Daring Greatly by Brene Brown

I just started Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. I hope you know that name, but if not, rush over to ted.com. Watch http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html and then watch http://www.ted.com/talk /brene_brown_listening_to_shame.html. I love smart people with great ideas! I loved her TED talks, I will let you know what I think of her book when I finish.

Update: I like a person who normalizes all my foibles. I love a person who normalizes them and then shows me a better way. Brene gets the job done. I definitely recommend this book, however, if I were to do it over, I would read Brene Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection first. Either way, you'll be gratified by her down to earth, insightful wisdom. Specifically, this book addresses the salient issues of shame, scarcity mentality and disengagement. Her solutions resonate and are backed by solid research.

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Go To Hell, It's Summer!

Yesterday was the last day of school for my three oldest kids. I feel like I just crossed the finish line of a marathon, hands on my knees gasping for air. The past few weeks I’ve passed other parents at bus stops, in school hallways, on field trips and returned their dazed looks with “how are you?” The predominant refrain is, “you know, June is crazy.” Yes, I know. Here is a sampling of what has been added to my already full schedule this month. Three separate choir concerts, a dance recital, 6 field trips, an end of the year medieval celebration, my daughter's formal “spring fling dance” and middle school graduation. Somewhere in there is the pressure to get (or even worse- make) a grand thank you gift for all my kid’s teachers and the guilt of failing, again, to do this simple task that everyone else seems capable of. Top that off with under-slept kids frantic about finals, excited about yearbooks and over sugared from end of the year celebrations. As I ...

Parenting’s Unexpected Gift As we walk into the old, sprawling new and used bookstore to join their monthly book club for the first time, I can feel the eyes of the group on us, their curiosity plain, though they are generous of spirit and welcoming. It will be four more months before one of them works up the nerve to ask how we know each other, trying to decipher our relationship. We make an odd pair, I suppose. Jan is the older of us two. Same age as my own mom, in fact. She exudes warmth and acceptance, which draws people to her. Then they become smitten by her wit, intelligence and self-deprecating grace. She is also, to use her word, “butch.” Everything she wears was purchased in the men’s department. She’s got a wallet in the back pocket of her Carhartt pants. Her ears, however, dangle silver Native American art. She once lived on a reservation in Montana where she worked with Native Americans and their culture has held sway in her heart ever since. I, on the...

Media Literacy How-To

Following my last post on media literacy, which focused on girls, I received this question from Lindsey, “ Can you share some dialogue examples for pointing out the dehumanizing tricks? I want to help my boys recognize this, but I haven't been able to come up with a succinct way of talking about it.” Photo Source I hate to include examples of advertising that I find so abhorrent, but we must understand what we are up against. Since I didn’t acknowledge it in my last post, let me say here that the harm wrought on girls by media and advertising in no way exceeds the damage to boys. Levin and Kilbourne explain, “Boys learn to look at girls as sex objects, they really learn a lot about how to treat girls. At the same time, boys are seeing images of being violent, tough and macho which go against being able to have caring connective relationships when they grow up.” How sad. Our boys are hit constantly with a double whammy (be tough and girls are objects to be manipu...

Where Parenting & Culture Collide

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