societal issues

Book Club: Why Richard Scarry’s Busytown Has the Worst City Government Ever

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

Book Club – quirky critical and social justice takes on children’s literature. Otherwise known as what happens when someone interested in pop culture and political analysis has read the same bedtime story for the 100th time.

Richard Scarry’s Busytown has the most incompetent municipal government I’ve ever seen, despite the fact that I live very close to Washington D.C. The urban planning is an utter disaster, the roads make Beijing’s highways look orderly, and the safety standards and training are non-existant. Urban designers take note – except for its astonishingly resilient citizens, Busytown is everything you don’t want your city to be.

To start with, the city’s traffic patterns and the resulting crashes are atrocious. We have two Busytown books (Cars and Trucks and Things that Go and Lowly Worm’s Applecar), both of which feature multiple car crashes or near-misses. For example, one accident involves at least 17 different vehicles, including a squirting mustard truck, a chinaware truck, a flour truck, a whipped cream truck, a tomato juice truck, and an egg truck. While thankfully, “no one was badly hurt” but it will “probably take a Million Years” for the mechanic to fix everything.

Scan from Cars and Trucks and Things that Go of a huge crash

The roads all appear to be multi-lane with no actual stripes to distinguish between them. There are few or no traffic lights or stop signs, with individual police officers directing traffic at overcrowded intersections. There are multiple turn-offs with no merge lanes, like drive through hamburger stands on busy highways. The roads appear to be constantly under construction, with minimal markings and barriers. The roads themselves go through dangerous areas with a lack of supporting infrastructure, as “shortcuts through the mountains” result in dangerous falling rocks. (The roads also appear to cut right across ski trails, which can’t be safe for the skiers.)

Beyond the physical infrastructure, there is clearly little municipal support for regulation. Enforcement of traffic rules is minimal, with one clearly dangerous driver being pursued by a single (but very determined) bike cop in one book and another completely ignored in another. Vehicles vary in size from tiny pencil cars driven by mice to huge multi-story tourist buses. Many of them appear to not pass modern safety or emissions standards, including pickle and banana cars. One even transforms into a helicopter and balloon, while having no obvious method of propulsion.

Scan from Cars and Trucks and Things that Go of a tractor that's fallen in a pond

The complete disregard for safety extends to the municipal staff, who clearly need better training and performance standards. They make the beleaguered Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority look staggeringly competent. A crane driver steers straight into a lake. (That wasn’t very smart, indeed.)

A steamroll driver loses control of his truck, which runs over several cars. A car carrier operator drops a car into the ocean. Six different dump trucks in one area dump their loads at the same time because of vague misheard directions from a citizen.

Scan from Cars and Trucks and Things that Go of cars run over

Lastly, the city is extremely auto-centric. While it’s not safe for drivers, it’s disastrous for bicyclists and pedestrians. There are sidewalks, but cars veer onto them on a regular basis, knocking over parking meters. There are no bike lanes or separated paths. There is a police officer on a bicycle, but even she rides on sidewalks to avoid the multiple crashes. Instead of bicycles, even the children are gifted toy cars that they’re allowed to drive on the road!

While Busytown looks pro-urban upon first glance, it is a classic example of a poorly planned, shoddily managed semi-suburban area. It is certainly a product of the time. Parents interested in finding good neighborhoods for their children and city planners alike can learn from this disastrous mess.

Refugees and Other Families Looking for a Better Life

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 6 Comments

Trigger Warnings: Child death and disappearance, homelessness, refugees

If you’re regularly on social media or watch TV news, you’ve seen The Picture. The photograph of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who drowned while his family was trying to escape their homeland’s civil war. Of course, it was undeniably tragic.

While I normally try to keep up on the news, I avoided that photo at every turn, averting my eyes when it came up in my Facebook or Twitter feeds. It certainly wasn’t because I don’t care about the plight of the Syrian people – I’ve signed many a petition demanding the US Do Something and am a religious contributor to Oxfam’s work.

No, it’s because I care too much.

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An Open Letter to Parenting Experts

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

I believe in being positive, especially as a parent, but sometimes I get frustrated. I get angry when people are being oppressed, when someone is reinforcing prejudicial societal patterns, or when people are putting others in unnecessary pain. These Open Letters are either to the people making me mad or those suffering.

Dear writers of parenting books and articles,

I have a bit of unsolicited advice. You’ve given us so much over the years that it seems time to give a little back.

