New Year's Resolutions...

It's the New Year and the majority of Americans are more-than-happy to leave the old one behind. 2009 was not a great year by any standard. In fact, a majority polled think the 00’s were the worst decade in…well…decades. On the flip side, a majority of Americans (although probably not the same majority!) are hopeful 2010 will be much better - I know I certainly am among them. I think if we all tried to be a little more balanced in our approach to life, avoiding extremes, we wouldn’t have all the craziness that sometimes seems to plague us. Not to say that flirting with limits and sometimes breaking them is not needed; if no one ever did we’d probably still be living in caves. Nor am I promoting never rocking the boat. Ideas need to be pushed, we need to stretch and challenge ourselves mentally and physically, we need to take chances. But a lot of our current quandary is the result of greed and hack reaction. Too much nowadays, people seem unwilling to read the fine print – or even the directions for that matter – to look more deeply in to an issue. We want a 30 second sound bite of everything but no more (and I think even 30 seconds might seem too long for a populace raised in the post-MTV age). I read not long ago that if the Cuban Missile Crisis happened today, the end result would probably be nuclear war instead of a crisis averted. In 1962 JFK had time to think and deliberate without being pressed by the press and Congress for a quick response to the situation. Today, the media juggernaught and politicians’ desire to be the constant center of attention combined with our collective short attention span unfortunately serves only to demand an immediate response from the president to every little blip and hiccup.

I’m not usually one to make New Year’s Resolutions. However, this New Year in trying to be a bit more balanced, I’m going to make my best effort to multi-task less, try learn about fewer things but each in more depth, read the long news story all the way through, and pay attention to the details. In that spirit this installment of The Balanced Guy will be dedicated to trying to help you be a little less crazy, a little less paranoid, a little less scattered, a little less…period. And fair warning – I get up on a bit of a soapbox this time around. 

I recognize the irony in this given that The Balanced Guy blog is about giving you short blurbs of information on a multitude of topics. However, maybe one or two of them will interest you enough to look a little more closely. Won’t you join me?

Greenbacks - In his recent article “Why American Consumers Can’t Add”, Bob Sullivan exposes a less-often-discussed contributing factor to the current economic crises – Americans are generally terrible at math, especially consumer finance. I find math to be a somewhat tricky subject to write about for several reasons.1) I wasn’t a math whiz growing up and had problems with it 2) I’ve actually turned out to be pretty good at doing basic math in my head 3) and I even have an MBA in finance yet still find some components of consumer finance tricky to understand at times. This all leads me to the realization that there are so many branches of mathematics and complex financial instruments that wanting people to have even a basic understanding of it all is almost akin to asking them to perform brain surgery. At the same time, basic financial literacy is something everyone should have. Not to knock my parents but they never taught me how to balance a checkbook, the basics of paying bills or the concept of a mortgage and interest rates let alone the intricacies of investing. I had to figure it out on my own. Which reminds me – I need to start involving my oldest son next time I sit down to pay bills.

Tasty Licks – In his masterful work, Last Child in the Woods, from 2005 (yeah, yeah…so it’s not brand new, it’s still excellent), Richard Louv examines and explores in detail how American society has taken its children out of nature and created a host of problems by doing so. Because I don’t think I could do better, I’m going to simply copy and paste a great and concise review of the book written by Jeanne Hamming that is posted on its Amazon listing.

Unstructured outdoor play was standard for me as a hyperactive child growing up in the rural Midwest. I fondly recall digging forts, climbing trees and catching frogs without concern for kidnappers or West Nile virus. According to newspaper columnist and child advocate Richard Louv, such carefree days are gone for America’s youth. Boys and girls now live a "denatured childhood," Louv writes in Last Child in the Woods. He cites multiple causes for why children spend less time outdoors and why they have less access to nature: our growing addiction to electronic media, the relinquishment of green spaces to development, parents’ exaggerated fears of natural and human predators, and the threat of lawsuits and vandalism that has prompted community officials to forbid access to their land. Drawing on personal experience and the perspectives of urban planners, educators, naturalists and psychologists, Louv links children’s alienation from nature to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, stress, depression and anxiety disorders, not to mention childhood obesity. The connections seem tenuous at times, but it is hard not to agree with him based on the acres of anecdotal evidence that he presents. According to Louv, the replacement of open meadows, woods and wetlands by manicured lawns, golf courses and housing developments has led children away from the natural world. What little time they spend outside is on designer playgrounds or fenced yards and is structured, safe and isolating. Such antiseptic spaces provide little opportunity for exploration, imagination or peaceful contemplation. Louv’s idea is not new. Theodore Roosevelt saw a prophylactic dose of nature as a counter to mounting urban malaise in the early 20th century, and others since have expanded on the theme. What Louv adds is a focus on the restorative qualities of nature for children. He recommends that we reacquaint our children and ourselves with nature through hiking, fishing, bird-watching and disorganized, creative play. By doing so, he argues, we may lessen the frequency and severity of emotional and mental ailments and come to recognize the importance of preserving nature. At times Louv seems to conflate physical activity (a game of freeze tag) with nature play (building a tree fort), and it is hard to know which benefits children most. This confusion may be caused by a deficiency in our larger understanding of the role nature plays in a child’s development. At Louv’s prompting, perhaps we will see further inquiry into this matter. In the meantime, parents, educators, therapists and city officials can benefit from taking seriously Louv’s call for a "nature-child reunion."

