When I reviewed The Fun Habit at the end of January, I stuck with observations that were in line with the focus of the book. What I didn’t mention was that, in addition to the expected insights about fun, there are some intriguing takeaways about the Church, education, community, and parenting. (Rucker doesn’t talk about the church; it’s a secular book. But he makes observations that, in my opinion, are applicable to the Church.) At the time, I promised my Facebook friends that I would come back and talk a little about those takeaways; that’s the purpose of this post.

These may come across as a little scattered at times, because they’re a collection of individual observations made at various points in the book. Some flow into each other better than others.

Insights on Education

Effective Learning

Conventional education is very much designed to strip the Fun — particularly as “fun” is defined in The Fun Habit  — out of the process. The problem is, fun (in this sense) is integral to effective education!

“According to Walter Isaacson’s biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe, the personality traits that contributed most to Einstein’s greatness were curiosity and nonconformism.”

Notice that these are traits that homeschooling — especially unschooling — particularly fosters…and they’re traits that conventional schooling discourages and sometimes even penalizes.

“Both learning and fun benefit when they are aligned with self-determination.” In other words, when people choose their own projects and challenges, they have greater success. Once again, unschooling and similarly self-directed homeschooling fosters this, while conventional schooling strips away self-determination.

“Freedom from constraint is not limited to early development. Anyone who has access to play, access to ideas — even access to abstract constructs — who is willing to play with ideas and constructs is going to be more likely to develop than somebody who is attached to ideas and constructs in a sort of static way.” (Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter)

Put another way, we develop more fully when we’re allowed to play & experiment with ideas than when we’re just told what to think and expected to hold to that unquestioningly. Exploration of ideas is as essential as merely having ideas.

Parental Expectations

“Rather than following their kids’ lead and jumping into play, parents tended to prompt and observe….parents were often too concerned about what their children would learn…”

This pattern demonstrates our obsession with the outcome and lack of faith in the process. We need to learn to reverse the order: have experiences (and allow our children to have experiences) and then assess what we’ve learned from them, not determine whether an experience is worth having by attempting to predict what we can or will learn from it.

More About Autonomy

“Under certain circumstances, demanding jobs were linked to better health outcomes…” “[Y]our stressful job is more likely to kill you when it is also lacking in autonomy.”

“[A] review of nine studies…concluded, ‘People desire power not to be a master over others, but to be master of their own domain, to control their own fate.'”

“[A]utonomy plays a central role in motivation”

“[B]oth motivation and learning peak when we’re fulfilling three basic human needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (i.e. a feeling of connectedness that is absent of ulterior motives)”

“When our needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy aren’t satisfied, we feel used up and empty.”

One major reason people generally don’t see work as fun is that “[d]uring those forty (or likely more) hours of your life, someone else is telling you where to be, what to do, and maybe even how to do it.”

All of this is a study in autonomy. Rucker is focused on adults and work, but think about the implications for our children.

If a stressful job lacking in autonomy is more likely to kill us, how healthy do you suppose coercive education is for children? We’re setting them up for poorer health outcomes, absence of motivation, inferior learning, and “feel[ing] used up and empty.” And then we wonder why we have a society of young people who are anxious and depressed.

Insights on Parenting

Patterns Are More Important than Perfection

“[O]ur brains are efficient. We often encode noneventful routine activities as a single memory.”

This really struck me, in relation to parenting. It’s the reality that keeps perfect consistency from being essential — which is highly encouraging! We don’t have to get everything right ever time when it comes to habitual/routine family activities. We just have to have the routine. The kids will remember that we did the thing, not all the details of every instance.

For instance, if you read the Bible and pray most nights at bedtime, your kids will form a memory of “reading the Bible and praying at bedtime.” They won’t be able to tell you later that “oh, well, we actually missed twenty-one days that year”; they’ll just remember that you regularly read the Bible and prayed!

Routines matter. Patterns matter. But perfection, not so much.

Addiction & Obsession

When speaking about the dangers of addiction and obsession, Rucker noted that “excessive” fun (that is, “fun” being abused in similar fashion to a drug, rather than used in a healthy manner) occurs when “self-control and autonomy are lost.” And he pointed out that “obsessive passions…are not enriching. When we stop, we feel empty.”

These can be helpful tools for helping our children evaluate when their own interests have become unhealthily obsessive. Is your self-control gone? When you stop, do you feel reinvigorated or empty?

On the flip side, “[w]hen we over-index on easy, pleasurable fun…we can get bored.” When the kids spend too much time on certain types of video games — especially with the cheat codes on — they may be undermining their own fun through lack of challenge. We’re designed to need a balance of easy and challenging tasks.

