Category: Health

The value of the personal touch….online!

Posted on by Suki
This photo is of a group of students who met for the first time. They are members of a long-running writing group and it was as if they were old friends…because they are even though they’ve never met IRL.

In my summer off from teaching online at Athena’s, I didn’t stop working. I read books, updated my classrooms, emailed with students and parents, consulted with our wise Athena (a.k.a. Dr. Kirsten), and sat in a circle on a lawn with some of my longtime students.

Wait, don’t I teach online? Isn’t online teaching all about being separated from your students?

Yes! And No!

Teaching is about connecting

One of my most important jobs as an online teacher is finding ways to connect with my students personally even though we are not in the same room, the same state, and even sometimes the same country. It’s a tricky part of online teaching.

This summer I got to see the fruits of my labor when I was hired to speak at a conference that, it turned out, a good number of Athena’s students would attend. I declared a time and place for the meeting and then, well, decided I’d have to wing it.

30-some homeschoolers meet on a lawn…

If I’d been a classroom teacher, I would have had physical memories to draw on: I could have brought familiar items from the classroom or done activities we’d already done together. But what would we do in an outdoor space?

The first challenge was to get everyone to make a circle. School is very good at teaching kids how to form geometric shapes. Homeschool, not so much!

Once we’d done it, though, I felt like we were back in our Blackboard classroom (which had developed ninety-degree weather, well-watered grass, and slices of watermelon being passed out by a parent). All the eager hands; those familiar voices chiming in with their creative, intelligent, and wacky ideas; and the smiles, though this time they were real rather than emojis. 😊

And then we connected

Here I am presenting at the conference.

When I asked the students what they liked about Athena’s, they pointed out everything that we teachers hope to convey: a safe space for all kinds of kids; a place where they could express their ideas; a place where they could explore a wide variety of topics with teachers who love what they teach and other passionate students.

I noticed that Dr. Kirsten had to wipe away tears!

Online education fills a need

The fact is, yes, we teach online. But no, we aren’t disconnected from our students. Online learning will never replace physical get-togethers, but it it fills a need that many students have. Our students feel that they are part of a community of kids and adults who share values and passions.

For me, the experience was one of the most memorable of my teaching career. Nevertheless, I’m happy to be back in our webinar room….though it is BYO sunshine, grass, and yummy watermelon.

6 Takeaways from Research on Teen Brain Development

Posted on by Suki

Not every parent is the brain research junkie I am, so I thought I’d sum up some important findings from current research into teen brains. It turns out that everything your parents thought they knew about your teen brain was probably wrong. Such is the way of science that some of the information below will be wrong soon, too, but science is making progress on understanding what sort of beast we’re dealing with once the hormones hit.

In short summary:

  1. The teen brain is changing rapidly
  2. Decision-making abilities are not fully formed
  3. Social connections matter more, for better and for worse
  4. What teens put in their bodies can have a permanent effect on development
  5. Teens need sleep!
  6. Teens need adults

In longer form:

The teen brain is changing rapidly

It used to be thought that teens were pretty much done being formed and it was All Their Fault when they didn’t make good decisions. More recent research throws that idea into the garbage bin of history. Teen brains are going through huge changes, and are significantly different from adult brains well into their twenties. Where childhood was a time of forward growth and learning, the teen years are a confusing time of reorganization, throwing stuff out, and trying out new, incompletely formed abilities…

Decision-making abilities are not fully formed

…Such as decision-making. Remember when your child was two and said, “I can do it for mySELF!”? Now your teens really can do it for themselves, sorta. They have big capable bodies, adult-size sentences come out of their mouths, and many have suddenly developed a very advanced case of strong-opinion-itis.

The thing is, their brains don’t work like adult brains yet. The much-prized pre-frontal cortex of the adult human is still developing and underused. Teens tend to base their decisions on emotion, which is why they seem to change their decisions daily, hourly, and sometimes within the same sentence. When teens do make well-thought-out decisions, it’s hard work for them, much harder than for adults.

We adults have the unenviable task of supporting them in their decision-making and watching as they make bad decisions. We have to let them make bad decisions and watch them fail. And hardest of all, we have to figure out when it’s time to step in and be the “bad guy” because a decision is too disastrous to let go.

