Light and Momentary

The Safety Cult

Oh, my friends, some days a person needs a duct tape helmet for prophylactic containment of her oft-exploded head. Every single time there's something on the internet about public breastfeeding, the comments are going to say, "Well, we don't POOP in public, do we?" And every single time there's something on the internet about free-range kids, the comments are going to say, "But BAD THINGS happen all the time." I hear you saying, "Why, Jamie? Why are you still reading the comments?"

Because, you guys, someone is WRONG on the internet.

Fallacy #1 is the most pernicious, I think, and I encountered it again in that Facebook conversation I was griping about in my last post. It's the idea that the world is swarming with wannabe perpetrators of stranger abduction. (Paging Bearing: you have an awesome quote in your archives somewhere (pulled from another blog, in one of your posts on this topic) about people living as if each child is assigned a would-be molester at birth. Can you help me track it down?) The person on Facebook said the Meitiv kids were doomed to be targets for child molesters now, because the perverts knew where to find them. Attention, world: it is exceedingly rare for childhood sexual abuse to work like that. The person to dread is almost certainly someone whom you have granted access, someone whom you have allowed to build trust with your child. Almost all of the time, childhood sexual abuse happens in the context of an existing relationship. It is easier to assume that nobody you know would harm a child. That assumption, unfortunately, is unwarranted.

Fallacy #2 is closely related: Because crime exists, your child is at risk of stranger abduction. I got this from the police officer who responded to my neighbor's call, as he pointed out sites of recent property crimes in the neighborhood. One of the things I appreciated about him was that when I said, "Property crime is in a completely different league from kidnapping," he said, "Yeah, that's true." This misperception is common, and I argue that it is poisonous. Wherever you go, there will be theft. Wherever you go, there will be vandalism and bad language. It's a fallen world. But it is simply not true that wherever you go there will be stranger abductions. Someone tossing an unsecured lawnmower in his trunk is a whole lot more probable than someone tossing an unsecured child in his trunk. The existence of A does not determine the odds that B will occur.

Fallacy #3: Kids will inevitably be scarred by adverse events. In that same Facebook discussion, a woman described a scary thing that happened to her and her siblings when they were left unattended. They started a fire...and then they put it out. You can tell that story as "so no one should ever leave kids unattended because they get in trouble" or you can tell that story as "kids can address problems swiftly and sensibly." Our current cultural narrative prefers the former option, as did the woman on Facebook. This is a really problematic preference. I cannot overstate the importance of teaching kids that they are capable of solving problems. If we say instead "But you might run into...A PROBLEM" in the same horrified tones we would use to say "But you might get...BUBONIC PLAGUE!" we teach them to doubt their own resourcefulness. And knowing that you are a resourceful person is one of the golden keys to living contentedly in a complex and difficult world.

Yesterday I followed a totally unrelated link and ran across this quote:

...Groups that are highly controlling, teach fear about the world, and keep members sheltered and ill-equipped to function in society are harder to leave easily. The difficulty seems to be greater if the person was born and raised in the religion rather than joining as an adult convert. This is because they have no frame of reference – no other “self” or way of “being in the world.”

In most other arenas, when people spout harmful fallacies and call them facts, and discourage independence and independent thinking, and insist that Really Bad Things will happen to dissenters (and that the dissenters will deserve them, hahaHA), we call it a cult. And yet somehow when it comes to 21st-century parenting, we call it normal.

P.S. to my more cautious readers (hi, Gina!): I wrote this last night and didn't hit publish because it is more inflammatory than my usual offerings. My point here is not that anyone ought to give her particular child more of a particular kind of freedom: you know your child better than anyone else, and you know your corner of the world better than I do. What I find objectionable is the assumption that I can't see my child clearly, that a stranger looking in from the outside can determine, based on faulty premises, whether I should be turned over to the state for neglectful parenting. Live and let live, that's all I'm asking.

Costs

Danielle Meitiv's comment hits close to home: "CPS has finally succeeded in making me terrified to let my kids out unsupervised," she says. "I'm afraid they're going to take them away." That's a lot like what I said in 2008: that the neighbor who reported me to CPS had sparked a series of events that my kids all found far more stressful than being told to walk home alone.

What happens with the Meitivs' kids remains to be seen. For my own part, I get weary of pushing back. Do you remember last fall, when the soccer coach didn't want Pete to walk home from practice? We haven't fought that battle this season. Some of it was that he needed someone to walk him through the route a time or two, because it's not a park we visit much these days. But really, it was mostly about the grownups. Having my judgment repeatedly questioned is frustrating, and wearying, and...it's easier just to jump in the car. 

I am typing that and thinking, "What a horrible defeatist attitude! Aren't you supposed to be pushing back?" But here's the reality: sometimes it's hard to be the only kid who's walking home. Sometimes it's hard to be that kid's parent. Sometimes there is only so much space in my head.

I left a comment on a Facebook post about the Meitivs, challenging a commenter who said she had no sympathy at all for them. Six-plus hours of needless worry, hungry kids, frantic parents -- but nobody in that scenario deserves sympathy. They should have listened to the authorities, you know.

Meanwhile my 6-year-old and my 10-year-old walk themselves to and from school every day, almost always unaccompanied by an adult. Sometimes when I imagine someone reporting me for negligence based on that decision I think, "Go ahead. Bring it." Mostly, though, I think, "Please don't. Just don't, okay?"

