The Crab Chronicles

Read to Your Children and Grandchildren

Years ago a lady I worked with who had two little girls told me about a wonderful product she'd found that would "read" to her children. It was a tape recording of someone reading; basically what we would now call an audio book. I said something like "Well that's great, for when you can't read to them." She said "Oh no, you don't understand, now I don't need to read to them." I was so taken aback I couldn't think what to say.

Reading is super important. That's not a new idea. You can see lots of reasons why here and here.

"Reading aloud to kids has clear cognitive benefits. For example, brain scans show that hearing stories strengthens the part of the brain associated with visual imagery, story comprehension, and word meaning. One study found that kindergarten children who were read to at least three times a week had a “significantly greater phonemic awareness than did children who were read to less often.” And the landmark Becoming a Nation of Readers report from 1985 concluded that “the single most important activity for building knowledge for their eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”

But reading also strengthens children’s social, emotional, and character development. According to a recently published study, reading to very young children is linked to decreased levels of aggression, hyperactivity, and attention difficulties. The study’s lead author shared this insight with The New York Times, “When parents read with their children more . . . they learn to use words to describe feelings that are otherwise difficult and this enables them to better control their behavior when they have challenging feelings like anger or sadness.”

A friend of my mother's, Caroline, raised three children, and her husband read to their children every night after dinner, for many years. I think he continued that right up until the youngest went away to college. The kids didn't watch TV after dinner. Their daddy read books appropriate to their age level and maybe a little bit beyond. All three kids were honors students and I think 2 of them went on to get master's degrees.

I have a lot of happy memories of my parents and grandparents reading to me.

Clearly, reading is good for children. I wanted to throw in a few personal anecdotes, though.

My grandfather Papa Hasty loved to read children's classics to me like Heidi and Swiss Family Robinson, and I also loved a big book of old Testament stories illustrated for children. Snuggling up against him while he read to me entertained me and made me feel safe and loved. He had infinite patience and would stop and explain anything I didn't understand. My father was sort of like the energizer bunny, always running around and rarely sitting still for long, but Papa always had time to read to me. (Dad always told me bedtime stories, though.)

In third grade I had a really hard year. We moved from Augusta Georgia to Knoxville Tennessee which was really stressful for me. We didn't know anyone in Knoxville. Some of the kids said I "talked funny." One good thing that happened was that the school tested me and put me into the gifted third grade class and the teacher, Mrs. Kidder, was wonderful. Every day after lunch she would read a chapter to us from a children's classic. She introduced me to EB White (Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little) and Beverly Cleary (Ramona the Pest, The Mouse and the Motorcycle). I loved that reading time.

When I brought my son home he was 10 years old, and reading was a challenge. He was reading way ahead of grade level in Kazakstan, his birth country. He learned English pretty quickly after he got here in 2007. About 2 years after he got here, though, his reading comprehension scores were not where they should have been. It concerned me.

A cousin of mine who was a kindergarten teacher heard about the reading issue and sent me a wonderful gift: the first three Harry Potter books. I told Michael I was going to start reading to him every night right before bedtime, for thirty minutes. He was not enthusiastic about the idea.

The first night he fussed a bit but then settled down and we read the required time. He sat right next to me and followed along on the page. The next night he was totally cooperative. It became something we both looked forward to every evening.

We read all the Harry Potter books. He cried when we finished the last one. I tried to comfort him and I said "Maybe Ms. Rowling will write some other books you'll like." He said "Wait. You mean JK Rowling is a GIRL?!" I said well, yes. He was flabbergasted.

We went on to read a lot more books, even continuing into his high school years. Often we would read together on weekends, after school, or whenever he was bored. I loved all the books we read, particularly a series by an Irish writer, Michael Scott, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel book series. He combines historical figures with fictional characters in a fascinating way.

Even in this high-tech world, books can be a magical way of connecting with a child. Besides being good for their brains and emotional lives, reading can be really fun for you, the adult.

The Lesson for Today: read to your children and grandchildren! You won't regret it.

Like the Commercials Say, I am Becoming My Parents

Memory is a funny thing.

My father was a banker, head of a trust department for many years, and a young man named David worked for him for years. David and his wife Mary became close friends of our family. Then they moved to another city. I reconnected with David about fifteen years later and over a pleasant lunch he told me that his main memory of me and my father was that we argued about politics a lot.

I was so startled I couldn’t even respond. I had to go home and give that a good mulling over. I realized he was right. I had forgotten. My father had been dead for several years and those political arguments had receded in my memory, probably because I wanted to remember happier times with Dad.

Dad loved Ronald Reagan. I did not. That’s all I have to say about that.

