If a near-death experience goes unnoticed, did it even happen? Yes, I can confirm, and for that we should always be grateful. I can explain. Recently, as I drove around my oldest daughter’s college campus, my mind returned to one of the best — but what could have been one of the worst — days of my life. It was just over 20 years ago, a few years before my wife and I started a family and I became a stay-at-home dad. At the time, I was excited about my new job teaching English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Another comfort I enjoyed that day was our new leased car: a … [Read more...]
Parents Need to Know History to Help Children Prepare for Future
One of the pleasures of being a parent of teens is the long history you can reflect on. From time’s perch, you can finally start assessing what went right as a parent. (You can also assess what went wrong, but that’s for another post.) During my younger parenting years, I had always heard that if a parent models a behavior at home, a child is very likely to adopt that behavior, eventually. As a writer and former professor, I’ve always tried to model my love of reading history as a way to counteract our increasingly context-free culture of media soundbites and tweet-size attention … [Read more...]
Optimistic Parenting: Change ‘Oh, No! to ‘Oh, Well’ for More Upbeat Kids
Is your family generally optimistic? In today’s anxiety-inducing culture, optimism can be elusive — especially for kids. Fortunately, a new book titled Making Lemonade: Teaching Young Children to Think Optimistically can help parents nurture their children’s sense of optimism from an early age. Laura Colker and Derry Koralek are early childhood educators who begin their book with a hopeful premise: optimism is primarily a learned way of thinking, not an inborn mindset. Genes account for “about 25 percent of our optimism ... the other 75 percent is determined by environment, social … [Read more...]
Parenting Mantras I Learned from Author Toni Morrison
The words of recently deceased, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison had a huge impact on my life —first as a student, then as a parent. In graduate school, much of my research focused on her powerful novels — especially Beloved — that explored slavery and its aftermath. Later, as a stay-at-home dad, I saw her appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and once again her words hit me hard. During that appearance, Morrison captured the nature of a parent's unconditional love: “It’s interesting to see when a kid walks in a room, your child or anybody else’s child, does your face light up? That’s … [Read more...]
First Responders’ Heroism a Lesson for Children on 9/11
Like most Americans, I experienced the trauma of September 11, 2001, through my television. My wife, 1-year-old daughter Lauren, and I had just moved to the Cleveland, Ohio area, and I was a stay-at-home dad. That morning I was in my living room while Lauren watched a children’s show. Our landline phone rang, and my brother-in-law said: “Turn on the news.” I changed the channel over Lauren’s protest. Smoke billowed out of the first tower. Watching a national tragedy unfold in the presence of a 1-year-old made an already surreal experience even more bizarre. I was unsure what to do … [Read more...]
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