maternity care

Jan 23, 2017

What I Really Mean When I Tell You to “Be Careful”

I know you think I’m foolish, that you are outgrowing my need for concern. You think I’m being overprotective, treating you like a little girl. You are getting ready to start high school soon, mature beyond your years. What I wish you could understand, really take onboard, is when I say “be careful” what those words really mean. What I’m really trying to say is …

Be careful with your heart. I know from experience how easily it can be shattered. Don’t offer it to the wrong person. Some will take it without consideration and use it for their own devices. They will waste its precious resources and leave you feeling worthless before you’ve ever noticed. If that happens a few times, you will begin to build a wall around you. A wall so thick and impenetrable that when the right one comes along, it will take them years to break through. You are worthy of so much more.

Your demeanor and attitude should never waiver depending on your audience. Manners matter.

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Be careful how you treat people. This matters more than any single thing you will do in your life. Consider how you behave toward every janitor, check-out clerk, bartender, flight attendant, and CEO. Your demeanor and attitude should never waiver depending on your audience. Manners matter. How you treat others is the single truest reflection of the person you are. There are few occasions in my life where I have wronged someone. No matter what good I have done or have yet to do, I will judge myself based on those circumstances more than any other.

Be careful with yourself. Take time to get to know who you are. Find your voice and form your own opinion. Learn how to argue and also how to listen. If you don’t agree with something, learn how to challenge an idea constructively. And if you aren’t being heard, then learn how to use your voice loudly. You don’t always have to be polite. There are certain situations where you will need to say “F you” and mean it. You will know when it’s time because you will feel it with every ounce of your soul. Don’t ignore your gut.

Be careful with your body. Don’t give it away. I know it may feel good sometimes but the more you do it, the less it becomes your own. Take care of yourself. Put mostly good stuff in it and it will do miraculous things. Occasionally put bad things in it because you only live once. Find a way to move that makes you feel good and do that more than you don’t. Don’t walk alone down back alleys or home from bars at night because there are bad people out there and I watch too much Dateline and I’m your mother so please just listen to me.

Finally, be careful what you wish for. Don’t confuse this with my desire for you to pursue whatever it is that makes you happy. I believe in you and know you can accomplish anything you set your mind to. That is not an empty mantra. You are strong willed and I believe you will realize any goal you set for yourself. But be mindful not to miss what is right in front of you. Take notice of the people and things that surround you. Don’t wish away today for tomorrow, it is not promised to any of us.

It Used to Be Me

I May Be a Neurotic Helicopter Parent, But I’m Still a Badass Dad

I’ve been a bit tightly wound for as long as I can remember.

It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that my jittery neurosis has served me well over the years. As a young boy I was always careful about a lot of stuff that other kids often don’t think twice about — like being careful not to split my head open while playing.

Does that seem a bit sad? Are you wondering what kind of life that must be for an 8-year-old, always putting safety first?

I can’t answer that without bias, obviously. And if we want to get down to the stark reality of things, well then I even have to admit to you that I did in fact crack my noodle open on more than one occasion. However, life is funny and no one will ever know exactly how many more times I may have busted my skull if I hadn’t been so vigilant about not letting it happen.

You see what I’m saying here?

Being a neurotic kid wasn’t easy. But I may have saved my own hide more than once. Hell, I’m sure I did.

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Doesn’t matter, though. Nothing about being a very careful child can ever prepare you for eventually shapeshifting into a parent with the same mindset.

Helicopter Dad.
Mr. Overprotective.
Doctor DON’T!

I am well aware that raising a child under the flag of Constantly Feeling the Monkey Bars to Make Sure They’re Not Slick with Morning Dew is potentially detrimental to your kid. Especially if you’re hoping that they don’t end up as self-exhausting as you are. I am aware of all of this, and yet, I would submit to you that even if given the chance to rewind my life back 8 years and begin raising my three youngsters all over again with a much more relaxed — heck, maybe even lackadaisical — approach … I don’t think I would change a damn thing.

Why?

Because I’m a badass father. And I know it. And I admit that to myself even in my many moments of neurotic despair.

There I am, on a snowy Sunday morning, picking up Lincoln Logs and tossing them back in their tin can before the freaking kids are even done with them.

How crazy is that?! Right? RIGHT?!?! I mean, what’s the point?

There is none. I should just chill, grab another cup of decaf (yeah, right), and cup it slowly to my nose and draw it in deeply as I watch the flakes fall quietly outside the window.

