An inspiring story of faith

Noble (PG-13) tells the dramatic true story of Christina Noble, who overcomes a harsh childhood in Ireland to give her life to helping abandoned children.

 

 

The film moves between scenes of Christina’s life growing up in Ireland and her arrival in Vietnam in 1989, 14 years after the end of the war. Different actors portray her as a child, as a young adult and as an older adult, arriving in Ho Chi Minh City with only a few dollars and unsure why she is even there. Years earlier, she has a dream about Vietnam, a country “she wouldn’t be able to show you on a map,” and it sticks with her.

Christina grows up in poverty in Dublin. Her mother dies when she’s young, and her father is an alcoholic who hits his wife. Christina is a talented singer and shows great resilience. When her father agrees to have her and her siblings removed from the home and sent to a Catholic orphanage, she escapes briefly and goes to a pub and sings. Captured, she endures harsh punishment from the nuns at the orphanage, which feels clichéd.

As a young adult, she is on her own and gets a job in a factory, where she meets a woman who becomes a close friend. She survives a gang rape (not shown), loses her job and is taken to a Catholic shelter. There she gives birth to a boy, who is taken from her and given up for adoption.

Later, she marries, has three children and finally leaves her abusive husband.

This litany of suffering is all back story to the amazing work she does later. Despite her experiences, she retains a faith in God. The film offers several scenes of her talking frankly to God, sometimes in a church, sometimes on her bed. While the film doesn’t dwell on her religious faith, it also doesn’t provide much explanation how she remains faithful, given all that life—and the church—has done to her. We’re supposed to just accept that this is how she is.

After she arrives in Vietnam, she notices children on the street and begins caring for them. One day, she happens by an orphanage and convinces the Vietnamese woman who runs it to let her work there.

Overcome by how many children are in need of care and protection, particularly from sex traffickers, she eventually convinces donors to give her funds, and she creates a ministry that has now reached hundreds of thousands of children throughout Asia.

Despite the description above of Christina’s life growing up, the film isn’t as hard-hitting as it might have been. It lacks the gritty realism that a film with better production values or a different director might have brought. This tamer approach, I imagine, is intentional, since the film is geared to a more conservative audience.

And while it is geared toward presenting a message of faith, it doesn’t feel heavy-handed. Christina is clearly a woman of faith, though it’s not clear how that happened. Inarguably, however, hers is an inspiring story.

Noble is available on DVD.

Reasonable risks are good for children

When I was a boy, I and my friends wandered the neighborhood unsupervised. We walked to school and didn’t worry about strangers. We had a tree house and built forts; we used our imagination to play various games.

Now that seems like a different world from today. I rarely see children playing outside in our neighborhood. And if they do, it’s usually in their own yard.

No, I’m not just being nostalgic. This change in our culture has unhealthy consequences for our children. An article in The Atlantic (April) addresses this reality and calls for change.

In “Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone,” Hanna Rosin points out that when kids face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and conquer them alone, this builds self-confidence and courage.

She quotes Joe Frost, a safety crusader whose influence brought drastic changes to playgrounds in the ’80s but has now become concerned that we’ve gone too far. Adults have come to the mistaken view “that children must somehow be sheltered from all risks of injury,” Frost writes, but “in the real world, life is filled with risks—financial, physical, emotional, social—and reasonable risks are essential for children’s healthy development.”

There has been a drastic change in parents’ supervision of children. Rosin refers to a U.K. study that showed that “in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower.”

Parents routinely tell their children never to talk to strangers, “even though all available evidence suggests that children have about the same (very slim) chance of being abducted by a stranger as they did a generation ago,” Rosin writes.

In fact, overall, crimes against children have been declining. One exception is family abduction. “The explosion in divorce in the ’70s meant many more custody wars and many more children being smuggled away by one or the other of the parents,” Rosin writes.

Ellen Sandseter, a professor of early-childhood education in Norway, published a paper in 2011 on children’s risky play. She concluded that children “have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement,” at least in their minds.

She identifies six kinds of risky play: (1) exploring heights, (2) handling dangerous tools, (3) being near dangerous elements, (4) rough-and-tumble play, (5) speed and (6) exploring on one’s own.

The last one, she says, is the most important: “When they are left alone and can take full responsibility for their actions, and the consequences of their decisions, it’s a thrilling experience.” And they gain self-confidence.

She writes that “our fear of children being harmed,” mostly in minor ways, “may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

Today, writes Rosin, “failure to supervise has become, in fact, synonymous with failure to parent.” And this has resulted in a “continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways,” according to psychologist Peter Gray.

In an essay called “The Play Deficit,” Gray chronicles the fallout from the loss of the old childhood culture: depression, narcissism and a decline in empathy, “a familiar list of the usual ills attributed to Millennials.”

Rosin concludes: “We can no more create the perfect environment for our children than we can create perfect children. To believe otherwise is a delusion, and a harmful one.”

Fear breeds fear. Raising children without phobias may require letting them play without parental supervision, letting them experience the thrill of reasonable risks.

How do digital immigrants deal with young digital natives?

In 2001, education and technology writer Marc Prensky popularized the term digital natives to describe the first generations of children growing up fluent in the language of computers, video games and other technologies. (The rest of us are digital immigrants, struggling to understand.)

