Today's New York Times features an article about a branch of homeschooling known as "unschooling." More or less, it's the kind we practice in our home, first with our daughter and now with our son. The thing that struck me about this otherwise fine piece of reporting was a two-word phrase in a caption of a photograph in the multimedia slide show that accompanies the article. Keep Reading…
Hey, I like video games as much as the next guy… if the next guy is Mahatma Gandhi. Reuters (reported in The Age out of Australia) shared research on the cardiovascular effects of the video game "Dance Dance Revolution" on overweight kids. They found that while playing the game increased heart rate and burned more calories (than, for example, sitting on their butts watching other people dance on MTV), essentially, it made no difference to their weight or fitness. Keep Reading…
Q: How do I get a kid to change from being used to eating junk food to healthy food? Sugar and fat just make foods so much yummier and I imagine there's some major withdrawal from being used to sweet and fat foods.
A: Sugar and fat make foods yummy not because God hates us and wants us to look bad in bathing suits and spandex, but because these substances are chock full of easily digested calories. For most of history, living beings faced two big problems: getting a date on Saturday night, and getting enough food to stay alive during the famine. In those days, it made sense to load up on the calories you found in a big slab of animal fat or hanging from an extremely ripe fruit tree, because who knew if that was the last food you'd see in a week.
This recipe is based on Jennifer McCann's Banana Oatmeal Cookies. I've added sesame seeds and chocolate chips, and streamlined the process to make it a little simpler. Thanks, Jennifer!
Ingredients: Keep Reading…
These sweet, quick and completely healthy snacks are cheaper and better versions of the raw food "bars" – like LaraBars – that have sprung up everywhere and cost a pretty penny.
If you know a chocolate lover, you'll make them a friend for life with this recipe: Keep Reading…
Students in England's state schools are up in arms over the government ban on junk food lunches, according to an article in today's New York Times:
Five months after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver succeeded in cajoling, threatening and shaming the British government into banning junk food from its school cafeterias, many schools are learning that you can lead a child to a healthy lunch, but you can’t make him eat.
The fancy new menu at the Rawmarsh School here?
“It’s rubbish,” said Andreas Petrou, an 11th grader… “We didn’t get a choice,” he said of the school food. “They just told us we were having it.”
Goodness! What is this evil and draconian menu foisted upon the helpless children of the Empire?
The government’s regulations, which took effect in September, have banished from school cafeterias the cheap, instantly gratifying meals that children love by default: the hamburgers, the French fries, the breaded, deep-fried processed meat, the sugary drinks.
Now schools have to provide at least two portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day for each child, serve fish at least once a week, remove salt from lunchroom tables, limit fried foods to two servings a week and cut out candy, soda and potato chips altogether.
Why is this so objectionable? Two reasons: Keep Reading…
It's coming…! For many parents who commit to transition to a healthy family lifestyle, Halloween is the first big challenge that seems bigger than they are.
Let’s get a little ridiculous for a moment and compare junk food to heroin. Both are harmful (the larger the quantity, the more harmful, but even small amounts are bad for you) and both are addictive. And both junk food junkies and heroin addicts tend to move around in environments where consuming the substance in question is considered normal.
So you manage to break free of the addiction. You make major strides in getting your kids off the stuff too. Then comes a ritual where they and all their friends are going door to door, holding out bags and getting large amounts of it for almost no effort. The ritual is reflected in school, in the media, in conversations with friends, and a lot of it is really fun. Dressing up, being creative, meeting the neighbors; it’s a mostly positive experience, except for the addictive and harmful substance at its core.
What do you do?
Here's an interview and Q&A session with Greg Lynn Weaver, Spiritual Director of the PeaceWeavers. The topic: "Peaceful Parenting When You Feel Like Wringing Their Necks."
Greg Lynn answered questions about:
- how peace is related to fitness and health
- what peaceful parenting looks like
- how we get peaceful when we’ve had a lousy day
- how we can practice peaceful parenting so we have the skills when we need them
- how to break the cycle of guilt that leads to poor choices that leads to guilt…
- how to not beat ourselves up over not being perfect
- whether expressing anger verbally is appropriate or bullying
This call is not for the faint-hearted. The "s-word" is used three times, and Mother Teresa is described as "ballsy." Greg Lynn is not a mountain-top theorist – he’s living in the real world, and his language is real as well. His gentle and compassionate style and great sense of humor can help us remember what’s really important as we go through the impossible and wonderful task of raising children.
Turn on your computer speakers, and you can listen right now to a 5-minute excerpt of the call, in which Greg Lynn helps a member explore her question about expressing anger toward her kids:
The entire call is available as a CD (and soon as an electronic transcript).
Last month I accompanied my daughter Yael's 5th grade class on an overnight trip to the Haw River State Park and Environmental Education Center. After a day of exploring the outdoors and playing games in a steady rain, we had gone through all our dry and clean clothes, and were sitting together in the gathering pit for a closing event.
One of the resident leaders congratulated us for being such troopers. He said, "Some people think that if they're not in a dry, 72 degree environment, they're not OK. Some people think that they need to be clean to be OK. We need to remember that being a little cold sometimes is OK. Being a little hot sometimes is OK. Being dirty is OK. Remember: DIRT DOESN'T HURT!"
That short statement helped a lot of kids reframe their experiences of the previous 18 hours. It helped me, actually. When I look honestly at my assumptions about comfort and the outdoors, I find a lot of intolerance for discomfort. Keep Reading…
On Tuesday morning, I brought home my old (and I mean old) Schwinn unicycle, thinking, maybe someday I'll learn how to ride the darn thing. It has spent the last several years in a basement in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.
No sooner was it in the house than Yael became interested. On went her helmet, and chaos ensued… Keep Reading…