Betzelem Elokim

A Jewish Journey Through Charlotte Mason Mother Culture

Book Review: The Darkest Dark by Astronaut Chris Hadfield

Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. How else will I afford my used book addiction? You can read my full disclosure statement here.


Today we discuss the book I’ve read approximately 35 times a day for the last week: The Darkest Dark by Astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield.

The Darkest Dark by Astronaut Chris Hadfield
The Darkest Dark by Astronaut Chris Hadfield, illustrated by the Fan Brothers

Did you know we’re in the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Moon Landing?? I’ll be honest; I didn’t. The anniversary of the launch was yesterday, July 16, with the anniversary of the landing on July 20th.

I didn’t plan to teach my toddler the moon landing, but here we are. #UnintentionalGoodParenting

I saw this book recommended on Instagram, maybe by Read Aloud Revival? I don’t think I really knew what it was about. But let me tell you, it was spot-the-hell-on for my life right now.

The day I picked this up from the library, I had been awake since 2am for the second time in two weeks with the 3yo. She’s developed a pretty serious fear of the dark, specifically robots in the dark. I myself struggled with this for a really, really long time, so I’m more than normally invested in doing it “right.” This page floored me because it was TOO REAL:

Pictured: Parent being woken up by child and face-palming in defeat and frustration.
Actual picture of my face-palm at 2am.

This book is about a family watching the moon landing in 1969, but it’s really about a little boy’s fear of aliens in the dark when he goes to bed and how the moon landing helps him overcome that fear. It has opened up so many good conversations about monsters in the dark with my 3yo, and while she is still struggling, I think this is really helping.

And bonus: it’s written by an actual astronaut. And includes a very cute pug named Albert. Only real downside I see is that every character appears to be white, but only one scene has people who appear to be outside the immediate family and they’re backlit in the dark in front of a TV screen.

Highly recommend.

Book Review: The Enchanted Hour by Meghan Cox Gurdon

Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. How else will I afford my used book addiction? You can read my full disclosure statement here.


TL;DR version: It’s a good book, worth a read. But it also has some white supremacy issues that it doesn’t handle well. I’d give it five stars if it had handled this issue better. And there’s a really nice booklist in the back. It’d have been better if the list were more fully annotated (children’s book titles aren’t very descriptive!), but you can’t have everything.

The Enchanted Hour by Meghan Cox Gurdon

The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction by Meghan Cox Gurdon

Well, now that I’ve written that summary, you’re probably like, “Uhhhh get to the second part.” Because you don’t just make a statement like that lightly.

Let me be clear: I’m not making that statement lightly. I think this is a serious issue, and I think that pretending the issues in this book are not a big deal is part of the problem in our society at large and in this book on a more micro-scale.

And I’ll also be clear that I think this is completely unintentional on the part of the author. That’s exactly why it’s a problem: this is an issue in the structure of our society that this book will unintentional reinforce. Say it with me: even good people can do racist things, even good people can unintentionally support white supremacy. Racism, and white supremacy more broadly, are not the realm of solely “bad people.” We have breathed this in since birth, and it is really hard to deprogram, and you probably will never deprogram it all even if you live a very long time. Every antiracist advocate, especially the white ones, is fighting this battle every single day, and we will all make mistakes. I think this author really thought she was giving good advice to prevent racism in kids. But she wasn’t. Bigotry is measured by impact, not intention. Intention is, quite frankly, irrelevant.

The Big Picture

Overall, the book is good. It’s about the value of reading aloud to children, even those who are proficient readers, but also delves into why reading aloud is good for humans of all ages. Specifically there’s a lot of nice content about reading aloud to the elderly or infirm. But I bet it’s going to preach to the choir rather than convert many people. Still, it’s good chizuk for those who already value reading and maybe help them/us read aloud a little more. For lack of a better term in English, chizuk means it gives you strength, supporting you. I’m just skeptical that someone who doesn’t already read to their kids regularly is going to pick up this book. But I’d love to be proven wrong.

The Problems:

In a nutshell, here is the problem. She talks a lot about how to handle “problematic” books, specifically those that we now socially recognize as racist or having racist content (yay progress of a sort). Her “solution” is simple: read it anyway because it’s good literature and talk about it with your kids. Racism: solved! My problem with this answer is two-fold:

  1. She doesn’t acknowledge at all the idea that the racist or other bigoted comments might apply to the children involved. Where is the advice to parents when the language applies to the kid hearing it? This advice only acknowledges the issues of white parents of white kids. It is a huge, massive, yet not surprising, blind spot.
  2. The answer is that parents should talk about it with their kids, but studies (and my life experience) show that white people do. not. talk. about. race. Even more so with their kids. And going back to the first problem, it ignores the fact that parents of color and all minority-group parents (Jews, LGBT, Muslims, whatever) have to have these conversations whether we want to or not, at least when it applies to our group. Plenty of parents ARE having these conversations, but that’s not who it sounds like she’s talking to. Parents in minority groups don’t have to be told to talk about problematic content; that’s a basic survival strategy. It is a fundamental part of white privilege to be able to choose to skip these conversations. People without privilege don’t have the choice.

