Planning for Summer

With July upon us, summer is in full swing. School ended and we took a week off from everything, enjoying being Unplugged. But then I felt a need for some kind of structure to the open-ended days that lay ahead of us. I wanted a way to harness my kids’ potential for finding fun and being creative while still maintaining the freedom and spirit of summer and allowing me to remain a step ahead of the stream of questions about what they could do. And I’m not going to lie, if they could keep up some learning activities, that wouldn’t be too bad either.

I do love a good checklist, so that’s where I started. Our daily chart has 5 boxes with minimum time requirements (more is always allowed):

• Music: 15 minutes
• Household help: 30 minutes
• Reading: 45 minutes
• Movement: 1 hour
• Other (arts & crafts, puzzles, games, writing, building, etc.): 1 hour

Then I sprinkled in some motivation. Checking off 2 boxes earns you 30 minutes of screen time. If your kids are like mine, they will already have figured out that they can check off 4 boxes and have an hour straight on screens, and that if they combine efforts and do each of their hours back-to-back, then they can watch a movie. If your kids are also like mine in their eating habits, then you may have to require eating meals before doing screens. (And you probably notice this doesn’t fill the day. That’s intentional so that they can practice filling their time. These boxes can be great starting points.)

I have to say that my favorite part of this chart is the household help. The kids have always had chores that took them less than 10 minutes to do. So now I have 20 minutes of their help each day for things that I was always scrambling to fit in before the twins sprinted down the driveway or dumped out the toys we just cleaned up or decided to eat yogurt with their fingers and then hop like frogs around the house. I was inspired by this podcast with Dr. Deborah Gilboa, a parent of 4, family medicine doctor, and parenting advice giver extraordinaire, where she gives great actionable tips about how to keep kids engaged in helping around the house and is totally clear on why this is so important. Here are some of the amazing things I’ve discovered my kids are quite capable of doing on their very own:

• Making and packing lunches for everyone (turns out they can make pasta, eggs in several varieties, sandwiches…)
• Loading and unloading the car with bikes, scooters, and helmets
• Gathering towels and floaties, and then hanging them up to dry when we get home 
• Cutting vegetables, opening cans, and even following a recipe to make soup for dinner
• Resupplying bathrooms with toilet paper or bedrooms with tissues

As always, flexibility is key. If we go out for the day, we don’t make a chart or worry about it. Most likely we’ve been hiking or swimming and everyone is tired, and relaxing with screens for half an hour is in everyone’s best interest. I’ve also been trying to have a weekly outing, inspired by my summer camp days with weekly field trips. It’s nice to break up the stream of summer days that can leave you forgetting what day it is, and it also gets everyone out of the feeling that there are no new choices available. Even if you don’t have the flexibility to take your kids somewhere, you might think about how to make one day “special” during the week, perhaps with pancakes or a longer project (talent show anyone?) or bedtime stories under the stars.

And speaking of shaking things up, that “Other” checkbox category is probably your ticket to never having to answer the question, “What can I do?” or respond to, “I’m bored!” Here are some ideas for that box, which may even take the form of a jar with suggested activities that kids can choose randomly:

• Wide Open School by Common Sense Media has virtual summer camp ideas and activities, as well as schedule templates for you to use in planning for your family
• TED-Ed has tons of short video lessons for kids on interesting topics that might spark ideas for a creative project or investigation, or simply make for some interesting dinner conversation
• The Boulder Public Library does a great toddler/preschooler story time, and they’re posting all their episodes so it can become a part of a routine that your kids get to know over time. Many local libraries have similar programs and even suggested crafts to go along with the theme of the stories.
• Even young children can play independently, and here’s a short piece with tips on how to encourage it
• Mommy Poppins put out this list of 100 activities for kids this summer that don’t involve screens
• PBS Learning Media Camp activities for pre-K to 2nd graders and for older students to keep learning fun and alive during the summer
• Finally, some thoughts about virtual camp and a list of ways to make happy campers from home!

Noticing and Acting on Difference

In this NY Times article, How to Raise an Anti-Racist Kid, the author emphasizes the starting point of talking, noting that we should not shy away from comparing and contrasting people, experiences, media, interpretations, reactions, and ideas in order to focus on the differences. (Speaking of which, this Nick News with Alicia Keys on 6/29 should be a great conversation starter!) While focusing on differences may seem obvious now (after all, variety is the spice of life!), it wasn’t always obvious to me, and it’s definitely not comfortable to me yet. Different means change, and change is hard.

