Growing A Yard For Harvest

I love to have a manicured yard. I want my yard to look good so that when I come home, I am arriving at a beautiful and uplifting place.

Growing native flowers is one way to achieve this with minimal fuss and no watering or chemicals. It's also important that I find my plants for free, and amassing my collection of native plants is something that I am always working towards. With many of my local parks growing native flowers, and no shortage of interesting flowers growing along the roadside, collecting seeds for my yard is both simple and exciting!

One thing that is just as important to me as having a nice looking yard is to have a yard that is useful. Again, growing native flowers is a useful way to garden because it benefits the local eco system and attracts beneficial insects and feeds the birds, squirrels and wild life. But native flowers are not only nice to look at and good for the environment, they make nice dried arrangements in the fall and can be used in many ways. Some wild flowers are edible like Queen Annes Lace (wild carrot) or have medicinal uses, like Echinacea.





I grow flowers with the ultimate goal of harvest. Even my ornamental rose bushes have a purpose aside from being pretty. I can make potpourri out of the blooms after they just reach their peak, and then I can blend them up to make rose beads for jewelry making.

Growing a yard for harvest naturally means growing a yard that is abundant in food. I would love some day to have a yard in which I can walk out into and pick a wide variety food to eat. I have my vegetable patch, my herb garden and my strawberry bed. I also have a hazelnut tree that I will find a mate for soon so that in a few years I will have loads of hazelnuts to snack on and cook with.

Nature offered me a blackberry bush earlier this year, that just sprouted in my yard and 75% of my vegetable garden volunteered itself, from the compost that I created from my kitchen scraps. I planted the cucumber and the bed of lettuce, but Nature decided to give me 3 squash plants, 2 pumpkin vines, 7 garlic plants and over twenty tomato plants. Yes, Nature is very, very good to me and I know how to use my bit of Earth.

One day I plan to have a small orchard, of four to six fruit trees, and I have a large currently unused area designated to grow others types of berries, apart from the blackberries I already have. But it's important to me to have a yard that is useful in many ways - not just pleasing to look at or delicious to eat, even more than a space for the children to play.

There are plants in my yard which are only grown for some sort of functional purpose.


I have an ash tree that was cut down to the stump a year ago because it was badly placed and would soon grow into the chain link fence. The sugars built up in the roots allowed it to sprout several upright branches, turning the tree into a bush. I noticed this when the shoots were small and could be snipped easily, but I quickly realized the potential in them. I allowed to shoots to grow tall, for they are straight and pliable. We have used them to roast marshmallows and hotdogs over the fire pit, and they are also useful for building natural trellises for vining plants. Cutting them down every fall will allow new shoots each spring to be used for many things throughout the next growing season. Because they are very bendy, they can be easily shaped and I am currently considering what types of things might be created from them.

I have a slope in my back yard that is a great place to allow the grass to grow in the late fall and get nice and tall. We purposely stop mowing it in early September. There are some weeds that grow in it, that once dried make nice floral arrangement along with the native wild flowers, but what I'm really after is the grass. In the late afternoon when there is no moisture on it, I will reap the grass and form it into little bundles. These are for my fire place during the winter. We also trim the trees back when the summer begins to get hot and the rapid growth of spring dies down. The limbs will then be cut into 8 inch long sections and dried out for fall, to become kindling. In the winter when I want to start my fireplace, which I tend to do daily, I grab a nifty little bundle of dried grass from the stack, and handful of the dried twigs. Getting the fireplace going is pretty easy with them, no need for fancy store-bought starter logs or supplies.

All along my chain link fence are many types of vines. But the vines I am especially interested in are the wild grapes. They are either too old to produce, or they are a naturally barren variety.
I don't grow them for the fruit, I don't even like grapes. I want the vines. These are invasive and unruly, however, I cut them down to their trunks in the fall, pull off all of the leaves and use the vines to make natural decorations, like wreathes to be decorated with fall leaves or Christmas baubles.

There is also my water garden, where I grow bulrushes and cattails. The long slender leaves of the cattail plants are great for decorating, lashing and I keep meaning to get around to weaving them into baskets or placemats. It's on my to-do list.

I do not consider myself an urban homesteader, and I have no desire to live on a farm at this point in my life. But utilizing my space in the most useful way possible just makes sense to me. Nature is very giving when you let it do it's thing.

50 Empowering Life Tips



 

1.  Don't wait around for someone to stick a label on you. If you want to be an animal rights activist, be one. If you want to be a human rights activist do that. Whatever you want to be, go be that. Define yourself. If you wait for someone to define you, you're probably not going to be happy with the label they pick.

