Mother Culture

Book Review: The Grapes of Math by Alex Bellos

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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.

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.

#MotherCulture: Going to a Charlotte Mason Conference

I have only been to two homeschooling conferences, thankfully both Charlotte Mason conferences.

Let me tell you, they’re not cheap. Registration, housing, food, gas/travel, Red Bulls for the drive…

And I did them both with baby in tow. Last year, baby was a newborn and one of three newborns who came. This year, nursling that she is (no one is more surprised than me – ask me sometime about my experiences feeding babies!), she had to come along especially since it’s such a long trip from home for me. And surprisingly, she was the only baby!

It is just so wonderful and amazing to meet other people who care about CM and nerd out in real life. Social media is great, more than I could have dreamed of before the internet, but it’s just not the same. It’s nice to be reminded that people outside the Facebook box like CM too. And I can feel a little more normal.

Of course, it’s never easy being a Jew in the homeschool world. The statistics on “secular” homeschoolers (meaning the broad definition of “non-Christian”) show a clear trend that there’s more of us, but we’re still hard to find. Christian voices are still the loudest and most common, and primarily evangelical Christians (and Catholics, I was surprised to find). I’ve found people are often uncomfortable rocking the boat and will “admit” to not being Christian (or a particular type of Christian) only privately after I’ve already outed myself. We equally fear being ostracized or missionized. We just want to be part of the conversation, not Other ourselves. And it’s not an unreasonable fear. It’s very realistic in my experience.

Obviously I stand out at a homeschool convention because I wear a headscarf. They may not know “what” I am, but they know I’m not Average American Susie Homemaker. Maybe they don’t know headwrapping is increasingly common in the Catholic and Greek Orthodox faiths or for people with various anxieties or just for fashion’s sake. They’re unlikely to know Jews wrap. But being white, they’re less inclined to think I’m Muslim (though of course that’s possible). From what I can tell, most people think maybe I’m a hippie. And even though I already know I stand out with my headscarf and skirt and sleeves, I’m still nervous to say aloud that I’m not Christian. Obviously I’m not afraid to say it if asked, but volunteering the information is scary. You don’t know how people will react, and you know from the conversations being had that just about everyone is actively assuming everyone present is actively Christian, from the prayers to the praise band breaks to the one-on-one conversations. I always end up outing myself because I think it’s important to challenge this narrative and make space for everyone, but that doesn’t make it any less scary to put yourself out there, especially in a time of increasing public antisemitism.

Now after that cheerful rabbit trail, back to how awesome it is to go to a CM conference.

You get to learn new things! Like trying your hand at calligraphy! It didn’t go well. I couldn’t get the nib to transfer ink! But at least now I have the fundamental ideas (and happen to have supplies at home thanks to a contest I won, and I couldn’t even give them away for free…guess that worked out for me in the end!).

Or finally seeing what sloyd is! My cute little paper chair before babyleh smushed it. Smushing it was totally worth the two minutes of occupied quiet baby time.

Mostly babyleh practiced her walking and running skills when not being worn. Babywearing is the best, y’all.

It’s even better when the conference is on a real working farm and you get to meet goats and chickens!

I had to leave early because of Shabbat starting, but you can read/listen to the speech I missed over at Charlotte Mason Poetry! Just scroll to the very bottom for the recording.

Is going to a conference worth the time, money, babysitting difficulties, and annoyance of bedtime while traveling? YES YES YES.

#MotherCulture win. Because mothers are people too.

Book Review: Laying Down the Rails for Yourself by Sonya Shafer

Habit training our children is a foundational principle of Charlotte Mason.

In her very Twenty Principles she lays it out:

“…we are limited to three educational instruments – the atmosphere of environment, the disciple of habit, and the presentation of living ideas.”
…By EDUCATION IS A DISCIPLINE, is meant the discipline of habits formed definitely and thoughtfully, whether habits of mind or body.”
(Vol. 1, Preface)

And what does that attention to habit get you? No less than…

“The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days.”
Vol. 1, p136

Smooth and easy days sure sounds nice. Mason says the top 3 habits for a child are obedience, attention, and truthfulness. How are you on all those habits? Great? Oh yeah, me too. Totally.

The author of Laying Down the Rails for Yourself, Sonya Shafer, is also the creator/author of some of the most popular Charlotte Mason curriculums at the site Simply Charlotte Mason (Christian curriculums). She also has many free ebooks you can download, plus a blog and a podcast that is an audio version of the blog posts. Here, she’s written a small book on how to apply Mason’s habit training methods to yourself.

