James' World 2

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There is no shortage of difficult and even painful conversations we may need to have with our kids throughout their childhood. But telling them their parents are divorcing, changing forever the very structure of their family and their lives, has to be one of the hardest, for them and for you. The messaging necessary in those conversations will evolve over time as they get older, and the behaviors they may display that indicate they’re in distress can look different depending on their age.

But Dr. Joanna Stern, a senior clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, says that although the way you talk to kids about a divorce will change and grow more nuanced the older they get, kids of all ages need to feel or hear reassurance that they are going to be cared for and supported during and after the process.

“What [parents] really want to communicate to kids of all ages is, ‘We’ve got you,’” Sterns says. “‘Your needs are going to be taken care of regardless of what is happening with us and with the divorce.’”

And just as important, Stern says, is to remember what not to say. Namely, don’t bad-mouth the other parent, even in subtle ways, and even with the youngest of kids. So let’s start there—with toddlers.

How to talk to toddlers about divorce

Obviously, there’s very little a parent can or should do by way of explaining a divorce to a child who isn’t yet verbal. A young toddler, though, is likely to require some kind of explanation if you’re divorcing and one parent is moving out.

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Illustration: René Ramos

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The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. In 2017, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

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Illustration by Ryan Melgar

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For nearly two decades leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin lived in London in a house at 36 Craven Street. In 1776, Franklin left his English home to come back to America. More than 200 years later, 15 bodies were found in the basement, buried in a secret, windowless room beneath the garden.

In 1998, conservationists were doing repairs on 36 Craven, looking to turn Franklin’s old haunt into a museum. “From a one-meter wide, one-meter deep pit, over 1200 pieces of bone were retrieved”—remnants of more than a dozen bodies,  says Benjamin Franklin House. Six were children. Forensic investigations showed that the bones dated to Franklin’s day.

Franklin was a noted revolutionary and powerful freemason—the Grand Master of Masons of Pennsylvania—so it’s easy to wonder what dark secrets Franklin may have hidden in his basement chamber. But the truth, it turns out, isn’t quite so dark.

“The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin Franklin’s young friend and protege, William Hewson,” said the Guardian in 2003.

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Photo by TonyBaggett/Getty Images

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There are a handful of topics that I almost force myself to not think about because the thoughts lead to a dead end. At the top of that list is climate change. It’s one of those problems that starts to overwhelm me when I consider the scale and the implications and all the barriers to tackling it.

I also know I can’t ignore it because it’s real, and it’s getting more urgent. In fact, the average temperature was as hot as it’s ever been, or at least as hot as we’ve ever recorded it to be, several days already this month. And if you live in the northeast United States, you’ve probably noticed the smoke blanket looming over you in recent weeks thanks to wildfires in Canada.

The question a lot of us have asked ourselves at various points is: What is my responsibility in this situation? What can I, as an individual, do?

There isn’t an easy answer here, in part because the problem is too big for any one of us to solve. But if you’re a parent — as I am — the climate predicament takes on an additional dimension. You have to wonder not just about the ethics of raising children in an unstable world. You also have to decide, in a very concrete way, what you really value and whether or not you’re willing to live in accordance with those values.

I spoke with Elizabeth Cripps for The Gray Area (full episode below). She’s a professor of political theory at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and she’s the author of a new book called Parenting on Earth: A Philosopher’s Guide to Doing Right by Your Kids — and Everyone Else.

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About 30 years ago, something happened to the way kids play.

While American children had once commonly enjoyed the freedom to run around outside with minimal adult interference, they began to spend more time indoors where their parents could watch them. When they did go outside, they were more often accompanied by a grown-up; unstructured roughhousing and roleplaying were replaced by supervised play dates or carefully shepherded trips to the park. Kids began to spend more time in organized activities, like dance or sports, and less time in the kind of disorganized milling-about familiar to generations past.

The reasons for this shift were many: fears of kidnapping, stoked by a series of highly publicized cases; an increase in the length of the school year; parental anxieties about children’s futures in a time of growing income inequality and economic insecurity. The result was a 25 percent drop in children’s unstructured playtime between 1981 and 1997, setting in motion a pattern of less freedom and more adult surveillance that historians and child psychologists believe continues to this day. “All kinds of independent activities that used to be part of normal childhood have gradually been diminishing,” said Peter Gray, a psychology professor at Boston College who studies play.

The decline in kids’ unstructured time is bad for fun as structured activities like classes and sports in which adults are evaluating and judging kids’ performance can be more like work than play, Gray said. It’s bad for learning because children need playtime to develop motor and social skills. And it could be hurting kids’ health — in a commentary earlier this year in the Journal of Pediatrics, Gray and his co-authors argue that the decline in play and independence could be one reason children and teens have reported skyrocketing levels of anxiety, depression, and sadness in recent years.

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Experts say kids’ freedom to play has been declining since the 1980s.Jorm Sangsorn via Getty Images/iStockphoto

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How to “square up” failure. How to use tools properly. How to take care of your home. When we asked a group of dads about the life skill they wish they taught their kids sooner, the answers revealed a simple truth: there’s always more to teach and, looking back, some of the things that are most useful are the ones we might not think to focus on until we see how useful it would’ve been. From the obvious (teaching more financial literacy) to the aspirational (cultivating an appreciation for exercise at an early age) to the oh-damn-I-wish-I-demonstrated-that-better (how to forgive someone), here are the life skills these men wish they taught their kids sooner.

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There’s always more to teach.

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