Archive for category Parenting
Learning to Listen Again
Posted by Abby Quillen in Nature, Parenting on February 21, 2011
The Christian Science Monitor published my essay “Learning to Listen Again” in their January 31 issue. (It was inspired by a post I wrote here last June.)
My world has gotten a lot louder lately. My 2-year-old son, Ezra, just discovered noise.
“Airplane, airplane, airplane.” He gestures toward the sky until I repeat, “Airplane.”
“Car!” He interrupts the story I’m reading and spins toward the window as a Volvo station wagon rolls by. “Phone, phone, phone,” he says as we walk through the grocery store and hear cellphones chirping.
Usually I’m blocking out these sounds. I suppose it’s a survival mechanism that helps me live in a world full of obnoxious, cacophonous noises, because now that Ezra’s pointing them out to me, I’m longing for silence.
I’m not the only one. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, travels the world recording natural soundscapes, and he’s been spreading some alarming news: Natural silence is going extinct.
“In the last 30 years, I’ve found it nearly impossible in the United States to experience 15 minutes or longer where there’s not some kind of noise disruption in the background,” Mr. Hempton explained in a recent radio interview.
A couple weeks after Ezra starts identifying sounds, my sister announces she’s coming for a visit and wants to go for a hike. “As long as it’s somewhere quiet,” I reply.
We choose McDowell Creek Falls, which is an hour from my house in Eugene, Ore. We turn off I-5 and head down a country road. The farmhouses thin; the road narrows; Douglas firs, Western hemlocks, and moss-covered big leaf maples crowd in. A stream babbles on our right. I can almost taste the silence.
When Hempton talks about natural silence, he’s not talking about the absence of all sound, just of man-made sound. Natural silence can be surprisingly loud, as anyone who’s been to the Oregon coast, visited a rain forest, or heard an elk bugling on a crisp fall morning can attest.
My sister parks the car and I strap my son onto my back. Then we cross a bridge and wind up a hill. My sister stops to snap photos of salmon berries and snails, and I close my eyes. I can hear a waterfall, birds, and an animal scampering through the undergrowth.
“Big truck!” Ezra squeals, as a logging truck rumbles down a nearby road.
Back in Eugene I surf through real estate websites from the tiny Colorado mountain town where I grew up. When I moved to the city for college, I told someone where I was from, and she replied, “Oh yes, I go there to listen to the silence.” When I temporarily moved back a few years later, I appreciated what she meant. The evenings were notably quiet in my neighborhood. Most of the houses were dark by 9, few cars passed, and it was more than a mile to the closest highway, which wasn’t exactly teeming with traffic most nights.
I start planning a visit with just one thing on the itinerary: sitting outside in the evenings and staring at the stars – just me and the crickets, hoot owls, and the occasional barking dog. I call my parents to announce we’re coming and to lament that I’m thinking of wearing earplugs from now on.
“I thought you left because it was quiet,” my mom says.
“What are you talking about?” I flash back to the last summer I spent in my hometown before leaving for my freshman year at the University of Denver. I longed to crowd onto the trolley and ride up the Sixteenth Street Mall, weave through packed city sidewalks, and shout along to rock concerts at Red Rocks.
“Remember, you used to complain about how dull it is here, how everyone goes to bed at 9, how…” I interrupt my mom, almost letting it slip that sometimes I go to bed at 9 now. Instead, I change the subject and wander around the house closing windows; outside, a diesel truck is idling and a weed wacker is hacking and whining.
Gordon Hempton teaches wilderness listening at Olympic National Park, and he writes that some students have a difficult time hearing silence for the first time and that many sounds aren’t audible until people have been out on the trail for two or three days. He writes about an elderly woman who took one of his classes. She thought she was losing her hearing and hoping to amplify what little she had left. But in the class, she realized that the problem wasn’t that she’d lost her hearing. What she’d lost was her ability to listen. I think Ezra is teaching me the same thing.
