bearing blog

Bubbling.

Yesterday, after six long months apart, we finally rejoined H. and her kids for co-schooling at my house.

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We had plenty of time over the summer to figure out what we were going to do.   Back when winter was yielding to spring, our little school gatherings (being more than ten people) were outright prohibited.   We slowed down, met with each others' kids over the phone and over Discord, stretched the end of last year into midsummer.    We thought about meeting outdoors, masked and distanced, but knew there was no way we could keep enough control over the six-year-olds for that to work.   Even after small gatherings were no longer outright prohibited, we stayed cautiously away.  There were visits to elderly relatives expected; there were sons visiting from college; we thought it best not to mix our family's risks, all summer long.

H. and I met a few times, outdoors and masked.  We took a long walk and hashed out our plans.  From Labor Day to Thanksgiving, we figured, there would be no visits to grandparents; there would be little or nothing in the way of social events; the young men in college hope to be staying away.   Our partners work similar jobs that expose them occasionally to the corporate workplace, but nothing more.  Neither family is attending religious services.  One teenager has a convenience-store job, so there's that; but otherwise, our risk profiles---between Labor Day and Thanksgiving---are similar.  And so we decided to merge bubbles, from Labor Day to Thanksgiving (as long as no one appears sick or learns of exposure).  And start co-schooling again:  three first-graders, one fifth-grader, one ninth-grader, one tenth-grader.

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You should have seen the shrieks and hugs when the little friends saw each other for the first time, the reunion on my front steps.  The bigger people tiptoed sheepishly around each other, flinching. 

Can it really be okay to step into your house? 

Can it really be okay to stand close enough to hand you a cup of coffee?  

Well, we cannot be sure it is okay, but we have tried to increase the odds as much as we can.  We have pulled back everywhere else. And it is a blessed relief to know that---now that we've let the hammer fall---we might as well let the children wrestle, we might as well eat lunch together at the same small table, we might as well pass the cucumbers and butter the children's bread for them, we might as well sit close together and sing out amem, ames, amet.  

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Once we got settled into teaching, we both felt more comfortable, and we made it through our whole day with time to spare, enough time to sit on my new socially distanced porch furniture---but all clustered together at one end--- and have a pot of tea and chat about how it had gone.   

And how had it gone?

Normal.  So much normal.  So much utterly craveable normal.  Just that.  So very valuable, an environment that we are used to, that we know how to teach the children in, that we know how to be together in.

And of course as we talked about the upcoming weekend there was the rush of delight when we realized that, in fact, we can get together this weekend.  Because, having made the leap, the marginal risk is now quite small.  And so maybe we will come over, bearing potluck dishes and wine, and let our children run around in the yard.  I don't know, we have to decide, but something can happen.  It is almost giddy.

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One of my children came into our bed weeping, Thursday night, because Thursday had been so wonderful that he couldn't bear to have a day that wasn't Thursday.  We soothed him:  Friday would be regular, just us in our house, but we would see them again soon.  And eventually he went to sleep. 

I lay there a bit longer in the dark after his sniffles had faded away, thinking that there was something of that in my own heart too, a bit of a scrap of loose end.  I decided (not to over-dramatize the pandemic) it is like when you come to the end of a post-apocalyptic novel, like Station Eleven or World War Z, and the author has decided to end the novel in the happiest way possible, by providing a little beam of hopeful evidence that things are going to get better.  It is nice to have a happy ending, and I much prefer my dystopias to have a bit of hope at the end.  But you know, those endings can never be much better than wistful.  There is a bit of hope and happiness, or hoped-for happiness, there.  But it's not the real happy ending you wished could be, the one where things go back to the way they were before.  There is still a long road ahead for the characters, a road that remains unseen now that the book is closed.  

And we have a long road ahead too, and we don't see it.  Still, the hope is real, and when the hopeful event is present, it isn't just hope but joy.  So.  We are going to enjoy it, each time we get a chance.  And in between, keep hoping.

 

Later, gaiter. (That is: later, we'll know more.)

My favorite mask so far has been the polyester neck gaiter, not worn pulled up in a single layer bank-robber-style over the nose (it's not nearly tight enough for me to feel secure that way), but lapped into at least three layers and with the selvages over my head to create a tight seal everywhere around my nose and mouth.  I showed exactly how I did it, with photos, back in May, partly in hopes to encourage the "tight-gaiter-as-mask" method of wearing it instead of the looser "bandit style."

I listed numerous advantages, and then added:

Potential disadvantages:

• Polyester knit is fairly loose-weave and its specific filtration efficacy is not known.  This is the biggest caveat.  It's one reason why I try to get at least three layers over my mouth and nose.
• Some brands are pricey
• Maybe it will fog your glasses and you'll have to add some wire or something
• It's a little hard to get it just right without a mirror (at least at first)

Give it a try and see what you think.

Repeated Disclaimer:  I am not a professional dispenser of legal or medical advice, and I have not done an exhaustive literature search to determine if there is any other available data regarding polyester knit fabric as part of masks for source control in the community.    

So!  We now have a little bit---emphasis on the little---of data regarding polyester knit neck gaiters, and that little bit isn't good.  In my opinion, the scrap of data is enough to make me at least temporarily uneasy about relying on the gaiters without an added filter, so I've resumed experimenting with cotton fabric. 

In my opinion, it is not enough (yet) to rule out gaiters as an effective option. 

We really need to know more about this, because they are a very popular face-covering right now, and for good reason.  Some people believe it's the only type they can tolerate for long periods, so if it turns out that they are reasonably effective when worn in a well-fitting way, we don't want to lose them as an option.

Let's dig in to the source of this data, which is a very cool study that came out this week and which I have carefully read with some consultation assistance from my spouse, who has professional experience in particulate imaging.

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Here's a typical article's headline and excerpts, this from CBS News:

Neck gaiters may be worse than not wearing a mask at all, study shows

Using neck gaiters as a face covering might be ineffective at stopping the spread of the coronavirus, and could even spread the virus further than not wearing a covering at all, according to a new study. Researchers from Duke University found that the neck gaiter they tested was "worse than nothing." 

"The neck gaiter that we tested did essentially nothing, and worse than nothing, because it appeared to make large droplets into small droplets," Isaac Henrion, the study's co-author, told CBS News. Henrion is also the coordinator of  Cover Durham, a community project to distribute tens of thousands of masks to vulnerable people.

The neck gaiter is a circular piece of fabric that sits around a person's neck and can be pulled up to cover their mouth and nose. The issue with the convenient cover-up is likely not with its design, but with the fabric it is typically made from.

According to Henrion, the study tested a neck gaiter made of a thin, stretchy polyester, which they are commonly made from. Instead of stopping droplets that can contain the virus from escaping into the air, the fabric appeared to turn large droplets into smaller ones known as aerosols....

Duke's study focused on droplet production while talking, as opposed to coughing or sneezing...

While the study did not set out to create a definitive ranking of masks, Henrion said that N95 and standard surgical masks released the least amount of droplets. N95s yielded the best results, and surgical masks came in second, stopping 90-95% of droplets. Simple two-layer cotton masks were effective at stopping 80% of droplets from getting out when participants spoke. 

As for neck gaiters, Henrion stressed that the study was preliminary, and did not conclusively determine whether a gaiter's fabric or construction was responsible for producing smaller droplets. A neck gaiter with two layers of cotton could be more effective.

Without easy access to PPE, many people have turned to making their own masks. The study showed that homemade versions can be effective, but people should be mindful of their mask construction and fit. 

"Further research is needed to investigate the performance of bandanas and neck gaiters, since our study is only a proof of concept for the experimental method," Henrion said.

Martin Fischer, an associate research professor in Duke's chemistry department who took part in the study, told WRAL-TV it wasn't meant to rate different face coverings, adding that "Not all ... neck gaiters are bad. There are plenty good ones out there. It depends so much on the material, on how many layers you wear."

So, if you read all the way through the news article, you do see some caveats.  It's not an irresponsibly written news article; but I'd argue it's focused incorrectly.  This study --- Fischer et al., Sci. Adv. 10.1126/sciadv.abd3083 (2020) --- is not a study of mask effectiveness at all.  It appears to be a valuable and elegant study, but they did not write the paper so that they could report mask effectiveness.    It is a demonstration study of their novel apparatus.

In other words:  

Fischer et al. were not trying to use their apparatus to demonstrate the effectiveness of 14 masks.  They were using 14 masks to demonstrate the effectiveness of their apparatus.

Along the way, though, they did produce some data, which we shouldn't ignore; but we should be aware of its limitations.  

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A much better article about the study, the one that I wish had gone viral in the first place, was published in WIRED.   From the very headline and sub-head, they get the focus correctly where it belongs:  on the apparatus, not on the masks.

Scientists Put Masks to the Test---With A Cell Phone and a Laser

When it comes to blocking germs, not all cloth masks are created equal.  A new, low-cost testing device literally illuminates which ones won't get the job done.

Three cheers for journalist Megan Molteni, who wrote the article!  Three cheers for WIRED, who put all of the above in big type before the colorful illustration!  

