social issues

Teaching kids about democracy by involving them in it

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of a bulletin board with five different sheets of paper, each with several different photos of playground equipment. Each photo has stickers on it that indicate 1, 2 or 3 for ranked voting.

“So there’s two regular swings and a baby swing and regular swing and an adaptive swing and regular swing,” I spoke into my phone while trying to maneuver the camera on it so my kids could see the bulletin board in front of me over FaceTime.

They were staying at my parents’ house (thanks mom and dad!) and I was at our neighborhood community center. The bulletin board was covered with photos of options for a future playground at the park across the street from our house. The community center had invited the kids in the neighborhood and after school program to do ranked voting for their favorites. That day was the last day to vote.

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How sustainability today can help us prepare for tough times ahead

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of a climate justice protest in Washington D.C. with trees, the White House, and the Washington Monument behind a gathered crowd on a rainy day

Endless hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding; astronomically high prices and low wages; biodiversity collapse – is this the future you expect for your kids in 30 years? For many of us concerned about climate change and social inequality, it seems like the future is going to be pretty grim. Some people are even going so far to think we’re going to be living in something out of a dystopia SF novel (if we’re not already).

But while being prepared for a legit natural or human-caused disaster is a good thing, hunkering down in despair isn’t. Honestly, our children deserve for us to at least try to turn this ship in the right direction. No one wants to tell their kids, “We didn’t bother trying because what was the point?”

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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.

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Valuing play for our children and ourselves

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of a young white boy holding up his hands above his hands, with a white wall showing a shadow split up in rainbow colors

Reading the plaque on the wall at the National Children’s Museum, I raised an eyebrow. I had been looking around while my kids climbed on the huge structure rising up two stories in the middle of the museum. The sign on the wall caught my eye, so of course I read it. It had a little blurb about the skills children would learn from using said giant climbing structure – like problem solving and teamwork – and careers that used those skills. Although I was nodding along at first, I stopped and thought, “Wait a minute! Why are we so worried about them learning specific skills, much less for a career? Why can’t we just let them play?”

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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.)

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.

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I May Be Brave to be Sustainable – But I Shouldn’t Have to Be

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
I May Be Brave to be Sustainable - But I Shouldn't Have to Be; Photo of a number of bikes - bike share, bikes with kids' seats, cargo bikes - parked on bike racks outside a park with a playground

“You’re so brave,” said a woman on the sidewalk as I pedaled by her slowly. Her words came right on the heels of me tearing into my older son about not screwing around while biking in the road. (He was riding so slowly I was almost crashing into him and swerving.) “Uh, thanks?” I stammered, not sure what else to say.

While I didn’t have much to respond in the moment, the comment stuck with me. Brave? What did she mean by that?

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How We Can Engage Kids to Build a Better World

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

How We Can Engage Kids to Build a Better World; Image description: Photo of two white girls with dar hair leaning over a table with a blue tablecloth, drawing pictures in marker, with the book Growing Sustainable Together above the paper

Under the little girl’s steady hand before me, I saw a world emerging. A world that’s more environmentally and socially sustainable, powered by solar panels and windmills, with lots of ways to get around besides cars. All laid out there in marker.

This was just one of many amazing examples I got when I asked kids to envision their ideal city. I did two different book promotion events – one at a spring festival at our local nature center and one at a book festival – and had this visioning activity to engage kids walking by. (It’s the activity in the last chapter of my book!)

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