Susan Boyle-Before               -Susan Boyle-After

                    Lin Miaoke-seen but not heard             Yang Peiyi, heard but not seen

 Ok, you can admit it.  When you saw Susan Boyle walk on stage you rolled your eyes and thought, “oh my God, what is she doing?”  Of course, that attitude came crashing down the minute she opened her mouth.  Like the judges-and everyone who saw Susan Boyle get on that ”Britians Got Talent” stage you let your pre-conceived ideas of what an entertainer looks like color your judgement. 

Ironically, we are the same people that reacted with distaste when we discovered that Lin Miaoke was actually lip-synching during the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.  Apparently, someone decided that the actual singer, Yang Peiyi, wasn’t cute enough to be seen and heard!

If, as adults, this dicotomy is diffult to grapple with imagine what it does to our kids.  We tell them not to judge people by the way they look, yet they see adults doing it all the time.  They feel our outrage when a child is penalized because she isn’t cute enough to be seen but is talented enough to be heard. Yet when Susan Boyle stands on a stage we quickly judge that she can’t be talented.

We tell our kids don’t judge books by their covers when in fact we do judge books by their covers.  If we didn’t, then publishers wouldn’t spend enormous quantities of money on designing book covers!  We also judge people by the way they look, sound, smell or other cues that may or may not indicate what they are really like or what talents lay hidden beneath the surface.  We are in fact, human.

So rather than telling our kids not to judge the proverbial book by its cover and holding them to a higher standard than we hold ourselves, perhaps we should be teaching our kids to do something that they can succeed at.  Maybe the message for our kids is to be aware of our immediate judgements-note them and then put them aside until we have had a chance to get to know the person better.

Maybe, just maybe, our kids will be able to suspend judgement-positive or negative-until they have more information.

Maybe, just maybe-we adults should try to model that behavior….or at least be consistent.  If we are appalled that Yang Peiyi didn’t get a fair shake because she wasn’t cute enough then we should be equally appalled that Susan Boyle didn’t get a fair shake initially either.

How do you model accepting and respectful behavior for your kids?

With gratitude,

Deb

How do you feel when you look at these powerful images of things that can’t be recovered? 

With luck, they will make you stop and think of the things we can recover.  Today would be a great day to reach out to someone who has been on your mind but for whatever reason you have been hesitant to connect with.  

Real friends can always be recovered-either spiritually or physically.  What a great lesson to teach your children.

With Respect,

Deb

It has been a long time since we have been blogging.  We have Facebooked, MySpaced and Twittered.  We have even traveled to Asia and back.  But blogging? No way.  No how.

 But now, we are back.  A little older.  A little wiser.  Even a little humbler.

Using your feedback, we are going to continue to do what we did well and can what didn’t work.  We are going to try and inject some more humor and take ourselves less seriously.  Sure, we are still going to spark controversy where we can just to keep things lively.  You can count on us for that. 

We will cover a range of topics-adoption, bullying, character education, racism, diversity, bias, education, family, and culture to name a few through our unique filter. 

Yes, we are going to help provide you some cool tools to help you navigate the sometimes stormy waters of parenting, with a view toward raising confident, hip and resilient kids ready to inherit their place in a global world. 

So thanks for hanging in there while we got ourselves together.

And by the way, don’t forget to check out www.adoptingsmart.com!  You-or someone you know will be glad that you did!

With Respect,

Deb

Yesterday was one of the first crisp fall days in New York and so we headed to the Bronx Zoo’s annual “BOO at the Zoo” event.

We had a blast-as we always do at the Zoo. Magic shows, story-telling, sing-a-longs, hay rides and trick-or-treating were just some of the activities.

As the day drew to a close, we wandered in to a tent where John Farrell was hosting a sing-a-long. Towards the end of his performance, he invited all the kids to come up to the front of the room and join hands-which they did. When he invited the adults in the audience to do the same thing-we couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t join hands.

