The other day I was chatting with a friend, recounting the recent sadness of a mutual acquaintance who had “lost her baby.” My four-year-old snapped his head to attention and asked me point-blank: “What do you mean she lost the baby?” Oof.
It’s moments like this when you suddenly realize that your little blobs are sentient beings with eyes and ears that are increasingly attuned to careless (or careful!) conversation and the steady thrum of NPR-modulated panic. It’s been tricky, these past weeks, to know just what to tell my kids, or if I should just keep lunging for the radio dial whenever something upsetting comes through the Subaru’s speakers. (“Something upsetting” occurs about every other story, I’d estimate.)
When I expressed this trepidation to a friend, she texted me a video of her kid at a protest the prior weekend and told me she’d been using recent events as a teachable moment. Of course, every kid is different, and while one five-year-old might be emotionally equipped to join a crowd of protesters with a magic-marker sign, for another kid the stress of such a situation might diffuse or obscure any message that another is capable of absorbing. I was enthused to see brilliant children’s book writer Oliver Jeffers’s touching illustration on his Instagram, but I didn’t rush to show it to my kids.
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For parents who are looking for a slightly gentler way to expose their children to the troubling news of the separation of kids from their parents, a brand-new organization, Stand for Kids, is coordinating a nationwide event this weekend to provide parents an opportunity to allow their kids to do some good. “These are overwhelming times, and we feared families were feeling deluged and paralyzed,” says one of the organizers, Elana Berkowitz, who pulled together the effort with Avani Agarwal, a designer at Google, and Josh Hendler, CTO at Purpose. “We have to be active citizens and allies. And we wanted to find an approachable, family-appropriate way to do it.”
The basic idea is this: You sign up your family at standforkids.net to host a lemonade stand and then donate the proceeds to one of 14 organizations, like the ACLU or KIND (Kids in Need of Defense), that are working to address the crisis. If your friends and neighbors are inclined to call their representative or write a postcard to a kid detained at the border (there are letter-writing materials to download), you’d offer them a free glass of lemonade or a cookie. A win-win at a moment when it feels like there is much to lose.