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!
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