“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” So entreats the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island, overlooking the place where immigrants used to disembark to begin a new life in the United States. But I don’t remember any words from that great lady about having to give up your kids.

Think of all the special moments you experience with your child: her first step, the first day of school, a birthday celebration. Maybe a family vacation comes to mind, or just the joy of having dinner with your family. Even getting through a difficult time together, like the death of a loved one, can cement family bonds so they are stronger than before.

Now imagine someone ripping that from you, tearing your child from your arms, all because you have, at great risk, sought a better life for yourself and your child or children.

My column about the Trump Administration’s inhumane policy of forcibly separating parents and children at the border begins below. You can read the rest of it by clicking on the link at the end of the excerpt.

There is proportional and effective punishment and deterrent, and then there is cruelty and oppression. As a nation, instituting this policy puts us squarely in the second category.

On the U.S.-Mexico border, a policy of anguish

Two weeks ago, my family celebrated my daughter’s bat mitzvah. My daughter, a child separated from her parents at birth, celebrated this Jewish rite of passage in grand style. With a long history among the Jewish people, the bat mitzvah (or bar mitzvah for boys) is when a girl commits herself to the rights and obligations of a Jewish adult. It’s a time of ritual and prayer with family, friends and, frequently, large doses of nostalgia.

To say parents feel time’s passage as they watch their 13-year-old read from the Torah for the first time is an understatement. As I sat in the front row of our synagogue, I couldn’t erase my smile as my daughter led the 2½ -our service. Dressed in lavender lace, her long dark hair reaching down her back, this beautiful young woman chanted in Hebrew, offered her interpretation of her assigned portion of the text and in general kept me wondering where the days, months and years had gone. I remembered the sleepless nights, the first smile. The hundreds of crayon pictures, the dawn of reading, the tween who was the only one of all her friends who didn’t have an iPhone – where had that girl gone? Even as I write this, the tears well in my eyes for all those moments past and the teen moments yet to come.

How many more tears would I cry if someone had stolen all those moments from me?

This is the official policy of the United States right now: to steal moments like these from parents who cross the United States-Mexico border without the proper paperwork. Our government is forcibly removing children as young as infants from their parents – sometimes literally tearing them from their parents’ arms – then dealing with the children by sending them to foster care or warehousing them in former military barracks, or, in the word of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, “whatever.” Parents are often given little if any information about the whereabouts of their children.

Why is this barbarous practice now official United States policy? Read the rest at the Concord Monitor by clicking here.

Hello! It’s been a long time. What’s been going on with you?

On my end? Let’s see: I became the parent of two teenagers. (Tips on survival welcome.) I completed another draft of a book and was thrilled. I workshopped it and began planning the next draft. My husband and I are teaching our older son to drive, which in New Hampshire generally happens prior to a kid’s required enrollment in Driver’s Ed. (Everlasting respect to the person who explains the rationale behind this backwards structure to me in a way that makes sense.) My daughter decided to live and breathe dance and became a trainee with a youth ballet company, and if I trusted my car enough, I’d find a way to let it drive itself to and from the studio almost every day.

What else? I learned how to live in a constant state of existential worry for my country, and I learned I couldn’t merely stand by and watch the disintegration. I developed a class in written political advocacy and I teach now. I also lead a local gun-violence prevention grass roots organization that is part of a resistance network. My eyes are glued to the news like every new story could hold the pivotal plot point to the story of our collective future, because it could. I know many people are similarly appalled and turn away from the television and social media to cope. But I can’t do that. I know it’s still happening even if I don’t look. I have to witness, to use my public policy background to explain the danger, to do something to stop it.

My kids want their calmer mother back. I want our calmer, more stable, democratic country back. No one is quite content.

So where does that leave us as a family?

Uncharted Parent will be back in early 2018! Gee, I wonder if there’s anything to talk about?

Enjoy your holidays, and I’ll see you here soon.

This would be easier if my kids were younger.

Yes, little kids are perceptive, but it’s possible to paste a smile on your face for them when necessary. You can watch animated movies with them, read picture books and keep your conversation G-rated. You don’t talk about the state of the country or the world because they’re too young to understand that kind of thing, anyway. They know Elsa wants to set her powers free and superheroes go after bad guys. If they do stumble onto anything real in the news, you comfort them, maybe give them cookies as a distraction. Paint the world with illusory bright colors and assure the children the good guys will prevail.

