Tim Wright's Blog: The Writing Adventures of Tim Wright - Posts Tagged "toby-baxter-tim-wright"
Once Upon a Time...
Four of my favorite words. When you read those words you know an adventure is up ahead... a story is coming your way. Once upon a time holds out the promise of new worlds, new ideas, new friends, and new possibilities.
I've been in the story-telling business for most of my life as a Lutheran Pastor. Each week I have the opportunity to retell some of the best loved stories in history.
Throughout my career I've written several books and articles, all of them non-fiction--mainly books for church leaders.
But since I first fell in love with Hobbits in High School, and then Thomas Covenant and Shannara and Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and The Chronicles of Narnia, I've want to give that genre a try.
After working with Dr. Michael Gurian (Saving Our Sons; The Minds of Girls) creating rites of passage programs for 13 year old boys and girls, I decided to take that ancient coming of age experience and the modern work the two of us had done around it, and put it into book form.
Hence, The Adventures of Toby Baxter--Book 1: The River Elf, The Giant, and The Closet.
Once upon a time there was a boy named Toby Baxter...
More to come!
https://www.TimWrightBooks.com
I've been in the story-telling business for most of my life as a Lutheran Pastor. Each week I have the opportunity to retell some of the best loved stories in history.
Throughout my career I've written several books and articles, all of them non-fiction--mainly books for church leaders.
But since I first fell in love with Hobbits in High School, and then Thomas Covenant and Shannara and Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and The Chronicles of Narnia, I've want to give that genre a try.
After working with Dr. Michael Gurian (Saving Our Sons; The Minds of Girls) creating rites of passage programs for 13 year old boys and girls, I decided to take that ancient coming of age experience and the modern work the two of us had done around it, and put it into book form.
Hence, The Adventures of Toby Baxter--Book 1: The River Elf, The Giant, and The Closet.
Once upon a time there was a boy named Toby Baxter...
More to come!
https://www.TimWrightBooks.com
Why Kids Love--and Need--Coming of Age Stories
Pimples. Bullying. Social media. Screen time. Sports. Homework. Menstruation. Sibling rivalries. Romance. Breakups. Success. Failure. Wet dreams. Facial hair.
How any child makes it into adulthood is a miracle! (How any parent survives their child moving into adulthood is a miracle!)
On top of the challenges our children face as they move through the teen years, they also begin to wrestle with the big questions of life:
Why am I here?
What’s my purpose in life?
Am I worth loving?
They may not use those words. Their questions may come out more practically:
What am I good at? Math? Science? Acting? Singing?
How can I make more friends?
Why do I have such a hard time making friends?
What’s happening to my body?
Thankfully, as all wise parents know, you aren’t on your own. For those willing to look, there are a variety of parent-helping, kid-shaping assets most parents can tap into:
Grandparents.
Teachers.
Coaches.
Religious leaders and communities.
Podcasts (like The Wonder of Parenting Podcast: A Brain-Science Approach to Parenting)
And… books!
Specifically, Coming-of-Age stories.
Think Harry Potter. Percy Jackson. The Chronicles of Narnia. The Hobbit.
These books, and books like them, take our middle-school-aged children (and our younger and older kids) on an adventure into adulthood. Characters, about the same age as our children, find themselves, like our children, trying to figure out how to navigate the pre-teen and early teen years.
Through the power of these stories our kids begin to learn important lessons about the adventure of life.
Author Jen Petro-Joy says it this way:
"Middle schoolers aren’t just toddlers with a few more inches on them. They’re not mini adults, either. Kids in middle school are unique beings, caught in that utterly amazing and uncomfortable space between carefree childhood and responsibility-laden adulthood. They’re starting to question their beliefs and their place in the world. They’re developing and refining their personalities and pushing back against their parents. They’re figuring out where they stand in their peer groups.
And often, even with people all around them, they feel utterly alone. That’s why books are so important. In books, readers can find people just like them. They can see how others navigated struggles and solved problems. They can brainstorm what might work for them and what might be a bad idea altogether. They can see that growing up may be hard—that it may seem almost intolerable at times—but that they can get through it. It might be messy and the process might not be wrapped up in a pretty bow with a perfectly crafted ending—but growing up without falling apart is possible.
That they can do it, too."
In a world shaped far too much by agitation-and-anxiety-inducing social media, hooking our children on engaging, compelling books will serve them well for the rest of their lives.
I wrote The Adventures of Toby Baxter in the hope of contributing yet another story on what it means to move from childhood into adulthood.
www.TimWrightBooks.com
Tim
How any child makes it into adulthood is a miracle! (How any parent survives their child moving into adulthood is a miracle!)
On top of the challenges our children face as they move through the teen years, they also begin to wrestle with the big questions of life:
Why am I here?
What’s my purpose in life?
Am I worth loving?
They may not use those words. Their questions may come out more practically:
What am I good at? Math? Science? Acting? Singing?
How can I make more friends?
Why do I have such a hard time making friends?
What’s happening to my body?
Thankfully, as all wise parents know, you aren’t on your own. For those willing to look, there are a variety of parent-helping, kid-shaping assets most parents can tap into:
Grandparents.
Teachers.
Coaches.
Religious leaders and communities.
Podcasts (like The Wonder of Parenting Podcast: A Brain-Science Approach to Parenting)
And… books!
Specifically, Coming-of-Age stories.
Think Harry Potter. Percy Jackson. The Chronicles of Narnia. The Hobbit.
These books, and books like them, take our middle-school-aged children (and our younger and older kids) on an adventure into adulthood. Characters, about the same age as our children, find themselves, like our children, trying to figure out how to navigate the pre-teen and early teen years.
Through the power of these stories our kids begin to learn important lessons about the adventure of life.