Let’s talk about this in more detail.

Her solution doesn’t take into account kids who are the subject of the dehumanizing language. And let’s be clear: bigoted language is, at its very heart, dehumanizing. That is its purpose in the philosophy of white supremacy. Her characterization of the problem is very detached: these are ideas we don’t want to expose our kids to. But what if you’re a Native American reading Little House on the Prairie, a text she gives as an example of great literature you shouldn’t put aside because of problematic content? Her writing seems clearly, to me at least, to be addressed to white parents of white kids. I doubt she intended to do that, but that’s the insidious nature of the white supremacy ideas we’ve breathed in since birth in America: white is the default and it’s rare for people, particularly white people, to remember or even see that there’s a different perspective on an issue. She only sees it from her own perspective.

The talk she’s advocating is this:

“We do children no service in cutting them off from transcendent works of the imagination, even if it means introducing them to troublesome ideas and assumptions, and to characters we would rather they not admire [do minority kids risk admiring characters who dehumanize them??]. Like life itself, literature is unruly. It raises moral, cultural, and philosophical questions. Well, where better to talk about these things than at home? The human story is messy and imperfect. It is full of color and peril, creation and destruction – of cruelty and villainy, prejudice and hatred, love and comedy, sacrifice and virtue. We needn’t be afraid of it. It’s foolish to cover it up and pretend history never happened [she forgets: and is still happening and affecting lives today]. It is far better to talk about what we think of these matters with our children, using books as a starting point for conversation.”

“Great art has often been made by bad people,” says the writer and provocatreuse Camille Paglia. “So what?” p172 (emphasis mine)

There are so many problems here, and it goes to both of the issues I identified above. It’s one thing to talk these issues over as a philosophical/history tale. It’s another to read Shylock to your child when you’re actually Jewish. Or about “bloodthirsty savages” when you’re Native American. Or the many and varied horrible stereotypes of Black people. Or any other group you can imagine. Those words dehumanize the child sitting in front of you. And this book has zero advice for how a parent should handle that situation, when the kid says, “But Mommy, I’m not like that. Are we bad people?” Does that work still feel “transcendent” to you when it says dehumanizing things about you? This is a huge problem facing so many parents in America, but this book completely ignores the problem and focuses on the perspective of a white parent of a white child. I certainly have no idea how to answer my child when we will inevitably come across casual antisemitism in a book, and some advice would be great, honestly.

But the biggest point of all: it’s been proven again and again that white parents do. not. discuss. race. White fragility strikes even the best of us. We literally begin to sweat, our hearts race, we may even shake from the anxiety of it. I still do, every single time I talk or write about race. My body physically tries to stop me from doing antiracist work, that is how deep white supremacy goes…into your very bones. But if you’re not actively doing antiracist work in your own life and social circles, then you are part of the problem. White supremacy does not need you to be actively racist. It just needs you to be complacent, even better if you’re “overly polite,” as I used to describe myself. (One of the best things you can do as a white person is read White Fragility by Beverly DiAngelo.)

The same liberal “I’m one of the good ones” white parents who will openly challenge the gender roles books portray, or even religious stereotypes, will either skip these books entirely or read them without real commentary. Maybe, at best, a “that’s not a nice thing to say about X people.” Then quickly move on to something else. Ask me how I know.

The book NurtureShock has a whole chapter on this that’s excellent. And it gives the best example that I remember seeing in real life so many times. I even have a vague memory of it from my own childhood. A white toddler in a grocery store points at a Black person and says, “Mommy, that person’s skin is brown!” The mother says, “Shush!” and maybe “I’m sorry!” to the other person, then pushes the cart away as quickly as physically possible with a broken, squeaky wheel. Red-faced embarrassment all the way to the door. It teaches the child a) we don’t talk about race and b) that the other person should be embarrassed to have brown skin and it’s unspeakable enough that we should apologize to them for it being pointed out. I have repeatedly heard white people say that’s not what that reaction means, that the kid was just impolite. Y’all. People in minority groups talk about the segments of society all the time. Do you know how many times a day I hear “Is that person Jewish or not Jewish?” from my toddler? Kids of color ask similar questions about the various shades of skin color. There’s nothing impolite or shameful about it unless you act like it is, and that is acting like it is shameful. WASP “politeness” is one of the most powerful tools of white supremacy. (And leads to tone policing.)

