"[North] American parents can become immune to just how rarely their children really play."

Reading a reflection this morning on how rarely parents let their kids just play, uninterrupted by adults and without screens, toys, or really even direction. The idea here is that real play is just pure imagination and environment. It's part of a growing conversation around the need for kids to engage in more 'risky play' time. It also could be seen as a direct reaction to the era of helicopter parenting we have been experiencing over the last decade or so.

One thing I really enjoyed about this particular reflection is the way it connected outdoor play with cultivating a love and concern for the natural world in kids. It notes how modern society tends to throw a book at every problem (something I'm definitely guilty of); but there is no replacement for simply being outside. The author writes, "[if you] want a world very different from the one we currently know? Let kids build the capacity to imagine it."

Happy New Year.

Yesterday I was walking my kids to the library and I had a thought around collective vs personal responsibility as it relates to safety. As the girls ran up ahead of me I considered how this is what parenting is, watching your kids exhibit freedom and move forward into the world in ways that will always be ahead of and beyond you. We're in the process of trying to decide when to start letting our kids walk to school on their own and a big part of that comes down to trust.

But the thing that struck me was that it's not only about trusting my kids to be safe, it's about trusting the community to keep my kids safe. To make this thought even more brazen, it is your responsibility to keep my kids safe. Just as it is my responsibility to keep other people's kids safe.

This is a mindset that I think we've really abandoned here in our neoliberal 'western' society. Here, one's wellbeing is primarily a personal concern. Watching out for one another, especially strangers, increasingly feels like a quaint, naive thing of the past. At best, we accept that there are certain structures in society (laws, systems, etc) that are designed to organize us in a way that keeps people safe. Yet, even those are often pushed back against in exchange for personal freedom. Our car-centric way of life is perhaps the best example of this. There are so many small steps we could take to make our streets safer, but we often reject these as they might interfere with our freedom of movement. And perhaps no one bears the burden of this more than kids.

But, coming back to this idea that kid's safety should be a collective responsibility. I think this is part of what fuels helicopter parenting. We simply don't trust that society will put our kid's wellbeing before their own freedom. So we adopt that mindset as well and our kids experience the world from the safety of their homes, backyards, and the backseat of cars. Never mind that this is having negative effects down the road.

I believe this is something we should reject and move away from. The old adage, 'it takes a village to raise a child' had it right. Kids should be seen moving around freely in our communities as though they belong there, not as a failure of parenting; because we should look at those kids and think it is my responsibility that they feel safe here.

Continuing through Devlin's memoir; she attributes her early political consciousness to her father (who died while she was a kid).

She recalls a story in which she came late to tea and began flipping through the loaf of bread to get to one of the highly coveted square end pieces. Her father stopped her and asked, "do you expect any other human being to eat the food you have rejected as not fit for your consumption?" He then said those five slices of bread that she flicked through would be her dinner and/or breakfast and that no one else would eat that bread but her. In her reflection, he did this not to teach a lesson in obedience but one in having consideration for others.

Her father would also tell the kids stories at bedtime that came out of Ireland's history. Stories of legend and of political struggle. They were told, as she notes, "by an Irishman, with an Irishman's feelings." She remembers one of her first nursery rhymes being a poem about the English flag being found wherever there was 'blood and plunder.'

I often wonder about how much we have given over to technology when it comes to raising our kids. Not just time, but the underlying values of the creators of that tech. What's behind the stories and songs that our kids consume? Anything? Or is it just mindless entertainment? Maybe it's just teaching them to be a good consumers...

There's a value in understanding the history of things, including the people you admire. You can't separate who Devlin became with how she was raised and that's an important reminder for us as parents.

Working on the final essay of my much delayed MDIV this week. One of my favourite things about writing is going down rabbit trails on ideas and concepts that are only tangentially related to the topic. It does make my process quite a bit longer but I find I come across so many fascinating ideas.

This morning I’ve been doing a bit of a deep dive into family-work conflict theory. This is when the energy, time, or behaviourial demands of work comes into conflict with your family (source). It seems that for a long time these were two spheres with not a lot of overlap in terms of academic research; however, as women increased in the workforce, more attention began to be given to this conflict. This is largely due to the way in which women’s roles in these two spheres tended to overlap with simultaneous demands on them from both.

What is most relevant to my research is the way in which work-family conflict relates to an overall sense of wellbeing. Studies show that,

“Workers who are satisfied with and engaged in their jobs, who can manage the daily stresses of work, and who are able to integrate their work with the rest of their life are happier and more productive."(Source)

Stress, on the other hand, is highly tied to work hours and when the demands of the job bleed into other areas of life. When that balance is thrown off, workers report higher stress which can lead to “psychosomatic symptoms, depression and other forms of psychological distress, use of medication, alcohol consumption, substance abuse, clinical mood disorders, clinical anxiety disorders, and emotional exhaustion.”

This is sort of the central point this paper will be exploring, one’s work life is directly related to the wellbeing of your whole life. Thus, advocating for better work for everyone raises the wellbeing of the whole society. As I will be arguing, this is something churches should take seriously in order to better care for people - as both individuals and families.

A coworker shared this article in which the author describes the social media version of motherhood:

Where life-style accounts feature memes about maternal exhaustion and infographics detailing various reasons a woman raising a child might crumble under her several thousand daily tasks. (“Hey mama ❤️ I see you out there with the weight of the world on your shoulders,” an average caption might begin, gesturing toward support while suggesting that an impossible individual burden is simply what motherhood means.)”

(Emphasis mine)

There's a lot more to the article, it's worth reading in full.