Take a look, it’s in a book.

A lot of people came to see the LeVar Burton of Star Trek fame this past Friday at the 21^st annual Congress on Children, but I was 100% there as a Reading Rainbow fan.  Although the show debuted on PBS in 1983 when I was 17 years old, I actually remember watching it. I was in high school, which is pretty extraordinary, even granting that we had so many fewer television choices back then.  I remember wishing he would read books for older kids. Years later, I starting having kids of my own and the show was one of the few I allowed them to watch. 

I was enthralled with Burton’s remarks at the Congress event.  I’m a big one for "live tweeting*" an event I’m really enjoying so it will come up every year in social media memories, but I couldn’t keep up with Burton.  It was just one amazing nugget of wisdom after another.  I had to resort to old school note taking, fast and furious.

Burton first did a reading of his children’s book "The Rhino Who Swallowed a Storm." It’s a lovely story featuring a mouse called Mica (after Burton’s daughter), and a Rhino who is sad because a storm took away everything he loves.  Burton said he wrote the book in part to fill a gap left for children by the death of Mr. Rogers for helping kids learn how to deal with trauma.  The story follows the rhino as he meets all kinds of friends, a spider, a kangaroo, a tortoise, a whale, who help him heal.  The gentle, sweet moral of the story is that there are people who care about you and can help you when bad things happen.  The story guides children in expressing their feelings when coping with hard times.

After the reading, the audience got to ask questions and Burton shared stories about his personal life.  As a lifelong insatiable reader, I completely related to his description of the first book he read that helped him really understand the power and magic of reading:  "Captains Courageous" by Rudyard Kipling.  After finishing it, Burton said he felt sad and depressed because he missed the world he had been so completely immersed in.  I have had this experience countless times.  After that book, he said he learned to slow down in the last chapter of a good book in order to savor it.  I too, have tried this technique. 

He described the culture in his home growing up as one that required reading, and said his mother was a "voracious" reader.  "Reading was such a part of our lives. It was as normal as breathing.  In my house you either read a book or got hit in the head with one," he said, to much audience laughter. 

He grew up in a single parent home, and his mother was a social worker.  He said she knew that in order for him to survive and thrive, and to level the playing field for him as a black boy and eventually a black man, he needed an education.  She loved him "fiercely," and established firm expectations and goals, primary of which was reading.  She was his first teacher who knew that without opportunity for language and literature, children are not going to reach their full potential.  With a mom like that, and access to books like "Captains Courageous," reading soon became something he didn’t have to TRY to do, but something he HAD To do. 

Burton went on to describe how negatively children are affected by trauma, especially if they have no one to help them through it. "I was shaped by the trauma in my life. It’s informed the person I am," he shared.  He said that inevitably we all DEAL with the trauma we experience, but the question is do we deal with it in a healthy way - for a healthy recovery?  He worries that kids today lack a safety net of caring people around them, ready to catch them when they fall. 

"We used to live in communities of multi-generational families. There was a system, a net that held us up in times of trauma. Kids today don’t have that net. They have the TV and the internet. We need to be able to catch these kids, because the success of the community depends on the success of each individual. Life should be about making the world a better place."  This statement was obviously accompanied by a lot of head nodding from the crowd of youth serving professionals in attendance at the annual Congress. 

He also talked about how storytelling helps us cope with trauma.  "Humans are natural storytellers, they are storytelling machines" he said, "with every picture we take and every post we make.  And when we are reading a book, "we make the movie in our heads." He went on to say that storytelling used to be controlled by a small group of people, but we are living in the age of the "democratization of storytelling," where anyone can tell their story now, which he seemed to think is a good thing.  "The genie is out of the bottle," he described it. 

He said it is not only reading that is so instrumental in children’s learning today.  "What we watch, read, and consume, all shapes us."  He shared how transformational it was for him as a child to see Lt. O’Hara on the bridge of The Enterprise.*  That said to him that in the future there was a place for him, for people who look like him.