Social connections matter more, for better and for worse

I notice that articles for parents are almost always about the negative effect of teens’ need for social connections and confirmation, but really, this is largely a good thing. We want our teens to learn to be part of a social group that requires them to control their own impulses and make decisions about group participation. As adults, they will no doubt have to stand in line at the DMV, and these skills will come in handy.

We parents can support the good side of this need for social acceptance. One wise mom told me that she made sure that her house was always stocked with snacks and she was available to give rides…that way she knew what sort of trouble her kid was getting into. Another wise mom made sure to dole out hugs to all the teens that came to her house, making it clear to them that she trusted them and understood their need for social connections.

What teens put in their bodies can have a permanent effect on development

I am in no way an anti-drug crusader, but the research I’ve read should definitely give us all pause. Vaping, for example, seems relatively innocuous. But it turns out that kids who vape on a regular basis essentially turn themselves into permanent addicts. Their brains adapt to the nicotine and show permanent changes. And kids may play around with smoking weed (especially now that it’s legal in so many places), but heavy use results in irreparable changes to teens’ brain functions. This all goes for prescription drugs as well, so the early teen years are a good time to reassess. Educate yourselves, and your teens, about health, nutrition, and brain development.

Teens need sleep!

Another way of saying this is: Teens aren’t lazy! (Well, not necessarily.) They need more sleep than most of them are able to get. I highly recommend weekly planning meetings with your teens, and one of the topics can be “how are you going to get enough sleep this week?”

Teens need adults

You may be reading this still shaking from yet another interaction where your teen treated you as something lower than the dirt they were walking on. Your teen may ignore you, may make fun of you, may criticize your “mom jeans,” and may infuse all family activities with Attitude. However, your teen needs you, and this is not the time to write them off. Although helicoptering isn’t the answer, checking out isn’t, either.

No matter what, remember that when your teen looks back from adulthood, they are going to remember that you were always there supporting them. They are going to remember the advice you gave them. They not only will probably forgive you for most everything they blame you for now; they will probably also appreciate how right you were in some instances.

So we parents just have to power through this. We have to know that we are important and feel confident that we are doing our best to support our teen’s developing brain and body. Though you may feel that you’re getting performance reports from a boss who hates your work on principle, it’s a job we have to continue to do with love and confidence.

Resources:

Parenting to avoid regret

Posted on by Suki

In my previous post, I wrote about fear porn, journalism which is designed to make parents fearful of the choices they have to make now. Parents who get immersed in this crap that’s being spewed at us become immobilized, fearful that everything we do may put our children at risk in some nebulous and undefined future.

I advocated rational decision-making, in which parents make a decision based on the information they have on hand. Then, I wrote, parents should simply move on. Regretting past actions doesn’t change the past action, doesn’t change the results, and certainly doesn’t make us better or happier people.

I always want to make sure on this blog to say that I am not setting myself up as an example of perfection in parenting. I believe that parenting is a messy business, and we are all just doing the best we can with the tools we have available to us. The reason I write about it is that I feel that parents exchanging information and ideas has transformed parenting—I hope my contributions help transform it for the positive.

So here’s my:

Case study in avoiding regret

At the age of eighteen months, one of my children was diagnosed with a congenital disorder. It was a physical part of the child’s organs that did not work correctly. At the time, all the data that had been accumulated on this particular disorder said that the best practice was to put the child on a low daily dose of antibiotics and watch to see if the body would correct the problem on its own.

I had no reason to question this information. The science was sound—this was a relatively common problem and my child was in no way special or different. (Though to us, of course, he’s very special and different!)

We went with the standard treatment. He ended up taking a daily dose of antibiotics for three years, then had the problem surgically repaired once it was clear that he was in the small percentage of children in whom the disorder doesn’t correct itself with no intervention.

Simple story, right?

Like many things medical, it wasn’t so simple. The human body is incredibly complex. We may know more about how outer space works than we know about how the human body functions. Medicine is still a frontier. We think of the barbers who sawed off limbs in the 17th century as barbarians; in fifty years, doctors will probably see the doctors of today as barbarians. It’s all relative.