Marathon madness

One day a year I am a sports fan. Usually I shake my head unsympathetically when I read about sporting events interfering with people's productivity at work (March Madness: who cares? and why?), but on Patriot Day I keep refreshing Twitter for Boston Marathon news.

Maybe it's because I have more of a referent for distance running than for other sports. I have a pretty good feel for how long I could maintain a 5:00 mile pace. (Answer: about 7 seconds. If I were being chased by a bear, maybe 8.) And so the idea of Rita Jeptoo knocking out a 4:48 mile 23 -- that reduced me to a blithering pile of wargle flungle zppt last year. (And then when she flunked her blood test after Chicago! Oooh! I was mad! Was it a clean win in Boston, do you figure? Either way, I still can't watch Shalane Flanagan's interview from last year without tearing up.)

Today I was pulling for her again, and for Meb Keflezighi. Neither had a great day. Meb says he threw up 5 times after mile 23. And this -- this blows my mind. If I throw up 5 times in one day I am going straight to bed, where I will rest not only on my pillow but also on a vast cushiony raft of self-pity. Throwing up 5 times puts my barfometer's needle right up in the red zone. My list of things to do after throwing up 5 times includes "drink small sips of ginger ale" and "whimper." Meb's list of things to do after throwing up 5 times includes "bust out a few more sub-5:30 miles and then talk to the media about how I wish I'd gone faster."

I guess that's why he's an elite runner and I'm...not.

A good day

Today on campus there was a festival of student research, in which more than 300 students presented their work. A team of 5 students had put together a poster based on data I collected last semester, so I was there offering moral support. They didn't need it, though: they knew what they were talking about, and their enthusiasm was contagious. A pregnant woman asked them what she needed to know about breastfeeding before her baby arrived, and they had lots and lots of ideas for her. "Wow!" she said. "This is so helpful!" 

That made my month, to see how well that conversation went for everyone involved.

It was also really cool to be in a university-wide conglomeration of presenters. The ag students had posters about nitrogen fixing and the CS students had posters about ethernet something-something vs. cloud something-something and the psych students had posters about ego depletion's impact on compassion. It reminded me what a tremendous gift it is to be part of an institution in which people are curious about so many diverse aspects of this vast and puzzling world.

When I went back to my office I found an email telling me a paper had been accepted. Huzzah!

Entendre

My pal Jenny and I are heading briskly up the sidewalk, in the third mile of our evening walk. We are both in our mid-40s, both redheads. We pause near a fraternity house where two of the brothers are tossing a football in the street. One of them looks at us and starts running backwards toward us. "Go deep! Go deep!" he shouts to his friend. He turns to us with a self-conscious sort of jocularity. He says, "Did anybody ever go deep on you, maybe way back in the day?" We keep walking. For a few strides I think, "He seemed weirdly deliberate about saying that. That was a strange encounter." The words play back in my head and I realize there's another way to interpret that question: did anybody ever go deep on you, maybe way back in the day?

I turn to Jenny with horror on my face. She is looking at me with the selfsame expression. "Did he...?!" "He absolutely did." "That is SO WRONG." "Totally disgusting, but that's definitely what he meant." The skeeviness is palpable. And I am mad.

We turn toward Jenny's house and I say, "If I were a better Christian I'd pray for him, but right now I'm just glad he's not likely to remain in the gene pool." We fume and steam. I stop. I say, "I have half a mind to go back and say something to him." She says, "What would you say?" I say, "I'll tell him, 'This is a civil neighborhood. People are polite to each other here. It is NOT appropriate for you to talk to random women like that.' Come on, let's do it." Jenny whips out her phone in case the conversation goes south, but I, uncharacteristically, have not a speck of fear in me. 

I stride up to him and plant my hands on my hips. "That was extremely rude," I say. He says, "What?" I echo his words: "Did anybody ever go deep on you, maybe way back in the day?" And what I think I see in his face is a crunch of recognition as he hears what we heard, followed by a surge of embarrassment. "Oh," he says, "That's not what I meant-- I was just talking about the football. Like in American Pie. Have you seen it?" I have never seen American Pie, but it strikes me as a terrible reference to choose if you're trying to distance yourself from sexually offensive talk. Still, he apologizes; I shake the hand he offers me. My anger has evaporated.

Jenny is not persuaded. She thinks he was just backpedaling, surprised by the wrath I was radiating. She is glad I confronted him. I am glad too, because I really felt slimed by the encounter. I am certain it would have taken me a chunk of the evening to shrug it off if I had walked away. 

But now I am wondering what the real story is, and if I was unjust. There was definitely something weird in the way he spoke to us. Was it just a college kid feeling a little too old to play ball in the street? Or was our mutual certainty about his intent actually on target?

If I were Captain Awkward, I'd write about rape culture here. I have been thinking this evening about the times in college when I didn't speak up, when I let skeeviness slide and regretted it later. And if I were a different sort of Christian, maybe I'd be humbler here about my initial refusal to pray for him. But maybe instead of writing about what I'm not, I'll head to bed so I can be the best version of myself tomorrow. (And I will say a prayer for him, whatever his needs might be.) I'm curious about your perspective on the situation, though. What would you have done? Has anything similar happened to you lately?