We kind of looked at the person who was sitting next to us and quickly turned away, putting our hands in our laps. There was no hand-holding on our end.

The kids, on the other hand, were having a ball-clasping the hand of the kid next to them without a second thought.

The difference was remarkable.

Now, the adults may have been fearful of germs-after all MRAS is making headlines. And it is scary stuff! Maybe we were uncomfortable with sharing ourselves with a stranger. But maybe we were somehow afraid of each other. This was a very mixed crowd-highly diverse as you would expect in a borough of New York City. Maybe we were afraid-not consciously-that someone elses ethnicity or race would rub off on us.

Whatever the reason, while kids joyfully and without hesitation grabbed anothers hand, the adults were uncomfortable and suspicious.

I wish that the kids’ lack of bias would rub off on us so that we might truly be able to embrace others-without hesitation or judgement. But I do have faith in our kids ability to look past differences and thrive in a multi-cultural world-if we don’t screw it up.

With respect,
Deb

This one is an oldie but a goodie. In fact, after a recent teasing incident this book was read to all the kids in my daughter’s school-followed by a discussion. This book does double duty-it is fun, has beautiful illustrations and packs a powerful message without hitting you over the head.

Take a look at

Giraffes Can’t Dance

and share it with your kids, your kids’ schools and anyone who will listen.!

With respect
Deb

Remember the days when we used the word ‘gay’ we meant happy? My friend Gay does!

But when my daughter asked, “What is gay”, I had to think for a minute about the answer. My daughter tends to ask me these types of profound questions when we are in the car, so thankfully, I could buy a little time while I ‘concentrated’ on driving.

Having gotten over my urge to jump right in, I asked her what she thought it meant.
She replied when two women love each other like they were married. Pretty smart, I thought.

“Can boys be gay,” she asked? That was an easy one-I just repeated her answer.

Things got a bit trickier quickly. She wanted to know if she was gay because she like the girls in her class (she likes the boys, too but she seemed to have forgotten that). Hmmmm….how to explain that one. We talked about what married people share-homes, family-building, committment and love and why that was different than having friends whom you love in a different way. Then I added that if she is gay then as she gets older she will have feelings-like marriage-to other girls.

I was really congratulating myself for some of these answers. It seemed to me that I was answering the questions she was asking, not giving her more information than she wanted and using her own knowledge as a jumping off point. Not to mention the lack of emotion in the discussion-it was clearly a ‘different strokes, for differnt folks’ kind of conversation.

Until we got to her final question-”Mom, are you gay”? I nearly drove off the side of the road when she asked that question and really had to stop myself from shouting, “NO I AM NOT GAY”. Thankfully, I managed to answer her calmly with a simple ‘no, I am not”.

As I thought about this it started to bother me. I have many, many gay friends in my life-and I am glad that I do. It never has mattered to me who they slept with. I am supportive of their lifestyles and choices and don’t think twice about what being gay might actually mean to them. How shallow is that?

And what about my horror about being pegged as gay? What is that about? I have to admit that I am not too thrilled with my reaction, but I am pleased that we were able to have a calm conversation that presented my daughter with the facts-as I know them to be-and that I was able to reign in my emotional response to her final question.

I truly believe that being gay is totally ok. Now I know that for whatever reason it is only ok for other people. That realization is definately the stuff that bias is made of and is MUCH harder to keep from passing on to our kids because it can be hidden deep within ourselves.

So remember, when your kids ask about something as innocent as ‘what is gay’ take a deep breathe and see how you feel-really feel-and act accordingly. At that point the choice is yours.

With Respect:
Deb

That harmless phrase was the beginning of one of those common school-yard clapping songs-the 21st century version of “Miss Mary Mack”-that my Asian-born daughter came home singing the other day. I didn’t think too much about it until I realized that the song came complete with gestures-one of which involved pulling the sides of the eyes into a long slit (aka Chinese eyes).

