Cross-Cultural Chinese Parenting 101
Episode 3
[00:00:00] Hi everybody, John Yoder here. Welcome back to the third episode of this series, Cross Cultural Chinese Parenting 101. Last time we talked about how your children think and how your children learn. And we said that the reason that they think differently than you do is because they went to different high schools than you did and they faced different life issues than you faced.
[00:00:26] Today's young people are facing issues that no previous generation had to deal with. When you and I, if we're in that older generation, didn't have to deal with social media, artificial intelligence, gay marriage, transgenderism, online pornography, and a whole lot more. We cannot speak out of our years of experience because we don't have any. [00:00:53] They are simply things our generations did not face.
Your kids need a faith [00:01:00] that is able to address these issues, and to do that, they need resources, voices, that are completely faithful to the Bible as the Word of God, and yet deal with these issues in a healthy manner. That's why we've generated our Cross-Cultural Voices podcast to present the voices of multicultural young adult Christians who face these issues, who obey Jesus and his word, and can explain these things to your adult kids in ways that they will be able to understand and accept.
Right now, I just want to share with you briefly about four of the issues that you need to be addressing with your adult kids. They are identity, mental health, gender, and race.
[00:01:50] So the first issue to talk about is identity. Gen Z is the first generation of Americans that have no majority group. In [00:02:00] older generations, white folks were 50 percent or more of the population. But in our urban schools today and suburban schools as well, whites 49 percent of the student body. There is no majority group, and Gen Z is used to functioning in a highly multicultural environment.
[00:02:20] Children born in the U. S., in Canada, in Britain today to immigrant parents have to function in two different cultures. When they're at home, they need to function in their parentsâ cultural norms. They might need to speak another language. But when they're at school, and in the workplace, they're expected to function like Americans.
[00:02:40] That gives to them a sense of cultural in betweenness. It's almost like they don't completely feel like they fit anywhere. Mexican Americans have said to me, âJohn, I'm never Mexican enough for the Mexicans. I'm never American enough for the Americansâ. They can't stop asking me, [00:03:00] âWhere are you fromâ?
There are three groups of people in the US, Canada, and Britain who have a very clear sense, culturally, of who they are. They are our majority group, our minority groups, and our first generation immigrants. So, if you're a white American, an African American, a Native American, or a first generation Mexican, Chinese, Russian, Sudanese, or, uh, those of many, many other groups, we all have a sense of identity. [00:03:31] We can tell you exactly who we are.
But for those who do not clearly fit inside one cultural box, it's a lot harder. So if you're Mexican hyphen American, Cambodian hyphen American, it raises the question, âWho exactly am Iâ?
Friends, Christians have an answer to this. Christians have a beautiful answer to the question of identity.[00:04:00] [00:04:00] We believe that the primary identity of every Christian is being a child of God and of being a brother or sister to all of God's other children. Every other identity is secondary. Your race, your language, your citizenship, your gender, your denomination, your political affiliation, your marital status, your wealth, your diplomas, all of these are secondary to your identity as a child of God. When any of them become more important, they become idols.
When young adults, when teens, children experience the safety and the belonging of knowing that they are children of God. And they are beloved brothers and sisters of other Christians, it makes all the issues of ethnicity [00:05:00] and gender and all the rest much easier to address.
American culture is much more open about this subject than it was when I was a young man, and most cultures in the world, including Chinese, are not as open yet as American culture is. So I remember, as a beginning language student in 2004, when I was studying Mandarin, I asked my teacher what the word was for sexual abuse.
[00:05:39] And she looked at me because she wasn't quite sure what that term meant. She got her dictionary out and she found ć§čĺž
, which is an accurate translation, but it was still just a phrase she looked up, and not something that actually meant anything to her. Or remember a Sunday at our international church where we had services in English and [00:06:00] Mandarin and other languages as well.
[00:06:02] We had a guest speaker who shared his personal story, how as an 8 year old boy, he had been sexually abused by Christians. In the English language service, the pastor stood up at the end and said, "We realize these are real issues that people face, and if you need somebody to talk to, we are here". In our Mandarin language service, the pastor said these are really issues that we don't talk about very much and he was much softer and shorter in his approach.
[00:06:30] You're going to find that your young people who grow up in the United States are going to know a lot about mental health. They're going to know a lot of vocabulary. They're going to know a lot of resources. And they may not put up with things that would be normal and natural in China or in other countries around the world. [00:06:50] If you are going to dialogue with them about mental health, you might need to do some learning yourself.
Today's young people are experiencing record levels of depression and anxiety. Now for my friends who come from various parts of the world, this is really hard for them to understand.
[00:05:22] Because some of you have come from countries of persecution, Some of you escaped war. Some of you came from refugee camps. Some of you have suffered unthinkable things. And you're tough. Those things made you tough and resilient people. Then, You look at what your children experience in elementary school and in middle school, and it baffles you how children who have such a wonderful life could be wrestling with anxiety and depression. But they are.
[00:06:00] Some of us find these issues very difficult to talk about. In some cultures, mental illness is shameful and to be covered up. Some time ago, I was in a church that had both English and Chinese services. And the speaker that day told his personal story as a child of being sexually abused by missionaries.
