John Madden. Betty White. Bob Saget. The somber news of celebrity deaths has been relentless over the past few months. Against the backdrop of the ongoing pandemic, each name seems to hit harder than the previous.

Then came Sidney Poitier, the celebrated Bahamian-American actor. His death struck me the hardest.

Poitier was one of my late mother’s favorite actors. More importantly, his The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography was the last book my mother recommended to me, via her landline phone, before her own death five years ago.

A lifelong reader, my mother lost her ability to read books in her 80s due to macular degeneration. But she moved on to audio books, and she encouraged me to listen to Poitier’s famous voice narrate his life story. I’m glad I listened to her and Poitier.

Early in the narration, Poitier reveals he was so frail as a newborn that his hardened, impoverished father obtained a shoebox that could function as a casket if necessary. Fortunately, Poitier gradually grew, and his mother ordered his father to throw the shoebox away. By the end of the book, Poitier builds to a grand, sobering-yet-also-inspiring statement: “The only thing we know for sure is that in another eight billion years it will all be over. Our sun will have spent itself … but you can’t live focused on that. … So what we do is we stay within the context of what’s practical … what values can send us to bed comfortably and make us courageous enough to face our end with character.”

Listening to that conclusion made me re-appreciate why Poitier became a celebrated actor.

Personal celebrities deserve re-appreciation, too

After reflecting on Poitier’s impact and death, I decided to reconnect with one of my own long-forgotten though still-inspiring personal “celebrities.” My 10^th grade English teacher, Rich, was the first teacher to expose me to mind-expanding novels like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Richard Wright’s Native Son. His class also featured a writing contest that I happened to win. I have viewed myself as a writer ever since.

When I called the number I had for Rich from years ago, things did not start well. He thought I was a telemarketer because I reached his landline rather than his cell (Rich is in his 70s). But after he realized it was me, we launched into a wonderful conversation about the old days and the new days. As our conversation ended, I considered how fitting it is that he still has a landline. Symbolically, people like your favorite high school teacher still have landlines to your heart. They are the forgotten celebrities. They had an outsized, larger-than-life impact on your actual past, not just your virtual, TV-viewing past.

Re-appreciating Rich inspired me to try to reconnect with some of my children’s forgotten celebrities — e.g., the gymnastics teacher who taught them life lessons and the volunteer coordinator who treated them with dignity. In the process, the family value of gratitude has been modeled and reinforced.

A final reason to re-appreciate your family’s personal celebrities sooner rather than later is simple. As celebrity deaths teach us, it is easy to forget the impact they had on us. Thanking them again before it’s too late helps us practice the values that, in Poitier’s words, “can send us to bed comfortably and make us courageous enough to face our end with character.”

Photo: © Konstantin Yuganov / Adobe Stock.

As Thanksgiving approaches, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the calculus of what families might be thankful for this year. Those of us lucky enough to remain healthy and employed can focus on those two facts during this year’s feasts. But for many, it’s easy to feel there is little to be thankful for this year, given all that continues to be infected, affected or simply canceled — including many of those traditional feasts. In other words, cultivating a grateful mindset during this traditional season of thanks requires many us to dig deeper this year. For me, digging deep into the history of today’s pediatric vaccines helps illuminate paths to gratitude.

The lack of a cure for the coronavirus has been humbling. It reminds us that even though modern medicine has achieved amazing feats, it is not able to solve all mysteries. Despite the pandemic, however, parents can feel thankful we live in this era by remembering how much child mortality has been impacted over the past few centuries by modern science — especially by global vaccines.

Pediatric vaccines vastly improve child mortality rates

In The Importance of Being Little, researcher Erika Christakis spells out the astounding numbers: “Child survival is one of humanity’s surprisingly recent success stories. Historically, many people didn’t experience something called childhood because … they were already dead. Today, in the industrialized world, mortality of children under age 5 hovers around five per 1,000. By contrast, in nineteenth-century Sweden, one third of young children died before age 5; in Germany, the child mortality rate was 500 per 1,000 children. And early childhood mortality among modern hunter-gatherers is 100 times more than in the United States today.”

Granted, additional factors like higher safety standards and better sanitation practices helped pediatric vaccines achieve such improvements. But Christakis stresses “we need to wrap our heads around this: the crushing of child death in the developed world over the last one hundred years is something truly radical and unique in the history of our species.” In short, “the victory over childhood mortality … has not only changed childhood but even, fundamentally, enabled it.”

Thanks for a children’s book about chickenpox

I experienced the world-changing nature of pediatric vaccines while reading a bedtime story to my younger daughter when she was little. One of her favorite books was Itchy, Itchy Chicken Pox, written by Grace Maccarone and illustrated by Betsy Lewin. Originally published in 1992, the story features a little boy who wriggles around in his pajamas due to red spots all over his body: “Under my shirt. Under my socks. Itchy, itchy chicken pox.” My daughter’s favorite line was “itchy, itchy, I feel twitchy,” which always amused my wife and me because at that age my daughter mispronounced the “tw” sound as a “b” sound.