My parents loved politics and it was often a topic of discussion around our house. My parents didn’t just “talk the talk” though, they really “walked the walk.” They would volunteer to go work for candidates. They went to dinners where you had to pay to get in, and the money went to a particular candidate. We were middle class and lived within our means so they didn’t contribute a ton of money to the Republican party but they did contribute. We got Christmas cards from the Bush family for years.

I never thought about it except to think that I would never allow myself to be swept away by either party. I always try to evaluate every candidate and vote for the person, not the party. My parents were exasperated by that, but they never criticized me openly about it because they knew I was trying to do what was right. My father’s often heard dictum was “Do the RIGHT thing, always!” [I was startled years later by the title of the Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing, but it is a great title.]

My point is that we don’t have to be like our parents, whether they are middle-class suburban white Republicans, or Yellow Dog Democrats. [By definition, a yellow-dog Democrat is willing to vote for any Democratic candidate even if it’s a yellow dog. I always thought that was a weird image, the swearing in of the yellow dog…]

Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, our parents influence us throughout our lives, in obvious ways and in subtle ways.

My mother found men with fat fannies utterly revolting. I could never date a man with a big butt, and it’s her fault. I myself have a large rear end but it’s okay on a woman -- or so I was taught. (Mom was right, though. If I had married and had children with a big-butted man our children would have had enormous butts and likely would have had trouble finding pants that fit, and life partners..)

My dad never trusted a man with his hands in his pockets. He told all his employees at the bank he better not catch them with their hands in their pockets. To him, a banker with his hands in his pockets was a shifty character. To this day, I rarely ever put my hands in my pockets, except to fish out my phone.

My mother was raised by my Memaw, and Memaw was a terrible snob, which she passed on to Mom. I didn’t really understand that until I started bringing home friends from school (and later dates) and Mom would always ask them “What does your father do?” If the answer was “My dad’s a banker/lawyer/doctor/engineer/store manager etc. that was fine. If the answer was something like “I don’t know. He likes to sit around the house and watch sports but my mom works” my mother’s eyebrow was instantly cocked and loaded into an inverted “V” and I got the stinkeye. I once brought home a guy I was seeing and Mom asked him what his father did when he was growing up. He replied “I don’t really know… I think he was a salesman?” That, combined with the fact my date didn’t put his napkin in his lap for the entire meal meant I never went out with him again. My parents thinly-veiled looks of pity are seared into my memory.

Dad would never, ever, allow a sign in his yard or a bumper sticker on his car, period. I don’t either, except for the For Sale sign that was in front of my house recently. However, when I was in my early 20’s I laughed when my friends put a bumper sticker on my VW Rabbit that said “If it swells, ride it!” with an ocean wave in the background. My father did not think it was funny. He asked me to remove it. I refused.

Mom had a very low opinion of women who couldn’t cook. Her mother was a wonderful cook, and Mom became an excellent cook after she married Dad. However, I’ve heard Mom say a million times “Well, she always looks nice, but she cannot cook a thing.” That was the equivalent of saying “She wasn’t raised right and her heart’s not right with Jesus!” It didn’t matter if the dad was the cook in the home and he liked doing it. Mom thought all females should at least be able to put a decent meal on the table. I have always been puzzled when confronted with a female who doesn’t cook, but the big difference is that I berate myself every time I have an unkind thought about a non-cooking gal, and Mother felt no such compulsion. She would sneer “She brags about not cooking!” in the same disgusted tone she might have said “That fella just ran over his mama at the Winn Dixie!”

Dad never bought a brand-new car in his life, right from a car dealer. He thought that was the height of stupidity, because cars lose their value so quickly. When Dad had been dead about a year I went to a car lot and bought a brand-new shiny black Honda Civic. I was inordinately proud of that car. It was so much more fun than my little used Toyota Corolla had been. I drove the Civic less than a year, and then got in a wreck and it was totaled. When I was sitting on I-285 waiting for the cops to come (I was unhurt, thankfully) I remember looking up at the sky and silently saying to Dad I know you’re up there laughing at me, but just hush! I never bought a brand-new car again and I never will, unless I win the lottery.

My parents were both highly intelligent and moral people. They broke with family tradition and became Republicans because in the 1950’s the Democratic party was the party of segregation and the Old South, which my parents found appalling. However, my father would have been completely mystified by the election of Barack Obama.

Dad would be completely puzzled by the fact that new cars today are scarce because of a shortage of computer chips. He would never have accepted Business Casual as a dress code. He would be appalled at the lack of civility in politics these days, because many of his friends and family members did not share his political views but he cherished those friendships nonetheless.

One of Dad’s favorite sayings was “He ate my barbeque but he didn’t vote for me!” which we both thought was funny – and sometimes very true. Dad hated hypocrisy in any form.

