Opinions and Advice

How to Be More Mindful and Present with Your Kids

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

It’s easy to lose focus or let your mind wander when you’re spending time with children. Try these six tips to be more present with your kids!

How to Be More Mindful and Present with Your Kids. (Photo: Man in a blue hoodie walking down a paved trail surrounded by trees pushing a stroller, with a child walking next to him.)

As I turn on my phone to check the temperature outside before going to the park with the kids, Facebook opens up. Five minutes later, I forget why I turned it on in the first place. Meanwhile, the kids are wondering why I’m looking at my phone as well – or trying to snatch it out of my hands.

It’s so easy to get distracted from the people and beauty around us. It’s especially hard to be present with your kids, when we’re pulled in so many directions – sometimes literally. As someone who gets stuck in her head a lot, I’ve worked on being present and mindful quite a bit.

Here are six approaches that have helped me be more in the moment:

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Why Our Kids Aren’t Our Accomplishments

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

our-kids-arent-our-accomplishmentsadd-heading

The overly cheerful Christmas letter is a relentlessly parodied cliche. Yet it and its cousin, the perfectly cultivated Facebook feed, call to us: “You want us, don’t you? Your life should be like this. Your kids should be like this.” And then we wonder – “Maybe I’m not trying hard enough. Maybe if I tried a little more, my kids would be like that.”

But for the sake of us and our kids, we need to resist the siren song. Not just of comparison – because that’s a shitty, dark hole to end up in as well – but of treating our children like our personal accomplishments. Believe me – I speak from experience.

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How Parents Can Help Love Trump Hate

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

how-parents-can-help-love-trump-hate

The election of Donald Trump for president has unearthed a whole spectrum of reactions. While some people are triumphant, many of us are frustrated, sad, angry, and exhausted – including me. Trump’s future policies are likely to be disastrous for climate justice, immigrants, people of color, LBGT people, religious minorities, poor people, and disabled people. Even though Trump hasn’t taken office yet, there have been numerous reports of people emboldened by his rhetoric who are targeting and harassing vulnerable people.

But as Valarie Kaur wrote after the Charleston shooting, “Today we mourn, tomorrow we organize.” Now, it’s metaphorically, if not literally, tomorrow. It’s time to pick ourselves up and take action.

While it can be very hard to find time, energy and money to spare as a parent, here are some constructive things that we can do in response:

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Earth Week: Using Permaculture to Talk to Kids About Environmental Sustainability

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

It’s Earth Week – my favorite secular holiday! For an environmentalist, Earth Day is every day, but it’s still nice to recognize it. This week, my posts are all going to be on how to engage kids on environmental issues, from how to talk about climate change to fun activities that can spark long-term change. 

Using Permaculture to Talk to Kids About Environmental Sustainability-2

Communicating about environmental sustainability is astonishingly hard; inspiring people to take action is even harder. In fact, I spend a good deal of my professional career contemplating how to do this effectively. Add kids into the mix, with their limited knowledge of science and ability to handle “big issues,” and it seems near-impossible. Kim Payne of Simplicity Parenting actually holds climate change up as topic we simply shouldn’t discuss it with children because it’s too stressful.

Unsurprisingly, I disagree. We have an obligation to teach kids about climate change and other environmental issues, if only because they’ll be ones who have to deal with this crap in the future. Plus, there are plenty of kids who want to know about them and like with sex ed, it’s better to give them good information than misinformation. I’ve been an activist since my elementary school self dog-eared a copy of 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth and I came out okay. (Right?) But Payne is correct that we often discuss climate change in ways that are disempowering and frankly, scary, for kids.

Instead, I recommend using permaculture as way to discuss sustainability. While permaculture has its roots (ha) in agriculture, it’s actually much broader. Essentially, it looks to structure how we live around ecological principles, helping us work with, not against, nature. It is based on three major principles: care for the earth, care for people, and return of surplus back to the system to meet the needs of the earth and people. I’ve been a fan of permaculture since I moved to D.C. and started volunteering with a Transition Towns group, a movement based on the idea of applying permaculture to entire communities. I learned more about how to apply it to teaching children from Jen Mendez from PERMIE KIDs when I attended her Rooting DC workshop last year.

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What I’m Doing Differently During My Second Maternity Leave

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

People say that moms are much more go-with-the-flow when it comes to the second child compared with the first, such as in this commercial. Much to my surprise, I actually do fulfill this stereotype. And it’s not just my perception – both my parents and in-laws remarked how much more comfortable I seem. While the fact that Little Bird is a better sleeper than his older brother and a fast physical recovery helped, so did the knowledge I’ve accumulated over the nearly three years of Sprout’s life. Here are some of the things I’m doing after Little Bird was born that I didn’t do the first time:

What I'm Doing Differently During My Second Maternity Leave

Encouraging people to visit: While welcoming visitors is the opposite of what most advice recommends, it’s been essential for me. I get cabin fever very quickly; I was getting antsy after a few days of being snowed in this winter. Postpartum, I have to deal with the double-whammy of not being able to bring the baby to public places before he gets his immunizations and the fact that exclusively breastfeeding him means I can’t leave for more than 45 minutes or so. With Sprout, I’m fairly certain this combination significantly contributed to some postpartum anxiety. Luckily, this time around I’ve had three different sets of friends visit, bearing news of the outside world and nice things to say about the baby. My friends understood that normal “host” etiquette was out the window and I was grateful for the company.