He went on about how children are shaped by media influences and need to see themselves represented in mainstream media for healthy development and positive self-esteem. Since kids have so much widespread exposure to media, it is inevitably a part of their education, but what it is teaching is not always positive. 

My absolute favorite part of Burton's remarks was when he shared his 4 Storytelling Mentors: "My mother, Alex Haley, creator of Roots, Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, and Mr Rogers."** 

#LOVE

Reading Rainbow aired for 26 years educating millions of children about the joys of reading and the power of the written word.  What an extraordinary achievement for LeVar Burton and how proud he must be.  I texted my daughters, aged 31, 26 and 17 asking what they remember about the show, and Lacey, the middle kid, texted back immediately:

"Take a Look, it’s in a Book."

"But…you don’t have to take MY word for it."    

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*One of my favorite parts of his talk was when he said "We had iPads on the Enterprise." #LOL

** I did post a couple of tweets including this one that LeVar Burton LIKED!!!  :) 

My last first day of school

Twenty seven years ago, in August of 1993, I sent my first child off to her first day of Kindergarten. Today my 3rd and last child is off to her senior year of high school. So my nearly 3 decades long K-12 journey is coming to an end. Of course this called for a nostalgic trip down memory lane through my photo albums. 

I found every first day picture for all 3 girls from 1993 to 2019 except for 1997. We had just moved from Oklahoma City to Alexandria, Virginia and there are all kinds of pictures in the album from that hectic time, except of what would have been Ariel’s 1st day of 4th grade. So I used her formal school pic instead. Oh well, 29 out of 30 is pretty impressive.

These days everyone has a camera on their phone, so it was a lot easier to find all of Zoe’s pictures than Lacey’s and even further back, Ariel’s. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any first day pics from my school days.

I’ve always been a picture taker. My memory has always been terrible, even in my younger days, so I think I’ve tried to preserve all the moments through pictures. My kids have spent a lot of time complaining about having to pose for pictures through the years, including Zoë this morning, but I think they’ll appreciate it when they get older.

Here are Ariel, Lacey and Zoe’s K-12 first day of school pictures through the years.

Ariel 1993-2005 K-12 1st days of school

Lacey 1998-2010 K-12 1st days of school

Zoe 2007-2019 K-12 1st days of school

Discovering Television

I’m learning to like watching tv after a lifetime of mostly ignoring it. As a kid, my siblings and I didn’t watch much TV - I have memories of corny after school specials ("My Mom’s having a baby") and being forbidden to watch "Saturday Night Live" while my parents were out (we mostly didn’t). "Happy Days" on Friday and "Love Boat" on Saturday were OK if my parents weren’t watching anything else.

Honestly, I’d so much rather have been reading a book.

My TV - with its also antiquated cable box

This is probably why I have a library in my house today, and an old TV with a screen that is measurably smaller than my laptop screen. I just never really got in the habit of TV.  When I got my first apartment I couldn’t really afford a TV. Cable was new, and financially out of the question.  A few years later, married with a child, I moved to England and our TV wasn’t compatible with UK voltage (and I have some vague memory that you had to pay tax on watching TV, so that was a nonstarter).  Mostly I remember reading books while Ariel, my youngest, watched episodes of "Sesame Street" that my friend Darryl sent me on VHS for 3 years, bless him to this day. I also went through a strange cross-stitch* phase in England.

Life is different when you lack the TV habit. Famously, I never even notice TVs in hotels. I once swore there was no TV in my hotel room at a work conference. I just simply do not see them.

But, on to the real reason for this post: TV has gotten so much better. Like amazingly better. So how can I not pay attention now? Also I really have to figure TV out so I have a clue how it all works when I’m in the nursing home in 20 years catching up on all the shows. ;)

My TV awakening started a few years ago when I was recovering from surgery. I was off for 2 weeks over Thanksgiving and I watched 4 seasons of "Game of Thrones." If you fast forward through all the sex and violence you can do that in less time than you’d think. I know that sounds like you'd be leaving out the best parts, but I was trying to catch up, so I focused on the dialogue. If their mouths weren’t moving, I was skipping it.

