Citrus Recipes Kids Will Flip For

Fruit makes a perfect snack for kids, no matter the season. And all kids seem to love the tender, juicy bites they get from ever-popular mandarin oranges. To mix things up a bit, we asked our friends at Halos for their take on how to get kids eating right with citrus—at snack time and beyond!

Mandarin and Quinoa Chicken Bowls
Serves 4

Quinoa is hearty, healthy, and easy to make. Spoon it into a bowl and top it with Wonderful Halos mandarins, grilled chicken, cilantro, black beans, and savory chipotle lime vinaigrette for dinner or a packed lunch.

1 cup quinoa
3⁄4 teaspoon kosher salt
1⁄2 teaspoon chili powder
3⁄4 teaspoon ground cumin
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
2 cups baby spinach
1 15-ounce can black beans, drained
1 small red bell pepper, sliced
1 avocado, pitted and sliced
1 scallion, sliced
4 Wonderful Halos mandarins, peeled and segmented

Chipotle Lime Vinaigrette:
1⁄4 cup lime juice
1 garlic clove, sliced in half
2 tablespoons honey
3 teaspoons adobo sauce, from canned chipotle in adobo 1 teaspoon kosher salt
1⁄3 cup olive oil

1. Cook quinoa according to package directions and set aside to cool.

2. Heat a grill or grill pan over medium-high heat. Mix together the salt, chili
powder and cumin and rub on chicken. Grill chicken on both sides until cooked through; set aside to cool, then slice.

3. Make chipotle lime vinaigrette by whisking together all ingredients. Discard halved garlic cloves.

4. Spoon quinoa into 4 bowls. Top each bowl with remaining ingredients and drizzle with vinaigrette e. Tip: If making ahead for lunch, pack vinaigrette separately so bowl stays fresh.

Prosciutto Bruschetta Bites

Toasted crostini is topped with a little slice of savory prosciutto, Wonderful Halos mandarin segments and shallot chutney for a sweet and salty appetizer bursting with flavor.

1 baguette, sliced and toasted
Olive oil, bowl for brushing baguette 1 teaspoon olive oil
2 cups shallots, sliced
1⁄2 teaspoon kosher salt
1⁄2 cup white balsamic vinegar
1⁄2 cup brown sugar
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon crushed coriander seeds 13 slices prosciutto
1 cup Wonderful Halos mandarin segments, roughly chopped
1⁄3 cup toasted hazelnuts, crushed
1 tablespoon fresh thyme

1. Heat oven to 375oF. Slice baguette thinly, brush with olive oil and bake until just toasted. Let cool.

2. Make mandarin chutney: In a skillet over medium heat, sauté the shallot and salt in 1 tablespoon olive oil until soft and translucent, about 20 minutes. Add the vinegar, brown sugar, bay leaf and coriander seeds and let simmer until vinegar is reduced and almost gone. Add the mandarin segments and stir; remove from heat.

3. Top toasted baguette slices with a 1⁄2 slice of prosciutto and a spoonful of mandarin chutney; sprinkle with hazelnuts and thyme.

Smoothie Pops
Serves 12

Sweet Wonderful Halos mandarins transform healthy breakfast smoothies into crave-able frozen Smoothie Pops. You can enjoy these nutritious breakfast popsicles on-the-go or as an afternoon snack—your kids will never miss the sugar.

Version #1: Smoothie Pops with Mango 4
Wonderful Halos mandarins, peeled
1 cup pineapple, diced
1⁄2 cup banana, sliced
1 cup mango, diced
1 tablespoon flax meal
3⁄4 cup vanilla yogurt
Extra Wonderful Halos mandarin segments

Version #2: Smoothie Pops with Strawberry
5 Wonderful Halos mandarins, peeled
1⁄2 cup pineapple
1⁄2 cup banana, sliced
1-1⁄4 cups strawberries, sliced
1 tablespoon flax meal
3⁄4 cup vanilla yogurt
Extra Wonderful Halos mandarin segments

1. For each flavor, combine all ingredients in the pitcher of a blender. Cover and blend on high speed until very smooth, about 2 minutes. Pour into ice pop molds and add extra Wonderful Halos mandarin segments to each pop; insert sticks.