2. No matter what you're religion or higher power, remember that everything you have ever been given or will be given came from the Earth. Honor the Earth and you will be honoring your higher power.

3. Remember the 60-40 rule. If 60% of your life is going well and 40% of it is failing, you're STILL winning.
4. You're not made of sugar and you're not going to melt in the rain. Whether literal or metaphorical, rain is no excuse to sit inside and complain that you're bored.
5. Everyone has their own standard of beauty. Meeting one persons standard means falling short of anothers. Be the beauty that YOU want to see in the mirror.
6. You are the one and only constant person in your life. You better be good company because guess what? You're stuck with you.
7. Make a goal to try something new every day.
8. Everybody has their own truth. What makes sense for one person won't make sense for another. There are very few “rights” when it comes to how things should be done.
9. When you find yourself in constant conflict, battling everyone around you and suffering one break up after another, then it really IS you. Sorry, but it's true. The good news is that you can fix you.
10. Some people have combative personalities. There's nothing you can do about it and shoving your perspective under their nose won't convince them that you're right. They will argue with you even when they agree with you.
11. Grow a plant, they're good therapy. If you suck at keeping plants alive, get a cactus. Recognize the limitations of your abilities and work with them.
12. Understand that we are all going about our day in the best way that we know how. Nobody is purposely trying to inconvenience you by being in your way.
13. Getting ahead in life rarely results from staying inside your comfort zone.
14. Don't be a sexist or racist ass-wipe. It's NOT going to get you anywhere in life. Really.
15. Finding people who agree with you doesn't mean that you're opinion is superior to another persons, because no matter what your ideology there will always be someone who agrees with it and others who don't.
16. Don't insult children. It's fine if you don't want them, it's fine if you choose not to be around them, but putting down any child will offend every single parent who hears you and you're going to look like a jerk.
17. Also, if you don't have children, keep your mouth shut on how they ought to be raised – especially when your beliefs aren't based on what is best for the child, but on making your life a little more comfortable.
18. None of us know every fact of any situation. Forming solid conclusions about any given person or situation means always being partly wrong.
19. Do get a soapbox. We all need to feel passionately about something, even when we're partly wrong about it.
20. Recovery is only impossible if you're dead. Recovery may not always be a hundred percent, but every situation can always get a little bit better than it is right now.
21. Don't be daunted when faced with an impossible task. Look at the tremendous feats man-kind has performed. A large amount of dirt can be moved by one person, one small shovel at a time.
22. When you feel like your voice doesn't matter, nothing you do can make a difference, remember this: there are other lonely voices who are singing the same tune at the same time. When those voices are all sung in the same direction, what is heard by the recipient is unison. You're never the only one, so sing loudly.
23. Get to know crazy people and weirdos. They will enrich your life in ways you cannot imagine.
24. What you project into the world is what you will receive. Some call this karma. Mostly, it's common sense. There are a few people who manage to be successful assholes, but we know them as the 1%. So that's probably not going to be you. Be nice if you want others to treat you well.
25. Finding a mate isn't about finding your ideal partner, but finding the person who's ideal partner is you. They're not going to be who you pictured yourself with when you were 13 so let go of your expectations.
26. Keep an open mind. Don't forget that life is about learning, first and foremost. You continue learning even up into old age.
27. Most people who are elderly are incredibly wise. Make friends with an old person, they can teach you a lot.
28. I've never heard a person say that they regret traveling too much and seeing the world or learning about other cultures.
29. Remember that the way you see the world is limited to the scope of your vision and another person can be standing right beside you and have a much broader view. This will likely change their opinion of what they are seeing.
30. Pick up trash on the street when you see it. Little things like that can make a big difference when many people do them.
31. Turn about is fair play. When someone shows you loyalty, remember them and repay the favor when you're able.
32. Take care of your body and your body will take care of you.
33. There are superficial jerks in the world, but most of us only want someone who doesn't make us feel badly about ourselves. If you want to make a lot of friends, spend time making a lot of people feel good about themselves. Then you will be genuinely popular, not superficially.
34. Do you ever notice that in movies, we all seem to root for the same person? No matter what our disagreements in life and the fact that as a society we can be so dramatically polarized, when it comes down to it we all just want the good guy to win.
35. In our own minds, we ALL think that we are the good guy.
36. Every substance that exists has it's use, but every substance that exists can be harmful when abused or overused. Moderation is the key to not totally fucking up your life.
37. Surprisingly, the people on television, movies, on the radio etc. aren't trying to entertain you. They are trying to sell you something. There is no exception, their goal is to get you to spend money in their direction, or in the direction of their sponsors.
38. When you say things like, “We didn't need that when I was a kid,” bear in mind how boring the world would be if we weren't changing things up all the time.
39. Being a bully won't get you respect. Remember that the most respected people to have ever walk the earth: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Jesus and others were pacifists and they were revered for their gentle natures.
40. Parents: Just remember that they way you treat your children will become the way they treat their own.
41. You can be brilliant, witty and beautiful, but your value to others will always be contingent on what you bring to the table.
42. In very rare instances, you will find a person who loves you even when what you bring to the table is lacking. Treasure those people. That is called unconditional love and very few will ever give it to you.
43. Make stuff up. Make up stories, words, songs, anything you want. If you go looking for something and find that it doesn't exist, make it up. Every innovation and cultural advancement that has ever come about, came from somebody deciding not to follow the rules and make it up.
44. It's never too late to change your game plan.
45. Stop fretting over the things you haven't done and start looking forward to the things you'll get to do.
46. Remember what your basic human needs are and focus on them. Television and Nike's aren't among them.
47. Stop trying to impress people and be someone that others want to impress.
48. The world does not have unlimited money and resources. When you take more than you need, you are taking from someone who needs it. If you are not willing to take less on that score, be mindful of the fact that someone out there is getting less on account of you.
49. Love as many people as you can, nobody ever worries that they're going to have too many people at their funeral.
50. Do what you can to make others feel good. No one in life ever regrets being kind to someone, even when the other person doesn't deserve it.

