Before we dive in, take a moment to just breathe, okay? I know race is a touchy and important subject, like talking about the birds and the bees (that’s code for sex – for those of you who were spared that analogy as children) so it’s natural to have some anxiety about how or what to say and how your child will receive it.

This isn’t relevant to just one race. It’s not a “how-to” guide for a specific group. So if you thought, “Oh, this isn’t for me,” I assure you, this is for everyone.

Imagine you’re a mother to a beautiful, curly-haired 8 year old with glowing brown skin, and you love him enough to move mountains for him.

I mean, why wouldn’t you? You literally let him reside, RENT FREE, in your body for nine months and then endured 16 hours of labor for him!

You spend nearly every waking moment thinking about how to make certain he grows to be the best version of himself, while ensuring he enjoys his childhood.

Then — all of a sudden — that very same bundle of 9 months pregnancy, 16 hours of labor and 8 years of unconditional love of a brown boy who turns to his strawberry-blond friend sitting next to him in the backseat of your car and says, “Sometimes I wish I was white like you.” As if it were nothing, as if he were simply saying, “My favorite ice-cream flavor is strawberry.” [Read more…]

Vegetables and beans may not always be an adult’s first choice when deciding on a meal, let alone a child’s.

I found this to be true for my very own little and big ones. Using all my creativity, I investigated attractive ways I could encourage my own family to become enthusiastic healthy eaters.

My philosophy is that excitement, great taste and love around healthy food results in good health. Planting your own food in a kid-friendly garden can do wonders in achieving such a result.

With our busy schedules, such time-consuming undertakings ordinarily take the back seat and never reach completion. In many cases, they don’t even begin.

Being at home with our children during this time of social distancing, we now have the opportunity to create a kid-friendly garden and initiate this entertaining and enlightening practice.

There is more to learning than numbers and letters. Although these are important, let us use this time we have been given with our kids to teach them more than just academics. [Read more…]

When I was a sophomore in high school, my parents sat the family down in the living room, opened up an enormous binder and asked my younger brother and me to pick a sister, any sister, from any country around the world.

We chose an eighteen-year-old, trumpet-playing, tall and strong-minded Finnish student who did, indeed, become a real sister to me over the course of the following year.

My parents had made rumblings in the past about hosting a foreign exchange student. We lived in a tiny, rural town in Central California, so they saw the exchange experience as a double-blessing: My parents could share the wealth of our small-town lives and the beauty of our diverse state while culturally enriching their own children’s lives. We had previously hosted a German teacher for a summer, and my brother’s baseball team had provided temporary housing for players from Russia — the USSR at that time. We were no strangers to strangers in our home.

But when the day finally came to choose the exchange student, I was nervous about the change. My life was filled with academics, sports and other extracurriculars, and my parents both had busy jobs in addition to being key participants in their children’s activities.

This experience was going to put me outside my comfort zone, and I wasn’t sure I would like it. Would there be enough room for another sister?  Would my parents have enough love to go around?  What would we gain by shaking up our seemingly comfortable lives?

As it turned out, quite a lot! While that year certainly came with ups and downs—as they do in any family—the lifelong friendship, the bond of sisterhood and the cultural experience I gained from having Karo in my life outshone all the extra squabbles over the shared curling iron.

It was such a worthwhile experience, that here we are, over 30 years later, preparing to choose another sister. Only this time, it’s my own family—my husband, myself and our three daughters. And this time, there will be no binder, no leafing through pages of possibilities, since we have already chosen our sister-for-a-year: Karo’s daughter from Finland. [Read more…]

Going to school for many kids is like going to war each and every day. It is a battleground where they are faced with the responsibility of making all kinds of decisions and having to deal with the consequences of their actions.

You see, making decisions independently is hard enough for a child. However, when faced with pressure from their peers to make a decision one way or the other, it becomes a whole new ball game.

There are so many more pressures that kids face today than ever before in history. The traditional pressures of smoking, drinking and drugs continue to pervade our society. But these days children have to engage on two different fronts: making wise decisions in person, and while using technology in the cyberworld, in particular on social media.

As a middle school teacher of 20 years, I have seen the evolution of challenges and the social pressures and expectations that kids face. Peer pressure to look and act a certain way, say the right things to be accepted into the “in-crowd,” play the “cool” games everyone else is playing, wear the latest designer clothing brands everyone else is wearing, and — nowadays — partake in the social media forums everyone else is taking part in. [Read more…]