CurrentMom

How To Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change

Guest post by Chuck McCutcheon

With Earth Day here, and summertime following after that, more attention will be paid to the problem of climate change. But even for adults, it can be a confusing topic. Too many Americans still don't believe it exists, and even among those who do, there's a tendency to think that a period of colder-than-usual weather means that the effects of climate change are exaggerated.

As someone who has written a critically acclaimed book for students aged 9 and older, and who has given lectures at schools around the country, I'd like to offer a few helpful areas to emphasize, based on the questions that I most often get asked.

Climate change is real, and people are causing it. There is no debate about this among international scientists. If you or anyone you know doubts this, please look at Grist.org's handy guide. But if your children are confused, you can simply tell them that science is not just like math; it doesn't always produces a single, universally agreed-on answer.

Global warming is a part – arguably the major part – of climate change. Global warming refers to the increase in the average temperature of the earth over several years or decades. Climate change refers to global warming as well as other changes in climate, like more common and intense extreme weather, and a rise in sea levels.

Leaning In

Truth Thursday

I probably didn’t even need to read Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, “Lean In,” because by the time I actually picked it up, I had read so many reviews, and had seen so much commentary about the book and about her everywhere – and I mean everywhere – that I felt like I already knew its basic premise (but for the record, unlike some bloggers who have written about her, I did read it.) 

It’s essentially a 4^th wave feminism theory. It’s not that we need to burn our bras for independence (1^st 20th century wave.) It’s not that we have to dress like men with floppy bow ties and shapeless suits to make our way up the corporate ladder (2^nd wave.) It’s not that we have to be superwomen, balancing work and family seamlessly and pretending that it’s all rose petals and perfection, and at the same time, fight the backlash against women in the world, a la Susan Faludi (3^rd wave.)

It’s that we are still trying to find a way to be the working women we want to be, the moms we want to be, the spouses and partners we want to be, and the people we want to be. And we need tools and support to make that happen. 

It’s actually a really good message, despite its detractors. Sure, many have criticized Sandberg for being elitist, for being wealthy and white, for being high up on the corporate ladder where few women rest and therefore not being able to see down the rungs behind her, for being hetero-normative, for being married to a partner with the ability to be flexible and allow her to stretch her limits with a safety net, etc. etc. 

All of this is true. And there is the whole nagging other side of the question that she doesn’t really address – how the work world does (or does not) support and accommodate women and men and families. But none of this makes her message any less resonant in my mind. 

Theft 101: Or, How My Kindergartner's Purple Backpack Came Back

Truth Tuesday

Guest post by Amy Rogers Nazarov

The other day, someone stole my kindergartner's backpack off our front stoop.

We'd walked home from school together, like we did every day. Upon arrival, Jake grabbed his crotch.

"I have to pee, Mama!" he yelled as he wriggled out of his backpack and tossed it onto the steps.

I unlocked the door fast, helped Jake throw off his coat, and cheered him down the hall to the potty. He made it in time, so we celebrated with a banana smoothie, sweetened with chocolate sauce, discreetly enhanced with wheat germ. I poured most of it in a glass for him but siphoned off a little for me.

I like these mundane after-school rituals and I hope Jake does, too. He's got big days at kindergarten: social interactions with peers to be negotiated, a tripod pencil grip to be practiced, numbers and rhymes to be learned. I think he benefits from chilling out at home with me, where the biggest decision we face is whether we'll make a skyscraper out of blocks or try to replicate a stop sign in chalk on the blackboard.

"Your backpack is still outside, honey," I suddenly remembered. "Let's get it."

We walked back up the hall, the door and looked at an empty stoop. The purple backpack – containing his lunch bag and homework folder – was not there.

Into the Parenting Wilderness - A Book Review

Truth Thursday

I am a reader, and a writer, but I have never before been a reviewer. David Ebenbach’s emotionally engaging new collection of short stories, Into the Wilderness, has changed that.

As a mom who writes about the intersection of life, work and parenthood, I sometimes smugly think that I have the higher ground when it comes to musing about the parenting life; how can a man possibly understand the complicated lives we mothers live? And the few dads who do take it upon themselves to write about their fathering experiences often couch it in standard-issue stupid/funny dad-stuff – teaching their kids how to make icky bodily noises, playing baby-too-high-in-the-air with their young children, and an abundance of pre-adolescent whining about lost youth and opportunity.

But David Ebenbach has created a completely different paradigm of man-into-dad literature. His beautifully-crafted stories take the reader into the lives of his characters, both men and women, and leave us wanting more.

Although each story stands alone, four of the book’s gems follow the life of Judith, a new mother but not by choice. Judith is single, a young and hungry journalist, and like many young urban dwellers, still in search of herself. But a night fraught with indecision and passion leads her to an unplanned pregnancy, which she, surprising even herself, decides to keep.

We meet Judith after the baby, whose name has not yet been chosen, is coming home from the hospital. Her parents, in from Indiana, are crowded in her small city apartment, trying to make the best of a complicated situation. Once they had accepted that Judith was indeed, having a baby, that there was no apparent father, and that she was in it alone, they swooped in, determined to help.

While grateful for her parents, Judith still struggles. The most difficult question is what to name her baby girl. Judith, although not observant, is Jewish, and the question of naming the baby – an important Jewish ritual – takes on gargantuan proportions in her first days as a mother.

Yet A Few More Words on Working Moms and "Having It All"

Work Wednesday

I was all set to blog last week about fomer high-ranking State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter's provocative, well-written and timely Atlantic Monthly piece, Why Women Still Can't Have It All but somehow I forgot. Yes, just plain forgot. I was too busy decompressing from a busy week of work in Brussels and Berlin, organizing my daughter for for her first-ever sleep-away camp experience, and getting my son off to his first-ever day camp overnight that I forgot.

By the time I remembered I was supposed to blog about what The New York Times called "Ms. Slaughter's confession-slash-manifesto" it was 11:00 p.m. on Tuesday night and my husband and I were home alone without our kids - for the first time ever since childbirth - and, well, it just didn't seem like the right time to hit the computer to blog about balancing work, kids, and, marriage. Enough said.

Besides, what could I really say anyway? Slaughter tossed up a  raft of data, opinions, and anecdotes about the issues facing (mostly elite, professional) working mothers designed to start a debate, and already been praised, denouced, interviewed, analyzed, canonized, villified and who knows what else by the time my CurrentMom deadline arrived (and passed). (Even the stock mother-with-baby-in briefcase photo that accompanied the article had been dissected online.) Frankly, I wasn't sure that there's anything more to say. (Google "Anne-Marie Slaugther" and "Atlantic" and you can sample the hundreds of articles, blogs and comments about Slaughter and having it all.)

But, I found myself, this week, still thinking about the article and the conversations it's called out. Whether it was Slaughter's confessional framing of her work-life issues (her teenage son's rebelliousness, her years of infertility, and her grueling commute), her descriptions of her glamorous-sounding but punishing "foreign-policy dream job," or just the fact that she tapped into a  discussion already primed by actress Tina Fey's Confessions of a Juggler and Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg's Barnard commencement speech, there's no doubt that Slaughter hit a nerve. And gone in deep.