What I can say is this book struck a chord with me and in the year since reading it, I have made it a priority to send my kids outside to play much more often. We are fortunate to have pretty big back yard that is far from perfectly manicured and even has a small - very small - section of “woods” in the back corner. We’ve only been back in NJ for about 6 months, having moved from Florida where the landscape is utterly man-made, manicured and manufactured – there are no woods in neighborhoods there and it showed in my children’s play when they moved here. At first, they were completely baffled at how to play in a backyard with no toys and I literally had to show them how I used to build cities and roads out of sticks, rocks and dirt. Since then, they’ve come a long way and can now occupy themselves for hours outside. Try this simple test with your kids – send them out without any toys and see if they can figure out how to entertain themselves. If they are having trouble, you know they need more unstructured play time in the great outdoors. Think back on your own childhood – are your fondest memories of playing in that stream behind your house or playing Atari? You know the answer.

WWWD? – Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t heard about “over-parenting” or “helicopter parents”. A recent article in Time is pretty interesting. These are the folks who schedule their kids’ lives 24/7/365, leaving them little time or chance to just be kids, to imagine, to play, to figure things out, to fail at something, to get hurt and to learn to pick themselves up and dust themselves off. I’m not sure how parents got this way, but some failure, pain (physical or emotional), and loss are an important part of the human experience. A good day is all the better for having known a bad one. I don’t know about you but I’ve learned more from failure than I ever did from success. To be sure, success is sweet and a taste of it will drive you to seek more, but the whip-crack pain of failure motivates even more. As parents our job is not to completely shield our children from failure, but to gradually expose them to it so that when they finally go out on their own they aren’t slapped upside the head when things don’t go their way. Speaking of kids’ heads, I was dumbfounded when recently ice skating and nearly half the kids were wearing helmets! What the…? Has it come to this? I recall being 8 years old and taking off for the day into the woods and fields with my BB gun and pocket knife, simply being told “Be home for dinner”.

Giving our children time to be bored, with no planned activities is incredibly important to their development. Boredom is the great crucible where ideas are born (just as long as someone is around to provide some modicum of supervision to ensure no real mayhem erupts or they don’t play video games all day instead). You’d be amazed what some scrap lumber, a hammer and nails can become. Most importantly, boredom enhances creativity. In both academia and the working world, professors and employers are finding that our young adults, while good at performing calculations and other rote tasks, are lacking in the ability to think creatively and problem-solve. No doubt you recall those lazy summer days as a kid spent conjuring up games from what was at hand instead of “playing” with a pre-programmed toy or video game.

Finally, I’ll make a call to abolish “participation trophies” given out at the end of a sports season. When did this become so widespread? I recall as a kid a the YMCA awards presentations when the tops teams got to go up and receive trophies for their success while the less-successful – the losers – sat, applauded the winners, learned to be good losers, went home empty-handed and let the pain of their loss feed their desire to do better. I was at both ends of that situation at different times. I also have a few participation trophies – they’re useless. However, in my box of childhood memories, the medals, awards and trophies from actual victories – those…they mean something despite the time gone by.

Honeydew – I’m learning to hand-cut dovetail joints. Sure I could get a dovetail jig for my router and make them perfectly, lickety-split but the satisfaction (and frustration!) of laying them out, cutting them and making minor adjustments all by hand until it works wouldn’t be there – not to mention the lack of power tool noise. It certainly takes a lot more time but I’m not a professional cabinetmaker under a deadline to complete a piece of furniture for client. However, having high-quality, professional tools makes a huge difference. The first few times I cut dovetails I used an old miter saw I had. It was not an enjoyable process. Then for Christmas I received a Veritas dovetail saw by Lee Valley Tools. Wow…what a difference! While my skill at making a professional looking joint increased only marginally (everything takes practice) the ease of cutting increased exponentially. It tracks straight and seemingly melts its way through wood.

The Wide World – Go for a walk. Seriously, take a hike. And if you want to turn it in to a fascinating experience that can fill an entire afternoon, take along an Audubon Field Guide. If you live anywhere in the Mid-Atlantic states, I highly recommend you buy the National Audubon Society Regional Guide to the Mid-Atlantic States. It’s a great handy reference for most things you’ll encounter along your walk from trees and flowers, to bugs, birds and bears. It’s fun and satisfying to learn the names of the flora and fauna in the world around you; to be able to tell your children that it’s not just a butterfly but an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail and not just a tree but a Yellow Poplar and the tallest tree in eastern forests. Showing your children you have a bit of knowledge and interest in the world around you can only help pique their curiosity and desire to learn as well. Soon they’ll be turning over rocks in the stream, wanting to know what that “bug” is (it’s the burrowing crayfish, Cambarus diogenes) and then soon running up to you with not just wildflowers they picked but White Wood Asters.

Should you want more information, Audubon goes into much, much more detail with separate field guides to butterflies, fish, wildflowers, trees (eastern US), trees (western US), the night sky, weather, rocks, mushrooms, fossils, seashells and most regions of the US along with a host of other topics. They are perfectly sized to toss into a backpack and are durable with a flexible plastic cover and sturdy pages.