That’s overwhelmingly how white people deal with racial conversations in our society, particularly with children who “embarrass us” in public, and it’s how I thought you were supposed to handle those questions! That, friends, is the white supremacist ideology that we breathe like air. NurtureShock was the book that taught me that race must be spoken about openly, matter-of-factly, and frequently. And that non-white parents were already doing this all. the. time. It was really my first “anti-racist book,” even though it’s just one chapter of a much larger book. (The whole book was great, highly recommend.) It was the first book recommended to me by a friend who helpfully (as shocked as I was at the time) pointed out that I had perpetuated white supremacy in a conversation and that it was my responsibility to educate myself. White parents, this is your responsibility too.

Having converted to Judaism as an adult, I see similar minority-majority group discussions in my community and my parenting, though it does come up less frequently because we are white and move through most of American society as white people (my personal white privilege has a lot of intersections with antisemitism but also Islamaphobia since I cover my hair – a practice of many orthodox married women – with a headscarf).

But wait, there’s more!

Now, even after detailing these issues with the book, there’s still another issue. Just reading racist or other bigoted texts to your kids creates implicit bias. The subconscious bias. I can’t recommend the new book Biased enough. My take-away from that (this was my own take-away, not something she said) has been that I need to avoid problematic texts as much as possible until my kids are really old enough to understand and interact with my explanation of it. We see professional advice about avoiding “scary” educational lessons like “climate change might kill us all” until around the fourth grade. Yet we think we’re going to solve the active racism in Little House on the Prairie with our 5 year olds before bed? Really now.

They will get enough exposure to bigoted stereotypes without my help, so I must actively work against this atmosphere of white supremacy and introduce my kids to actively non-bigoted works to make other groups seem, quite frankly, boring and normal. Not amazing super-people. Just everyday people going about life like we do. But it’s still a fine line. Biased goes into research on how positive portrayals of Black characters on TV actually managed to reinforce subconscious negative racial stereotypes anyway. That’s FUBAR.

And that’s before you deal with the lessons unintentionally given when most of your books are populated solely by white drawings, which is another issue the book fails to address. If you sit down and actually count, you would be surprised how many books don’t even have a token person of color in the background (which is a different problem). Instead, the author actively advocates adding more “diverse” books, but should you also be evaluating the number of white-only and white-dominated books you already have? How many books do you have where there are no white characters? (And more broadly, how often are you in situations where white people are not the majority of the people in the room?) That’s the necessary flipside of the “diverse books” question. Diverse books aren’t like an extracurricular add-on activity you do in addition to school, it should be the default of your book collection. And yes, that means you can’t stock every “great book” you see recommended on Facebook because doing so will make your collection way too white. You will have to pick and choose if this is really important to you. And if it’s not important to you, then you need to know that you are perpetuating white supremacy to the next generation.

We’re kind of hosed living in this literal fog of white supremacy that clouds over all our interactions and yes, just about all our books. The best thing white parents of young children can do is to de-segregate your life because odds are that most of you (and me) have lived and are living lives entrenched in (unintentional by you, but very intentional by our history and social structures) segregation. And for more on that, definitely check out Raising White Kids by Jennifer Harvey.

So in other words…

This author’s argument not only fails, it will compound the issue she claims to be solving (did she really think it would be so easy??) and actually make it worse. White parents will feel they have the green light to read problematic texts, with the full good intention of discussing the problems, then they either chicken out in the moment or discuss it in a way that actually makes the problem worse. And the author does not seem to have any of these issues on her radar at all. It would be one thing if she acknowledged them and even said, “you know, I don’t have an answer for that.” Minority parents’ experiences and needs are erased by this book and her answer will unintentionally reinforce another generation of white supremacy. And she doesn’t even know it. Which is kind of the problem of white supremacy and white fragility.

And what books does that leave to read to our younger kids? That’s a different question, and I don’t have great answers. I’m muddling through that myself. And being perfectly honest, I’m usually not thrilled with the literary quality of works that actively try to avoid these issues. And of course, some may actually compound the issue by trying to avoid it. Because…white supremacy. It has its dirty little fingers in everything.

Further Reading:

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Beverly DiAngelo

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do by Jennifer Eberhardt

Book Review: Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn

Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. How else will I afford my used book addiction? You can read my full disclosure statement here.


Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn is essential Charlotte Mason reading. Full stop.

You need to read it.

I liked it so much that I bought a copy. It’s definitely a “reread periodically as a reminder” book.

I originally read the older version but bought the 25th Anniversary version. There are lots of used copies, and quite affordable.

A must for your parenting library.

You might even learn something about yourself along the way. I love that the book focuses on three areas: parenting, school, and the workplace.

Further Reading:

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck: the book that established the now well-established field of growth versus fixed mindsets, your perspective on your potential, intellect, and abilities. Her work is foundational for Kohn’s work here, and it’s also required Charlotte Mason reading.

Book Review: Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery

Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. How else will I afford my used book addiction? You can read my full disclosure statement here.


