Today's required reading list:

The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf. A great book about the American shift to fascism. Wolf points out the ways in which our current society parallels the move to fascism in numerous previous times this has happened across the world. Scary, and important.

Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason by Alfie Kohn. This is a book with the potential to really make you re-think the way you interact with your kids (and other people's kids), in terms of moving away from control and toward cooperation. There is a lot of information in it, backed up by many studies across multiple socioeconomic backgrounds, countries, etc., to show that children do better the further away you get from any carrot-and/or-stick methods, and the more you allow them choice and autonomy, and the more you work *with* them instead of controlling them. While I already do a lot of the things he talks about, it helped to point out to me just how much *more* I could be doing these things, and how I can change my point of view. It also makes me much more motivated to keep Anja in Montessori schooling in the future.