Diminishing the Power of Negative Emotions

“Some psychologists (e.g. Dr. Dan Siegel) advise the technique ‘Name It to Tame It’; studies show that if we name our negative feelings (e.g. I feel angry, I am afraid), their potency reduces as we are able to integrate the left and right sides of the brain and lower the response of the amygdala and other limbic areas.”

Even the author himself notes that this is particularly helpful for parents to guide children in! Identifying the emotion seems like such a small thing, but it can be very powerful — and it’s not always as easy as it sounds.

Playing with Children

“David Lancy…argues that the entire idea of playing with your child — whatever that looks like — is uniquely modern and Western.”

I’ve made this observation before. Parents in previous eras didn’t spend a lot of time sitting and playing with toys with their children. They primarily either brought their children alongside them in their work, or they let the children play with the children. Lancy takes this even further, though, alluding to connections I hadn’t made.

“In centuries past — or even decades past — grown-ups did grown-up things while children played with other children. Lancy calls this hands-off approach benign neglect and sees some benefits — for example, preventing the emergence of ‘kidults.'”

Is it possible that our cultural emphasis on playing with our children all the time is creating an extended immaturity, because we’re modeling something other than the desired adult behavior we want them to aspire to? That by spending so much time joining them in their childishness, we’re actually failing to model how to be a grown-up?

Insights on Worship

One section of the book talks about a certain aspect of fun or delight that eludes description. In part of this section, Rucker talks about “escapism,” which, in this context, he means in a positive sense — not so much escaping real life as escaping the…rat-race-ness of life, I guess? (As I said, this is a hard concept to describe!)

This whole idea revolves around that state of being we all encounter sometimes where life just feels like “more.” When an athlete or artist is “in the zone.” When you’re basking in the awe of the Grand Canyon or the sparkling night sky. When you’re just enjoying the temporarily unhindered delight of a a toddler giggling and the rest of your children being at peace with one another.

Do you know what I mean? That sense of cosmic rightness? Of being staggered by the beauty of Creation? Of feeling like a part of something wide and wonderful?

Rucker says that in an “escapist state,” you “become completely absorbed” (in the sense of being fully present in the moment – “nowness”), you “might temporarily disassociate” (this sounds wacky, but contextually I think this is about being entirely undistracted), reaching “oneness,” and you also replace your judgment of yourself with “a reverence for ‘something so much bigger than you.'”

Worship does all of these things. I probably wouldn’t choose the same wording he does in every instance, but it’s the same essential state of being that he’s trying to describe. A fully immersive experience, where we block out all external distractions and we really experience ourselves as part of a larger whole (the Body) and as overshadowed by and in awe of the Creator.

“There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that experiencing awe, experiencing yourself for a speck for a minute or two, really gives your nervous system a break.”

“Dr. Mark E. Koltko-Rivera…proposed the following description of a person who reaches self-transcendence: ‘Seeks to further a cause beyond the self and to experience a communion beyond the boundaries of the self through peak experience.'”

Remember, these are secular psychologists, so they’re not trying to make religious commentary here, but it’s striking to me how closely they’re describing the rest and peace and unity, etc. of worship. We’re made for this.

Insights on the Church and Community

Something I’ve been noticing over the past few months is that school has, for the most part, replaced the church as the center or “hub” of community. People can be present at every service and every activity the church ever has, and still find themselves feeling like “outsiders,” because people’s real close circles of friends are built around where their kids go to school (or what schools they work at). And I’ve been pondering the mechanisms behind this and how we might address it. The Fun Habit has a couple of observations that can shed some light here.

“Daily life was once naturally social….These days we’re more transient than tribal…”

There are “three things sociologists say are critical to making friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that helps us relax and let down our guards.”
“The importance of proximity and repetition cannot be understated.”

This is why, in contrast to church, schools are taking over as the “center.” The New Testament church met daily. The modern church meets much less rarely than students or parents meet at church. Where it used to be the case that the church was an integral part of people’s everyday lives, now school is part of everyday life, but church is not; it’s a mere interruption to or punctuation in people’s everyday lives.

The community that has your “proximity” the greatest percentage of the time has (in general) the largest share of your affections.

He goes on to say that there are “three…success factors…” that may help us to maintain friendships. 1) Consistency. 2) Accountability, and 3) Having fun.

This, too, is an area most churches are weak in. Many do okay at consistency. Fewer do well at accountability. But most churches downplay the importance of fun. It’s seen as frivolous. But because having fun together is an intrinsic part of building close friendships, when the Church minimizes fun so that we get all of our fun elsewhere, we ensure that all of our closest friendships come from somewhere else. We’re cutting out entire elements of community, and then wondering why our sense of community is weak.