1) Don’t over-promise unrealistic results. Look, we know there’s lot of competition on the parenting advice shelf. In the age of Twitter, you have to catch their eye right away. Nonetheless, it’s nothing but sheer cruelty to guarantee “Teach your baby to sleep (in just seven days)” or “How to eliminate tantrums and raise a patient, respectful and cooperative one to four year old.” While those claims are clearly absurd to people with two brain cells available to rub together, parents that have been waking up multiple times a night for more than a year or are trying to tolerate whiny kids don’t even have that minimum available. (I say this as a victim of the former situation.) Giving false hope is just mean.

2) Don’t shame parents when your tactics don’t work. When you claim your advice will work for all kids, you imply that if it doesn’t work, it’s the parent’s fault. For example, a number of books and articles emphasize how very important it is that your infant both sleep exclusively on their backs by themselves as well sleep through the night for a specific period of time. But there’s a percentage of kids who will never do that! Good luck explaining “but the books says you have to sleep!” to them.

3) Acknowledge yours may not be the only solution. Everyone knows different tactics work for different kids, even in the same family. So of course, a family may need to draw on a whole toolbox of ideas, not just the ones in a single book. But too often, you allude – or even occasionally state outright – that using other methods makes the reader a Bad Mother.

4) Don’t assume everyone has a Leave It to Beaver middle-class nuclear family. Increasing numbers of families have diverse structures, with single parents raising kids on their own, grandparents helping out, same-sex couples raising kids, and many more combinations. Parents may have high or very low incomes. The primary caregiver may be a mother or father or not even a biological parent at all. Yet you often give advice that’s only helpful, applicable or realistic for a small portion of the population. You recommend absurd amounts of unnecessary baby gear, assume a broad variety of available childcare options (FYI, nannies and au pairs are not affordable for most families), assume the mom will be doing most of the work, and give advice only helpful to parents with 9 to 5 schedules. This structure makes the rest of us feel like we don’t matter or even exist.

5) Don’t recommend – nay, require – contradictory actions in the same book. My “favorite” example is from the tome of pregnant lady-shaming, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. The authors recommend to eat locally as much as possible. Then just a few pages later, the same book recommends pregnant women eat 4 servings of fruit a day, especially mangos. Unless you actually live in South America, that’s ridiculous. Some good copy editing will save a lot of parents some head-banging, and not of the heavy-metal kind.

6) Don’t use the word “should” to refer to a child’s behavior unless you’re actually referring to a developmental milestone. Modern-day parents get just a tiny bit obsessive about their kids hitting their milestones. These days the only things we can turn to to know if our kid is “normal” is other parents, our pediatrician, or parenting books. While there are certain ones that it’s important to meet, it really muddies the waters when parenting books just make up new ones. For example, there’s no set standard for when your kid must sleep through the night. There are some adults who don’t sleep through the night!

7) Never use the term “mother’s intuition.” Most moms arrive home and think, “What the hell do I do now?” The sole extent of my “inborn knowledge” was “Oh crap, my baby is crying!” I knew I should do something to calm him, but what I should do eluded me. Suggesting that I should have some magical ability to know what to do made me even more insecure. If parenting intuition exists, it’s from the slow, beautiful process of learning to know a child’s personality and unique traits. It’s much more helpful to reassure new parents that it will get easier over time as they get to know their child.

Now all of this might make me sound rather, well, motherly. But I’m pretty sure you can handle it. After all, you’ve given plenty of “shoulds” and “should-nots” to us.

Songs to Grow Up With: Kids’ Music for Little Radicals

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

songs-to-grow-up-with_-kids-music-for-little-radicals

Listening to music can be a radical act. And I don’t mean in the 2112 or Footloose “music is evil” type of way. But more that the type of music we listen to is not only a reflection of our tastes and perspectives but an influence on them.

Nowhere is this more true than for kids, who either end up listening to music developed for their specific age group or are subjected to their parents’ musical tastes. While some kids music is absolutely inane, it doesn’t have to be. Without needing to go full-on Defiance of Anthropomorphic Sea Mammals (from Portlandia), here are a few songs that may help inspire your kids to be activists or at least anti-authoritarian. Not all of these were originally for kids – many of them are straight-up folk songs – but I think they all have a kid appeal.

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The Type of Neighbor I Want to Be

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Last week, I found out that my neighbor across the street, Wilma, had died. I hadn’t seen her around in a while, but it was still very much a surprise. She was one of those people you always assume will be there. She was the definition of a neighborhood institution. While we were friendly, I wish I had been as good of a neighbor to her as she was to the whole neighborhood.