“Leaves,” he says as we walk through our neighborhood. He points up. Far above our heads, the birch leaves are dancing in the breeze, and their gentle rattle drowns out the sound of a passing car. I turn my face up and remember to listen.
YES! Magazine Article
Posted by Abby Quillen in Parenting, Social movements on January 19, 2011
My article, “Raising Babies in Prison,” which appears in the Winter 2011 issue of YES! Magazine, is now available online. The article begins:
Like most new moms, Erika Freeman is enchanted by her baby, nine-month-old daughter Riley. She decorated her daughter’s room in pink, with pictures of princesses and “Princess Riley” on the wall in block letters. Freeman grins when she talks about her daughter’s strong personality. “She wouldn’t eat for me. She would only eat if she could hold the spoon. It was everywhere.”
In other ways, Freeman has little in common with most new moms. She can’t take her daughter to the park or library. She can’t take Riley to her grandparents’ house, and at certain times of the day, she can’t even take Riley down the hall to the bathroom.
Freeman is in prison at the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW). She is one of 12 low-level, non-violent inmates who are parenting their infants for up to 30 months behind bars in WCCW’s Residential Parenting Program (RPP). They live in the J-Unit, a housing complex surrounded by razor-wire fences in the prison’s minimum-security wing.
The J-Unit is the sort of facility you’d expect in a prison—with gray walls, pay phones, and locked doors. But the mother-baby pairs have their own rooms, painted in bright colors and furnished with beds, cribs, and rocking chairs. There’s a shared kitchen and a cheerful playroom outfitted with couches and bins of toys.
You can read the rest of the article here.
(You can also read more about my visit to the Washington Corrections Center for Women and the process of writing the article here.)
Car-Free Delivery
Posted by Abby Quillen in Alternative transportation, Parenting on January 3, 2011
I’m surrounded by trucks – dump trucks, tow trucks, garbage trucks. They’re all a few inches long, and they’re motoring up the sides of tables, spinning across the floor, scattered across my son’s bike trailer. It seems ironic that my son is obsessed with motorized vehicles at the same time that my husband and I are learning to live without one.
He memorized a picture book about trucks, which he recites at random moments during the day. “Here come the trucks. They go over bridges. They come through tunnels.”
“There’s a tanker truck delivering oil.” He points at a truck idling near the park. “Just like in the book!”
A well-placed truck can turn a bad mood around faster than anything else. “Look, a fire truck,” I’ll say. Tears dry up. A grin spreads across his face.
So I’m increasingly aware of just how many trucks are all around us – purring to a stop at corners, barreling up hills, idling in front of our house. They dump leaves in gutters, hurl our recycling bins into the air, drop off bread at the store. We are forever on the look out for tractors, front-loaders, excavators. Trucks are everywhere. They are taking over the world.
So imagine my surprise when we were walking a few mornings before Christmas, and I glanced up and saw a UPS carrier riding a bike – or actually walking a bike up a hill.
Apparently UPS has been delivering by bike in the Northwest for a few years. According to a 2008 article, UPS started using bike delivery, because it saves money. For “every three bikes used during the holiday season, UPS will save $38,000 in vehicle operation and upkeep costs,” Jeff Grant, the workforce planning manager for UPS’s Oregon district, told BikePortland.
But as I watched this delivery rider trudge up this hill in the drizzle, his trailer stuffed with boxes – up to 200 pounds at a time, according to the story – I had to wonder if this is the best way to deliver packages.
Then, the next day I saw the same carrier again. This time he was whizzing down the hill with an empty trailer and a huge smile on his face. And I was reminded, once again, that for all of the challenges of the car-free life, it comes with incredible rewards.
Interested in reading more about car-free living? Check out these posts:
Simple-Living Boot Camp
Posted by Abby Quillen in Parenting, Simple Living on December 13, 2010
We’re all familiar with the learning curve – that slow, hiccuping start we get off to when we tackle a new task. The period where we suck at something, which is the necessary preamble to the period where we kick ass at something.
