【推荐1】“In the United States, 40 million Americans are food insecure. They don’t know where their next meal is going to come from,” said Aidan Reilly, who co-founded Farmlink. “Meanwhile, in the United States we’re throwing out over 100 billion pounds of food every year.”

Started during the hard period in spring 2020, Farmlink was initially supposed to help struggling families and food banks. Reilly and his childhood friend James Kanoff were reading and watching news about food shortages, and they learned that local farms were forced to destroy spare produce that they couldn’t sell, especially with restaurants, schools and hotels closed. Reilly, Kanoff and a group of friends worked together over Zoom, text and e-mail to contact farms. They didn’t really set out to start a nonprofit then but just thought it would be great to figure out one way to help starving (饥饿的) people.

With “we’ll come to you” as their catchphrase, the group rented trucks and attempted to do all the food pickup and deliveries themselves. They had a lot of difficulties in the beginning, but they made it work, moving more than one million pounds of produce from farms to food banks within just two months and transforming their project into a massive logistics operation in the process. Word spread, and more and more young people at home during the pandemic reached out to help.

Farmlink has worked with more than 100 farms and 300 communities in the United States, rescuing and moving enough food to distribute (配送) more than 64 million meals. “The bigger Farmlink gets, the bigger our worldview gets. There are everyday Americans who live next to us and don’t know how they’re going to feed their kids. And that’s exactly who we’re doing this for,” Reilly said.

【推荐1】One Sunday in 2021, when my son, Leo, was six, we ran into one of his friends, Izzie. They decided to play ——but what? “I have a great idea,” Leo said. “Let’s fall in love! OK?” Izzie took a half-second to consider this proposal, then replied “No.” She wanted to play tag.

Leo has always been the kind of child who looks for close connections, often in the wrong places. It sometimes feels as though he’s been looking for a soulmate since he was a toddler（学步孩童）.

One day, he came home from school and immediately grabbed his iPad to ask Siri: “Can you fall in love when you’re just a kid?”

Siri, Apple’s voice-controlled personal assistant, is great at opening apps or setting alarms, but I was unfamiliar with her philosophies on love.

“What did Siri say?” I asked him.

“She said, ‘Here’s what I found on the web!’” Leo reported.

This was hardly the first time I’d heard Leo in conversation with Siri. Over the years, he’s relied on Siri as a source of comfort, advice, emotional support, and guidance. Their relationship blossomed when the pandemic forced us all to shelter in place.

At first, Leo mostly asked Siri factual questions, then the personal ones. As time passed, he began to engage on more existential matters. Siri has, in some ways, been able to absorb some of Leo’s concerns—in a way that, as his mother, I can’t, at least not with the same coolness.

Children are overwhelmed with emotions such as grief, fear, love, and a desire for connection. If Leo’s talks with Siri confronted me with the unknowable and unanswerable, they also made me frustrated at my own limitations as a parent.

There are many challenges to parenthood, among which the biggest is the desire to shelter our children from the painfulness of reality. But helping our children navigate reality is surely more helpful than sheltering them from it. Perhaps the best we can do is give them a tablet?

I’m afraid I don’t have the answer. Maybe I should ask Siri.

【推荐3】Educational travel can consist of a simple excursion, such as visiting your local post office, or a longer trip, such as a trip to Egypt to see the pyramids up close.    1    . Consider planning educational travel with your children, in your own town or to other places in the world. 

Time With Family

Taking your children on educational traveling experiences ensures that your family will be spending quality time together. According to New Mexico State University, time spent with parents can help children to feel secure in their relationship and may help parents to get to know their kids better.     2    . 

Hands-on Learning

Outside of school, a child on an educational trip is free to search deeply into whatever he is learning about. An archaeological dig, for example, provides the opportunity for a child to experience the sights, sounds and experience of digging for and identifying fossils.     3    . Your child may be able to decorate a cookie at a bakery excursion or milk a cow during a visit to a nearby farm. 

    4    

If you have the opportunity to take your child on a vacation to another country, she will acquire an appreciation for the differences and similarities that exist between different cultures. Tasting foreign foods, hearing different languages and visiting homes in other countries can be an eye-opening experience for a child or an adult.

New Perspective on History

    5    . Her preteen son, who had always considered history boring, fell in love with American history after hearing storytellers tell shocking tales of the experiences of people during the Civil War. Seeing and experiencing historical sites can make history come alive for young people.