Category: Culture

It's International Year of Forests! Call your lawyer today!

Posted on by Suki

Maybe I’m just in a mood tonight, but I just bumped into something that really rubs me like velcro on Berber carpet: I saw a note somewhere that this is International Year of Forests, as designated by the UN. I love forests. I live in one. Cool, I thought. I clicked on the link, and got to the very nice UN site about this designated year. Cute logos on it. I notice a little note at the bottom: “Logo guidelines and waiver form.” Hm. Click on that link and get a PDF:

All entities interested in using the International Year of Forests logo for information purposes must apply to the UN Forum on Forests Secretariat. When requesting approval, the entities should provide:

␣ A short statement of identity (nature of organization and its objectives);

␣ An explanation of how and where the logo will be used; and

␣ A Waiver of Liability (please see page 5) must be signed by the entity requesting to use the logo

What? Perhaps I’m just channeling my inner Libertarian here, but is this really necessary? Do I, Suki Wessling of Santa Cruz County, California, need to sign a waiver for the UN in order to display a logo? One that I think is pretty? One that promotes love of forests? One that is, fer gawd’s sake, disseminated by a body whose motto is “It’s Your World”?

Heck, it’s my world, so here’s the darn logo:

The UN logo -- in 6 languages!
The UN logo -- in 6 languages!

So sue me.

It’s amusing to channel other political persuasions on occasion, but back to my regularly scheduled liberal. We now have a Democrat in the governor’s mansion and do I think things will get better?

In particular, the things I’m interested in: schools, health care, funding for important services that have made the life of the 21st-century Californian one that people around the world envy?

Well, not really. I think there’s a systemic problem here, and no one has figured out how to deal with it. The problem is this: If you like your government-funded services—pick your favorite—you have to allow your neighbor to like his (or her) government services. So perhaps you value well-maintained roads and quick emergency response. Well, you have to deal with the fact that a neighbor on one side values food stamps for the poor and free women’s shelters, and the neighbor on the other side likes subsidies for his industry and the tax break he got for his big, gas-guzzling SUV (owned by his business, of course).

So you might be tempted to say, hey, I think we should only pay for necessary government services, and if you’re like most of us, you think the necessary ones are the ones you value and use.

But if you’ve signed on to government services, you have to deal with this package deal problem: none of us will ever agree which ones are really vital. All of us will agree that there are some that we think make our lives and the lives of our neighbors better. But which those are? We’ll never, never agree.

So I’ll call our systemic problem the Package Deal Problem. I want more money and less bureaucracy for public schools. So I have to give a nod to something I think is totally ridiculous (Got Milk?) because we’re in a democracy here, and the one thing we can agree on is that we don’t agree.

So frankly, no, I don’t think that having a Democrat signing bills will do much. What can he do? Our state is in a perpetual state of government gridlock. We can’t even agree to disagree and do a “simple up-or-down vote” (as Republicans say when it’s to their benefit). We have our state government set up to fail. It’s supposed to provide all the services that we and all our neighbors want, but it’s not supposed to raise the taxes necessary to pay for those services.

Cities have been failing—going bankrupt—at a steady trickle lately. Counties and states aren’t far behind. We have to agree to pay for the services we want, or we’re all going to end up living in our big piles of garbage while we argue with our governments about who is supposed to pay for hauling it away.

It’s a Package Deal, but the package is so stinky, none of us wants to be the one to take the responsibility of saying it’s ours.

Just haul it to the dump, OK? We can keep lowering taxes and raising services and driving faster and faster to get away from the stench.

A problem of definition

Posted on by Suki

I have two wonderful and rather intense children. Our days can often be quite lovely. Often there’s a lot of argument and obstinacy. But all in all, we make it through our days pretty well.

This is not how I would have described my family a few years ago. When my daughter hit the toddler stage, it was as if our family had been sucked into a hurricane. All the wisdom written about in parenting manuals and all the advice from highly experienced early childhood teachers just simply did not apply. Something seemed wrong.

It all came to a head when it became clear that school was not a place our daughter was going to thrive. In fact, it seemed to be a fight to the bitter end: either school would destroy her, or she would destroy the school.

All of this led us to the office of a well-regarded child psychiatrist, who, with very little attention paid to the little girl in front of her, started talking about “rapid onset bipolar disorder.” We left the office feeling like something was wrong. After some discussion and reading, we decided not to return.

I’d read enough about this so-called disorder to smell a skunk. Parents like us are desperate, yes. We find no help in traditional parenting techniques, certainly. Our lives are turned upside-down by one person, definitely. But to say that our brilliant, wonderful, creative daughter was mentally ill? This was a step we just couldn’t take. We didn’t go any further than that, and here we are today. Our days can actually be pleasant and sometimes even border on serene.