I would love for you to read the whole WIRED article, but I'll pull out a section that's especially relevant to the neck gaiter question.  Emphases are mine.

 The neck gaiter, made out of a lightweight, breathable fabric favored by runners and cyclists, let through even more particles than the control group—110 percent relative to wearing no mask at all.

If you’re wondering how that is even possible, you’re not alone. Fischer was similarly stumped. Then he went back and looked at the footage again of himself wearing the neck gaiter. “You can see that it’s not just that there are more particles, but that on average, the particles are much smaller,” he says. His team believes the stretchy, porous material is actually fracturing bigger, heavier droplets, splintering them into tinier particles that can more easily remain suspended in the air.

If that’s true, it would blow up the maxim that any mask is better than no mask, says Kimberly Prather, an environmental aerosol researcher at UC San Diego who was not involved in the study.

But there’s another possible explanation: Maybe the extra particles aren’t all respiratory droplets. Instead, they could be fibers shedding off the material itself. This has been shown to happen before, and would be easy enough to test—but Fischer and his coauthors didn’t. “Splintering would be bad, but we don’t know for sure that’s what’s going on,” says Prather.

She also points out that the sample size for most of the mask testing is precisely one person. The study doesn’t capture all the variability in how people’s face shapes and speaking patterns might affect the effectiveness of different kinds of masks. So, while this project’s results are in line with other, larger, more rigorous studies, one shouldn’t read too much into the performance outcomes of individual masks based on this study alone, she says.

Still, Prather is impressed that the Duke team’s technique can detect particles down to half a micron. Most laser visualization methods are sensitive only to about 20 microns. “That’s a big deal, because this captures aerosols—the particles that come out during speech—not just bigger droplets emitted during coughing or sneezing,” she says. “Keeping it in perspective, I think it’ll be a great comparison tool to look at variability between people, more conditions. There’s a lot of different things you can do with the setup they’ve developed.”

Fischer and Westman also recognize the study’s shortcomings. “This was never going to be a definitive ranking of all masks under all types of conditions,” says Fischer. Doing that would require hundreds, or even thousands, more people testing lots more masks. “What we don’t want people taking away is: ‘This mask will work. This will not.’ It’s not a guide to masks. It is a demonstration of a new, simple methodology for quickly and somewhat crudely visualizing the effect of a mask,” he says.

If you would like an article that is a little more mainstream-web than the tech-web WIRED, you could try this article by Susan Matthews  in Slate.  It's more of a rebuttal to the "neck gaiters are definitely worse than nothing" narrative, and mentions other reasons why it is too soon to draw that conclusion definitively.  And it's written in a conversational style that might get the average person reading to the end. 

And, just in -- that is, a nurse friend shared this on Facebook while I am actually writing this blog right now -- here is an article from ScienceNews that has a bad headline (it isn't a "mask study!" argh) but summarizes everything I've been trying to say.  I'm being scooped in real time!

I do want to emphasize that the study is not a flawed study.  It's a good study!  And the paper is very responsibly written.  Fischer et al. themselves are very careful to explain what their work does and does not show.   It's just that media outlets don't always bother to read that far.

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I have many hot takes from all this, but as a number of them are duplicated in the news articles I've linked above, I'll restrict myself to a few in particular.

(1)  A new, cheap, effective testing method. 

The fundamental advance of Fischer et al.  is to design and describe a low-cost mask-effectiveness-testing apparatus and data analysis method that can be assembled by any research lab and even by your higher-level citizen scientist,  It is not beyond the ability of a bright high school student looking for a science fair project, or a garage tinkerer, if they can manage the data processing part or else figure out a proxy measurement.  

(2) This is the first mask-tester I have seen that actually tests the mask's performance while it is being worn by breathing humans.

Other studies of mask effectiveness have looked mainly at the filtration efficiency, by  (for example) stretching a sample of the fabric over an opening and pumping a mixture of air and saline droplets through the mask.  But the filtration efficiency of the fabric is definitely not the only significant question, and for all we know it might be one of the least important attributes.  We do not know how important the edge-seal around a mask is.  We do not know how tight a mask needs to be.  We do not know if the best mask-shape is different for different kinds of facial structures.  We do not know how well masks perform after they become wet with sweat or respiratory fluids.  We need to know these things, and the only way to find out is to test masks while they are being worn by real people.

(3) Now that an easy-to build apparatus exists, perhaps we'll soon start to see the mask studies that answer some of our questions.  

What we want to see are studies that evaluate a single type of mask in many iterations on many people, while they breathe, pant, talk, sing, cough, sneeze, and shout.   We want them to specifically identify the type of mask it applies to, and no, "fleece gaiter" is not good enough, nor is "two-ply cotton mask" or "poly-cotton blend."  What's the proportion of polyester and cotton?  What's the thread count?  Is it held on by ear loops or head ties?  In the case of a multipurpose face-covering such as a gaiter, is it worn tight to the face and jaw like I always have, or only pulled up over the nose?  I'll just point out that this study mentions three different two-layer cotton masks, and they do not measure the same.

(4)  Certain improvements that could be made will answer even more questions which are not possible with the current apparatus.  Among them:  how important are droplets that come away off to the side instead of dead-center in the front?

The authors of the paper explain that some very important questions literally cannot be answered with the apparatus as described in their paper, but in principle some design changes could close those gaps.  I'll just quote here.

A first limitation is that our experimental implementation samples only a small part of the enclosure and hence some droplets that are transmitted through the masks might not be registered in the laser beam.... The physiology of each speaker is different, resulting in variations of the position of the mouth relative to the light sheet.  Hence, the droplet count reflects only a portion of all droplets... A speaker hole that is sealed around the face would prevent the undetected escape of particles.

From looking at the diagram of the apparatus, I judge that droplets escaping around the edges of a poorly-fitted mask are the least likely to be caught at all.  So if edge-leakiness is to be evaluated, the apparatus will require development.

(5) One possibility:  This apparatus could be used to give a quick estimate of a particular person's particular mask on a particular day.  

My spouse, who unlike me does his engineering for a corporation for actual money, immediately thought of commercializing a similar design as a screening tool.  If it's vitally important that people have to have a mask that functions well on them to enter your building, you could set something like this up at the door and intercept people before they enter.  You could then, in principle, get a quick estimate of how well each person's mask is working for them, relative to a standard of your choosing.  If the mask they are wearing doesn't work well, you could advise the person to adjust the mask fit, or could offer the person a different type of mask.

(6)  It's definitely too soon to shame people who are wearing neck gaiters.

Don't do it.  I, personally, am concerned enough that I'm going to start looking for a comfortable cotton mask that fits me well (previously I had decided that the neck gaiter, twisted into a tight mask conformation, worked so well that I hadn't even bothered with cotton ones).  After all, we might find out that the gaiter really is a poor choice, and I want to be ready.  But we really do not know enough to abandon them, or the maxim that the best mask is the mask that you wear correctly and consistently.  Save your shame for the conspiracy theorists and the people who refuse to wear any mask at all.  We just don't know enough to be sure.

And I'll be frank:  One of the cotton adaptations I've tried so far, and the one that I like best, is to layer the neck gaiter on top of the cotton mask.  It's a little hot, but the tightness of the gaiter securely fastens the cotton mask to my face so it won't budge; destroys glasses-fogging; and spreads the pressure out all over my head.  But you know what?  You can't see that there's a cotton mask underneath.  So if you see me on the street with my gaiter wrapped around the lower half of my face, have pity:  I've got another layer under there.  

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My ultimate recommendation is to watch for citations of Fischer et al. in the literature.  Any paper that reproduces or improves upon their apparatus ought to be citing them, as should any paper that uses the apparatus to do a true mask study.  And if my observations about media coverage of scientific results are accurate, no matter what followup studies they perform, we'll likely never see them go viral again.

Sleep timing and other potentially poor choices.

I have sleep on the brain this week. 

I am a big believer in the importance of getting enough sleep, probably because I've never (not even when I was much younger) been able to function well after missing it.  I'm highly assertive about myself going to bed on time, taking naps, and resting extra on weekends.  Also, I'm a morning person.  But for the past six months or so I've been having a sleep problem:  not insomnia exactly... more that I start getting tired in the afternoon, and by the time 7:30 or 8 pm rolls around I'm absolutely ready for bed.  And then I do go to bed, leaving the teenagers to clean the kitchen (no problem there) and Mark to send the youngest two to bed all by himself (he's rather good at this, but I don't blame him if he would like me to do my part sometimes), because, well, see above:  highly assertive. 

And then I pop awake at two or three in the morning... if I manage to get back to sleep again, I'll pop awake at 5... and my alarm really goes off at 6.