Laying Down the Rails for Yourself by Sonya Shafer

Shafer advocates on her blog that the top 3 habits for a homeschooling mom are orderliness, adhering to a regular routine, and the habit of a sweet, even temper. What, you didn’t know your temper was a habit? Now you know. That was a hard pill to swallow when I first heard this post on the podcast, but the more I think about it, the more I agree with her. If only agreeing were enough to make it suddenly appear in my life!

So how does one cultivate these habits…or any other? Especially with the new secular year approaching, a lot of us are reviewing our lives and habits, seeing how we can make the next year better than this one. Habits are the best place to focus, but it’s hard to reconcile all the different habit advice on the market (and the web). Believe me, I’ve read a lot of them.

What I like about this book is that it takes all the different analogies and “word pictures” that Mason uses to describe habits and breaks them down. Train tracks, well-trained riding horses, good investments, etc. Further, it follows Shafer as she changes her own health habits, applying each chapter to her story.

I found it encouraging and a different perspective than I’m used to in habit books, plus the bonus of further geeking out on CM. It also has a handy list of the habits Mason herself wrote about in her volumes in the back of the book. I read this over Shabbat, so I couldn’t take notes, but from what I recall, this was a secular resource, though her reasons for her habit change were religious.

Highly recommend.

Further reading: The other perspective-shifting habit book I’ve read was Gretchen Rubin’s Better than Before. However, if you struggle(d) with disordered eating, I do not recommend this book because I think it advocates a very disordered approach to eating as a “health” practice.

The other (obvious) further reading is the original Laying Down the Rails by Sonya Shafer, which is a lightly annotated and organized collection of all Ms. Mason’s quotes about habits in her Volumes. I was skeptical about buying a book full of quotes in books I already owned, but it’s organized neatly by topic, which makes it a great reference. It can also be read straight through, but it’s not the most engaging for a straight read, given the nature of the resource. I’m still reading it straight anyway, of course. Because that’s how I roll.

What’s your favorite habit resource? And what habits are you working on? Personally, I’m in the middle of trying to establish a regular routine.

An Amazing Book: White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

Normally, almost all my books come from the public library. That’s how I stumbled upon this book. But it was so good that I bought a copy for myself, and I’m recommending it left and right!

Really. If you’re a white person (like me), you should read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo.

It is important. So important. This has been one of the most important reads of my life. While it’s about racism, I found the ideas helpful to understand all conversations about bigotry, whether discussing transphobia or people responding to me pointing out antisemitism against me.

Being perfectly honest, I checked this book out because I wanted to understand “other” white people. Because clearly I’m “one of the good ones,” someone who has been trying to learn about racism and be a good ally for years.

Oh ho, this book was all about me. Yes, it also helped me understand my interactions with other people (especially now that I’m less likely to stay silent), but there was so much going on inside myself that I never recognized. Why I was silent most of the times when close friends said explicitly racist things, why I didn’t challenge hard-to-explain-to-the-unconverted racist statements and actions, why my heart literally races at top speed when I read these books about racism. My anxiety is literally triggered by these conversations.

The biggest take-away that I remind myself very frequently now: no matter how uncomfortable taking about racism is or what it costs me in friendships, that will never be as big a cost as racism costs to people of color. Prioritizing my comfort is being complicit, and it is a mark of privilege for me to say “this makes me anxious, so I won’t do it.” An anxious person of color gets no such reprieve.

Obviously, I’m not perfect. I have a ton of work to do. But I’m doing it, and it gets easier the more I speak to others, as I figure out how to put these very complicated concepts into words. I’ve lost a few friends, some my choice and some theirs. I don’t need people in my life who say such horrible things and dehumanize people of color, especially when they have reacted so poorly when the problematic nature of their statement is pointed out (as kindly as I can, but really, does dehumanization require kindness?). Those are not middos (character traits) I want to cultivate in myself, and you are often the sum of the people you spend the most time with.

As Jews, we exist in a liminal state between whiteness and Other. Most American Jews are white, whether or not they want to admit it. We benefit from white privilege all the time, while we also struggle with antisemitism all the time. One foot in, one foot out. I particularly see this myself as someone who wears a headscarf for religious reasons. Here in NY, people know that’s a Jewish thing but I also fear Islamaphobia, especially when I visit my family back down South where orthodox Jews are uncommon.

