This past weekend I was faced with an unanswerable question from Theodore’s almost-4-year-old son, JP. Why, he asked me, are you an adult? How do you respond to such a question? How do you tell the truth in a way that a preschooler will understand—and that actually feels true to you as well? “I’m an …
Monthly Archives: May 2010
Down with Pronouns
One of the marvels of language development–this process that all of us parents get an unexpected front-row seat for–is how a child will occasionally fall into a vortex, some pattern of wrong or incomplete language that they get stuck in just long enough for us to take notice. It is a real phenomenon, not like …
A Week on the Wagon: Playing With Our Balls
Usually, every Friday when we put together “A Week on the Wagon,” we try to discern a uniting theme for the past five days’ posts. Were we all cranky? Did we put up a lot of funny pictures? Was Theodore cranky, Nathan morbid, Christopher nerdy, and Matt drunk? But sometimes, nothing emerges. Like this week. …
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Let Us Now Praise Dubious Stuff: Embarrassment Edition
I came across an interesting little tidbit at inCharacter (“the journal of everyday virtues”; I, of course, prefer my virtues to be offered on a sub-weekly basis, like a housekeeper). Entitled “The Death of Embarrassment,” it is an essay on how shame, embarrassment, and scorn have become degraded social values in today’s culture. This, apparently, …
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