Wilma grew up down the block from her current house, around the corner from her grandparents. My neighborhood is a historically black community and her family was a fundamental part of its foundation. She told me stories about when she was a kid and everyone had apple trees and chickens that ran amuck on the sidewalk. After men came back from fishing, multiple families would come together and share a big fry up. The city didn’t provide many services – there are still some houses with wood-fired stoves because it took so long to get gas service – but they preferred being ignored to being harassed or worse. 

As Wilma grew older, the neighborhood began to develop problems, namely crime and drugs. While it had always been poor due to systemic racism, it had previously been safe. But in the 80s, It was one of the main gateways for drugs into D.C. There was at least one murder (and probably others). It had enough of a reputation that even when we moved here in 2010, the landlords from our former apartment warned us against it.

But Wilma wasn’t going to let that stand for long. As the unofficial mayor of the neighborhood, she ran the neighborhood’s advisory board. The board represented community needs to the city government, ranging from concerns about large trucks on the streets to over-development. She was the Commissioner of the local Housing Authority and advocated for better, more affordable housing. By finding private funding for the project, she was a big part of the movement to replace the run-down subsidized apartments nearby with new integrated, multi-income townhouses. Since then, our county has largely moved towards integrated subsidized housing because it’s more respectful towards low-income folks and prevents a lot of the problems caused by ghettoizing people. Her efforts largely contributed to the fact that my neighborhood is safe enough that I feel comfortable and happy raising my son here.

Needless to say, that was all before we moved in. I wouldn’t have known about any of it if Wilma didn’t make an effort to be as welcoming and friendly as possible towards us from the very beginning. As Chris and I are a young, upper-middle-class white couple – the epitome of gentrifiers – she had every right to be skeptical. But she never was. She opened us with open arms, frequently saying hello to us from her porch. Although she didn’t think it would be successful – at first – she loved the fact that I was growing vegetables in my garden. And when Sprout came along, she absolutely adored him. She was always asking after him and what new milestones he was passing. By making us part of the essential fabric of our neighborhood, she made us comfortable enough that we wanted that for ourselves too.

When I found out she died, I was struck by a deep loss. Regret that I hadn’t checked in on her and helped her when she was sick. Regret that I had never expressed my appreciation for her. Sadness that Sprout wouldn’t be able to grow up with this wonderful older black woman as one of many diverse role-models. Sadness that we lost such an important person to our neighborhood. 

Wilma was truly a good neighbor to everyone around her. With her absence, it will be up to the rest of us to reach our hands out to help each other in honor of her memory.  

What neighbors have you had that affected you?

Missing the Home in Hometown

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

When you’re a kid, you’re told to live up to your potential. As a chronic overachiever, I’m a little obsessed with that. So it was disappointing to realize that my hometown hasn’t held up its end of the bargain. On a trip home for Independence Day, my family shared some of the best my hometown had to offer. While I loved it, I couldn’t help but feel that the town is undervaluing some of its best resources.

I was happy living in the epitome of upstate New York suburbia, but by the time I reached high school, I also felt that things could be better. I knew that my town didn’t have a sense of place or provide me with a grounding other people had. Most of my fondest memories (outside my house) were in different towns altogether. The closest we had to a downtown was the mall, but malls are never true community places. Living in walkable towns and cities, from nearby Ballston Spa to Oxford across the pond, was revelatory. What I experienced in those places shaped a lot of my priorities when Chris and I looked for our own house.

So returning is always a little weird, realizing how different my assumptions and basic operating procedures no longer fit. Biking at night or during rush hour is near-suicidal. Walking anywhere is a challenge both because of distance and parking lots. The mall is still the center of retail. (Okay, so most of my current city’s center of commerce is a road surrounded by strip malls. At least we’re trying to improve.) There is zero mass transit.

But there are some similarities that still warm my heart: the dedication of volunteers, public spaces that have community buy-in, and beautiful natural places.

Our first stop was one of the town’s community-run firehouses, where my father-in-law is a volunteer safety officer. Despite the many things I disagree with my father-in-law with -from politics to food – I have immense respect for the many hours he’s given back. Before the engines headed off to the Independence Day parade, we received a personal tour. Sprout had the honor of sitting in a tiny truck that actually drove, which captivated his attention to the exclusion of everything else. Later on, a firefighter lifted him up onto the seat of a real engine, the height of which alone was startling. We even got to meet the official firehouse dog, an affectionate red bloodhound named Ruby. As we took the tour, I noticed small indications of the dedication and time these men and women put on the line for their community. Everything from the kitchen to the awards case spoke of great personal commitment.