photo: James Jordan

Growing Native in My Flower Beds

Welcome to the April edition of the Simply Living Blog Carnival - Going Green cohosted by Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children, Laura at Authentic Parenting, Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy, and Joella at Fine and Fair. This month, we write about going green and environmentally friendly living. Please check out the links to posts by our other participants at the end of this post.

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I have always enjoyed growing a flower garden. My first flower bed was a six foot by two foot patch of dirt in front of a town home I was renting. That year we planted several flower seeds, but none of them took despite my best efforts of watering daily, fertilizing and weeding at least once a week.

That was eight or nine years ago. My green thumb is more practiced now and I can grow a whole lot of things. I have six flower beds in my yard now, as well as several large terracotta pots that I also grow flowers in.

I know that growing flowers isn't the most eco-friendly practice. I choose to forego fertilizer, though my flowers my look a bit wimpy. However, they still need water at least three times a week, and daily in the hottest months. With six large beds, it's a lot of water and it has bothered me for years that my marigolds and petunia's are so darn needy.

I learned about growing native when I first began gardening. Actually, I was looking for cheap/free seeds and I had wondered if I would be able to find plants out in the wild that would look nice in a flower bed. That is how I came across the term “Growing Native.”

But wildflowers in the city are hard to come by and I didn't have the time to drive all over the countryside looking for cone flowers and black-eyed susans. It was less expensive to spend 50 cents for a packet of allysum than order wild flower seeds from a nursery.

Then last spring, my city surprised me. They decided to grow native in all of their public landscaping! That's right, every city park has flower beds brimming with daisies, native asters, flowering milk weed, and some very interesting plants that I had never seen before.

Throughout the season I watched these flower beds mature with my home made seed packets at the ready. In this post from last fall, I describe the process of seed harvesting. When I knew that the seeds were ready, I went on a few excursions to get the native flowers that I wanted from some of my favorite parks. I was very careful to only clip a few dead flower heads and and be respectful to the plant the habitat.

I have waited all winter long to plant my precious little seeds and now that spring is here, I put them into the ground last week. Because I harvested my own, I was able to get a lot of seeds – especially purple cone flower. But I also planted daisies, poppies and a tall exotic looking (but native) grass. I missed harvesting the black-eyed susans, they were spent before I got to them.

While I do still have a few rose bushes and other non-native water plants in my water garden, I will slowly replace these with native species as they age and need replaced.

So what is the point of growing native? How is this a green thing to do, and how does it simplify my world?

Native plants require very little, if any, watering. They are completely used to living in the conditions which I planted them so no need to amend the soil. They are resistant to local pests and plant diseases. They don't need fertilizer to grow well. In other words, you can plant native flowers in their home environment and they will thrive with virtually no care whatsoever. That's easy on my time constraints as well as my budget and it also keeps my yard organic while looking top-notch.

