Even though the young, the elderly, and the ill are the folks most vulnerable to this disease, odds of about fifty million to one are ones I’m willing to take. And I let my kids take them too. (But not when the beaters are still plugged in! See above.)
School Shootings
The alarm goes off, the teacher flies to lock the door, and the kids sit rigidly at their desks, awaiting further instructions—or doom.
It’s a lockdown drill, the kind used in schools across the country to prepare for a Columbine-type killing or terrorist attack. Are those really something we need to worry about?
No. Not that shootings never occur at schools, but they are so few and far between that kids are actually safer at school than almost anyplace else. Consider that of all the homicides of school-age kids, only 1.4 percent actually take place at school. (This does not count the kids who die of boredom.)
Besides, schools are becoming safer and safer. Theft at school is down by more than 50 percent since 1992, and so is violent crime.
Although it’s hard to shake the fear of something as graphic as Columbine, educators should get a grip. One school district in Massachusetts has gone so far as to propose training children age ten and up to fight crazed gunmen using their backpacks and textbooks. (Stop or I’ll give you a pop quiz on early American history!)
This seems more hysterical than helpful, considering that those kids—all kids—have literally a 0.0003 percent chance of being killed at school. Math teachers, please explain: those are very, very long odds.
Spoilage (of Children)
You can’t spoil a baby by holding it too much, that much I know. And positive reinforcement beats negative at every age (even ninety). Positive reinforcement isn’t spoiling unless a pony is involved more than once.
Beyond that? Here’s the simple, brilliant, antispoiling trick a housepainter from Pakistan taught my friend: every week, run out of one thing. Orange juice, cereal—whatever. It’s a way to get kids used to not always having exactly what they want exactly when they want it.
Spoilage (of Lunch)
On a field trip a few years back, one of the moms looked anything but jolly. Because the trip was to the park, the kids had been told to bring their lunches in disposable bags. You know—the brown paper kind?
“I just hope it’s OK,” the mom fretted.
“What’s OK?” I asked.
“My daughter’s lunch! It’s not in an insulated bag. I hope the sandwich doesn’t spoil!”
“Did you bring your lunch to school in an insulated bag?” I asked. She shook her head. “So why are you worried now?”
She didn’t give an answer so allow me to supply one. Back when we were kids they didn’t sell insulated bags, so no one worried about needing one. But now that some marketing genius has come up with those bags and even, God help us, little ice packs to keep your child’s apple slices crisp and cold, the idea of a room temperature tuna sandwich sounds to some like death on toast.
But here’s the deal: Your kid’s tuna salad is going to be just fine because—surprise!—mayo actually helps prevent food from spoiling. Commercial mayonnaise is almost always made with vinegar and its acidity slows the growth of bacteria while increasing the sandwich’s deliciousness. Win/win! (Unless we’re talking about cholesterol.)
Of course, the mom on the field trip had actually made her daughter a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which probably won’t go bad until April 12, 2027. But now you know that mayo is okay-o.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—SIDS—is a devastating disease, but the first thing to remember is that it is also rare, affecting about one baby in two thousand. We sometimes forget how very safe childhood is now compared to any other time in history. Abe Lincoln had four children, only one of whom made it to adulthood, and that was not an unusual track record back then. Even in the last hundred years, the infant mortality rate has plunged, from 111 children per 1,000 in 1915, to 26 per 1,000 in 1960, to 6.3 in 1,000 today. Yes, as recently as when we were kids, more or less, four times more children died in infancy than do now. So when we worry about childhood illnesses, let’s try to keep in mind how much better the odds have become in our favor.
I know—that’s hard to do when all we hear are warnings (and you’re about to hear another). But knock wood your kid was born recently and then read on.
“SIDS is a mysterious disease. Kids die for no apparent reason,” says Sydney Spiesel, a pediatrician and professor at Yale Medical School. He has his theories about what may cause it, but there’s only one thing he is certain about: put your baby to sleep on its back.
The statistics seem irrefutable on this point. In 1992, the United States began its first major campaign against stomach sleeping. By 1994, SIDS deaths were down by 15 to 20 percent.
How did the medical establishment come to discover this simple preventive measure? By studying the different rates of SIDS in different countries. “There are tremendously different rates around the world, and sometimes the rate rises or drops the second you cross the border,” says Spiesel. “And sometimes the rates would change dramatically in a country. So, for instance, the rate was pretty constant in Holland then suddenly, in a period of a year or so, it dramatically rose and everybody was scratching their heads.”
What changed?
It was all “tremendously mysterious,” Spiesel admits, “until we had an experiment in nature. That experiment occurred in Australia and New Zealand where, if anything, they have an excess of two things: Rabbits and sheep. It was almost a crime if you didn’t put a sheepskin in your baby’s crib, because what could be more wonderful than a sheepskin? But they had a very high rate in both those countries of SIDS, and one of the things they noticed was that those who slept on sheepskins had much higher rates [of SIDS]. Then they discovered that sleeping on a sheepskin amplifies the risk of sleeping face down.”
