parenting philosophy

Passing on the Torch of Live Music

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Concert at a baseball stadium, taken from high in the stands. Green Day are on stage, with singer Billy Joe's face projected on giant screens on either side. The area in front of the stage is packed.

From the packed field below to the people in the tippy-top nose-bleed seats (like us), the crowd buzzed with energy. Most sung loudly along with the lyrics from the band: “I wanna be the minority / I don’t need your authority / Down with the moral majority / ‘Cause I wanna be the minority!”

When I glanced over at my kids, they didn’t know the lyrics, but were definitely engaged. My older kid had his “I’m not smiling because I’m so intensely paying attention to what’s going on” look on his face and my younger son was bouncing on his seat and clapping. They don’t know Green Day songs well, but between Weird Al parodies of them (my older kid went through a big Weird Al phase) and hearing them on the “classic alternative” iTunes station, they recognized a good number of the songs.

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Cultivating an Environment for Growth

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Small purple crocuses and red berries among grasses

Digging a tiny hole to transplant my peppers, I smiled as the soil crumbled in my hands. It was dark, moist soil, the result of years of adding organic matter (straw, compost, and leaves) to the heavy clay in our yard. While I care for my plants by watering and weeding them, the soil is probably the most important part of my garden’s success. There’s nothing you can do to force a plant to grow, but there are lots of ways we can create an environment that nurtures them. The same goes for people and situations as well.

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We are all our hands and holders

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
A gray rabbit with a white face sitting on a striped cushion

As I held the furry gray and white body against my chest, a sense of warmth moved through me. This rabbit had been abandoned in the streets of Washington DC, sitting in her cage for God knows how long before being rescued. And yet she let me pick her up. She could have scratched or bitten me, but she just wanted to be held closely, with love. The fact that she felt safe around me was an honor.

While most of us have never been abandoned as completely as she was, we’ve all be hurt by people in some way or another. Yet like her, we need to rely on others.

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Cycles of parenting and life

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
My younger son (a white boy in a sweatshirt with multicolored dinosuars, black jeans, and blue hiking boots) stepping between rocks next to a stream

“The seasons go round and round / the painted ponies go up and down / on the carousel of time….” I crooned softly to myself, looking out my back porch. Joni Mitchell’s song The Circle Game echoed in my head, one of the few guaranteed to make me choke up. For those not familiar, it’s about a child growing up, with each verse describing a different stage of childhood. 

In the past, I heard it and was sad about the child growing up. How terrible to have to leave each of those ages behind, especially as that child’s parent?

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Being honest about being a good enough parent

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Me (a white woman with brown hair and glasses in a multicolored sweater) balancing a stuffed Gelatinous Cube on my head

Before kids are old enough to really believe in God (or choose to not believe in God), they believe in their parents. Having taken care of them since they were babies, small children look up to their parents as all-knowing, all-powerful beings that can fix anything. And then, one day, they stop.

My kids are both around the ages – 8 and 10 – where they start losing serious faith in parents as masters of the universe. So when I saw This American Life was doing an episode on that subject called Parents Are People, I was intrigued.

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Finding Rest in the Chaos

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
A purple violet growing through the sidewalk
Seeing flowers on my daily walk is a big part of my rest.

“Why are you on your phone – again?” my younger son asked with an edge of whine in his voice from the bathtub.

I felt a pang of guilt. I should be paying attention to him – right? My undivided, unquestioned attention.

But wait. I had given him a ton of attention earlier that day. We had played a board gamebefore dinner. I had just played a game of 20 Questions with him focusing on Dungeons and Dragons monsters while he was in the bath. No, I shouldn’t feel guilty. I needed that break.

“Because my brain needs a break. I find being a good listener takes a lot of energy. Reading gives my brain a rest. So I’m just reading on my phone for a little while,” I responded.

He grumbled and started telling me something anyway, but at least I tried.

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Cute Robot Dogs and Raising Kids Who Ask Questions

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
A robot dog that has a yellow and black body "standing" on top of a set of uneven stairs with two children and an adult looking through a window on the other side

The dog stretched its legs, sniffed around, and laid down to rest. All totally normal dog things. Except this one was made of metal and settled itself into a charging station. All of the kids watching from outside a window cried “Awww!” They were crying in wonder of not just a dog, but a robot dog! How cool is that, right? Maybe.

Once I pulled the kids away from the window and bought tickets to get in the Boston Museum of Science (where we were), I discovered that the robot dog was part of a larger artificial intelligence (AI) exhibit. I talk a lot about using AI for science in work, so I was intrigued. How was the Museum of Science going to explain AI in a way that was interesting to non-scientists?

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Why posts about shallow inclusivity make me cringe

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
A photo of me (a white woman with brown hair and glasses) in a Wonder Woman dress standing in front of a bookshelf with books and a plant on it

I know what it’s like to be the kid sitting alone in the cafeteria. I also know what it’s like to be the kid who befriends a kid sitting alone in the cafeteria.

In eighth grade, I was having a very rough year. At the beginning of the year, I was kicked off the swim team for the simple fact that I wasn’t very good, the one place I had a semblance of a social life. I had befriended a few folks at the beginning of the year, but wasn’t very close to them yet and didn’t have the same lunch as them. Most of the time, I ate lunch in the cafeteria alone and then moved on to the library to read or music room to practice my saxophone. I never got particularly good at the saxophone, but it was a heck of a lot better than sitting around by myself in the cafeteria.

Around that time, an advisor for a club I was in (who was also a guidance counselor) suggested that I befriend a classmate. I knew I was nowhere near popular. I was barely tolerated in class among the “smart popular” kids who were in honors classes but weren’t as weird.

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