I’ve watched my two-year-old son wobble, fall, and falter hundreds of times already. So I’m sure I’ve been through the learning curve more than a million.
But, for some reason, I didn’t expect a learning curve when it came to simplifying our lives
About a year and a half ago, my husband and I both worked outside the home. We had opposite work schedules, so we never saw each other. We were both working constantly, either at our jobs, or at home caring for our infant son and trying to tame mountains of laundry, dishes, and bills.
By the time our son was one, we were crazy about him. But we were exhausted and miserable about our lifestyles. We knew we had to make a change.
We decided the answer was simple – simple living that is. We would choose to live on less, allowing me to quit my job and be with our son, as well as focusing on my dream job of freelance writing. We’d make bread. We’d garden and compost. We’d ditch processed foods and restaurants and cook everything from scratch. We’d keep backyard hens. We’d make stuff ourselves and heat our house with wood. We’d hang our clothes on the line. We’d ride our bikes and walk more and drive less.
It’s not as though we lived extravagantly before. My husband and I have both always lived fairly simply. I was raised by thrifty freelance-writer parents. I’ve ridden my bike and walked most places for my entire life. I’ve never been into diamonds or spending weekends at the mall. Shopping has always been low on my list of favorite pastimes. And I’ve long been a fan of the voluntary simplicity movement.
So I assumed we’d love our simpler lifestyle. I imagined it would be relatively easy to pare down.
It wasn’t easy.
Recently, a few things made me realize how difficult it was.
- We went out with friends to a restaurant we used to frequent. (We used to eat out a lot.) The food didn’t taste good. Then the same thing happened at another restaurant. That’s when I realized what had really happened. The food we make at home now tastes really good. We learned how to cook.
- I started looking forward to heading outside on cool mornings to swing the axe around and realized that I’ve become a master wood-splitter.
- I have not used a recipe to make bread in eight months.
- My friend asked me if I missed our car, and I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about at first. Miss our car? Oh, that’s right, we’re not driving our car. I hardly even think about our car, and I usually don’t miss it, at least 95 percent of the time.
The relative ease of cooking from scratch, making bread, chopping wood, and living sans automobile today made me realize that these and so many of our other lifestyle changes were once pretty difficult.
The first few times I made bread felt like conducting a chemistry experiment. And I’m glad you’ll never see my first attempts at chopping wood or taste some of our not-so-delicious attempts at main courses. When my husband first started riding his bike to work, he came home exhausted most days. And I think he probably said, “The simple life isn’t so simple.” at least 50 times last year.
It feels like we’ve been through simple-living boot camp.
We still have a lot to learn. But we’ve gotten physically stronger and more resilient and we’ve honed dozens of skills that serve us well everyday, make us feel better about our environmental impact, and which I hope will help us be more financially secure in the future. As my friend, who’s been on her own journey toward a simpler, greener, thriftier life, quipped the other day, “If I’d lived like this for the last ten years, I’d have $50,000 in the bank right now.”
So if you’re thinking about paring down, trying to save more money, learning to cook or meal-plan, giving up TV, ditching plastic, switching to green cleaners, making your own personal care items, or embarking on some other lifestyle change, I am here to tell you that it may not be easy at first. You will probably have to learn each new skill, just as you’ve learned everything else in your life – slowly and day-by-day.
But you will kick ass at it before you know it.
What new skills have you learned this year? What’s the most difficult lifestyle change you’ve made? What’s the most rewarding?
Raising Babies in Prison
Posted by Abby Quillen in Parenting, Social movements on December 1, 2010
I’m thrilled to announce that my article, “Raising Babies in Prison”, appears in the Winter 2011 episode of YES! Magazine. It’s about the Residential Parenting Program at the Washington Corrections Center for Women, which allows selected pregnant, non-violent inmates in the minimum-security wing to raise their babies for 30 months in prison.