In my own life, I notice myself being stuck in the same interactions. Why do I keep having this same fight? Why do I keep putting other people’s needs ahead of my own? Think of what being “stuck” looks like for you. I’m sure it’s there because, after all, we’re only human.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about some of my “stuck” points, and I keep coming back to the need for trying something different. And more and more I’m realizing that different is just that: different. It doesn’t have a judgment attached to it. It’s more of an observation, or something to experiment with. Doing something different is pretty likely to lead to a different outcome. For example, try meeting that person in your argument with curiosity, or try saying no to something you might have normally said yes to. See what happens. My husband shared this Autobiography in 5 Chapters by Portia Nelson with me that captures this so well:

Chapter 1: I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost. I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost. I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 3: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there, I still fall in. It’s habit. It’s my fault. I know where I am. I get out immediately.

Chapter 4: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter 5: I walk down a different street.

I love this quick description of life. And just like with our other “stuck” points in life, it’s incredibly applicable and powerful within the context of institutional and systemic racism. We’re going to keep walking down the same street and falling in that same hole if we don’t open our eyes to the hole and do something different. And though it takes time to even notice the opportunity to do something different, once you see a different path, there’s no going back down that same street again.

I also really appreciate that this autobiography starts in observation and lack of responsibility and ends with agency and action. One of the people quoted in the article from the start of this post said: “Don’t frame anti-racist work as an extracurricular, but rather as an integral part of life...Art, coding, policy, statistics--all of these can be harnessed for anti-racist work on a daily basis.” To really make change requires commitment, putting intention and action together to do something different.

This also got me thinking about Carol Dweck’s revolutionary idea of growth mindset, that believing one can learn and improve allows one to put in the effort required to actually learn and improve. Like anti-racism, it’s a pervading idea and way of life that cannot be siloed into a specific context. Just as I said at the beginning that change was not comfortable to me yet, I can work at it and grow in my relationship to change. The same is true of anti-racism. It may not pervade my everyday experience yet, but I can work at it and I can change. Like this Mom of All Capes on a new podcast I’m enjoying points out, we have the power to “turn talking into action” and to see that “the world isn’t falling apart; it’s coming together.” Let’s notice our differences, see our opportunities to try something different, and put in the effort to be a part of that change!

There Are No Stupid Questions

You know the adage, “There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.” I’ve found myself wondering about that lately. I have a lot of questions, and I’m worried to ask some of them because it makes me vulnerable. Vulnerable to exposing my ignorance, to being met with criticism or disdain, or being told that my question is hurting someone else. In effect, feeling humiliated, or even worse, being mean. In that context, it feels hard to believe there are no stupid questions.

Then I listened to this powerful conversation with Lama Rod Owens on Dan Harris’ Ten Percent Happier podcast. It is long but well worth the listen. One of the points he gently offers is that a big challenge of difficult conversations is when one or more participants ignore the relevant feelings that are present within the conversational space, and instead remain in the intellectual realm. In the context of race, this might look like a white person asking questions to try to understand the Black experience at a cognitive level while remaining separate from the emotional level, which may be where the experience largely exists for that Black person. When the people conversing are in different realms, they fail to connect in a meaningful way. A safe space is not provided for actual talking, listening, learning, growing, and building a relationship.

So, maybe it does turn out that there are stupid questions? Just kidding! I don’t think it’s the question that is stupid, nor do I think “stupid” is a helpful label. So I’ll try to stop using that word, just like I ask my kids on a regular basis. Like Lama Rod points out, the feelings matter. How we ask a question has a lot to do with our emotional intent, and how we hear a question or receive an answer also has a lot to do with the emotional state we’re occupying.

This all makes me think of shame and defensiveness. Feeling shame can help us, while being shamed is likely to do the opposite. I listened to Brene Brown’s podcast with Ibram X. Kendi on anti-racism. It’s amazing, and has this valuable metaphor in it: Racism is raining down on us, and powerful people are raining it. But these same people are telling us we’re dry, when in fact we’re wet. Along comes someone who offers us an umbrella. To feel shame is to suddenly realize we are wet. But we can still accept the umbrella and thank the person offering it to us.

In this metaphor, we (or I, as a white person) are not even asking a question, and by not asking, we have been complicit in a system of racism that we may not have even known existed. However, once we are offered the umbrella, we can either feel the shame of not having ever asked the question (Am I wet?), or we can be defensive (I’m dry) and continue to perpetuate a racist system, but now a little less blindly. At that point, the questions, no matter how “stupid” they might seem, need to be asked so that one is at least in the conversational space. And once we step into the arena, as Brene Brown would say, we begin to break the cycle of being both the victim and perpetrator of racist propaganda.

Similarly to not asking uncomfortable questions, silence can send a message of shame, regardless of whether or not that was our intent. For me, I have experienced this in the world of fertility. You might have family or friends who hide their sexuality in this way. Sometimes it feels like it’s up to the person assumed to be experiencing the shame to take control of sharing or explaining, like we might put people on the spot or be insensitive by bringing up uncomfortable subjects. But for me, I welcome the questions because it gives the opportunity to celebrate something beautiful and wonderful that brings me pride. But getting there definitely took some emotional work. I imagine it might be similar in racial conversations. Questions may actually be welcomed and answers received openly once some emotional work has been done to trust the conversational space.