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Long story short, I bought one of those light therapy devices, the wearable kind, which makes you look slightly like a cosplayer fan of Geordi LaForge* and shines bright LED light down at your face for 20-40 minutes.  Most people who buy this are putting it on first thing in the morning, when they wake up, because most people who buy this thing either have difficulty getting up early in the morning, or they live somewhere that's too dark for happiness and they need to trick their brain into thinking they get to sit outside and enjoy a beautiful sunrise.  But if you fall asleep too early and get up too early, you might be eligible for a diagnosis of Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder, which sounds like "Long-Untreated, It's Gotten Extra Bad Sleep Phase Disorder" but really means "The Opposite of Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder."   And that sort of person is supposed to wear the thing shining down upon them in the evening.  So that's what I've been doing for the past few days.  No improvements seen yet, but I'm hoping that at least the placebo effect will start kicking in soon.

Geordi LaForge. Not Data.

(No, I haven't gotten a diagnosis.  Yes, I have sought the help of Doctor Google, M. D.  Why?  Because as far as I can tell there aren't any unpleasant side effects, and buying the thing and trying it out is significantly cheaper than seeking a diagnosis first.  If it works, I'll come out way ahead; if it doesn't work, I'm set back by way less than the cost of a specialist visit.

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The homeschooled teenagers who live with me also have inconvenient (to me) sleep schedules, but it goes the other way.  They stay up late (ok, that helps with getting the kitchen cleaned up; I drowsily noticed plate-clattering noises from downstairs when I turned over in bed at 11:45 pm last night).  If left to their own devices, they sleep in well into the morning and sometimes even the afternoon. 

The 16yo boy has, after a couple of years of trial-and-error, adapted his schoolwork routine remarkably well; he rarely, now, misses turning in his homework assignments on time.   This morning, as I often do, I came down for my coffee to find on the counter the algebra book and a sprawl of mostly-finished homework; he'll have time to complete it before it's due early afternoon.   I saw a similar pattern in his older brother, who's now doing fine in college as far as I can tell:   given the freedom to set his own schedule, he adapted early to a routine that's not all that unusual among college students.

NOTE:  I mean, I didn't do that when I was a college student.  I preferred 9 a.m. classes; I badly needed to go to sleep by 11 p.m.; and I successfully avoided all-nighters for my entire undergraduate education except for twice (thank you, enforced group projects with assigned partners who did not share my self-care priorities).  But I can see how it can work.

The 13yo girl has only just been given control over her schedule this year, and is still in the trial-and-error phase.  Occasionally I need to firmly suggest that what she is exercising is procrastination rather than Scheduling Work To Happen At A Time More Convenient Than Right Now, Namely Later, When I Will Really Be Motivated.   But I am also seeing some creative problem solving; lately she's initiated a daily trek to the public library branch, where she has the opportunity** to do her homework in an environment of enforced quiet. 

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I mentioned that I really believe in sleep.  I especially believe in sleep for teenagers:  quite literally, one of the benefits of homeschooling that I always tick off when asked to explain myself is that we are free to find a sleep schedule that suits our bodily needs, instead of conforming to whatever schedule the school district imposed upon us in order to marshal its transport resources.  So I'm inclined to (mostly) let them sleep when they want to sleep.  Occasionally the outcome of this plan, confidently prescribed by Erin-the-believer-in-getting-enough-sleep, is a little shocking to Erin-the-natural-morning-person. 

I didn't really expect, the other day, after a late scout meeting, that when I said "Tomorrow, since we had to stay up late, you can sleep in," that one of the teenagers would actually not come downstairs until 2 p.m.   Who would voluntarily miss the whole morning?!?   What is this sorcery?

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So, here's a question that I think is open:   Is it a problem if a teenager, able to set their own schedule, chooses to sleep as late as 2 pm on a regular basis?  

Note that it's not just homeschoolers.  Around here, high school juniors and seniors can be dual-enrolled in college courses that might not start until late morning or afternoon; and of course there are some young people who are in vocational programs, or not in school for whatever reason and working jobs for now.   Is it a problem?

I think I'm a little privileged, as a natural morning person.   The class of American morning people seem to have been able to take a position of power in which they have set expectations for early starts to all kinds of businesses, including many that really don't have to have early starts.  So I think there's a prejudice against sleeping late and going to bed late, a prejudice that implies moral laxity or sinful sloth, when it's really just a matter of timing. 

Some people have trouble getting up in the morning.  I'm not much good by dinnertime and am almost incapable of staying up late.  It's not that hard for me to imagine an alternate world where school starts at 3 pm, where bosses expected all employees to do productive work late into the night and didn't let you start until after lunch.  This would be a world that would fail me and call me lazy.  So I'm sympathetic, and I try not to assume that sleeping past an arbitrary clock time = dangerous malingering.

And nobody denies that sleep deprivation is bad for your health.

On the other hand.... we live in a scheduled time, and one day the sleepy teenager may be a sleepy adult who is required to be at a desk, or on a line, or at a post, by 8 in the morning.  In the winter.  Is it better to train them to be able to ignore their body's needs, so they can meet their economic needs?  Will the teenager who is allowed to sleep regularly from 3 in the morning to noon, develop a sense of entitlement?  (The same entitlement, because aligned with the world, that I feel to keep my schedule of sleeping 11-to-6?)

Is it a good idea to practice the flexibility needed to keep a variable schedule ("OK, on Tuesday and Friday mornings you can sleep as late as you want, but Saturday there's a 9:30 class and on Wednesday I need you to be up in the morning because I've got something to do in the afternoon")?  Or is it better to be consistent, getting up at the same time every day aligned with the earliest regular appointment, preferring regularity to getting, on average, enough?

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The whole point I am trying to make here is that I think it's obvious that this is an open question.  The answer here is "It Depends."  Different families, with different schedules and different needs, are going to approach the question in different ways and come to different conclusions.  They may change their policies from one teen to the next, as well.

It's also obvious (to me) that a large number of people will have strong opinions that only one answer is correct.  I say those people are wrong.

Third obvious thing:  Even the parents who make the decision that is the best choice at the time, with all the available information, and carefully and selflessly choosing for the good of their individual children... well, some of them are going to find out later that maybe a different choice would have led to a better outcome.    It turns out that they were missing information that would have helped them make a choice with a better outcome. 

(Missing information, because they can't see into the future.  But I digress.)

Like, maybe they pick the get-up-early-every-day option, because they truly are convinced that sleep schedules can be shifted.  Maybe with the help of dark shades on the windows, special sunrise alarm clocks, melatonin pills, and light-therapy devices like the one I just bought.  They expect that the child is going to need to learn to get up by 8 AM eventually, so they do their very best to enforce it.  And then maybe their child turns out to have some kind of sleep disorder that they couldn't predict, one that's very resistant to all the light therapy, and maybe losing sleep turns out to have awful consequences later, like exacerbating a tendency toward depression or anxiety.  Maybe in the end, after years of bad grades and employment struggles, the now-grown-offspring finds their niche working in an industry with late nights and late starts, or works remotely for people in a different time zone.  Maybe it becomes obvious in retrospect that, if everyone had only respected the teen's needs early on, they would have thrived under those expectations all along.

But at the time, it didn't make sense.

Or, well, you can write the alternative.  I'm living it now.  I'm letting the kids take naps if they say they're tired, and rarely wake them up before ten-thirty, and occasionally sleep as long as they want even if that's through lunch.  It seems best to me, because I think sleep is important for health, near the bottom of the hierarchy of needs.   And I do wonder if someday they're going to come back to us and say, "Mom, Dad, I really wish you had forced me to get up in the morning and drink some coffee or Mountain Dew or something and start staring at my books and papers by 8:30, like all the other kids, because now I have to get to work on time and I still haven't learned to accept it and sometimes I sleep through my alarm and people get angry at me."

(You can write the alternative, because I just tried to write that one, and I'm fully aware I can't do it in a convincingly parallel fashion.)

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What's my point here?  SO MUCH of parenting is like this.  SO MUCH is doing the best we can, with the information we have at the time.  And SO MUCH of the answer to the question "is this good?  are we doing things that are good for our kid?"  is not going to become clear until YEARS after it's too late to change our trajectories.  Should we train this teen to work WITH their body or DESPITE their body?  We... don't... know!  It could go either way!

From "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," of course.

We might choose poorly, and not know it till later!

I'm talking about sleep.  That's important, but... there are even more serious parts of parenting.  Homeschool, private school, or public school?   What sort of food should we make freely available, and what sort should we restrict, and how much?  How should we help a young person who, we discover, is engaging in risky and perhaps illegal or addictive behavior:  leap into assertive action and require immediate treatment and behavioral change before it's too late, or move carefully and prioritize a message of acceptance and unconditional love?    Should we give our children lots of freedom and plenty of responsibility for their own safety, or should we take steps to protect them from foreseeable hazards; and which hazards, and for how long?

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If serious outcomes do befall our young people,  experience (see:  media) suggests that someone, somewhere, will confidently say it's all our fault***, as if we had that crystal ball.  When easily it could have gone wrong the other way, and then there would be just as many someones, somewhere, who would confidently say that that would be all our fault.

Much better not to listen to those someones. 

You know what's even better than that?  Not to make decisions coming from a place of fear of those someones.   I confess that I have a hard time with that one.

 

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I picked that .gif up there, "He chose... poorly"  for a reason.   In the movie referenced, the villain had a bad outcome because he chose poorly.  It wasn't the other way around, the way the someones often reason:   the bad outcome didn't make his choice poor. 