We’re not the only people balancing on that razor’s edge, but we’re a very large group who are. Jewish tradition speaks strongly of social justice, and the Torah itself tells us at least 36 times (there’s debate whether there’s more) to care for the “stranger” because we were strangers too. A few thousand years and that hasn’t really changed. I’m disturbed by the anti-stranger sentiment within the Orthodox community, and I think it’s absolutely against the Torah. Anti-racism work is religious work for me, what I’ve been commanded to do. I just didn’t see the full extend of the work before because I had been blinded by the White Supremacy soup I’ve been surrounded by since birth. Personally, I know I’ve been surrounded a bit more by that soup than the others in my Jewish community because I converted as an adult. Perhaps I experience antisemitism and Otherness differently than they do because I grew up without personal exposure to bigotry. I chose to join a group who faces bigotry, which is not a choice many white people make (not saying they should, it’s ok to be a white Christian). I had a taste of it growing up in an atheist family in the Bible Belt, but it’s nothing like having armed guards in my house of worship. Granted, I used to fear my children’s school one day being shot up (as Jewish institutions have been), but now it seems all schools face that issue 🤷

Given that it’s such an important book, I’m happy to report it’s pretty affordable as new books go, under $11 as of when I bought it and today (a month later).

Further reading: To continue the work started in this book, I highly recommend the free workbook Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad. It’s set up as a 28 day journaling process, but you can do it in a shorter or longer time frame if that works better for you. I have found it incredibly useful.

Right now, I’m also reading Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey. It’s excellent.

I’m continuing my anti-racist education, continuing to work through the workbook, planning to join an anti-racism course that’ll be offered in the spring, and working my own way through the Black Lives Matter syllabus. I’m doing a Charlotte Mason #MotherCulture challenge this year, and like last year, have mapped out a reading list for myself for 2019, with different books in different categories. I added anti-racism work as a category for this year to teach myself parts of American history I was not taught and more about the experiences of other marginalized groups in America, particularly the black community. I also added a memoir category, and about half of the books I’ve mapped out (what actually happens may be pretty different, as 2018 was) are activists or other change-makers.

What are you doing to challenge yourself to be a good ally to groups different from your own?

Book Review: If All the Seas Were Ink by Ilana Kurshan

This book is the ultimate in Jewish #MotherCulture. It is meta Mother Culture, an inspirational and fascinating story of the process of Mother Culture within one Jewish woman in Jewish texts.

This is the story of Kurshan learning Daf Yomi over the course of about seven and a half years. YEARS. That’s dedication, even before you add in the three children she had in that time.

Kurshan wasn’t a mother when she began her Talmud journey. In fact, her journey was precipitated by her divorce from her first husband. Things were hard, and this helped her through and through all the hard times that came after that.

“Mother Culture” is not a process just for mothers. The way I see it, it’s just more important to encourage in mothers because mothers are the first people to stop their self-education because they’re so busy educating little people. And because the society around us tells us that we should sacrifice ourselves at every turn. If we’re doing something for ourselves, for our own benefit, society says that is selfish and harms our children. Mothers are an at-risk group, in a sense. It is so easy, and so culturally encouraged, to lose ourselves. And so we let ourselves atrophy.

And what could be more “selfish” than something that takes a significant amount of time, daily, for more than seven years?? How many women do you know who are comfortable committing to a daily practice for seven years? I know I don’t feel like I could because what will my life be like then?, I barely have the time now, sure the afternoon is free now but will it be in three months, I could make it work for a little while but what about when the rest of my family when the newness wears off… I could write excuses all day long to not sign up for a seven year program! But really, it’s not for seven years. It’s for today. Maybe tomorrow. Take one day at a time.

We adults, even us mothers, are “born persons,” as Mason would say. Our education, our enjoyment, our growth matters. Simply because we are people separate from our partners and children. Some in our culture try to make a “loophole” for mothers to do such “selfish” things for ourselves like sleep, exercise, and read books, but it’s such a backhanded permission: “your growth benefits your children directly” or “you can take care of yourself so that you’re less snappy at your family.” It’s still always couched in terms of other people’s needs, not ours.

Well guess what. Your needs matter, and your needs are rarely at odds with your family’s. Your needs are just as important as your children’s, and all of you deserve (and have the responsibility to) continue growing and challenging yourself every day. I’m writing this just as much for myself as for any of you. I need to hear it too.

