"I have heard it said, and now have found, that strong structure, and ritual for that matter, not only helps but actually creates discipline," Crawford wrote. "If bedtime always occurs at eight o'clock, without all of the waffling and bargaining I know goes on in many American homes, then children will come to accept it as a given and not create a stink every night when it's time to hit the hay. In our house, we'd disintegrated into the habit of announcing bedtime about twenty minutes before our target time, because a long negotiation had become inevitable. If I forgot to make the announcement, the girls got less sleep. That's not right." She said she had to work on not giving in to bargaining in all areas. "[Her daughters] are so happy and lovely when I relent ... unfortunately, this led us to a point where they did not really hear what I said the first time, knowing that there was a good chance I'd crumble."
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.
