In my early twenties, I worked as a flight attendant and as I wrote in my book, this experience was surprisingly relevant later in life when I found myself as a single-mother, working hard to rehabilitate my daughter after a childhood stroke. One of my tasks as a flight attendant, of course, was the safety briefing at the beginning of each flight. 

 Along with showing passengers how to buckle and unbuckle a seat belt (which I don't think anyone needed to be shown), we tucked the long tube that was attached to a spare oxygen mask into one hand and then simulated it dropping down from the overhead bins. At that point, the announcements said, "...In the unlikely event of a decompression, place the mask firmly over your nose and mouth and breathe normally." Then, the announcements said  that if you were traveling with a child, you should "put your own mask on first and then help your child".

 As a mother, that seems counter-intuitive at first glance. I can certainly picture myself holding my breath and gasping for air in an emergency, as I frantically try to save my children above all else. But, if I take a step back and think analytically, it makes perfect sense. If I'm not doing well, or if I pass out from a lack of oxygen, then how can I make sure that my children are thriving?

 When I found out that my daughter had suffered a stroke, I threw myself into doing everything that I could to help her. It was years later that I realized that I had basically been existing on adrenaline and caffeine and, that I should have taken some time now and again to make sure that I too was getting enough oxygen, so to speak. Just like it is with the oxygen masks "in the unlikely event of a decompression”, my daughter would still have been as fine as she is today, but I wouldn't have been gasping for air as long as I was. And, maybe I would even have been in a better position to help her along the way.

In 2004, the New Yorker published an article by Malcolm Gladwell called The Ketchup Conundrum. In it, Gladwell discusses how Howard Moskowitz, an American market researcher and psychophysicist, changed the food world with the results of his studies on consumer preferences. The article describes how, in 1986, Moskowitz was hired by the Campbell’s Soup Company, which also made the Prego brand of spaghetti sauce, to generate new ideas to help the tomato sauce side of the business get out of the slump that it was in.

Instead of trying to come up with the “perfect” sauce that consumers would want to buy over the competing brand, Moskowitz worked with Campbell’s kitchens to come up with 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce and then tested them in different cities. What Moskowitz found, was that there was no “perfect sauce”. In fact, overall, each person had a different idea of what the “perfect” spaghetti sauce should be like. For the most part, people’s preferences fell into one of three general categories: plain, spicy and extra-chunky. Based on these results, Prego launched an extra-chunky sauce which turned out to be extremely successful. And, this was the beginning of the trend towards many different varieties of the same product as we now see on grocery store shelves.

Why am I writing about this in the context of this project? Well, my observation is that in the same way that adults react differently to different tomato sauces, children respond differently to different things as well. For example, in the case of my daughter’s rehabilitation, for each challenge that we faced, we were generally shown a series of exercises to work on. This could be considered the plain tomato sauce equivalent—sitting down each day and just doing whatever we were supposed to do.

But in real life, kids get bored quickly and trying to fit rehabilitation activities into an already busy life is not as straightforward as it may seem. So, to keep my daughter motivated, I found that I often had to “spice things up”. It could be adding funny sounds to the exercises, making jokes, distracting her with conversation or using chocolate chips to motivate her—whatever it took to keep her on task. And finally, given everything else on the to-do list of any particular day, sometimes I just couldn’t find the time to sit down and do what needed to be done. Instead, like the randomly distributed bits of tomato in the chunky sauce, I had to fit the exercises in here and there wherever I could—like always holding her affected hand whenever we walked together and giving those muscles a good stretch without her really noticing.

Overall, I think that there will always be some who choose plain tomato sauce over spicy sauce and vice versa, whereas others, like myself, could choose either, depending on the day. The point is, that there is no “perfect” sauce that will appeal equally to all people, all of the time. In the same way, what children like and dislike, and what motivates them and what doesn’t, varies. That’s certainly been the case throughout my daughter’s rehabilitation. Sometimes a plain approach has been just fine and sometimes a spicy version is what was needed. Other times, a random extra-chunky approach has been the only way to go. For us, variety has been a key ingredient.