Have you had negative experiences with the medical profession? You’re not alone. Is it the fault of individual doctors who are bad people? No, this is a structural, institutional problem that goes down as far as medical research itself (or the lack thereof).

You should read this: Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery.

Doing Harm by Maya Dusenberry
Doing Harm by Maya Dusenberry

Because it’s not just you.

And somehow, reading this was very healing. I have had issue after issue after issue for most of my life, and I couldn’t figure it out. Was it my fault? Was I not explaining myself well enough? Was that one doctor just an a-hole who hates women? Was that other doctor just a different kind of a-hole? I used to think I must be imagining my problems, but then I finally got a diagnosis of PCOS after 18 years of actively complaining one or more times a year to doctor after doctor.

And that’s not the worst thing I suffered. As a child, because of my PCOS, I ended up visiting the gynecologist much earlier than anticipated, at 12. He decided to put me on birth control because doctors have consistently not cared about my symptoms of PCOS, just throwing birth control at the symptoms rather than finding the cause. (Over a year of infertility was the only thing that finally convinced a doctor to locate a cause. It felt acutely like they only cared about my childbearing abilities, not my day-to-day life – seeing me as an incubator not a person.)

But this being the South and him apparently being a religious man concerned about the sexual liberation of teenage women, he flat-out made up facts about my body and told me I was infertile and worse, could never have a sexual relationship without immense pain and possibly paralysis. That my womb’s position meant it would smack my spine with every thrust of sex. I didn’t find out he was lying until I was in college. I spent all my formative years imagining a life without ever having a romantic relationship or children.

That is a large part of why I had such a hard time getting married and having children. I literally had no concept of my life involving them and had spent so many years training myself to not want those things. Ironically, my mother had also been told as a child she could not have children (no idea why and she had already died by the time I learned this about myself) and she convinced herself that she hated children, only to be surprised by having one many years into her marriage. But growing up “knowing” you’re infertile was far worse in the TN of the 1960s than in the 1990s/2000s. She had to convince herself that she hated kids. I just had to convince myself they’re scary and ignore them, which our society has made so easy to do. (Children and the elderly are shockingly invisible in our society.)

That doctor was not just a lone a-hole, though he’s certainly a special one. He’s part of a larger system and society that dehumanizes and objectifies women and our bodies (even female children’s!).

Gdwilling these discussions will continue and break open this broken system and society so that we can all get the medical care we need and deserve. Healthcare is a fundamental human right that we should be prioritizing if we claim to believe all people are made in the image of Gd. Sexism and racism and fatphobia and transphobia in the medical world, above and beyond the individuals working in it, literally kills people.

Read this book. Get angry. Speak up.

Book Review: The Grapes of Math by Alex Bellos

Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. How else will I afford my used book addiction? You can read my full disclosure statement here.


Do you, a non-math person, want to learn to appreciate math and even find it beautiful?

This is your book: The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life by Alex Bellos.

The Grapes of Math by Alex Bellos

One of my goals this year is to develop an appreciation for math and understand more of the math around us as I begin “teaching” math to my almost-preschooler. How can I point out these math ideas around us when so much early math isn’t what I think of as “math”?? I had no idea math includes concepts like “bigger/smaller” or matching. So I wanted to find a book that would help me see math in everyday life.

This book may not be exactly what I was looking for, but it’s full of so many “WOW” moments that it’s definitely giving me an excitement about math.

He says his other book, Here’s Looking at Euclid, is more abstract math. This is the practical, everyday stuff.

No lie, the concepts can still be hard sometimes for me to understand. And I have to read it only at times when I can give it 110% attention because of that. But it’s always worth it, and I generally don’t need to understand it exactly to get the point, so to speak.

I’m only about halfway through, but this is truly a Charlotte Mason-worthy “living book,” a literary-quality book written by a passionate expert who is talented at conveying the beauty and fascinating qualities of his subject.

Is this specific to early years math? No. But it’s making me think math and mathematical ideas might just be beautiful.

It’s funny to boot, but in the way his other book’s title is funny: Here’s Looking at Euclid. If you think that’s funny, you’ll probably like this book.

Further Reading:

I also read Everyday Calculus by Oscar Fernandez, but it was too high-level for me. However, I would highly recommend it for someone in the process of learning calculus.

Book Review: Home Is Where the School Is by Jennifer Lois

Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. How else will I afford my used book addiction? You can read my full disclosure statement here.


I’ve been learning a lot about emotional labor over the last couple of years, so when someone (I wish I could remember where!) mentioned a book with both homeschooling and emotional labor right in the title, you know I jumped all over that. My library system even had a copy! What luck!

And that’s how I came to read Home Is Where the School Is: The Logic of Homeschooling and the Emotional Laboring of Mothering by Jennifer Lois.

Home Is Where the School Is by Jennifer Lois
Can we talk about how perfect this cover art is?