I didn’t only watch GOT during my convalescence. I asked for recommendations, and so I watched the "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" and it was highly entertaining. Then "True Blood" which was unbelievably addictive and satisfying. "Breaking Bad" was like a car accident I couldn’t look away from. I have since watched all of "Outlander" - a book series I had adored for years- and most recently, "Killing Eve," which has some seriously kick ass female characters.

I’m increasingly amazed at how good TV can be. This is a far cry from Love Boat, am I right?

My next post will feature my predictions for who is most likely to sit on the Iron Throne, because I am now in the TV Club. 

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One of my cross stitch projects while in England

Fundraising: The New American Pastime

It's too bad that the tax laws changed right around the time that everyone became a fundraiser.

It was crazy enough when anyone could start their own 501 c 3. That at least required some knowledge, planning and goals.  But now, you too can become an Instant Fundraiser by creating a page on Kick-starter or GoFundMe, or some other platform from a fast growing list. Even my elderly relatives are raising money for a cause on Facebook.  Last week, I read that Instagram is getting a donate button.

Grrreat.

I started out this post intending to complain about how hard nonprofit fundraising already is without every single person old enough to get on social media as competition. But then I got a Timehop notification of an old tweet asking why couldn't we give bigger tax breaks for donations that reduce the tax burden?

So I thought maybe I'd write instead about a new charitable taxing system that factors in average citizens as fundraisers.

Right now, all I have are questions.  Does it make sense to stagger tax benefits around what cause a donation goes to? For example, would it make any sense for a donor to get a bigger tax break if he/she gave money to a cause the government has to pay for? So, if you donated to a food bank, you would get a bigger tax break than if you gave to the symphony. Not that I have anything against the symphony, but I don't see anyone complaining about how many tax dollars are being spent on the symphony. The idea here would be to utilize the American desire to support a cause as tax relief.

Or take it even further, and say that a donation to a "teach a man to fish" effort got a bigger tax break than a "give a man a fish" effort, because prevention has a better ROI than intervention and warrants a larger tax break.  Or maybe, only donations that go towards charities that directly relieve government social programming are even eligible for a tax break.

As many as 87% of Americans donate according to this Gallup poll. Nearly everyone does, according to this report.  Combine that with American's "profound yearning to change the world," according to this great TED talk, and we might be on to something.

Americans hate paying taxes. They hate the IRS and they hate the idea that someone is cheating on their taxes or paying less taxes than they are, or both.  But they don't hate all taxes. Obviously, the majority of Americans understand the need for taxes to pay for things we collectively need and benefit from.  Where we get into trouble, is having to pay taxes for things things like social services.

Charitable deductions were established form the beginning in part as a way to to relieve taxes and help nonprofits. But faith in the system has damaged the efficacy of that plan. It's time for a reboot. Although there is evidence that nonprofits do a better job of providing social services than the government does, it's also a fact that the general public is as distrustful of the nonprofit sector as it is of the government. It's no wonder we struggle with proving value, producing outcomes.

I'm not saying that nonprofits should replace government, just that nonprofits that develop expertise in social service delivery are more likely to be effective than government at actually solving problems. Just like in the private sector. And further incentives to support those nonprofits could be a really good thing. 

I know little to nothing about taxes, other than how to how to fill in boxes on Turbo Tax and pay it to file for me. But I know a lot about nonprofits and social services and fundraising.  Fragmentation of funding has been eroding the effectiveness of social services for years.  This trend where everyone's a fundraiser is only going to lead to more problems with the stability and sustainability of critical nonprofit services.

I know a lot of people who’d be even more incentivized to raise money on social media if they knew they were reducing taxes and solving problems. It’s time to evolve the system.

Our kids need a break

There’s something very wrong with kids being stressed out by extracurricular activities to the point they aren’t enjoying them.

