How to Make a Difference When Everything Seems Awful

How to Make a Difference When Everything Seems Awful (Photo: Hand-painted sign of The Lorax with the quote 'Unless someone like you cares a whole lot, nothing will change, it's not.')

The headlines never end. More school shootings. White people putting people of color in danger for merely living. The gap between rich and poor growing ever wider. America having the highest rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. The 400th straight month of higher-than-normal temperatures from climate change.

There is so much wrong with the world. I am so damn tired from it all. It’s so easy to be.

Unfortunately, no one’s going to come around and fix it. Change starts with us. It’s about radical kindness in your daily life. It’s about standing up and demanding justice and fairness from our policy makers. The political is personal and the personal is political.

When it feels like the world is awful, here are some ways you can make a difference:

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How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change

Has your child heard about climate change and are starting to ask questions? Or do you want to broach this difficult topic but don’t know where to start? Here are good ways to talk to kids about climate change.

How to Talk to Kids About Climate Change (Photo: Group of kids in front of a capital building holding a poster saying 'Kids Want Climate Justice')

“We’re going to tell the people who make the rules that we want clean air and water for everyone,” I told my then three-year-old as we made signs for the People’s Climate Mobilization. As we got ready for the march, I struggled with what to say to him about it. In the end, I settled on the vague “air and water” statement. A clear mom fail at avoiding the issue.

Or was it? After all, three is awfully young to face the fact that our everyday choices could affect everyone on the planet in both in the present day and hundreds of years from now. There are plenty of adults who can’t grapple with that reality. Climate change activism is my personal passion, but it’s not right to force it on him before he’s ready.

Since then, I’ve thought a lot about explaining climate change to our kids. More than a year later, we still haven’t directly explained it. But now I see it as more of a process than a one-and-done conversation.

In addition to my personal interest, my professional background is informing a lot of my approach. As a science and environmental communicator, talking about climate change and related issues is one of my specialties.

Here are some big principles to consider if you are going to  talk to kids about climate change:

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The Reality and Fantasy of Green Living with Kids

 

The Reality and Fantasy of Green Living (Photographs: - set of three - Upper left-hand corner, very neat arrangement of produce; upper right - photo of the overgrown garden, Giant cargo bike holding two children and also not interested in learning.

Skimming through Pinterest, I’m slightly overwhelmed looking at all of these lovely photographs. Let’s be realistic. I’m a lot overwhelmed.

I squint looking at homesteading blogs, wondering how these women grow all of their own food and make time for their kids. I sigh looking at the “green living” posts with their homemade cleaners. Does it count as green if I just don’t clean at all?

Maybe you feel the same way looking at me. You may think, “How does she find time for all of this stuff?” The answer is that I don’t. Not really.

Personally, here’s how my reality doesn’t come even close to matching my fantasy:

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How Becoming a Chef Turned My Husband into a Feminist Role Model

White man in a white chef's jacket in a classroom, holding a piece of French bread pizza

Two weeks ago, I was finally able to call my husband a chef. Looking at him in his white culinary school jacket with his name on it, I realized this situation wasn’t quite what I imagined when I watched him walk across that stage. Because instead of him being the head of a high-end fancy restaurant, he was teaching a bunch of preschoolers how to cook.

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A Letter to My Kids on the Anniversary of the Trump Presidency

It’s been a full year since Donald Trump became president. A full year since he stood on the National Mall and swore to “faithfully execute the office of President of the United States,” just as Barack Obama had done eight years before. Attending President Obama’s inauguration was one of the most patriotic moments of my life. Instead of attending Trump’s inauguration, I joined with half a million other women in the next day to raise our voices in protest.

Photo of a white woman in a red and gold Wonder Woman shirt and black sweatshirt looking at the camera in a selfie.

Needless to say, I entered Trump’s administration ready to fight. In my Instagram photo from that day, I’m wearing my Wonder Woman shirt, my smirk and stance challenging the camera.

But despite my attitude, I was worried. In fact, I had been worried since I blearily read the results the morning after the election. I was worried for you and even moreso for the many families less privileged than ours. As we’ve seen since then, my worries about the treatment of immigrants, LGBT folks, black people, and poor families were justified. Everything has been as bad as we expected. In some cases, it’s been worse.

And yet.

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Our Creative Alternative to the Thanksgiving Myth

Our Creative Alternative to the Thanksgiving Myth (Photo: Table set with a variety of food for Thanksgiving)

“They’re not dressing up as Native Americans, are they?” I said, wrinkling my nose. After reading about how cultures aren’t costumes around Halloween and how the whitewashed version of the Thanksgiving story is painfully inaccurate, I hope that my son’s preschool isn’t re-enacting the famous version of the Thanksgiving narrative. Regardless of their curriculum, I know we won’t be repeating it in our household. So we have to come up with an alternative.

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The Absolutely Best Ways to Donate to a Food Drive

Want to give effectively to a food drive to a local food bank?

The Absolutely Best Ways to Donate to a Food Drive. We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So (Photo: Cans of food stacked in very large piles)

You rarely have the opportunity to decide how to spend your co-workers’ hard-earned money. But as the one responsible for running our yearly food drive, I wanted both them and the food bank to get the best bang for their buck. Just randomly picking out whatever I felt like at the grocery store wasn’t going to cut it. But how could I donate in the most effective way possible?

I’m not the only one who struggles with this question. Thanksgiving and Christmas are the “food drive holidays,” where everyone from churches to Boy Scouts troops are collecting cans to donate to food banks. Unfortunately, the donations to these drives aren’t as helpful as they could be because people just aren’t aware of the most effective ways to give.

Between my experiences running the food drives and reading up on the subject, I’ve found some really handy rules to guide your food drive giving.

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How to Prevent Raising An Entitled Kid

How to Prevent Raising an Entitled Kid. Want to raise a respectful kid who doesn't think they deserve everything? Try these seven things our family is doing! (Picture: Victorian illustration of a little girl asleep on the floor, clutching a box of chocolates with a dog next to her)

“Why did he think he was better than everyone else?” my four year old asked as we were reading the picture book Little Blue Truck. In the story, a huge construction truck comes barreling through a farm, proclaiming, “I’ve got important things to do!” As a consequence of his pride, he slides into a mud puddle and his huge tires get stuck. In the world of trucks, he’s a bit of an entitled brat.

Answering my son’s question was tough. Why do some people think they’re better than others? Why do some people think they deserve more or better than other people do? As challenging it is to answer these, they’re essential questions to figure out if we’re going to raise kids who respect and value other people. In other words, to prevent raising entitled kids.

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Why White Parents Must Confront White Supremacy

Why White Parents Must Confront White Supremacy (Photo: Sign saying "The answer to whether we'd have marched in the civil rights era is whether we're marching in this civil rights era")

Content warning: Racism, racially-based violence

When I was a teenager in the late 1990s, I thought I was born in the wrong time. In my mind, I should have been coming of age in the 1960s, the height of the Civil Rights era. I imagined myself as a fierce crusader for the rights of others, on the front lines of the marches and sit-ins to confront white supremacy.

Dear Lord, I was a fool.

Admittedly, that’s pretty common among teenagers. But this was a special kind of foolishness. One that seems especially relevant in this rather terrible time in our nation’s history. Almost fifty years after Martin Luther King’s death, a white supremacist in Charlottesville plowed a car into a group of anti-racist protestors. He killed one person and injured 19 others.

To me, this incident highlights how ignorant I was back then. It also illustrates how common my views still are. My naivety illustrates everything about why white parents need to talk to their kids about white supremacy. (By which I don’t mean just Nazis, but the cultural aspect of valuing white people and culture above all others.)

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