I’ve interviewed many people for articles, and it’s been inspiring to hear their stories, to focus on actively listening to them, and to weave their words into articles. But until now, I’d been writing articles about green entrepreneurs and social activists. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I traveled up I-5 to Gig Harbor in September to visit a prison and sit down with an inmate.
I had to go through security and walk through a razor-wire fence to get to the J-Unit, an H-shaped building in the prison’s minimum security wing, where up to 20 mothers at a time live with their babies. I met with Erika Freeman in an empty administrative office. Across the hall, inmates in prison uniforms – gray sweat suits, white socks, and black plastic sandals – sprawled across couches and chairs and watched TV in the day rooms.
Freeman is 26 and friendly. She drank coffee from a plastic cup as she told me about the crimes that brought her to WCCW, the terrifying months she spent in Closed Custody, when she didn’t know if she’d get into the program or have to part with her newborn, and about bonding with her daughter Riley. I walked away inspired by Freeman’s courage to change her life, by her determination to help other young women not end up where she is, and by the power of family bonds, especially those between parents and children, to heal us.
As with every interview I’ve done, I was also amazed by how powerful the act of listening to someone’s story is – for both the teller and the listener. It’s something we can do for free by just calling or visiting someone, asking questions, and focusing on listening, yet, we seem to do it less and less in our hurried culture.
A few weeks ago, after I’d finished writing and editing the article, my next door neighbor knocked on my door, and asked if I’d seen the local paper that day. “Your prison moms are in there,” she told me.
It turned out that the Portia Project was sponsoring a conference at the University of Oregon on women and prison. Cheryl Hanna Truscott, a photographer who has documented the women and babies in the Residential Parenting Program for seven years, would be displaying her photos that evening. She was the first person I interviewed about the program, and her beautiful photos accompany my article. I wanted to meet her in person, but it was short notice, and I couldn’t make it that night.
The next afternoon, I went to campus, hoping to see the photos and perhaps sit in on a lecture or two. I had no idea what the agenda was, or if Truscott would still be around. When I walked into the lecture hall, I recognized the speaker’s voice immediately. It was Marie-Celeste Condon, a researcher I’d interviewed. Many of the other people I’d talked to for the article were sitting on the stage, and Erika Freeman’s parents were there. It felt like a cosmic moment, like I was supposed to write this story and be in this room – even though both occurrences had seemingly happened by accident.
It was great to meet everyone in person, to talk to Freeman’s parents, and to hear the stories of a few more of the mothers who’ve gone through this program, which I’m now convinced is a beacon of hope in our Corrections system.
So if you get a chance, I hope you’ll check out this issue of YES! Magazine. (Coincidentally, it includes a feature by Jeremy Adam Smith, who was my editor at Shareable.net until he left recently for a Knight Fellowship at Stanford, as well as photos by Patrick Barber, who I interviewed last November for an article about the Eastside Egg Cooperative in Portland.) I’ll post a link to my article, when it’s available online.
In Search of Healthy Cookies
Posted by Abby Quillen in New Urban Habitat, Parenting, Whole foods cooking on September 27, 2010
Credit: D Sharon Pruitt
Anyone who’s spent any time with my son Ezra in the last six months has heard about his favorite food: “Hookies!” (The rest of us call them cookies.)
Ezra turns to me at least a dozen times each day and says with the utmost seriousness: “I need a hookie.” Dog, Bear, Turtle, and Seal eat a lot of hookies when we play make-believe. And as Ezra spins the steering wheel on the jungle gym at the park, he invariably explains, “I’m going to get some hookies.”
Back when I was pregnant and scarfing down organic salads, wild salmon, wheat germ smoothies and the like, I never imagined how many cookies this child of mine would eat. But he loves them. He really does. And as much as I’d like to see him develop a fondness for say, alfalfa sprouts and endive, I can’t help but enjoy seeing the sheer pleasure this boy gets from a cookie. Oh yes, he delights in them that much.
