Something beautiful

John Holland-McCowan was sitting on a beach in Hawaii with his parents and his baby brother, Harrison, happily playing with coconuts and driftwood. "I'm so lucky," the almost-five-year-old suddenly announced. "I have all these toys to play with and all my toys at home."  His startled parents replied that he was indeed lucky, since a lot of kids didn't have any toys at all. "That's when he started to cry," recalls his mother, Anne.

 John's softhearted woundedness over kids less fortunate startled his mom.  But instead of patting him on the head and changing the subject, she helped him take action. When they returned home, he talked to his friends, hosted pizza parties, and came up with a concrete idea.

John and his friends named their enterprise Kids Cheering Kids, and today there are 19 chapters in the greater San Jose/ South Bay area; another in Metairie, Louisiana; and still another in Portland, Oregon. John is 16 now, a six-one sophomore and a water polo star at Menlo High School. He still visits kids at the San Jose Family Center, helping out with a carnival they're putting on.  

 The Holland-McCowan family captured the young enthusiasm and generosity of their children, to great effect.  This Reader's Digest article discusses how four families tried to become service oriented as well.  It'll inspire you. 

What I liked about John's mom is that she allowed her son to "feel" the pain of others, instead of explaining it away or just creating a distraction.  There's something to that -- to really letting kids see the inequity of life -- that's refreshing, don't you think? 

Maybe I'm prone to overlooking problems because I'm a Southerner.  But during my husband's deployment, I had no choice.  That's when I threw my hands up in the air, acknowledged life was going to be tough for a year, and just pushed through it.  And there was something about that realization -- the truth of the difficulty -- that liberated the kids to perhaps thrive amidst tough times.

It's not to say young children should start watching the evening news or hearing things that would be unduly upsetting...  It's just to say that parents are perhaps too prone to smooth discomforting things over.  I know I have been.

The cool thing about John's story, at least to me, is that it demonstrates that an awareness of other people's circumstances can be the start of something beautiful.