So where does that leave us? Getting back to Lama Rod, I think it leaves us creating safe spaces for questions and conversations and building relationships. And in building those relationships, uncomfortable topics will not only become more comfortable, they will also become more pressing and personal, and impossible to ignore. I already wrote about updating media to be more representative and inclusive, which I think is a huge step towards educating ourselves about history and the typical experiences of other people, from their perspectives. And that helps a lot with the emotional work of asking questions from a place of empathy and receiving answers without defensiveness. But then I think we need to make it a bit more personal in order to find a place of action. And while personal is necessarily individual, here are a couple of my own thoughts:

• My kids were walking with their friends in the neighborhood and came across a house with 3 dogs, 2 white and 1 black, playing outside. My oldest son commented on how hard it is to imagine treating the black dog differently than the white dogs. His friend agreed, “I mean, they’re all dogs. How could you treat them differently?” Obviously I don’t want to equate humans and dogs with this example, but I do want to point out that this experience brought this topic to the personal level for them in a way that they could talk about it, empathize with the arbitrariness of racism, and have some thoughts about unfairness that might percolate for them and perhaps lead to some action.
• Books and other media can bring up uncomfortable topics and can model language for having difficult conversations. I’m a huge fan of podcasts, as you might have noticed. In this Parent Trapped conversation with Allison Briscoe-Smith, she brings up the parallel discomfort you might feel in a conversation with your kids about sex and in a conversation about racism. Even though it’s uncomfortable, we can agree that it would be irresponsible to not have a conversation with your child about sex, and the same applies to racism. And she notes that starting with your children’s questions and being alert and sensitive to their reactions and discomfort is also important. For me, listening to podcasts about talking to kids and having conversations about racism and social injustice is helpful in thinking through and imagining such conversations, preparing me for some of the emotional work of being in such conversations, and framing the importance of having the conversations amidst the discomfort. And she concludes by noting the importance of emphasizing resilience and how far we’ve come and how far there still is to go, which in itself is a call to action.

The Learning that Cannot Wait

For my family, this is the final week of school. Wherever you are, some version of school has likely already or will soon be coming to a close for summer break. We’ve heard about summer slide and there has been amplified worry over the COVID slide, given the loss of learning that has already happened from disrupted schooling this spring.

I had already been gathering thoughts about ways to stay engaged and learning this summer, while still feeling the fun and freedom of summer. I had been returning to my ideas around sparking curiosity with media and engaging in project based learning. But suddenly it is abundantly clear that there is learning that cannot wait around social justice and racial inequities.

Media is helpful for creating meaningful and engaging learning opportunities. It often has fun and playful contexts that are motivating and can facilitate and accelerate skill building. It can build from prior experiences or create a foundation from which to build skills in new contexts.

With all of that in mind, below are some media resources for getting started. I hope you will spend some time being thoughtful about the books, movies, games, and experiences you select to specifically engage your children and family for maximum impact. You may have seen the saying going around about resistance not being a one lane highway. Think about what lane you and your family are currently in (having conversations, understanding the messaging in language, making signs, joining protests…), as this is the best way to ensure you will actually engage your energy in a sustainable way. My hope for my own family is that books will shine a light on new perspectives, paint new characters from different backgrounds, share new lessons and draw from rich histories that are different from our own. From there, we can question, listen, understand, and seek out more. We can be spurred to action and broken from our silence. And just like with reading and math, we must use it or lose it to avoid that backward slide towards complacency.

• NPR’s Talking Race with Young Children: You might listen to this episode with your children, as it helps start the conversation about skin color and other physical differences rather than avoiding it. Beverly Daniel Tatum and Jeanette Betancourt (who were also on the Sesame Street/CNN Town Hall) are featured speakers, and I really appreciate their clear, child-friendly language and messages.
• Social Justice Books, referenced on the Sesame Street Town Hall by Beverly Daniel Tatum, has book lists by age group and around specific areas of social justice, and is also a great place to start conversations and educate yourself around race, racism, anti-racism, and social justice.
• There are so many other book lists, like these by Common Sense Media for younger kids, The Brown Bookshelf, The New York Times, Black Books Matter, and even Little Passports, so you should be able to find some books that work for you. And one thing I appreciated in these lists is that, while some of the books are on the topic of social justice, many of them are fictional or non-fictional accounts about the experience of Black children and families, or even fantasy stories by Black authors, like this Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky that I ordered for my Percy Jackson fan.
• While Daniel Tiger definitely targets our youngest viewers, this episode on Not Hurting Your Friends, with this song in it, just feels so applicable to everything right now: “Stop, stop, stop. It’s okay to feel angry. It’s not, not, not okay to hurt someone.”
  