If starting Daf Yomi is something that interests you, you don’t even need to understand Hebrew or Aramaic to learn something. For about a month (sadly only a month), I listened to a really nice podcast that summarizes the day’s Daf Yomi in 5-6 minutes: 5 Minute Daf with Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld. I still check in from time to time, and this is where I’ll start if I come back to this practice. But don’t worry, I have plenty of other practices keeping me busy right now!

So what are you doing for you?

Book Review: If All the Seas Were Ink

I’m going to lay it all out here: I loved this book. It’s one of my favorite books of the year, and the year is only half over and I read a lot of books.

If All the Seas Were Ink is a pleasure.

I don’t read much fiction and even fewer memoirs, but this was just a damn good story. Sure, it happened to a real person, but this felt like a great fiction read. I stayed up all night to finish, and I rarely do that since having babies. Ironically, I knew I would like this book because she started by explaining that it was simply the story as she experienced it, and that no one could write an objective memoir. That kind of intellectual honesty and attempt at kindness to the people in her memoir is unusual and much appreciated. (Whether anyone should write a memoir…or a blog…that involves speaking about other people is a question I’ve long struggled with.)

But why would I classify this book as Mother Culture?

This isn’t just a memoir about one woman’s divorce after making aliyah. It’s really more about her relationship with the Talmud. Yep, the Talmud. Post-divorce, she accidentally falls into learning Daf Yomi, the daily study of Talmud.

As someone less than experienced with the Talmud, this book was such a pleasurable way to get a kind of overview of the Talmud and some common and less-common stories from it. I would call this a living book for the Talmud. (If the concept of a “living book” is new to you, check out this podcast episode!)

I admit, it inspired me to do a little Daf Yomi myself. It only lasted about a month, but that’s a month of learning I wouldn’t have otherwise done. Nothing too crazy, especially as someone who is only a beginner learner of Talmud. I found a podcast with a 5-6 minute summary of each day’s daf (page): 5-Minute Daf Yomi with Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld. I continue to listen here and there, and maybe saying this aloud will make me take it more seriously. I really need to take my limmud (religious education) more seriously overall. It just gets so frustrating when my skills aren’t to the same level I can do in English with so many other topics. No adult likes feeling like a first grader again :/

But this book gave me back some of my passion for limmud, which has helped me stand up to that discomfort more often. It was an encouraging, enlightening, and engaging read. Definitely check it out!

Defining Charlotte Mason’s Philosophy in 100 Words

What a challenge, right? If you’re familiar with the Charlotte Mason philosophy, you know how hard this is! Especially if you want to avoid terms of art that someone who doesn’t know CM wouldn’t understand!

I’m doing the Afterthoughts blog’s Charlotte Mason Bootcamp, and an assignment involved reading some attempts to distill the CM philosophy into 100 words or less. A commenter on one post claims Ms. Mason herself did so in 86 words:

“The object of education is to put a child in living touch with as much as may be of the life of Nature and of thought…. a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we must train him upon physical exercises, nature, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books….Add to this one or two keys to self knowledge, and the educated youth goes forth with some idea of self management, with some pursuits, and many vital interests.” Vol 1, p4, 7, p4

I think this is a great summary, but it wasn’t exactly Ms. Mason summarizing herself. These are three different quotes pulled from the Preface.

What do you think about this summary in Ms. Mason’s words? Is it enough or should we be trying to improve on it? Would you have chosen different quotes from the Preface or her works as a whole?

How would I summarize it? Can I? This kind of forced-short narration attempt seemed like a great way to “test” my current understanding of Ms. Mason’s philosophy and what’s important to me about it. Perhaps at the end of this bootcamp, I’d write a very different summary? Maybe I’ll do it again if I remember!

Now for my first attempt at a summary in about 100 words:

Children are born persons, created betzelem Elokim. There is no separation between sacred and secular knowledge, all reflect and stem from Gd. Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life. Habits are the basis of education, especially the habits of focused attention, obedience, and truthfulness. The teacher sets a wide feast of subjects and ideas, and the student chooses what to internalize. Using interesting and narrative books, the student learns from the best minds throughout history and connects with them, then narrates back what he has heard to ensure understanding and internalization. The child connects with the world and Gd through nature and real life activities and relationships.

108 words! Not bad! I expected to go through about 3 drafts, but I feel pretty good about this one.