I have a couple of favorite cookie recipes, which are easy to make and produce cookies that are tasty and as healthy as cookies can be. They are in heavy rotation around here these days, and I will share them below. Oh please say you also have a favorite healthy cookie recipe you’d be willing to pass on.
Honey Peanut Butter Cookies
(From Laurel’s Kitchen)
- 1 cup natural peanut butter
- 1 cup honey
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
Cream peanut butter and honey together. Stir in egg and vanilla. Sift together salt, soda, and flour, and stir in peanut butter mixture.
Drop by teaspoonfuls onto oiled cookie sheets. Mash each cookie slightly with the back of a fork.
Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 8-12 minutes. They burn easily, so keep a close eye on them.
Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Walnut Cookies
(From Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair)
- 1 1/2 cups rolled oats
- 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
- 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
- 1/2 cup maple syrup
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/3 cup chopped walnuts
- 1/3 cup chocolate chips
Combine oats, flour, and salt together in a large bowl; set aside.
In a separate bowl mix together maple syrup, butter, and vanilla.
Add wet ingredients to dry mixture and mix well. Stir in nuts and chips. With moist hands form dough into 3-inch cookies and place on a lightly oiled cookie sheet.
Bake for 15-20 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Do you make healthy and tasty cookies? Will you share a favorite recipe? (Links to blogs or online recipes more than welcome.)
The Joys of Living Carlessly
Posted by Abby Quillen in Parenting, Simple Living on July 15, 2010
Shareable.net published my article about Paul and Monica Adkins, who live car-free with four kids. Their enthusiasm for simple living is contagious. And the amazing photographer Jayce Giddens took beautiful photographs of the Adkins cycling through fall leaves to accompany the story.
The article begins:
Paul Adkins rode a Yamaha 60 motorcycle when he was five and bought his first car when he was 14. Growing up in Kent, Ohio, he and his four brothers spent their weekends working on cars.
Now, at 44, Paul lives with his wife Monica and their four kids in Eugene, Oregon. They have a black Labrador, some chickens, and a two-story house near the Willamette River – but no car.
Two years ago, Paul and Monica sold their Toyota Previa minivan to go car-free. Paul works in a bike store and is the former board president of a bicycle advocacy group called Greater Eugene Area Riders (GEARs). He had wanted to sell the family car for a long time, but it was Monica who made the final decision.
“For so many years, when Paul would talk about going car-free, I kept thinking, but, what if…” Monica says.
Monica’s what-ifs weren’t what you might expect. She didn’t worry about how the family would handle a medical emergency, or get the kids to school in bad weather, or take their dog Josie to the vet. She was more concerned with how they’d go to the coast or Portland for a weekend or take their canoe up the McKenzie River.
“But one day I woke up in the morning, and I realized we’re paying into this really horrible system,” she says.
“We try to look at where our money goes and shop locally.” Paul adds. “When we give our money to gas or insurance, it doesn’t come back to us in any way.”
“It was like going on a diet and not drinking soda anymore,” Monica says. “We were divorcing the system.”
You can read the rest of the article here.
Want Peas With That?
Posted by Abby Quillen in Family life, Gardening, Parenting on July 14, 2010
You’ve probably seen those “10 Ways to Raise Healthy Eaters” and “8 Ways to Get Your Kids to Eat Veggies” lists advertised on the covers of parenting magazines. One thing seems to invariably make every list: gardening. Common wisdom dictates that kids are more apt to eat their veggies if they see how much slugs and grasshoppers enjoy them, and it’s even better if they learn to wield a water canister and pick a few weeds too. That sounds perfect to me, since I need all the help I can get in the garden. But I’ve wondered, is it actually true?