The TL;DR version: interesting, provocative, but fundamentally an academic work. Not the pop psychology book I expected. But worth a read if the topic interests you.

It was a bit hard to read at times. It was just so…academic. The title and cover had me expecting a more layman-focused book, and maybe this was intended for laymen, but it was a slog at times, no matter how interesting the underlying concepts were. You have to cross your Ts and dot your Is, and that means detailed discussions of study methodology.

I also never really figured out what the “the logic of homeschooling” part of the title meant, and that bothered me. Referring to the reasons why people, mothers really, choose to homeschool? Because that’s the primary question. So I guess that’s what it means?

That was perhaps the most should-have-been-obvious-but-wasn’t idea for me: classifying mothers based on the reasons they decided to homeschool and seeing whether their reasons impacted their homeschooling experience and their satisfaction with it. Specifically, she was able to catalog the mothers as first-choice and last-resort homeschoolers (I believe the exact phrase was different, but I had to give the book back to the library before I wrote this!). It makes me rethink myself. Am I considering homeschooling as my first educational choice or is this just because this is the best option I have? Would I choose to homeschool even if I loved the dayschool system and specifically the day schools available to me, and money were no object?

I can’t answer that question. Both I guess? I’m not sure many parents committed to a religious-school education could really answer that because of the intervening issues of finances and religious education. How many of us can really say that money is no object and that we adore the religious schools available to us? But especially the money aspect. The preschool programs available to me, just a half-day program, cost over $10k per year per child. No matter what a good job I think they’re doing, and I do believe they are, how would I afford that PLUS another several thousand for childcare during the rest of business hours? Because I would not be staying at home any more if I had that bill to pay. And certainly not for 2 kids (or 4, which seems to be about the average family size in the Modern Orthodox community).

The choices just aren’t so simple when your alternative isn’t the “free” local public school (admitting that public school is not nearly as free as portrayed). 

But the question and the framework are useful, and they have helped me spot issues I might face going forward (and face a little now). It gave me a lot to think about, and was a very interesting discussion even if some parts were a bit slow. If you’re a real nerd about homeschooling, I recommend this book. If you aren’t, I don’t think you’ll miss anything by not reading it.

Book Review: Before Morning by Joyce Sidman

Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. How else will I afford my used book addiction? You can read my full disclosure statement here.


On Facebook, I saw a post asking for recommendations for good winter picture books. What a great question, I thought! Being a good book nerd, I scoured through the recommendations and found a few to request through my library’s app. Technology is really amazing sometimes.

One of the books I requested is Before Morning by Joyce Sidman and illustrated by Beth Krommes.

Before Morning by Joyce Sidman, illustrated by Beth Krommes

It’s interesting because I really like it, yet I also don’t know how to read it. So it’s a little complicated for me.

My problem is that not all the pages have words. Or as few as two words. My toddler finds this unacceptable.

“Read it!”

“There aren’t any words/aren’t any more words.”

“Read it, Ima.”

“There aren’t any words here. Look, birds! And snowflakes!”

I think the illustrations are beautiful and intricate and provide a lot to talk about, but I guess I’m too used to a more structured book. It’s almost worse on the earlier pages, which are illustrated fully like a normal page but have copyright info or the dedication, for example. I normally don’t read those parts, but we usually can skip those pages entirely. They don’t look like the rest of the book. But when I tell the toddler there’s nothing to read there but it’s part of the narrative, she is frustrated. There are obviously words there.

Bonus points for the mother being a pilot (and the subtle placement of copies of a book about Amelia Earhart around the house).

And more bonus points for making their house look as “real” and “homey” (meaning messy) as mine.

Beautiful and realistic, plus the beautiful outdoor winter scenes.

I definitely recommend Before Morning. But maybe you guys can tell me how to better read such a lightly structured book?

Book Review: Faster than Normal by Peter Shankman

Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. How else will I afford my used book addiction? You can read my full disclosure statement here.


I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I have ADHD. And it informs the way I think about and look at everything in my life, especially when thinking about educational philosophies like Charlotte Mason. I also spend a lot of time learning more about ADHD, though much less than I did in the crazy year after I was diagnosed (about two years ago). No joke, my diagnosis changed my life. For the first time, everything, and I mean everything made sense: my work history, my romantic history, my major life decisions, my major failings, my great successes. ADHD is the thread that runs through everything in my life; it is the source of my best traits as much as my worst.

Recently, I was listening to the Chutzpah podcast and heard an episode with Peter Shankman about ADHD. Through that, I found his podcast Faster than Normal, “where we recognize that ADHD is a gift, not a curse.” That’s exactly my philosophy on ADHD, so I began binge-listening episodes here and there as topics struck me.

Eventually, an episode mentioned he has a new book by the same name: Faster than Normal. I immediately checked it out from the library.