In the time after he went on antibiotics, data started coming in that suggested that longterm antibiotic use might have some pretty wide-ranging negative effects on the body. You may have read about the human microbiome. That’s all the stuff that’s living in your gut. It turns out that the stuff living in your gut doesn’t just affect your digestion. It may be related to, in no particular order:

  • autoimmune disease
  • depression
  • autism
  • eating disorders

And so on.

So in putting our child on antibiotics for three years, we were now learning, we may have…

Stop right there

This is the problem: we may have. I put an underline and an italics there, because here’s where I’m getting to my main point.

We can’t know what result our decisions had on our child’s future

That’s right, we can’t know. Perhaps, without the therapy, our child would have lost a kidney, been on dialysis for the rest of his life, or even died. Perhaps our child would have been just fine.

But perhaps, just perhaps, the antibiotic therapy actually caused other issues that have come up in the meantime.

This is when we need to depend on our belief that rational decision-making is always the best approach

Sure, I could spend days, weeks, months, and years in regret. I could feel like I have to do something to “fix” the result of making our decision.

But the fact is, we made the decision armed with all the knowledge we had at the time. Certainly, some scientists were already studying the microbiome and had suspicions about its connection with various human maladies. But that doesn’t change one fact.

We made the right choice with the information we had on hand at that time

If you haven’t read my previous piece, please go read it so that you can understand the context. Do I suspect that the antibiotic therapy may have contributed to some issues that we faced later? Yes.

Am I tempted day in and day out to regret my choice?

Of course.

Do I regret doing what was seen as medically necessary for my child?

Absolutely not.

I made the best decision I could make at the time with the information I had on hand.

It’s time to move on now, and we’re moving on. Our child is a healthy, wonderful teen. Our family is secure in the knowledge that we always try to make the best decisions we can, and we try not to beat ourselves up over what we might perceive as past mistakes based on our current knowledge.

Parenting is a messy business, and we are all just doing the best we can with the tools we have available to us.

Parenting in the age of fear porn

Posted on by Suki

Faced with clickbait articles about all the harm we can do to our children, it’s hard to know how to make decisions. Parents are facing very real distress at the onslaught of competing voices. I am not immune, of course, but I have made a choice.

I advocate rational decision-making based on using the information we have, then moving forward with our lives without regret.

Here’s why:

Rational decision-making is a process of watching accumulating data and making the best choices given the data we have.

There’s a great temptation to parents to try to figure out what to do based on our fears of the future. Will we regret making this choice?

But there’s no reason to regret your past choices if they were made based on the best data you had at the time. Rational decision-making allows you to let your future self off the hook.

Fear journalism is not there to inform us or help us in our decision-making.

Fear-based articles are not there to inform us. They are there to titillate us. People get off on reading scary stories about what other people “did to” their kids.

I remember what it was like when states started enacting seatbelt laws: I kept running into stories about how “my kid/mother/friend” was “thrown clear” in an accident and “would have died” if s/he’d been in a seatbelt.

Of course, the data on seatbelts is absolutely, unequivocally clear: they save lives. For every person who might have been “saved” by not being in a seatbelt, millions really are saved.

Make the right choice for now and don’t regret it later if more data proves that choice wrong.

It’s very common for parents now to agonize over choices they have to make for their children. Many of these choices are medical, and involve a new vaccine, therapy, or treatment. The best way forward in all of these cases is to check out the reasons for the treatment, what the current understanding is, and go forward with the treatment if there is no clear reason not to. In the future, accumulated data might suggest that the risk of that particular treatment outweighs the benefits in certain cases. Or maybe a commonly accepted treatment will be replaced by something better. But that won’t change the rightness or wrongness of an individual choice at this time.

The right choice is to do what current understanding says is the best choice, and not regret it later.

Decisions made based on fears of what might happen aren’t rational and don’t have good outcomes in general.

Just because sometimes they turn out to be “right” doesn’t make them rational. Most of the time decisions made out of fear have worse outcomes than rational decisions. But there’s very little money in publishing stories about bad things that didn’t happen: “My Kid Didn’t End Up in a Wheelchair Because of Polio” isn’t very enticing clickbait.