A lot of parents are taking that other route, but I don’t blame them. A well-respected professional tells them that their child has a mental disorder. Their lives have been sucked into a hurricane. There is even a drug the child can take! A return to normalcy is promised.

Problem is, it’s all based on misinformation and misunderstandings, and I’m not the person telling you this. It’s the person who wrote the book on mental disorders.

There is an excellent article in Wired Magazine this month about Allen Frances and his crusade against DSM-5, the upcoming update to what our nation’s psychiatrists define as mental illness. Though the article spans many topics having to do with DSM-5, the paragraph that caught my eye concerned Frances’ dismay over how the DSM-IV, of which he was lead editor, affected one particular mental illness that hadn’t even existed before:

Shortly after the book (DSM-IV) came out, doctors began to declare children bipolar even if they had never had a manic episode and were too young to have shown the pattern of mood change associated with the disease. Within a dozen years, bipolar diagnoses among children had increased 40-fold. Many of these kids were put on antipsychotic drugs, whose effects on the developing brain are poorly understood but which are known to cause obesity and diabetes.

The article goes on to point out that the most influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar in children had been paid by Johnson & Johnson, the maker of the drug used to treat it.

The Wired article is not online yet, but you can read Frances’ argument in Psychiatric Times. Reading this doesn’t make me feel smug; it makes me feel ill. I am so sad for all those families whose real problems were caught up in a fad. I am so sad for all those kids who are being left with lifelong health problems from the drugs they took. I’m especially sad that even if they choose to stop today, what’s been done to them cannot be undone.

Dealing with a difficult and unusual child is never easy. Perhaps the answer will involve drug treatment, though it doesn’t always. I’ve written before about the various steps we’ve taken, and how it has affected our lives both good and bad. The process has been infuriating, isolating, depressing, maddening. The route we chose to take was slow-moving and indefinite. But at every point on this slow-moving journey, we could have turned onto a new path. We could, and did, question the choices we were making. We made a choice to let our child be who she was, to work with what we had, and see if we could find a healthy path for her.

The drugs, we knew, would always be there if we chose to use them. But we could never look at drug therapy with the cavalier attitude of that psychiatrist, who seemed only to be thinking about pacifying the hurricane now, not how to work with it longterm.

I’m so glad that Allen Frances is sticking his neck out for all those other kids, whose parents didn’t feel they had a choice. And I hope that the people writing the new DSM-5 understand the awesome responsibility that comes with defining those parts of children’s behavior that are mental illness. I hope that they look down on the floor and really see that little girl they are fitting into their box.

The eight-year-old singing seamstress

Posted on by Suki

I see by the date of my last post that I’ve been gone a while. To give you a bit of perspective, this is what hits me come late November:

  • Thanksgiving
  • Daughter’s birthday
  • Husband’s birthday
  • Chanukah at our house
  • Christmas at my parents’ house

See? You don’t have it so bad after all with just two holidays! It would probably be OK except for the way that Chanukah bounces all over the place. Darn lunar calendar. Just when I get a fix on Chanukah that spans Christmas, I get Chanukah in November. Oy.

But daughter’s birthday leads me to my rant of the day, or rather, sage advice of the day. Too tired to rant.

Daughter loves sewing. She always enjoyed making little things by hand, then friend Heddi got ahold of her and she joined Heddi’s sewing club. Now, she is simply mad about sewing.

The other day, I had to tell daughter that I was sorry to inform her, but she couldn’t only do sewing in homeschool. She looked at me with that newly minted eight-year-old dismissive stare. And went back to sewing.

Till the darn machine jammed and she was crying again.

Now, sewing and crying have always gone hand-in-hand for me, but I thought with her things might be different. I admit that I got so mad at my old sewing machine, which never worked, that I gave it away. That was the better fate I’d chosen: if I hadn’t found someone to haul it out of my house, I would have pitched out a second story window.

So as her birthday approached, it occurred to me that what we needed was a sewing machine. One that worked, preferably. So I set the grandmas on the problem, and we decided on a cheap, cute thing that would probably break in a couple of years, but at that price, we could just buy a new one, right?

Now, you think I’m a writer because I have wisdom to impart, but I’m here to tell you today that I’m a writer so that I can find my various patches of idiocy and publicly purge them.

What was I thinking?

Am I not the writer who tells you to spend more money and buy local? Am I not the homeowner who will tell you that every piece of cheap junk I ever had cost me more time and in the end more money than buying the high-quality thing to start with?

Yeah, well I guess I’m just flappin’  my lips here, because I didn’t take my own advice. I e-mailed a link to the grandmas. A cheap, cute machine that she’d love. Free shipping!

For a year or two, I thought.