In her article “The Touch-Screen Generation” in The Atlantic (April), Hanna Rosin writes about how young children—even toddlers—are spending more and more time with digital technology. She asks, “Should parents recoil or rejoice?”

In 1999, Rosin writes, the American Academy of Pediatrics discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, “citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for ‘direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers.’ ” In 2006, 90 percent of parents said their children younger than 2 consumed some form of electronic media. Yet in its updated policy in 2011, the AAP “largely took the same approach it took in 1999, uniformly discouraging passive media use, on any type of screen, for these kids,” writes Rosin.

What are parents to do? Well, Rosin is one, with three children “who are all fans of the touch screen.” But when she talks with people (also parents of young children) who help develop interactive media for children, she finds them more restrictive than she is about their children using technology.

Rosin describes “the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children.” Parents are afraid that if they don’t use the new technology just right, “their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can’t make eye contact and has an avatar for a girlfriend.”

Rosin asks, How do small children actually experience electronic media, and what does that experience do to their development?

Because much of the recent technology is new, most of the research in this area concerns toddlers’ interaction with television. Researchers eventually identified certain rules that promote engagement: “stories have to be linear and easy to follow, cuts and time lapses have to be used very sparingly, and language has to be pared down and repeated.”

Now researchers are beginning to study toddlers’ use of iPads to see what they can learn and if they can transfer what they learn to the real world. They ask further, “What effect does interactivity have on learning? What role do familiar characters play in children’s learning from iPads?”

Rosin wondered if too many apps developed for children emphasized education over play. Then she came across apps designed by a Swedish game studio named Toca Boca.

In 2011, the studio’s founders, Emil Ovemar and Björn Jeffery, launched Toca Tea Party. “The game is not all that different from a real tea party,” writes Rosin. It’s not overtly educational, and there’s no winning and no reward. “The game is either very boring or terrifically exciting, depending on what you make of it,” she writes. For kids, the game is fun every time, “because it’s dependent entirely on imagination.”

Rosin notes that “every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people.” However, despite “legitimate broader questions about how American children spend their time,” parents have to decide for themselves.

Rosin decided to let her young son have access to an iPad for six months. “After about 10 days, the iPad fell out of his rotation, just like every toy does.” It was just one more tool.

We digital immigrants will continue to struggle with our digital natives.

Electronic cocaine

Before I get to that title, a few stories from this past week:
• On Saturday I was in Oklahoma City, attending the annual assembly of Western District Conference of Mennonite Church USA. That morning I led a workshop (organizers called it a "learning community") on spiritual practices. I'd barely begun when someone's cell phone went off. I said (to laughter), "Maybe a spiritual practice could be to turn off our cell phones."
• On Wednesday afternoon a friend of ours who moved to New Zealand in January stopped by for a visit, one of many stops during her two-week or so visit back to see family and friends. As we talked about the differences between New Zealand and here, she mentioned that there people are more active, less sedentary, less obese. And, she added, less obsessed with cell phones. She had visited a friend (here in the U.S.) who spent much of the time they were together texting. And there weren't others in the room; just the two of them.
• Later that evening, I went to our local grocery store to pick up something. On my way to the checkout counter, I passed a young boy, maybe 7 or 8 years old, walking behind his mother. He held a device that held his attention. As I passed him I saw that he was playing some kind of game on it. He seemed oblivious to others around him.
Then I came upon this article in the latest Newsweek called "Is the Onslaught Making Us Crazy?" by Tony Dokoupil.

I won't take the time to go through the article thoroughly but merely highlight some of its points. (Read it if you can.) 
First some stats:
• the average teen processes 3,700 texts per month;
• one-third of smart phone users go online before getting out of bed;
• in a poll of millennials (13- to 30-year-olds), most said they felt "exhausted" by their online activities;
• the brains of Internet addicts scan a lot like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts.
Have you ever heard of "phantom-vibration syndrome"? That's when everyday cell phone users report feeling their phone vibrate when in fact nothing is happening.
Dokoupil writes that "research is now making it clear that the Internet is not 'just' another delivery system. It is creating a whole new mental environment, a digital state of nature where the human mind becomes a spinning instrument panel, and few people will survive unscathed." 
Susan Greenfield, a pharmacology professor at Oxford University, says, "This is an issue as important and unprecedented as climate change."
Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, says "the computer is like electronic cocaine" (there's our title), fueling cycles of mania followed by depressive stretches.
Dokoupil goes on to refer to several different studies that show that overuse of the Web actually rewires the brain. A Chinese study showed that Internet addiction has led to "shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory and other information."
The new Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders, due to be released next year, will include for the first time Internet Addiction Disorder.
One psychiatrist, Elias Aboujaoude, points out that ADHD diagnoses have risen 66 percent in the last decade and adds, "There's little doubt we're becoming more impulsive."
Maybe that's enough. If we're dealing with addiction, then it won't be easy to change people's behavior. But in terms of spirituality, let me just go back to that incident in my workshop. We laughed, but maybe limiting our use of the Internet should be a spiritual practice. That may at least be a place to start.