Simplify, reassure, protect. That’s a parent’s job when it comes to the very young.

Adolescents offer a more complex challenge. They are caught in the space between child and adult, and as any parent of an adolescent knows, you can encounter both the small child and the mature adult in the same kid inside of sixty seconds. Anytime you think you’ve figured out which version of your kid will appear in response to any given stimuli, that same kid will prove you wrong. The only constant is that you’ve got to be prepared for anything at any moment. The world is confusing to us adults and we’ve been living in it for decades. It can be exponentially more befuddling to our adolescent kids.

So for those of us presently deeply distressed about the state of our nation and our world: how much of that do we let our older kids see, and how do we balance what we show them with parental reassurance aimed at reassuring the more childish aspects of who they are?

This is a time of warmth and cheer for many people, hot cocoa and fireplaces, friends, family, candelabras, Christmas trees and latkes. It brings happiness to many, sadness to others, probably a mix of the two to more than we realize. But we do our best, especially if we have children, to create an atmosphere of joy.

It’s the end of a year, too, and not just any year. 2016, don’t let the door hit you in the derrière on the way out. On second thought, do. You deserve it.

There will be plenty of time and opportunity in the year to come to experience and express sentiments we wish we could live without. So let’s set that aside for the last week-and-a-half of 2016, and lift ourselves up a bit. Let’s look for comfort for our kids, who, despite seeming evidence to the contrary, might need some help processing the world at this troubling time. Let’s read a few stories to warm our hearts—stories to help us remember what’s good again. We all know we love our kids, but sometimes an outside perspective can help us see that in a new light. And what are all of this season’s holidays about if not lights in the darkness?

First, from the Washington Post, Karen MacPherson offers a great list of 19 books to help children find hope and strength in stressful times for children ages 3 to 12.

Author and co-owner of the soon-to-open Belmont Books in Belmont, Massachusetts, Chris Abouzeid, suggested these three titles for tweens and teens:

• The War that Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
• Outrun the Moon, by Stacey Lee
• Counting by 7s, by Holly Goldberg Sloan

Next, this piece on Babble.com by Lori Garcia, 46 Things No One Tells You About Parenting a Teenage Boy, literally made me laugh out loud. Number 38. And number 12. Also number 15. Oh, just about all of them.

You may want to get a tissue ready for The Child I Love, by Jon Ralston, about his relationship with his transgender son.

Finally, don’t miss , about—well, I’ll let you discover what it’s really about. It features Santa Claus, a sled, a bag and a fence.

Happy holidays, no matter which or how many of this season’s holidays you celebrate. See you in 2017!

Remember the old days—you know, October—when you didn’t need to care about the news if you didn’t want to? Those days are over. Even if you preferred to stay away from current events before, we all need to stay informed about what’s happening in our country right now.

But what if you’re not a news geek by nature? In this age of fake news sources, biased media outlets and “everyone’s an expert so long as they’ve got a Facebook account,” how do you know what to believe? I’ve fielded a few inquiries about reliable news sources over the past few weeks. In response, I’ve cobbled together something of a New User’s Guide to Reliable News Sources in an Unreliable Atmosphere here.

Please note what the list below is NOT. It’s not comprehensive. It’s not foolproof. It’s not assembled by an inhuman, bias-free robot.

I’ve selected a few resources to serve as starting points for people who haven’t previously been regular consumers of news and who want to begin to equip themselves with actual facts[1] on a regular basis. With that goal in mind, here we go.

First, a couple of guidelines

• Is it true? Before accepting something as fact, look to see if you can find a second reliable source for it. This is not as hard as it sounds. Google the “fact” you’ve just read that made your jaw drop. If it’s something that just happened five minutes ago, this might be difficult. But other reliable sources should have it within an hour at the most. Usually it takes only minutes for other outlets to pick up something real.

• Look for media outlets with a solid reputation for investigative journalism. Sometimes that means they will run negative stories about people you like. Sometimes they will mess up. Always, the questions you want to ask are, how often does a media outlet do the hard work of digging deep and getting the story right? Do they seek out and report the facts?