But I don’t. Because that’s not me. I don’t chill. I don’t breathe in coffee. I suck it down FAST and by cup three I’m running around looking for specks of Pop-Tart to vacuum up. Or for ways to make sure that the caulk in the window frames is definitely not decrepit enough for a rattlesnake to push his way in on a frigid January afternoon.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m proud to be a good dad — even if I am a touch neurotic and overbearing.

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Because who cares? I could be worse. And the upside is that my house is always straightened up. Even when it’s super messy from kids being kids, I’m on it.

My sink is void of dirty dishes.

My rugs are lint free.

My kids’ Halloween costumes from every year are all tightly folded and sleeping in a plastic tub upstairs. (No they’re not labeled, smart ass.)

There are no stitches in any of my kids’ heads as of this moment.

School lunches for tomorrow are packed and in the fridge.

Air pressure on the Honda tires is set for optimum anti-carseat bounce.

And … the Lincoln Logs are so cleaned up that they’re back on the toy store shelf. Because there’s just too many of them to pick up over and over again.

What can I say? I must somehow, strange as it seems, actually like being this way. Just as I must subconsciously really DIG following my toddler over to the playground to make sure he doesn’t slip and whack his mouth on the third bar of the iron caterpillar (because that is where the bend starts and he always gets a little shaky there).

I like a clean house. And I like a kid who ain’t marinated in his own gum blood. And I like feeling good about them feeling good.

I never seem to let up much, and it’ll probably kill me in the end …

But so it goes.

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This One Goes Out to Every Parent Who’s Had to Explain What a “Land Line” Is

I’m in the car with the kids in the back. We’re riffing on something, cutting each other off as our conversations go, even while I’m telling them that cutting people off — no matter how excited you are about your next thought — is lame. Especially if it’s your dad and he’s as brilliant and insightful and handsome as me.

They stare at me in the rearview. Dead eyes. Whatever.

Somehow our talk turns to me getting a new cell phone. I tell them that my old one is busted, that I need to pick up my new one later at the store. Then we glide into talking about the past. A past they’ll never know. And after a few sentences, I realize I am an antique.

“Listen, you guys. This is the truth,” I say. “When Mom and I were your age, we didn’t have the kind of phones we have now. You couldn’t sit at the table at the Chinese food buffet place and be able to watch Curious George on a tiny phone screen.”

My daughter Violet’s eyebrow twitches a bit, so I can tell I’ve piqued her curiosity. She’s almost 8, the oldest of my crew, and she’s at that inquisitive stage where she’s always wanting to know a little more. So I run with her attention.

“We had one phone in our house when I was growing up,” I continue. “And it was massive and heavy and you could drop it on your foot and break it if you weren’t careful.”

She giggles at this. So does Henry. Charlie doesn’t care. He’s got a Goldfish cracker crumb shellacked to his chin, but he doesn’t even care about that, let alone Dad’s boring tales of growing up in the Dark Ages. Still, two out of three isn’t bad when I’m waxing about the old days.

“Yeah, it’s true. You guys have no idea how good you’ve got it. The phone ringing sounded like a fire alarm going off in our house back then. And we’d all run to answer it from wherever we might be, in the bedroom or down in the basement, just so we could feel the thrill of being the first one to get there.”

“Who was it?,” Henry blurts out. It’s a beautiful question. I smile and laugh.

“Who was it?” I say. “Haha. It was usually my Mom-Mom. Like 40 times a day.”

And it was. Instead of checking cell phones all the time like we do now, I guess my grandmother got hooked on something else. Which was calling our house to see if my mom remembered that ground meat was on sale this week. Or just to hear our voices maybe.

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Our talk meanders from there, but we stay on topic. I tell my kids how we had like 9 channels on our TV when I was their age. There was no “On-Demand.” You couldn’t call up a cartoon whenever you wanted to watch it. It wasn’t even a thing we would waste energy dreaming of.

“And you know what?” I ask, checking the rearview for reaction.

Violet and Henry are grinning slyly like I’m kidding them. Which, to be fair, I do a lot.

“If we wanted to watch movies we had to go to the movie theater. They hardly ever showed kid movies on TV.”

It’s at this point that Violet loses it.

“Naaaaaaaahhhhhhhooooooo!” She tries to use her irresistible smile to lure me out of my cave of lies. But I’m not lying. You know it, and I know it. But to our kids, it’s almost beyond comprehension. Just like when we were kids, and some old-timer would talk about growing up with nothing but an outhouse and a bucket of water for a bath.