And what did "choosing poorly" mean, in the Spielbergian spirit? 

Not the choosing from a place of fear; not the choosing from a place of reduced choices; not choosing from a place of inevitability of bad outcomes; not choosing from a place of ignorance, even. 

No, what was wrong here was that the villain chose from a place of extremely misplaced priorities.  The villain chose from a position of moral poverty.   

That---unlike the other ones---is the kind of poverty that we, we parents, are bound to avoid, and all of us competent to avoid if we wish.  

 

FOOTNOTES

_________________________________

*I had to seek the help, once more, of Doctor Google (D. F. A.?) to get this character name correct; my first guess was "Data"

**I'm no fool.  There, she also has the opportunity to play computer games we don't have at home and read books for fun, and also to sit in comfy deep armchairs.  I will judge this tree based on its fruits.  But I'm not going to say NO, either.  

***Let's be real.  It'll be the mother's fault.

"A little knowledge..."

I don't believe in putting bumper stickers on my car.

The caveat here, before I explain myself, is that I don't care if you want to put bumper stickers on your car. Do it as much as you want. It is a matter of personal expression, and I am cool with that. But I don't put them on mine -- I guess you could say that an unadorned bumper is my personal expression.

It isn't that I don't appreciate a well-turned, pithy statement. I am fond of KILL YOUR TELEVISION. I like very much WHO ARE YOU TO TELL ME TO QUESTION AUTHORITY? I wholeheartily agree with LOVE THEM BOTH. I have a special appreciation for outrageously large window decals of Our Lady of Guadalupe. You have a lovely stick figure family.

I just ... don't want such things on the outside of my car. Not even the tiniest, most unobtrusive rosary sticker in the corner of a back window. Definitely not anything political. There may be a sticker out there that I would be comfortable putting on my car, but I have not yet seen it.

Once, without consulting me, Mark put a sticker on the Volkswagen supporting a particular vote on a local ballot-initiative. Given that he knew I was planning to vote the same way he was, I think he was probably surprised by how annoyed I was that I had to drive around town in a car with a political bumper sticker on it. I made sour faces, I drove the minivan instead as much as possible for the next several weeks, and I made him peel it off the car on the first Wednesday in November. I didn't just feel annoyed about it, I felt unreasonably angry, and I spent a lot of time behind the wheel trying to articulate to myself why. I didn't quite come to an answer.

The other morning when Minneapolis and St. Paul woke up to the viral video of Phil Castile dying of five bullets in the front seat of his car while a panicked policeman shrieked "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" I briefly wondered -- as I have wondered about various political and philosophical statements over the years as they became timely -- if it was maybe time to get a Black Lives Matter sticker. Some of my neighbors have the signs in their front yards. I don't mind signs in my yard as much, we've had candidate signs in the yard and that has never bothered me. I wondered very idly if I, bearing such a sticker, might be more likely to be pulled over. I wondered, too, if the same neighbors would see such a thing with appreciation or with derision, now that virtue-signaling is A Thing.

Two days later after the five Dallas murders I waded into one too many comment sections and I knew from my reaction to them that however sympathetic I may be to #BlackLivesMatter -- and even though I could still do the yard sign thing, like I said, I don't have the same feeling about yard signs -- I wasn't going to put any bumper stickers on my car, not of any sort. And I think I have figured out why.

It isn't that I don't want you to know what I think.

It's that I don't want you to think you know what I think.

+ + +

Last December Ken White, an attorney who blogs at Popehat, published an op-ed in the L. A. Times about "culture-bundling." He was writing about the unproductivity of most debates about gun control -- and it's a useful contribution to the discussion on that subject, too -- but what really stuck with me was just one of his three points, namely, the "bundling" concept. Bear with me, I know this passage uses gun control as its example, but I'm quoting it not for that particularity but because of the general concept that I have underlined.

We culture-bundle when we use one political issue as shorthand for a big group of cultural and social values. Our unproductive talk about guns is rife with this. Gun control advocates don't just attack support for guns; they attack conservative, Republican, rural and religious values. Second Amendment advocates don't just attack gun control advocates; they attack liberal, Democratic, urban and secular values. The gun control argument gets portrayed as the struggle against Bible-thumping, gay-bashing, NASCAR-watching hicks, and the gun rights argument gets portrayed as a struggle against godless, elitist, kale-chewing socialists.

That's great for rallying the base, I guess, but that's about all. When you culture-bundle guns, your opponents don't hear “I'm concerned about this limitation on rights” or “I think this restriction is constitutional and necessary.” They hear “I hate your flyover-country daddy who taught you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were 12” and “Your gay friends' getting married would ruin America and must be stopped.” That's unlikely to create consensus.

The original blog post , not bound by external editorial standards, uses a bit more colorful language. I think I prefer it. About an example of a pro-gun-control meme, White writes,

The intended message may be "fuck the people who don't seriously debate gun control because they accept vast campaign donations and they are afraid of NRA-led primary attacks and who refuse to even consider whether there's something we can do about madmen spraying crowds of innocents with bullets." But your message is "fuck you and your flyover-country Daddy teaching you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were twelve and fuck the church you went to afterwards."

And about an example of a pro-gun-rights meme,

Your intended message may be "the government doesn't get to determine my rights based on its assessment of what I 'need," nor do fellow citizens who may arbitrarily determine I don't 'need' a wide variety of things based on their concerns." But what you are conveying is that "the people who want gun control are God-hating, kale-chewing, coastal-elite socialists who want to imprison your pastor for not marrying gays."

I encourage you to read the whole thing there.

+ + +

Even for straightforward messages that one might think could not be misinterpreted, the phenomenon of culture-bundling means that people are tempted to make assumptions about each other. The Jesus Fish drags a trail of associations behind it like so much grimy seaweed. The Black Lives Matter sticker is smugly, mentally, made to bow and scrape as a mere corollary to All Lives Matter. Every car can be neatly shunted into the left and right lanes.

Such assumptions are not warranted, ever.

Yes, but...

No. They are not warranted. Not ever. The environmental-responsibility sticker doesn't also mean "People are bad and abortion is good." The second-amendment sticker doesn't also mean "Gay marriage is an oxymoron." The Jesus-loves-you sticker doesn't also mean "Keep evolution out of the schools." The support-our-troops sticker doesn't also mean "I -heart- the death penalty." The opinions behind the strawmen may be correlated one way or another, but human persons are not correlations.

The assumptions aren't warranted. They aren't warranted because when we make them we are seeing a human being as an object: an object of our own self-gratification, the pecular good feeling because it reinforces all the things we already think.

Bumper stickers tempt people to see each other as objects.

Bumper stickers tempt people away from compassion and toward derision.

And that is not even counting the occasional sticker that actually expresses something that's not just unpopular, a minority opinion, or countercultural, but actually vile.

+ + +

And what about Christian witness? Have I got something against proclaiming Jesus Christ on the outside of my vehicle?

Yes, I do. I do not deserve to prominently display the Holy Name on the outside of my car. I have a lead foot. I have a big scrape on my minivan door where I hit a pole in the co-op parking lot on the day before Thanksgiving. I accidentally cut people off while shouting at squabbling kids. The best I can do for a justifiably pissed-off fellow commuter is that super-apologetic "Sorry! My bad!" wave. I don't think my displaying a Queen of the Rosary sticker is going to do either the Queen of the Rosary, or myself, or the guy leaning on his horn, any good in that moment. My mishap may do more damage because of it.

There are shades here of Luke 18:9-14. Being a Christian behind the wheel should mean driving with awareness, attention, and courtesy, not driving the right car or having the right sticker. I need the mercy of God inside my car.

+ + +

And the world needs the mercy of God outside it, too, which is one reason I don't want to tempt anyone to think nasty thoughts. There are plenty of other places to speak the truth: places where, unlike on the bumper of my car, I get to speak the whole truth, put things in context, show my face, be seen as a whole person and not a hashtag.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. We have seen that this week, to our national grief.

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Unreasonable expectations in design.

True or false:

It is irresponsible and negligent for a parent to take a picture of his or her small child in public, especially at a crowded, dangerous place like the zoo. Every photograph of grinning, sticky-faced siblings, posing in front of the aquarium or the cat house, is evidence of the crime of child endangerment.

Silly?

Well, let's think about what has to happen for a parent to take a photo of her child in public. First the parent has to let go of the child. She needs both hands to manipulate the camera or the smart phone. Then she has to step a few feet away -- maybe a dozen feet or more, certainly out of arms' reach. She has to take her eyes off her charges for long enough to select the proper settings or apps before finally locating them in the viewfinder. Once the picture is taken, she may pause to stow the camera away before returning and once again securing the child in a firm grip.

She lets go. She steps several feet away. She looks elsewhere. It is long enough.

+ + +

What I see in the great rush to condemn the mother (it is always the mother) of a small child who crawled into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo this week: a widespread refusal to believe that bad things can happen to "good people like me." She MUST have done something wrong (i.e., "something I would never do") for a terrible thing to happen to her child.