It was decent. Everything there is good, but I think the coverage was limited, focusing primarily on what can make us more productive and better workers. There was one chapter on relationships with non-ADHD people, your partners and children. But there was little about the wider aspects of life. For instance, balancing the comorbid issues – other than addiction, which had a lot of attention – that tend to come with ADHD like learning disabilities, auditory processing issues, depression, anxiety, sexual disfunction from distraction or hypersensitivity, etc. And what if you’re not an entrepreneur? Most (all?) of this productivity/worker advice applied to knowledge workers in an office setting. The biggest problem I remember being discussed with a boss was a boss who refused to set deadlines! Who has that boss?! How do I choose a field when my ADHD makes me curious about far-flung topics? A jack of all trades and master of many has a really hard time picking a job, especially when you constantly fear that a topic might suddenly stop being so interesting. No wonder I’m drawn to writing!

And what was there for me, as a stay-at-home parent? Someone who doesn’t fit society’s “good person” criteria of being the Ideal Worker? While Shankman is a single dad who seems to have his daughter a significant amount of time, he seems less than interested in tips for parenting with ADHD and especially the emotional labor that comes with being the primary parent. Instead, this book seems written for “how to work 60+ hours a week with ADHD.” No mention of how family emotional labor is the thing my brain is least made to do: keep track of who needs to go for a checkup when and with which kind of doctor, when the air conditioner filter was last replaced, what’s the name of our plumber, how do we get a copy of the birth certificate, what’s her social security number?

An ADHD brain is barely able to take care of my own brain needs, much less be the external brain for another adult, two children, and two pets. Yay for having intense social pressure and shaming to make me keep trying and feeling horrible when I inevitably am not “perfect.” On the other hand, the intense pressure for perfection in motherhood has made the women around me understand ADHD a little better. No one brain is designed to do what we ask women to do today, though an ADHD brain is spectacularly not made for it no matter how amazing it is in other ways. But this is a double-edged sword; either they understand me better and sympathize or they’re likely to diminish or even entirely negate my struggles with “we’re all a little ADHD.”

All I got really was improve my sleep, eat good food, exercise (outside whenever possible), and eliminate choice. Good rules, but almost all the specific tips in the book don’t really apply to someone with literally zero forced structure to a day, which is when my ADHD finally broke me and I ended up diagnosed after a couple of years of absolutely floundering mental health-wise. I could go to law school, get great grades, lead student organizations, have three jobs, write for the Law Review, edit on the Law Review, have a social life, and convert to Judaism. All at the same time. Yet I couldn’t structure a life alone in a house with a baby. Combined with our society’s demand for motherhood perfection and you’re-always-doing-it-wrong-no-matter-what-you-choose, no wonder I succumbed to depression and anxiety and a total loss of my self-esteem (certainly a process begun by being laid off before children).

Further, as a more general problem, the book doesn’t really address the issues specific to women and people of color with ADHD. I knew things weren’t going to go well with the “here are famous people with ADHD who did amazing things” that is supposed to cheer you up and remind you that you too can do great things! But every person on that list is a white man. And the list pulls from history, not just people officially diagnosed today with ADHD. If that list can include Leonardo DaVinci, surely a single female and/or person of color could have been found. And how inspirational is a list like that for someone who has no aspiration to be a Richard Branson?

Writing from that millionaire-entrepreneur white male perspective, the book misses very big factors that affect the lives of people with ADHD who are not white men. And especially those who don’t aspire to the Ideal Worker model of constant work and socially-approved achievement measured in dollars and cents. A model that ignores workers are born persons, as Charlotte Mason would say, with families, friends, and interests beyond their work. People who don’t want to be “on” 24/7 and don’t aspire to the C-suite (or even if they do, recognize that they are very unlikely to get there for whatever reason).

People of color with ADHD suffer significantly more because of their ADHD. Because of subconscious racist stereotypes, hyperactivity even today is labeled being a bad kid rather than someone to refer for testing. Children of color with ADHD are more likely to be suspended than tested. Shankman writes and speaks frequently of being “three bad decisions from jail,” yet especially for children of color with ADHD, those decisions are being made for them and drastically changing their life trajectory than if they’d been tested and treated as white (particularly male) children are. Undiagnosed ADHD is almost certainly a major factor in the school-to-prison pipeline, as multiple studies have found that undiagnosed ADHD is pervasive among long-term prison inmates, just as studies have found people with undiagnosed ADHD are pervasive among addicts of all kinds. When we aren’t helped with our problems (that are made worse by a society somehow designed precisely to rub up against how our brains work), it’s no surprise when we suffer as adults from depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and are overrepresented in prison populations and addiction centers. For more, here’s a study on a prison population that found 40% of long-term inmates had ADHD and a recent expose on Georgia’s almost entirely black “separate but equal” special education school system, on top of the normal special ed classes in their mainstream schools.

