Roper says that while she would read about the best way to get messages across to your children and resolve to do them, often the task of looking after two babies at once made following the "rules" harder. "Once, for example, Clio decided to grab on to and shake the floor lamp in our living room," she wrote. "So I firmly told her, 'No, no, Clio, don't touch'.... but that was a best-case scenario. Elsa was otherwise happily occupied with something, so I could devote my full attention to Clio for more than a few seconds. The more typical scenario would have been that while Clio was shaking the lamp, Elsa was standing at the baby gate in the kitchen doorway.... so instead of telling Clio to stop in a developmentally appropriate and self-esteem-promoting manner, I would be more likely to say, 'No, Clio, stop it,' so I could quickly go let Elsa into the kitchen. But then I'd hear the lamp being shaken ever more violently, pivot back to Clio, and scoop her up onto my hip, prompting her to start whining and screaming because, hey, she was having fun with that lamp. Then I'd go over and open the ... gate for Elsa and put Clio down, sprinting back after her when she made a beeline for the lamp again, just as Elsa started crying.... Should I go on?"
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.
