parenting philosophy

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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Fantastic Ways to Teach Kids How to Serve Others at Christmas

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

Want your kids to focus less on “stuff” and more on people? Try these six ways to serve others at Christmas with them!

“Did they have a home?” my three-year-old asked as I finished telling him the Christmas story.

“Yes, they had a home,” I said, skipping the whole “escaping into Egypt” bit. While his question surprised me, it wasn’t out of nowhere. We’ve been talking about how not everyone has the same privileges we do, including homes.

Cartoon of a Christmas tree

These discussions are important all year round, but I find them especially important at the holidays. It’s easy for kids to get wrapped up in the Christmas’s surface-level magic, from twinkling lights to presents. Instead, as both a Christian and someone who’s concerned with our society’s inequality, I want to teach my kids how to serve others during Christmas.

Here are some ways to turn away from consumerism and towards serving others at Christmas:

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Why I Didn’t Make a Sign for My Son’s First Day of School

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

Why I Didn't Make a Sign for My Son's First Day of School (Photo: Young white boy closing the door of a house)

Two years ago, I made a controversial parenting decision. On the night before my son’s first day of preschool, I chose not to make him a “first day of school” sign. For that matter, I’m not making one for his first day of kindergarten next week either.

As I said on my personal Facebook page: “I was going to make a sign for [my son] to hold on his first day of preschool tomorrow. But I fell asleep in his room while trying to get him to sleep and woke up at 10:40. And now it’s 12:30 and it’s still not done. Maybe next year!”

My friends cleverly suggested a few work-arounds. “You can do it this week and say you forgot!” or “You can use Photoshop!”

But I didn’t take a single one of them.

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8 Ways to Encourage Exploration in Your Kids

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 8 Comments

Want your kids to embrace life and all of its forms of adventure? These eight principles for parenting can help you encourage exploration. 

8 Ways to Encourage Exploration in Your Kids (Photo: Young white boy in a bucket hat standing in the sand in front of a mountain)

Watching my three-year-old scale the “rock-climbing” wall at the playground, I bite my tongue. Of course, I don’t want him to fall. But neither do I want to discourage him from trying this new piece of equipment.

In theory, I want my kids to explore their world enthusiastically. They should feel safe enough to climb high, able to assess risk well enough to know what’s too high, and gutsy enough to pick themselves back up when they fall. But as all parents know, it’s a difficult balance.

Embracing these eight principles to encourage exploration in our parenting has made my children more willing to try new things. It’s also helped them appreciate a wide diversity of people and experiences.

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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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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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Eating Ethiopian with a 2 Year Old

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

As a kid, my idea of adventurous eating was that I went to a deli that served tongue. (I never ate tongue, but the mere presence of it on the menu was enough street cred for me.) Admittedly, I didn’t live somewhere with a whole lot of options – all we had in my town for years was a couple of average Italian restaurants, a pub, and a Friendly’s.

But now, living in the D.C. suburbs, we are absolutely spoiled for choice. D.C. itself has a thriving foodie culture and our suburb has a number of immigrants who have brought their delicious food with them. So I’m dedicated to ensuring Sprout is exposed to all sorts of cuisine. So far, we’ve had Indian, Thai, Lebanese, dim sum, and authentic Chinese dumplings. But last weekend, we went a step more adventurous than we ever had before – Ethiopian.

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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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Always Be Yourself. Unless You Can Be Santa; Then Be Santa

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

How can anyone dislike Santa Claus? However, my relationship with him as an adult is a bit ambiguous. While I hate lying, I’m a storyteller at heart. I hate the modern-day commercialism around Santa Claus, but love the magic of the toymaker myth. So I thought I was going to have a lot of heartache about how to treat Santa Claus when Sprout got old enough to understand him. But I think I’ve come upon an approach that makes sense – emphasizing the idea of Santa Claus as a character rather than an actual person.

Always Be Yourself. Unless You Can Be Santa; Then Be Santa-2

It certainly helps that Sprout is the most familiar with Santa as a character rather than a real person. We already read about Santa in books, from ones as simple as Biscuit’s Pet and Play Christmas to as weird as Lemony Snicket’s The Lump of Coal. The un-reality of Santa is emphasized even more by the fact that Santa isn’t even human in all of the books – in Pete the Cat Saves Christmas, he’s a cat, and Merry Christmas, Ollie! features Father Christmas Goose.

Through these stories, we can talk about whatever parts of Santa we want to, instead of the dominant cultural version. We’ll emphasize the idea of Santa as a generous toy giver who brings gifts because he loves people, just as we give each other gifts because we love each other. (And to tie to the actual religious part of Christmas, because people loved Jesus and brought gifts to him.) We won’t touch the “good girls and boys” nonsense with a ten foot pole because I’m already ideologically opposed to using toys as rewards.

Now, distinguishing between a character and a real person sounds terribly naive when talking to a two-year-old. But while little kids have difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality, it doesn’t mean that they’re incapable of it. Contrary to 1960s British “moral campaigner” Mary Whitehouse’s position, kids back then did not actually believe that Tom Baker (then playing the Doctor in Doctor Who) was actually drowning for the entire week between a cliffhanger and resolution. Even Sprout, who is only two, knows that characters in books are not “real.”

So when it comes time for him to find out that Santa isn’t a “real” person, I hope that this approach allows us to acknowledge the fundamental fiction of Santa while maintaining the magic and spirit. An excellent book for doing this, which is also had the most heart-breaking first chapter of anything I’ve ever read, is The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, by Julie Lane. (There’s a couple of other books of that name, but this is the best, obviously.) The beautiful part of it is that it roots Santa Claus and the traditions associated with him in tragic, beautiful, real world (albeit still fictional) circumstances while maintaining a little of the mystery.

Besides “Santa as story,” I think it’s also important when the time comes to provide some explanation as to why we’ve been pretending to be Santa this whole time. Fortunately, even that’s rooted in an idea that Sprout understands – cosplay! Because of our foray into costuming for Baltimore Comic Con, he already understands that sometimes adults wear costumes and pretend to be characters because it’s fun. Clearly, people dress as Santa because everyone wants to be him. People dressed as Batman or Groot aren’t actually Batman or Groot, but it’s fun to pretend we are. And who wouldn’t want to be Santa? He gets to give out presents, eat cookies, ride on a sled pulled by flying reindeer, and only works for a month a year (I assume production at the North Pole starts in late November).

No matter how we get there, I want to teach Sprout that we are all Santa for each other. While there’s no single jolly old man in red dropping off presents, we can act in that spirit by giving each other gifts and reaching out to those in need. Instead of Christmas becoming an orgy of consumer receiving, we want to frame it as a gentle season of generosity. And if I can teach him that, the magic of Santa will always be in his life.