People don’t usually equate Navy SEAL training with children. It’s also unlikely that people think parents should take the advice of a Navy SEAL on child-rearing. However, one former SEAL says otherwise. Brandon Webb, a former Navy SEAL sniper trainer, was still training recruits when the Navy adopted positive psychology rather than punishment-based corrections. The dad explains to The Independent, “When we introduced changes to training to focus on positive psychology, our 30 percent failure rate went down to 1 percent.” That’s when he had the idea to introduce the same concept to his parenting style. No, he wasn’t teaching his children to be snipers, but his training helped him keep his cool. It also showed him that using negative tools of correction was far less effective than many once believed. Military members practicing aimPhoto Credit: Canva “If I say to a trainee who’s learning how to use a high-power rifle, ‘You’re flinching,’ that puts it in his head,” Webb told The Independent. “You can’t point out mistakes, especially in front of other people, because then it just spreads, infecting everyone like a virus — setting them up for failure.” After the realization that using positive psychology decreased the failure rate of trainees, it made sense to translate it to his personal life. After successfully raising his three children, with whom he maintains a close relationship, he wrote a book to help others. Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids. Man in Navy uniform hugging childPhoto Credit: Canva In the book, he uses four core principles he learned as a SEAL to parents everywhere. These are the principles he used with his own children: visualization, positive verbal cues, self-image management, and a positive outlook in all situations. Visualization and positive verbal cues In his book, he explains that a parent is like a pilot during turbulence. Nobody would feel calm if an airplane pilot started panicking over the intercom every time he hit an air pocket in the sky. The same goes for parenting. According to Webb, “Kids need three things more than headlines: safety in the present moment, adults who are steady under pressure, confidence that uncertainty is survivable.” Man and child on a paddleboardPhoto Credit: Canva A parent implanting negative thoughts into their child’s head becomes the child’s internal thoughts as they get older, Webb explains in his book. He shares, “It’s incredibly important to positively imprint desired outcomes or behavior — not reinforce the negatives.” A positive outlook in all situations Webb details a time when his oldest son had to utilize this skill after the former SEAL refused to help him out of a bind. The adult child accumulated over $17,000 in credit card debt and requested Webb’s help to pay it off. Instead of jumping to the rescue, Webb encouraged him to figure it out. His eldest son figured it out on his own. Dad helping child with homeworkPhoto Credit: Canva The father of three shares in the book that it’s hard to watch your children go through something hard. However, he later explains that kids have to learn how to go through difficult things in life without always having someone save the day. What do the kids think? The kids are all adults now, ages 19, 22, and 24. They’re thriving. His youngest son has just finished his freshman year of college, while his daughter is finishing her master’s degree in London. Webb’s oldest runs his own tech company. All three children have expressed gratitude towards the way their father raised them. One of his sons left him a note after spending time together during COVID that simply said, “I feel like I won the dad lottery.” The post How a former Navy SEAL used his sniper training to shape his approach to parenting appeared first on Upworthy.

June is recognized as Pride Month in multiple countries, including the United Kingdom. This year, Durham, a city in the UK, cut funding to its annual Pride Parade. It was a devastating blow to the city’s LGBTQ community. Without the funding from the city, the parade would likely be postponed indefinitely. When the news spread, unlikely allies decided to stand in the gap. Coal miners from all over the UK stepped in to raise funds so the Durham LGBTQ community could go on with their parade. To understand the bond between the two unlikely communities, you have to rewind the clock 40 years. Man in orange inside minePhoto Credit: Canva But to understand the importance of Pride, you’d have to go back even further. LGBTQ people have been fighting for civil rights since the late 1800s in Germany, with the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. The committee advocated for the decriminalization of homosexuality in Germany, according to the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. In 1924, Henry Gerber, a German immigrant and postal worker, founded The Society for Human Rights in Chicago, IL. It was the first gay rights organization in America according to LGBTQ History. In 1969, police infamously raided the LGBTQ bar Stonewall Inn. A riot ensued, catapulting LGBTQ rights into the spotlight. This riot kicked off the first Pride Parades, and they continue to this day to observe, celebrate, and remind people that the fight hasn’t ended. People waiving rainbow flags at a pride parade.Photo Credit: Canva People across the globe continue the tradition of Pride Parades, and Durham is no different. However, after the city canceled funding, the miners took it upon themselves to repay a four-decade-old debt. In 1984, 20,000 miners were fired as a retaliation against the miners’ unions in the UK. This mass firing led to massive union-backed strikes, which prompted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to deny all of the unions’ national funding. On Instagram, Patch Bay Media shares, “This forced the miners to go to smaller local groups to ask for help, so they could continue their rightful strike. But then, a group of London activists decided that they didn’t like this injustice and took to the streets to raise money.” View this post on Instagram The post adds that the group became known as the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). “Together they raised £22,500, which is about £70,000 in today’s money. That year, to show their support and their solidarity with the community, miners from working-class backgrounds, covered in coal dust, marched in the front of Pride Parades all across the country.” It’s due to this relationship that started in 1984 that miners in Durham today took it upon themselves to raise money for the Pride Parade. In fact, the Durham Miner’s Association raised more money than the city would’ve normally given. The post says, “So this year, Durham will have its biggest Pride Parade ever, and that is the power of advocacy.” Viewers of the informational video love the solidarity between the two groups, with one person writing, “Queer rights are workers rights, and workers rights are queer rights.” Two women wrapped in rainbow flagPhoto Credit: Canva Another says, “We are stronger when we remember we have more in common with our neighbors than our oppressors.” Several people shared that there’s a movie called Pride about this very unique solidarity. And someone who attended this year’s Pride Parade in Durham shares that it was indeed the largest event: “I was at durham pride on saturday in my LGSM t-shirt! the best turnout I’ve seen since I started attending in 2018. I was so pleased to see the various trade unions and miners banners there.” The post After a UK city defunded their Pride parade, trade unions raised money to fund it appeared first on Upworthy.

