Call it the Jeffington Post. It's your occasional parenting article (particle) roundup. I see particles linked all the time on social media, and I read some of the ones that I see. Here are some recent ones with my quick take on them.
What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Taught me About Being a Stay-at-home Dad.
While there's nothing actually ground-breaking here, it's well-written and an interesting slice of the at-home dad world. The best nugget from the justice: "You can’t have it all all at once."
The Race to Nowhere in Youth Sports
This really targets parents who have bought into the hyper-competitive part of the youth sports spectrum. It asks for changes from coaches and parents. Unfortunately, it also lays out why change will be difficult to effect. "The path is a race to nowhere, and it does not produce better
athletes. It produces bitter athletes who get hurt, burnout, and quit
sports altogether."
We're Ruining Our Kids with Minecraft; The Case for Unstructured Play
When I read this, I felt very validated about some of the choices we've made as parents:
"If we want our kids to relearn how to play, we have to begin by exposing them to boredom." We send our kids to camp in the summer, but we also structure their summer specifically to create boredom in hopes that they will overcome it of their own initiative. Articles like this are fueled by scary statistics; this one features a finding that kids 8 to 18 spend 6.5 hours on screens per day. That sounds outrageously high to me across the board. I have no doubt that it's true of some kids, but where are they finding that kind of time?
This is more of a marriage essay (messay?) than a particle, but I saw someone link to it on Facebook. The title "I Wasn't Treating My Husband Fairly, and it Wasn't Fair" should alert you to the kind of rocket surgeon we're reading here. It's pretty annoying in the middle, so either read the whole thing or don't read it at all. She finally gets around to a point that doesn't make me really resent her or her husband.
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