Magazines serving the communities of Northern Westchester
The Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center invites you to our Spring Luncheon, May 10, 12 Noon to 2 PM . It will be held at Bet Am Shalom Synagogue, 295 Soundview Avenue, White Plains, NY 10606. The cost is $36 includes program and kosher lunch.
Holocaust survivor, Helga Luden, will be the guest speaker. Barbara Wind, Director, of the Holocaust Council of Greater MetroWest, will discuss “How to Talk to your Children about the Holocaust.”
For more information, please call (914)696-0738.
By Danika Altman, Ph.D.
Most of us believe our message to our children is: “Do your best.” But the implicit message may be: “You need to be the best.” We are a community of achievers with high expectations for our children. We want our children to replicate our success. We employ coaches and tutors to help, but by doing so we may also be conveying “You must do well.” The problem is that this message may be causing anxiety and win-at-all-costs attitudes in our children.
An overemphasis on winning neglects the valuable lessons that are learned from losing. It is painful and humbling. In order for our children to cope with losing, they must feel compassion for themselves. When we face our failures, compassion and support gives us a chance to rebound. Compassion for ourselves despite our flaws and mistakes is the way we endure criticism and grow. Alternatively, judgment and negativity after a failure often leads to anxiety, depression, aggression, quitting or poor performance.
In the U.S. Open Tennis final, Novak Djokovic gave us a good example of his need to win-at-all-costs. He called for a medic just before Stan Wawrinka’s turn to serve rather than before his own, and a game short of the changeover. The announcers alluded to this being poor sportsmanship. Wawrinka had momentum, and the six-minute hiatus could have caused him to lose focus but–despite it–he won the title. What makes this interesting is Djokovic and Wawrinka are friends, but will Wawrinka ever trust Djokovic again?
We have fortunately many opportunities to teach our children about sportsmanship and friendship. We have likely overheard children posturing, saying things like: “I’m the best at soccer and so and so is next.” If children brag to feel powerful by inducing envy in their friends, they will not likely have many successful friendships. We should teach our children that everyone has strengths and weaknesses. We should help them focus on their strengths and improving their weaknesses rather than on other children’s weaknesses to feel good about themselves. An excellent exercise in self-esteem building for children is to have them compliment someone who needs improvement in a particular skill. It creates positive feeling and connection rather than “power” at another child’s expense.
When we face our failures, compassion and support gives us a chance to rebound.
Children are experts at reading their parent’s reactions. If we express anger that our children have made the B team instead of the A team, they feel that they have failed, when in fact they have an opportunity to grow.
If we point out the number of children our children have to beat to get to the top of the tennis ladder, we are sending the message: “I will not be satisfied until you get there.” If we express disappointment when our children receive a poor grade on an exam, the message is “only an A makes you acceptable to me.”
Parents who criticize their children, their children’s teammates or coaches, create anxiety. They are teaching their children that their weaknesses will be seen and judged by others. When children feel shamed, they feel resentment toward their parents, rather than a desire to improve. Instead, empathic statements about how hard it is to be on the playing field or score As on tests are very valuable. Our children want to know that we support them and their friends despite setbacks. Empathy for their struggles empowers them to be resilient and self-confident. It enables them to work through their own disappointments without quitting or doubting themselves.
We abhor losing because it makes us feel pain and vulnerability but it also gives us opportunity to build self-esteem. If we help our children to see that we have been there and pushed through, we become role models for how to rebound. If we help our children view failures as something that happen to all of us but do not define who we are, they might even accept a bit of advice. If our children see our confidence in their ability to work hard and our compassion for their pain, we give them the strength and determination to try again.
In a Ted Talk, Julie Lythcott Haims reports the Harvard Grant Study shows that the best predictor of success in adulthood is not athletic ability or grades. It is the number of chores one did in childhood. A greater number of chores is correlated with taking initiative and contributing to the greater good at work. We all know that working with colleagues is equally as important for success as surpassing them.
If our implicit message to our children is that they have to win, they may not be developing confidence, compassion, humility and resilience in the process of growing up.
If instead, we help our children reach their goals by supporting their strengths while having compassion for their weaknesses, they will hopefully have the self-esteem to do their best.
