portrayed by Hollywood, where the boy asks where babies come from, and dad spends days rehearsing his lines in a dead panic.  We also didn’t introduce graphic details about copulation to our toddlers.  We gave them just enough information to satisfy their curiosity, and no more.  We were usually surprised at how little they really needed or wanted to know.

We started as soon as our toddlers could talk, by practicing naming all the body parts in the bathtub.  If a nipple, penis, or vagina is named just as often as an elbow or toe, there is no mystery, and the parts covered by clothing didn’t seem to come up very often in public conversations.  When young children start asking about where babies come from, they aren’t asking about intercourse, they’re just asking for very basic information, so we gave simple answers.  When we gave them simple answers, they usually didn’t ask for more, so we eased our way into the details.  Here are some examples of simple answers to questions from young children:

Question	Answer
Where do babies come from?	Babies come from their mommy’s abdomen.
How does the baby get inside the mommy?	The daddy puts it there to grow until it is ready to come out.
How does the baby get out of the mommy?	The mommy goes to the hospital, where the doctor takes it out for her.

At the same time, we would introduce age-appropriate books on sex education.  These books begin for children as early as 3 years old by talking about body parts, then move to discussions of puppies and chickens with babies inside them.  They eventually move on to eggs and sperm, then copulation, and finally to tougher issues like menstruation and sexually transmitted disease.  Age appropriate books worked very well for us, because we could sit down and read them to younger children, without having to design our own “birds and bees” discussions, and once the kids could read, they could read the books themselves, and we only had to define a few terms.

This still left us with an occasional surprise question at the dinner table, which we answered honestly, and which often launched us into a deep discussion about our family value systems on sexuality.  There were a few times when we had to delay the discussion to shield the younger children from topics they weren’t emotionally ready for, but we generally answered all the questions at the time with the simplest answers.  Because of the books we’d used, we didn’t have trouble answering questions on basic biology, but did struggle more to find simple answers for questions like, “What is sexual violence?” “What is prostitution?” “What is AIDS?” “What is an orgy?” “What is homosexuality?” and “What is sexual slavery?” 

One of our favorite family stories happened when Rick was staying out of town with his brother-in-law, and our son called to ask a question.  Our brother-in-law answered the phone, and was kidding around with our son.  Since our brother-in-law is a biologist, he is used to getting school questions from the nieces and nephews, so he lightly offered to answer our son’s question.  When our son asked him to define masturbation, our brother-in-law tossed the telephone to Rick like it had given him an electric shock.

We owe much to the authors of books we’ve used over the years, and many parents have come to us for recommendations. There are a wealth of books for young children, but appropriate books for grade school and middle school audiences are difficult to find.  If you have a daughter, we highly recommend the American Girls book, Care & Keeping of You.  For teenagers, we recommend the Every Young Man’s Battle and Every Young Woman’s Battle books.  For all parents, we recommend the series of books that have a book for each age range.  Here are the details on these books:

God’s Design for Sex Series, Stan & Brenna Jones, NAV Press

The New Learning About Sex Series, Concordia Publishing House

Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls, Valerie Schaefer, American Girl Publishing

Every Young Man's Battle : Strategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation, Stephen Arterburn, Fred Stoeker, Mike Yorkey, Random House, Inc

Every Young Woman's Battle: Guarding Your Mind, Heart, and Body in a Sex-Saturated World, Shannon Ethridge, Stephen Arterburn, Random House, Inc

The Art of Role Modeling

Over the years we’ve crammed a lifetime of intentional training into our children, which we’re eager to shrae in this blog.  But despite our best efforts, the most valuable life skills our kids learned from us haven’t been a result of our brilliantly planned, scheduled, and structured teaching. Instead, they’ve absorbed both good and bad skills by osmosis. Whether it’s the noble and courageous act of reaching out to someone who’s suffering, or leaving the empty milk containers in the refrigerator, they learned it without our direct instruction.  As they interact with us, watching and learning from our examples, they begin to emulate us.  In times of crisis or uncertainty, they’ll draw on those household experiences and examples they’ve had growing up, and then use them to make critical and life changing decisions.  For better or worse, we’re their role models. 

Because our actions have so much influence in our kid’s lives, our lifestyles are critical to raising successful children. When we want our children to be kind, moral, generous, responsible, healthy, and purposeful, we need to first display those characteristics in our own lives.  No amount of lecturing on healthy eating and exercise is going to sink into them if we mumble it from the couch through handfuls of potato chips.  Every time the two of us talk about the changes we want to see in our children’s behavior, we have to re-evaluate our own lives.  Are we parents living the lifestyle we want to pass on to our children?  While our kids were preschoolers, we would casually throw around the phrase, “I hate it when that happens.” Eventually, our children began to tell us that they hated objects, activities, and even people, which is pretty strong language for preschoolers.  When we asked them if their feelings were really that strong, they told us that they didn’t truly hate anything or anyone, but were just using words that they’d heard us using.  We decided that “hate” would be a “bad word” in our house for a while, and shortly after we stopped using it, the kids did too.

