Children’s Book and Media Reviews

By Sarah Newland, Waldorf parent of two children, ages 9 and 17

Ganesh’s Sweet Tooth
By Sanjay Patel and Emily Haynes

This is not a retelling of the classic legend of how Ganesh broke his tusk, though it is loosely based on the story. Some elements and scenes in this book are not found in Hindu mythology (the super jumbo jawbreaker laddoo!), and certain plot points were changed to develop an original, fun picture book. It will entertain and inspire readers to learn even more about the rich and varied stories of Hindu mythology.

$7.99

Tree of Wonder: The Many Marvelous Lives
of a Rainforest Tree
By Kate Messner and Simona Mulazzani

This is a lush and fascinating book about the rainforest’s abundant beauty and the wonderful multiplicity of life sustained by just one almendro tree. Your child will search and count through each page while learning scientific facts about each animal.

$16.99

A Rock is Lively
By Dianna Hutts Aston and Sylvia Long

A book about rocks and crystals for kids! Sometimes a book comes along that is just perfect for Crazy Wisdom. This is one of them. Beautiful pictures combine with just enough facts to keep slightly older children interested. Fun for budding geologists.

$7.99

Swan: The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova
By Laurel Snyder and Julie Morstad

One day, Anna’s mother takes her to the ballet, and the girl’s simple life is changed forever. Anna grows up to become the most famous prima ballerina of all time. The elegant style of these drawings are captivating, and the book is perfect for slightly younger kids interested in dance.

$17.99

The Categorical Universe of Candice Phee
By Barry Jonsberg

Candice Phee isn’t your typical 12-year-old. She has more than her fair share of quirks. But she also has the very best of intentions and an unwavering determination to make sure everyone around her is happy. Which is no easy feat when you’re dealing with a pet fish with an identity crisis, a friend who believes he came from another dimension, an age-old family feud, and a sick mom. But she is on a mission. This is a heartfelt and fun book for middle schoolers.

$6.99

Flower Heaven
By Else Wenz-Vietor

In the Waldorf tradition of Elsa Beskow, this lovely little book is about what happens to plants and flowers once their petals have been plucked or uncared for. The angels in flower heaven nurture and heal them, of course!

$16.95

French Dreamland cd
By Putumayo World Music

These charming lullabies will transport you to the lavender-scented French countryside. Wonderful for Francophile parents, too!

$13.95

---

Events Calendar for Kids • January through April 2016

Conscious Parenting: Ten Tips for When Your 'Gentle Parenting' Is Going Out the Window

By Catherine Fischer

As parents, we’ve all been there, or we will be someday. Our busy lives create lots of pressure. It’s awful when the patience, perspective, mindfulness — or whatever we have been working to sustain or cultivate — just slips away from us. It may feel like everything is fine until, suddenly, it’s not. Or, we know we are on a downhill slide but feel helpless to stop it. Either way, we end up saying or doing regrettable things, and it feels terrible. This is not what we hoped for when we became parents!

Five Tips for When You Are About to Lose It

1. Check in with Yourself

As parents, sometimes we set aside our needs to the detriment of ourselves and our children.  Have you heard of HALT? It’s a simple mnemonic to help you check in with yourself when you are feeling bad. Are you Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? Sometimes asking ourselves these questions can help us notice that the root of our bad feelings isn’t actually our children!

2. Lower Your Standards 

Are we trying to do too much? Are our expectations too high for ourselves and our children?  Sometimes a little flexibility can go a long way.

• Can you simplify the meal you are making? 
• Can you stop fighting with your children about what to wear and let them dress themselves?
• Can you let some of the housework go?
• Can you allow yourself to be late to where you are headed? Do you need to change your plans altogether?
• Can you wait a little longer for your child to turn off the TV/computer? 

3. Take a Time Out  

If it is safe for you to leave your children unattended briefly, you can go into another room by yourself and “let the upset out” without directing it at your children. Cry or yell into a pillow, hug a teddy bear. If you can’t walk away, you can simply try to take a deep breath.

4. Connect with Someone

Find someone to vent to (or with) when things feel out of control. Tell someone you trust about the struggles you are having. Ask if you can call, email, or text them to vent when you are upset.   You could even pre-program a phone number into your phone, and then ask your children to tell you to call that person if you are getting too angry, or have them call the number themselves. Your children probably know your warning signs better than you do!

5. “Give Up”  

This one might sound off-the-wall, but consider the alternative. You already know that you might yell or hit and you don’t want to. When all else fails, try lying down on the floor. It will literally give you (and your children) a new perspective.

Five Tips for After the Crisis

When the crisis is over, or better yet — averted, we often move on without much chance to think about next time. Usually we hope that we will stop ourselves next time, or we simply decide, I’m never doing that again. Sometimes, though, a decision isn’t enough to hold up in the face of the intense emotions of parenting. So, as difficult as it can be to find or make time for ourselves and our emotions, sometimes we can’t change the behavior until we get help with the emotions.

