Shannon Brescher Shea and "Growing Sustainable Together"
An interview with author Shannon Brescher Shea about how to parent kids who like to push boundaries and how to build a foundation for more sustainable living and parenting.
This week I’m so happy to bring you an interview with author Shannon Brescher Shea. Shannon works for the Department of Energy and lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband and two children. Her book “Growing Sustainable Together” was published in 2020 (a pandemic book baby!).
Tell me about your book and how it came to be:
My book is about how to use environmental activities to teach your kids to be kind, engaged, responsible citizens. I’ve been an environmentalist since I was a little kid, so I knew when I became a mom that this was not something I could not give up. It’s really embedded in my values.
But one thing I kept coming up against was this sense that being green and being a good mom, or having a good time with my kids, were conflicting somehow. I can’t go to this protest because I was working all week and I need to see the kids. Should I be spending time in the garden when the kids are doing XYZ? It was this guilt of I’m never doing enough, and then the endless mom guilt. If we could run the world on guilt that mothers experience, I think we’d have an endless supply of energy.
I was writing a blog on parenting at the time, and I started asking people I interviewed about sustainability, “How does this conflict with parenting?” And all of them said It doesn’t. So I was like, “Am I the only one? Am I just nuts?” But eventually I figured out that the things we were doing to be sustainable were actually going to help me raise the kind of kids I wanted to raise: kids who are kind, who are interested in social justice, who care about their neighborhood. I also think a lot about co-benefits, where it’s not just the right thing to do, but there’s all these great benefits for you and your kids. When you learn to garden, your kids are going to learn how to deal with stuff that’s not going the way you want it to, but it’s pretty low-stakes. These are skills all of us want our kids to have. Everyone says they want their kids to be kind, but a lot of times, we undercut that by sending the message that it’s all about them. If the kid keeps getting the message that it’s all about them, that’s not going to foster kindness.
Everyone says they want their kids to be kind, but a lot of times, we undercut that by sending the message that it’s all about them.
I realized that, for some people, sustainability is very much an add-on, but it only works when it’s woven into things from the start. People will ask, “What are your top five easy things to do?” And I don’t have those, because that’s not how it works. But what I will say is that if you’re going to take small steps to start with, make them ones that can be foundational to bigger steps. So you want to drive less, great. Figure out where you can walk. Walk somewhere. Now you know how to walk to that place or bike to that place or take the bus, so you can do it next time. You did that step once, and that allows you do to it again and again. That’s different than, Oh, do you think you should bring reusable bags to the grocery store? That’s not really something you can build on.
Your kids are early school age. Did you choose your kids’ school? What do you like about it?
Ours is our neighborhood school. Many schools are far less diverse than if you just did strict geographic boundaries, but ours is the opposite, you can tell that they included our neighborhood for more diversity.
I actually really love our school. One of the things I really liked about it was, I know you can’t judge based on test scores, but not only were the test scores pretty good, but we also had pretty good economic diversity. I think it’s important that kids are part of a diverse community. I would want a school that had really good support for kids of all types of learning abilities, all the way from good support for kids with learning disabilities up to kids who are gifted, for kids of all races, economic and income backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, things like that.
How similar or different you think your children’s experience of childhood is to your own experience of being a child? What stands out to you as the major similarities or differences?
In a lot of ways, I feel like my children are actually having a childhood more similar to my mom’s childhood than mine. We’re in a much more diverse community, so in that way it’s very different. But as they grow up, they're going to be able to walk places and bike places and take the bus, so they will have far more independence than I did in my suburban childhood in upstate New York. We live in a much smaller house, probably close to size of the one my mom grew up in. We share more with our neighbors — we go to the park and the community center.
In terms of parenting philosophy, I was a very rules-oriented kid, from an early age. And my kids are the opposite — they are like chaos embodied, kind of anti-authoritarian. and will question the rules and push the boundaries until they find out exactly where the line is. So where time-outs worked very effectively for my mom, I don’t think they’re helpful or useful for most kids, and especially not for my kids.
I hate when people guarantee things or suggest that if you do it and it’s not “working,” then either you’re doing it wrong or you’re broken. I tried very hard to avoid that in my book; to phrase things more as “This can help.” Just because something doesn’t get the results you expect doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do. It might be teaching things that just take a long time and they have to grow into those skills.
You can find Shannon online at We’ll Eat You Up, We Love You So, or follow her on Instagram or Twitter. Don't forget to enter the giveaway to win a copy of her book! If you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, won’t you consider subscribing? It’s free! I hope you have a great week and your kid's school does NOT shut down because of COVID, lolsob