My mother outlived Dad by more than twenty years. She was always fascinated by politics, but in recent years I couldn’t get her to understand the importance of actually fact-checking outrageous political posts that popped up in her Facebook feed. Like Memaw, she struggled with the idea that not everything you read in the paper is necessarily true. I tried to explain to her that editors and producers always heavily influence content – an idea which doesn’t bother me too much – but she was horrified by that.

I try to not discuss politics or hot-button social issues with my friends, because I don’t ever agree with anyone totally, and I hate discord. Unlike my parents, I don’t find politics exciting and fun. I always hold my nose and vote for the candidate I feel will do the least harm. That’s the attitude of most of my friends.

I’m not willing to admit my parents have influenced me too much. I am an independent thinker and proud of it. However, I will grudgingly acknowledge a serious aversion to big-butted men and women who brag that they cannot cook. If I see a politician with hands in his pockets he won’t get my vote. If a candidate is seen driving a brand-new car I am disgusted. Am I proud of those terrible and unfair biases? No. I am just honest about them, which I feel is the first step to Salvation.

I am willing to acknowledge my biases and I am working on being more broad-minded. I would go so far as to posit that if all of us would seriously consider the good and bad ways our parents influenced us, the world would be a better place. Here endeth the lesson. Amen.

5 Ways to Get Kids Interested in History

I have a relative who runs a history page on Facebook and just this morning he gently chided me about commenting on a post about a former sheriff of Cobb County, in office a hundred years ago. There was nothing wrong with the original post except I thought that it would be fun to add an interesting anecdote.

This is what I commented: "I don't know if he was the sheriff, but my mom told me a funny story about a sheriff (from many years ago) who went home one day at lunch and discovered his wife in bed with another man. The sheriff pulled his gun and made them get up and march all around the square buck nekkid, while the sheriff followed behind with his loaded pistol pointed at their backsides."

Generally speaking, infidelity and public humiliation aren't necessarily funny, but then again, being marched naked around town because you were party to that infidelity is sort of funny to someone like me who has a somewhat dark sense of humor.

History is a subject most kids hate, and we need to figure out how to make it more interesting.

When I was in school I had a history teacher who really just supervised the class and gave us tests. She would hand out worksheets with lists of things -- like if we were studying the Civil War the list might say "Gettysburg / Antietam / Frederick Douglass" etc. Then we had to read the chapter, find the terms, and write down WHO WHAT and WHY IMPORTANT for each term. She rarely lectured. She let the book teach us everything. Nobody liked her. I didn't like her and I didn't like her class. I think I made an A in there, though.

In hindsight, I realize that I learned a lot that year because she forced me to read about History and actually THINK about events and people. The "why important?" aspect of each term was the one that forced me to read and re-read.

My dad loved History. I've written before about how he was able to talk about it with me and my brother and make it come alive. He would have made a wonderful teacher of History.

History is filled with interesting facts and funny stories. We need to sprinkle these in with the more boring facts so that children will remember what they are supposed to be learning.

One of my high school teachers told me Benjamin Franklin had something like 18 illegitimate children. I found that fascinating. Historians now say that number is probably incorrect, but whatever. It gave me a lot more fascination with reading about Franklin. Just now I googled that and came up with an interesting page from the University of Delaware that has a lot of fascinating facts about Franklin. It fails to mention that Franklin thought our national bird should be the turkey but that has been stuck in my head for many years.

I wrote my sophomore research paper in high school about female spies during the civil war. It forced me to read a lot about the Civil War.

 

If you have a child who isn't interested in History, here are some suggestions:

1) Seek out movies for kids that can teach them some history. Lots of parenting websites have suggestions.

2) Find pages of weird history facts and go over them with your child. Example: During the Great Depression, people made clothes out of food sacks. People used flour bags, potato sacks, and anything made out of burlap. Because of this trend, food distributors started to make their sacks more colorful to help people remain a little bit fashionable. My grandmother made little dresses for my mom out of flour sacks. If you can connect the information to the child in some way, it helps.

3) Take your child to a historic site and talk to them about why it's important. Just south of Atlanta we have the Ocmulgee Mounds National Park, for instance.They are far more likely to recall basic facts about the indigenous people who lived in the mounds as they are climbing all over them.

4) Give your child a list of historical figures and tell them to research and make a list of 5 interesting facts, then talk about the person. Reward them with a scoop of ice cream or something small.

5) Encourage your child to talk to older friends and/or relatives, and ask them three questions like

What was life like when you were growing up?

What historical events have you lived through that you can tell me about?

How has the world changed during your lifetime?

Most older people enjoy talking to kids, and if it's their grandchild they really want to pass along facts about themselves and what they've learned.

Below left, my grandfather and some of his friends during WWI. Below right, the car dealership owned by my great-grandfather.