6. What Was Happening in Your Life When You Were That Age?

If you are having a particularly challenging time with your parenting, it might be worth thinking back to what was happening in your life when you were the same age as your child. Sometimes we can have an aha moment when we realize that, when we were that age, we moved, or our parents got divorced, or we started school and hated it. Those memories and the accompanying feelings shape how we feel about what is happening in the present. By becoming conscious of them, and perhaps having an opportunity to resolve those old hurts, you will find that responding to your children with patience and understanding becomes easier.

7. Do You Need to Set Different Limits?

When it’s time to set a limit for our children, we may ask “nicely” and become frustrated when our children don’t respond to our pleasant tone or our reasoning. Sometimes parents then flip over into harshness because they are so frustrated. Rather than trying to be “nice” and “reasonable,” try going for “kind but firm.” Don’t expect your child to agree to the limit. You may need to listen to your child be upset about the limit, and that’s okay.

8. Find a Support Group

It’s okay to need help with our parenting. Do you need information? Support to know that you are not alone? There are lots of parenting support groups and classes around … explore until you find one that is a good fit for you.

9. Be Gentler with Yourself 

The harshness toward our children comes out after we have experienced harshness ourselves, either as children or in our adult relationships. I also think that just living in the U.S. means that you are facing harshness as a parent. If we are beating ourselves up in our own heads, eventually it will also come out at our children. Considering everything that’s happened in your life, you are doing the best you can. You can want to do better without being hard on yourself.

10. Find a Listening Partner

One awesome way to do the venting and reflecting necessary for change is to set up a “listening partnership” with another parent. The basics are simple: you take turns listening to each other for equal amounts of time … no advice, no jumping in with our own story, just listening and remembering that this other parent is doing his or her best. And so are you.

Catherine Fischer, M.A., C.P.D., helps parents learn strategies for the emotional challenges of parenting with consultations, support groups, and classes. She is also a birth and postpartum doula. You can find out more at SupportForGrowingFamilies.com or by emailing catherine@supportforgrowingfamilies.com.

---

A Test of Character — The Immeasurable Impact of the Arts

By Truly Render

I read a headline in The Onion recently that hit close to home: “Struggling High School Cuts Football — Nah, Just Kidding, Art It Is.” As a 2004 college grad, I’ve spent the bulk of my professional life to date weathering the financial storm in the nonprofit arts world. And while the headlines focus almost exclusively on dried-up dollar amounts from government, corporate, and individual giving sources, there is a larger issue at play causing serious repercussions to our cultural landscape — cuts to arts education. 

When Bush introduced No Child Left Behind in 2002, standardized test preparation became paramount, sucking resources dry for everything else. So the eighth grader in 2002 is now the 26-year-old who looks at an orchestra concert, art exhibition, play, or a dance performance and scoffs, “This isn’t relevant to my life, this has nothing to do with me.” And they’re right. At best, cultural outings for many millennials are a reason to dress up and do “something fancy.” Our country has failed to raise these individuals with a shared language to think and talk about their own culture. Worse still, this approach to education reinforces discomfort with the grey areas of open interpretation, emotion, and unfamiliarity instead of building a student’s capacity for these 21st-century skills.

Perhaps the weirdest side effect of No Child Left Behind has been arts advocates turning to neuroscience to justify their existence. We can’t cut the music program — not because music is a timeless and essential thread in the fabric of human existence — but because learning to play an instrument improves executive functioning, focus, and the ability to multi-task. We can’t cut the art program — not because “visual” is our species’ first language — but because art benefits literacy skills. Creative endeavors are now categorized, justified, and defined as a means to a more important end: testing.

I’ll risk being a “bad” advocate here: the arts never helped me take a test. I was heavily involved in the arts as a high school student — choir, solo & ensemble, theater, media arts, and creative writing club. And while these activities were the reasons that I came to school most days, I consistently tanked at standardized tests. A verbal processor, I craved informed conversation around subjects of inquiry. True or false reasoning in a silent room stifled my synapses and created a sort of blinding anxiety. It still does.

While the arts failed me in the realm of standardized testing, my high school arts education provided me with incredible learning moments; specifically, drama club and choir built my character in ways that have had a direct impact on my career trajectory and successes.

A snapshot of my drama nerd creds: president of Drama Club my senior year; cast in every play and musical throughout my high school career; wrote and directed one-act productions; produced/directed a 9-hour production/fundraiser called Theater-A-Thon. There may even have been some miming involved. I was in deep.  

