parenting philosophy

Experiencing the world through others’ senses

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of our rabbit (a white lop with brown patches around his nose, eyes, and on his ears) sitting on our blue couch

Watching our rabbit sniff and scratch at the floor, I wonder what he’s experiencing.

From reading Ed Yong’s brilliant book An Immense World, I know our rabbit’s sight alone is far different from ours. Rabbits don’t have the cone in their eyes that distinguishes between green and red, so they’re essentially red/green colorblind. Because their eyes are on the sides of their heads, they have much better peripheral vision than we do, but don’t see particularly well straight in front of them. And that’s just vision – his sense of smell and hearing is likely far different from mine in a way that’s hard to comprehend.

Yong talks about how we try to force our sensory experiences onto other animals and assume they experience the world how we do.

But the fact is, we do it with people too. I just have to put on my husband’s glasses to be reminded of how radically different the visual world is for him. (I have glasses too, but I merely get a headache without them – he can barely see a couple of feet in front of him.) Or watch my kids slosh the unicorn slime from hand to hand that touching it makes me shudder. While all humans have approximately the same sensory systems, we still have radically different experiences of how our bodies take in and process that information.

Continue reading →

Weaving climate change discussions into everyday life

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of a kid in a blue fleece jacket (my son) and older man in a green sweatshirt (my dad) walking down a hiking path with trees on both sides

Warm weather in January stirs up a lot of ambiguous feelings in me. On one hand – it’s beautiful out! On the other – it’s probably because of climate change! (It’s also called climate chaos for a reason – the up and down unpredictability is part of it.) And back to the other hand – we should enjoy it while we can! In reality, it’s probably a combination of all three.

Bringing kids out in nature and modeling enjoying it is one of the best ways to build lots of emotional and physical skills as well as environmental awareness. You don’t need to get all apocalyptic, but it’s also a chance to draw attention to how it is unseasonably warm and how the climate affects it. You can get curious, asking your kids what they think we can do to help. (It’s very possible they’ve already discussed it in school.) We don’t want to put the whole burden on them though, so be sure to talk about what adults (including yourself) are doing, like Indigenous water protectors fighting oil pipelines or Black and Hispanic activists working to close coal and natural gas plants in their neighborhoods. And of course, all of the people working to build renewable energy!

If you want somewhere to start, check out the Family Climate Justice toolkit I created with Raising Luminaries.

(I originally wrote this post on New Years’ Day and posted it to social media then.)

Slowing down for sustainability

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of a crescent moon between the branches of a bare tree

I always want to look up in wonder when someone says “Look, the moon!” and teach my kids to do the same.

Even if you live in an area with a lot of light pollution, we almost all share the moon. Watching it shift through its waning and waxing cycles is a beautiful way to keep in tune with and respect the cycles of nature.

Taking time to notice and truly gaze at the “everyday” things in nature – from the moon to dandelions – is both something that kids are naturally good at and provides us adults joy in rough or busy times. Slowing down doesn’t mean coming to a halt – it can just mean finding time for small pauses. It means noticing the things we wouldn’t otherwise. It can teach us to be more sustainable to both ourselves and our wider world. The more we can look beyond our individual worries, the more we can care for and accept care from those around us.

What Biking with My Kids Has Taught Me About Communication

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
What Biking with my Kids Has Taught Me About Communication; photo of my kid (a white boy) on a blue bike waiting at a traffic signal on a sidewalk

Hearing a car approach behind me, I yell “Car back – stay to the right!” My older son shifts to the right on his bike. He’s close enough to the parked cars so that another car can pass safely, but not so close that he’d get hit if one of the parked car’s doors opened unexpectedly.

Every ride to school, my older son and I have many of these back and forths, mini-exchanges for our mutual safety. We also talk about other things – from what they did at school that day to their latest video game milestones – but these are necessary for the sake of transportation. In our daily commute this fall (paused for now due to the weather), I realized how biking was reinforcing so many of the communication skills for parenting I learned elsewhere. In other situations, they seemed nice but optional. While biking, their necessity appeared much more obvious and urgent.