Another plus of native growing is that the local wild life will benefit from what I have planted. These are the plants that best serve the butterflies, lady bugs and other local insects who can feast on the plants without damaging them. In many urban settings, the beneficial insect populations are dwindling, which impacts the larger animals who need the bugs to survive.

Growing native looks great, costs very little (if anything), requires practically no care, and boosts the health of the native ecosystem.

If you would like more information about growing native, visit:
grownative.org

If you live in Missouri and are looking for information (or seeds and seedlings) of native Missouri plants, visit:

www.missouriplants.com
www.missourinativeplantsociety.org
www.mowildflowers.net



Cone Flower Photo Credit: Sean McMenemy

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  Thank you for visiting the Simply Living Blog Carnival cohosted by Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children , Laura at Authentic Parenting, Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy, and Joella at Fine and Fair . Read about how others are incorporating eco-friendly living solutions into their everyday lives. We hope you will join us next month, as the Simply Living Blog Carnival focuses on Daily Lives!

 

 

• Green Renovating: A Lot, A Little, Not So Much - Laura at Authentic Parenting ponders about the many things that have an impact on eco-friendly renovating
• Growing Native in My Flower Beds - Destany at They Are All of Me takes the guilt out of her flower habit by switching from high maintenance flowers to native plants which not only lessens her gardening load, but also benefits the local wild life.
• Baby Steps - Kellie at Our Mindful Life shares how her family became more sustainable, one step at a time.
• A Greener Holiday - Sara from Family Organic discusses the overwhelming amount of "stuff" that comes with every holiday and talks about how to simplify instead.
• Forcibly Green--Obligatory Organic - Survivor at Surviving Mexico talks about her family's evolution from passive to active green and sustainable living.
• Giving It Away - Juliet Kemp of Twisting Vines writes about the role of Freecycle, the giant karmic lending library, in her simple and green living.
• Simply Sustainable - Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children discusses her family's attempts to live in harmony with the earth by living simply and more sustainably.
• How Does Your Yarden Grow - Alisha at Cinnamon&Sassafras writes about an ongoing permaculture project, converting her grass lawn into a mower-free paradise.
• Green? - Is it about ticking the boxes? sustainablemum shares her thoughts on what being green means in her life.
• Using Cloth Products To Reduce Household Waste - Angela from Earth Mama's World shares how her family replaced many disposable household products with cloth to reduce their household waste.
• Going Green in Baby Steps - Joella of Fine and Fair shares some small, easy steps to gradually reduce your environmental impact.
• Are You Ready To Play Outside?! - Alex from AN Portraits writes about gardening, and playing in the dirt, and how it's O.K. to get dirty, play in the dirt, play with worms, for both adults and kids.
• Lavender and Tea Tree Oil Laundry Booster - At Natural Parents Network, Megan from The Boho Mama shares an all-natural way to freshen laundry.

Make Your Own Hot Cocoa Mix - How and Why

Everybody loves a nice steamy cup of hot cocoa and these days, it's as easy to make as pouring hot water into a cup and mixing in some powder.

But do you want to know what's gross? Spending seven dollars for a large tub of premade powder, and opening it up to discover it's only 2/3's of the way full.

Do you know what's grosser than that? Supporting companies like or Nestle, who's business and manufacturing practices are deeply unethical and cause a lot of damage to our global community.*

And it gets even worse. Just look at the items on the ingredients list. Then, as if to insult your intelligence, Nestle claims their cocoa powder mix is good for you! They think you can't read (actually, they expect you're too busy or too lazy to read).

I don't claim to have the worlds healthiest diet, you will not find a complete absence of junk food in my home. I buy cheap sandwich cookies for my kids to snack on every week, and make most of my cakes from a mix. Oh, and I do buy canned frosting.

I haven't bought hot cocoa mixes in many, many years because I'm too frugal to bother. Besides it tastes so much better when you make it from home, even though it is more work to cook it on the stove.

Last week, my husband went to the store, and he did bring home the dreaded 1.73lbs. can of Nestle Cocoa powder. Rather than fret, I thought I would take the opportunity to do some comparing for the benefit of my household and for you!

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Here is the basic recipe:

1 part cocoa powder
2 parts sugar (adjust to your liking)
2 parts nonfat dry milk

You can mix the ingredients and put them into a jar. It doesn't need to be fancy, you can see I used an old jelly jar I had saved.
I did take the above photo before mixing so that you can see the ratio. It is very handy to mix in a blender, especially if you are using raw sugar, in order to break up the clumps of dry milk, cocoa, and powder the sugar.
It will look like this afterward.
You stir this into hot water, just like other mixes. You can also add it to coffee or tea.