Are we kind and generous in our interactions with ourselves and other people, or are we self-serving?  Are we exercising and eating right, or are we stuffing ourselves with junk food in front of the television?  Do we establish goals and pursue them with discipline, or do we wander through life without purpose?  Is our language wholesome, and our communication free from deception? Do we take responsibility for our actions?  Do we love each other unconditionally and selflessly? Do we put in the work to stay married for the rest of our lives? Do we fight without shouting, calling each other names, or using other hurtful tactics?  Do we honor our agreements? Do we have our addictions and anger under control? 

These are the aspects of successful childrearing that we can’t teach to our children through lectures.  We have to live the way we want our kids to live, and not just when we think they can see and hear us. If we want our children to have admirable character, we have to become adults of good character.  Kids are too smart, and will see through our ingenuous attempts to fake good character. Some friends of ours had a toddler who was tightly bonded to his purple dinosaur plush toy, which they misplaced right before an airplane trip.  In exasperation, the mother exclaimed, “Where is that little purple s**t?”  Do you know what that toddler called his plush toy for months afterward, including every time he saw the character on television?  You guessed it, everywhere he went, he called it “Purple s**t.”

Rick has been through several breakfast “phases” since the kids have been old enough to prepare their own breakfasts.  For a while, he was eating peanut butter on toast for breakfast, and we suddenly noticed we weren’t going through any cold cereal, but were using a lot of peanut butter and bread. Then Rick began microwaving an egg in a bowl for breakfast, and suddenly all the kids were microwaving eggs for breakfast.  The same thing happened when he started eating yogurt for breakfast, and again when he returned to cold cereal.  For a while, we had extra leftovers, so Rick started re-heating leftovers for breakfast, until the kids started cleaning them out for their own breakfasts.  Lately, we’d returned to cold cereal and milk again, but Rick started pouring yogurt over his cereal instead of milk.  The other day, we discovered that a gallon of milk had gone bad, but we were out of yogurt again.  It seems that the older two kids were pouring yogurt on their breakfast cereal. 

Once the kids were old enough to serve themselves breakfast, we began stocking cold breakfast cereal in the pantry, and gallons of milk in the refrigerator, under the assumption that they would eat cereal and milk for breakfast.  We never told them to eat toast, or eggs, or yogurt, or leftovers. They just picked it up from Rick on their own.  If they are imitating us in such trivial things as breakfast foods, what truly good and bad habits are they catching from us?  We parents need to have good character, so our children can catch it from us.  We need to be the kind of people we want our children to become.  We need to take a deep look at our own motivations, thoughts, and actions, and Rick needs to start eating vegetables for breakfast.

The Art of Teachable Moments

Have you heard of “quality time” from the 1980s?  There was a myth that if you weren’t spending enough time with your child, you could make up for it by orchestrating special, “quality” experiences with them.  We thought it was a silly idea from the start.  We recognized that we wouldn’t always spend as much time with our children as we’d like, even with Becky staying at home, so instead of pursuing “quality time,” we looked for opportunities to seize what we called teachable moments.  Teachable moments are times, however long or short, when the child is curious and receptive to being taught or trained.  Teachable moments are determined by the child, not fabricated by the parent.  You can provide an environment conducive to teachable moments, but you can’t force them to happen.

There are several ways to foster teachable moments, and several places where we consistently discover teachable moments.  We find many of our teachable moments when we are alone with one child; on a walk or bike ride, driving, eating in a restaurant, tucking them into bed, or working together on a project or task around the house.  Remember that you can plan time alone together, but if the child is tired or emotional, they won’t be teachable.  Some of our best teachable moments have come while driving one of our kids to a social, sports, or music event, because they didn’t have to compete with the other siblings.  The kids are more teachable when they aren’t distracted by, or competing with, siblings, parents, or friends, but not all teachable moments are one-on-one.  We’ve had many teachable moments around the dinner table, playing in the yard, driving on trips together, or squashed into a hotel room on a vacation.  If you’re not sure what a teachable moment looks like, borrow someone’s 6^th grade boy for 20 minutes, listen to everything they say, and answer their questions with as much depth as you can – 6^th grade is the maddening time when children have an unquenchable curiosity about absolutely everything, but lack the social graces to keep most of it to themselves.