Danika Altman, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice with adolescents, adults and couples. She specializes in adolescent anxiety, depression, and identity development. She also works as a coach for students on college and employment interviews. She has offices in Pleasantville and Manhattan.
By Dana Y. Wu
Our bucolic suburban hamlet with its excellent schools and vibrant community support for literacy is the perfect setting for the 4th annual Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival (CCBF) on September 24. This free, day-long event attracts thousands of families from Westchester and beyond to meet 90 authors and illustrators including award-winners Chris Raschka, Rita Williams-Garcia, and Jane Yolen.
Children’s authors and illustrators share a similar hope–to imagine a better world through images and ideas in books. Book lovers know the particular joy of putting a book into young hands and seeing curiosity greatly inspired by imagination.
Eric Velasquez says his book, Liberty Street, a story of a slave girl’s escape, is one of his favorites, “because the closer the little girl in the story gets to being free, the closer she gets to literacy.”
Writing as Activism
At a master class hosted at the Library of Congress, Kwame Alexander, the 2015 Newberry Award winner for The Crossover, said that “writing children’s books is activism.” Given recent events that signal a more polarized world, the CCBF is our community’s way to acknowledge, appreciate and celebrate both differences and commonalities in our increasingly multicultural and multilingual society.
Velasquez continues, “When I was a child, very few children’s books had characters that looked like me. I remember feeling left out and uninterested in reading.”
Today, his deeply moving drawings are rendered with realistic details so children see themselves, their friends and their families in his books, but also see outside themselves.\“Children need both windows and mirrors. Too much of one and not enough of the other can seriously impair the intellectual growth of a child, especially their sense of empathy,” says Velasquez.
Author/illustrator Nick Bruel, creator of this year’s CCBF poster “Be Part of Our Story” makes a conscious effort to be inclusive and authentic in his laugh out loud books which are about a cantankerous cat.
Bruel says, “In A Bad Kitty Christmas,” I needed to depict generations within the same family. I made several characters, Black, Asian and Hispanic, and I included a LGBT couple. I debated with myself–do I write a book that could potentially speak to that kid who actually has two Mommies? I recognized that there would be people who would be offended. Like it or not, that kid exists and deserves to see his/her world represented in a book. Over the years, I received many, many angry missives over the very brief mention of Nan and Pam and even a school in Houston banned my book.”
Shared Priorities
The CCBF is our community’s way to promote reading, freedom and the power of discernment–keys to our children’s success in the 21st century world. Our town’s recent capital bond vote enables our schools and the Chappaqua Library to be “active and dynamic learning environments where students engage in meaningful inquiry, invention, interaction, hypothesizing, collaboration, and personal reflection.” It demonstrates our shared priority that students think deeply, apply problem-solving skills, and actively participate in their learning. The CCBF represents the desire for all our kids and teens to experience a broader world through the pages of a book, with empathy in their hearts and critical thinking in their minds. Barry Graziano of Houlihan Lawrence says, “the CCBF “is a great example of bringing the community together for a great cause. By empowering our children with the art of reading and language, we open a world of culture.”
Here’s what to look forward to:
“Banned Books Week” Sept. 25- Oct. 1, 2016
This annual event sponsored by the American Library Association celebrates the freedom to read, to seek and to express ideas, even those ideas which some consider unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those viewpoints to all who wish to read them.
Innovative Assistive Technology Gives Voice to the Voiceless
Ossining, N.Y. — In an ordinary household, on an ordinary day, a seven-year-old boy might see lunchtime as an opportunity to sharpen his negotiating skills and press for chicken nuggets when Mom offers salad.
When seven-year-old Antonio requested chicken nuggets over salad for the first time, it was anything but ordinary. In fact, until recently, Antonio couldn’t ask for lunch at all.
As a non-verbal child with significant cognitive and physical limitations, Antonio could only gesture and hope the loving adults who care for him full-time at the Sunshine Children’s Home could correctly read his cues. They usually could and always tried to the best of their abilities – they’ve been working with Antonio for much of his young life. But while his support team worked tirelessly to meet his daily needs, they wanted much more for Antonio. They wanted him to enjoy the things that typically developing kids can take for granted – things like choices, a sense of control and, perhaps most importantly, the feeling of connectedness that comes so much more easily to those who can communicate and interact with others.