As much as I loved theater, most of the time I wasn’t the star of the show. During our production of Camelot, I auditioned for the role of Morgan le Faye but wound up as a dancing tree in her enchanted forest. As much of a disappointment as a non-speaking role was to my 16-year-old self, I took our theater teacher Mr. Tice’s words to heart: a production is only as good as the smallest part. I decided I was going to be the best-goddamned tree anyone had ever seen. I quickly learned to take solace from my embarrassing foliage-littered leotard in the company of my fellow trees.  After college, when it was time to “pay my dues” in career-land, I was stuck with any number of boring, semi-demoralizing duties: schlepping boxes, collecting and collating endless departmental receipts, and sifting through vast landscapes of Excel spreadsheets. But after silently cursing these dull duties, I’d hear Mr. Tice’s voice in my head — a production is only as good as the smallest part — and I’d kick my work into high gear, taking solace in the camaraderie of my colleagues. My rigorous, thorough approach to the smallest of tasks, combined with my collegiality, earned me my very first promotions in the workplace. In teaching me to embrace the smallest roles, Mr. Tice showed me how to grow beyond them.

From grades 6 to 12, I participated in Vocal Solo & Ensemble Festival, the annual convening of teenage masochists. While most humans navigate around life’s gaping canyons of public humiliation, my love of music convinced me I could sprout wings and fly over them. Most of the time I was wrong, but it took me six years to figure that out.

The first time I participated in Festival as a soloist, I was a gangly, flat-chested eighth grader. I had to rummage around in my mouth to pull spitty cross-lateral bands off my braces to get full jaw extension. But my choir teacher, Mrs. Linder, looked beyond the orthodontics, the wire-rim glasses, the acne, and the scrawn and saw a young alto with an expressive voice, a love for vocal dynamics, and a warm tonality. She suggested “American Lullaby,” a 1932 piece by Gladys Rich. The song is about a nanny caring for a baby whose parents are preoccupied in the adult world. While I hated babysitting and was skeptical of anyone who crapped their pants on a routine basis, there was a haunting loneliness underscoring the proffered comfort of that song that struck a chord with me. The feeling of the song was universal. I sang it all the time, I experimented with it, I made it my own. I got a blue ribbon at Festival.

The following year in high school, my choir teacher, Ms. Warren, saw my skinny pip of a self and assigned me “Cherry Ripe,” a terrible screech of a song from 1879 by John Everett Millais, someone who clearly believed that young women and warbling birds were one and the same. As a freshman, I was a stranger to Ms. Warren; she didn’t know me well enough to hear my strengths, to know my weaknesses. I gave the song all I had, but I only succeeded in hitting the notes when I was making fun of the song, which was often. Solo & Ensemble was awful that year. At the very start of the song, my voice cracked and it was over. My nerves drove my pitch sharper and sharper and drove the tempo faster and faster. I was a horrible mess of nervous vibrato and shame. I got the lowest possible score. After the performance, I went to the girl’s bathroom with my best gay choir friend, Keith, to cry red-hot tears on his shoulder. After a few minutes of sobbing, I farted. We laughed so hard we thought we’d die. And then Keith said, “F*&% that song.” And all at once I realized how personal singing is. There is no such thing as being a bad singer or having a bad voice; it’s a matter of finding your song.

When I think back to my time as a teenage singer, I’m also struck by how committed my teachers were. After a long day of school, my choir teachers stayed late to give private lessons to Solo & Ensemble participants — forsaking their families, their free time, and their own creative endeavors. This level of intense dedication sailed directly over my self-absorbed teenage head, but it became something I would marvel over in adulthood. These teachers were incredible and showed me the level of one-on-one, personal, mentored support that young people need to grow. I’m not a teacher, but I work with a lot of undergraduate interns. For interns who go the extra mile, I make it my business to go there with them, offering everything I’ve got to help them build their careers, figure out their footing, discover their voice, and find their song.

My teenage arts participation taught me how to be a collaborator, how to respond to constructive criticism, how to be a leader, how to be creative in a deadline-driven environment, how to embrace experimentation, how to cope with failure, and how to market an artistic product. In many ways, my arts education taught me who I was, how I could fit into the world at large, and how important risk, and sometimes even failure, is to that process. Great arts educators might not do a damned thing for our test scores, but they do something better. Great arts educators provide opportunities for curious students to immerse themselves in the traditions that make us human, giving us a shared language to understand, appreciate, and participate in our own cultural landscape. Through these opportunities, students gain an understanding of the challenges the world holds for them and how they can help. Arts educators help students grow into leaders, advocates, and engaged community members who want to make a difference. And that’s more than any test can say.

Truly Render is the Director of Communications & Marketing for the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. She is also the founder of Truly Render Creative, a boutique marketing and copywriting service. When not at work or Girl Scouting with her daughter, Truly enjoys reading, writing, and experiencing the incredible cultural offerings of southeastern Michigan with friends and family. Connect with her at trulyrendercreative.com or trender@umich.edu.

---