Crawford writes that she and her husband were unsure what punishment approach to take when her toddler Daphne took a crayon and drew on the walls of their hallway. "Time-out? Stern warning?" she wrote. "Daph was just shy of three years old, so taking away privileges or toys wouldn't really register much with her. When I asked [her friend] Lucie what they might do in France with this type of toddler misdemeanor, she didn't hesitate: 'You go to the kitchen and get a sponge with soap and water. Sit her on a stool and have her scrub.' I was incredulous. Scrub it all off? My husband had tried and couldn't erase so much as a single scrawl. Then Lucie assured me that I only needed to make Daphne wash the wall for a minute so that she had a chance to understand the consequences of her action – and to see how ... hard it is to get crayon off a wall. It seemed so obvious. Yet somehow, in the hyperattentive, must-do-the-right-thing parenting environment in which I'd been marinating, nothing was obvious anymore."
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.