Try a day or two. The darn thing kept jamming. Finally I called a service center over the hill and he told me that I should already have told myself (and what Heddi, who is the patron saint of sewing machines, also told me): This was not the sewing machine for an eight-year-old girl. It was cheap. It was picky. It was going to keep on jamming. It was eventually going to get itself thrown out a second-story window. That would be its good fate. If it met its end on a bad day, it was going to become a science experiment, and the death would be slow and painful.

So we sent it back. I hauled my kids into a wonderful local sewing machine shop, Judy’s. Judy showed us the machines that would suit a highly creative, eight-year-old singing seamstress. I bought it. It’s now on our dining room table, happily purring away.

Now, this story may have an end that hasn’t come yet, but tonight’s end is a happy one. We stayed local. We spent more money. We got a good, solid thing (it even has some metal in it!) that will serve us well and make us happy.

Well, OK, I will admit that personally, I will still view it with suspicion, no matter how well it works. But for an eight-year-old singing seamstress, it’s a dream come true.

Screentime revisited

Posted on by Suki

Longtime readers of my blog know that I am not a convert to the belief that unlimited screentime is fine for kids. There are plenty of homeschoolers who do, in fact, believe this, and they have their arguments. In this case, I will respectfully agree to disagree.

I had no opinions about kids and TV, really, until I had my son. One night, while I nursed my baby, my husband and I were watching our then-traditional Thursday night TV: Seinfeld, Friends, and ER. Our son was young, probably only a couple of months old, but he was alert, interested in the world. And he was definitely interested in that TV. He kept popping off to watch it, mesmerized.

I reacted as I react to almost everything: research.

At that point, not a lot of good research had been done, but what had been done seemed clear enough to me: Kids who watched a lot of TV had lower IQs, lower grades in school, lower attention spans, higher body fat.

Because he was the first, it was an easy choice. We turned off the TV. Until he was about 4, we watched almost no video at all, except the occasional Muzzy when I still was deluded enough to think that we’d all become fluent Spanish speakers.

Our second child came into a house with no TV. But after it was clear that she was a different sort of child, and after it was clear that preschool, then kindergarten, were just not going to work for her, I begged my sisters, who had not limited screentime: “Please, tell me what’s good!”

I hadn’t paid any attention to kids’ media, and I needed a break. I needed that electronic babysitter.

In other words, I gave in a bit in terms of screentime. But in reality, my kids went from waaaay weird (no screentime) to pretty darn weird (up to 1 hour a day so Mommy could sit in her office and type her brains out).

Meanwhile, the digital world became more enticing, and the research became more clear:

Too much screen-watching, no matter what type of screen it is, is not completely healthy for your child.

The unhealthy things are obvious:

  • Kids who watch a lot of TV and use a lot of video games are more likely to be obese and have the host of health problems to go along with that.
  • Kids who have a lot of screentime are more likely to have low IQs and low grades in school.
  • Kids who have a lot of screentime, especially unmonitored screentime, are more likely to be psychologically damaged, with their psyches, in one report I heard on the radio, similar to those of kids who grow up in war zones.
  • Screentime promotes ADHD-like behaviors: short attention span, excitement-seeking, lower tolerance for the slow-moving parts of life.

Let’s face it: TV is largely dumb, violent, sexist, and passive, reducing your kid to a passenger in a car that is totally out of control. Many video games, even the ones made for kids, are much the same.

But then there’s the other side. My husband and I spend much of our professional lives “online.” We use computers for our work. We are hooked into various types of media to give us news that feeds our work, networks that feed our professional lives, and yes, lots of dumb stuff. But we use the dumb stuff wisely: I am very good about being professional with Facebook, for example. I have “friended” a number of present and past real-world friends, but FB is mainly a way for me to receive news from organizations that I care about.

And there’s also the other side of the research: Yes, many kids who OD on screentime are freaked-out fat kids, but many of them also benefit:

  • Video games can stimulate reflexes and hand-eye coordination.
  • The decision-making skills of video game users seem to be quicker.

I think that as parents, our decision-making comes down to the same thing it always does: What are our values?

My husband and I met in Silicon Valley, working at a computer company. We have known many people who have spent way too much time in front of screens. Those people show the effects: They are largely obese (though sometimes unhealthily skinny), they lack social skills, they often have no life outside of the one they live online. My husband and I value the “real” world and want our kids to be healthy and successful in it. We want them to have interests outside of the world in their computers. We want them to be able to chat in real life with their grandmas as well as with the geeky kid next to them in an Internet cafe in Thailand.

We also want them to make up their own minds as to what is right, what is valuable, what is good. TV and increasingly, the Internet are attempting to take over people’s decision-making abilities. TV has largely succeeded with a segment of our population. Now it’s on to the Internet. Do you want someone else to tell your child what is good and right?

