child development

Opportunity, Risk, and Bad Ideas

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
My younger son (a white boy in a black sweatshirt) standing on a playground merry-go-round as it is spinning, with a row of pine trees behind him

Sometimes your kids take a cautionary tale as an questionable opportunity.

When I was about eight – old enough for my front teeth to be permanent – my mom sent me off to the park for the first time without her. I was with our next door neighbor, who was a few years older than me. He was supposed to be the responsible one.

I was quite fond of hanging upside down from various items of playground equipment, including things that probably shouldn’t have been hung upside down from. Including the bars on the infamous merry-go-round.

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What does equity and equality have to do with being spoiled?

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
An illustration of people looking over the fence at the baseball game, where there is reality where the tallest person has a bunch of boxes and the shortest is in a hole, equality where they are all on one box, equity where the tallest person doesn't have a box, the middle has one box and the shortest has two boxes, and liberation, where the fence is gone altogether
Images have been created by Craig Froehle, Angus Maguire, the Center for Story-Based Strategy and the Interaction Institute for Social Change.

“But he’s spoiled!” my older son proclaimed loudly, expressing his opinion that his brother always gets what he wants.

Now, his claim is blatantly untrue. In fact, my older son is probably the one who gets what he wants more often just because he has stronger opinions. My younger son is more likely to say, “Yeah, sure, that sounds good.”

But I wasn’t going to get into that conversation. I knew it wasn’t going to go anywhere and just turn into the nonsense of trying to list every time that my older son got what he wanted.

Instead, I took a different angle. “Well, you know that we do try very hard to be fair. But fair doesn’t always mean equal.”

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Watching My Kids Get a Little More Independent Day by Day

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
A white boy in a rain jacket on a bike on the sidewalk next to a parking lot, with an adult on a bike in the background

“Hey, does anyone want to go down to the creek?” I asked my kids, who were sprinting across the sprawling playground equipment at a local park.

“No, we’re racing,” my older son replied.

“Well, I want to go down to the creek,” I said, with a hint of whine in my voice.

“You can,” he stated, plain as day.

“That’s true, I can!” The fact that they could play on their own, that they were big enough not to be constantly supervised and could come get me if there was a problem popped into my head like a cartoon lightbulb.

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Moving from watching to participating as a parent

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of my kids (two white boys in t-shirts) in a carnival ride that has a bucket on an arm that spins around

“You aren’t supposed to lead play, just watch,” the parenting expert voice in the back of my head said. So I sat there on the living room floor and watched, keeping my mouth closed, lest I pass judgment on how my kid was playing.

Even though something felt ‘off’ about this statement, I couldn’t help but see it as the culmination of so much parenting advice – and more strikingly, parent shaming.

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Showing ourselves the grace we show our kids

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Shannon (a white woman in a teal scarf) looking up at the camera with my younger son (a white boy) sitting next to me playing a Nintendo Switch on a blue couch

“I’m sorry – what was your name again?” I asked the man sitting next to me at the community meeting.

“Luis,” he replied, then gestured. “Remember, I asked you about hosting the neighborhood pantry?”

“Oh, right!” I recalled. “I’m sorry – I’m really bad at both faces and names.”

I’ve had some variation on this conversation dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

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Respecting all types of family time

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of two white boys cuddled together on a giant bean bag, both playing separate Nintendo Switches

“Nothing is wasted in nature,” I whispered to myself as I dumped moldy strawberries in our composter.

I despise wasting food. There are so many things wrapped up in the production of our food – from how farm workers are treated to the amount of fertilizer used – that throwing it away feels a bit like sacrilege. But we bought far too much for our Christmas fruit salad and the extra got shoved back in the fridge with the other holiday leftovers. So into the composter it had to go.

I at least had the solace that this food wouldn’t be wasted – it would break down into good compost to feed our garden next fall. Just like the fallen leaves in the forest feed the insects and fungus, which in turn feed the roots of the trees and other plants.

In fact, this is idea that nothing is wasted in nature is a mantra I’ve been trying to adopt in life far beyond our composter.

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