During my son’s first year, he devoured soupy, squishy vegetable concoctions that didn’t look appetizing even to me, and I love veggies. He gobbled up squash, spinach, beets, carrots, green beans, and cauliflower. In my naive new parental state I was thankful that I’d somehow dodged the picky-eating issues and could get a head start on agonizing about the piercings and tattoos he’d get during his teenage years.
Then my son turned one.
Suddenly he developed keen vegetable detection skills rivaling the U.S. Geological Service’s earthquake detection system. He picked out the bits of spinach in an omelet, scowled at the green peppers on a piece of pizza, and pushed the vegetable soup away before trying it, proclaiming, “All done”. What was going on? Had he somehow sensed that his dad and I found pureed greens distasteful? Had the piece of chocolate cake he’d smeared on his face on his first birthday ruined his proclivity for vegetables forever?
One study suggests that toddlers might simply be hard-wired to spurn their greens. Kids with a “bitter-sensitive allele (P) on the TAS2R38 receptor gene” – supposedly about 80% of kids – are acutely sensitive to bitter tastes, and thus naturally tend to prefer sweet things. Perhaps my son had been condemned by his genes to eat broccoli only when smothered in cheese, hidden in muffins, or prepared in the other ways the aforementioned lists advise weary parents to sneak greens into veggie-spurning kids.
Of course, this hasn’t stopped me from making the little fellow toil in the garden. He’s only two, but he holds the hose and helps pick weeds. He can’t yet tease out the difference between bindweed and spinach, so he often hears, “No, no, no, not that one.” But he doesn’t seem to mind.
And imagine my delight when we trudged out to water the garden one morning and he squealed, “peas” then proceeded to identify all the other vegetables in our raised beds. Of course, he wasn’t particularly interested in ingesting any of them, but at least he was learning some new words.
Then an astonishing thing happened. I was lounging on the porch on a scorching afternoon recently eating snap peas and dreaming of rain deluges, and my son, who asks for a cookie within 45 minutes of waking most mornings, ran up to me, held out his hand, and said, “Pea please.” I was sure I’d misunderstood, but I handed him one anyway, hoping the nutrients might absorb through his skin. Then he ate it … and asked for another. And he’s been gobbling down peas ever since.
Now, I’m not sure that watering peas is what made him develop a palate for peas. This is most likely just like every other thing involved in parenting a toddler: maddeningly unpredictable. But at least one study suggests that older kids who garden are more likely to choose fruit and vegetable snacks. Fourth to sixth graders participating in garden-based activities at a YMCA summer camp for 12 weeks asked for and ate more fruits and vegetables after the program. Moreover a full 95.6% of them reported that they enjoyed working in the garden.
As school gardens become more common, I’m sure we’ll see many more studies in the next few years. But I’m already sold. It doesn’t hurt that I have a helper to carry my watering can and spade.
What do you think? Do you garden with your kids? Does it make them more keen on eating greens?
Out of the Wild
Posted by Abby Quillen in Nature, Parenting on July 6, 2010
Colorado Central Magazine published my essay “Out of the Wild” in their July 2010 issue. It’s about my failed efforts to introduce my son to the wilderness. It starts:
I grew up in Central Colorado, and most weekends my family piled into a canary-yellow 1975 Chevy pickup and pitched down rutted-out, rock-strewn roads to hike, explore, or cross-country ski at places with names like Mosquito Pass, Missouri Gulch, and Cochetopa Creek.
By the time my sister and I were 18, we’d both sucked in the thin air on top of a 14,000 foot mountain, run across high-mountain meadows, visited too many ghost towns to list, waded barefoot in ice-cold streams, and spent countless nights sleeping with only a tent and a sleeping bag between our bodies and the hard, cold ground.
Like any wilderness adventures, our outings weren’t always predictable or safe. My dad delighted in driving down twisting and switch-backed mountain roads, often with precipitous drop offs on one side. My mom spent most of our rides clutching the truck’s dashboard, taking in sharp intakes of air through her teeth. “Slow down, Ed,” she’d hiss. “Watch the road.”
