Posts by Jen Lumanlan
086: Playing to Win: How does playing sports impact children?
Individual sports or competitive? Recreational or organized? Everyone gets a trophy or just the winners? And why do sports in the first place? Granted there are some physical benefits, but don’t we also hope that our children will learn some kind of lessons about persistence and team work that will stand them in good stead…
White privilege in schools
Public schools are open to all children, no matter what their race, so where’s the privilege in schools? In this episode we’ll learn more about how even (and perhaps especially) well-meaning liberal white parents perpetuate inequalities in schools which disadvantage children from non-dominant cultures. We’ll cover the way that purportedly ‘scientific’ standardized tests perpetuate inequality,…
The Science of RIE
“Is RIE backed by scientific research?” It’s a question that comes up every once in a while among parents who use the Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) approach to raising their children, and then they all (virtually) look at each other kind of uneasily because no study has ever shown that children raised using RIE…
Six Things Parents Should Teach (and Learn!) During Black History Month
As a white parent, I feel very conflicted about wading into a debate about Black History Month. Plenty of people have argued that we shouldn’t confine our study of Black history to just one month (and that it has failed to bring about any improvement in race relations, and it wasn’t intended for White people…
Read Full PostWhite privilege in parenting: What it is & what to do about it
This episode launches a series of conversations on the intersection of race and parenting. I spent a month wading around in the psychological literature on this topic and deciding how best to approach it, and eventually decided to split it into four topics. Today we’ll dig into white privilege in parenting through a conversation with…