UnchartedParent.com

I know, you think I have lost it. You believe I’ve journeyed to that part of the galaxy where grown men and women whom you think of as ordinary neighbors, coworkers and such suddenly sneak off on a Saturday morning sporting Vulcan ears or muttering in Klingon–a language that someone has actually taken the trouble to invent, for crying out loud–and gather in convention centers the size of space docks to worship aging actors dressed as imaginary space voyagers. And now I’m trying to pull a parenting lesson out of it and take you with me.

Well, the last sentence is true. But stick with me on this, because as sure as the Horta* was a determined mother, there are values I want my kids to learn and I found one in this movie.

**WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD**

I saw Star Trek into Darkness with my husband last week. It was filled with bravado, bad guys versus good guys, explosions, multiple references to Trek culture and to our own, real world. Just like all the Star Trek movies. It was a fun romp, even if the plot was a bit tired. But even though I thought eleven-year-old “Jack” might have enjoyed the movie, it never occurred to me to recommend it to him–until Kirk’s mentor, Captain Pike, died. Kirk grieved his loss, and I realized that the men’s relationship demonstrated something many kids don’t get to learn today.

We live in a time and place where parents battle teachers over bad grades, demand that coaches give their kids more playing time on a field, insist that there’s no way their kids could have exhibited the poor behavior for which they’ve been disciplined. Kids are often praised for being smart instead of working hard, parents complete homework projects and tough or grumpy teachers are often considered a problem for parents to deal with rather than a learning opportunity for students.

The fictitious Captain Pike isn’t easy on bad-boy James Kirk. (more…)

Sound familiar?

Today I’ve got a links roundup for you. Some fascinating articles have come out in the parenting world this week, and a few of them dovetail nicely with what’s been going on in my own house. I actually used the advice in one the same day I read it. Below you’ll find useful tips, a recommendation, and–don’t say I didn’t warn you–an example of truly abysmal human behavior.

• “‘It’s Not Fair!’ How to Stop Victim Mentality and Thinking in Kids and Teens” – Hands up if you hear this one from your kid. Okay you, the one with your hands down: kudos. Everyone else: read this. From Empowering Parents comes an article that I literally needed yesterday, and it gave me the tools to help explain to my eleven-year-old son the difference between someone who is targeting him and someone who is merely a grumpy person. It also helped me first empathize with his feelings, then start to work through steps to help him consider his own solutions to his problems and see that he has options for responses, even though he can’t necessarily change other people’s behavior. Problems solved? No. But it was a good beginning.

• “How Could a Sweet Third-Grader Just Cheat on That School Exam?” – A Wall Street Journal article examines a question that often elicits horror, denial or both from many parents who find themselves confronted with the fact that their young kids have cheated in school. I know, because recently my own second-grader did something with her schoolwork she shouldn’t have, and I was appalled. But this article explains why it can be harder than we think for kids to understand where the lines between right and wrong are, and it offers tips for how to make those lines clearer.

• “Mira Ptacin: Is Baby a Luxury?” (more…)

Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home. (Photo credit: AFagen via Flickr.com)

Last summer, I ran a list of 12 Uncharted Tips for visiting Washington, D.C. with kids. We just returned from another visit to the city in which I lived and worked for ten years, and we were able to delve a bit deeper into its many offerings. Each trip back with the kids is a learning experience, so here I share my latest set of tips and ideas for visiting Washington D.C. with kids:

*If you can manage it, visit Washington, D.C. in the springtime. The emergence of the pink, cottony cherry blossoms that heralds the end of winter seems to lighten both the atmosphere and the spirits of the city’s residents (except for members of Congress, but that’s another story). Following the cherry blossoms, D.C.’s mild, not-yet-sweltering temperatures bring out tulips, lilacs, dogwoods and azaleas in rapid succession, everywhere you go. Especially if you’re traveling from a place like New England where the four seasons are sometimes known as winter, winter, winter and road construction, a spring visit to D.C. provides a welcome salve to the winter-chapped soul.

*Tourist food: Do as I say, not as I do. In my last set of tips, I advised you to bring your own food to tourist sites like the Air & Space Museum in order to avoid paying the absurd concession prices for junk food. This is solid advice you should follow. Ahem. I did not do this. Thus we paid $4.00 per slice of pizza at the National Zoo, which I found appalling until we paid $7.00 for a slice of pizza at Mount Vernon. Someone make me go to the grocery store before sightseeing next time, or at least to an off-premises Subway sandwich shop. Yikes.