It's very important for some people to put distance between the grieving and themselves. I see this elsewhere; I often read articles about cycling accidents, because I am interested in traffic safety in my town, and let me tell you, getting hit by a drunk driver when you had the right of way is no excuse: you should have been more aware or you shouldn't have been on that road, you two-wheeled freak. We all know that many cyclists today completely ignore the law. So it goes.

I think we can extrapolate from the evidence (many small children at zoos, the existence of preschool educational programs at zoos) that it is widely believed (whatever some folks may think) that a zoo is a good place to take small children for a fun family outing. So to go so far as to say "well, of course you don't take a 3-y-o to a zoo, that's for older children" is, shall we say, OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM of thinking.

The notion that no reasonable parent would ever enter a situation where a 3-year-old might escape her notice long enough to get into serious trouble is a little more understandable, given the low amount of experience that many people have with the wide variety of three-year-olds. Most people only ever parent zero to two of them.

Some commenters who take a position closer to my own have been focusing on "It's not possible to keep your eyes on a three-year-old 100% of the time so they can't escape." I'd like to point out that we don't really WANT mothers (it's always mothers, isn't it) to do what would be necessary to prevent three-year-olds from escaping. Because we would have to do more than just watch them all the time. We would have to grip them all the time. That is why I began by having you think about picture-taking, how it is an utterly normal thing for parents of children to do at zoos, take their child's picture; and how the act of taking a picture contains within it all the possibility that allows for an escaping child.

There's this strange thing about children: they want to explore the world around them. They will pull and actively try to escape you. The zoos, along with science museums and other places that attract children, incidentally, have this odd feature (often, not always) -- they have exhibits here and there that seem to encourage children to explore the environment. "Please touch," they will have signs up for the petting zoo, or they will have fish tanks that are down near the eye level of toddlers, or they will have buttons to push and things like that. It seems almost as if the zoos.... EXPECT there to be three-year-olds with their parents, three-year-olds who are not buckled into strollers! I think the last few times I've been to the zoo I've even seen groups of preschoolers on a field trip, not with their parents, but with teachers and chaperones!

+ + +

I'm very sorry that the zoo had to shoot the gorilla. I'm thrilled that they apparently had a backup plan with a "dangerous animal response team" that included a take-down-the-animal plan. This was good planning for a situation that, however unthinkable it may be, clearly someone had thought about it in advance. It's the zoos' job to keep people away from the animals and animals away from the people.

And yet... sometimes people get in.

Isn't it also the zoos' responsibility to protect the animals from people who might harm them? Is it really reasonable to assume that visitors will police themselves sufficiently that the exhibits need not be made secure?

I'm thinking back to the last time a determined adult got into an exhibit (it does happen) and wondering if anyone was discussing whether zoos have a responsibility, grounded in the welfare of the animals, to make it impossible for determined persons to get into the exhibits. I think they do have a responsibility to make it very difficult for a determined adult to get into an exhibit. It is a completely foreseeable risk that a determined adult will TRY to get into an exhibit, and it really ought to be harder for a determined child to get in than a determined adult -- so if the zoos designed to make it extremely difficult for determined adults to get in, it ought to be that much harder for a determined child to get in.

It is a known risk that people occasionally attempt to breach the barriers -- not just children, but also adults. Zoos face a design problem that we should probably acknowledge: their mission is to bring us close to the animals while their responsibility is to keep us separated from them. I have some respect for the argument that this design problem, with its inherent tension, represents a set of risks that is not worth the benefits; that is a value judgment and we can come to different conclusions about it. I don't have any respect for the argument that this design problem doesn't exist.

Without saying anyone was at fault, I'm going to say that the design of the exhibit is probably the ultimate cause of this disaster.

OK, then... why don't you go so far as to say "the zoo was at FAULT," then?

Because design problems that involve inherent tensions between two design goals are notoriously difficult, and designers can act in good faith from start to finish, with the best of analyses, but still bad things can happen. I simply don't know enough details, and likely you don't either.

Is it possible to design a zoo in which all barriers CANNOT be breached? Yes; would people want to go to that zoo? Would those who argue for better habitats for the animals' welfare be pleased with that zoo? It's possible that the designers really did act in bad faith, that they designed an exhibit that they knew was not up to whatever the commonly accepted standards of zoo barriers were at the time. That would be a kind of fault. It's possible that the zoo staff acted in bad faith: that they disabled safeguards that were part of the system put into place by the designers, or that the barriers were not well maintained, or something like that. That would be a kind of fault. But it's possible to have a design that turns out to BE FAULTY (in retrospect) without any person actually being "at fault."

The public may have unreasonable expectations of the designers here. Not that it isn't reasonable to have as your GOAL "no one shall breach this exhibit." But that the public hasn't taken the time to really imagine what the tradeoffs would be that would make it literally impossible for no determined person to breach the exhibit, and they haven't considered that some of the things that make exhibit-breaches possible would make them enjoy the zoo less. Might even make them complain about the poorly-designed exhibits.

Here are some links for your perusal.

Last week at the zoo in Santiago, Chile, a determined man got into the lion enclosure, and the zookeepers shot the lions.

Last month a determined woman got into the tiger enclosure at the Toronto zoo.

This one goes the other direction. Less than three months ago, at the same zoo in Cincinnati, the polar bears breached their first enclosure.

About six months ago, another woman was determined enough to pet a tiger that she got into the enclosure at the zoo in Omaha.

2014. Copenhagen. A determined man entered the polar bear enclosure.

2009. Berlin. A determined woman entered the polar bear enclosure.

In the last link, a zoo official says of the exhibit, "It is already safe... People who want to jump in will always find a way."

For the sake of the animals as well as the people, maybe we should be asking why that is good enough. It simply isn't true that a zoo can't be built with barriers that visitors can't breach. We certainly try to manage it in prisons that hold human beings and in museums that hold valuable artifacts.

To ask why we accept risks is not necessarily to mandate that we remove risks. I respect those who argue that the benefits of zoos aren't worth the risks of bringing the public in close contact with animals. That Even though we don't come down in the same place, they and I recognize that there is a tension between the risks and benefits of zoo design, that it is acceptable to run some risk in order to reap some benefit, if the benefit is good enough.

It turns out that there is also a tension between the risks and benefits of bringing children out into the world. If we are going to cut the zoo enclosure designers any slack here, if we are going to say about those who build barriers to protect the animals "You can't be expected to stop every determined person from getting in," then we also have to be ready to say about all those charged with children, "You can't be expected to stop every mischief that could possibly happen."

In both cases, we could. But we choose not to. Because there are risks in that direction too.

 

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In case of emergency (repost).

Here's a repost from a couple of years ago. Updated a bit to make it read more smoothly now that I have reposted it a couple of times.

+++

Once or twice now I have unwittingly worried a friend of mine in Facebook chat.

I'd mentioned that Mark was out in Colorado on a climbing trip. The last exchange of the chat went like this:

FRIEND: Prayers 'till Mark gets home!

ME: Thanks! If he doesn't call by 11 pm I have to call search and rescue.

Would love to chat longer but have to teach history now. Take care!

+ + +

On Sunday at coffee and donuts she mildly chastised me for joking about the search and rescue. "I wasn't sure whether to be worried about you or not!" she said.

"I wasn't joking," I said. Her eyes got wide.

Of course, I hadn't been joking, but I also hadn't thought that it would have been the kind of thing that would worry a friend. Why did I throw the offhand comment out?

I suppose it's one of those things you do in the Twitter age. We are now masters of the Short Enticing Comment Intended To Give The Appearance Of Having A Much Longer Story Behind It.

The idea is, of course, that in your interlocutor's imagination, the story you merely hinted at will grow to hilarious proportion, and your interlocutor will project their own imaginings onto you, and you will be lauded for your sparkling wit. When in fact all you wrote was something like "OMG NO NOT THE MOLASSES #twoyearolds #bathtime #gin"

+ + +

Anyway, the truth is that I was not, in fact, joking about the search and rescue -- well, I did abbreviate a bit, as one is wont to do. My actual instructions were to wait until 11 p.m. for contact from Mark, and then start calling these numbers in order:

1. Mark's cell
2. His climbing buddy's cell
3. The backcountry guide's cell
4. His climbing buddy's wife back at home in Tennessee
5. The mountain climbing school and guiding service
6. A climbing gym that serves as the after-hours contact number for said service
7. The county search and rescue (SAR) dispatch

If you're wondering whether it isn't the job of the mountain climbing school and guiding service to decide whether it's time to call SAR, you're right -- the service has a protocol for keeping tabs on their guides in the field. If one doesn't check in after a trip, they are supposed to follow up. (That's why I'm supposed to call the guiding service before going straight to SAR myself.)

But redundancy is a good thing, and nobody's more interested in having Mark come home safely than I am, so nobody's better suited for the task of checking up on him should he go missing. Besides, he was planning to climb a different mountain two days later with his buddy and no guide, and in that case there wasn't going to be a mountain school looking over his shoulder.

+ + +

"I'd be so worried if my husband gave me a set of instructions like that," a different friend said to me on a differnet occasion.