Later, we visited a more historical testament to the willingness to volunteer: a giant wooden playground. The playground at the Commons (what I said the Adventure Playground reminded me of) was built about two decades ago by community members. Between hard labor and donated funds, our community made this awesome structure happen.  Chris and I both remember our parents pitching in and actually constructing it. We kids were assigned low risk odd jobs like soaping screws and sanding wood. I always thought of it as one of the few places in my hometown that had a distinct character and was a reflection of the people in it.

After it was built, I spent hours scaling its steps, peering out of its towers, and hanging upside down from its monkey bars. My hometown has very few playgrounds outside of schools, so it was special. Besides, all of the little passageways made it superb for hide and seek.

I couldn’t wait to watch Sprout experience those same joys. For the most part, he did. Following him, I spent a lot of time ducking into short passageways and climbing over walls that weren’t meant to be climbed. He especially enjoyed scaling a steep ramp and tiptoeing over a stack of tires that made up a bridge between two sections.

The playground at the Commons. Towers and climbing structures with a castle theme painted black.
Unfortunately, The Commons looked the worse for wear. The wood had been painted black, which gave it a weirdly somber tone, and even that paint job was peeling a little. Some sections were bordering on splintery. Parts of the playground that had broken – like cross-bars and a mat-like bridge – were just removed instead of replaced. There were bits here and there that showed signs of active maintenance, but they were few and far between.

What was the most disappointing was not the difference from my childhood memories, but the fact that the city wasn’t respecting the hard work the community members had put into it. The town’s lack of upkeep seemed to reflect their lack of interest in cultivating public spaces and engaging the larger community in them. As the firehouse showed, there is a real spirit of community alive and well in my hometown. The government just needs to tap into it.

The last mini-field trip we made was a tromp through a wildlife preserve to see a heron and osprey nesting area. Just getting to the trailhead was a challenge. There was no parking and no sidewalk, so we had to walk in the shoulder of a 40 mph road. The trail was narrow, overgrown and muddy.

But oh, what a swamp! To the left, five or six heron nests, conglomerations of random sticks in the notches of bare trees. Juvenile birds stuck their long necks out, chattering to their parents. With binoculars, we could see into the nests, getting a surprisingly close view of their awkward adorableness. As we left, two siblings got in a squawking match, tussling over some perceived slight. To the right, a huge osprey nest looking like it might fall out of the dead tree, one parent nearby chasing away intruders. A songbird kept swooping by the nest, perhaps trying to steal an egg or two. In the pond, a beaver dam was managing the water flow without revealing its residents. As we approached, a few frogs hopped into the water, perhaps sensing a grabby toddler on his way. Dragonflies buzzed the surface, flicking the tops of reeds. I reveled in it and while Sprout had a limited understanding of what he was seeing, he definitively enjoyed tromping through the woods.

Although I loved that we could visit this site, the path seemed both under-maintained and underutilized.  In addition, there was no signage that it existed from the road and walking from the parking lot with Sprout made me nervous. (I probably would have calmer if he wasn’t with me.) Just a sidewalk or pedestrian path in addition to the shoulder would help a lot. With a few additional resources, this trail could be available to more people without compromising its special nature.

My trip home reminded me of both the promise and the challenges my hometown faces in trying to remain vibrant. I hope that the community itself can realize the amazing potential they have available today and capitalize on it in the future.

Guest Post on Urban Planning and Parenting

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

I have a guest post up at local urban planning and smart growth blog Greater Greater Washington (welcome folks from over there!): If you want a place to welcome kids, make it urban.

Drawing on my experience growing up in a suburban environment and raising a kid in a semi-urban environment, I consider some of the best parts of urbanism that can make places better for kids and parents.

Here’s the first couple of paragraphs:

A child’s surroundings can make all the difference in what and how they learn, and urban places can offer what kids need for healthy development. Here are some ways we can make places kid-friendly.

While zoning meetings aren’t exactly a hot topic on parenting blogs, perhaps they should be. Our neighborhoods’ physical structure strongly influences how residents can raise children. Within the cultural conversation around the Meitiv’s, the Montgomery County couple who Child Protective Services investigated for allowing their children walk home from a park, little of it has been on how communities could make themselves better places for children.

Read the rest at Greater Greater Washington!