In the story, the boy gradually recovers from chickenpox on his own: “I rest. I read. I eat. I play. I feel better every day.” Usually, my daughter would just finish the book after that page, but one day she asked if I had chickenpox when I was a child. After I said “yes,” she asked if she and her sister would ever get it. “No,” I said, “because you were both vaccinated against it when you were babies.”

That’s when it hit me. As I tried to explain “vaccine” to my daughter in an age-appropriate way, I realized that because my daughters were born in the 2000s, they had benefited from the chickenpox vaccine, which became widely available in the late 1990s. Hence, the plot of Maccarone’s children’s book, published a few years before the vaccine became available, had in some ways become obsolete.

In that moment, I felt intense gratitude for all those shots my daughters received at the pediatrician’s office when they were babies. By extension, I was thankful for all the immunizations I had received when I was a child.

The race for COVID-19 vaccines will no doubt contain false starts, research detours and distribution challenges. But because vaccines have helped eradicate diseases and lengthen life expectancy in our era, we can all be thankful for the hope that medical research provides. May the coronavirus one day become associated with just another shot for babies alongside those for measles, diphtheria, and yes, chickenpox.

Pediatric vaccines photo: © angellodeco / Adobe Stock.

Is your family generally optimistic?

In today’s anxiety-inducing culture, optimism can be elusive — especially for kids. Fortunately, a new book titled Making Lemonade: Teaching Young Children to Think Optimistically can help parents nurture their children’s sense of optimism from an early age.

Laura Colker and Derry Koralek are early childhood educators who begin their book with a hopeful premise: optimism is primarily a learned way of thinking, not an inborn mindset. Genes account for “about 25 percent of our optimism … the other 75 percent is determined by environment, social support, and learned behaviors.”

Colker and Koralek recommend parents foster an “optimistic explanatory style” at home. They explain that “if we think a problem will have far-reaching, long-lasting effects, we have a pessimistic explanatory style.” Hence, pessimists often use words like “always” and “never.” Conversely, if we believe “a problem is temporary and has only localized negative effects, we think optimistically.”

So how can parents foster an explanatory style, or self-talk, that is optimistic?

One way is to challenge a child’s “thinking traps,” which include jumping to conclusions, making assumptions and catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is “assuming the worst-case scenario is in place or exaggerating the likelihood that something bad will happen or exaggerating how bad it will be.” The authors provide an example: “Bobby accidentally knocks the basket of collage materials on the floor. He thinks [or says], ‘The teacher is going to be really mad at me. I’ll never get to make things again.’”

Ideally, parents in this situation can notice the pessimistic explanatory style and intervene. Encourage children to “dispute negative thinking and substitute pessimistic thoughts with flexible, optimistic ones. … Whenever you hear a child expressing pessimism (‘I can’t do it’ or ‘No one wants to play with me’ or ‘I miss out on all the fun’), it is time to have a conversation.”

Parents can also slow a child’s thinking and put challenges in perspective.

Help a child stay in the present with a problem, not forecast negatively into the future or return negatively into the past. Gratitude is another way to use the past to appreciate the present. The authors suggest making “gratitude journals a part of your daily routine. Children can draw something they are grateful for while you write in your journal about something you appreciate.” Or as a family try to “pick a time every week to sit down and talk about your good fortunes.”

Optimism learned is optimism modeled

Perhaps most important, parents should try to model optimism as much as possible. The authors suggest having “a lighthearted approach to everyday family problems: ‘Whoops! Bowser grabbed tonight’s dinner off the kitchen counter. We’ll just have to have breakfast for dinner tonight. Who wants to help make the pancakes?’” If you can’t achieve lightheartedness during challenges, at least try to stay neutral and quiet (as my father often did) instead of venting pessimism and self-abuse.

Another strategy is to replace your own negative thoughts with positive ones. Do this aloud “so your child can hear your thinking: ‘I thought Hazel the puppy had taken my slippers, but then I remembered I had put them in the closet.’ When your child does this too, comment on what you saw or heard: ‘You were going to say, ‘Oh no,’ but you changed it to ‘Oh well.’ That’s positive thinking!’”

Granted, it is difficult to model healthy self-talk and avoid thinking traps all the time. But to dispute pessimism, tell stories of problems overcome in your own past or your child’s past. And if you overreact or catastrophize, return to the incident later and put it in context, perhaps even laughing about it in hindsight.

When my oldest daughter was quite young, she said: “Dad, I’m a little bit big and a little bit little.” The same can be said for most problems—depending on how you look at them. In other words, don’t let a little picture become The Big Picture. Or as Steve Gross, CEO of Life is Good Kids Foundation, says in Making Lemonade: “There’s no use being pessimistic. It wouldn’t work anyway.”

Photo: © kieferpix / Adobe Stock.