When the first soon-to-be Colonial Americans crossed the pond from Great Britain, they brought the native English language of their homeland with them. Over the years, their typical British accent morphed into an entirely different accent and dialect known as American English. But what exactly did Colonial Americans sound like? In 2008, HBO premiered the seven-part miniseries John Adams, which followed the life of Founding Father John Adams in Colonial America and documented his impact on the formation of the United States. Widely considered one of the most accurate historical dramas to be created, the show’s screenwriter and producer Kirk Ellis utilized dialect coach Catherine Charlton and early American history to make sure that the characters sounded as close to what real American Colonists sounded like in the 1700s. Nailing down the Colonial American accent The English first came to America in the 1600s, with English settlers founding Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. By the 1730s, England had established all of the American colonies, according to the Library of Congress. It’s hard to fully define what the American Colonists sounded like by then. In fact, in a 2008 interview with Vanity Fair, Charlton explained that, simply put, no on can truly know what they sounded like. “We don’t know exactly. It’s almost forensic in some ways,” she said. “For example, an English lord who arrived in the colonies made a comment about how clearly spoken the Americans were compared to the British.” Charlton is referring to a 1770 excerpt from the visitor to the Colonies, according to JSTOR: “The colonists are composed of adventurers, not only from every district of Great Britain and Ireland, but from almost every other European government…Is it not therefore reasonable to suppose that the English language must be greatly corrupted by such a strange admixture of various nations? The reverse is however true. The language of the immediate descendants of such promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform, and unadulterated; nor has it borrowed any provincial, or national accent from its British or foreign parentage.” The accent sounded similar to British As Charlton explains, accents take time to form. “Accents today are influenced by people moving from one town or village to the other, or the television, etc.,” she explained. “But in those times, for example, John Adams used to ride to the Congress in Philadelphia from Boston on horseback. That took a long time. There wouldn’t be a huge and rapid change of dialect like there is now.” In a 2008 interview with The New Republic, Ellis shared that they learned Colonial Americans were not speaking with a “full-blown” American accent like we have today. “All our research pointed to the fact that, in written and spoken speech, America was much closer to the mother country than had been acknowledged in past dramatizations,” he shared. Ellis explained how they consulted historians on what the Colonial American accent may have sounded like. “From our advisors in Colonial Williamsburg, we learned that one’s residence in America frequently depended on one’s point of origin in England. Virginia, for instance, was largely settled by residents of East Anglia—in terms of dialect and accent a very distinctive region,” he explained. “Moreover, a goodly number of our characters (notably John Dickinson) had been educated in English schools and had acquired the manners and speech of the time and place. Still others, such as Adams’s Secretary of War James McHenry, were themselves immigrants whose accents (Irish, in McHenry’s case) were noted at the time.” Characteristics of the Colonial American accent In her dialect research for John Adams, Charlton learned how American Colonists put their own twist on English. “There were certain things that were quite clearly American. Webster was writing his dictionary at this time and they really hated the way the British would say things like “secretary [Ed. Pronounced “SEC-reh-tree],” “cemetery,” as so on,” she said. “And children were actually taught how to tap out syllables. Ce-me-ta-ry, mil-i-tar-y.” Charlton worked with the actors to develop their Colonial American accents by geographical region. “It was a very complex thing for the actors to try and assume an accent that is developing. “I figured that I would give them enough background information and then have them listen to particular British dialects with a preponderance of certain sounds—for example, in the Boston area the Pilgrim’s ancestors were mainly from non-rhotic parts of Britain, when you don’t pronounce the letter ‘r’,” she added. “So we could make a distinction between the Northern territories and the Southern territories. Virginia was mainly colonized by west-country people.” The post This is exactly what Colonial Americans sounded like, according to dialect coach appeared first on Upworthy.

