How to be a family : the year I dragged my kids around the world to find a new way to be together

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Kois, Dan

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

viii, 324 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm.

Summary:

"What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family? Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family--Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters--could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together? In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois' go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home--but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble. How to be a family brings readers along as the Kois girls--witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper--hike through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go? A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, How to be a family will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take."--Amazon.com.

Subject Term:

Voyages around the world

Families -- Travel.

Voyages and travels -- Anecdotes

Parenting -- Anecdotes.

Travel writing

Publication Info:

New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2019.

Subject:

Voyages around the world

Families -- Travel.

Voyages and travels -- Anecdotes

Parenting -- Anecdotes.

Travel writing

Kois, Dan -- Travel.

Circumnavigation

Journeys

Tours around the world

Travel books

Travels

Trips around the world

Voyages around the world -- 1951-1980

Voyages around the world -- 1981-

Family

Families -- Social aspects

Families -- Social conditions

Family life

Family relationships

Family structure

Relationships, Family

Structure, Family

Parent behavior

Parental behavior in humans

Travel -- Authorship

SAILS ISBN:

9780316552622

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Rehoboth - Blanding Free PL	910.4 KOI	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Rochester - Plumb Library	B KOIS KOI	BIOGRAPHY	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

In this "refreshingly relatable" ( Outside ) memoir, perfect for the self-isolating family, Slate editor Dan Kois sets out with his family on a journey around the world to change their lives togethe r.

What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family?
Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family-Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters-could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together?

In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois' go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home-but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble.

HOW TO BE A FAMILY brings readers along as the Kois girls-witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper-like through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go?

A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, HOW TO BE A FAMILY will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kois, a parenting podcaster and editor at Slate, believed that he, his wife, and two daughters "were doing being a family wrong" and tells of his radical step to rectify their situation. He decided they should spend 2017 living in new locations far from their Arlington, Va., home, spending three months in each location. The experiment's results are varied and delightful to read about: their happy idyll in beautiful Wellington, New Zealand, is packed with friendly neighborhood barbecues and a rejection of American helicopter parenting. The Dutch in Delft, in the Netherlands, seem a cooler lot and obsessed with "normalcy," though Kois--a serial enthusiast--is entranced by their social cohesion and bicycles. Bug-infested Samara, Costa Rica, is appealingly laid-back, though its roughness starts straining family ties. Back in the vaunted "Real America" of Trump-voting Hays in western Kansas, Kois is as intrigued by the close-knit religious town as he is with the locales abroad. He fills his narrative with both ironic, self-deprecating humor and earnest soul-searching ("A place never solves anything") as he comes to the realization that "you can't actually change your kids but your kids change nonetheless." This "foolhardy jaunt" into experimental family life--hacking consistently pleases and surprises. (Sept.)

Kirkus Review

Slate editor Kois (Facing Future, 2009, etc.) looks for a little quality time with the family, finding it in adventures and misadventures around the world."Above all," writes the author near the beginning, "our life as a family felt as though it were flying past in a blur of petty arguments, overworked days, exhausted nights, an inchoate longing for some kind of existence that made more sense." The answer: Uproot. Move. Go see what the rest of the world looks like while the kids are still young. Kois and his family embarked on a journey that took them from Northern Virginia to New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, Kansas, and back again in a whirlwind year. The book doesn't have much of a thesis, but its slightly melancholy ending might remind cinema-minded readers of the end of Bill Forsyth's 1983 film Local Hero. There are a few set pieces and clichs but also some nicely tuned-in observations befitting a keen-eyed journalist. For example, the author writes about how in Holland, speed laws for motor vehicles are set at 30 kilometers per hour because anything more would likely doom a pedestrian or cyclist to death. So it is that people survive such collisions in Holland, which puts a nation assured of good odds on two wheels, which, thus applied to children, "helps create the kind of independence that Dutch parents prize." The America of red-state Kansas proved more fearful but not without civic virtues; refreshingly, Kois doesn't hammer too hard on politics even though it's clear where his views lie. Overall, the book is a minor contribution to the literature of family (and travel, for that matter), but it's a pleasant narrative that makes few demands on readers.Slack moments aside, this memoir of travel with a family in need of change has its pleasures. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Journalist Kois' first book looks back with dry humor on the year his family spent away from their Arlington, Virginia home. In 2017, Kois and his attorney wife, Alia, uprooted their two daughters, introverted 11-year-old Lyra and extroverted 9-year-old Harper, to spend three months each in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and Hayes, Kansas. Sick of the routines of suburban East Coast living, Kois wanted to investigate whether other places had figured out family life better than his neighborhood had. Yes and no, he discovered. The kids enjoyed running around unsupervised in New Zealand and savored slow Saturdays in Hayes, but Lyra suffered under a restrictive school system in the Netherlands, and nobody liked the bugs in Costa Rica. Their family bond became closer, but perhaps mainly because of their enforced closeness and the fact that the parents were only working part-time. While only a qualified success as an experiment, the project makes for diverting reading, with occasional asides from Kois' wife and daughters adding varied perspectives--Margaret Quamme Copyright 2010 Booklist

You're Screwing Up	p. 3
New Zealand: January-April
Steves	p. 31
Chapter 1 Number 8 Wire	p. 39
Chapter 2 Te Aroha	p. 57
Chapter 3 On Any Walk	p. 72
The Goodbye Party	p. 99
The Netherlands: April-July
Phantom Ducks	p. 107
Chapter 4 A Revolting Attitude	p. 117
Chapter 5 Fietsen	p. 137
Chapter 6 The Poldermodel	p. 151
The Dance Recital	p. 173
Costa Rica: July-September
Tides	p. 181
Chapter 7 Every Day	p. 186
Kansas: October-December
Bricks	p. 241
Chapter 8 A Quiet America	p. 247
Chapter 9 Bloom Where You're Planted	p. 265
Chapter 10 A Holy Hug	p. 286
The Posada	p. 305
Love and Attention	p. 313

Available:

Bound With These Titles

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Summary

Summary

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

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