People seek out titillation.

We are living in an age of fear porn.

Parents are the most vulnerable victims of fear-based journalism. We are making choices for other humans that could change their entire lives.

One area where fear-based journalism has had a great effect is vaccines. We read and hear these fear stories daily. “My child got a vaccine and this horrible thing happened.”

But the data on vaccines is abundant and the scientific community continues to agree: The overall effect of vaccines on our population is a clear positive. If you like to get your journalism with a dose of humor and foul language, check out this piece by John Oliver. If you like a point-by-point refutation, this is a good one from Australia. If you want links to the data, start at the CDC.

With vaccines, the only rational decision to make is to go with the data we have on hand and move forward. Fear of what might happen leads us to make irrational decisions. Understanding the data lets us make the right choice for now and move on.

How we live and parent is our choice.

You don’t have to go with the crowd and live a life based on clickbait-generated fear. You get to make the decision about how to live your life.

The rational way to get through this life of too many competing voices is to make the best decision based on the information we have on hand and move on. But this is hard to do when we are facing the onslaught of fear journalism.

Reject fear porn.

Avoid clickbait, let your future self off the hook, and stick with the science.

Also, listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

More on this topic:

Beauty and the modern human

Posted on by Suki

Recently a Facebook “friend” (a young woman I was in a class with for a few months) posted that she had been deemed “ugly” by an app that purports to be able to divine whether someone is “beautiful” using math.

Apparently, her “interocular distance” was too wide, and some other such nonsense.

Well, yes, it’s nonsense—but I’m sure that mathematically, it’s true. This young woman is striking by anyone’s measure. She doesn’t look like anyone else. Her eyes are noticeably far apart. But does that make her ugly?

I was lucky to have been assigned John Berger’s Ways of Seeing as college reading. No doubt it’s terribly dated now, but at the time, it was mind-bending. Using the nineteenth-century oil painting tradition, he showed how “beauty” in many instances is actually more about power and ownership.

Real beauty isn’t perfectly symmetrical faces. It’s not female bodies molded to fit an ideal invented on a computer screen. It’s not the perfection of a Photoshopped landscape that removes all irregularity and dullness.

The Botticelli head cut out by John Berger in the opening sequence of “Ways of Seeing”

When I think about things I find beautiful, I know that it’s the imperfection that sets them off. Why would I find beauty in a face so generically perfect I wouldn’t be able pick her out on the street? I read somewhere that all the most successful actors have something “wrong” with their faces.

But this is the joke our modern culture is playing on us: On the one hand, we prefer imperfection. We find people attractive who have all sorts of imperfections. Sometimes the imperfection itself is what attracts people.

On the other hand, we are pressured to change our own selves to make ourselves more and more perfect, less and less interesting. Women especially, but men more often now, fuss about their faces, their butts, their ankles, their hair. In a world where we actually can change almost any aspect of our looks, people are starting to think that they should.

The problem is, perfection isn’t attractive in the literal sense of the word: humans are not attracted to perfect specimens. I read recently about an experiment that underscores this: viewer were shown two photos of the same subject. One photo was a selfie, approved by the subject; the other was an informal photo taken by a researcher. The viewers overwhelmingly choose the non-selfies as “more attractive.”

This is from a 17 Magazine article about taking the perfect selfie. What a perfect illustration of how repulsive we can make ourselves look when we are trying to please other people!

In other words, what we do to ourselves in the name of social acceptance may actually have the opposite effect. When thong underwear were all the rage, for example, a male of my acquaintance confessed to me that he found panty lines very erotic.

I was very heartened by the responses that came from my “friend’s” real friends: They were appalled, amused, outraged. One of her friends posted something like, “the male half of this species begs to differ.”

I feel like each one of us needs to consider that everyone we meet is subject to this sort of media onslaught. We need to appreciate each other’s imperfect beauties, and do it out loud. We need to appreciate the individual ways in which people make this world more beautiful, whether it’s by what they wear or what they do.

Our culture is hell-bent on making us all feel like ugly, repulsive creatures who need to submit ourselves to daily torture to pay for our sins.

I beg to differ.

 

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