Sleeping face down on something soft like sheepskin tends to prevent a lot of “gas exchange”—that is, it prevents a lot of new air from reaching the baby’s nose and mouth. Instead, the carbon dioxide gets concentrated. Although Spiesel still believes that we may yet discover a genetic component to SIDS, he also thinks the face-down babies who die of it may have suffered from breathing in too high a concentration of carbon dioxide.
As for what happened in Holland that pushed up SIDS deaths so dramatically, it turned out to be a popular pamphlet given to new parents recommending tummy sleep for their infants, says Spiesel, a mistake the country has, of course, long since corrected.
Other recommendations from Spiesel and the American Academy of Pediatrics include making sure that the crib mattress is firm, because a baby’s nose could sink into softer bedding. For that same reason, keeping stuffed animals, baby bumpers, or even pillows in the crib is not recommended. If you want to go the distance, skip the blankie, too. (But we always used one. Come to think of it, we had totally unnecessary, puffy baby bumpers, too, as if our kids were pinballs.) In 2000, several of the biggest baby bedding retailers—Babies R Us, IKEA, JCPenney, Kmart, Lands’ End, Sears, and Target—all vowed to display their cribs bare of soft bedding. Considering they probably forfeited a bundle in the sale of fluffy baby junk, that was pretty noble of them.
The peak time for SIDS is the first two to four months. By the time kids can turn over from back to front by themselves, says Spiesel, “It’s not an issue any more.” They’re much safer. Just start them out each night on their backs “and don’t throw a lot of crap in the bed.”
Well said.
Sunscreen, Vitamin D, Skin Cancer, You Name It
The rules for using sunscreen almost defy you or your child to live a normal life. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises older children, for instance, to “limit sun exposure during the peak intensity hours—between 10 AM and 4 PM.”
Gee, that doesn’t cramp anyone’s day, does it? Just scurry inside at ten and don’t come out again till four. What a fun summer! Fire up
the Cartoon Network!
Meantime, the academy also recommends that children wear sunscreen and reapply it after “swimming or sweating.”
“Wait up, guys! I’m glistening with perspiration! Gotta reapply the SPF 15!”
Have those words ever been uttered by a nonfictional child? Maybe if the kid had suffered a severe sunburn. But this is beyond the behavior of most real children, who consider sunscreen a gloppy form of cooties.
Anyway, as it turns out, maybe that’s not so bad. Because the academy’s newest worry is rickets! The bone-softening disease kids get when they don’t get enough vitamin D! The vitamin we get from . . . sunshine!
Because of “recommendations regarding sun avoidance,” reads an article in the journal Pediatrics, there have been “increasing numbers of reports of rickets in Western industrialized nations,” and the reason for this may well be, “the excessive use of sunscreen.”
Excessive?! Who told us to use it in the first place? Arghhhh!
So children are now instructed to get about fifteen minutes of unmitigated sun during the spring, winter, and fall, and to cover up the rest of the time. And that, I must wimpily admit, is my “official” recommendation to you, too. But unofficially, what I do is try to get my kids to put on some sunscreen in the morning if they’re going to be outside most of the day, and wear hats.
Skin cancer is a reality, but it is not a childhood disease. It’s something that usually develops later on—same as heart disease can, if your kid never gets out and runs around, and grows up to become a couch carrot. (I’m so sick of the word potato.) And then there’s the no-sun-leads-to-rickets thing.
All in all, if you can avoid sunburns—great. But the idea of avoiding the great outdoors in the delectable Oreo middle of the day is like saying, “Avoid childhood so you can become an adult.” Let us repeat:
Arghhhh.
Teen Sex (Yes, Kids, We Know You’re Reading This. Now Come and Ask Us All About Contraception)
The good news? You don’t have to have “The Talk.”
The slightly more daunting news? Turns out you have to have talk after talk after talk. It’s not just a one-shot deal.
The good news about the slightly daunting news? When you do start having these talks with your kids, you can totally screw up and it’s OK. Because now that you know you’re going to have, God help you, a zillion talks with your kids about sex, love, and body parts, you don’t have to worry that if you don’t present everything perfectly, they’re going to end up like Jamie Lynn Spears (or what’s-his-name the dad).
So when should these chats begin?
Planned Parenthood recommends you start talking to your kids about sex when they’re preteens, because by middle school some kids will begin fooling around, and by high school, forget it. The latest numbers from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that in 2005, 46 percent of kids in high school had had sex at least once. That’s down from 54 percent in 1991. But we’re still talking about almost half of all high schoolers.
Doesn’t simply talking to kids about sex increase the chances that they’ll go and do it?
No.
Truly, statistically, it does not. I asked. And even keeping some condoms available doesn’t make kids run out and use them, any more than keeping umbrellas around makes it rain.
Billy Crystal once said that he wouldn’t mind his daughters having sex—as long as they wait till he’s dead. But even if you preach abstinence before marriage (or parental death), your conversations should still cover pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and birth control. How come? Because if your children do have sex sooner than you’d like them to—something that I hear has happened at least once or twice in human history—you want them to be safe. So instead of just hoping they sit tight, your job is to give them the information that some day, when you’re not around (or maybe you’re upstairs watching Leno), they can use. Planned Parenthood calls this approach “Abstinence Plus.”