In 1999, an American teacher named Ronald Sakolsky was working as an English exchange teacher at Luoyang No. 2 Foreign Language School in central China’s Henan Province. One day he caught a televised news segment about a woman named Yin Yuzhen, who was attempting something that sounded borderline insane: turning a stretch of the Maowusu Desert in Inner Mongolia into a forest, one sapling at a time. He was moved enough to do something about it. Sakolsky wrote to institutions back in the US and got a foundation in Boston to donate $5,000 for Yin’s tree-planting work. The money was sent to her in cash. “I have never seen such a big amount of money before. It made me surprised,” Yin told the news portal The Paper, as reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP). To put it in perspective, that $5,000 in 1999 could have bought her a 400-square-meter apartment. Instead, she spent nearly all of it on saplings. She kept exactly one dollar bill as a souvenir. A young tree sprouts from the ground. Photo credit: Canva In the spring of 2000, Sakolsky traveled out to the desert to meet her in person and see the work. At that point, the land was still mostly yellow sand. He was openly skeptical. “When Mr. Sakolsky visited me, he saw me planting trees in the desert. Seeing the land filled with yellow sands, he shook his head, saying ‘impossible, impossible’,” Yin said to China Daily. Yin’s story started in the 1980s, when she moved from Shaanxi Province at age 19 to marry a man living deep in the Maowusu sandy area, China’s fourth-largest desert. Her first home was a cellar half-buried in sand, where overnight winds would sometimes seal the entrance with drifting dunes. From there, she and her husband started planting, and they didn’t stop. Over the following decades, they restored more than 70,000 mu of desertified land, roughly 4,600 hectares, into green oasis. Yin was named a National Model Worker by China’s State Council in 2000 and later shared her experience at the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. After Sakolsky finished his teaching assignment and returned to the United States, the two lost touch. But Yin never forgot him. She had his name engraved on a stone monument in the desert. And the saplings his money bought kept growing. In early May 2026, Yin decided to find him. A video of her standing in front of the now-dense woods was posted online and shared by CCTV on Instagram. In it, she makes an appeal: “Mr. Sakolsky, we would like to invite you to come back to China to witness how the US$5,000 you donated many years ago has become a large forest.” View this post on Instagram The clip went viral. With help from Sakolsky’s former students and colleagues, the search took under 48 hours. The school’s former vice-principal, Bai Fan, who had accompanied Sakolsky on that original visit in 2000, got him on the phone. On May 18, 27 years after the donation, Yin and Sakolsky reconnected on a video call. “It’s amazing! It’s amazing to me! I can’t believe we are talking,” Sakolsky said, according to China Daily. Yin told him what his money had become. “You are my brother. I used the $5,000 you donated to plant a forest. When will you come and see it? I really want to see you.” “I will try,” Sakolsky replied. Then, speaking slowly in Chinese, he added that he wanted to come back and plant a tree with her himself. He called the transformation “a miracle” and Yin “a truly amazing woman.” She told SCMP he plans to return this summer or autumn. That $5,000 is now more than 50,000 trees. The forest stabilizes what used to be barren, shifting dunes, shelters wildlife, and holds back the encroaching sand. Yin’s corner of the desert has since drawn others into the same work. According to China Daily, An American volunteer who goes by the Chinese name Yin Yifan has been planting trees alongside her since 2015, adding more than 2,000 of his own. A 76-year-old Chinese American educator recently flew in from California just to plant four saplings herself. The broader backdrop is staggering. According to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, by the end of 2024, 53% of China’s manageable desertified land had been treated, a net reduction of about 65 million mu (4.3 million hectares). China is the first country in the world to achieve a zero net increase in land degradation while shrinking the area of its desertified lands. Land that was once bare sand now grows medicinal herbs, grasses, melons, walnuts, and fruit. But the heart of this particular story is smaller than national statistics. It’s one skeptical teacher who said “impossible,” one woman who refused to accept that, and a single dollar bill she kept for 27 years to remember the moment a stranger believed in her enough to try. The post A teacher helped a woman plant trees in the desert. She found him 27 years later. appeared first on Upworthy.

Kids who grew up in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are now adults longing for the good old days. We 100% find ourselves hooked on nostalgia, and we will dive in at any chance we get. Life was certainly much simpler a few decades ago, but without modern technology, we’d never have the chance to revisit our beloved past. So we’ll call the launch of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on YouTube a win for the past and the present. Now, we can watch Mr. Rogers, Lady Elaine Fairchilde, Mr. McFeely, Handyman Negri, and all of our friends in the world of make-believe any time that we want to. ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ Has Something for Everyone Every episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood offered life lessons, music, friendship, and opportunities to learn new things. It followed a very simple formula that helped keep it on the air for more than 30 years and 895 episodes. They’re not all online, but seeing just a few full episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood has plenty of people in their feels. “So many of us grew up on the wholesome hero in a sweater. He would be beside himself with sadness seeing what we’ve all become and how we treat our neighbors,” someone shared on X. “This world needs a modern version of this because Lord knows this word needs all the help it can get,” someone else added. Others hope that seeing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood will bring back some other classic television favorites. “Show them all, on loop forever. While we’re at it. Do the same with Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow,” a fan suggested. This person nailed it. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” This story’s featured image is by CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images