Females of all races are significantly underdiagnosed and ADHD often presents differently in girls and women. He mentions that women have been underdiagnosed and that many of us get diagnosed only after our children get diagnosed, but nothing about how symptoms can present differently or be changed through gendered “discipline.” Like me, girls with ADHD often feel intense pressure to be “good girls” and avoid becoming like the “troublesome” boys with ADHD who overturn desks in class. We talk too much because of our hyperactivity, we run too much, and we get shamed for it rather than getting in “trouble.” We put our heads down, bury our hyperactivity as best we can, and think we must be lazy, crazy, or stupid (like an ADHD book of a similar name). Shame is a lot more effective than time-out, let me tell you.

Because of all these factors, I would theorize that black women are the most underdiagnosed of all groups with ADHD.

Overall, yes, I recommend Faster than Normal. Highly even. But I want you to remember that it is a limited book and you will need more sources of information and advice than this, and some of you may even find this book demoralizing because it completely ignores the issues you most face from ADHD.

Further Reading:

The Faster than Normal podcast

You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder by Kate Kelly and Peggy Ramundo

Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder by Dr. Edward M. Hallowell. This is a classic text on ADHD and he runs the Hallowell ADHD Centers in various cities, including Manhattan. I would love to go there, but commuting into the city is hard enough without also figuring out what to do with two children 2 and under (either bring them with you for Hell #1 or Hell #2, trying to hire a babysitter when you might be away for anywhere from 4-8 hours, even before you consider the breastfeeding angle). And they don’t take insurance.

I don’t know how people with ADHD are supposed to get treatment when every specialist I’ve found, in the suburbs of NYC no less, doesn’t take insurance. I can’t imagine what it’s like back in my hometown in TN, much less a rural or low-income urban area. More examples of how socio-economics affect the treatment of ADHD. So I continue reading books and self-medicating with caffeine as best I can. Insurance should really cover my Diet Dr. Pete Soda Stream habit. I still remember the horror on my midwife’s face when she found out someone “who eats so healthy” could drink so much soda. Only later did I learn caffeine is a very common unconscious way to self-medicate ADHD. Suddenly I understood why I drank 5-6 Red Bulls a day for much of law school.

The Queen of Distraction: How Women with ADHD Can Conquer Chaos, Find Focus, and Get More Done by Terry Matlen. This is the best female-specific ADHD book I’ve read so far and was one of the first ADHD books I read. Highly recommend. It’s also the only book I’ve seen discuss how ADHD can significantly affect women’s ability to orgasm. Sexual issues are rarely discussed in ADHD books and I wonder whether the authors even know they exist. Since the medical establishment has been so gung ho on learning about how women’s bodies work, especially in sexual issues. For more on that, check out Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenberry.

Well, this was sure a cheery book review. What’s your favorite ADHD or ADHD-adjacent read?

Book Review: On Mother’s Lap by Ann Herbert Scott

Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. How else will I afford my used book addiction? You can read my full disclosure statement here.


I’ll cut right to the chase: I love On Mother’s Lap. Highly recommend.

It’s a sweet and simple story about a preschooler named Michael who wants to rock in his mother’s lap with all his toys but doesn’t want to share it with his baby sister. Bonus points for being drawn from everyday Inuit life without fetishizing it, with the drawings informed by the illustrator’s experience living in an Inuit village for a short time. (Eskimo is written in the book jacket but is often considered a derogatory term today.)

The moral: “You know, it’s a funny thing, but there’s always room on Mother’s lap.”

If you have more than one child, you need On Mother’s Lap in your life.

Book Review: Raising White Kids by Jennifer Harvey

Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. How else will I afford my used book addiction? You can read my full disclosure statement here.


Some light reading, right? First White Fragility, now Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey.

This book is a must-read. It is a challenging but very necessary read.

I can’t help but compare this book to Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne. That is also a very good read I’d like to re-read again and will probably review it here.

I’d already thought about and bought into his ideas about minimizing our stuff and schedules. So the biggest take-away I took from Simplicity Parenting about a year ago was his suggestion to simplify kids’ exposure to news and other “adult” conversations. It really struck a cord with me because we were screen-free at that time except for us adults watching news over dinner. Oh yes, we break all the Good Parenting Rules and watch TV at dinner. Granted, we pause to debate frequently.

What he said resonated with me, and I knew that our nightly news would have to go sooner or later. It’s not appropriate for little ears. Spoiler alert: it probably should already be gone and isn’t.

This book threw a wrench into what I thought I knew from Simplicity Parenting.

I can’t protect my children from the world forever. Yet I can protect them from a lot of the world if I listen to Simplicity Parenting, but only because of white privilege. As I described in my review of White Fragility, I can avoid dealing with racism because I feel anxious, yet people of color with anxiety get no such reprieve. That has been the driving force for me since. This book had a similar effect on me:

Meanwhile, the reality of racial injustice raises genuinely difficult questions about what and how much to say: when to leave the radio on and when to turn it off. As one parent put it to me, “I don’t want to lie to my kids about US history and our society. But how do I talk about histories of violence – for example, what slavery or treatment of Native Americans was like? I don’t even let my eight-year-old watch violent television shows.”