*We were able to take in a few sights with our 11 and 8-year-old kids that we wouldn’t have tried in earlier years. When the kids were younger, they might have fussed too much and/or simply wouldn’t have appreciated a tour of the U.S. Capitol building–including a visit to the House of Representatives Gallery and the old Supreme Court Chamber or a trip to the National Archives to see the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (and a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta). And yes, certain aspects of the history-filled Capitol were lost on them. But they are old enough to understand the building’s importance, they loved some of the stories they heard and eleven-year-old “Jack” was fascinated by the Whisper Chamber, where two people can stand in specific spots on opposite sides of the room and whisper a conversation to each other. Also, we were fortunate to be given a rare dome tour of the building, where we climbed the 300 or so steps to the top of the Capitol’s dome. When we stepped outside at the top–and I swear on my American heart I am not making this up–a bald eagle flew in front of us, circled for a bit, then soared off over the city’s horizon.

The old Supreme Court chamber in the U.S. Capitol building.

*The National Museum of American History was a sleeper hit. (more…)

(Photo credit: kbowenwriter via Flickr.com)

First, an announcement: As we say here in New England, I am wicked excited to share with you the news that I’ve been awarded an Artists Entrepreneurial Grant by the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Part of what the grant will fund is a renovation of this blog, so if you see scaffolding going up in the coming weeks or months, that’s why. I’ll let you know if you need to wear a hardhat when you’re on site.

Second, a totally judgmental calling out and tip for parents in restaurants: If your children are a) standing at my table with one of their chins over my child’s head, as if to join my family; b) following patrons into the bathroom and harassing them; c) tripping the waitstaff in the aisles; d) chucking toys (or items from tables) over the ledge separating the brick oven area from the dining area; e) wandering into the entrance area and interfering with the ability of the hostess to greet customers such that waiters have to escort your child back to his table; and f) traveling from unoccupied table to unoccupied table throughout the restaurant, without regard to neighboring patrons, and running toy cars on said tables, playing games there, etc., while you do not once turn your head to check on your children nor reprimand them in any way, then you are not doing an adequate job of parenting your children during dinner.

Yes, as I said at the beginning, I understand I’m being judgmental here. But honestly, I couldn’t believe my eyes. When I see behavior in this vein, I try to remind myself, even if I’m annoyed, that perhaps I don’t know the whole story. Maybe there is a special need I don’t know about, or perhaps the parents have had a terrible week due to a situation I can’t even imagine and this is their one, much needed break. But I found it hard to invent excuses for this complete disregard of everyone else in the restaurant.

Okay, enough time on my high horse. Moving on…

Books. Two nights ago, when eleven-year-old “Jack” and I finished reading The Hobbit, I realized with dismay that I had no book lying in wait for the following evening. Jack is selective about what he’ll read, so I knew I had a bit of work in front of me to find something acceptable if we were going to start a new book right away. (My own recommendation is not sufficient to sell a book to Jack; in fact, it often has the opposite effect. How old is he again?)

I asked Jack what qualities he’d like in our next book.

“Adventure. Suspense.” (more…)

(Photo credit: Sean Dreilinger via Flickr.com)

Every now and then, I hear a story or read an article that makes me think, Damn, I’m turning my kids into slackers.

A parent I know tells me about her kids who make their own breakfasts, pack their own lunches and all but drive themselves to school. An article notes that ten-year-olds are perfectly capable of cleaning the bathroom. Someone else mentions that his kid shoveled the driveway after the latest snowstorm–actually removed the snow, as opposed to digging a fort out of it.

My children do not do these things.

To be clear, my kids do have responsibilities around the house. Actually, that’s what we tend to call them: “responsibilities around the house”–just like my husband and I have, only far fewer. But often, I wonder if they have enough of those responsibilities.

Let’s face it: from a parenting perspective, chores are tough. There’s the complaining, the whining, the arguing. There’s the undeniable fact that with young kids or even older kids learning to do something new, it can take more time to teach them to accomplish something than it takes for you to do it yourself. There’s the reality that today’s kids are busy, families are over-scheduled, and if you’re desperately searching that Google calendar looking for a place to pencil in some family time, do you really want to spend it trying to convince the kids to do chores?

