The Cultivated Home Journal

It’s the morning of Christmas Eve, and I am listening to the wind rush from the canyon and swirl around my childhood home as I cuddle with my baby boy in the glow of my mother’s harp-themed Christmas tree. Just a few days ago we said goodbye to the lights of Stuttgart’s Christmas markets, eating fried pastries as we walked along cobbled streets.

The week of Thanksgiving, we were notified that we were moving back to the States. It was a move we were expecting, but we didn’t know the timing. So that we could be with our children—and grandchild–for Christmas, we expedited everything. Fortunately, few moves this time of year meant that our household was packed and on its way across the ocean less than two weeks later. 

It’s been a whirlwind, and Germany will always have our hearts, but this was the right move for our family, as it will mean more time together–in Utah, with our adult daughters and our extended families, as well as in our new home in Williamsburg, Virginia! We visited this area when we lived in North Carolina, and fell in love with our British Colonial roots, so we are thrilled with the chance to dive deep into these, as well as the vindication at Yorktown and the origin story of Jamestown. We want to pour the beauty of our American roots and our European heritage into our new home.

But in the meantime, it’s Christmas time and we don’t have a home of our own. We’ve done this before–16 times. We’ll likely do this again. It’s never been easy, but we’ve learned a few things that have helped us build stability and focus on growth, even in a time of transition. We thought this would be the perfect opportunity to share how educational principles and life lessons help ease the chaos–in real time.

We’d like to invite you to join us Thursday mornings as we share our journey to creating our new home in Williamsburg. We might be a little quiet through the New Year as we plan to focus on our Utah family, but my goal starting mid-January is to post a new article every Thursday morning. Feel free to check out our About page to find out more about this website.

Thank you for being part of our story, whether we’re family by birth or by adoption–in Alaska or Florida or Stuttgart! We love you and are grateful to have gained strength from our friendship. If you sent us a Christmas card, thank you! We plant to send out belated New Year’s cards when we have our new address.

Wishing you a season of light and joy through our Savior Jesus Christ,

Matt, Amanda, and family

P.S. If you’d like to see more of what our family’s been up to during our Stuttgart time you are welcome to check out our Life Snapshot.

From what I have seen, transforming experience into character isn’t simply a matter of waiting it out. One must actively engage in the learning process and embrace who we are. Approaching some of the challenges of being a foreigner with the goal of using the situation to help us develop our sense of self has been invaluable. The goal isn’t to isolate so we fit in neither the American nor the German worlds, but that we are comfortable in both, and at the same time relying on a source of our identity and sense of self-worth independent of either. This same approach applies to every culture, no matter how similar or dissimilar it is from who we are.

The most important thing we can do to help our children develop this is to model it, to live this as parents. My favorite thing that I’ve learned through my experience as an educational designer in the home is that the greatest gift parents can give their children is themselves, just as they are. Parents who know they aren’t perfect, do their best, and share a cheerful hope that their children will be just a little better than they are give their children a solid foundation to build on in their own journey in knowing deeply who they are themselves. You are what your kids need more than anything else in this world. Self acceptance in our roles as parents and our place in the world both help our kids develop it in themselves. This self acceptance is key to a strong self of self.

Modeling self acceptance puts us in a prime position to mentor our children in their own self-acceptance. We can guide our children in the kind of discussion and self-talk that helps them see themselves as valuable as they are, see others as valuable as they are. Even our flaws, differences, and trials can be sources of learning and connection. These are things we come across every day and certainly don’t require an across-the-world move. 

Here are 5 at-home activities that research had shown that we as parents can do to help our children develop self-concept clarity:

1. Read aloud and discuss books as a family

Asking questions, such as, “What do you think” about how characters respond to different situations. This allows us to step away from an environment and look at things clearly. Sometimes areas of development are just too close and emotionally charged to talk about openly. Books can be extremely useful case studies. We select books for their uplifting qualities, but reading with the intention of developing a sense of who we are makes conflict and poor examples a learning experience. Relating it back to how we should respond deepens the message. When we’re in a situation in real life, it can be hard to respond well, but going through scenarios before our kids encounter them in real life helps them make better choices. This can also help us define our personal and family values, further solidifying our knowledge of who we are.

2. Journaling

Journaling helps us become more aware of our thoughts and actions, allowing us to better align our actions to our beliefs. Research indicates that individuals who regularly reflect on their thoughts and experiences develop a more coherent and confident sense of self. Expressing gratitude in our journaling can be a powerful focus. We encourage our children to write in a journal on a daily basis as part of their goals, which brings us to our next activity:

3. Goal Interviews

We meet with our kids on a regular basis to help them make physical, intellectual, spiritual, and service goals. Aligning personal goals with values helps kids reflect their authentic selves. Goal-setting also fosters a sense of purpose and direction, helping them to see themselves as someone who is moving towards who they want to be.