[00:06:24] At the end of that service, the English language pastor said to his congregation, âThese are real issues that we really face, and if you need to talk to someone, we are availableâ. The Mandarin language pastor said, our congregation really doesn't prefer to talk about things like this, and wasn't as direct in dealing with it. [00:06:49] So some cultures find mental health to be shameful and something to be avoided.
Other cultures see depression and anxiety as the [00:07:00] work of Satan. And the solution is to cast out demons. And I've seen pastors try to cast demons out of people who didn't have demons. Whether you go for either of those two options, to ignore it or to see it all as demonic, it's not likely to be very helpful to your children.
[00:07:22] For some, dealing with emotions is not important because they believe that we should deal with facts of the Word of God. Well, one of the facts of the Word of God is that God is a deeply emotional person. Jesus was a deeply emotional person. There were times when he was compassionate, times when he was grieved, times when he was angry.
[00:07:47] You and I experience emotions because we are created in the image of a God who is deeply emotional. Now, in today's short podcast, we don't have time to get into it, [00:08:00] But in March, we are going to have a series, âFaith, Feelings, and My F-150â, that addresses issues of mental health from a biblical and practical perspective.
[00:08:12] The third issue that today's young people need to face is gender. They are facing issues that were unthinkable 25 years ago. 25 years ago, in the United States, nobody imagined that gay marriage would be part of the law of the land. Nobody envisioned that transgenderism would have the kind of broad support, the kind of social acceptance we see today. [00:08:40] There are some high schools in which one out of six students profess to be gay or trans or something else on that LGBTQ spectrum.
In both of our podcast series, we hold to the biblical position on gender that the church has maintained for centuries. We [00:09:00] believe that there are only two genders, male and female, they're determined at the time of conception, and they are unchangeable. [00:09:08] We believe that God's provision for sexual intercourse is inside a lifelong marriage covenant between one man and one woman.
But we realize that ours is a minority position. We understand that in broad society that most people are ready to embrace pornography, premarital sex, living together outside of marriage, and more. [00:09:34] And sadly, sometimes we find these things embraced even inside the church. We have no right, no ability to demand that people in society live by our standards.
So, there are two realities that we need to hold in tension. The first is that the church does not have the ability to change the laws that God has [00:10:00] given to us just to accommodate our society. [00:10:03] But the other belief is that we have a minority view that people in society do not embrace a Christian sexual ethic, and we need to love them as our neighbors.
For our younger generation, gays are not people they read about in the news. They are their classmates, teachers, co workers, neighbors, brothers, and sisters. [00:10:30] They are friends, not enemies. They are family, not aliens. And we need to be able to teach them to hold unshakably to truth, and yet to act in loving ways to those who do not share their beliefs.
When it comes to understanding that Christianity is a minority religion, and that our moral code is not embraced by most people in society, those of you who grew up in China have an edge over those of us who are older Americans. We older Americans remember another era where these new sexual ethics didn't exist.
[00:11:33] We are grieving losses. Many of us want to go back to the old ways, to the ways that it used to be. But if you grew up in China, you're used to Christianity being a minority religion, you're used to it being persecuted, and you never expect society to embrace your values. You never expected to vote, you never expected to have any influence on the government.
[00:11:55] However, when it comes to these new sexual ethics, this is new to all of [00:12:00] us. Now we know that China is more conservative on these issues than America is. But for any of us who are 40 years old or older, dealing with homosexuality, dealing with transgenderism is completely new to us and we are struggling to find ways to hold to absolute biblical truth while loving our neighbors as ourselves.
Fourthly, young people today need to talk about race. Race has always been an issue in American history, and to be honest, in the history of every other country in the world.
[00:10:59] I don't [00:11:00] know of any country anywhere that doesn't have issues with race. But after the death of George Floyd in 2020, race became a very volatile and a highly discussed subject in American society, and in a window of time, there was a flood of organizations, books, podcasts, and dialogue focused on race.
[00:11:24] More recently, there's been pushback to this. Most people cannot support the kind of extreme positions that popular progressive voices were advocating. And there was a whole new set of vocabulary that was either invented new or popularized during the discussion. Maybe you've heard some of these words: intersectionality, gaslighting, columbusing, heteronormativity, ethnomathematics, decolonization, microaggressions, and more.
And these are bewildering to everyday people that just want to get along with others, and I've [00:12:00] talked to many of you that just simply wonder, âDo we need to talk about this stuff at allâ?
[00:12:06] Today, with corporations rethinking their priorities and their language about diversity, a lot of folks are simply sick and tired of the discussion. They just want to check out.
Now, if checking out means that you're sick and tired of the new vocabulary and the new ideologies, I actually think that's a good thing. [00:12:29] But, if checking out means that you give up on building healthy relationships with others who are ethnically different than you, that's a problem. The Christian faith insists on welcoming people who are not like us. The Bible makes it very clear that Christians are expected to love one another, even across cultural boundaries.