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A couple of things about this cocoa mix. You will note that there are exactly 5 ingredients, rather than the 16 found in the Nestle. And although there is processing involved in the individual ingredients, I can say that dry milk contains no artificial growth hormones, and that the cocoa powder was not processed in unnatural ways (it was not processed with alkali). You may also have noticed that it is fat free.
 

    Now look at the label on the Nestle Can:

Not only are there over 16 highly processed ingredients on the label, but many of them are synthetic.

 

If you were to look up each of these ingredients (Wikipedia has information on all of them), you would find that some of them are known to have harmful side effects.

 

The biggest offender would be the artificial flavoring, simply because many flavorings aren't even tested for what they might do to us if we ingest them. Incidentally, if the cocoa in the Nestle hadn't been processed with alkali, which not only reduces the antioxidants by a large percent, the flavor would have been deeper and there would be no need for added fake flavoring.

What's really bothersome about this label, however is the fact that Nestle is actually claiming this stuff is healthy for you. There a few antioxidants, but far less than you would find in regularly processed cocoa powder. The calcium is also minute. Consider that there absolutely 0% vitamins, and very little protein, healthy carbs, or fiber, the very notion that anything in this can could be considered nutritionally valuable is revolting.

 

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* Claims against Nestle as an unethical food company are due to multiple infractions including: Buying cocoa from companies which use child slave labor, buying ingredients from unethically seized farms, targeting young children for the sale of nutritionally deficient unhealthy foods, destruction of rainforest (palm oil harvesting), misleading mothers about the harmful effects of infant formula and persuading them to not breastfeed, coveting and abusing natural water sources in the production of bottled water, and denying workers rights across the globe.


**While I shop at Aldi, which claims to be an ethical company (don't they all?) I admit that the origin of their food is quite obscure and it is difficult to find out any information on their products. There have not been any good or bad reports, but I cannot in good conscience claim that the cocoa I am using is the product of fair trade practices. I can only make choices based on information that I have, with in the constraints of my families budget. If you have any concrete and provable information on the origins and integrity of Aldi products, please let us know in the comments below.

Our Bully Culture - Part 1

I don't think it's much of a secret that society and our culture are major contributing factors to bullying. We live in a hierarchical society, one that is often defined by the "haves" and the "have nots". We use language such as "Keeping up with the Jonses" or "the grass is always greener" to describe the idea of one party having or being better than another. This Better-Than/Less-Than factor is a major contributor to the bullying problem. On the one hand, it creates or adds to insecurities in already sensitive people that often attracts bullies. On the other hand, it creates a sense of superiority, even a feeling justified bullying through rankism.

Social Heirarchy We all know what this means. The cool kids, the popular kids, the pretty kids vs. the dorks, the poor kids, the misfits. This social divide has been in place as long as we have had public arenas to host it. Back in medieval times and long before that, we've had peasants vs. royalty or those with status. The movie "A Knights Tale" is a very good example of (our modern interpretation) of how those with no status, in this case a distant royal bloodline, were quite literally unimportant nobodies. In the movie, the protagonist wins the heart of the prince and the people, therefore earning himself a place of value - but only after intense work and suffering. Even though he gains the right to be somebody, the prince actually has to issue him paperwork to make this legitimate. I recently read that the need for status is largely an American phenomenon(1), and found this to be a fascinating idea. 

Our actual social hierarchy is not so severe as that, although to a teenager it can certainly feel that way. Any of those on the opposite ends of the social divide can tell you. Kids who are born from privileged backgrounds very rarely socialize with those from impoverished households. As adults, we do this as well. Those with lesser means may feel inferior or insecure in ways that prohibit them from hobnobbing with those with money or important social connections. And they may well be justified in their belief that they will be looked down on. People with status and money are often perceived (and portrayed in the media) as arrogant, self-absorbed and judgemental. In the movie "Overboard" Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell are from two separate worlds. One very wealthy and the other quite poor. The wealthy character played by Hawn is not only snobbish and rude, she assumes Russell's character to be stupid, unrefined and lacking proper manners.

While both ends of the social divide are often exaggerated in film and in books, this mutual preconception exists and therefore, socially accepted belief. As a culture, we not only relate to it, we believe it to be the standard rule of thumb. Of course this hierarchy finds its ways into schools, it's a huge part of our society and one that we as parents contribute to on a regular basis even if we don't realize or intend to.