I said, "I'd be more worried if he didn't."

One of the first rules of safe backcountry travel is to let someone else know exactly where you intend to go and when you intend to get back. You'll find this advice everywhere; here it is in a well-written .pdf about backcountry safety:

One important rule too often forgotten is to let others know exactly where you are going, with whom and when you can be expected back. I hate to sound maternal, but search and rescue teams often spend hours driving around on back roads looking for a subject's vehicle before they know where to enter the field to begin a search.

By letting someone know EXACTLY where you intend to go, when you expect to return and where your vehicle will be parked, you can eliminate the possibility of searchers having no idea of where to look. Should your plans change in route to your destination, stop and notify that person of your new itinerary. In addition, if you leave pertinent information on the dash of your car (e.g. name

and phone number of your contact in town, location of travel/campsite and so on) search teams will have a very timely idea of your plans. Otherwise, search teams can be of little assistance when all that is known is that you "went camping somewhere in the Gore Range."

And then, it's nice to have specific instructions. That's one of the things I insist on, whenever Mark heads off to go backcountry skiing or climbing -- guided or not: a specific set of "deadlines" and directions for what to do if he misses each one.

If he were to tell me, "I'm parking at the such-and-such trailhead and planning to summit such-and-such a peak; we're going to turn back by 11 a.m. at the latest and I expect to be back in cell phone range by 5 p.m.," that would be ... a good start. But that doesn't answer the actionable question, which is... so what do you want me to do if you haven't called me by 5 p.m.?

I can't read his mind (too bad, that would come in handy for backcountry travel), and I'm hundreds of miles away and not familiar with the area he's in. Furthermore, it's his job to set up the safety procedures for his trip, not mine -- even if I have a role to play in those procedures.

Some people might think that the right thing to do is call the authorities the minute someone is overdue. But this would be premature. SAR is expensive, and part of backcountry ethics is being prepared to deal with delays and unexpected events. You're not supposed to have SAR be your first line of defense if anything goes wrong; you're expected to do what you can to aid in your own shelter and rescue. So, for example, if there's a signficant chance that a delay could force you to spend the night on the mountain (rather than trying to follow a difficult trail down in the dark), you bring bivy gear and extra food, and you instruct your contact person that your arrival time could be delayed by twelve hours or whatever with no cause for alarm. It would be silly to send out the dogs for someone who's comfortably ensconced in warm waterproof layers, seated on an insulated pad, munching energy bars, and waiting for nothing more dramatic than daylight.

In this case, even though he expected to be back in cell phone range by 5 pm, he definitely didn't want me calling SAR at 5:01 . He figured on giving himself several hours of leeway time -- time to accidentally go down the wrong trail, figure it out, and backtrack if necessary; time to sustain an ankle injury and slowly crawl back to the vehicle, should that happen; time to arrive at the climb, find it occupied by another party, and wait for them to finish before starting. None of those delays, not even an injury, are an emergency that requires calling out the authorities; they're all the kind of things that you're supposed to be prepared to deal with yourself. And if you wind up dealing with something like that, you'll be delayed. And that's okay.

It's not terribly fun to have to wait the few hours between "overdue time" and "call out the dogs time," but it's much better than sitting there wondering, "Should I call out the dogs, or is it too soon? I wonder how long I should wait? If I make the wrong decision SOMEBODY COULD DIE."

I told Mark, he has to own the when-should-I-call-search-and-rescue decision. And he owns it by giving me specific instructions about when to call, and whom to call. And also by telling me everything pertinent: where he's starting, what he plans to do, and even what he's carrying (I like to know, for example, if he's prepared to spend the night outdoors and what weather he's prepared for, and for him to confirm that he has a GPS, map, and compass).

+ + +

Every once in a while I run into the opinion that it's irresponsible for anyone, but especially a parent of young children, to engage in common adventure sports at all. Backcountry hiking, black-diamond skiing, rock climbing, etc.

(Occasionally this extends to activities as banal-sounding as bicycle commuting. There's a lot of victim-blaming in the comments to news stories about cyclists who get struck by cars. It's very depressing. I have a theory that a large number of people simply don't believe that bad things can happen to good people.)

I think it's irresponsible to think you can remove all risk from life. Every day we're surrounded by common risky activities: from the acutely risky, like riding in cars or taking showers in slippery bathtubs, to the chronically risky, like occupational exposure to low-frequency noise or sitting around getting no exercise. And many culturally-not-considered-extreme hobbies carry a surprisingly high risk; for example, recreational boating is well accepted here in Minnesota, but it's also relatively risky (one estimate from Ohio: about 1 fatality per million operator-hours; another estimate has 1 canoeing fatality per 720,000 outings.)

Rock climbing is riskier than boating, but not the OMG IT MUST BE MANY TIMES RISKIER HOW COULD YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT WHEN YOU HAVE SMALL CHILDREN AT HOME!!! that you might expect from all the teeth-gnashing about it. Do you ever hear anyone say, "Gosh, I'd never have elective surgery under general anesthesia while I still had young children at home?" Well, that's more likely to kill you than a rock climbing trip.

All this is to say: Hobbies are important. It's good to have them. And it's okay to have hobbies that carry some risk. The important thing is to diligently take reasonable precautions and follow well-accepted safety protocols; to keep your head and know your limits; and to talk about safety and comfort with the people who depend on you, to make sure that no one is forced into a situation where they're uncomfortable with the level of "adventure." Mark and I have worked pretty hard over the past few years to create an atmosphere in which I'm always on board with what he's up to, and if I'm not, we work together to figure out what needs to change until I am.

+++

I did it again on another Sunday a year or so later. "Is Mark having a good Father's Day?" asked a friend after church.

"I assume so," I said, "He's out in Colorado rock climbing."

Her jaw dropped a little and she said "Oh my gosh! I'll pray for his safe return!"

"Go to Blessed Pier Giorgio," I said cheerfully, "it's what we always do."

On the Saturday before I had run into a little bit of an issue because Mark forgot to tell me which time zone he meant when he sent me my schedule of whom to call when. Was that "call SAR if you haven't heard from me by 6 pm" Denver time or Minneapolis time? The difference is only an hour, so I sent him a text message letting him know that I was going to split the difference and call out the troops at 5:30 Denver time. Fortunately he got that message in time, because they took longer climbing on the glacier than they intended and the schedule had to change; he sent me a text later to let me know I should extend the deadline.

So that was one thing learned on this particular trip. Another one -- not so much "lesson learned" as "detail that occurred to us for the first time" -- was that he really should tell me the make, model, color, and license plate number of the rented car he is driving to the trailhead.

People still ask me if I am not worried about him. We are, a little bit, I guess. I definitely start to get a little antsy when the "I will probably be done by X-o'clock" time approaches. But it is an enormous help to know that I will never have to sit at home wondering if I should do something or not. I know I can drop that worry and leave it behind, trusting him to take care of himself if he can, trusting in the grace of the sacrament of marriage to take care of the kids and me if he can't. And he knows that I know, and so that thread of intention connects us, whether we are both in cell phone range or not.

+ + +

I bring all this up now because today the man is in Colorado again, attempting to summit Hallett's Peak (via the "chimney" route, in case you are the sort of person who is interested in that), with a buddy and a guide.

And this year, he remembered to give me the car description without being asked. So it gets better each time. I noticed partway through the day that I was totally at peace. And the main reason is that I don't, at least, have any uncertainty about what I am supposed to do "in case of emergency." That helps a lot.

Well, the insurance policy helps too, not gonna lie.

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Free-range parenting in the news - a quick link.

Spurred by the recent NPR piece, Jane the Actuary has some thoughts on free-range parenting.

(Incidentally, the NPR piece has a table of the minimum legal age for kids to stay home alone. I am a little annoyed this morning, because my kids' former pediatrician either told me or strongly implied that the legal minimum in Minnesota was age 12, and I believed her -- but actually there's no minimum age defined here. The highest age in the table is 14, in Illinois.)

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Deliberate heart-to-heart.

Last week this article from the NYT was making the rounds:

To Fall In Love with Anyone, Do This

More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes...

I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.

“Let’s try it,” he said.

It's a little bit scary to think that one could just make attraction and connection happen, rapidly, in such a way. On the other hand, most people trust in random interaction to bring them together with potential mates.

We have so little time to spare once we set out into adult life; maybe it makes sense, in some circumstances, to try to speed up the getting-to-know-you process. Arguably such a series of questions might help you spot red flags as well as attractive qualities in a potential partner.

(The 36 questions are here.)

The story, true to the tradition of journalists writing (partly) about scientific research, has seized on the aspect of the research which makes for the best story: the one with the happy ending. I would have been very interested to hear the stories of pairs of people who answered the set of personal questions and did not fall in love with each other. Was anyone repulsed? Did anyone stand up and say "I'm not going to do this any more" and leave the room? Did any subject later go out with friends and relate over drinks the hilarious story of the loser from the psychology lab?

I would think this is at least as important. Surely it is just as practical -- and more protective -- to be able to realize quickly that the attractive stranger across the table is not a good potential mate for you.

