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I’m not trying to be a killjoy here, but superheroes bore me. I understand why people love Marvel movies, cheering as the hero beats the villain down, but for me, that’s not a good enough story. Add to that stories where the hero conveniently has the magical ability that will solve everything. I’ve really had enough of children’s stories that offer easy solutions that no real human can employ.

Kids love superheroes and magical solutions.

They love stories in which there’s a really ugly villain and a really amazing hero who vanquishes the villain and makes the world right again. And why wouldn’t they? We adults thought the world we grew up in was screwed up—today’s kids are facing much bigger threats. Escapism can be very tempting.

Of course, any story worth listening to or reading is entertaining—any good preacher will tell you that no one cares to hear a boring sermon, either. But the function of storytelling throughout time has never been just to entertain. And any good preacher (or fiction writer, or TV series writer…) intrinsically knows that, too.

Superhero stories are the wonderbread of storytelling: lovely to the touch, easy to digest, offering no real nourishment for the soul. Stories in which magic saves the day are processed junkfood when what kids really need is fiber and nutrition.

We’re not superheroes, we’re not magical, we’re just human.

Even the real humans we call heroes are just human. It’s a bit depressing to admit that, but it’s also what makes us so fascinating to ourselves. If we were all superheroes or supervillains, life would be a wonderbread story: fluff through-and-through. We wouldn’t bother to care: the hero will always win, the villain will always come back, the little people will always die.

A really good story has at least a kernel of the human struggle in it. In magical stories like Harry Potter, magic doesn’t actually save the day—friendship, love, and faith do. In my current favorite kids’ book When You Reach Me, time travel is hard and imperfect but it’s the tool one kid has found to fix a screwed-up situation. In good realistic fiction like Wild Bird, kids struggle, embarrass themselves, and still find love and acceptance from other flawed humans.

Good stories, whether fantastical or realistic, teach us something about ourselves, ask us to question our assumptions, or inspire us to become better, stronger people.

A steady diet of superheroes and easy magic is not healthy for kids.

Many young writing students are attracted to stories in which they give their characters “powers” which allow their characters to step out of the human condition. It’s the rare kid who understands how much they sap the humanity of their characters by letting them solve their problems with a handy power that just happens to be the one needed to save the day.

Even worse, in writing these characters kids are able to avoid the introspection that writing fiction requires. No matter the genre that you’re writing or reading, when your character is in a bind, that’s when you learn something about life.

Kids will never be armed with a lightning bolt.

Ancient people used mythological gods to explain the forces that they couldn’t understand. But we do understand most of the malevolent forces facing us today.

When our kids experience the hurricanes, droughts, and poverty caused by climate change, they will know that no god was involved in creating the problem, and that they will never be given magical powers to fix it all with a wave of a wand.

When our kids face the deep political divisions in our country, people on the other side will simply be humans trying to make their way in the world, not supervillains to be killed off.

When our kids face heartbreak, illness, fear, or confusion, they will need tools.

Fiction can give them those tools.

We have to work within our human limitations.

I’m not against a good, fun read or two hours of light entertainment. But I am against bombarding kids, over and over, with stories that set them up for disappointment. No human they ever have a conflict with will be as simple to hate as a supervillain. No human who ever reaches out a hand to help them will have a hero’s lightning bolt to offer.

Stories help children make sense of the world by offering them tools in the form of words and ideas.

We’re giving our kids a pretty darn screwed-up world.

So let’s give them the tools they need to prepare them for the fight ahead.

I love a good dystopian novel. I love the ones that end with a glimmer of hope. I love the ones that make me angry. I love the ones that illuminate the path our society is on.

But let’s get this straight: Dystopian novels are not a blueprint for how the future will look—they’re a warning to change lest our future go wrong.

We seem to be missing the point…

We do not need screens in every room in our house telling us what to do (1984)

The advance of technology is happening at a staggering pace. Looking at the world of 1984 in the actual year 1984, I remember all the relief that the media expressed. “See? It’s 1984, and our screens don’t control us. They can’t see what we’re doing. They aren’t in every little corner of our lives!”

1984 shows us a world in which the British (assumed) government surveils its population day and night. The government lies to everyone—even changing their lies from day to day—and the population largely takes it. What else can they do? Screens are in control.

Yes, it took a little longer than Orwell thought, and it’s not actually the government that is doing it, but here we are. Have you looked at the videos that an amusement park enthusiast took before and after the smartphone revolution? It’s…shocking. We are now living in our screens. We do what they tell us to do.

