It was eleven in the morning on a Sunday. My oldest child, who is nearly six, had just finished her breakfast and was about to scurry off to play with her one-year-old brother.

Being on my normal table manners duty, I called out to her “Don’t forget to put your plate in the sink!” She hurried back, picked up her plate and started walking to the kitchen. Halfway to the kitchen she turned around, looked at me, said with a sweet smile “I love you,” and then ran off.

This small moment became larger as I reflected on the parenting my wife and I have done over the first six years of our daughter’s life and the impact we may have had in that seemingly small moment.

It is reassuring to think that for our daughter to express her love in such an unprompted way, she must feel the love that we have for her. In contemplating this discovery, I decided to pay extra attention to some of the small things our daughter says and does. The way that she wants to share a story from school with her mother, or the way she will kindly ask if we are okay when she notices that we look tired; it all comes back to modeling the same empathy and love that we give her. [Read more…]

Last fall, I put my oldest son into public school for the first time.

He was in second grade. We had just moved to a new state and I was hoping that going to “normal” school would help him make friends and get adjusted to our new home. Prior to that, he’d been in an online school–which basically meant he was being homeschooled, but with a state-sponsored curriculum.

There were lots of reasons I initially chose to keep him home. I worried about the strong academic focus of our local elementary school and the kind of pressure that would be present, even in kindergarten. I worried about long hours away from home. I worried about minimal outdoor recess time for a child who didn’t particularly excel at sitting still.

What I didn’t realize at the time was how much staying home with me had allowed my son to grow into himself and to build his own sense of who he is and what he likes. I also never anticipated how quickly public school would pressure him into conformity.

I still remember the first time he went to school with his nails painted. We had all–both of my sons and myself–painted our nails over the weekend: blue and purple with sparkles.

When I picked him up after school on Monday, his nails were bare. His classmates had made fun of him and he’d painstakingly scraped all the colors and glitter off over the course of the day.

I was heartbroken. I had always tried so hard to build up my son’s sense of individuality, to support his interests and not force him into a box based on socially acceptable, but outdated gender norms. And a few months of public school was already working to undermine all that. [Read more…]

When I was in high school, I was assigned an essay for a philosophy class. As a straight A student, I was devastated when I got a D on the essay.

My world seemed to collapse, as I realized with embarrassment that I was secretly struggling while my classmates seemed to be doing fine. The fear of failure and embarrassment became so serious that I even considered changing high schools for a less demanding program.

I vividly remember one particular day in which my emotions towards failure got the best of me and a schoolmate found me crying in the hallway. After listening, the classmate asked a simple question: “Is this the first time you feel challenged by an academic task?”

His words hit me hard. I took a deep breath and did a mental scan of previous tasks and homework. I quickly realized that until the philosophy class, I had not struggled academically. Learning was something that came effortlessly, with little hard work needed for positive results. Similar to a natural athlete being able to quickly pick up a new sport, school had always been easy for me.

As I shared this with my classmate, his face lit up and he simply assured me that I would be fine. It was only years later, as a mother, that I was able to look back and realize that his sudden spur of optimism was simply a positive recognition of the important part that failure plays in our lives.

He knew and trusted that once I put myself out there, I would learn how to move forward. He knew that failure was an essential part of success.

So for those who perhaps thought the title of this article was a mistake… it is not! [Read more…]

I scanned the mess in our living room…and couldn’t help but smile.

Two kids sat at one end of a card table. One child flopped turkey slices on bread while the other added cheese. A third child was loading baby carrots into sandwich bags at the other end of the table, while the toddler did what she did best: cheerfully pull things out of place and generally add to the chaos.

Then the assembly process began. As the stacks of food dwindled, the other card table for finished sack lunches grew.

The kids were proud as they cleaned up the mess and surveyed their donation.

We took the sack lunches to the shelter as a family. The kids smiled and waved at the people milling around the shelter. Although they were from a completely different walk of life, it didn’t seem to matter to our kids or the people who stopped to chat.

As we drove home that afternoon, everyone felt really good.

I wish I could say every experience volunteering with kids was like this.

In reality, it’s not.

If volunteering with kids seems hard to you, you’re not alone. [Read more…]

When my daughter started to struggle at school and I was trying to figure out what was going on, I was surprised to discover that learning disabilities in children are quite common.

According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, one in five children has a learning or attention issue.

Many children with learning disabilities are highly intelligent, so their disability can be hidden– even to teachers. For me, it became evident when my daughter’s attitude about school totally changed.

“Mom, I don’t want to go!”

There I was again…irritated at the front door, while my daughter was sprawled out in the hallway having a meltdown about going to school. I was trying to come up with a magic phrase that would get her off the floor and out the door.

Reflecting back, I believe that her meltdowns were about failure at school. Why would she run gleefully out the door for a day full of disappointment? Why would she want to fail in front of her best friends at school–their perfect scores next to her failing one? [Read more…]