And in this moment, I realize something: As parents, it’s typical for us to attach a lot of worth and importance to the era in which we came of age. Our days are our days until we overlap into a new generation, and then there’s a sense of proprietorship for our past that we’re proud to manage. At times that can lead us to thinking that we grew up in a better time, too.

But I’m not so sure about that.

There’s this tendency for every generation to confuse what we didn’t have for what no kid really needs today. But it’s pointless.

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My brother and I would have given anything for the magic ability to watch Grape Ape whenever the hell we wanted to on TV. Hell, we would have probably eaten a dozen night crawlers straight out of the dirt pile we used to play in all day if someone promised us it was possible. My mom would have probably jumped at that chance, too.

“Eat those night crawlers! Mommy’s getting a new babysitter and her name is TELEVISION!”

There’s this tendency for every generation to confuse what we didn’t have back then for what no kid really needs today. But it’s pointless. I can’t argue that too many technological advances are actually a good thing for our kids; I’m not fully convinced they are. Yet resistance, at least to a point, is futile.

I can keep them from watching some of the ridiculous thinly-veiled commercials disguised as kid reality shows on YouTube these days, but I can’t also be the dude who constantly switches off Pokémon because I still can’t understand what the hell is happening.

It seems too easy to blame technology for kids going wrong somehow. They don’t listen or they throw a fit or whatever and boom: blame it on their chiseled-down attention spans and their deep fried cyber brains. It’s not the reality of the situation, though. There’s always something more to it than the shows on the the tube or the screens we keep staring at.

Hell, me and you, we grew up before all of this stuff came along. And we’re as guilty as anyone for being sucked into it.

So yeah, the kids will be fine as long as we are, too.

But that one’s still up in the air.

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I Bought Into the Instant Pot Craze — and Yes, It Really Is Magical

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There’s a high probability that you first heard about the Instant Pot phenomena some time around the holiday shopping season last year, after it started bombarding your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter feeds. That’s how I ended up buying one — and joining a semi-intense cult of culinary connoisseurs.

It all started after a friend from the U.K. posted about a crazy Black Friday deal Amazon was having on the Instant Pot, and listed a bunch of reasons why she had fallen in love with hers. I’d heard of it before, but after reading my friend’s post, I decided to check out this gastronomic “miracle” for myself. The majority of the 15,000 Amazon reviews it had already racked up were positive, but what really struck me was how passionately people felt about this slow cooker/pressure cooker hybrid.

I decided to take the plunge. (Though, okay, in the interest of full disclosure here, I might have initially purchased the IP as my mom’s Christmas present — but knowing she would be traveling all of January, I figured I could be a dutiful daughter and break it in for her!)

For those of you still wondering what exactly an Instant Pot is, here’s a quick rundown: It’s a 7-in-1 multi-functional electric cooker that acts as a pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, yogurt maker, steamer AND warmer. Oh, and it can also sauté. (Got all that?)

In other words, it’s magic.

The thing that really caught my eye, though, was the pressure cooker part. I’ve always wanted to use one ever since I first started experimenting in the kitchen — and heard it could cook meat in only a fraction of the time it takes to cook on the stove — but I was too freaked out by all the warnings my mom gave me about its potential hazards growing up.

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For me, all the word-of-mouth praise — and those glowing Amazon reviews — was enough to have me hooked. And according to a recent story by NPR, I was far from alone. In fact, most of Instant Pot’s viral success owes itself to the word-of-mouth campaign launched by its many fans, and not in fact to any major marketing dollars. (If that’s not a major selling point alone, I don’t know what is.)

Do I sometimes feel like I joined some kind of underground cooking cult? Yep. But is the hype worth it? Totally.

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No commercials, no print marketing … just the authentic praise of amateur cooks everywhere. Needless to say, the IP has become the No. 1 best-selling cooker on Amazon. But the fandom doesn’t just end there. A quick search on Facebook reveals a seemingly endless number of Instant Pot communities, with the largest one having more than 300,000 members. (And please, just check out the comments — they’re an enthused bunch!) Thanks to these groups, there are literally thousands, if not millions, of rabid fans at your fingertips who are willing to invest time and expertise in guiding you towards falling in love with your very own cooker, and sharing their best recipes.

Do I sometimes feel like I joined some kind of underground cooking cult? Yep. But is the hype worth it? Totally.