• This PBS blog post gives ideas on sparking conversations about Black history through art and stories.

Different Stages of Grief

I wrote a post last week about the loss of normalcy during the pandemic and the potential for growth. And then the White world awakened to the reality of racial injustice, deciding there was no more time to sit on the sidelines and wait for change, and that everyone was a part of the solution. The post I was planning seemed tone deaf, and a new one seemed needed. While I cannot profess to have something insightful or even helpful to say, it does seem that we each ought to at least reckon with our feelings, our beliefs, our actions and begin to step into the arena to be a part of the solution. This is my step. It is a baby one, but a step nonetheless.

I grew up going to a Jewish day school from kindergarten through sixth grade. For seven years, I heard from Holocaust survivors who shared their first hand accounts of the fear and struggle, sadness and anger, and ultimate humanity and survival. It was simultaneously terrifying, inspiring, and confusing. Perhaps that’s why I had a need to know more. I was not a bookworm as a kid, yet I sought out books set during the Holocaust or that contained accounts from children. I had frequent nightmares of being chased by Nazis. I’d awaken and go through scenarios of how I’d play dead, how I’d run, where I’d hide, how I’d outmaneuver. And I imagined living in a ghetto, being torn from my family, marching unknowingly into gas chambers, surviving death camps. As I write this, it sounds morbid. Maybe that’s why I’ve carried forward a seemingly large sense of the sadness for those left behind. But it was the way I knew to take control of all that horrible information. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for Black children to be hearing today’s stories and living them, rather than hearing about it in the past tense and relegating the fear to the world of dreams.

Each survivor story I ever heard always had a tone of hope, that sharing their story and educating the children of the future would ensure that all they endured would be put to good use. I fear that I’ve lost sight of some of that. I’ve felt invincible, even as antisemitism has risen in the world around me. I feel safe in my bubble, and would rather not think about or imagine the scariness that exists beyond my immediate environment. I can barely even read or watch the news, let alone let it sink in. And that makes me feel so guilty because that is such a luxury.

I cannot begin to understand the experience of being Black in America. But I hear and see the injustice, I fear and feel for those affected, and I vow to work to understand and to not pretend to be invincible myself so that I can stand with those who know they can never be invisible or invincible.

A lot of our posts on this blog have to do with leading by example, supporting each other, and finding opportunities amidst challenges. I have believed that everyone has their own worries, struggles and successes, and that my own are not diminished because there are those whose worries and struggles seem so much deeper and daunting or whose successes so much harder earned. I recognize my experience is my own, but I still think there is a lot that is relatable and supportive of others’ experiences. In the area of racial injustice, I feel lost. My current worries, struggles, and successes do seem diminished in the context of what others find themselves up against. But I think it’s important that this comparative suffering doesn’t keep me silent for fear of further insensitivity. I may not know the best thing (or even the better thing) to say yet, but in speaking, I can have the chance to listen and I can learn. With this in mind, it is heartening to see the impact of this injustice being felt worldwide and the voices being lifted from all corners of the globe. This is not just a local issue, and not just a national issue but a global one. And it’s largeness feels entirely overwhelming.

I guess this is where those stages of grief from my original post may provide some helpful landmarks. Many of us find ourselves in the lands of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and even acceptance. These are important guideposts on the journey to recognizing, labeling, understanding, and acting against racial injustice. But I believe it is the need for meaning that has the greatest potential for change.

In my own meaning-making, which is in its infancy, I find myself thinking about diversifying our children’s and our adult bookshelves with stories that represent wider perspectives, backgrounds, and contexts. We have made some efforts in this area with regard to LGBTQ literature and are proud when our kids are quick to notice that the school’s puberty video only references feelings around male-female relationships. But I’m ashamed to notice that we have merely two picture books with primarily Black characters and not many more books about the Black American experience. What about our dolls? Game pieces? Art on our walls? No wonder we don’t have many conversations around race. What would spark it?

As I continue to think about my next steps, in terms of conversations within my own family and community, I will definitely be digging deeper into online resources and tools that are geared towards supporting these conversations and deepening understanding of the experiences of others in our world. But for now, here is a starting list:

From Common Sense Media:

• How White Parents can use Media to Raise Anti-Racist Kids (within there are lists to Coretta Scott King book award winners as well as links to Black media outlets like The Root, and other great resources and ideas for being more informed consumers of media)
• Talking to Kids about Racism and Racial Violence
• Social Justice Resources for Educators
  

Trevor Noah’s heartfelt and clearly explained thoughts about the current state of society

Embracerace has great resources and articles for families

Teaching Tolerance also has great resources for educators