“I don’t really feel like I have much left to say.”
That’s what I said to myself in an audio journal about six weeks into my daily blogging experiment.
It might have actually been true at the time. I hadn’t yet trained my brain to come up with new ideas every day, so I was still documenting ideas I’d already thought of. I was working through a backlog of stuff I wanted to talk about, and I was, indeed, coming to the end of it.
Read MoreI didn’t realize the extent to which some kids face pressure to excel until I moved to a major city and began to work with affluent families there.
Though these kids enjoyed certain privileges and choices that I had not had, they were also expected to follow a certain path in life. They were expected to be exceptional students and go to exceptional colleges.
Presumably, to have exceptional lives.
Read MoreOn one dark morning, forty minutes after sunrise, the streetlights came back on.
The clouds were so heavy that they convinced the light’s sensors that it was night.
We humans can be fooled, too. The contrast between a bright sunny day and a moody, cloudy one — or stormy one — is stark. When you’re in one, it’s hard to imagine, from the evidence, that another is possible.
Read MoreWhen I speak of my life as a child growing up in a small town in Maine, I’m not exaggerating or idealizing when I say that there was endless time to play.
Back in the olden days of the 1980s, kindergarten lasted only a half day, there was no homework until third or fourth grade, and children who were barely out of the single digits could roam around on bikes or on foot. Older kids enjoyed a six-hour school day and no carpool — just a short bus ride. Standardized testing was minimal, and we had outdoor recess all the way through middle school. We didn’t have devices or the Internet — we had the woods, the beach, the library, and each other. And lots and lots of snow.
Read MoreHow do you measure the value of a human life?
Is it measured by how successful someone is? Well then, how do we define successful? And how do we measure success?
Parents want the best for their kids — that appears to be universal. But there is no objective measurement of what best means.
To generalize mercilessly, I have observed three ways in which parents grapple with this issue.
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