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I cried in the grocery store last week. In my defense, I was out of milk for coffee. And, after the morning I had, I just couldn’t live up to my socks.
What followed was an unexpected chance to reflect on my #1 job. New post on the ongoing search for what being a great parent can look like in this moment, even on the hard days.
Thank you for nominating me Jenn Smukler for this 5-fact challenge. Here are mine:
1) I, too, really love humans, especially young ones.
2) For over a decade, I’ve made it a habit to smile at people, hold my smile just a bit, then see what I get back. Most people smile back, and I have actually found people more responsive than ever over the past yea…
Appreciate so much about this.
Really relate to: “And if it's hard to let ourselves sit in the hard stuff, it is even harder to let our kids. Every instinct we have as parents is to fix it, reframe it, make it better.“
Inspired by: The value in getting granular and specific about what is hard as a means to process, learn and move through it.
Love: Having a family moping party (on it!).
What if the best tool to help kids understand their attention was a really good metaphor…or three? New post on the flashlight, the floodlight, and the juggler — and why giving kids accessible mental models for how their attention operates is a powerful way to help them start to own it.
Inspiration for this exploration from Amishi Jha and Alison Gopnik.
Beautiful. Got me reflecting on the loving I do as both mom and daughter in this “midlife” moment.
“We seem to have been born into a world where love, except for brilliant, exceptional moments, seems to exist from one side only, ours, and that may be the difficulty and the revelation and the gift – to see love as the ultimate in giving and letting go –”
Our 15-year-old needed advice about finding a summer internship. So, we suggested she ask three advisors: her grandfather, a family friend, and Claude. We hoped she’d get a chance to note the differences between AI and human-sourced advice, and she did. What seemed to impact her the most, though, was how different the experiences felt.
The question isn't whether AI will be part of our kids' lives. It already is. The deeper and more urgent question, and the one worth slowing down for, is how. The full answer will take time and patience, but this latest post has a few guideposts and a place to start.
Grateful for insight from: Media Education Lab, The Rithm Project, Jenny Anderson, Rebecca Winthrop, Elizabeth Spiers
Resurfacing this intriguing reframe from Peter Gray from just over a year ago. When I read it then, and still now, I have no question that we’ve blocked much of the goodness of childhood for kids. I found Peter’s take on the Internet as a space of freedom, agency and opportunity both provocative and mind opening. And I still do.
So much about this (except for whom I was rooting in the game in question, sorry!) resonates. I keep thinking about the difference between these two types of motivation in our democracy, in my own work, in my approach to supporting my kids (protect vs empower). Great post.
Something I keep thinking about:
Marjorie Taylor Greene retired from Congress and criticized Trump, and I felt genuinely excited about it.
Not because something good happened. Because something bad stopped.
That's the feeling of a prevention mindset. Relief instead of joy. The bar dropping so gradually you don't notice until you're celebrat…
Thanks for highlighting!
I love that humans beat the bots, and I really love why we won. Not because we're better conversationalists, but because we attend to each other in more fully human ways. And because one human can lead you to many more.
A question I’m so eager to explore: who in our communities is brokering real connection right n…
Latest post! What if you walked into every interaction this week already liking the person on the other end? We tried it, parents and kids (11, 13 and 15). The results were illuminating 🔦 in really cool ways to each of the five of us. How could "I like you already" shift how you attend to other people?