2. Freeze until solid and remove from molds; serve immediately or store in a zip lock bag in the freezer.

DIY Parents: How to Organize the Craft Supplies

There’s a distinct downside to having art- and craft-loving kids. Namely: all that art- and craft-making stuff. Not to mention, the pile-up of the arts and crafts themselves. Find yourself vacuuming up perfectly good beads because you just can’t stand the never-ending sprawl of them across the living room floor? Or secretly tossing projects-in-process into the trash, then pretending you have no idea what became of them when your kid asks? Then you’ve clearly hit your craft-clutter limit.

Never fear, you can take this matter firmly into your own hands. For tips on how to make sense of your mess, we turned to Mabel’s Labels founder (and mom of six), Julie Cole—a woman who knows more than possibly anyone about getting and staying organized.

Toss it. Before you can even begin to tidy up, you first need to assess what should stay and what absolutely needs to go. Markers that don’t work anymore, paint brushes that have lost their bristles, yellowing wads of craft paper—all this should be sent straight to the trashcan. Also remember that not every piece of art your kid makes is created equal. Assess each one honestly, then hold on to those that really mean something to you and your family, and the ones that exhibit that special kid-art-genius flair.

Sort it. Set aside a little time each night or every weekend to pick through the crafty “keep” pile. This is the time to find the stray colored pencils, the paint tubes that wound up under the bathroom sink, the buttons that somehow got mixed in with the souvenir seashells, and put them all to rights—each kind of thing in its own designated pile. You might find more things that need to be deaccessioned. You will certainly discover which items you’ll need to replace—and which you never want to buy again (glitter, anyone? We didn’t think so).

Set it up. If you didn’t have a dedicated crafting area before, designate one now. Or, reclaim an established area with force and conviction. Even apartment dwellers can eek out a little room on the coffee table that’s just for making things, and one shelf (or three) that’s just for craft storage. Maybe your über-crafty kid wants to turn over part of his or her room to the endeavor. In which case, you can reassign closet, desk, and shelf space there. The real work? Making sure that the craft space stays a craft space and that supplies don’t leak out all over the rest of the house.

Stash it. Now it’s time to put everything away. For the big stuff, like rolls of paper and ribbon, and paint and crayon sets, pick up or repurpose some bright, colorful plastic bins that will fit neatly on your shelves. Stash smaller items like beads, buttons, rubber bands, googly eyes, and pipe cleaners in lidded glass jars. Frequently-used items like markers and pencils and even paintbrushes can be stashed in table-top canisters. Give all your bins and containers a home within easy reach of your smallest crafter. And be sure to label everything clearly, for easy cleanup today and hopefully forever!

Photographs courtesy of Mabel’s Labels

For ConstructionKids’ Deb Winsor, Confidence Comes with the Bang of a Hammer

By Lela Nargi

The 214-year-old Brooklyn Navy Yard is a three-acre industrial park that occupies a small cove just across the East River from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As a major builder of battleships during World War II, it earned the nickname the “Can-Do Yard,” a title that moldered along with its buildings when the yard was decommissioned in 1966. But lately, it’s been reclaiming its former glory, after the 2004 arrival of Steiner Studios to the park (Boardwalk Empire and the film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were both shot here)—and on its heels, hundreds of “can-do” businesses of all varieties: artist and textile studios, furniture restorers, ship repairers, woodworkers, a rooftop farm, and one seemingly incongruous company with a large “workforce” comprised of people who are all under 48 inches tall.

That company is ConstructionKids and its fearless leader, Deb Winsor, has in her six years in business taught some 12,000 New York City schoolchildren the rudiments and beyond of building things with wood and nails and hammers. Her home base is in the Navy Yard’s Building 92, the former Marine Commandant’s House that serves as exhibit space and education center; the second floor is devoted to ConstructionKids. “People are always amazed when they walk in and with 40 kids, it’s humming like a factory in here and nobody’s fooling around,” says Winsor—loudly over the din—as a group pint-size builders cobble together tool boxes at low tables in the center of the large, project-lined space. “It’s fully engaging for children when we give them the tools and the process to be self-reliant.”