4. Make our homes a limited-technology sanctuary

Even as we seek to create additional sources of interaction for our children, we need to reign in and be intentional with this interaction. This means being selective with how we use technology. It can be hard to set limits, but reducing exposure to external influences, such as social media or societal expectations, helps us focus on being our authentic selves. Life is hard! We can make our homes a place where it’s just a little more ok to be who we really are. Studies show that when our lives are not filled with the social comparison and external validation of social media, we can develop higher self-concept clarity. When setting limits, it helps older children if they can be part of the decision-making process. 

5. The Family Narrative

Another tool our families can use is the family narrative. This includes the books that are written about our ancestors, our family scrapbooks, and photo books, physical or digital. It also includes the stories that may or may not be written that we talk about often. All of this makes up the story of our family. Research has shown that late adolescent university students  who have a knowledge of the stories of their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents and beyond have greater self-concept clarity. Research in identity development emphasizes the need for individuals to explore and make commitments to roles and ideals while negotiating the balance between autonomy and relatedness within the family, peer, and other social relationships. As we learn about our ancestors, we see patterns of life, of marriage, of children, patterns to emulate, and patterns to avoid. We are more resilient in the face of trials when we are familiar with the challenges our own ancestors faced.

These activities have been part of our at-home education since the beginning and it has given me such confidence as a mother to know that I am doing my part to help cultivate in my children a deep sense of who they are. Since the experience I shared in part one of this post, my 16yo is now 18 and moved to the states for college, my Tahitian missionary returned home after 18 months, and my oldest daughter graduated college, got married, and had her first child. I’m a grandma! Although I still worry about how my children will adjust to adult life, I feel a deep sense of peace that all will be well. We talk on the phone (sometimes for hours!) every day, and I love the shared meaning of family identity we continue to create with our adult children. The story continues to evolve in beautiful ways. The Lord is so good to us! 

How have you incorporated these strategies for developing a deep sense of self in your everyday family life?

A year and a half ago, I got on the Apple app Find My Friends. I saw the location for my 16yo daughter: home, right by me in our Stuttgart, Germany apartment. She had been long boarding around the neighborhood and I hadn’t heard her come in. I felt my mind slip into that sense of ease a mother feels when children return home.

I tapped on her older sister. I saw her location populate around what I recognized as my parents’ apartment in Armenia. She was visiting them for the week, a last visit before leaving for an 18-month mission to Tahiti. I loved having my Dad’s round profile pop up right next to hers. I realized that soon that round dot with her face on it will be surrounded by the ocean, on the opposite side of the world. I wanted to enjoy this closeness while it lasted.

I clicked on my husband’s location. Africa hadn’t been on my radar for a while, but in his latest job assignment, I knew Africa would be of greatest concern to me for the 10 days of every month he spent there. I swiped over to my oldest daughter, our 21 year-old. The habit of the past 18 months had me thinking of her in her missionary service area in Cusco, Peru, but she had recently returned. Now she popped up in Provo, Utah, and the packed humanity of university suburbia. At least I knew what that place looked like. I grew up an hour from Provo. When we left the state 20 years ago, I imagined we would return within a few years like my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had done.

I spun the Apple-created world to view my family in their various locations. I suddenly felt like I was actually floating, suspended in space, trying to grasp a sense of intersection between my people and all of our places. I felt uprooted, ungrounded. This was going to be my new normal, but how could I find a foothold, with my family on four continents?

How can we raise a grounded family in an uprooted world? Though you may not be living overseas or even away from the community you grew up in, I don’t know any family that feels perfectly situated. Today’s world is an unsettling place!  In this blog post, I will explore this question from the perspective of one very much displaced from my home environment, but the solutions can apply to every family looking for strength in our unstable world.

One of my favorite authors, Frances Hodgson Burnett, wrote about two very different little girls who both grew up away from their homelands of England, in India. Upon the death of her parents, Burnett writes of Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden. “Mary had liked to look at her mother from a distance and she had thought her very pretty, but as she knew very little of her she scarcely have been expected to love her or to miss her very much when she was gone. She did not miss her at all, in fact, and as she was a self-absorbed child she gave her entire thought to herself, as she had always done.”

Contrast this with Sara Crewe of A Little Princess. When her father died, his proposed fortune died with him, and thus the means for Sara’s maintenance. Sara said to Becky, the servant, “Oh, Becky…I told you we were just the same–only two little girls—just two little girls. You see how true it is. There’s no difference now. I’m not a princess anymore.” Becky replies that Sara was indeed a princess. That no matter what happened to her, she would “be a princess all the same.”