And I think most moms who’ve given the IP a try would agree. Because if there’s anyone who loves a convenient cooking gadget that makes dinner way less of a headache, it’s us.

Here are 5 of my favorite parts about it …

It’s safe – If the thought of a pressure-cooker scares the crap out of you (as it does me), rest assured, the IP comes with 10 separate safety mechanisms that make it much safer than its predecessors.
It’s quick – I can cook frozen meat in 20 minutes flat — and same goes for flavorful stock, lentils, or dry chickpeas. TWENTY MINUTES, PEOPLE!
It offers you tons of variety – You don’t have to be a culinary genius to get creative with your IP. From eggs to cheesecakes, if you Google it, chances are someone has tried making it in an IP.
You don’t have to babysit it – I can put all the ingredients in the pot, set the timer, and leave. I don’t have to keep coming back again and again to stir or fuss over the food. And I LOVE that.
It’s dishwasher-friendly! — Less dishes = happy mom. Need I say more?

The amount of recipes you can find online are pretty unbelievable. I’m always surprised by how creative people are, and though I haven’t tried anything too complicated yet, my absolute two favorite recipes were this delicious red lentil chili and butter chicken curry.

So there you have it — after about a month of using the IP so far, I’ve become unapologetically obsessed … have you?

To My Daughter, Who Spent Her 8th Birthday Marching for Equality

Violet (left) and her friend, Josie, at the Women — Violet (left) and her friend, Josie. (Image Source: Monica Bielanko)

Hey there, Violet.

I’m writing this in your chair at the kitchen table. It seemed like the right place. This is where you have your Cinnamon Toast Crunch every morning. This is the place where you draw in your doodle books and play Animal Jam on my computer.

I’m sitting where you sit, glancing at all the stuff on the walls, at the construction paper portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. that you made when you were in Kindergarten. I love that thing so much. I hung it in our kitchen, but that’s only because I didn’t want the big museum people to spot it. If they ever do, I know they’re going to want to hang it up in their vast halls, between the Monets and the Renoirs and all.

I’m inches away from the cheap flowers in the big Mason jar in the center of the table. The ones that I always tell you guys not to mess with so you don’t tip the water out and fry the TV remotes I keep sitting there. It’s a dumb place to stash them, I guess, but hey: it’s better than losing them down in the canyons of the couch.

Everything I see right now reminds me of you. Of your smile that shoots through heart like sugar lightning. Of your tears that plop down on the scuffed old linoleum and make me grab you and pull you tight. I see spots where I have stood and hollered at you for crazy crap you’ve done. Or maybe even when you hadn’t done much at all, but Dad was tired and worn out and hangry.

All of it, all of my world, from this old kitchen straight through the front door and on up the road — straight up to the mountain tops where the eagles and the wild turkeys and the deer look down on our town — it all makes me think of you, kid. I see the sun shining certain days and before long you cross my mind.

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I can’t believe you’re 8 years old now. I can’t wrap my head around it all that well. Yesterday I held you in my arms as your mom and me looked at each other in the hospital room where you were born. It was the 21st of January, 2009. We had the TV on while you were landing in this world. We were watching the first African-American man ever to be elected U.S. President be sworn in. You were born in the middle of that magic moment.

That staggers me. It seems almost too good to be true. Your mom and me, our lives were changing for the infinite better at the very same time that the world was, too. I know I’ve told you that story a million times already. (Haha, I guess I’ll never stop.)

We’ve both raised you so far to be someone born on love and reared on empathy … you long ago proved to us that you have a shining spirit and a legendary heart.

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This year, your birthday was pretty special too, huh? And I knew it would be: As soon as the Women’s March on Washington was announced a few months ago, your mom wanted to take you.

“It’s her BIRTHDAY!” she said to me. “Do you realize how unreal and cool that is that we can march together on her birthday?!”

She was so excited about the prospect of it all, and so was I.

We’ve both raised you so far to be someone born on love and reared on empathy. You took to that right away. Beyond any hope or loose game plan we might have had for you, you long ago proved to us that you have a shining spirit and a legendary heart.

You ask all the right questions about life, about people, and what’s important when it comes to peace and equality. You get upset at all the injustice that comes across your young radar. And, best of all, you seem to think that you can make a difference in this sad, beautiful world just by being a cool person to everyone you meet. You seem to think that kindness and smiling and including kids you don’t even know in your games at the park can somehow help change the world in some way or another.