“It’s fully engaging for children when we give them the tools and the process to be self-reliant.”

Construction Kids is a highly likely culmination of a lifetime’s experience for Winsor. “Coming from a family of engineers, I spent a lot of time down in the basement watching what my dad did,” she says. “Carpentry and woodworking really spoke to me.” After majoring in industrial design at Syracuse University, she realized that she wasn’t cut out for office work and wound up in Nantucket, painting houses. That led to historic preservation work, then a move to Long Island to learn about boat building and restoration. Says Winsor, “That was a real game changer, because you can make a chair that looks great, but a chair doesn’t have to float and keep you alive in a storm.” She got a Master’s in historic preservation at Columbia University, “wound up in New York with a family,” and all was plodding steadily on. When she got a call from her son, Jack’s, preschool teacher.

“They were studying igloos,” Winsor recalls. “His teacher said, Can you build an igloo with a bunch of 4-year-olds, in Brooklyn, in May?” The final product—made from a bent wood with fabric stretched over it—was not quite the “igloo” Winsor had in mind. “But we were all down there on our knees on the floor, and it struck a vein with every kid, every teacher, every parent,” she says. That summer, she ran her first two-week camp through the school. “It took off like a shot,” she says.

Now running more than 100 programs city-wide—including afterschool programs at the Navy Yard space and in some 20 schools; vacation and summer camps; birthday parties; and special events—Winsor admits, “We’ve never been quite able to meet the demand. It’s a crazy business model to have!” She credits her success to her commitment to expanding slowly—“If I need to buy three hammers, first I need to make the money to buy three hammers”—as well as meeting a primal need of an increasingly sedentary, screen-focused population of elementary schoolers to do something physical and hands-on. “It’s whole-child learning, which they don’t get much of in school these days,” she says. She offers an analogy to Jack’s first foray into Little League baseball: “He walked across Prospect Park with this bat-weapon in his hand, hitting the ground, the dog, the tree. When I picked him up from practice two hours later, that bat was no longer a weapon; it was a tool and he had been taught to use it. That’s what we do, too. It gives kids confidence.”

Every day, one of Winsor’s teachers arranges the hammers in a different pattern on the floor.

During camp season, Windor takes on some 60 employees but during the regular school year, her staff of 14 teachers, administrators, and fabricators work to ensure that every child who comes to build has a fun, creative, and safe experience. “Someone calls up and says, We need to build the Lincoln Memorial for a program we’re doing in our school,” says Winsor. “Our creative and fabrication teams get together with the educators to talk about what kind of curriculum themes they’re trying to develop, then we build prototypes.” Always, they start kids building with wood because while kids have plenty of opportunities to use clay and paper and fabric in school, wood is not often offered as a material.

Winsor’s program also begins with hammer and nails—the “iconic tools,” as Winsor calls them. “When it’s paper, it can only be wrong or right, but if you bend a nail, you can take it out and put in another one; it doesn’t feel like a failure,” she explains. From there, kids progress to saws and vices, then wrenches and bolts, then nippers and pliers. At each step, they’re taught how to hold the tools correctly and most of all, safely.

The age of the kids is of paramount in importance in determining programming. Not only are the materials scaled down to meet their physical needs and abilities—like four-ounce hammers for the littlest builders—so are the expectations. “We work with little, tiny 3- and 4-year olds who are still learning what a triangle, square and rectangle are,” says Winsor. “So, we spend a disproportionate amount of money on program development,” to make sure Construction Kids get things just right.

On the other, older-kid, end of the spectrum, “It was transformational day for me when the three boys arrived and told me they wanted to build Yankee Stadium,” Winsor laughs as she remembers. “Which also was the day we established one of our few cardinal limits, which is, any project you build in this workshop has to fit through a New York City subway turnstile”—the measurements for which, along with those for those of an American Girl doll, Winsor and her team have committed to memory.

Teaching kids how to use tools responsibly gives them confidence—part of the core culture of ConstructionKids.

And indeed, in an era when so much is made about creating STEM opportunities for girls, Winsor admits to a certain amount of frustration around persisting gender stereotypes. “Making is a gender-neutral skill,” she says. “So, we embrace the American Girl doll as an opportunity for girls to do architecture around this omnipresent character. We don’t have a marker for girls that we can recognize as ‘building’ except for their creative play—making environments for dolls—but that to me is science and STEM and architecture and planning. I don’t know if everyone sees it that way.”

 The final component to making ConstructionKids such a unique space is what Winsor calls an “intergenerational connection.” Staff is often high school and college students—grownups who are not quite peers but more along the lines of older cousins, or family friends. Says Winsor, “We teach them that their role is to be a safe buddy, so kids can step out of that teacher-child, parent-child world they spend their whole day with. That’s a big part of our culture.” She talks about the joy of watching kids of all ages learning from each other in her big, bright, tidy, and tool-filled space. “They’re marching over to get their end-nipper, or marching over to the vice to chuck up their piece of wood,” she says. “Confidence—that’s what we’re about. It’s pretty fantastic stuff.”

 

Photographs by Roy Beeson

Crafty Kids: How to Make Maps of Your Neighborhood–and Your Imagination

Children love maps. The graphic imagery of even the simplest charts can give them lots to feast their eyes upon, and to dream about. But maps also help them make sense of the world around them—something grownups, who’ve committed thousands of routes to memory, often take for granted.

The warming weather provides the perfect opportunity to accompany your budding cartographer out into the neighborhood, to sketch up the way to a friend’s house, or the playground, or just once around the block. Some kids prefer to draw places they see in their imagination. Either way, inspired by the book Mapsby Aleksandra and Daniel Mizieliński, and featuring images from the accompanying Maps Activity Book, here we offer a primer in the ancient art of map making.

What you’ll need:

  • Writing implements—pencils and colored pencils, markers, pastels
  • Paper—either a printout of one of the templates below, or plain paper of your choosing

1.     Decide what you want to make a map of. Will it be a map of a place you know already—like your room or your block? Will it be a map of someplace big, like the whole Earth or a made-up planet? Or will it be a map of someplace small, like your school or your neighborhood? Take a tour of the place—if you can—to get the lay of the land.

2.     Map out your map. With light pencil or chalk marks, rough out where everything on your map will go: buildings, streets, parks, trees, oceans, cars—whatever you fancy! Then work on making your map more permanent, with firmer marks and color and details like windows on buildings, or waves on the sea, or leaves on your trees.

3.     Label the things you’ve drawn on your map: Nico’s house, the Indian Ocean, Christmas Street. Then, make a legend. A legend tells things like how many inches equal a mile, what the capital of your country is, and what the native language is. If you like, you can also draw pictures of local birds and flowers, and the people (or aliens!) who live here.

4.     Finally, make sure you give your map a compass rose, so the people who use it know which direction they’re heading in!

Hand drawn map by Ada Grazia Cowan.

Maps Activity Book. Copyright © 2013 by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielińki. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.

Maps. Text and illustrations copyright © 2012 by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielińki. Translation copyright © 2013 by the Templar Company Ltd. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.

Crafty Kids: How to Make an Up-cycled Birdfeeder

The weather’s warm and the birds are fitting all through the neighborhood! Turn your window or fire escape into a bird-viewing station by luring in some feathered friends to nosh at this seed feeder, made from an empty snack container. This easy, cheerful craft comes to us from Project Kid by Amanda Kingloff. When you’re done with it, you might just be inspired to make a dozen more!

What you’ll need:

  • 1 small nut can (about 3 inches in diameter)
  • Scissors
  • 1 6-inch stick
  • Tacky glue
  • Outdoor craft paint
  • 1-inch foam brush
  • Twine
  • 2 wooden beads
1. First, empty the can: Peel the foil cover halfway back and remove the nuts. Cut off the unattached foil, then cut a 1⁄4-inch slit vertically in the center of the remaining foil and fold the edges down on both sides to create a wide V shape. (We want the birds to enjoy their meal without injury.)

 

 

2. To create the perch, punch a small hole near the bottom of the attached foil with the end of the stick and push the stick through. Before the stick hits the back of the can, apply glue to the bottom edge of the stick and let it rest standing up in the bottom, back edge of the can until dry.

3. Paint the outside of the can and let it dry. Add a second coat if necessary.

 

4. Cut a piece of twine that’s 5 feet long, plus as much as you’d like to use to hang the feeder. Find the center point of your length of twine and place the bottom edge of the feeder on it. Wrap each end of the twine around the can about three times, until both ends are once again at the top. Tie a knot, thread the beads over the two ends of the twine, and hang outside. Voila! You’re done. And the birds will surely thank you.

 

Crafty Kids: How to Make a Beaded Woven Plant Hanger

It’s spring, which means it’s a great time to bring some nature inside for you and the kids to nurture and enjoy. These easy decorative plant hangers are easy to bead together—think of them as macramé without the fuss. And they serve a three-fold purpose: they provide a fun craft for an otherwise dull afternoon; they enliven boring terra cotta pots; and they get plants up off the floor and other easy-to-reach surfaces where they can be easily knocked over.

These come to us from our friends at Crafting Community and we think you’ll have so much fun making them you won’t be able to stop at just one!

What you’ll need:

  • 2 7-foot lengths of butcher’s twine, or other sturdy rope
  • A yardstick
  • Assorted colorful wood beads
  • Assorted small, low-maintenance plants from your local nursery; cactuses and other succulents make good choices

1.     Stretch out your two pieces of twine together, fold them in half, and knot them together in the center, 2 inches from the top of your loop. Line them up as pictured on the yardstick, splitting the 4 strands into 2 groups: AB and CD

2.     Add a few beads to the strands in each group, then secure group AB with a knot 17 inches down from your top knot; repeat for group CD, making sure the knots are even.

3.     Four inches below your last set of knots, knot B & C together, and A & D together. Again, make sure the knots are even.

4.     Repeat step 3, knotting strands from opposite groups together.

5.     Two inches below your last pair of knots, knot all 4 strands together.

6.     Test out your pot in your hanger, making any adjustments to knots that may be necessary.

.     Find a sunny window and display!

DIY Parents: Getting Ready for the Big Move…Before You Move

By Smith Banfield

Moving into a new apartment can be overwhelmingly stressful—especially when you’ve add kids to the already chaotic mix. To figure out how to mitigate some of the horror, we asked styling consultant Smith Banfield of Clear Space in New York City for her top survival tips.

1. When you move, you’re stepping into the future—but not everything you own needs to go there with you, because most of that stuff is from your past. Before you just empty drawers into packing boxes, take some time to go through everything and really assess if you have to bring it along into your new, and doubtless limited, space. That having been said, don’t make those decisions for anyone but yourself. My mother was really harsh with me about things she’d bought me that were expensive and she thought we should keep, but ultimately, she decided what was important to me as a child rather than letting me decide. So, don’t force your children to keep anything they don’t want. If you think it’s worth saving, donate it to another family that can’t afford it. And if your child really feels she needs to hang on to something, let her make that decision.

2.  Categorize things before you move! There are boxes that you know will live in certain rooms, so you can transfer things from the old kitchen to the new kitchen; if you have comparable space in the new place, you can even transfer things from the top kitchen drawer, the middle kitchen drawer, and so on—mark all your boxes clearly with the room and its place in the room. You may need to modify this if you’re moving into a smaller space. And you should definitely throw away anything item you wouldn’t purchase tomorrow if you found it in its current condition at a garage sale—like a disintegrating spatula. Curate! So many people who say, “I’ll deal with it later,” then they wind up with a pile of boxes in a room that soon becomes invisible, and you put a lamp on it. It’s self-sabotaging, when what you really want when you move is to step into a new life, with a clean slate.

3.  Take the time to measure every inch of your new space before you move in, and then take a hard look at the furniture you have, so you don’t move a bulky couch that’s not going to fit through the door—because remember, everything you put on the moving truck increases the cost. What I do is take blue painters tape and tape it down on the floor where I think any object is going to go. If it looks like a tight fit, like the king bed is not going to fit in the bedroom, you can decide to buy a smaller bed. It’s also important to slow down and analyze your space once you’ve actually moved all your stuff into it. Before you do a huge redesign, live in the space for six months, so you and your family will learn your habits in terms of how you use it. I know you want everything to be perfect, but it is a process. That goes for painting the walls, too. You can have your landlord put up a fresh coat of white paint, and then wait and see what the lighting is like at night, or in winter; this avoids the mistake of deciding on a pretty blue for the dining room, only to discover that there’s not a lot of light coming in in December and the blue just looks depressing. It might take an entire year for you to feel like you’re completely settled in. But that’s okay!

Crafty Kids: How to Make Beaded Key Fobs

The title of this craft begs the questions: what exactly is a fob, and why on earth would any kid want to make one (aside from the fact, of course, that they’re really pretty)?

Traditionally—meaning, in the late 19th century—a fob was a decorative chain that attached your pocket watch to your person. Since not many folks wear pocket watches anymore, the craft is reimagined here by our friends at Crafting Community as a decoration for a key. And as every kid knows, getting your own key to the house is an enormous rite of passage, one that symbolizes a surge in responsibility as well as a parent’s recognition of it.

Why make a key fob? To celebrate that oh-so-important key and make it look as important as it really is. Not to mention, help your kid find it in her cluttered backpack!

What you’ll need:

Plastic lacing
Scissors
Metal clips
Pony beads in assorted colors

1. Start with about 6 feet of plastic lacing, fold it in half, and put it on a metal clip.

2. Thread your first bead onto one end of the cord, then thread the other end of the cord through the opposite side of the bead.

3. Begin your design by adding the next row of beads. To do this, slip on 2 beads to the right half of the lacing and then thread the left side of lacing through both beads.

4. Continue to increase or decrease by 1 bead each row until your design takes shape. Once your design is finished, make a knot and hide the little ends under the last row of beads. Now it’s time to hook on that key!

Eat, Play, Sleep

By Susan Maushart

In a recent Australian study, four in ten mothers describe dinner as an “unpleasant experience,” with the meal usually ending in an argument. At the same time, 76 percent agree that sit-down meals strengthen the family’s communication (and possibly its vocal chords), according to a recent survey of more than 16,000 mothers nationwide. Contradiction? Not necessarily.

Maybe the experience of being together as a family is a bit like eating your spinach. As Popeye might have observed, that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Like it or not—and clearly four out of ten of us don’t—family meals are consistently correlated with positive outcomes for children. And not just slightly positive outcomes. Ridiculously positive ones. Kids who eat family meals five to seven times a week get better grades, have a sunnier outlook on life, have significantly fewer problems with drugs, alcohol, or nicotine, and seem almost magically protected from developing eating disorders. They also—surprise!—have healthier diets. Recent research from the Department for Children, Schools and Family found a direct link between frequency of family meals and high school leaving scores, while a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2008 uncovered a clear, inverse relationship between “eating together as a family” and risky sexual behavior. Weirdly enough, simply having supper together was as protective against unsafe sex as “doing something religious together.” Then again, maybe it’s not that weird.

It’s not the “postcode effect” either (where socioeconomic class is the underlying determiner of advantage). Researchers in study after study have controlled for demographics and the findings remain. Rich or poor, middle class or underclass, highly educated or barely educated, families that eat meals together are dishing up a smorgasbord of advantages for their kids.

These facts are hardly news—although the media love nothing better than to give parents a serve on the topic. Or mothers, more accurately. In most accounts, the demise of the family meal is attributed to the usual suspect: feminism—or, as it is more decorously described, “Women’s participation in the workforce” or the “dual-earner family.” The implication is that when mothers work, families, like chickens, go free-range and slightly feral. Yet in Australia, where the full-time workforce participation of women with children is much lower than it is in the United States and the UK—a mere 11.42 percent of mothers report that their children usually eat at the family table. Remember, too, that we are talking about where and how the family members eat, not about who (or what) is doing the cooking. The effect is exactly the same, whether it’s a roast with all the trimmings, a stir-fry with fourteen intricately diced and unpronounceable vegetables, or burgers and fries eaten straight from the wrapper…

Among the things the family-meals literature doesn’t tell us is whether the benefits increase arithmetically with time—if twenty minutes around the dinner table is beneficial, are forty minutes verging on miraculous?—but heading into The Experiment, it seemed safe to assume that more of a goof thing was probably going to be…well, a good thing. Because we had always been a family that ate meals together…I was looking to The Experiment as a way of extending the experience in both quantity (time spent) and quality.