The warning that I take from this book:

1. We should not be complacent like a frog in a slowly heating pot of water. We must always resist—thoughtfully.
2. Humans should be able to escape the trappings of modern life and, in order to be healthy, should do that on a regular basis.
3. We should view anyone in a position of authority with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The blueprint that people seem to be following:

1. Screens everywhere? Why fight it? In fact, let’s have Alexa in every room so we can’t even have a normal conversation without a machine listening in.
2. It’s private companies, not government, that’s doing this, so it’s OK.
3. Governments will always be manipulative. Politicians will always lie. Not only should we accept this, but let’s embrace it and elect people who don’t even try to hide that they’re lying.

Remember that the free exchange of ideas should not be limited without very, very good reason (Fahrenheit 451)

In Ray Bradbury’s dystopia, there are no books. Knowing what I do about Bradbury, this was probably the scariest future he could imagine. But somehow, though [almost] all of us find Bradbury’s vision as frightening as he did, we still argue about access to books.

Neither the left nor the right is solely in charge of this particular failure of imagination. Parents of all stripes fear what words can do to their kids. And when politicians and other “influencers” use that fear, it can be potent. As I write this, new laws in conservative areas are trying to make sure that children won’t feel “ashamed” of their cultural legacy—as long as those children are white. And the left has been making trouble of its own, trying to balance whose suffering is worth highlighting by trying to assess the relative “power” of groups who have suffered.

It’s a tiresome project no matter who does it. Children need to be challenged, and need to feel secure in their ability to respond to those challenges. We need to value but not assign relative value to all human histories. It seems pretty straightforward, but it’s not. I know that I read books when I was younger that I wasn’t ready for. But I also know that I did not need anyone to save me from those ideas—I was challenged, and I rose to the challenge.

The warning that I take from this book:

1. You can’t just take away some knowledge; if you start taking it away, you’ll find that there’s no clear line where you should stop.
2. Human history is valuable, whether we like it or not.

The blueprint that people seem to be following:

1. Banning books, ideas, and historical fact is OK as long as my side is doing it.
2. We can trust ourselves to know which information is damaging to kids.

We should not devalue physical intimacy to the point where it becomes simple currency (Brave New World)

I’m not going to say that I have any insight into current young people’s sense of sexuality and relationships. But all measures seem to be showing a decline in people who even believe that having a committed physical/spiritual/emotional relationship is worth it.

In Brave New World, sexuality has been coopted as a tool by the government. (Once again, a dystopian fiction gets the bad guy wrong, since the reality is that governments are nowhere near as good at fooling people and making them do what they want as the private sector.) It is true that our government isn’t exactly telling us to use sex as currency (though, heck, if they really wanted more people to get married, wouldn’t they get rid of the marriage penalty in our tax code?).

I agree that the so-called sexual revolution was a necessary step. Women were not allowed full agency over their bodies and their lives, and that was wrong. Frankly, if two consenting adults want to exchange sex without emotional involvement, who should care?

But it seems that many people ignored Huxley’s actual warning.

The warning that I take from this book:

1. Humans need love. Period.
2. Without love, humans lose their humanity.

The blueprint that people seem to be following:

1. There is no point to love and commitment—it’s so old-fashioned.
2. People who want love are pathetic outsiders who should just go live in a shack somewhere. OK, boomers!

* PS: I’m not a boomer…

We do not need to separate our country into warring regions willing to kill each other to keep our little bit of land to ourselves (Hunger Games)

It is inevitable that humans will have disagreements. It’s probably inevitable that we will always be tempted to separate ourselves into “us” and “them”—though I think some people are making progress on resisting that tendency.

But it is very much not inevitable that different areas of one country (such as in the US) or different cultures around the world should literally fight to the death in the arena, a la Hunger Games, to solve our differences. In this series, humanity’s in some trouble. We don’t know everything that happened between now and this future, but it was pretty disastrous. Our heroine is supposed to go and kill other people simply because they are representatives from other regions of the country.

The warning that I take from this book is in two halves:

1. Don’t screw up the world so badly that humanity is nearly wiped out, OK?
2. If you do, remember that we’re all in this together and only by helping each other will we all climb out of the hole.

The blueprint that people seem to be following:

1. We’re gonna screw it all up anyway so don’t bother to keep the bad stuff from happening.
2. While we’re at it, tribalism has always worked so great for humans, right? So let’s make sure to spread hatred of people in places we don’t approve of!

In conclusion, I’ll just say it again:

Dystopian novels: warning, not blueprint.

California is in a drought…still.

It’s interesting: when I mention the drought, lots of people say, “Oh, no, not again?” as if the drought ceases every time we get measurable rain.

It doesn’t. The drought is the worst in centuries, with no end in sight. And given the uncertainty of climate change, it may not be a drought at all. It may just be our new climate.

What does permanent drought mean for us?