Author Jen Petro-Joy says it this way:
"Middle schoolers aren’t just toddlers with a few more inches on them. They’re not mini adults, either. Kids in middle school are unique beings, caught in that utterly amazing and uncomfortable space between carefree childhood and responsibility-laden adulthood. They’re starting to question their beliefs and their place in the world. They’re developing and refining their personalities and pushing back against their parents. They’re figuring out where they stand in their peer groups.
And often, even with people all around them, they feel utterly alone. That’s why books are so important. In books, readers can find people just like them. They can see how others navigated struggles and solved problems. They can brainstorm what might work for them and what might be a bad idea altogether. They can see that growing up may be hard—that it may seem almost intolerable at times—but that they can get through it. It might be messy and the process might not be wrapped up in a pretty bow with a perfectly crafted ending—but growing up without falling apart is possible.
That they can do it, too."
In a world shaped far too much by agitation-and-anxiety-inducing social media, hooking our children on engaging, compelling books will serve them well for the rest of their lives.
I wrote The Adventures of Toby Baxter in the hope of contributing yet another story on what it means to move from childhood into adulthood.
www.TimWrightBooks.com
Tim
Our Boys Need a New Storyline
Mom of two sons, Elissa Strauss, wrote this in an op ed to CNN: Since my sons were born, I've tried to speak openly about gender. I've taught both of them, now ages 5 and 9, how to spot the ways the world holds girls and women back. I've also taught them about gender norms in toys and clothes, and why it is OK for both boys and girls to break them. I thought I was being proactive in my approach until recently—when I realized there was a large, hiding-in-plain-sight, missing piece in everything we discussed. We never once spoke directly about masculinity or dug into what it means to be a boy or a man…
… The problem is my boys and their friends are lovely, sweet and not at all toxic. Why would I start a conversation with my boys about "boyness" on such a critical note? Doing so might result in silencing or shaming my sons for behaviors or traits they don't have.
Elissa is not alone in trying to find the storyline for her boys. With masculinity increasingly stereotyped as toxic, harmful, dangerous, and even unnecessary, it’s no wonder moms, dads, educators, religious leaders, and the media have a hard time coming up with a positive storyline or vision for our boys.
Add on top of that the known—but unseen—challenges our boys face in the 21st Century:
• Since 1982 boys have fallen behind girls in every level of education from pre-school through graduate school.
• On average, boys receive 70% of the D’s and F’s and only 40% of the A’s.
• For every 100 girls suspended from elementary and secondary school, 250 boys are expelled.
• For every 100 girls expelled from school, 355 boys are expelled.
• 85% of stimulant-addressing meds in the world are prescribed to US boys.
A headline on NBC News asks this question: Boys need better access to mental health care. Why aren’t they getting it?
If you were to ask the average person, what is a good man? or what does it mean to be a man? or what is the purpose of a man? you’d likely get several deer-in-the-headlights looks.
But as Elissa says in her op ed, and parents and grandparents and educators and coaches and therapists all around the world know: Boys are awesome!
But for our boys to grow into awesome men our society needs to reclaim the important role men play in our society: a vision of men, joining with women and all those on the gender spectrum, in building a better, healthier world. Testosterone, the primary hormone of men, is a get-it-done, let’s-build-this-better, let’s-fix-it, gift that men can offer the world.
Quest stories offer us a tool to inspire our boys to be good men. From Harry Potter to Percy Jackson to Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee to my new character, Toby Baxter, these Quest stories hold up models of what character, service, compassion, confidence, and love look like.
We would do well as adults to read or re-read these wonder-filled boy stories, and to read them with our sons and our daughters.
… The problem is my boys and their friends are lovely, sweet and not at all toxic. Why would I start a conversation with my boys about "boyness" on such a critical note? Doing so might result in silencing or shaming my sons for behaviors or traits they don't have.
Elissa is not alone in trying to find the storyline for her boys. With masculinity increasingly stereotyped as toxic, harmful, dangerous, and even unnecessary, it’s no wonder moms, dads, educators, religious leaders, and the media have a hard time coming up with a positive storyline or vision for our boys.
Add on top of that the known—but unseen—challenges our boys face in the 21st Century:
• Since 1982 boys have fallen behind girls in every level of education from pre-school through graduate school.
• On average, boys receive 70% of the D’s and F’s and only 40% of the A’s.
• For every 100 girls suspended from elementary and secondary school, 250 boys are expelled.
• For every 100 girls expelled from school, 355 boys are expelled.
• 85% of stimulant-addressing meds in the world are prescribed to US boys.
A headline on NBC News asks this question: Boys need better access to mental health care. Why aren’t they getting it?
If you were to ask the average person, what is a good man? or what does it mean to be a man? or what is the purpose of a man? you’d likely get several deer-in-the-headlights looks.
But as Elissa says in her op ed, and parents and grandparents and educators and coaches and therapists all around the world know: Boys are awesome!
But for our boys to grow into awesome men our society needs to reclaim the important role men play in our society: a vision of men, joining with women and all those on the gender spectrum, in building a better, healthier world. Testosterone, the primary hormone of men, is a get-it-done, let’s-build-this-better, let’s-fix-it, gift that men can offer the world.
Quest stories offer us a tool to inspire our boys to be good men. From Harry Potter to Percy Jackson to Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee to my new character, Toby Baxter, these Quest stories hold up models of what character, service, compassion, confidence, and love look like.
We would do well as adults to read or re-read these wonder-filled boy stories, and to read them with our sons and our daughters.
The Writing Adventures of Tim Wright
Join me as I share insights into my new adventure of writing quest/fantasy books, particularly my new series, The Adventures of Toby Baxter.
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