But then there’s the flip side: it’s important to teach kids responsibility and the daily life skills that come from accomplishing chores. Plus, there’s a lot to do around the house, and shouldn’t the younger people who live there contribute?

So how do you make it happen?

I suspect there are as many thoughts about chores as there are parents, but here are few strategies to consider for getting school-aged kids to participate in chores. (more…)

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One afternoon last October, seven-year-old “Emmie,” who is in second grade, came home from school and announced, “Mrs. S___ told us she’s going to read us Harry Potter!”

Later that night, I asked my husband, “Does Mrs. S___ plan to come over in the middle of the night to deal with Emmie’s nightmares?”

To be clear, I adore Harry Potter. I picked up the first book years ago when I learned people were trying to ban a popular young adult book about a boy wizard because I wanted to understand what all the noise was about, and I’ve been a devotee ever since. I love the detail of the world Rowling created, I love the sheer fun of it, and I love how it’s encouraged so many kids and adults to read. I read the entire 4100 pages of the series aloud to now eleven-year-old “Jack” when he was seven, and I will always cherish that year of bedtime reading.

But Emmie is a different child. In short, Emmie doesn’t do scary. She’s tried to watch some of those Disney movies that have become staples of early American childhood, but Ursula in The Little Mermaid induced wide-eyed shaking and Emmie ran from the room. We knew better than to attempt The Lion King. We began reading The Little House on the Prairie to her, but had to stop as soon as the howling wolves sauntered onto the page. People fighting onscreen or on the page, the discussion of robbers from a news clip–anything at all frightening has the potential to terrify her. If we don’t see the reaction right away, we’ll hear it in the middle of the night.

So introducing Emmie to Voldemort? The only way we could see this working is if we were equipped with a drop or two of Felix Felicis, and I was fresh out.*

Thus I found myself in a bizarre quandary. As someone who used to defend civil liberties for a living, who does not believe in censorship or book banning or dictating curriculum to public school teachers, but who is the parent of a child who could be emotionally scarred for months by this book, what should I do? (more…)

(Image credit: zanzibar via Flickr.com)

So I didn’t post at all last week, and now it’s Friday. What’s up with that? Well, there was this school break, and the laptop got sick and had to go to the computer hospital, and then there were one, no two, no THREE snowstorms…yeah, so the dog ate my blog post. Except we don’t have a dog. Never mind. Let’s get to it.

Seven-year-old “Emmie” has been thinking about her origins lately. No, this isn’t an adoption post. She’s been thinking about her origins as a human being–about our collective origins. Early in the week, she approached me with this question:

“You know how God made the world? Well, when did the dinosaurs come in?”

You’d think I would have an articulate answer for this one at the ready. After all, we’ve been through this with eleven-year-old “Jack,” who was obsessed with dinosaurs between the ages of two and eight. He long ago had to work out the inconsistencies between what he read in his encyclopedias on prehistory and what he learned in Hebrew school.

But that’s just it: Jack worked out that dichotomy on his own. He never came to us with questions, never seemed troubled that both the Genesis story and the theory of evolution couldn’t both literally be true. One was Science, one was Not. That’s always been good enough for him.

But kids are different.

Not wanting immediately to discredit too much of what Emmie had learned in Hebrew school, and feeling a corresponding need to ease her into the science, I explained about dinosaurs preceding humans and talked about the allegorical nature of the Genesis story. She nodded, and didn’t ask any more questions.

But Emmie always has more questions. Sure enough, she just needed some time to cook them. (more…)

(Image credit: Toca Boca via Flickr.com)

Last week, I wrote about the adjustments in our house–and my attitude–toward the tween and his new technology after I realized that “Texting is the New Phone Call.”

“Jack” is now allowed to text seven days per week. It’s a big exception to our previous screen-time rules, but I believe it’s a good one.

Texts aren’t the only exceptions that have crept into those rules, however. The iPod Touch in a tween’s hands is like the tiny, hairline crack in the foundation of your basement that your handyman tells you might possibly one day let in a smidge of dampness, only to discover that by the end of the spring rains, you have three inches of standing water covering your basement floor.

The rules began with a bright enough line: no screen time during the week. The inevitable result of this declaration was that both children got off the school bus on Fridays, tossed their backpacks aside and dove for any and every device within their reaches–preferably all at once. Food, verbal interaction, even bathroom needs were secondary.