What do you think? What would you have chosen to include that I didn’t? Would you word something differently?

Personally, looking at it now, I really liked a sentence from a commenter’s attempt: “Focused attention at short, varied lessons keeps the mind fresh and leaves free time for personal interests.” I wish I could elaborate on the ideas of atmosphere, obedience, and discipline since so many people have a very different understanding of those words than Ms. Mason promotes. But I chose to leave them alone, and if someone wanted to ask, I could go into more detail after this elevator pitch!

What I Wish I’d Known: Book Binding

Horror of horrors. I bought a used copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, and a section of pages immediately fell out! Because of course they did.

Broken copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

Now what am I supposed to do?? Until now, I’d just stuffed the pages back into the book and stuck it back on the shelf. Except I’d just started reading this book! And now I have a toddler! There was no way this book would survive marginally intact.

I turned to social media for help, as you do.

I recently bought book tape to repair some spines (totally aspirational – haven’t gotten around to it yet), but that didn’t seem like the right tool to repair something inside the book. And apparently that was right. A librarian recommended a special kind of glue. My reaction: ugh something else I have to buy and don’t know how to use. But sure. I’d do it. It’s a good skill for a book hoarder to know.

But then someone came along with a radical idea: take it to an office supply store and put it on a spiral binding. I admit I scoffed a little at first. That would ruin the book!!1! But she had a great point that with a spiral binding, it could lay flat, and that sounded nice. After sitting on it for a week or so, I decided that was actually a brilliant idea.

I had already intended to print out my Exploring Nature with Children curriculum PDF and make it spiral bound, so why not hit two birds with one stone? And they came out great! Pretty cheap for a store too, $14 for both bindings and to cut the original binding off my book.

Maybe one day I’ll get my own spiral binding-thingy-majigger!

Book Review: Raising a Child with Soul by Slovie Jungreis-Wolff

As central as children and family are in the Jewish world, there really isn’t that many parenting books. I was even surprised how few books there are on the halacha related to raising children, especially babies. (There are a fair number of books on chinuch, as in teaching Jewish law and practice to your children, but those have seemed to me often limited to just ritual practice matters and often skewed toward male children, based on perusal in bookstores. Having girls, I haven’t bothered to buy any yet but probably will soon enough.) But when I asked around for the halachic considerations of having a newborn, the response was overwhelmingly:

Friend/Facebook: What do you mean? What’s there to know?

Me: Like halacha of kids. I’ve heard people talking about how you need to change diapers differently on Shabbat. Rules for how to sort toys to clean them up. Feeding meat and milk to kids. Can you wash breastmilk or formula bottles in a meat dishwasher? C’mon. How do you not see a million questions here?

Friend/FB: I never thought about that. It seemed obvious. / I just did what I had to do and didn’t ask questions I didn’t want answers to. / I just did what my mom or friends do.

Color me shocked. We analyze everything. Everything. Every detail of life. Why did I see so little discussion of halacha with kids? There are some books, mostly older. (I don’t recommend them – ask your posek/mom/friends. Way too many issues involved, and the books just give the most stringent answer based on assumptions that aren’t always articulated clearly.)

There’s a similar lack of books about parenting Jewishly, though there are more coming out all the time, mostly from the non-orthodox perspective, which I think is interesting. I have several Jewish parenting books I’m going to be reading over the next year or so, so look forward to more reviews! But let’s start with an excellent one: Raising a Child with Soul: How Time-Tested Jewish Wisdom Can Shape Your Child’s Character.

Raising a Child with Soul by Slovie Jungreis-Wolff

But what if you’re not Jewish? Is this still worth a read? Sure, why not? Given the nature of the parenting publishing world, I read a lot of parenting books explicitly written from a Christian perspective (heck, most of the Charlotte Mason community writes from this perspective). I’ve learned a great deal from them. You take what works and leave what doesn’t, and that’s true for every parenting book we encounter. Personally, I find it interesting to read parenting books that present cultures very different from my own, whether Christian, Dutch, or French. (Those are the groups I’ve read the most about.) Seeing common questions from a very different perspective of your own and with very different justifications or assumptions, you can analyze your own perspective and assumptions with a fresh eye.