Plus nonabstinence, I guess.
Anyway, one thing you can remind your children is that even if they do decide to have sex, they can always go back to abstaining whenever they want. (Sort of like when Madonna went through that I’m-a-proper-English-children’s-author phase.) Also remind your children that you love them no matter what and that they can come to you with any embarrassing questions they have.
About sex, that is. Not about why you’re wearing that outfit.
The Woods, Playing In
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”
Thank you, Bob Frost, thanks a heap.
Thanks for that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” poem, reinforcing the fact that woods are dark and deep. Now we’ll never let our kids play in them, even though there’s something almost transcendent about kids connecting with nature.
“Nature Deficit Syndrome” is the name Richard Louv uses in his book Last Child in the Woods to describe the sad situation of kids today, most destined never to explore anything wilder than a Chuck E. Cheese.
One story in Louv’s book concerns a couple of bored, cranky kids whose fed-up parents send them out to a field behind the house with the order, “Don’t come back for two hours!” Well, the kids come back several hours later, excited and happy. That’s because there’s so much to discover in nature, from bugs to trees to soaring attention levels. One study at the University of Illinois found that kids with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder had fewer symptoms after playing in nature than they had after playing video games.
So why don’t we send kids out to explore more?
“The woods seem chaotic,” says Robert Bixler, a professor at South Carolina’s Clemson University who trains future forest rangers. We’re used to either urban playgrounds or suburban lawns, both of which bear about as much resemblance to actual forests as snow domes bear to Antarctica. The woods are unfamiliar.
Generally, unfamiliar things are scary, and that’s especially true when worrywarts keep warning us about them. One parenting magazine piece, “The Great Outdoors,” ran with the subhead, “We’ve pulled together the gear and accessories you need for a fun (and totally safe) day in the sun.”
Like you couldn’t possibly go outside and expect to be safe with your child without four pages of safety precautions and a truckload of junk—excuse me—“gear,” including an insulated stroller organizer to keep baby’s juice cold and a $590 bike trailer.
Before the fifth graders at my sons’ school go on their overnight to a nature preserve, they receive a ten-page xerox detailing every possible danger, from poison sumac to wolves to bears to “bald-faced hornets” who “build nests shaped like footballs.” How inviting! And I’m sure kids get really psyched to hike after they read that whole paragraph on “what a bee sting looks and feels like.”
Nonetheless, even the super-cautious school realizes that being in nature is important for kids. It nurtures curiosity and independence and a connectedness to time and the earth and all the stuff it’s impossible to talk about without waxing crunchy.
Think back on your own childhood, and chances are you’ll recall spending some very rewarding time in nature. Find some again now, even if it’s only the edge of a playground where the weeds are growing wild. Give your little explorers guidelines about how far they can go, give them a tick check when they return home (although ticks are only active when it’s warm out, so in winter climes this is not an issue), and heck—these days you can even give them a phone.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
Have a great day and wait for the beep.
Walking to School (or at Least the Bus Stop)
Here’s one of those ironic facts that’ll haunt you tomorrow morning if you have a child heading off to school. Do you know what percentage of kids hit by cars near schools are hit by cars driven by parents dropping their kids off because they’re afraid of them getting hit by cars?
Half! Fifty percent! One out of two.
So if everyone ju
st walked to school, already we’d see a 50 percent reduction in the number of children hit by cars near school!
Walking to school used to be so commonplace, it wasn’t even up for discussion. Forty years ago, 66 percent of U.S. children walked or biked to school, says Ian Thomas, executive director of a Missouri-based pro-walking group called the PedNet Coalition. (I’d change that name, buddy.) Now the number of kids walking is down to about 10 percent.
Some of this can be attributed to schools built on cheap land at the edge of town from the sixties onwards—big schools that take kids from such a wide catchment that it is too far for most to walk—and also to the stupid suburban idea that since we all have cars, who needs sidewalks? No sidewalks, no safe routes to school, no walkers.
But there are still plenty of neighborhood schools that are reachable. And yet the Free-Range Kids site gets a ton of letters like this: “I can see my children’s school from my bedroom window and I let my nine-year-old walk his sister to school. She’s six. Some parents think that is crazy. My neighbor drives her children to school every morning.”
What that neighbor has yet to realize is that if kids started walking again, everyone would be better off, thanks to less pollution, less traffic, fewer accidents, and fitter—as opposed to fatter—kids. And by the way: kids who get their morning exercise may even do better in school, having gotten their ya-yas out along the way. Children are supposed to get an hour of exercise a day, but most don’t. I won’t even go into the long-term health implications. (Well—yes I will, really fast: diabetesheartdiseaseobesity.) So let’s just assume that with all the advantages of walking, parents must be driving either because they’ve simply gotten into the habit or because they think that walking is dangerous.
Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry) Page 19
