Grant remembers when her son Ian was younger and he would see a sibling or other young child fall down. According to Grant, Ian would coolly gaze at the child who was hurt and state (with the speech impediment he had at the time that stopped him from pronouncing his "r"s), "Well, on the bwight side, it didn't happen to me." Grant says she worried over this, thinking that Ian didn't have compassion towards other people. But today, she says, it's different. "He has a gift for working with children and becomes a one-man vaudeville show when he's with a young child who is fussing or sad," she writes. Grant cautions against parents who worry endlessly over a child who's too fidgety (will he never be able to pay attention in school later?) or a child who likes the ice cream truck (will she only want to eat ice cream as an adult?). "I wish I hadn't seen everything my little ones did as somehow predictive of what they would do as adults," Grant writes.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