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Green Kids: A Toddler’s Guide to Starting Seeds

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 14 Comments

A Toddler's Guide to Seed Starting

Our yard would be mostly vegetable garden if its topography and Chris’s aesthetic preferences allowed me to do so. As it is, we have a modest but productive 10X15 garden in the back. While I could fill it with seedlings from the farmers’ market, my thriftiness and DIY-aesthetic motivated me to learn how to start everything from seed a few years ago. So every spring, I flip through the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalog, order too much, and start the long process of bringing up seedlings. Except this year, I have a helper. Sprout – true to his nickname – joined me to start planting this past weekend.

Sprout also “helped” start seeds last year, although that was more about introducing him to gardening than him actually being useful. This year, I still could have done it faster and with less of a mess by myself, but he did actually contribute.

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7 Ways to Get Your Child Ready for a New Baby

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 9 Comments

7 Ways to Get Your Child Ready for a New Baby (Photo: Teddy bear sitting on a high chair)

“You’re going to be a big brother!” I told my son (nicknamed Sprout) when he was almost three years old. “That means I’m going to have a baby.” He shrugged and went on his merry way.

Telling him was the easy part. Getting him ready was the challenge. I’m an only child, so the personal aspect of having a sibling was pretty foreign. Chris has a younger sister, but he doesn’t even remember her being born.

To prepare, we looked into advice on the internet, took suggestions from other families, and thought about what we would want if we were a little kid facing this big change.

Thankfully,  following these ideas really did help. Almost two years on, our kids have a great relationship. While they shove and complain, they also show incredible generosity to each other. One of my favorite things to watch is when

Here’s some of the best advice we gathered, along  with how we applied it:

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When Restrictions Keep You From Lifting Your Toddler While Pregnant

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

Parenting with Pregnancy Restrictions. How can you be a good mom to a toddler or preschooler if you can't pick them up? Here's how. (Photo: Boy kissing a mom's very pregnant stomach.)

Sitting in the specialist ob-gyn’s office, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that I could avoid more scary bleeding during my pregnancy if I just followed a few simple guidelines. The bad news was that the guidelines were simple, but they weren’t easy. In particular, I was forbidden from lifting any heavy objects.

Looking at my two-year-old son, I asked the doctor, “Does that mean I can’t pick him up?” The answer? Definitely not. He was little, but  still way past my weight limit.

Not being able to lift my toddler while pregnant put a major crimp in my parenting options. Suddenly, a key piece of my toolkit disappeared, affecting everything from how I hugged my son to bedtime routines. Over the course of the months of restrictions, I figured out some strategies to adapt my parenting to these limitations.

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How to Parent like an Outdoors Guide

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

How to Parent Like an Outdoors Guide (Photo: White woman with two kids in front of her on a hiking trail)

Watching my five-year-old run down a rocky hiking path, I winced. I wanted to say “Be careful!” so badly. But I thought for a second and tweaked it just a bit.

“If you run, you’ll hit loose rocks,” I yelled. “If you don’t like walking down, you can walk sideways, like this,” I added, demonstrating the sidestepping technique.

He slowed down and started walking instead. “But it’s faster to run!” he explained as I caught up to him.

“I know, but you know what happens if you hit a loose rock? Bump bump bump bump,” I said, illustrating the bouncing down a trail with my hand. “That would hurt.”

While I’m not as outdoorsy as some (like these folks who hiked the Grand Canyon with their three-year-old), we’ve brought our little ones on their fair share of outdoors adventures. While I think just being outdoors teaches kids amazing lessons, parenting in the wild has helped me a lot as a mom.  Because helicopter parenting is far too restrictive and totally free-range is a little too hands-off, I’m somewhere in-between.

Instead, I see myself in the role of parent as an outdoor guide, like one you have for hiking or rock-climbing. Although I’ve never been a fully licensed guide, I’ve led hikes, belayed climbers on rock-climbing walls, and taught field ecology to elementary and junior high students. You have to be quick-witted, skilled at the Art of Being Prepared for Anything, and well-versed in both first-aid and outdoors skills. Most importantly, you want to bring people on and back from an adventure safely, where they both learn skills and a lot about themselves.

Here’s what I learned that applied to parenting:

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