Despite my mom’s careful backseat driving, my dad managed to get our truck stuck in some precarious places, notably on a ledge on Mount Princeton and another time in the mud up the North Fork.
You can read the rest of the essay here.
Six Books That Could Change Your Outlook on Life
Posted by Abby Quillen in Family life, Parenting, Simple Living on May 31, 2010
Photo credit: austinevan
My husband and I don’t collect many things, but our house is full of books. I love to read fiction, but I tend to collect more practical books, ones that I’ll look at hundreds of times – almanacs, reference books, plant-identification guides, cookbooks, and how-to guides. My husband’s into the decidedly unpractical – first edition novels.
I spent many years working in libraries and bookstores; I loved being surrounded by books and people who love books. At the last library I worked in, I sometimes wandered the shelves in the afternoons as the sun streamed through the stained glass windows and just gazed up at all the books. Each represents months, years, or decades of brainstorming, writing, revising, editing, and proofreading; it seemed that any of them could alter your life, shift your viewpoint … change everything.
Here are a few of the non-fiction books I’ve found particularly thought-provoking over the years:
1. Material World: A Global Family Portrait by Peter Metzel and Faith DeLusia
A team of photographers traveled the world, got to know 30 different families in 30 different countries, and asked each family to pile all of their possessions in their front yards for a giant photograph. The result is a surprising and unforgettable book. It’s 16 years old now, but I still pick it up all the time, study the photographs, scan the statistics, and read about the different families, and every time I learn something new.
2. Hungry Planet by Peter Metzel and Faith DeLusia
For this volume, Metzel and DeLusia photograph a week’s worth of food bought or grown by 30 different families in 24 different countries. The photographs are accompanied by a detailed listing of the food; a discussion of how the food is raised and used; a variety of family photos; and a treasured family recipe. Like Material World, this is a book I read over and over again.
3. No Contest: the Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn
Alfie Kohn argues that Americans have a difficult time seeing how competitive our society is, because we’re like fish trying to come to terms with being in water. Kohn cites more than 100 studies showing that competition is not inevitable, that it doesn’t make people perform at their best, that it undermines self-esteem, and that it damages relationships. He also offers ways that we might restructure our lives, classrooms, and society to encourage cooperation instead of competition. It made me take a critical look at the structured competitive activities in my life and my own inner competitiveness, and I came away feeling that both were often keeping me from reaching out, learning, and connecting with others.
4. Slow is Beautiful by Cecile Andrews
Andrews envisions that people can find more fulfilling lives through the “rediscovery of caring community, unhurried leisure, and life-affirming joie de vivre.” I read this book years ago, but I still think about it often. It reminds me to slow down and think of joy, itself, as an important and worthwhile goal.
5. Your Money or Your life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez
Dominguez and Robin encourage readers to think of money as something we trade life energy for. They lay out nine steps for readers to assess their finances and decide how much energy they need to spend earning money, with the goal of achieving financial independence. My family still has a long way to go toward financial independence, but this book and others helped me to think about earning and spending money in an intentional way.
6. Between Parent and Child by Haim G. Ginott
Ginott encourages parents to look at situations from their child’s viewpoint and help him or her vocalize emotions. The book, itself, is a bit repetitive, but I found Ginott’s advice incredibly helpful in communicating with my two-year-old. Tantrums and midnight wakings go infinitely better when I remember Ginott’s advice; it helps me to get to the root of why my son’s upset, help him vocalize his emotions, and reminds me to empathize with him. Ginott’s approach almost invariably calms him down instantly. Amazingly, the book also has helped me to communicate more effectively with my husband. I’ve read heaps of books on communicating and attended various workshops on the subject at past jobs, but this book is the first I’d describe as truly helpful.
What books have you found particularly thought-provoking? Has a book ever changed your outlook on life? I can’t wait to hear your suggestions.
RECENT COMMENTS