Teachable moments can involve physical training, like how to throw a football, hammer a nail, or play a chord.  They can be academic, moral, or social learning opportunities. Teachable moments are not lectures, they are conversations or practice activities.  They often start with a child’s question, and are more about understanding and encouraging the child than they are about driving home the parent’s point.  Teachable moments are a chance to train the child in how to think or do something for themselves, with some guidance and clarification from the parent.  A well used teachable moment will endear your child to you like no other activity can, but they are rare, special and elusive, so you have to grab them when you see them.

The Lost Art of Friendship

For kids to bond, they need time together doing an engaging activity.  For toddlers and pre-school children, we arranged  times for friends to meet with our children, either by joining “play groups” where parents and their children meet weekly at parks or other child-friendly locations, or by inviting children over to our house for “play dates.” As our children entered school, there were many more opportunities to meet with friends in addition to play dates, including parties, organized sports, and clubs.  The key was to make sure that our children were spending time with their friends in engaging and positive activities. 

After we’d planned a meeting for our kid’s friends, we’d start planning engaging activities for them.  Engaging activities are activities that interest and engage the children, while allowing them an opportunity to interact with each other.  To set up the best environment to attract friends, we wanted to create play times with our child unique from their friend’s other play experiences.  While we didn’t need to have all of the latest and greatest toys and resources, we did try to purchase one or two unique and age appropriate activities that kids might not have at their own home. For instance, we were the house that had swings and a slide, or the toy with all the fascinating parts and little people, or the house with the finger paints and other art supplies.  When we didn’t have the resources to purchase unique toys, we provided novelty by hosting creative activities.   We took the kids to the park to teach them outdoor games, hosted dress-up parties (nail polish is a big draw) and allowed the entire family room to be turned into a giant blanket fort.  For a while, we were the only household that allowed rubber band gun fights, and we couldn’t keep the boys away.  They key is to provide an engaging activity that will consistently draw your kid’s friends to them.

Not all engaging activities are pure “fun” or “play.”   Our kids formed stronger bonds over activities with a purpose than they did with entertainment activities.  Some of our kid’s strongest bonds of friendship have been formed while helping us with chores and projects around our house, or with community service like landscaping our high school, building houses for the homeless, or serving at our local church.  It’s not unusual for our children to tell their friends that they have to spend 2 hours on a Saturday landscaping before they can play, and have the friend offer to come over early to dig in the yard or haul wheelbarrows.  Other parents are amazed that their children are eager to join us in “work,” but we find that children get deep gratification from activities that have a purpose, or that teach them a new skill.  When we take a group of teenagers to Mexico each year to build houses for the homeless, we work them all day like adults, but then they tell us things like, “this is the hardest I’ve ever worked, and the most tired I’ve ever been, but it’s also the most fun I’ve ever had.  I’d rather do this than take a vacation at an amusement park.”  In that week, those teenagers form permanent and inexplicable bonds with our children that go much deeper than the normal disruptive forces of teenage life.

For friendships to grow, friends need to know they are physically and emotionally safe, and that they are valued and cherished.  Physical safety means that toddlers and pre-school children don’t bite, grade school children don’t hit, and teenagers, especially girls, never feel physically threatened in our home. Children feel emotionally safe in our house because toddlers don’t scream, school children don’t call each other names, middle school children aren’t cruel to each other, and teenagers aren’t duplicitous.  Since we value physical and emotional safety for both our children and their friends, we intentionally trained each of these negative behaviors out of our children, through modeling, instruction, and discipline.  We’ve even caught them being champions of physical and emotional safety (“You shouldn’t call her that mean name.”).

Because we value people, we trained our children to value and cherish their friends and acquaintances.  We’ve all met the socially inept child that struggles to make friends, but what was it about that child that kept them from forming friendships?  It’s often that they don’t value other children with their time, respect, conversations, and resources.  We’ve noticed that children who love others are generous: they listen to their friends instead of dominating the conversation and always talking about themselves.  They share their toys and games, and concede their opinions and desires to their friends; they don’t insist on doing their favorite activity every time they play.  This is not to say that generous children are pushovers or doormats, because our children have very strong opinions and personal presence; but we’ve trained them to consider their friend’s preferences and desires when choosing their activities.  When we’d invited an artistic child over to play, our kids didn’t expect an athletic experience, so they’d offer up a couple of their favorite artistic activities, like drawing or making crafts.  With their more athletic friends, they’d suggest riding scooters or playing ball.

Friendly children often have strong personalities, which attract other children, but they are also polite and kind to the children who gather around them.  As we train our children to be loving and kind, which is a difficult and ongoing endeavor, we can’t just instruct them at home alone in a vacuum.  When they play with friends, we monitor their activities, correcting and directing them to be safe, kind, and generous.  Especially when they were very young, it was tempting to drop them into a group of children and run to another room so we could take a break with other parents. Instead, we found that if we wanted to train our children to be good friends, we had to be actively involved with them while they played.  If they were being selfish with toys, or reacting to conflict physically, or being mean and rude, we had to be there to correct them or even discipline them, taking an active role in their social development.  