A few weeks ago my 16 year old daughter, Zoe, was on her way to a choir competition. On the way there I asked her how she was feeling:

"I’m too busy. I need more time to do nothing," she said.  This made me worried, and a little sad. 

There’s been a lot of attention over the last decade or so around the over-scheduling of our children. If you think about it, it starts before they’re even born:  reading to them and choosing their schools while they’re still in utero and such. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do those things, but the foreshadowing might warrant caution. 

I never did much as a kid other than going to school, reading books and playing with my friends. We usually went on a vacation in August before school started back up. My siblings and I did nothing but play all summer and it was pretty glorious. We might have been bored at times, but then we found things to do, which, of course, helped develop things like resourcefulness, initiative taking, and creativity .

We also had chores, a lost art these days. In my house it’s a chore for me to wait for a time when Zoe's home to unload the dishwasher, pretty much her only household responsibility.

My parents might have put us in a bunch of programs if they’d thought about it, or could even afford it. I remember being briefly in the Girl Scouts at school, which mainly reinforced my love of reading. I got to go to summer camp for a week once, too, which was cool. I think my younger siblings did more things because my parents were more experienced by then, but I don't remember any over-scheduling.

I wonder about all this frenzied activity today, and who it’s for. In my 30 years of parenting, I’ve seen a lot of stressed out, resentful kids along the way, on soccer fields, in gyms and cafeterias, and on stages. They have so much pressure on them already to perform academically. And we heap on more responsibility all the time. Why?

I read an article recently that kids with "hyper-involved parents have more anxiety and less satisfaction with life."  I know these parents mean well, but it can’t be good to fill up every minute of our kid’s time.  The article goes on to say that "when children play unsupervised, they build social skills, emotional maturity and executive function."

Last year Zoe found out she was accepted into the National Honor Society. My initial feeling of pride quickly morphed into dismay because I know what a pain in the ass the required "volunteer hours" were going to be on top of school, theater and choir. But what kind of mom tells her kid she can’t be in the national honor society?

I know I sound ancient, harkening back to my school days, but I was in the honor society and I never had to do one second of volunteer work for it. It was something I was awarded because of all the hard work I’d ALREADY done to be such a stellar student. (Thank you very much.) It’s got to be confusing to tell a kid nowadays that they’re such a great student that they get to go do more work. "Hey kids, how’d you like to do more work that will in no way assist in improving your schoolwork, and may even end up interfering with your schoolwork at some point? Here, let me sign your form."

My daughter also feels like she doesn’t have enough time to be with friends. She has to schedule her friends, another thing that didn’t happen in my childhood. And she is more resentful than any normal teenager should have to be about spending time with family during school breaks. 

Which by the way, when did School Breaks stop being school breaks?

During pretty much any school holiday these days, I guarantee there is a practice or a rehearsal or a volunteer obligation on the schedule.  Sunday is the only day Zoe gets off from theater rehearsal, and they’ve even had a few of those along the way. I just can’t imagine my parents putting up with this. 

The high-jacking of school breaks is particularly egregious once kids get to high school. Over the last three years, Zoe’s father and I have had to come to terms with the fact that Zoe no longer has any free time for us to force her to endure family traditions to the degree that we tortured her much older sisters.

It sucks more for her dad than me, mostly because he does a lot more stuff. I’m kind of over-scheduled at a job that has things going on days and nights and weekends. I’m just grateful I can fit in all the chauffeur duties I’m required to perform for Zoe's activities. I can’t wait til she drives herself next year even though that means I will probably see her even less.  

It’s not that I think Zoe hates all her extracurricular activities. I know she loves performing in plays. I know she’d rather be at rehearsal than going to the lake for spring break. She’s told me so many times over the last couple of weeks. I just hope she’s becoming a more rounded person from all of it because I can see that she’s exhausted.  And I resent that school breaks are not school breaks anymore. Kids need time to recharge and rest their brains.