I hemmed and hawed about what to do. I felt that this gesture was disrespectful and could lead to other stereotyping and teasing, but since I sometimes go off half-baked I decided to cool my jets for a bit.

The results of yesterday’s poll swayed me. All of the voters indicated that they would take some action-evenly split between intervening immediately if their child was bullied or helping the child deal with the situation and then intervening if the child needed further assistance.

I opted for contacting the school and the teacher. Thankfully, their take on the incident was similar to mine-not appropriate, disrespectful and must end-and the teacher took immediate action in the classroom and the school principal readily acknowledged that the problem was not likely isolated to the third-grade and they would be taking action school-wide.

Later in the day, I got an email from the teacher. She had spoken to some of the kids involved-none of them had really listened to the words or understood the implications of the gestures. Her comment-when do we learn what the words mean?

The answer, I think, is “when we teach them what it means”. My daughter was furious that I went to her teacher-she said she wasn’t upset by the song or the gesture. I had to explain to her that both were disrespectful and inappropriate and that I was standing up for what I felt was right-and the school was supportive.

My daughter learned two valuable lessons-1) The importance of standing up for what you believe-even if it doesn’t effect you directly and 2)why that particular song and gesture were inappropriate. With luck she will begin to evaluate other things with a more critical eye-asking herself and her peers to be more considerate of others and figuring out that is never ok to make fun of the way anyone looks-ever.

These are lessons that need to be taught. They don’t happen automatically. So, if you are parenting on autopilot-as we all do-take a minute and listen to what your kids are singing, what they are saying to their friends and others-and make sure that you like what you hear-or do something about it.

With respect,
Deb

On Monday, people in 33 of our 50 United States celebrated Columbus Day. Of course, this immediately begs the question “what happened to the other 17 states?” Do they know something we don’t? Or is it purely a bureaucratic oversight?

Not knowing the real answer, I started to look into Christopher Columbus’s story. I had grown up singing “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, thinking that Columbus had, in fact, discovered American.

As it turns out, Columbus ‘discovered’ land that was inhabited by hundreds of thousands of native people that had arrived in what is now the Americas, around 800 BCE via the Bering Strait. Not only that, but Columbus made four trips to the New World,was arrested in his own colony and sent back to Spain in disgrace.

His fourth and final trip brought him within 9 miles of his goal of reaching the Pacific Ocean to get to China and India, but his stubbornness and arrogance caused him to turn around. He didn’t believe the native people knew an overland route to the Pacific.

Columbus was greedy and an incredibly bad leader-his own men and the indigenous people couldn’t stand him. He died broke and forgotten in 1506.

Wow! Who knew? I had always held Columbus in the highest esteem-a hero even. But faced with additional information, I had to revise my position. Columbus, far from being a hero was a failure and by all accounts a miserable guy to be around. Not only did he not find a trade route to the “Indies”, and fail to find the amount of gold he promised Ferdinand and Isabella, he was imprisoned in his own colony and was an all around jerk!

Of course, he was a brilliant sailor and navigator and his contribution to our world is enormous, but at the very least Columbus was a complex dichotomy. Maybe even a bit of an enigma.

With this new information, my bias about Columbus and his endeavors-which up until now were positive-have shifted. I can not just accept the information I was taught as a kid. I must face the fact that there is more to Columbus than meets the eye.

Hmmmm, this sounds familiar doesn’t it. We develop biases based on data that may or may not be accurate and we own them. Ok, we are human. The question is what do we do when faced with additional and/or conflicting information. Do we rigidly hold onto your old beliefs or do you modify based on the new information?

I am suggesting that we teach our children to evaluate their biases and beliefs as new information comes their way. When it comes to the biases that can lead to bullying, rigidity is not something we want to promote.

So, if an when my daughter comes home humming a tune about Columbus, I will tell her the entire story-the good and the bad-and let her make her own judgement about Columbus.