The Art of Natural Consequences

When adults are foolish, they receive the natural consequences of their actions.  For instance, when they act dangerously, they are physically injured.  When they are rude, mean, or hurtful to others, they lose relationships.  When adults act stupidly, they suffer financially.  Because life has these natural consequences, we do our best to make the “punishment fit the crime,” making the discipline as close to the natural consequence of breaking the rule as possible. When a child wouldn’t share their toys, we took away a favorite toy.  When they threw a fit (which is a demand for attention), we gave them a time-out away from other people.  When older children broke something through disobedience, (“don’t slam that glass door, or it will break!”), we had them participate in the repair work, either financially or as a helper.

When our teenage daughter violated our “only use nail polish remover on the bathroom counter” policy, she learned how to refinish Becky’s brand new kitchen table the hard way (did you know that nail polish remover dissolves Styrofoam cups in a really cool way, but doesn’t stop when it hits varnish?).  We weren’t always able to make a good fit, but were always searching for creative discipline to match the infractions.  Surprisingly, when we asked the kids for their suggestions, they often came up with very creative disciplines, especially when it was for their siblings!

Each child is different, valuing different objects or freedoms.  For our introverted pre-teen, we found that just the threat of removing his bedroom door was enough to correct a serious behavior problem.  For our extroverted teenager, one day’s restriction from the cell phone was much harder than a week’s restriction from any other activities or objects.  Some children’s personalities will only require a stern look and the threat of discipline, while others will require draconian measures before they will change a bad behavior.  Make sure to study your child to see how they’re built, so you’re administering a discipline that is personalized and appropriately restricting to cause a change in behavior.

At first, we were concerned that removing a favorite toy or object would bond the kids tighter to that object, and make it a problem in the future.  However, our experience was just the opposite.  When they received the security blanket or plush toy back at the end of the discipline, they bonded to it for a short time, but then abandoned it in the long term.  They learned that no object is truly secure, and began to find their security in other, more appropriate places.  In our materialistic society, we’re surprised to find that none of our teenagers are tightly bonded to any of their possessions.  They may value what an object represents, like the communication from a cell phone, the enjoyment of a video game console, or the freedom of a vehicle, but they don’t mourn the loss of any of these objects if they are broken.

The Art of Group Dating

The first part of our plan was to encourage our children to have positive interactions with the opposite gender, as early possible.  In pre-school, they were happy to engage in play activities without regard to gender.  By grade school, they seemed to have a natural draw to spend time within their own gender, but we still encouraged them to form cross-gender groups and partnerships for school projects, and to interact with family friends of the opposite gender in social situations.

Once our kids hit the pre-teen years of middle school, we began encouraging them to participate socially in what our friends called “group dates.”  We wanted them to learn how to interact with other kids of the opposite gender, and begin to assess which personality traits they valued in people of the opposite gender, without the intimacy of one-on-one dating situations.  Group dating allowed our kids to have the kind of social interaction that allows exploration in an emotionally safe environment.  It gave them opportunities to become familiar with a new boy or girl by interacting with their group of friends, outside of the pressure and awkwardness of a formal date.  Here are some guidelines to help your kids with successful group dating:

All events should be adult supervised.  For pre-teens, this means parental supervision.  For teens, it can also include other adults at supervised events like school socials and dances, church youth gatherings, and birthday parties.  Your supervision shouldn’t be suffocating, but you’ll want to keep an eye on what’s going on.

Parental planning and facilitation. In the pre-teen and young teen years, parents should be involved in the planning, to help orchestrate a successful social event. You may also need to host in your home or drive all the kids to an event.

It’s best to start with large groups.  Even if the boys and girls stay grouped by gender for most of the social activity, they will at least begin to get comfortable having each other around.  As your kids get more comfortable breaking the ice and interacting, you can reduce the size of the groups.

Odd numbers are best.  You want to avoid pairing off, so an odd number of kids are best, but not required.  For special events, like formal school dances, this may not be possible, but the goal is to avoid the pain of adolescent infatuation.  Double-dating is OK for teens, as long as the goal isn’t to begin a “steady” relationship.

Have them bring a friend.  When inviting friends of the opposite gender to a social event, the most common question is, “who else is going to be there?”  No awkward pre-teen wants to be the only boy or girl at an event.  We recommend all invitations to mixed social events always either extend an invitation to bring a same-gender friend, or clarification that a close friend is also being invited.  Don’t be surprised if everyone needs a separate phone or text message conversation with all of their friends to make a group decision before accepting the invitation.