Category: Parenting Page 1 of 2

My parents, Kim and Margaret Coutts, have been married 50 years this month, a milestone that only 5% of American marriages achieve. They have extraordinary lives, worth writing about.

My dad was serving as a pharmacist at a military hospital at Fort Dix, New Jersey when a fellow officer knocked on his door and asked, “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven?”

My dad was irritated – angry, even – but couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was just one of many instances in their early adulthood when God inserted Himself into their story, and it wasn’t much longer before they turned their lives over to Him. It wasn’t a flippant decision. It was the beginning of an entire re-orientation of their priorities.

About four years later, my mom and dad attended a missions conference at First Baptist Church in San Jose – the one whose foyer boasted the spiral ramp that surrounded the two-story fountain. When the speaker gave a challenge, while the background music played, they walked forward to the altar to offer their lives in missionary service.

They spent almost a decade of service in missions in Liberia and Ethiopia, despite my mom crying every single day for the first six months. It was a sacrifice: her own mother refused to write or speak to her for the entire first two years. My mom taught elementary school, and my dad served as head pharmacist at ELWA Hospital, then as hospital administrator.

The year we returned, while still working as chief pharmacist at Kaiser, my dad went on to revolutionize the missions program at Hillside Church in San Jose. He started the partnership with Tanzania that changed the course of my life and dozens of others. He began a missions prayer ministry that has continued for three decades. He led numerous other short-term trips and developed several other overseas partnerships.

Meanwhile, while my mom taught kindergarten, she launched a ministry in the low-income neighborhood down the street from our church. Thirty years later, that ministry has flourished and is thriving. My mom invested in scores of children in that neighborhood, including taking in two of them for several of their college years, enveloping them as surrogate daughters.

My parents have done some big things in their 50 years of marriage. But what strikes me the most is how they have been faithful in the little things, the things that most people don’t see.

Have I Failed My Children?

By Amy Medina

On March 1, 2023

In Adoption, Parenting

“It’s such a shame that they failed two of their children.”

I was in college, and my friend was referring to a Christian family with adult children, two of whom had gone off the rails into drugs and unwed pregnancy.

My friend had young children of her own, and as someone several years ahead of me, she was a mom I greatly admired. She and I both knew that she would certainly not fail her children. I tucked away this lesson: My children’s choices would be a reflection of me.

***

Around the same time, I attended a large children’s ministry conference where a seminar speaker declared that ADHD was not a real condition – a child who couldn’t pay attention or sit still was the sad result of bad parenting. As an elementary teacher, I suspected the speaker was wrong, but it didn’t stop me from being marinated in the idea that I was responsible for my children’s behavior.

“First-time obedience” was the mantra of my era of Christian parenting. None of this “count to three” stuff; you were not a good parent if you had to ask twice. If they didn’t obey, it was on you. Being a responsible, perfectionist person, I took this seriously. I was up for the challenge.

When I first became a parent, this worked. I’d been trained as a teacher. I knew how to hold children to high expectations without raising my voice or losing my cool. And my stubbornness could match the most strong-willed of children. I remember a fellow mom responding with amazement at how quickly my kids complied when summoned from the playground. Yep. I was not going to fail my children. No siree.

It worked, that is, until it didn’t work. Then it became a dumpster fire. And demanding “first-time obedience” became the gasoline that made the fire explode. With one child in particular, the more I dug in my heels and expected obedience, the more the opposite happened. As I increased the consequences, so did my child’s unhinged behavior.

On Transracial Adoption

By Amy Medina

On January 16, 2023

In Adoption, Parenting, Race and Diversity, Re-Entry to America

There was a lot I didn’t know when I adopted my children.

Since then, I’ve wondered a hundred times if we did right by our children when we adopted them. Adoption heals a wound, but I underestimated the depth of the wound and overestimated the ease of healing it.

Several months ago, I was asked to do a webinar on my advice for raising adopted children overseas. I turned it down. I can’t give advice on this because I’m still raising my children. Ask me again in ten years, and I’ll see if I have advice. Maybe only once I’ve heard what my adult children have to say about it.

For the bulk of their childhoods, Haven of Peace Academy shielded my children from the pain. They were different by being raised by white parents, but lots of children at HOPAC were different for lots of other reasons. Most were born in one country and raised in another, many were biracial, almost all knew what it felt like to navigate various cultures. My children were stuck between worlds, but so were all their classmates.

I ripped my children from Tanzania and dropped them into America in the spring of 2020, when the world had shattered into uncertainty, and racial anger that had festered for decades was exploding to the surface. We lived like hobos that spring with no place to call home, and the night in June that we arrived at my in-law’s house, there was a curfew over all of greater Los Angeles because of George Floyd rioting.