Well, for one, I won’t say that I haven’t been tempted by despair. The biggest despair I feel is when I look out our back windows at the old-growth redwoods there. We haven’t had our trees dated, but a rough guess is that they’re over a thousand years old.

Think about it for a minute: These trees lasted through everything in the last thousand years: droughts, torrential rains, pests, and lightning (you can see the scars).

But we’re succeeding in killing them off with less than a human lifetime of burnt carbon. Redwood trees take most of their moisture in through their leaves (they have leaves, not needles), so they’ll be OK as long as we’ve got fog. And so far, we’re doing OK on that front.

But the unpredictability of climate change tells us that we can’t plan on fog the way we used to. What if it all dries up?

A positive focus on what we can do

But despair is pointless. Despair stops us from finding solutions, and solutions are what we need. I’m not a water engineer, a climate scientist, or a politician, but that doesn’t mean I’m powerless. I’m part of the system, and I control my little part of the whole.

Part of what I control is my household and my yard. And believe me, we’ve done almost everything there is to do:

• We let the lawn go dormant in the summer from when we moved in
• We replanted with low-water or no-water plants
• We installed a drip system and we use it wisely
• We have all low-water appliances and toilets
• Shower timers, leak detectors, hot water pump…

Besides what I do at home, I also control the messages I send out into the world. I’m a writer, yes, but I’m also a person who gets into conversations at the pool and the grocery store. I can share ideas for positive action when others express despair.

Education is the key

My feature article in Growing Up in Santa Cruz this month is about How to Raise a Water Wise Kid. If you’ve got a family and live in a drought-prone area, take a look at my suggestions. There are lots of fun water-themed adventures you can take. We can never be perfect as parents, but we can do our best to make sure our kids have the information they need.

It’s so important to educate ourselves and be ambassadors of good information. For adults, I highly recommend this in depth article from the New York Times.

Over the past couple of years I have posted a few pieces about the constant attacks on charter schools in California. As I wrote to a legislator involved in one of the unconscionable guttings of laws related to charter schools, “The level of antipathy against these programs at the state level is truly shocking.”

Why are alternatives important?

The spirit behind charter school law, as I understand it, is to free schools from certain levels of state oversight in order to:

• foster innovation in education,
• serve students with unique needs, and
• challenge mainstream public schools to do the same.

I see charters as having succeeded in that mission perhaps too well. One charter high school in our county is always at odds with the County Office of Ed because they are seen as “siphoning off” the high-scoring students from comprehensive high schools. Another was accused of discrimination because they required parents to volunteer at the school.

But if the comprehensive high schools were serving those students’ needs, they wouldn’t leave. And research shows that every school should strive to get every single parent involved in some capacity.

The right response to competition is to do better than your competition, but too often, the school system pressures legislators to cut off innovation rather than getting inspired by it.

What sorts of alternatives do people look for?

1. Smaller schools
   As public high schools get bigger and more impersonal, anyone who wants a personalized environment for their student votes with their feet (and their tax dollars).
2. Special educational focus
   Some students simply have needs that can’t be served by just any school. Let’s just admit that and allow them to find the approach that suits them.
3. High quality teaching
   One persistent problem that our neighborhood schools have is attracting and maintaining qualified, dedicated staff. Charter schools offer good teachers a more flexible environment, and the staff at a charter is often passionately dedicated to their school.
4. An environment that fits a family’s special needs
   Our focus on the idea that only children with disabilities have special needs hurts our school system. All people may have special needs, and the more flexibility we offer in educational environments, the more families we serve.

These four points were emphasized by educators I interviewed for my recent article about innovative independent schools in my county.

What sorts of kids and families seek out alternatives?

1. Children with special learning needs
2. Children who have been bullied
3. High-performing students
4. Low-performing students
5. Families with special lifestyle needs
6. Children with special physical or medical needs

As anyone can see if they glance at this list, kids at the edges are the ones who need alternative options. A child who’s being treated for cancer may want or need to learn at home. A child who has been bullied may thrive in a small school where teachers can keep a closer eye on the school culture.

Who suffers when alternatives are restricted?

All of us. Let’s not mince words here: The quality of our educational system affects all of us. A well-educated child who finds the right environment to nurture their strengths may well end up being the EMT, therapist, scientist, or innovative chef who saves your life.

We can’t know what any one child will bring to the world. But if we nurture them all in appropriate educational environments, we can know that we’ve given them all the foundation they need in order to bring what they can.

Just before the turn of the new millennium, my husband and I were sitting in our living room, our sleeping baby in my arms. Somehow we got on the subject of teenage hijinks and the state forest behind our house. My husband and I had both grown up in places with convenient nooks and crannies for teens to get up to the usual teen stuff away from the prying eyes of adults.