I was so happy to discover this book at the library. I knew about the author’s mother, Rebbetzin Jungreis from the Hineni Center in Manhattan. When I was in my first year of law school and not actively affiliated with a community, I began watching Shalom TV since my roommates had cable (my first time with cable in 10 years at the time!). I was floored to find a Jewish channel on tv! Each Shabbat morning, I would watch a parsha shiur by Rebbetzin Jungreis on Shalom TV, and it was a major part of what pulled me back into shul and my conservative conversion (affectionately referred to as Conversion 1.0). When I learned that her daughter had written a book on parenting, I knew I wanted to read it. But at the time, I didn’t have any kids! Then of course I forgot about it.

I highly recommend this book. I like that this book gives Jewish sources and perspectives on the gentle parenting practices thankfully prominent today. But while still being authoritative and maintaining a clear distinction between parent and child, which I personally think is an important component of gentle parenting. There must be a foundation of respect of a parent, just because they’re the parent. While a child deserves respect as a born person, my home is still a benevolent dictatorship at the end of the day. She can’t understand every reason for the actions I take, and that’s ok and means I don’t always have to explain myself in the here and now. She’ll understand later. And while I’m happy to reconsider a situation based on new facts, I’m not trying to raise a lawyer who negotiates every decision. That’s not always a popular thing to say in the crunchy-ish groups I belong to, but my own life experience has shown that friend-based parenting isn’t a model I believe in.

And that’s also the model Charlotte Mason advocates. Both would argue that a child deserves a reason if they ask, but they also must be obedient regardless of whether they understand our reasoning or not. I believe both offered this excellent advice: if you tell your child to do something (and you shouldn’t overwield this power), and the child asks “why,” they can have an answer. But only after they’ve done what you asked. After they’ve obeyed quickly and cheerfully, they can come back to you for an answer and discussion. Funnily enough, they rarely come back because during the action, they magically remembered the reason you’ve explained to them 32 times before. It was usually just a stalling tactic. You’ve respected their request, respected their personhood by making reasonable requests in the first place, and also demanded the obedience that builds good character.

This book doesn’t explicitly say so (that I remember, but I remember hints at it), but Jewish parenting fulfills a key aspect of CM’s parenting advice: your child should understand that you too are bound by rules and must do the things you “ought” with quick and cheerful obedience just like they have to. Parents must obey Gd and the secular laws, just as a child must obey his parents. Few religious communities make that as clear to children as halachically-observant Jews. We have so many opportunities to model quick and cheerful obedience in our own behavior: “I’d really like a piece of cheesecake, but I just ate meat. I’ll have to wait three (or six or whatever) hours. Darn! Oh well. Wanna go read a book?”

The only downside of this book is that I didn’t connect well to the examples given. The author’s work is obviously primarily with very wealthy families. I’m not wealthy. It seemed that many of the parents were not orthodox like the author (and myself, though we are likely from very different orthodox communities), but I didn’t find that to be a barrier to connecting with the examples. Maybe that’s because I haven’t always been orthodox, but I think both orthodox and non-orthodox folks can connect with these examples.

On the other hand, I did have a hard time connecting to the example because I have different parenting practices than they do. I don’t (yet) have iPad and Disney World battles, and I hope that my parenting practices will nip most of those questions in the bud. For example, we’re not totally screen-free, but we’re close to it.

But I’d love to have summer home and international vacation problems. Hook me up!

Tl;Dr: Check it out, Raising a Child with Soul is definitely worth a read. Very practical and presents a different model of authoritative parenting than I’ve seen before, though many writers today tackle that fine line between permissive and authoritarian parenting. If you struggle with that line between being a crunchy parent and a traditional American parent, this one will speak to both sides of you and harmonize the best parts. If you lean toward one side or the other, you might benefit from a different viewpoint that’s still closer to the middle of the parenting spectrum.

Book Review: Plan Bee by Susan Brackney

Want an easy and enjoyable nature study read? This is it! Short, funny, and really easy to understand. You too can begin fact-checking board books that mix up bumblebees and honeybees!

The author dreamed of raising backyard chickens. And then when she finally bought a house, the city outlawed them. Plan B: bees. Sort of by accident. (I loved this story, btw.)

Like the best living books, this is one written by a non-expert who became an expert because she loves her subject. And loves sharing what she learned with other people. I discovered this quite by accident when I discovered the animal book shelf at the library (call number 595), and I’m so glad! Let’s be honest, it was short and had an eye-catching cover.

I highly recommend Plan Bee: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Hardest-Working Creatures on the Planet as a quick-enough-to-read-on-Shabbat read!

Further Reading: