mercredi 3 mai 2017
What the Unicorn (and Now Dragon) Frappuccino Can Teach Us About Parenting
I'm about to talk about to you about the challenge of modern parenting through the lens of the recent culinary atrocity that is the Starbucks Unicorn - and now Dragon - Frappuccino. Stay with me.
I'm a coffee drinker, the kind that wants all coffee to taste like something between espresso and soil - very hot and very, very strong. Occasionally, like if it's ninety degrees, I will allow my coffee to be served cold, and with a touch of almond or coconut milk, but I do not want sugar or hazelnut syrup or whipped cream or sprinkles anywhere near my coffee. I'm sure you can imagine, then, that the newly-released brightly-colored Unicorn Frappuccino troubles me. Coffee isn't supposed to be pink. Or yellow. Or blue. And it certainly shouldn't look like a dozen peeps fell into a blender. This isn't coffee. I'm not sure this is even food, in the strictest sense, but it isn't coffee.
And this reminds me of the challenge we face as parents in current culture: everything is fun and fast and brightly colored. Everything is sugary and delicious and sparkly, apps and shows and toys.
This is what I want to do: I want to appeal for some non-flashy, slightly old-fashioned kid stuff. A hammock hung between trees. Sand. Dirt. A hunk of printer paper and a few colored pencils. If I feel exhausted and overwhelmed by the aggressively flashy offerings for children these days, how does it feel for my children?
I imagined that one major component of parenting would be showing my children a big, beautiful, multi-faceted world. It is, but more often these days, I find myself focusing on how to build boundaries on the complexity of the world available to them. I want to make their world a little smaller, a little simpler: water, sky, grass.
I sound crotchety, possibly, or at the very least old-fashioned, but in this season, my major parenting plays sound like things Laura Ingalls' parents encouraged her to do: get outside. Play. Make things up. Rest. Tell stories. As long as I'm on the curmudgeonly track, I might as well tell you that the Little House series is my all-time favorite: yes, a series of books about farming and oxen and calico.
I live in the same modern world that you live in. My kids live in the same modern, tech-saturated world that your kids do. We watch MasterChef Junior, and I love watching my kids make stop-motion videos on their iPads, and when I'm out of town I'm incredibly thankful for FaceTime and other technologies that help me stay connected to my family.
And yet: the Unicorn Frappuccino. I'm becoming increasingly sure that one of my most important jobs as a parent is making sure that my kids don't develop a taste for Unicorn Frappuccinos, literally and metaphorically. I want to give them an appetite for things that are hearty, wholesome, nutrient-dense-again, literally and figuratively.
It's more a defensive position than I'd imagined, before I became a parent. But there are more flashing lights and sparkly seductions than I'd imagined fighting for airtime in my children's lives and brains and ears and eyes. In a world of loud, brightly-colored junk-food, it's my job to lower the volume of their environments, and to fight for the nutritional level of what they're consuming.
What I keep coming back to: dirt. Play. Strawberries in the Spring and apples in the Fall. Time. Silence. Coloring. The exact opposite of the Unicorn Frappuccino.
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