Yes, sometimes I want to be alone. But you know what? I don't want to feel alone.
“I fell into conversation with a woman who had helped develop Montessori Letter Sounds, an app that teaches preschoolers the Montessori methods of spelling. She was a former Montessori teacher and a mother of four. I myself have three children who are all fans of the touch screen. What games did her kids like to play?, I asked, hoping for suggestions I could take home. “They don’t play all that much.” Really? Why not? “Because I don’t allow it. We have a rule of no screen time during the week,” unless it’s clearly educational. No screen time? None at all? That seems at the outer edge of restrictive, even by the standards of my overcontrolling parenting set. “On the weekends, they can play. I give them a limit of half an hour and then stop. Enough. It can be too addictive, too stimulating for the brain.” Her answer so surprised me that I decided to ask some of the other developers who were also parents what their domestic ground rules for screen time were. One said only on airplanes and long car rides. Another said Wednesdays and weekends, for half an hour. The most permissive said half an hour a day, which was about my rule at home. At one point I sat with one of the biggest developers of e-book apps for kids, and his family. The toddler was starting to fuss in her high chair, so the mom did what many of us have done at that moment—stuck an iPad in front of her and played a short movie so everyone else could enjoy their lunch. When she saw me watching, she gave me the universal tense look of mothers who feel they are being judged. “At home,” she assured me, “I only let her watch movies in Spanish.””
UNDER normal circumstances, the Border Patrol is supposed to transfer captured children out of its holding cells and into the custody of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement within 72 hours. But last year children were held for up to two weeks in Border Patrol cells with no windows to the outside, showers or recreation space, according to a report by the Women’s Refugee Commission based on interviews with 151 detained children. Some complained of inadequate food and water. One described a cell so crowded the children had to take turns lying down on the concrete floor to sleep. The lights were never turned off.
These children need our help. In recent years KIND has recruited more than 5,000 lawyers. But they are still only able to triage their limited resources; we need far more volunteers, and more law firms willing to count pro bono work toward lawyers’ billable hours.
“As both parents and teachers, we are surrounded by societal expectations around the social capacities of our children. How do we prepare the children for the world in which they live, giving them age appropriate guidance that meets their needs? How do we develop the virtues of generosity and compassion that make us fully human? How do we meet conflict healthily in our both conflict ridden and conflict averse world?”
— Social Development in the Very Young Child | Waldorf Today
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