Radiant Fatherhood – pioneering muckraker Lincoln Steffens’s magnificent 1925 reflection on the unexpected rewards of parenthood and what babies know about life that we don’t, with a delicious side of gender equality decades ahead of its time.
Read it here.
Kafka’s remarkable letter to his demanding, narcissistic, and emotionally abusive father – a litany of indictments 30 years in the brewing, deeply relatable for anyone who has shared life with a narcissist or been raised by an abusive parent.
I started leaving poems in her shoes in the morning. She had used the shoes as a form of quiet protest, so I decided I would use them to make a quiet stand for hope. When one of your primary strategies as a parent involves leaving Wendell Berry’s “Mad Farmer Liberation Front” in your child’s shoe, it’s clear things aren’t going well.
What I wanted her to know is: People have been in pain before, struggled to find hope, and look what they’ve done with it. They made poetry that landed right in your shoe, the same shoe you didn’t wear for four months because of your despair.
[…]
The most optimistic people often struggle the hardest. They can’t quite square what’s going on in the world with their beliefs, and the disparity is alarming.
Considering how important grandparents are in many modern families … isn’t it surprising that we don’t find more of them in contemporary fiction?
[…]
Look around current adult fiction and there’s little writing about grandparents as grandparents. You can find forever-young baby boomer grandmas falling in love at 60 and novels about spirited older women finding self-fulfilment, but novels about grandparents’ relationships with their grandchildren seem in short supply. One rare exception is Finnish writer and illustrator Tove Jansson’s magical The Summer Book. Jansson (of Moomintroll fame) here turns her shrewd gaze on the interaction between an elderly grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter, spending the summer together on an island in the Finnish archipelago. The book is beautiful, astute and tells us a lot both about childhood and about old age.
Over at The Guardian, Helen Harris considers where all the grandparents have gone in fiction.
Jansson was a visionary writer and artists in other social dimensions as well, from her philosophical adult comics on why we join groups and seek community to her allegorical children’s books about uncertainty and self-reliance.
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For more ideas on expanding your learning horizons, check out Noodle.
Work: An Occupational ABC – wonderful alphabet book by Canadian illustrator and graphic designer Kellen Hatanaka offers an imaginative atlas of vocational possibility that stands as an antidote to our culture’s limiting definitions of success.
Oh, and it’s full of brainy, brawny women, people of color, bodies of all shapes and sizes, and various stereotype-defying characters. Dive in here.
Bertrand Russell on the essential role of boredom and “fruitful monotony” in the conquest of happiness – sublimely timely read from 1930, which also includes the following gem:
The capacity to endure a more or less monotonous life is one which should be acquired in childhood. Modern parents are greatly to blame in this respect; they provide their children with far too many passive amusements… and they do not realize the importance to a child of having one day like another, except, of course, for somewhat rare occasions.
Read more here.
Legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead, born on this day in 1901, on myth vs. deception and what to tell kids about Santa.
To help kids learn about birth, see this; about death, see this.
After the launch of her book, Miracles Now, a reader asked Gabrielle Bernstein about the best way to get kids hooked on meditation. This is her answer. Also see Sam Harris on the paradox of meditation.
(via Swiss Miss)
Nobel-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill on happiness, hard work, and success – fantastic letter of tough love to his unmotivated teenage son
For Sherwood Anderson’s birthday, his spectacular letter of advice on art and life to his teenage son
My Father’s Arms Are a Boat – a tender Norwegian illustrated story about love, loss, and modern fatherhood
One family’s impossibly moving story raising a transgender kid – the most poignant such perspective since this one.
Stay with it through the end – you won’t regret it.