I wondered what world I had brought my Black children into.

Imagine telling your children about the things that people who look like you have done to people who look like them in the country you brought them to live in.

Astray

By Amy Medina

On October 20, 2022

In Adoption, Parenting

Last night my stomach tightened as I pulled Johnny’s red jacket out of the dryer. This is the jacket I described to the police officer. Will I ever be able to look at it the same way again?

This past Sunday morning at 8, I holler at the kids to get moving. Johnny isn’t in bed, but that is normal. As the youngest, he usually is out of bed before anyone else on weekends. Routine bedlam ensues, with teenagers jostling for the bathroom and grumbling over who ate the last piece of banana bread. At 8:40, Gil and I bellow for all to get into the car.

Only when everyone is clambering out the door do we realize Johnny isn’t in the house. I huff, questioning why he would go out to play when he knows we are heading to church.

Johnny is my independent, curious one. He’s the child most likely to make himself a spinach and mushroom omelet for breakfast, experimenting with spices. The night before, he was obsessed with conquering a new Rubik’s Cube. He told me recently that he is too old for hugs and kisses now, and I conceded on the kisses but declared that I will hug him for as long as I live, so too bad for him.

His three teenage siblings are often too busy for him, and Johnny doesn’t like playing by himself. His screen time had been confiscated for this weekend, so that’s likely what drove him outside. He loves roaming the neighborhood on his bike or hoverboard, but today both of those things are still in our garage. Plus, he knows there are three rules: Don’t leave the house without telling a parent. Don’t leave the neighborhood. Don’t go inside anyone’s house.

Selling Our Souls to Soccer?

By Amy Medina

On August 5, 2022

In How Americans Think, Parenting

Josiah came home to us at nine months old and found the ping pong balls on the second day. They were the perfect size for his tiny fists and he crawled around the house with one in each hand, clicking on the tile floors.

His first word was daddy and his second word was ball and I’m not bitter about that at all of course.

All his favorite toys centered around soccer. On Sundays after church, we ate at P-Square and while we waited for our rice and beans and mishkaki (P-Square had the best mishkaki), he and his sisters would hunt around the plastic tables for bottle caps. Soon he had enough so that each kind was a soccer team – like, Fanta was Manchester United and Sprite was Liverpool. Gil made him a soccer field out of green pressboard and Josiah spent hours playing bottlecap soccer, arranging his “players” in perfect formation.

Every year for his birthday, the only gift he wanted was the new version of the FIFA video game. So every fall, we figured out a way for somebody to bring us FIFA 2014 or 2015 or 2016 out to Tanzania. His parties were soccer themed for six years in a row.

He mastered a diving header at three and a bicycle kick at four. He played soccer before school, at recess, and after school and usually came home with his lunch uneaten because he played then too. When I nagged him about eating lunch, he asked me to make him something he could shove down his throat in 30 seconds.

In Tanzania, I loved that Josiah loved soccer and I loved watching him play. He joined the HOPAC team and had a couple of practices and a game each week. Maybe twice a year, he had a tournament on a Saturday. Often, Gil was his coach. On Sunday evenings, families would informally gather at HOPAC and play together – all ages. Soccer almost always happened at HOPAC so it flowed easily into our lives.

Two years ago, we moved to America, and I started hating soccer. Josiah was quickly recruited for an AYSO club team, and we said yes because during the pandemic, we were eager to help him make connections. And thus, the full force of what it means to have a kid play club soccer crashed down on me, with evening practices and games almost every weekend – year-round.

I threw several little hissy fits last year. I seethed against the hurried family dinners and the lack of free time on weekends. I mourned our busyness and inability to spend more time in ministry. But then I looked around and other families didn’t seem fazed by this. Driving an hour to a tournament every Saturday was apparently normal life for American parents. I experienced serious culture shock.

Gil and I have never had aspirations for our kids to go far in sports. We don’t have lofty goals for college; we drive past the community college five minutes from our house and cheerfully announce, “Hey kids, wave hello to your future college!” I rail against this American culture that tells me I must push my children to reach their potential in every area, that success in school and sports or arts is the ultimate goal of parenting.

Josiah always said he wanted to be a professional soccer player when he grew up. And I would always smile condescendingly and say, “That’s a nice dream, Buddy, but it’s not going to happen. Choose something else.” This was usually followed by, “Get off your backside and do your homework.”

Unfortunately for me, this summer the coach of an elite team invited Josiah to be a starter on his team. He told us that Josiah could likely play for a Division I college. And possibly become a professional player.

Category: Parenting Page 1 of 2

This is What 50 Years of Faithfulness Looks Like

Have I Failed My Children?

On Transracial Adoption

Astray

Selling Our Souls to Soccer?