When our family was considering a move to Germany, I wanted to know the long-term effects such a choice would have on our children. We were not living in the community generations of our family had been raised in, but we had developed roots in a supportive, small town community. Perhaps you have observed as I have, families and individuals that move overseas and return with a fresh perspective on life. They radiate growth. On the other hand, perhaps you have seen families who move overseas and when they return, their children seem to have a long-term sense of disorientation. As exciting as we felt an overseas adventure to be, we knew that the home lessons are the most important lessons and the ones that are the most difficult to teach. I didn’t want to lose our family’s roots in order to grow less essential branches.

So I hit up Google Scholar. What has science found to be the effects of living overseas? I found some disturbing statistics. One study showed that American adolescents who lived in a foreign country for two or more years viewed themselves as less important. They viewed their mothers as less important. They saw their future as more reliant on external sources. They were significantly less likely to view parents, relatives, or family as the most important thing in their lives. They were more likely to bond with places than with people, perhaps grasping for a sense of stability in their uprooted world.

This made me want to dig in my heels and stay in North Carolina forever, but I suspended this feeling until I could learn more. I had observed a different result in some of my friends. As Tolkien wrote, “Not all who wander are lost.” I went back to the world of academia for more answers. Fortunately, I came across a publication by a group of Harvard Business professors that gave me hope. These wise teachers had collected a whole new slew of research in favor of living overseas. They identified that beautiful quality of growth I was searching for. In academia, it is called self-concept clarity, or in my version of mom speak, it is knowing deeply who you are. While technically these terms are distinct, they both deal with having a clear and grounded understanding of you one is, so I will use the terms interchangeably. 

Every mother I know is looking to give her children a deep understanding of who they are. As an educational designer, stumbling upon an academic equivalent for what my mom-intuition values is like finding a gold mine. It quantifies things in a way I can research. It helps me identify specific strategies that are proven to help build it, instead of groping in the dark for what I hope will help. It means aligning the desires of my heart with answers from more experienced minds than mine.

The research I found demonstrates how important this deep self-knowledge is, this element called self-concept clarity. Self concept clarity has been proven to help us maintain our beliefs over time. Self-concept clarity is associated with higher psychological well-being and greater resilience. Furthermore, people with greater self-concept clarity are better able to project a clear and consistent self-image to others and are better able to make clear decisions about their future, such as important career and family choices. 

Even before discovering this academic equivalent, coming to know deeply who we are was one of the goals of our family’s home education. I like the way it is described in A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter. It is a coming of age story. The main character, Elnora, began life the night father’s tragic death. Because of this, her mother is embittered towards her. Elnora is required to provide many of the wants in her life for herself—or go without. Elnora bravely faces this challenge.

As Elnora matures, the book pauses to reflect on the beautiful young woman Elnora is becoming. She has a quality which if it is not self-concept clarity, it is similar enough to be useful. The book states that she has an “added touch from within that might have been called comprehension. It was a compound of self-reliance, hard knocks, heart hunger, unceasing work, and generosity. There was no form of suffering with which the girl could not sympathize, no work she was afraid to attempt, no subject she had investigated she did not understand. These things combined to produce a breadth and depth of character altogether unusual.” The trials Elnora experiences make her compassionate, rather than hard.

A Girl of the Limberlost is not a perfect book, but it has secured a permanent location on our bookshelf. It demonstrates the process of how one comes to know oneself deeply. As I thought about it, I realized this is the element that keeps this book on our shelves. We like our teens (sometimes mature tweens) to read this book because they can experience Elnora’s trial second hand, absorbing a fragrance of her depth of character in the process. It can guide our children to transform their difficulties into their own deep sense of self.

Trials aren’t something we go seeking. Experiences of all forms can give us self-knowledge, but what is it that turns experience into self-knowledge rather than bitterness or disorientation? Back to the research by our Harvard professors regarding overseas experience, they acknowledged that there is a period of disorientation. They hypothesize that as one acclimates to the constant comparison of my culture vs your culture, a person is able to sift through the parts of themselves that belong uniquely to them vs. the pieces of who they are simply because of the culture they came from.

Here in Germany, I work with teens as a music teacher, as a church leader, and other varied community roles. I have seen American teens that never want to go back to the United States. I have seen some that attach to their American culture because it is seen by their German peers as cool. And I have seen others who come to know who they are as individuals who are confident to embrace both the differences and similarities in others, one person at a time. This means seeing past which culture you belong to, and seeing both yourself and others as who you really are.

In part two of this post, we discuss specific strategies for cultivating deep self-knowledge. Until then, let’s keep our eyes open for all the ways knowing who we really are shows up in our lives and in the lives of our children!