Who we really are

My three-year-old daughter recently declared that she had a favorite song.  The use of the term “favorite” made me sit up and listen.  Although she had been displaying preferences since birth, this was her first declaration of a “favorite” anything.  I find the idea fun, even if I have to listen to the “Wheels on the Bus” every time I get in the car.  

As I watch my daughter jump headfirst into defining what she likes and dislikes into favorites and aversions, I know that she is, at the core, defining a preference.  She is at the beginning of a lifelong road of finding and defining the things that she prefers, and ultimately loves or hates.  In the end, I know that it is these specific definitions, our preferences, which make us who we are.  
At this early stage, my daughter has yet to learn that a preference is a one-sided opinion.  What is pleasant to one person may be entirely unpleasant to another.  These differences make us all unique.  It is when we begin to define our preferences that our differences are revealed.
Next week the nation will express our preferences as we go to the election polls.  Elections, after all, are nothing if not about defining our preferences and our differences.  
Now that my daughter is in preschool, these defining preferences are becoming a theme in her interactions with her peers.  We, as parents, love to watch our children find things that they love.  My kid loves the sandbox, and yours loves the monkey bars.  Isn’t that fascinating?  So wonderful!  Watching the beginning of finding a passion in our children is thrilling to witness.
But I have to wonder as I watch these children define their favorites.  Such a simple distinction like the sandbox and monkey bars are innocuous now, but over time, will it grow to an unreachable divide?  By the time these kids reach middle school, after playing apart in their favorite activities for so long, will they have anything in common?
Is a common ground even necessary to form a friendship?  Just because one prefers the sandbox and another prefers the monkey bars, does that mean they won’t be friends?  Or, can’t be friends?  As adults, is it necessary to have something in common with another to be friends, or for that matter, friendly?
As I watch the election coverage, it makes me wonder what sort of example we are setting.  Any child watching would suspect that a common ground is absolutely essential for grown ups to be friends, or even to respect each other.  

How do we teach our children to respect each other’s preferences, when one is constantly saying that the monkey bars are better than the sandbox and neither will budge?
Perhaps it’s a far-reaching analogy.  But as we catapult into this election, our preferences and likes and dislikes blazing, I can’t help but think about where that came from.  Somewhere, sometime, a mother like me sat on the side of the playground and cheered as her child displayed an unabashed love for a new favorite thing.  

As adults, have our definition of preferences and favorites taken us so far?  When did we determine that it was okay to disrespect someone else’s preferences?  These are things that make us who we really are.  And just because we prefer two distinct things, does that really make us so different from one another?  As a parent, I know that it is my job to teach that a difference in preference does not mean an end of a friendship.
My daughter is too young to make this election any sort of teachable moment for her.  But it may be a good one for me.  Regardless of the elections outcome, it might do us all good to remember that it is our choices that make the world an interesting place.  After all, just because you like the sandbox and I like the monkey bars, doesn’t mean we still can’t play in the same playground.

Previously published in "The Star," Grand Coulee, Washington.  October 31, 2012

If we are what we eat...

Like many children who grew up in the suburbs of America, I had a typical, and rather uninvolved relationship with the food I ate.  I was an athlete and had healthy parents, so tried to be thoughtful, but I spent very little time wondering where the food we bought in the grocery store came from and what, if anything other than satisfying my hunger, my food was doing to my body.

When I moved to a small college town in Oregon for graduate school, I got in the habit of going down to the farmer’s market on the weekend.  On bright summer mornings, there wasn’t a better way to spend an hour or two than walking by the river, sipping coffee and contemplating the splendid array of fresh, incredibly bright and tantalizing fruits and vegetables.  After a time, I even started buying some.  Immediately, I was impressed by the taste and incredible affordability of the food.  For less than I spent on that coffee I was sipping, I could buy a bag or two of locally grown, picked-just-this-morning fruits and vegetables.

I was hooked.

When I moved into my own house, I started a vegetable garden and have depended on a small but steady supply of fresh vegetables every summer since.  Like many others who have small vegetable plots, I still buy the majority of my food from a grocery store.  But, I am far from alone in delighting in eating what I grow, and each year the local food movement grows stronger.

Next week, on October 24th, the nation will celebrate its 2nd annual Food Day.  Organized by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Food Day is “a movement for healthy, affordable, and sustainable food.”  With a strong focus on health, the day is also meant to highlight hunger, agricultural policy, and animal and farm worker welfare.