Advertisments & CommercialsMarketers are very effective bullies. Companies pay them huge amounts of money to manipulate us into buying their products. Some of this is sneaky and hard to identify: playing up our insecurity by showing an already flawless face to be one that needs anti-wrinkle cream. Or a person with an already white smile as she is embarrassed to show her teeth in public before trying the new Crest White Strips. That isn't necessarily bullying (although it sets near impossible standards for what is socially acceptable and what is not), but I recently heard a radio commercial for Celsius Tannery that outraged me. I have tried to find an actual transcript online, but have been unable to do so. The commercial is of a woman who claims to have looked in the mirror in the spring time and gasped in horror at her pale reflection. She goes on to describe how unacceptable it is to be pale. She used the words "gross" and "disgusting" to describe how white her skin was and expressed that she would be embarrassed to be seen in public in a bathing suit before she went to the tannery to darken up.

When I first heard this advertisement I was shocked and offended. Why? Because I have naturally pale skin that is part of my Irish heritage. I don't tan, and I don't feel like I should have to. But this commercial, and our cultures obsession with tanning, opens it up a new form of racism. If you think that statement is over the top or out of line, just imagine a commercial where a woman who is dark because of her race were to express horror and disgust as she looked in the mirror and realized how black she was. That she was so concerned with the darkness of her skin that she rushed right away to a place of business that would bleach her in order to feel confident enough to go out in public.

While I am a grown woman and I know better than to play into these insults and slights on my natural appearance, there are many people far more impressionable than myself (mainly youth) who are goaded by these sentiments and feel that they have little choice than risk their health to make their skin darker in order to meet societies approval of their appearance. If they don't, they will be looked at as "gross and disgusting"... Even if they are not pale from lack of sun, but pale because they are born that way.

This same type of marketing technique is used for many products - most of them for beauty, and most of them for women, although marketers know where to hit the guys too. Just recently I heard an advertisement for an herbal solution that will enlarge a mans penis size. Listening to it, I thought it would probably make some guys feel pretty bad and send them running to the phone to call in and order. The next time you're watching or listening to commercials, pay attention to the language that is being used and how advertisers play on our  every insecurity to insinuate how Less Than we are and that we NEED buy their product in order to be acceptable.


TV shows & MoviesThey say that art is a reflection of a culture, and culture is a reflection of art. Therefore, it's simply a given that television, movies, and even books not only reflect bullying attitudes but perpetuate it. It can also be an effective catalyst for changing attitudes. Commercials aside, shows like "Glee", "The Middle", "The New Girl", "Raising Hope", and many more not only portray "real" people, with many imperfections, they in a sense glorify them. "The New Girl" features Zooey Deschanel in a very quirky and nerdy role, that exemplifies eccentricity and social awkwardness. "Raising Hope" features a working class family whose poverty is a running theme as is their unconventional family structure, "The Middle" is very similar, though the family is much more average. "Glee", of course, covers this subjects nearly every episode, stigmatizing bully behavior and creating tolerance not only for gays but for kids with disabilities. While these shows are an important tool in creating social tolerance, the concept is not a new one. Any time we have been in a climate of social change, TV shows and movies have existed to work as a catalyst for that change. Look at "All in the Family" or "The Jeffersons." While Archie Bunker said some very offensive things even for the seventies, he was portrayed on his sitcom as a bigot and his mentality often portrayed as incorrect.

Of course, there are many other shows out there that still feed our insecurities and strengthen the social divide. Many of these are reality shows that glamorize those with elevated status or wealth, for example. Shows featuring celebrities are often mere stages for them to parade their endless luxuries and brag about being wealthy and "important". Shows like "Jersey Shore", "Real Housewives", or any of the countless "inside the private life of this or that celebrity..." are entertaining to so many not only because they are often comical characters who do outrageous things, but but because so many people (mainly teens) want to be like them. These shows send a very clear message that if this is how the "important" people are living and you're not one of them, you are not an important person. For most of us, we could care less. However, this does tend to have a large impact on impressionable teens and adolescents who are still trying to discover or establish their own place in the social hierarchy. It is therefore very important for parents to have real discussions with their children about these shows if their children watch them. Television can seriously alter a childs sense of reality if they buy into it too much.



1- http://postmasculine.com/america

Do you feel that the need for status in our culture is a contributing factor for bullying? In your opinion, what drives this need? As parents, how can we keep our children grounded and prevent them from falling for these sales tactics?