[00:12:54] Romans chapter 15 verse 7 says, âWelcome one another [00:13:00] in the same way that Christ welcomed us to the glory of Godâ. James 2, verse 1 says, âBrothers, do not hold to the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with partialityâ.
Jesus says to us that the second greatest command in the Old Testament law is to love your neighbor as yourself. [00:13:22] When he did, he was quoting Moses from Leviticus chapter 19, verses 33 and 34, which says this, âWhen a foreigner sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the foreigner who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. [00:13:51] I am the Lord your Godâ.
It is an indispensable part of the Christian faith that we need to love people of all ethnicities. [00:14:00] Does that mean, then, that we need to learn all of this vocabulary about gaslighting and intersectionality and dismantling privilege? Not necessarily. The way that Christians have loved others across ethnic boundaries has not changed for centuries. [00:14:19] The Bible gives us clear, easy to understand principles for building strong relationships across racial boundaries, and I have seen these work in church after church after church.
John 13:34-35: âA new commandment I give you, that you love one another, just as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.â
[00:14:51] Philippians chapter 2, verses 3 and 4. âIn humility, count others more significant than yourself. [00:15:00] Let each one of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of othersâ. 1 Peter 2, 17 âHonor everyoneâ. Romans 12, verse 18 âIf it is possible, to the extent that it depends on you, get along peaceably with everyone.â
Matthew 6 verses 14 and 15 âIf you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses.â And finally, Matthew chapter 7, verse 5. âFirst, take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to cast the speck out of your brother's eyeâ.
Folks, if we obey those simple commands, we would [00:16:00] experience an unprecedented outpouring of racial unity. Racial unity does not come when we point fingers at one another and tell other people that they need to change. [00:16:12] That produces hostility, not reconciliation. Unity comes when people come together to change. And everyone gets to speak, to listen, to confess sin, to forgive each other, and to submit to one another.
And so friends, you can tell this is nothing more than a bare introduction and overview to each one of these four areas. [00:16:38] In 2025, we will be dealing with many of these issues in much fuller detail in complete series in our other podcast, Cross Cultural. The very first series with which we open Cross Cultural Voices is entitled Church for People Who Hate Church.
I joined two other multicultural pastors, Sam [00:17:00] Chacko and Moses Saldivar, and the three of us are very open about wounds the churches have caused people, but we're also open about the church as a place of hope or healing. [00:17:11] So if you know young people who are cynical about the church, who believe it's irrelevant or judgmental or does not begin to understand them, this is a really good place for them to start.
Our second series deals with the idea of identity, and it's entitled Loving Your Multicultural Identity. It follows the fictional story of Kenny, a young man who struggles because very few people seem interested in his cultural heritage.
[00:17:38] He stumbles across Michelle Lee-Barnwell's excellent book, âA Longing to Belongâ. He loves the book, he gets a Zoom conversation with Michelle, and together they come to some very helpful conclusions about how to love your multicultural identity even when most people around you don't seem very [00:18:00] interested.
[00:18:00] Our third and longer series is about mental health, and it's entitled Faith, Feelings, and My F 150. It follows the story of a young man named Alex. He's a construction engineer who drives all around the metro for his job. He has a lot of anger because of what has happened to him in the past. His wife recommends that he reads the book, âWhat Made That Feel So Hard?â by Lauren Wells.
[00:18:24] He responds he doesn't like reading. She gets him the audiobook so he has no excuse. And over the next four months, he listens to the book. He has time to pray and reflect. This is not psychobabble. It is not secular theory. It is the word of God. And it gives us language to process emotions in a healthy way.
[00:18:47] Another series for this year is called Friendship in Black and White. It follows the story of two women, a white American and an African American, who had very opposing beliefs about racism and [00:19:00] social justice, but they determined to go on walks together, and to talk together until they could find some kind of consensus.
[00:19:08] Their debates became very heated, there were questions at some point that they would break off the relationship, but they didn't, they kept walking together. Ultimately, they came to a consensus, they came to a shared belief, and they came ultimately to found an organization and write a book to help others understand that blacks and whites can really build healthy relationships together.
[00:19:32] It's most likely that we will not address the issue of gender until sometime in 2026. It's not something we can address quickly. We want to take our time and make sure that we can be thorough in sharing the issue with you.
Now, all of these things that I just shared with you are in our other podcast for young people called Cross Cultural Voices. [00:19:55] Here in this podcast, Cross Cultural Parenting, as [00:20:00] those episodes are released, I will be talking with you about why and how we pick the material, the authors, the presenters, why it matters, and how you can understand it and how you can apply it. I want you to succeed. I want you and your adult kids to build better, stronger relationships, and I hope that our resources will help you in that process.
[00:20:26] As we close, I just want to share with you two verses, Malachi chapter 4, verses 5 and 6. These are actually the last two verses of the Old Testament. Malachi says, âSee, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the hearts of the children to their parents or else I will come and strike the land with a curseâ.
[00:20:56] Friends, we don't want that curse for you. We want to [00:21:00] see parents and adult children turn their hearts toward one another. And as you listen in and apply what you learn here, my prayer is that God will turn that into a reality for you.