For all the greeting card inspired holidays that fill our calendar, I find this new national celebration day to be worthy of some involvement and attention.  According to their website, foodday.org, 50 million Americans are near hunger and those who are near the poverty line are lured into buying cheap, overly-processed foods, contributing only to increasing waistlines and declining health.  In fact, it is because of this diet that one-third of children born after the year 2000 will likely develop diabetes.  And it is this downward spiral that perpetuates the current estimation that this generation of children will, for the first time in history, have a shorter lifespan than that of their parents.

While the local food movement is growing, and many people nationwide are becoming aware of just how far their food has traveled to get to their table, so far it isn’t enough to change either the food system or our health.  The USDA estimates that only 1.6% of food sales is direct farm-to-table, including farmer’s markets, CSA’s and school gardens.  

There is much that divides us, nationally, internationally, and even within our own towns.  But food is not only something that all of us need, it is also something all of us want.  Who doesn’t want food that is affordable, delicious, and good for us too?  

According to the Food Day website, there are four events taking place in Spokane and over 1,600 events taking place in all 50 states on October 24th.  We don’t have to drive to Spokane to recognize this day, and in fact, it doesn’t even have to be something we do on just one day.  Whatever our situation, eating healthy and thoughtfully is a goal to be achieved by all.


Previously published in "The Star," Grand Coulee, Washington. October 17, 2012

From "free-range" to "helicopter" parenting

A couple of weeks ago, a rather notorious mother in New York, Lenore Skenazy, started an after-school program for children.  This is the same mother who, a few years ago, let her then nine-year-old son ride the New York City subway on his own, with nothing but a map and fare money.  Her new after-school program is an 8-week course costing $350 per child.  All that is on the schedule?  Free play in a playground in Central Park with the promise of absolutely no adult supervision.  In fact, Skenazy herself will be around the corner in a Starbucks.

Skenazy’s movement, labeled as “free range parenting” is considered by many to be radical, but I wonder instead if it is simply at the opposite end of the spectrum of the more popular, and even more socially acceptable, helicopter parenting.  Is her parenting style just a knee-jerk reaction to a movement she finds overbearing and unsuccessful?  Is it a throwback attempt, when childhood was, presumably, slower paced?

In either case, the arrival of free-range parenting is a spark for the always-conversational topic about parenting styles.  In many areas of the country, the way you parent your children has become a bit competitive.  Whose child has the highest grades?  Whose child has the fastest time, got into the best college?

This pervasive competitive spirit among some parents has me wondering.  What does it mean to be a successful parent?  A child that makes it out of adolescence without bodily harm to themselves or others?  Entrance into an Ivy-League school?  A well-rounded, happy adult? Is success as a parent even something we can measure, much less compare to others?

In a poll conducted by Vanity Fair last month, a whooping 95% of us think we rate either the same as or better than our own parents at parenting.  What could possibly make us think so highly of something that is difficult at best to measure?  Are we that self-assured that we are forming the next generation of super-adults?

In actuality, despite the fact that more and more of America’s children are achieving a higher education, kids are taking longer to be independent.  This has even sparked the new phrase “Adultescence” to describe the extended period of financial and emotional support provided by parents before children make the final leap into adulthood.  This phenomenon might instead suggest something larger in our society, whether it is the propensity of helicopter parents, over scheduling of kids, or the long list of other factors that make “childhood” almost unrecognizable to the generations that came before this one.

Free-range parenting leader Skenazy insists that total supervision of children is not only unnecessary, but harmful.  When parents hover and interact with children on a minute-by-minute basis, we neglect to let them experience such things as frustration, disappointment, and even anger.  She insists that left alone, they will work out any social transgressions and physical limitations on their own.

Here in the coulee, we aren’t presented with some of the difficulties raising children in other places are.  There could hardly be a safer place to let your kids go outside and play unsupervised, and over scheduling is not necessarily something we have to worry about either.  But nationally, all these things are a daily presence for many kids in America and it is something interesting to think about.  Would you let your children play in a city park unsupervised?

In my short three and a half years as a parent, I’ve found that, like politics, you can almost always find credible information to support your beliefs as a parent.  And, like politics, extremism as a parent ends up making everyone around you crazy.  Perhaps, for those of us in the middle on the helicopter vs. free-range debate, it is simply another exercise in finding the right balance as a parent.  After all, parenting is, if nothing else, about finding a balance.

Previously published in "The Star," Grand Coulee, Washington.  October 3, 2012