Do you know what that does to your Mom and me? I know you really don’t, kiddo, and that’s totally fine. Let me give you a hint though, okay?

It allows us, through all the strange and difficult times of divorce and blues that have come down these past few years, to understand that we have been luckier than we ever dreamed possible. Because of you. Because of Violet, who’s turning 8.

You know, as your proud dad, I picture you in there someday. All up in that White House … President Violet.

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Down to DC you went on Saturday, to march your march. You took your time, too. You held on to Mom’s hand and went with the spectacular flow of women (and men and children!) from all over the world who right there with you. You looked at all the different faces moving alongside you, and smiled your epic smile at as many as you could. Heard their words as you moved through their chatter and picked up on the positive pure human electricity that comes along at times like these.

I picture in my mind where you marched, mere blocks from the White House, your whole life ahead of you, and my heart nearly explodes with love and hope.

You know, as your proud dad, I picture you in there someday. All up in that White House.

President Violet.

I really do.

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I’m sitting here in your seat at the kitchen table right now, baby, but if I close my eyes I can imagine me sitting there in that Oval Office chair: I’m spinning and spinning around and giggling and crying my old man eyes out.

And there you are, saying, “Dad, STOP! You’re embarrassing me! Go get ready for the ball tonight!”

I won’t stop, though. No, no, no. Just a few more spins for a proud papa. Just a few more teary laughs for a guy who knew all along that there was magic in his little girl’s heart.

Happy Birthday, kid.

I love you.

March on.

Jan 20, 2017

Mom Celebrates Daughter’s First Period by Throwing an Epic “Period Party”

Getting your period for the first time can be pretty terrifying if you have no idea what to expect.

I should know: I got mine when I was 12 and was completely horrified by the whole event. I can still vividly remember making the discovery one night in the bathroom, and thinking that surely some mistake must have been made.

When I finally mustered up the courage to poke my head out the door and call to my mother, my little sister overheard and promptly ran around the house yelling, “KAITLIN GOT HER PERIOD!” … over and over again. Before I knew it, my entire family was crowded around the bathroom door.

See? When you’re 12, periods can be embarrassing.

But they shouldn’t have to be.

Case in point: Last week, Florida mom Shelly Lee welcomed her 12-year-old daughter Brooke into womanhood by throwing her a full-on “period party” — complete with gifts (aka a stockpile of tampons, pads, and other accoutrements) and a cake (decorated in red icing, of course). And it wasn’t mortifying at all.

Shelly told Buzzfeed that she got the idea after seeing that Brooke was anxious about having her period. “I wanted to make this event a little more fun!” she shared.

And that she did.

Shelly even went the extra mile to bake a chocolate cake since she knew it had “serotonin in it to help her with Brooke’s first period.”

(Talk about forethought.)

Brooke’s little period party might have just stayed a funny family story had it not been for her friend and cousin, 17-year-old Autumn Jenkins, who found the whole thing pretty hilarious.

Turns out, she wasn’t the only one — on January 9, Autumn tweeted photos of the party along with the caption, “Brooke started her period today & my family is super extra.” To date, it has over 7.2K retweets and 15K likes.

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@autumn1shea I love this omg more __parents need to be open and supportive about things like this!! 🙂

— Libra Queen (@marinayeee) January 13, 2017

@autumn1shea I love this. A lot of people scare away from menstruation and dont give proper information that girls need. Shes got a good team around her

— Desy (@iBECREEPINNNNN) January 14, 2017

The positive response to Lee’s “period party” was overwhelming, with many commenters sharing that girls don’t often get the proper information or support about their periods from the get-go. Others called out the ongoing taboo that’s surrounded periods since … well, basically the dawn of time.

And it’s true: In the last few years, we’ve heard a lot about period shaming — in fact, it’s part of why NPR called 2015 “The Year of the Period.” But finally, the conversation is shifting towards why we need to end it.

Kicking things off was Kiran Ghandi, the Harvard MBA student and drummer for M.I.A. who made headlines in April 2015 when she ran the London Marathon while “free-bleeding.” Plenty of online commenters called her “disgusting” for the decision, but as Ghandi later told PEOPLE, she did it to raise awareness about the many women throughout the world who are not only shamed for having their periods, but also forced to live without basic access to feminine care products.

And it worked — if for no other reason than sparking a conversation on a larger scale.

“The fact that we’ve been able to talk about periods openly is the biggest step in the revolution,” Gandhi told NPR. “So many people are weighing in about the problems they currently face with their periods. It makes people empowered to speak about their own bodies.”

