This week, we enjoyed an interview with Wilderness Therapist Brad Reedyover at The Awl, who discussed wilderness therapy and why it works.
“I think about what makes it effective a lot. I think it definitely is unplugging. And I think that is more profound today than it was 15 years ago. A lot of what I attribute the success to is what we call primitive living. We provide them supplies. We provide them food and all the gear that they need, but they have to do everything themselves every day. They have to build their own shelter. They have to cook their own food. They make fire every day to cook on and stay warm by. They do it in small groups of eight to 10 students. Every lesson you want to impart to them is implicit in daily living.”
Meanwhile, two moms stirred up a lot of controversy this week with first-person articles about their relationships with their daughters. Jennifer Coburn had more trouble dealing with her daughter’s break-upthan her daughter did.
“Katie told me to take a deep breath. It would all be fine, she assured me. She explained that John was a nice guy whom she enjoyed getting to know, but ultimately they had very different interests. They lived on different coasts. It could never work.
‘But … he was so cute,’ I said, pouting.”
And in an article in Vogue, mother Dara-Lynn Weiss, whose daughter talks about helping her daughter lose 16 pounds using methods that many found distasteful, if not abusive. The article, which is not available online, was summed up in a piece at Time by Judith Warner, “Why We Should Thank Vogue’s Diet Mom.”
“When Bea turned 7, Weiss discovered, at a pediatrician checkup, that her daughter was technically obese, with a weight in the 99th percentile for her age and height. She decided to take matters in hand.… She deprived her of dinner one night after learning that Bea had consumed ‘nearly 800 calories’ of Brie, filet mignon, baguette and chocolate at a French Heritage Day event at school. She forbade participation in the school’s Pizza Fridays after the girl ‘admitted to adding a corn salad as a side dish one week.’ She lost it at a Starbucks when an employee couldn’t tell her the exact number of calories in a kids’ hot chocolate.”
The article produced scorn from across the web, with bloggers and commenters accusingWeiss of abusing her daughter and projecting her own body image issues. But Warner pointed out that there is virtue in the discussion that has been raised by Weiss’s tactics.
“In putting herself out there for the world to despise, she has lifted the lid on the little-discussed but vitally important issue of how difficult it is for parents with their own food-and-body-image issues to nourish and nurture their children in healthy ways, particularly when they’re up against a culture that endlessly (and hypocritically) reinforces their own worst tendencies.”
At Huffington Post Parents, Dr. Joanna Dolgoff, the author of “Red Light, Green Light, Eat Right,” which was mentioned in the Vogue piece, spoke out against Weiss’s tactics, stressing that the Red Light, Green Light method “lets kids be kids.” Also at Huffington Post, Lisa Belkin brought up a wider-reaching question provoked by both Weiss and Coburn’s stories: Is it fair for parents to be exposing so much of their children’s lives to the public? Well, what do you think? What did you see this week that you absolutely loved (or hated!)? Let us know in the comments!