Continue reading →

What a White Board Reminded Me of as a Mom

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
What a White Board Reminded Me of as a Mom - photo of a white board with the words Question? Imagine Wonder and Explore around it with Where the Wild Things Are and alphabet magnets on it

The white board hangs on our basement wall, rather disused. A few letter magnets – an A there, a D there – hang on it, along with a mess of adorable Where the Wild Things Are magnets. In bulletin board letters, the words “Question – Imagine – Wonder – Explore“ posted around it declare its purpose – to inspire questions and inquiry. But while it seems unused, its appearance belies its real impact.

Continue reading →

Just Take Care of Each Other

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Just Take Care of Each Other; Photo: My kids (both white boys with dirty blonde hair) sitting on stone stairs leading to a stone pathway with grass on both sides, bouncing a small ball

As I watched my younger son walk through the school’s front doors, I could feel the words not leave my lips. I usually yell “Take care of each other!” to him and his brother as they walk into school together. But that morning, his brother had a doctor’s appointment and wasn’t with us. It felt strange telling him to take care of someone who wasn’t there. But it was strange not saying it as well.

While some of the strangeness came from breaking my habit, some of it was because the words I say to them each morning encompass so much of what I want to teach them in life: “I love you” and “Take care of each other.” While these are simple phrases, they hold so much meaning.

Continue reading →

Respecting the Seasons of Growing Up

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Text: Respecting the Seasons of Growing Up; Photo of tomatoes entangled in a mesh fence with trees and plastic flamingos in the fence in the background;

Breaking off twigs heavy with red cherry tomatoes, my mouth twisted in dissatisfaction with the brown leaves around it. I should have watered it better, I should have cleared the yellowed leaves out more, I should have, I should have, I should have.

But no, I thought, pushing that criticism aside. I was deriding myself for not fighting the plant’s natural cycle. Trying to keep cherry tomatoes neat and pruned is a fool’s errand. It works against rather than with the plant. We’re still getting loads of tomatoes – so what if it’s messy?

So often we try to buck the natural cycle of things even when they fulfill their purpose, don’t we? So often we try to make things neat and fast when they are messy and take time – like childhood.

Continue reading →

Relying on the Village in Parenting

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

Relying on the Village in Parenting; photo of a white boy in a red kayak on a lake

I opened and closed my mouth trying not to say anything to my younger son. Finally, I just had to. “No, not like that!” I cried, as our kayak started moving backwards. I sighed and thought, “I thought he knew how to do this?!”

My younger son was sitting in front of me in a red double kayak. I was attempting to leave shore. He dipped one side of his paddle in the water, then dipped it on the same side again, and then dragged it backwards on the surface.

“Take your paddle out!” I yelled. I struggled to figure out how to explain the sixteen different things he needed to fix, all at the same time. I tried to start with something concrete.

“Ah, ah, your hands, your hands need to be spaced the same amount apart. Can you spread them out?” I stammered as I paddled, trying to keep us from running into another boat or going backwards. As he fixed his hands, I replied, “Yes, like that.” Then thought, “Or not,” as his hands shifted exactly back to where they were before. And then his paddle was going backwards again. “Ack, no, stop paddling!”

My husband, Chris, spotted our flailing. My older son was in his kayak and while his form wasn’t perfect, he had done it before and was remembering the rhythm. My husband was in a good place to provide a metaphorical hand.

Continue reading →

Teaching My Kids Interdependence Instead of Independence

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

Teaching My Kids Interdependence Instead of Independence; photo of a kid climbing a rock-climbing wall and almost being at the top

Smearing sunscreen on my face at the pool, I realized it was just me and my older son. My husband had already taken our younger son to the water.

“Hey, how does my face look?” I asked him. Rather than giving me a silly answer, he looked thoughtfully at it and said, “There’s some near your hair.”

Now, I could have looked at the selfie setting on my phone, but I’m glad I didn’t. That’s because I don’t want to teach my children independence. I want to teach them interdependence.

Continue reading →