Something beautiful happened a few months ago as my wife and I were editing a new book on the parable of life with our son Edward – who has Down syndrome. We were working on a chapter that explored the challenge between “choosing for Edward” and “letting him choose,” when he came down the stairs…
Going through my inbox the other day, an email caught my attention. It invited me to participate in a research project examining “caregiver burden” in families of children with medical complexity. I completed the survey, but I also wrote to the research team to ask about their choice of language. By using the word “burden,”…
The deafening sounds and scary sights of the war in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, are taking a toll on parents and children – especially as the conflict grinds on toward its fifth year. “When you go into the city, you can hear the sound of sirens. You can see that people are a little bit tense or…
This past Spring, I read Let Your Heartbreak be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation by Episcopal priest Adam Bucko. I considered my life and saw that my heart had been repeatedly broken. I revised the question to: What is my greatest heartbreak? It didn’t take long for the answer to emerge – my failings…
I had dinner with some new friends last month; all of us are caregivers of children with disabilities and developmental challenges. At one point, we discussed the question, “If you could change anything about your child, would you?” It sparked some deep reflections about making changes for our children versus making changes about them. Several…
This September the usual back-to-school focus on new pencils and a different classroom sits on the surface of a boiling cauldron of controversial issues in education. From nursery schools to elite universities, education has become one of the biggest battlegrounds in the contest to control and shape social development in Canada and the U.S. In…
In my last column, I suggested that parents and teachers have a responsibility to vet the appropriateness of the materials that their children read, but that care must be taken not to judge a literary work on superficial moralistic grounds. An example of this moralistic impulse is the frequent banning of Mark Twain’s classic, The…
Parents today spend almost twice as much time with their kids than parents in the 1960s did. And this intensive commitment is not simply the result of fathers taking on a greater role in childcare. Believe it or not, mothers also spend more time with their kids now than in the 1960s – even as…
How do you make decisions? Are you a pros-and-cons list maker, weighing each side like it’s a courtroom debate? Or maybe you like to test-drive your choices (my preference): Pretend you’ve picked one path for a few days just to see how it sits with you, then flip to the other and compare. Making medical…
Another laughing scream, and I send them all outdoors. /
Out, out!
My children take risks, and that’s all right with me. Risky play, or what we lovingly call danger play in our house, is an incredibly important part of childhood. While it can be difficult for a parent to watch, the thrill of it allows children to feel excited by their accomplishments and challenged by the…
Did you know that children have a right to play? Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes “the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child, and to participate freely in cultural life and the…
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