With Respect,
Deb

PS: Max got out within hours of my triumphant announcement that I had fooled him. Back to the drawing board.

Sometimes lessons can come from the most unusual places!

I can sometimes feel a bit like trying to change the course of a river. I look around me and wonder, “am I really making progress”, or “can we really make our future bully-free?”

Yes, there are times that I want to give up and let it be someone elses problem.

But then, something happens.

What happened this time was Max.

Max is our 2 year-old beagle-poodle mix-we call him our designer dog gone bad as Max was in a puppy mill waiting with his head on the chopping block. Max is one determined dog. He likes to roam. I have spent more days and more money trying to keep Max safe and in the yard. Yet Max always finds a way out.

Oh, I can keep him in for a while but eventually he finds another escape hatch and I have to find out where it is and then how to patch it up so that he can’t escape.

You have to hand it to the dog, he just doesn’t give up. There are times when I think he is smarter than I am-or maybe he is just focused on one objective-exploring the neighborhood.

Today, I found his latest path to freedom and spent some time putting up yet another piece of fencing. So far, he appears to be flummoxed, but I know that someday soon he will be visiting his friends on the other side. He just will keep looking and sniffing until he is successful.

This lesson from Max couldn’t have come at a better time for me. It can get tiring and frustrating to carry the bully-free future flag.

But like Max, I am going to keep looking and sniffing-focusing on one child, one school and one community at a time. I know that we can successfully eliminate bias and bullying.

Won’t you join me?

Where do your lessons come from?

With Respect,
Deb

Please take a minute and vote for Jenny Bowan to carry the Olympic Torch in Beijing. Jenny is the founder of the Half the Sky Foundation which is dedicated to the children in China that are still in orphanages. The program has done some incredible things-increased the number of foster parents, improved orphanage conditions dramatically, provided education and medical care. In short, this organization is performing miracles. We would love to see Jenny represent the orphans of China-usually girls. They are a group that is often forgotten. Please vote for Jenny today-and pass this onto anyone you think might be interested.

Vote here:http://pub1.chinadaily.com.cn/olympics/torch/members.shtml?mid=212

Good Monday morning and welcome to October. October is a busy month-the Supreme Court begins its sessions today, harvest festivals begin popping up all over the country,kids gear up for Halloween-second only to Christmas in terms of retail sales.
Beijing is choosing their Olympic torch bearer and people all over the world put their own unique spin on the transition from summer to autumn.

We celebrated Asian Mid-Autumn festival last night-albeit a few days late-we ate moon cakes (we liked the winter melon the best), the kids made dumplings and we ate delicious, homemade and authentic Chinese food. Seated at our table were three Shanghai natives, one girl who’s mom is Chinese and her father white, one woman born in Uruguay, a couple of plain old Americans of European ancestry and a girl who joined her family via adoption from China.

It was quite exciting-people speaking in Chinese and Spanish, the kids trying to communicate with the the non-English speaking group, the English-speaking rolling Chinese words around on their tongues, and the non-English speakers doing the same with English. Of course, there was plenty of Spanish thrown in to the mix.

As I was shooed out of my kitchen when the Shanghaiense women took over, I was able to sit back and watch the show. Not once did I hear the kids-or adults-become frustrated by the difficulty in communication. Not once did I hear anything about the ‘unusual food’. The kids-and adults-listened in awe as they were told the story of the Mid-Autumn festival communicated in Chinese, Spanish, English, and pantomime.

Of course, there were some goofs-we forgot to treat the older women with the respect they deserved. We should have seated them at the head of the table-but everyone sat down willy-nilly. But in general, we managed the evening without international incidents.

We were lucky to truly bring authentic experiences to our children. It broadened their horizons and gave them insight into a distinctly different cultural experience.

With more of these kinds of experiences the kids (and their adults) will truly be able to understand and respect culture, choices and ‘abilities’. We are five kids closer to a bully-free future!