The kids hoarded their screen use into the weekends, and we began to impose limits then, too. Jack in particular had a tendency to turn into a grunting, Neanderthalish version of his usual self following too many hours in front of the small screen. After witnessing this phenomenon repeatedly and consistently over a long period of time, we explained what we had seen. He didn’t deny it, and mournfully agreed to comply with the limits.

Enter the iPod. (more…)

It’s Tuesday night, and we’ve just finished our family dinner. We begin to clear dishes and rinse off plates as we chat about this and that.

Eleven-year-old “Jack” contributes a school-related topic. “On Friday, we’re going to have a combination lockdown drill and fire drill. And they told us that if that happens, we should listen to the lockdown drill, and only leave the building if we actually smell smoke.”

In less time than it would take to say, Holy crap, what kind of a world are we living in?, my mind runs through the implications of this information. But all I manage to sputter aloud is, “Um, what?”

“If we get both alarms, we only leave the building if we smell smoke. Otherwise, we listen to the lockdown.”

“But…”

“So we’ll be safe because if there’s smoke, we’ll leave,” pipes up seven-year-old “Emmie,” who attends the elementary school.

The seven-year-old is familiar with this procedure, too.

“Yeah, unless a crazy guy sets the school on fire to get us to go outside,” says Jack.

“Hmm,” says Emmie.

The two of them are discussing this in the same matter-of-fact tone they use to discuss the constitution of their breakfasts. I, on the other hand, am so unnerved by their casual conversation that I have to leave the room momentarily and chase from my mind the images that have been present there since Jack’s introduction of the topic. The crazy-guy-pulls-a-fire-alarm scenario. A mistaken lockdown alarm resulting in a too-late attempt to escape a fire. Bodies.

Come on, mom, pull it together.

I suppose I should be grateful that my children are not terrified by what goes on around them. I should be–and am–thankful that my children’s schools are clearly handling security in a manner that prepares the kids for various, unthinkable events without scaring the hell out of them. (more…)

(Photo credit: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)

This election was a Very Big Deal in our house.  We’re a political family, and we discuss government and politics around the dining room table, in the car, in front of the television–just about everywhere.  Also, we live in New Hampshire, where politics is considered an active, participatory sport.  My kids have met numerous state and local candidates and officeholders, had the opportunity to see every presidential candidate more than once (if only their parents had brought them to all of those events) and discussed the election in their respective fifth- and second-grade classrooms.

(In fact, my ten-year-old son, “Jack,” yesterday demonstrated an impressive understanding of the electoral college.  I wish I could claim credit for this, but in fact the kudos go to his social studies teacher.  Way to go, public schools!)

Unless you’re brand new to the blog, you have by now figured out that I live on the left side of the political spectrum.  (And if you are new to the blog, welcome!)  Many of the candidates I supported did well, and the national and state results gave us a lot to celebrate.  My kids saw my and my husband’s joy and were part of it, and they will be in the days to come.

But there is more to educating kids about elections and politics than pro and con, winning and losing, left and right.  Here are some of the things I tried to inculcate in my children throughout this political season–lessons I think are important no matter where you align yourself in the political spectrum:

• Elections are about your world, so pay attention.  You don’t have to be as fascinated as I am, but know who’s running for office, what they stand for and what they want to accomplish.  Know how your government works.  This will affect your life and the lives of the people you care about.

• Vote.  I arranged my day in part to make sure I could take my kids into the voting booth with me.  I discussed the races with them in advance, including the ballot questions, so that even seven-year-old “Emmie” was focused on what I was doing when I was filling in bubbles to make my choices.

• Respect.  This is the tough one, and I won’t pretend I was always successful here.  But I tried.  Yes, I yelled at the television during the campaign season.  But I tried to convey to my kids that when I disapproved of certain candidates or actions, I always had a substantive reason.  I explained to my kids that I preferred candidate X over candidate Y in part because I thought her approach to education issues was superior and why, because I thought candidate Y’s approach to women’s issues was detrimental, etc.  I talked about the economy, I discussed Libya.  I explained ads I thought were deceptive.  I frequently overshot my children’s attention spans.  But I’m confident at least some part of the point that you need to have reasons for the positions you take got through.

• Political opponents are not life opponents.  (more…)