How much and in what detail are, in many ways, personal parental questions that have to do with many things, including the temperment of our particular children. At the same time, just as I felt myself viscerally react to the mom who said to me, “I’m just glad she doesn’t have to worry about any of it,” I felt in the painful experience with my daughter the visceral knowledge that having chosen to allow her some heartbreak was, in fact, life-giving, humanizing, and necessary,

It’s deeply necessary we let our children’s hearts get broken a bit if they are going to remain able to recognize the humanity of their fellow humans whose lives are at stake in the system we live in. It’s necessary if they are going to grow any rooted sense of themselves as part of a larger, multiracial community of people to whom they are committed, and with and for whom they must speak out and act.

What I’m describing here goes well beyond tactical questions about teaching kids how to engage in activism. It goes beyond saying, “Well, if Black kids have to learn about police violence then so should white kids – otherwise we are just embracing white privilege.” This is certainly true, of course. But it’s a rather surface assessment of the stakes.

What I’m getting at is creating space for our kids to move into their deeply embodied relationships with injustice, as risky as that may feel. We need to create space for them to literally feel injustice and feel, touch, and ache from its real costs.

What I relearned in this painful experience with my daughters was that the entire enterprise of raising white kids for racial justice requires a difficult, vulnerable recognition: in a world where human beings are suffering from human-caused injustice and violence, the humanity of even the youngest of our children is directly tied to their ability to identify with that suffering. And our children also need to explicitly come to understand that same truth.

It’s understandable we want to protect our kids. But if we confuse finding age-appropriate ways to tell the truth about racial harm with overly insulating them, if we are too cautious because we are afraid it’s just too much, if we don’t want to cause them suffering, we withhold the very things they need to participate in deeper and more truthful ways of living. Indeed, we withhold the very things they most need to retain their humanity.

Raising White Kids, p257-258

No pressure, right?

As hard as the work will be, I’m thankful to be able to start with my kids so young. I wish I could start when I was a toddler, but now is better than tomorrow. And I’m lucky to live in a much less segregated place than the one where I grew up. As powerful as White Fragility is, this book was far more practical, though I still wanted more.

The two take-aways I had from this book:

  1. Talk about race. Stop being silent. Discuss skin colors as you would discuss hair colors or professions. Babies pay attention to skin color from before the time they can talk. And little kids also quickly realize that they’re not “supposed” to point out skin colors or race, being shushed as soon as it’s mentioned. (See the race chapter in Nurture Shock for studies.)
  2. Desegregate your life. This is a much harder project. I had chosen not to see how segregated my life has always been, despite my liberal values. This is a work in progress, but I’ve started with the two easiest parts: reading and media. Of course, I’m also continuing my way through the [free!!!] Me and White Supremacy Workbook. I’m trying to find other ways to desegregate my life, and some are in the works already, but this will be a lifetime project. Just like dismantling the white supremacy subconscious within me.

Reading: about racism and the parts of history that is still relegated to “electives” in schools as well as understanding other people’s experiences and how they differ from mine as a white person. I have a lot of catching up to do. I haven’t written about this yet, but I’m (again) doing a self-created Mother’s Education Course à la Charlotte Mason and the PNEU. One of the reading categories I included is social justice and another is biographies, focusing on people notable in the fight for social justice. (I’ve read few biographies, but I’ve twice read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and highly recommend it. I’m not sure when or why I originally picked it up, but I think of his story often.) I have never learned about most of American history. Really, have you considered how much history is missing from our educations?? And there’s a lot to learn now too about the ramifications of structural racism. There’s so much I have never seen because I was trained to not see it. It’s time to see the world from a fuller, more truthful perspective. Here are the books I’ve checked out from the library right now:

Media: I have never felt like I’m “allowed” to watch or listen to “ethnic” media. Except In Living Color. I watched the heck out of that, at a much younger age than was appropriate. I think I was just too young to catch The Cosby Show, though I watched Steve Urkel and the Mowry twins. But as an adult? I cut out most media when I dropped TV at 19 because it was expensive. My media intake became much more segregated. An echo chamber of the worst kind. I started by seeking out new podcasts, then branched out into some new TV. No, I don’t understand all the references, and that’s important. In the rest of my life, people cater to my culture and my perspective. Becoming Jewish exposed me to codeswitching and being that outsider perspective, and now I’m going through that process again from yet another perspective. It’s keeping me humble, that’s for sure.

Read Raising White Kids. You won’t regret it. And if you’re a Christian, also check out her book Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation. (I might read that too eventually just because.)