Bringing Peru to the National Mall: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival

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Every year, the Smithsonian brings a little piece of somewhere else in the wide world to the National Mall. Although not well-known by tourists, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is a fantastic event that I always look forward to attending. This year, the Festival focused on Peru, making for a slightly surreal but very satisfying experience, considering I traveled there just a few years ago.

While seeing my personal experiences laid out as exhibits was odd, I was so glad I could share them in a concrete way with Sprout. One of the main tents focused on the highland Peruvians’ yarn-dying and weaving traditions. On our trip, we visited a mountain village, where we saw the women making elaborately patterned scarves and blankets with traditional tools. I still have a scarf I bought there, made of intertwining strands of pink and blue llama wool. At the Festival, they had a more modern version of the set-up, using a portable stove. Inside stainless steel pots, red dye bubbled and produced billows of steam. Sprout loved looking into the pots, feeling the heat and smelling the odd odor of cochineal, a bug used to make brilliant red dye.

Photo of dancers in full costume and masks waiting to parade as part of the Fiesta de la Virgen del Carmen de Paurcartambo

I forgot to take a photo at the Folklife Festival, so here’s an actual photo from our trip.

Similarly, there was a whole tent devoted to the Fiesta de la Virgen del Carmen de Paurcartambo, an amazing festival that we happened to attend through happy coincidence on our way into the Amazon basin. I had never heard of it before our trip; now I was reading a plaque about it on the National Mall! The costumes used in the festival are all bright colors contrasted with black, topped by detailed, grotesque masks that represent 13 different stories in Peruvian culture. Seeing the masks brought back memories of the little convenience store selling cheap plastic versions and the energetic dancers winding down the cobblestone street. Even though we didn’t get to see a dance demonstration, Sprout liked the bird-headed costume, probably because it was pretty obvious what it was.

Other tents highlighted parts of Peruvian culture we completely missed on our trip. Neon-colored posters with elaborately swirly writing were familiar to me, but until then I didn’t realize they were part of a specific art form called Chicha silk-screening that emerged from Cumbia amazónica concert posters. Nearby, an artist was filling in a giant version of the word Liberte over purposely painted graffiti on a huge wall. Afro-Peruvian music provided a soundtrack that I grooved to with Sprout hauled up on my shoulders. A radical radio station that promotes social justice issues in the context of native groups broadcast in both Spanish and English in the next tent over. Seeing the broad array of cultural and political diversity of the country that filled in some gaps in our trip made me value it all the more.

While we had little chance to talk to the people (I had to get back to work), one of the things I like the best about the Folklife Festival is that the staff members are actually from the country and culture being highlighted. They actively choose to share their lived experiences, both the positives and negatives. Unlike some exhibits that put cultures in a convenient little box, the Folklife Festival doesn’t shy away from the economic, social and cultural challenges people face. It also allows real conversations to take place, a cultural exchange that is often very difficult for people who face financial or other barriers to foreign travel. At a previous Festival, I chatted with a Welshman about the political aspects of my favorite band, who are from Wales. As I want Sprout to be exposed to a variety of people’s experiences and backgrounds, the Festival offers a unique opportunity to do so each year. Lastly, it offers an “in” to improve our understanding of our own community. We have a number of South American immigrants in our area, many of them from Peru. At our town’s Memorial Day parade, we saw groups wearing costumes very similar to those we saw on our trip and at the Festival. Whereas I would have just seen them as pretty costumes before, after our trip, I better understood their cultural context.

I wish I could have stayed longer and seen all of the exhibits, talk to the man fixing his fishing net or caught a dance demonstration, but I was so glad we could bring Sprout to the Folklife Festival. It was a really good reminder of why I love living close to the Nation’s Capital.

Five Ways I’m Raising Peacemakers

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 11 Comments

"Five Ways I'm Raising a Peacemaker." When the world is so violent, how do we teach our kids to build peace? (Graphic: Dove made up of different colored words saying "peace.")

Trigger warning: racism, racial violence, murder

Day after day, year after year, the names of murdered black men and women keep getting longer and longer. Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Philando Castile, Tywanza Sanders. These are all rooted in a long history of violence against black people in the U.S.; a history few white people choose to face the results of today. On the Sunday after the Charleston shooting, my my pastor directed us to build peace: “If you are a father, teach your children; if you are a mother, teach your children. If you have any influence at all, use it.”  It is our responsibility as parents of all races to teach our children to find alternatives to violence, to be peacemakers. For white parents of white children like me, it’s an absolute obligation.

Here’s how I plan to help my sons become peacemakers – people who doesn’t passively accept the culture but actively works to make it more just.

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