It didn’t happen overnight. One by one, various modes of communication were trialed for a period of time, without success. No tool was able to meet Antonio’s complex needs and help his communication skills advance beyond basic gestures — until the beginning of this school year.
In the fall of 2016, Antonio was introduced to an app called Proloquo2go – a program that enables him to tap a picture on a tablet to express what he wants to say. Antonio had finally been given a voice.
For a boy like Antonio, there’s no such thing as an overnight success. His journey began with a single picture on a tablet. He received training. He practiced. He made mistakes.
And then one day, for the first time in his seven years of life, Antonio asked for his lunch.
The significance of this success was profound – and it was only the beginning. Once Antonio had mastered the concept of using the tablet to make a verbal request for a basic want, he was given the opportunity to communicate a preference – he could choose what he wanted for lunch from a selection of foods.
The Sunshine Children’s Home is specially equipped to give children with complex medical needs a safe, loving home, a school experience, social connections and recreation. And over time, Antonio’s tablet has been programmed to assist him throughout every part of his day, including nursing, recreation and school. There are buttons for morning meeting, for math and for physical education, so he can have the opportunity to actively participate in the program.
Antonio still needs reminders – he spent seven years using gestures to communicate, so at times he understandably reverts to his old habit of communicating that way. But his progress is significant. He has used his buttons to communicate spontaneously; he has requested for specific buttons to be added.
Recently, Antonio had the opportunity to go out into the community for a day to go shopping at a toy store. There, he achieved an important milestone: With verbal cues, he was able to use his tablet to choose a toy and interact with the shop owner.
Antonio still needs excessive verbal and visual cues as he works towards his next goal — increasing his core vocabulary in order to be able to formulate simple, three-word sentences.
The road toward greater independence is long. At the Sunshine Children’s Home, the caring, creative and innovative team will continue to see to it that Antonio has the support, encouragement and technology he needs, every step of the way.
The mission of the Sunshine Children’s Home and Rehab Center is to create a loving and supportive environment that provides the highest level of quality pediatric care for children who need it. Sunshine provides a quality home for children from birth to 18 years of age who require post-acute medical care and/or rehabilitative therapy, combined with psychological and developmental interventions. About 46 percent of the children in residence require palliative care, while an equal percentage of others improve enough with care to be discharged to a group or community facility, or ideally, at home with their families. For more information, visit www.sunshinechildrenshome.org.
A Kids’ Carnival and “Funraiser,” with activities and carnival games for kids, will take place at 586 King Street in Chappaqua on Sunday, May 1 from 1 p.m. – 4pm, with proceeds benefiting the Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival. Families will have a rare chance to meet Rosemary Wells, of Max and Ruby fame, courtesy of Houlihan Lawrence, and there will be lots of carnival fun including Kiwi Country Day Camp’s gaga pit, blow-ups, carnival games, plus raffles and refreshments.
“The Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival has grown to become one of the most anticipated family events in Westchester,” said CCBF Executive Director Dawn Greenberg. “In order to continue championing our cause to promote children’s literacy, we need the support of our community. It’s through fundraisers such as the Kids’ Carnival, as well as through our thoughtful sponsors, that we are able to raise funds to keep our Book Festival as vibrant as previous years.”
COST:
Admission is $20 per family.
REGISTER:
To register visit, EVENT BRITE.
(https://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=24333125032)
WHEN:
Sunday, May 1, from 1 to 4pm
WHERE:
586 King Street, Chappaqua, NY
WHO:
The Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival is the only children’s book festival in Westchester County. From princesses to pups, to angst-filled tweens, and every crazy character in between, you’ll find them all at the fourth annual CCBF, on September 24, 2016. More than 85 popular authors, who bring your favorite characters to life, are expected to participate. Most will be signing their books and reading excerpts. It will be a family event with tons of fun, food, kid-friendly activities, entertainment and, of course, books! For more information, visit www.ccbfestival.org or follow the CCBF at www.facebook.com/chappaquachildrensbookfestival.