So we find ourselves walking that line: Yes, our kids use computers. Computers are tools, and why would you deny a child a hammer if what he really needs is to pound in a nail?

But no, we don’t think that unbounded screentime is good for anyone (not even adults). And we do believe that parents have the inescapable role as mentor and guide for their children. (In other words, even if you don’t serve as a role model for your kids, you’re serving as a role model for your kids. Get used to it, and decide to live the life that you want model for them.)

I have strong TV memories from my childhood: I’m from a family of 5 kids, with scientist parents. They decided that we could have one “TV night,” and that we would vote on what night that would be.

TV night was a treat for us! We would buy pop (Pepsi and Sprite), and pop some popcorn. We’d line up on the naugahyde couch (green, of course) to watch Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy. The shows didn’t really matter. The lesson we learned from this exercise was that TV — screentime — was a treat. The real world would still be out there, and we had to be ready to meet it.

But it was fine, about once a week, to sit back on that shiny, sticky surface, and enjoy what we knew was just entertainment.

Superman running in a race to nowhere

Posted on by Suki

I think it’s indicative of our times that there are two films about education making the rounds of theaters right now. Everyone seems to know that there’s a problem. Many people are sure they have the answer.

The places where we disagree are are simply these:

What is the problem?

What is the solution?

OK, so that should be easy to fix, right? Just kidding.

For background, you can read my review of Waiting for Superman here, and my review of Race to Nowhere here.

The easiest way to think of these films is as Superman, the Republican, and Nowhere, the Democrat. Superman as tough love, Nowhere as nurturing earth parent. Superman as quantifying and Nowhere as qualifying. That would be oversimplifying, but oversimplification is something both films had plenty of.

Here’s where the films agree:

Our schools are really not working. Our students are not happy. We aren’t producing the right sorts of students that are needed. We’re going about it all wrong.

But really, the films don’t even agree on what the problem is. According to Superman, the problem is unions, lack of flexibility, big schools, lack of government oversight, too much government oversight, low expectations, non-involvement of parents, and teachers.

According to Nowhere, the problem is too high expectations, too much homework, too much stress, over-involvement of parents, and cavalier attitudes by administration.

I think that both films are right, in the sense that for any reasonable problem you investigate, you’re going to find plenty of kids who fit the bill. And both films did a great job of finding those kids. Superman found kids who wanted to work harder, who wanted their parents to be involved, who wanted to be asked for more. Nowhere found kids who needed lower expectations, less work, less stress, schools less focused on numbers.

Neither film, true to what’s going on in general in our culture, spent much time talking to the teachers who are on the front lines of all this. Superman simply vilified them; Nowhere showed them as passive enablers of society’s worst attributes.

Both films suffered from what all 2-hour documentaries suffer from: lack of depth and oversimplification of the issues. I got the sense, however, that Superman would not have benefited from a longer length because, frankly, the film-makers were trying NOT to look at the wider picture. They had a narrow thesis and they stuck with it; the film was not nuanced enough to deal with all the exceptions to the rules they were stating.  Nowhere, however, did attempt to do a quick tour of all the issues, and would simply benefit from the format of a PBS series instead of a film that tries to say it all in 2 hours.

What it comes down to is that these two films are a great opening to a much wider conversation. That conversation absolutely must include the undeniable fact that although we have the same rights, we are not all the same. We do not all need the same kinds of schools, the same kinds of instruction, the same levels of stress, the same kinds of teachers… or really the same of pretty much anything.

Superman suffered from the assumption that all neighborhood schools are failing, all charter schools are succeeding, and all kids would do better in the environment they were pushing.

Nowhere raised some very good points, and allowed for a bit more fluidity in the assumptions about what kids need, but it also didn’t speak for all kids, all schools, or all families.

In my wandering about the educational opportunities where we live, trying to place two very different kinds in an environment that suits them, I have seen the whole spectrum. It always comes down to this: For almost every school someone hates, someone else loves it. For almost every teacher who can’t reach your kid, there’s another kid she can reach. For almost every kid who is stressed out about a high level of expectations, there’s another kid who’s suffering because so little is expected of him.

What we need is educational choice. We need to admit that there is not one answer for every child, and we need to open up the possibilities for all children. I actually wrote about my vision for community schooling a few months ago, so I won’t go into details here!

I do hope that these films open up the conversation more: really, Superman and Nowhere could have quite a discussion if they both agreed to leave politics aside and talk about what’s good for all kids. All of us need to stop thinking quite so much about political clout and money, and a whole lot more about how to serve the needs of the students who walk in the doors of our public schools, no matter who they are today and who they will be tomorrow.

Now available