+ + +

I find myself wondering if a similar battery of questions could be devised for a broader purpose: sparking not romantic love, but friendship.

We are increasingly isolated from people in our physically proximate communities, turning instead for moral support to friends we've never met before in real life, linked by shared interest, and long-distance old-friend relationships maintained lightly via social media. These friendships by correspondence are as real and important as friendships carried on by letters have ever been, and in a way they illustrate how rapidly mutual affection, good will, appreciation, and charity can develop. With letters or emails or blog posts and comments, one can go straight to the intellect, giving and taking commentary and ideas at one's leisure, letting one side of the conversation percolate through the mind and memory before sitting down and composing a complete, and thoroughly spell-checked, thought.

I went out for breakfast a couple of weeks ago with a woman who lives a couple of blocks away and has two children whose ages closely bracket that of my 4th child. We'd been Facebook friends for a while, having met at a block party, and she had messaged me (weeks earlier) to ask if I had any thoughts about trying to stay connected to the neighborhood; she was feeling pressured by family to move out to the "safer" suburbs, and knew me as someone who planned to raise my family in the center city.

I really enjoyed talking to her, and we both lamented the difficulty of finding time to nurture real friendships among neighbors. The thing is, even though living near someone is no guarantee that you're going to hit it off or get along -- especially in areas that attract a diverse population, so that you could well find yourself surrounded by people who don't speak your language, or have entirely opposite social philosophy, or have a vastly different lifestyle -- it's incredibly useful to have neighbors who are friends and friends who are neighbors. The opportunity for mutual support, whether it's emergency babysitting, keeping a spare key, or bringing dinner over when someone is ill, is multiplied by the ease of offering that support across the backyard fence. And it's pleasant, too.

And yet: there is so little time. My neighbors mostly have children in school, of course -- not the same schools, since Minneapolis has many charter and magnet schools, and children bus all over town, further meaning that they aren't brought together with each other by commonalities in their kids' schedules. Certainly the schedules have little in common with that of my kids, who sleep till nine and stay up till eleven. There isn't time to build the kind of ongoing conversation that brings people into a real relationship. And why would we invest the time, in the unknown stranger across the backyard fence, when we can take that conversation back to our computers and get instant gratification from faraway friends we've already made?

I think the answer is to be more deliberate, to voice the wishes we have for "connection," to take it from abstract to personal. As awkward as it may be: "Let's try to become friends." Once we've grabbed coffee with that other mom after preschool music class, or played a lunchtime chess game with the guy from the cubicle down the hall, what if there was a fast way to move from casual acquaintance to more -- to "one of my good friends," to "buddy from work."

There are less efficient ways, even more ludicrous ways, than a questionnaire. But even the questionnaire is just an excuse, a peg on which to hang the real act of deliberate connection: revealing your real self with honesty, possibly to be disappointed, even rejected.

 

 

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Looking for the magic words to push back with.

This was going around on FB the other day:  Two parenting stories from the country that used to be America:

Hardened Criminal #1: Stay-at-home suburban mom lets kids ride scooters on her cul-de-sac. Pain-in-the-ass neighbor calls to complain. Idiot cops fail to tell neighbor to get bent, and instead arrest the mother for child endangerment: overnight in jail, orange jumpsuit, 18 hours behind bars and all.

Hardened Criminal #2: Working, lower-income mom gets daughter a laptop so the daughter has something to do while she waits in McDonald’s for mom to finish her shift. Laptop gets stolen. Daughter asks if she can play in a nearby park with fresh air and cool water rather than soaking up the atmosphere in the nation’s primary fat factory. Mom gets daughter a cell phone so she can check on her and then let’s her go play. Mom is arrested for child endangerment and daughter is given to social services. 

I passed it on, too, mostly because I liked the following comment from Tom McDonald, who put together the post:

People are acting like every child is assigned a stalking kidnapping pedophile at birth who follows him around waiting to pounce.

And people are letting their desire to feel comfortable trump parents' right to make reasonable judgment calls.  

Once a meeting my nearly-12yo was at, at church, was running late, so his dad and I gave him a cell phone and went to run a quick errand 1/4 mile away, telling him to call us when he was done and wait outside in front of the church -- in broad daylight, I might add, on a suburban street with plenty of foot and vehicular traffic.

My cell phone rang all right -- from one of the other parents, who called me to let me know that he had arranged for someone to babysit my 12-year-old inside the youth group room because he just didn't Feel Right about letting my son call us on the phone from outside the church to say "I'm done with training, come pick me up now."  

This annoyed me on several levels, some of which you will no doubt be able to come up with on your own.  I found myself really at a loss on the phone to come up with the right language for this situation, which was not, I believe, "Thank you for your concern."  In retrospect, I wish I had handed the phone to my husband and let him deal with it.

I just didn't know what to say that would help.

Isn't this what we are all most afraid of, the thing that keeps us from letting our kids develop responsibility and self-reliance?  Not the nasty kidnapper, but the nosy neighbor?  The person who "just couldn't forgive herself if something happened and she didn't say something?"  The person who then gets to go about her day thinking of herself as a swooping rescuer, and doesn't have to live with the long-term consequences?

Jamie, however, says:  "Push back."  I quote her in toto:

You guys, things have gone too far. I just saw this link on Facebook, followed by a bunch of worried comments. It is time for a Sane Mom Revolution, in which we decline to take any more of this crap.

In case you have forgotten or are new around here, I was the subject of a full-on investigation by CPS. I can attest that it is NO FUN to be asked how many of your children tested positive for drugs at birth. (I have wondered, in the years since I wrote those posts, if I would have been less agitated in a non-pregnant state.) I can also attest that my husband's words were true: we are not living in a Kafka novel. I can attest that you can have a calm conversation with a CPS representative about why you let your kids out of your sight now and again, and you can be persuasive. Declaration: unfounded.

You can have an awkward conversation with a neighbor who thinks your kid shouldn't walk around the block, and it can go smoothly. You can talk to the cops when the cranky neighbor calls them about a lemonade stand, and the cops will probably be reasonable.

We can't live in fear that our kids will be kidnapped, and we can't live in fear of the people living in fear that our kids will be kidnapped either. CPS and the police need to hear from American parents: we are not going to expose our kids to unnecessary risks. In keeping with this commitment we are going to stop driving them all over the damn place because that's the thing most likely to kill them. Let 'em walk -- save a life!

There's a lot at stake here. Independence and good judgment do not suddenly descend upon 18-year-olds who have spent their lives being driven about from place to place -- kept safe from mustachio-twirling strangers, perhaps, but not from their own stupidity. 

She's right.  

I'd wager that the number of children whose parents are investigated by CPS because they let their kids play outside is preeeeeeetttty small, even if it seems that we all know someone who know someone that happened to, including witty and popular Catholic mom-bloggers.   

Are we letting ourselves be ruled by that fear?  It's a poor substitute for being ruled by the fear of kidnappers or pedophiles or dingoes, you know.

The truth is, I have been.  There may not be that many CPS investigations, but there are a lot of nosy people who are worried about their sensitive ability to forgive themselves, it seems.

This past Saturday I was taking a walk with my four-year-old.  I had the baby in a carrier on my back.  We were on our way home, chatting happily, and as we approached the last crosswalk before our block, the four-year-old said to me:  "Mama, I want to try walking next to you without holding your hand."

"Okay, we can practice that," I said as we got closer.  "Remember to walk right next to me the whole time, just exactly as if you were holding my hand, because the cars can see taller people like me better.  And don't go until we both see the little walking man light up."

He hopped with excitement and let go of my hand as we waited on the corner, and when the little walking man lit up, we started across the street.  He took carefully timed steps to stay close, and I touched him lightly on the top of his head, pleased at his idea.

Just as we stepped up onto the opposite curb a big SUV slowed down abruptly next to us and a bit in front, and the driver shouted something that I didn't quite hear.  Was he asking for directions?  I tilted my head inquiringly -- he shouted again -- I walked forward with my sons and said "I'm sorry?"

"You holding that boy's hand?" demanded the man behind the wheel.

Oh, I get it.  "It's okay!" I shouted back cheerfully. "We're practicing!"

"All right then!" shouted the driver, and accelerated away.

I stood there for an instant watching him go, wondering what had come into my head to say We're practicing! and also wondering what about those two words, or about us or about me, had given that neighborhood stranger the message that he was looking for, to feel that he had seen enough to stop shouting at me.  I felt a tug at my hand:  my son was grinning from ear to ear and asking, "Mama, did you see me?  Did you see I stayed close to you?"

"I saw it all right," I said, and we went home.  Later at dinner he bragged to his dad about what he had done, proud and happy.  

We're practicing.  

It may not make all the specters fly away, but it's a start.

In case of emergency.

Here's a repost from last May, with some new material at the bottom.

+++

Last week I unwittingly worried a friend of mine in Facebook chat.

I'd mentioned that Mark was out in Colorado on a climbing trip. The last exchange of the chat went like this:

FRIEND: Prayers 'till Mark gets home!

ME: Thanks! If he doesn't call by 11 pm I have to call search and rescue.