Admittedly, we were coming off a pretty low base. I would definitely have put up my hand along with the 40 percent of Australian mothers who find mealtimes unpleasant AND the 67 percent who believe they are good for us anyhow. Most nights, I’d put a fair amount of effort into preparing a meal. Nothing lavish—like most teenagers, mine are allergic to lavish—but in the main nutritious, balanced, and quasi-palatable…My kids were demon speed-eaters…With no more attractive prospect to lure them from the dinner table, [they’ did not exactly learn to linger over cigars and brandy. But at least they stopped inhaling their food and bolting for the nearest digital foxhole. We did slow down, all of us, and, over time, we did engage in more meaningful dinnertime dialog….

There were unexpected gains elsewhere on the bill of fare. Deprived of his early- morning downloads, Bill started spending more time at the breakfast table. He didn’t initiate a lot of conversation. But he did eat a lot more eggs, and spent an impressive amount of time reading the sports pages. I’m not sure it improved family communication, but it made me smile to see him tented behind the pages of The Australian…Sussy, too eventually started to make unscheduled appearances at the breakfast table…I’d serve her whatever it was I was making for Bill, anyway, and she’d eat every bite. It was sort of the opposite of demand feeding—more supply feeding, really—and I wished I’d started it fourteen years earlier.

Excerpted from The Winter of Our Disconnect by Susan Marchaut. (c) 2011 Susan Marchaut. Jeremy P. Tarcher, Penguin Group USA, Penguin Random House.

Photograph by Anna Demianenko via Unsplash.

Why Creativity Matters for Kids

By Clark Burbidge

The importance of creativity in our lives has been supported by study after study, but in our current public school system, the curriculum rarely supports creative thinking in our children. Too often, we find standards that are driven by tests, or by the desire to deliver curriculum in the most economical way. Such efforts do not train our children to think; rather, they teach memorization without meaning and regurgitation on demand, without understanding.

Measuring students’ skills by using a grading scale, while critical in schools, does not take into account the full spectrum of learning development necessary for our children to achieve success in many aspects of their lives. By taking our children away from art, music, performance, and other creative offerings that historically round out primary education, we are sliding ever more toward teaching what the answer is, rather than why the answer is important and how to get there. And as a result, our children are losing touch with the actual beauty of life on this planet.

Fostering creativity in children builds confidence, self-esteem, understanding, empathy, and emotional health. And if they aren’t getting it in the classroom, we parents must provide it ourselves. Below are a few great ways to help foster your child’s creativity outside the classroom environment—beyond art and craft projects.

Start a family book club. Reading with our kids is a great way to develop imagination. Take it a step further by spending time talking about the book afterwards. To avoid this feeling like just another homework assignment, start with an informal dinner conversation, asking questions like, what was the motive of the main character? Did he make a morally right decision? What would you have done in that situation? Help your kids look at the story from different angles and think of new possible outcomes.

Start a family blog. Creative writing can help improve a child’s vocabulary, as well as his creative muscles. A blog can be a great medium for a fiction series (like, what if we lived in space?) or to explore a topic your child is interested in, like cooking or science.

Take advantage of YouTube. There are a great many educational shows on YouTube and some of them are terrific—like TED’s Education channel. So many subjects are left out of traditional education these days. Discussing them will expand your child’s view of the world, and may even lead to a new passion! Ask your child what her favorite building is and why (maybe you have a budding architect on your hands), or her favorite scene in a TV show (maybe she’d like screenwriting), or favorite magazine (journalism). If you have middle- or high schoolers, discussions about social interactions and problem solving will develop creative and critical thinking skills and help them work out social interaction strategies.

You don’t need to be an expert in any of these things. Just get started—from wherever you and your child happen to be. Don’t overlook simple opportunities like museum exhibits, city festivals, and other cultural events. Then, make these creative interactions a regular part of your family life. That’s when the miracles will begin!

Photograph by Lotus Carroll via Creative Commons.