Reliable media outlets

Print and/or digital editions of print publications

• It’s 2016, but the old standby print journalists are still, for the most part, doing the best job of getting the story and getting it right. This includes, of course, their digital editions. So a great way to get real, factual news is to subscribe to the print and/or digital editions of one of the major city newspapers, e.g, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, etc.[2] The digital editions of these papers update throughout the day, so you can stay informed as things happen if you choose. (A note about the “bias” that some people will warn you about in these newspapers: most newspapers with sizeable circulation separate their reporting pages from their opinion pages. There are usually different editors for these sections, and the above listed papers follow this practice. The opinion pages may in fact lean in one direction or another politically. The reporting pages focus on investigation and reporting of the facts.)

• Your local newspaper. Subscribe to your paper, either in print or online, and read it. Know what’s going on in your community. The quality of these newspapers runs the gamut, so again, it’s always good to check what you read with a search to confirm something that catches your interest. Did your representative really say that? Find out for sure before you get angry.

• Are you really obsessed with what’s going on in Washington? Subscribe to Roll Call and/or The Hill.

• Online editions of some foreign media outlets can be reliable. Try The Guardian or com, both from the U.K.

Internet-only outlets

• Wire services, like AP or Reuters. You can download their news apps onto your phone and customize to your interests. Reuters also has a user-friendly site and an RSS option if that’s how you prefer to get your news. (You will also see wire services’ articles in newspapers.)

• Snopes.com. You heard something and you don’t know if you should believe it? Go to Snopes. They may not always have the fastest check on the latest political appointment, but they may, and it will be accurate. Did the President-elect really say those words during that interview in 2014? Is that urban legend about the call coming from inside the house really true? Ask Snopes. (Note: I taught my kids to use Snopes for rumors and urban legends years ago. Don’t ask me if Bigfoot was spotted downtown. Ask Snopes.)

The beginning of the United States Constitution, the foundation of our republic.

I’ve been absent for a while for health reasons. After Nov. 8, there was also the electoral shock into numbness. Finally, I wrote this. I hope to be back on a regular basis now.

In my inbox, I have a newsletter from a writer I respect, whom I won’t name here. It includes the following:

Maybe your candidate won, maybe yours lost. It’s a system. One side has been in for eight years. Another is going in now. If everyone moved to Canada because they didn’t get their way in this country where everyone has a voice, we’d have very few people left.

… Wake up still happy. Continue your days proud to be American. Take the stance that you will continue thinking positive and pursuing your dreams regardless who is President [sic] or who throws an obstacle in your path. You choose how you think. You choose how happy you’ll be. Nobody else affects that if you don’t let it.

No.

If you believe that what happened on November 8 was simply that one side lost and the other side won, you don’t understand what happened. I’ve supported the losing side in elections before; this is different. Much more was at stake, and what we lost may be so great, I’m not sure it will be regained in my lifetime.

Upon graduating from college a few decades ago, I moved to Washington, D.C. to begin a career in public service. I never doubted that I wanted to work on behalf of my country, because I had studied history and different political systems of both this country and others, and I believed strongly in the virtues of the United States, even with all of its many flaws. I wanted to dedicate myself to be part of the centuries-long process of making our system and our world better. I worked my proverbial butt off for months and landed a job in the U.S. Senate. This was back in the days before “compromise” became a dirty word.

I am an institutionalist. I believe in Congress, the presidency, the judiciary. I’ve seen them work beautifully (okay, I’ve seen them work), and I’ve seen them muck things up. Later in my career, I worked as a civil rights and civil liberties advocate, and my job was to persuade Congress and sometimes the executive branch to see things the way that I and the people for whom I worked did. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I didn’t. Often I was frustrated. But this is our system, and I continued to believe in it and its sometimes ragged march toward greater justice.

Then came 9/11. If you were an adult then, you remember the fear, the horror. And I hope you remember also perhaps the only good thing to come out of that living nightmare, which was the very brief sense that we were one nation in the face of an attack against us. Trying to tear us apart Would. Not. Stand.

We are on the other side of that now.

I am a Democrat, but I have seen and worked with many Republicans I respected. I’ve also seen and tried to work with those I didn’t respect. Throughout the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, I disagreed