Would love to chat longer but have to teach history now. Take care!

+ + +

On Sunday at coffee and donuts she mildly chastised me for joking about the search and rescue. "I wasn't sure whether to be worried about you or not!" she said.

Of course, I hadn't been joking, but I also hadn't thought that it would have been the kind of thing that would worry a friend. Why did I throw the offhand comment out?

I suppose it's one of those things you do in the Twitter age. We are now masters of the Short Enticing Comment Intended To Give The Appearance Of Having A Much Longer Story Behind It.

The idea is, of course, that in your interlocutor's imagination, the story you merely hinted at will grow to hilarious proportion, and your interlocutor will project their own imaginings onto you, and you will be lauded for your sparkling wit. When in fact all you wrote was something like "OMG NO NOT THE MOLASSES #twoyearolds #bathtime #gin"

+ + +

Anyway, the truth is that I was not, in fact, joking about the search and rescue -- well, I did abbreviate a bit, as one is wont to do. My actual instructions were to wait until 11 p.m. for contact from Mark, and then start calling these numbers in order:

1. Mark's cell
2. His climbing buddy's cell
3. The backcountry guide's cell
4. His climbing buddy's wife back at home in Tennessee
5. The mountain climbing school and guiding service
6. A climbing gym that serves as the after-hours contact number for said service
7. The county search and rescue (SAR) dispatch

If you're wondering whether it isn't the job of the mountain climbing school and guiding service to decide whether it's time to call SAR, you're right -- the service has a protocol for keeping tabs on their guides in the field. If one doesn't check in after a trip, they are supposed to follow up. (That's why I'm supposed to call the guiding service before going straight to SAR myself.)

But redundancy is a good thing, and nobody's more interested in having Mark come home safely than I am, so nobody's better suited for the task of checking up on him should he go missing. Besides, he was planning to climb a different mountain two days later with his buddy and no guide, and in that case there wasn't going to be a mountain school looking over his shoulder.

+ + +

"I'd be so worried if my husband gave me a set of instructions like that," a different friend said to me on a differnet occasion.

I said, "I'd be more worried if he didn't."

One of the first rules of safe backcountry travel is to let someone else know exactly where you intend to go and when you intend to get back. You'll find this advice everywhere; here it is in a well-written .pdf about backcountry safety:

One important rule too often forgotten is to let others know exactly where you are going, with whom and when you can be expected back. I hate to sound maternal, but search and rescue teams often spend hours driving around on back roads looking for a subject's vehicle before they know where to enter the field to begin a search.

By letting someone know EXACTLY where you intend to go, when you expect to return and where your vehicle will be parked, you can eliminate the possibility of searchers having no idea of where to look. Should your plans change in route to your destination, stop and notify that person of your new itinerary. In addition, if you leave pertinent information on the dash of your car (e.g. name

and phone number of your contact in town, location of travel/campsite and so on) search teams will have a very timely idea of your plans. Otherwise, search teams can be of little assistance when all that is known is that you "went camping somewhere in the Gore Range."

And then, it's nice to have specific instructions. That's one of the things I insist on, whenever Mark heads off to go backcountry skiing or climbing -- guided or not: a specific set of "deadlines" and directions for what to do if he misses each one.

If he were to tell me, "I'm parking at the such-and-such trailhead and planning to summit such-and-such a peak; we're going to turn back by 11 a.m. at the latest and I expect to be back in cell phone range by 5 p.m.," that would be ... a good start. But that doesn't answer the actionable question, which is... so what do you want me to do if you haven't called me by 5 p.m.?

I can't read his mind (too bad, that would come in handy for backcountry travel), and I'm hundreds of miles away and not familiar with the area he's in. Furthermore, it's his job to set up the safety procedures for his trip, not mine -- even if I have a role to play in those procedures.

Some people might think that the right thing to do is call the authorities the minute someone is overdue. But this would be premature. SAR is expensive, and part of backcountry ethics is being prepared to deal with delays and unexpected events. You're not supposed to have SAR be your first line of defense if anything goes wrong; you're expected to do what you can to aid in your own shelter and rescue. So, for example, if there's a signficant chance that a delay could force you to spend the night on the mountain (rather than trying to follow a difficult trail down in the dark), you bring bivy gear and extra food, and you instruct your contact person that your arrival time could be delayed by twelve hours or whatever with no cause for alarm. It would be silly to send out the dogs for someone who's comfortably ensconced in warm waterproof layers, seated on an insulated pad, munching energy bars, and waiting for nothing more dramatic than daylight.

In this case, even though he expected to be back in cell phone range by 5 pm, he definitely didn't want me calling SAR at 5:01 . He figured on giving himself several hours of leeway time -- time to accidentally go down the wrong trail, figure it out, and backtrack if necessary; time to sustain an ankle injury and slowly crawl back to the vehicle, should that happen; time to arrive at the climb, find it occupied by another party, and wait for them to finish before starting. None of those delays, not even an injury, are an emergency that requires calling out the authorities; they're all the kind of things that you're supposed to be prepared to deal with yourself. And if you wind up dealing with something like that, you'll be delayed. And that's okay.

It's not terribly fun to have to wait the few hours between "overdue time" and "call out the dogs time," but it's much better than sitting there wondering, "Should I call out the dogs, or is it too soon? I wonder how long I should wait? If I make the wrong decision SOMEBODY COULD DIE."

I told Mark, he has to own the when-should-I-call-search-and-rescue decision. And he owns it by giving me specific instructions about when to call, and whom to call. And also by telling me everything pertinent: where he's starting, what he plans to do, and even what he's carrying (I like to know, for example, if he's prepared to spend the night outdoors and what weather he's prepared for, and for him to confirm that he has a GPS, map, and compass).

+ + +

Every once in a while I run into the opinion that it's irresponsible for anyone, but especially a parent of young children, to engage in common adventure sports at all. Backcountry hiking, black-diamond skiing, rock climbing, etc.

(Occasionally this extends to activities as banal-sounding as bicycle commuting. There's a lot of victim-blaming in the comments to news stories about cyclists who get struck by cars. It's very depressing. I have a theory that a large number of people simply don't believe that bad things can happen to good people.)

I think it's irresponsible to think you can remove all risk from life. Every day we're surrounded by common risky activities: from the acutely risky, like riding in cars or taking showers in slippery bathtubs, to the chronically risky, like occupational exposure to low-frequency noise or sitting around getting no exercise. And many culturally-not-considered-extreme hobbies carry a surprisingly high risk; for example, recreational boating is well accepted here in Minnesota, but it's also relatively risky (one estimate from Ohio: about 1 fatality per million operator-hours; anotherestimate has 1 canoeing fatality per 720,000 outings.)

Rock climbing is riskier than boating, but not the OMG IT MUST BE MANY TIMES RISKIER HOW COULD YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT WHEN YOU HAVE SMALL CHILDREN AT HOME!!! that you might expect from all the teeth-gnashing about it. Do you ever hear anyone say, "Gosh, I'd never have elective surgery under general anesthesia while I still had young children at home?" Well, that's more likely to kill you than a rock climbing trip.

All this is to say: Hobbies are important. It's good to have them. And it's okay to have hobbies that carry some risk. The important thing is to diligently take reasonable precautions and follow well-accepted safety protocols; to keep your head and know your limits; and to talk about safety and comfort with the people who depend on you, to make sure that no one is forced into a situation where they're uncomfortable with the level of "adventure." Mark and I have worked pretty hard over the past few years to create an atmosphere in which I'm always on board with what he's up to, and if I'm not, we work together to figure out what needs to change until I am.

+++

End of repost.

I did it again on Sunday. "Is Mark having a good Father's Day?" asked a friend after church.

"I assume so," I said, "He's out in Colorado rock climbing."

Her jaw dropped a little and she said "Oh my gosh! I'll pray for his safe return!"

"Go to Blessed Pier Giorgio," I said cheerfully, "it's what we always do."

On Saturday I had run into a little bit of an issue because Mark forgot to tell me which time zone he meant when he sent me my schedule of whom to call when. Was that "call SAR if you haven't heard from me by 6 pm" Denver time or Minneapolis time? The difference is only an hour, so I sent him a text message letting him know that I was going to split the difference and call out the troops at 5:30 Denver time. Fortunately he got that message in time, because they took longer climbing on the glacier than they intended and the schedule had to change; he sent me a text later to let me know I should extend the deadline.

So that was one thing learned on this particular trip. Another one -- not so much "lesson learned" as "detail that occurred to us for the first time" -- was that he really should tell me the make, model, color, and license plate number of the rented car he is driving to the trailhead.

People still ask me if I am not worried about him. We are, a little bit, I guess. I definitely start to get a little antsy when the "I will probably be done by X-o'clock" time approaches. But it is an enormous help to know that I will never have to sit at home wondering if I should do something or not. I know I can drop that worry and leave it behind, trusting him to take care of himself if he can, trusting in the grace of the sacrament of marriage to take care of the kids and me if he can't. And he knows that I know, and so that thread of intention connects us, whether we are both in cell phone range or not.

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