My
first grader came home very excited - he was chosen to be the class news
reporter for the week. The assignment is
to select three news stories that happen this week by watching the TV news, reading
the newspaper or looking on the internet.
Once found, he has to write a couple sentences on a piece of paper
(that looks like an ice cream scoop). On
Friday he will “report” his news to the class.
This
is a great exercise to get the kids involved with current events and learn
about new things/topics. The only problem
is that we don’t watch the news in our house.
In fact shortly after we had our first born, we made the conscious decision
to ban all news because it’s so incredibly negative. As you listen, you can’t help but think, what if that was me
and my family? Letting your mind wander
on those thoughts is enough to drive you insane. Author Brene’ Brown refers to this as “foreboding
joy”. In one example she describes feeling
overwhelming love for your children as you watch them sleep. Then you follow that joyful feeling with the
worry/fear that they would stop breathing or something equally horrible would
happen. You end up being consumed
with the worry of what might happen instead of enjoying exactly how things are
right now.
However,
an interesting thing happens when you stop looking at the negative news. When you start actively looking for the
positive, it starts showing up more often all around you. On Facebook, more people are posting/sharing
positive, feel good stories. Corporations
are also starting to embrace this.
Starbucks has long been a leader in positivity running in store promotions
to create jobs for veterans and printing cups with positive affirmations. Chipotle also has a new project where they
have teamed with authors and thought leads to write short excerpts on their
cups and bags. The one I received was titled
“A Two-MinuteCase for Optimism” by Steven Pinker.
He writes on this exact topic, how easy it is to get discouraged by the
negative news until you start to look more closely at the numbers. It’s a great read, delivered in a very
interesting way; I just hope that people take notice before they throw it away. If you think about it this applies to many
things – it’s all right in front of us, are we taking the time to see it? Or do we assume it’s like everything before
it and throw it away without even looking?
After
all of these thoughts ran through my head, I figured I’d just have to let it
all go and hope for the best. My son
woke up the first morning and was eager to turn on the news and get
started. I tried to pick a local station
that I thought would have more community stories and less sensationalism. (Because really, how do you explain ebola to
a 6 year old in 2-3 sentences?) The
broadcast started with the overnight stories including a house fire, wrong way
driver car accident and a local shooting.
We talked about these a little bit, but thankfully he didn’t get too focused
on them. Luckily the news commercial
previewed new seasonal jobs at Amazon, so he was holding out to cover
that story. He wrote up his first scoop
and we’ve got one down, two to go. I
know that we can’t avoid all of the negative and I’m prepared to have those
conversations as they come up. But I also
have to admit that I will be gently steering him towards the more positive news
stories so that he learns that sharing these stories is much more fun.
Heart-FULLy
yours,
Kacey
If you are interested in reading the Two-Minute Case for Optimism it can be found here: http://cultivatingthought.com/author/steven-pinker/
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