Tag: children
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Top 10 Books for Parent-Child Book Clubs with Tweens and Teens
Read Article: Top 10 Books for Parent-Child Book Clubs with Tweens and TeensAs the author of a book about mother-daughter book clubs, and as a parent who often read books with my daughter at home, I cannot speak highly enough about the transformative power of literature. My favorite part of sharing books with my daughter is having a discussion that begins with some aspect of the plot…
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Why We Should Talk to Our Kids About Class and Privilege
Read Article: Why We Should Talk to Our Kids About Class and PrivilegeI remember the first, rather generic conversation I had with my daughter when she was in elementary school about how her life compared with the lives of other children on this planet. I drew a triangle for her and said, “The tippy-top point is where the richest and most fortunate people in the world are.…
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The Value of Boredom
Read Article: The Value of BoredomWhen I was a child, my parents often ignored me. It’s not that they were unkind to me. It’s that they had full lives of their own and didn’t like playing Candy Land. They believed that you should open the door and say to children, Go out and play. They understood the value of boredom.…
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How Highly Gendered Toys Present an Exclusively Heterosexual Worldview to Children
Read Article: How Highly Gendered Toys Present an Exclusively Heterosexual Worldview to ChildrenWhen girls and boys walk into a toy store in 2015, they see a significantly more gendered, heteronormative arrangement and selection of toys than I did as a girl forty years ago! Toys, grouped by gender, are prescriptive of gender roles. It is not only a problem of limiting the ways to be a girl…
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If Our Sons Were Treated Like Our Daughters
Read Article: If Our Sons Were Treated Like Our DaughtersCome with me. Let’s open the door to a parallel universe. You unlock this door with a key of imagination, just like on The Twilight Zone. Here in this parallel world, the rules are different because gender roles are flipped. Loving parents and teachers accept this strange culture as if it’s not so bad, or…
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Reading Captain Underpants
Read Article: Reading Captain UnderpantsI used to hear a lot about Captain Underpants during lunch in the schools where I worked. You learn a lot about the lives of your students at lunch table duty! But I have not read Captain Underpants myself in years, so I stopped by the Concord Bookshop the other day and picked up a copy…
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When Children Die and It’s Incomprehensible, How We Move Forward as a Society
Read Article: When Children Die and It’s Incomprehensible, How We Move Forward as a SocietyAlmost twenty years ago, in February of 1993, my daughter was a toddler and sometimes hard to keep track of in stores if I took my eyes off her for a second, as all parents occasionally do. Around that time I lost her in Gymboree at the mall for perhaps 10 minutes because she was…
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When Parenting Your Adult Child Is Like Parenting Yourself: A Story
Read Article: When Parenting Your Adult Child Is Like Parenting Yourself: A StoryWhen my daughter Charlotte went off to college, suddenly and abruptly petless, it did not take long before she determined the rule about pets in dorms: fish only. On impulse, and accompanied by a new friend who had a tank of goldfish in her room, Charlotte made her way to the nearest pet store and…