Culture & Race
029: Why we shouldn’t ban war play
This episode comes to us by way of a suggestion from my friend Jess, who told me she had joined an outing with some children in her three-year-old son’s preschool class. She said some of the slightly older children were running around playing that their hands were guns and shooting at each other, and the…
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028: How do children form social groups?
This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting. Click here to view all the items in this series. How social groups are formed has profound implications for what we teach our children about our culture. Professor Yarrow Dunham of Yale University tells us how we all group people…
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018: The Spiritual Child: Possibly exaggerated, conclusions uncertain
Someone in a parenting group on Facebook suggested I do an episode on The Spiritual Child, by Dr. Lisa Miller. My first thought was that it didn’t really sound like my cup of tea but I was willing to read it and at least see what it had to say. I was surprised by…
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006: Wait, is my toddler racist?
This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting. Click here to view all the items in this series. I’d always assumed that if I didn’t mention race to my daughter, if it was just a non-issue, that she wouldn’t grow up to be racist. Boy, was I wrong about…
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001: The influence of culture on parenting
Have you ever thought about how common the murder of children has been in societies we now call “Western” in the past, as well as societies all over the world today? In my naivete as a parent I figured there would be some differences in how people parent their children around the world, but I…
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