We gazed out the back window at the trees. When we were young in the 70s and 80s, it was very typical for teens to sneak out into the woods to smoke some weed (we called it pot!). Of course there was quite a stigma about more hardcore drugs, but there was always this sense that cannabis was no big deal.

But life in the 90s was different. The topic of our conversation was “What will we tell our kid about drugs?” And the reason for our conversation was the so-called War on Drugs, which had imprisoned a large number of young people. At that point, we were regularly reading about young adults losing their freedom over the sorts of mistakes cops used to shrug about.

What will we tell him? we asked each other. Little did we know that we’d face a much harder question 23 years later.

This isn’t 1978

In so many ways, the lives are teens are fundamentally different now. And that means that parenting is fundamentally different. The War on Drugs gave my husband and me pause in 1999, but we had no idea that once our children were young adults, a whole new danger would arise.

I’ve spent the last few weeks reporting on the fentanyl crisis in my county. One thing I learned is that most of us have it all wrong. Most people would probably not get 100% on this important quiz:

True or false:

• Fentanyl overdoses mainly happen to homeless drug addicts
• Fentanyl overdoses happen to people who knew they were taking a dangerous substance
• Opioid overdoses are someone else’s problem

All of those statements are false, it turns out. The fentanyl crisis is not an overdose crisis. It’s a murder crisis.

Murder isn’t too strong a word

The word was used by a grieving mom I interviewed, and at first it gave me pause. She told me that her son’s death would be labeled an overdose, but it wasn’t an overdose since he didn’t mean to take fentanyl at all. He thought he was taking half a Xanax he’d bought from a street dealer. He’d been suffering from anxiety, and the pandemic hadn’t helped. He’d run through his health insurance’s therapy allowance, so now he was self-medicating, as so many do.

He took half a Xanax, went to sleep, and never woke up.

You might argue that this was an unintentional poisoning, but there is clear intent and clear understanding of the consequences on the part of the people who are manufacturing, distributing, and selling these drugs. Manufacturers are adding fentanyl because it’s cheap and because it creates a quick addiction—thus a guaranteed profit. The deaths aren’t affecting their bottom line, so they’re ignoring them, spiking even “prescription” drugs like Xanax with enough fentanyl to kill someone.

So if you think it’s just opiate addicts who are dying, think again. A kid who thinks they’re buying a relatively safe “party drug” can end up addicted or dead from a drug they didn’t even know they were taking.

How that conversation would go now

Here’s where I imagine myself sitting with that baby in my arms now rather than at the end of a very different millennium. Then, we were concerned about the government harming our child who had just been acting as teens have throughout human history. Now, the fear is of a much deeper, much more permanent harm perpetrated by people we can’t vote out of office.

I really don’t know what we’d say.

My heart goes out to parents who have young teens now. These years when our kids are forming their sense of self are so fraught with danger even when someone isn’t willfully putting them in harm’s way.

Let kids know the risk

Young people are dying now. Sadly, the mainstream media seems to be ignoring it, or maybe families are embarrassed and don’t want to admit why their child died.

I wish more families of victims would speak out and educate other parents about what’s happening. I hope that parents are listening and not just falling back on stereotypes—”That would never happen to our kid.”

My article contains tips for talking to your child about drug use, as well as information about how and when to use Narcan/naloxone.

Resources:

• Read my article in Growing Up in Santa Cruz.
• Song for Charlie is a family-run nonprofit charity dedicated to raising awareness about ‘fentapills’ — fake pills made of fentanyl. The website offers parent educational materials.
• Santa Cruz ​County Health Department’s list of tips for considering whether an adolescent has a problem with alcohol or other drugs.
• Community Prevention Partners addresses ​​youth and community safety through sustainable alcohol and drug prevention efforts.
• SafeRxSanta Cruz County offers support for prevention, increased treatment access, and evidence-based harm reduction practices, to improve community well-being and save lives. 
• This poster has lots of good information about different pills that have been found spiked with fentanyl and how to recognize the signs of an overdose.

• If you are in California, you can get Narcan from any pharmacy. The pharmacist can write you a prescription, and you don’t have to have a reason. Health officials recommend that everyone have some at home—if not for your own family, possibly for someone who visits your home. You can also get it free from most public and nonprofit addiction services.
• On my blog: Parenting and Drugs: This isn’t 1978

Podcasts:

• Listen to my full interview with Rita Hewitt of SafeRX Santa Cruz, in which we focus on fentanyl and its effects on youth.
• Listen to my interview on KSQD with Rita, Dr. Jen Hastings, and Dr. Casey Grover about drug use, addiction, and the best ways to combat them in our community.