We still have a ways to go — both abroad and at home — when it comes to period shaming, but it’s nice to see small signs that things are getting better for the next generation of girls.

Now only if we could all get chocolate cakes made for us every month …

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All of Our Children Have the Right to an Equal Education

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be an article about politics. (Believe me, at this point I’m as weary of the political debates as anyone.) But I’ll tell you what this article is about: Our children, and the need to do right by them.

Unless you’ve been living in a bubble the past few days (and given the current state of affairs, who could blame you if you are), you probably heard that Betsy DeVos’s confirmation hearing for Secretary of Education was held Tuesday. But on the off-chance that you haven’t heard about the woman who will be tasked with running our country’s public education system, let’s start with her resume:

DeVos is a proponent of charter schools, vouchers, and the privatization of education.
She’s a Republican donor who, along with her family, has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the political party over the years.
She never once attended a public school, nor have her children.
She has no personal experience with federal student loans whatsoever.
She has never been a teacher or a school administrator.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

DeVos’s resume alone should be cause for concern to those who care about education — which should be all of us. But her responses during the confirmation hearing yesterday were nothing short of alarming.

First, Ms. DeVos refused to agree that guns don’t belong in schools, citing the potential threat of grizzly bears. Yep, you read that right — grizzly bears. She literally said this. (Honestly, folks, you can’t make this up.)

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Even more horrifying is the fact that she didn’t seem to understand that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is a federal law that applies to all schools that receive public funds in order to provide free and appropriate education to all students with disabilities.

You can watch the exchange she had with Senator Tim Kaine over this for yourself (it gets going around the 3:30 mark):

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In saying that states should reserve the right to decide whether or not to enforce IDEA, DeVos seemed to not only lack the understanding that IDEA is a federal law, but also the empathy and compassion for anyone with a disability.

She also refused to agree that charter schools should be held to the same level of accountability as public schools even if they receive public funds, and was utterly dumbfounded when asked about issues regarding the use of standardized tests to measure student proficiency and growth.

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No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, it seems impossible to listen to DeVos’s responses and read about her platform without weeping for our children. I personally am crying hot angry tears today — and not just for my own children, but for yours as well. Because regardless of your beliefs (political or otherwise), these are children we are talking about and they all deserve a fair chance in life. And so much of that starts with their education.

All children have the right to quality education. PERIOD.

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Public education is not a political issue; it’s a moral issue. It isn’t a question of Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal; it’s a question of right and wrong. It’s about the wellbeing of our children, fairness, and doing the right thing.

Look, we all want what’s best for our children, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of the right of other children to a quality education. All children have the right to quality education. PERIOD.

Buzz words like “school choice” sound great in theory, but the bottom line is that many families don’t have a choice when the system is complex and designed to help those families with the resources to better navigate its complexities.

Parents choose to send their children to private schools for a wide range of reasons — many of them wholesome and well-intentioned reasons — but the simple fact is that the privatization of education is breaking an already fractured system even more. While there are certainly some positive charter school models, in many cases, charter schools and vouchers have myriad unintended negative consequences.

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What’s more, in some states, public schools receive funding based on enrollment, which means that every student who attends a private school results in a loss of public funds for public schools. While this might not be a huge problem in affluent and upper middle class suburban neighborhoods where property tax dollars can fund the shortfall, in lower income and inner city schools this is disastrous.

There is so much upon which the nation is divided right now, and reasonable people can disagree about things like health insurance, military spending, and immigration. But if there is one thing we can all agree on, surely it is that all children — regardless of their parents’ financial situation — deserve every chance for a happy and successful life that we can give them.

Regardless of whether you choose to send your kids to public, private or charter school, we all have a stake in this and it’s time to get involved. If you’re feeling helpless about all this, don’t. Instead, act. Call your representatives. Donate money to public schools in struggling districts. Advocate for increased government funding, particularly in struggling school districts.

I'm a Single Mom Who Relies on the Affordable Care Act, and I'm Terrified to Lose It

Children are among the most innocent and vulnerable, but they are also our future. It’s in everyone’s best interest to take care of all children, not just the ones who were lucky enough to be born to __parents who can afford private school or live in a neighborhood with quality public schools. After all, there but for the grace of God go we all.

So no, this isn’t about politics anymore; it’s about basic human decency and fairness — two things I think we can all agree we could use a little more of these days.

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Jan 23, 2017

Jan 20, 2017