The Lamb Bomb

Story-time this morning, for no other reason than the fact that I was ruminating on how poorly adults can do things.

When you’re a kid, you think that adults are more than just sensible. You think they’re omnipotent, and that they know everything, that their views are more than just legitimate, they’re quite literally the unshakable orthodoxy.

And then there comes a period in every child’s life where the thin veneer of adult-truth evaporates revealing wobbly gnosticism. For me that happened quite early on, because like a few other kids in the 80s, my parents divorced. This is not a post where I re-litigate the poisonous immolation of two boomers at war – it’s all very predictable. What I will do is to tell you a story about how adults use kids to get at each other, for no other reason than to marvel at the fact that I am now older than my parents were at the time, and still marvelling at some of my contemporaries who are engaging in exactly the same behaviour. Some things never change.

By the time I was about 8 my parents had both ‘re-partnered’ and ‘the children’ would visit my Dad and his partner in the school holidays, twice a year.

Now, without getting too maudlin I’ll say I was not a happy kid. Things were not going well with my Mum’s partner. And, it was the mid 1980s. I was tall and skinny, an effect amplified by the fashions of the time. Bedecked in pastel ‘stirrup pants’ with my short hair shellacked in gel I resembled a pissed-off toilet brush. Socially, it was a bit of a low point.

So, I looked forward to holidays with my Dad, who was mostly working while we were visiting, but a comforting presence nonetheless. Dad lived in a pretty remote area and at the beginning of the holidays I acquired a sickly lamb from a neighbour that was immediately dubbed Schizo.

Being a miserable, introverted girl I latched onto that poor little animal like an organ transplant. Four times a day I’d mix up a giant bottle of powdered “Anlamb” and gently cradle Schizo while he bobbed his nugetty little head against my chest, slurping down all the milk, often shitting it straight back out again. Schizo had what my Mum referred to later as, ‘the scours’. This lamb was not destined for term three.

But Schizo kept me occupied for the two weeks of the school holidays which was undoubtedly the point. When the time came to go back to school I cried and cried at the thought of leaving Schizo behind, but was assured that he would be taken good care of, and that my Dad, who had never cooked so much as a plate of baked beans for his own children would assiduously stir up warm bottles of powdered milk several times a day for an undercooked lamb.

I hated returning home. Mum would attempt to soften the blow with a nice tidy bedroom and sometimes some new undies, such were the excesses of 1980s New Zealand. The following evening, after I’d returned from my first day back the Ritual Shaming Institute (school) Dad called. Pretty much the only time we had any contact with Dad was in person, twice a year. So when he called I knew something was wrong.

Dad had bad news. Schizo was, of course, dead.

I was devastated and cried for three days.

The beauty of his “play” never occurred to me until last night, when I was furnishing the latest episode of Epic Fails of Pet Husbandry for my daughter with the tale of Schizo the lamb whose only characteristic was attempting to shit himself inside-out every day.

I realised that My Dad and his partner had sourced the sickest lamb in the South Island for me to keep on death’s door, until five minutes after the car pulled out of the driveway at the end of the holidays, at which point they no doubt tipped the Anlamb down the plughole and left the animal outside for nature to tidy the ledger. And then they waited until I was home from school to deliver the news to my Mum so she could relay it to me after they were safety out of harm’s way. The Lamb Bomb.

Now, my Mum grew up on a remote sheep station and so her regard for sheep in general was murderous at its most generous. However, she also possesses a studied, impenetrable calmness that I like to refer to as, ‘The Rock’ and it was The Rock that listened gently as I recounted spending the entire holiday tipping endless bottles of powdered milk into Schizo’s warm carcass, his demise no doubt apparent to her from the moment I burbled out the teary words, ‘his Mum didn’t want him’. By the following day she was presented with an inconsolable child to deal with, whilst managing all the other usual crap that comes with full-time work and parenting.

I’m painting one team as the villain here but as anything who has had any experience with an acrimonious separation can tell you, there is always give and take. All parties covered themselves in glory during The War Years, but the lamb was a particularly apposite example.

The story about The Richardson’s Guinea Pigs was funnier.

Post Script; If you find yourself in a similar situation, the correct response is this; The next time the child visits (months later) you take the child to a paddock full of sheep and point at the happiest one and say, ‘There he is! With his flock! Isn’t he happy!’

Parenting is two parts wiping and one part lying.

What’s it for?

Sometimes people wonder about the point of something like sociology or cultural studies, but seldom seem to criticise the purpose of anthropology. Anthropology, as most ‘westoids’ think of it, is the practice of studying funny, non western cultures. At its core is an exoticism that renders ‘the other’ as simplistic and inferior. One might suggest that this is an artefact of the process itself – when an outsider makes abstract pronouncements about how ‘a society works’, it’s bound to come up with some over-simplifications.

Others, however, genuinely think that western society and culture is uniquely sophisticated and nuanced, and broadly structured around the Enlightenment principles of rationalism and scientific thought. To an anthropologist, this is the funniest idea yet.

If social media has brought us anything, it has elucidated and amplified the rich silliness that characterises a complex society, and has always done so. Indeed, as our collective ideas about how the world operates become increasingly self-referential, we reach new and ever more vertiginous pinnacles of silliness. The madness of crowds grows ever madder the more we listen to the crowd.

In the past I’ve considered two topics – the Covid19 pandemic and what we might call ‘gender business’. My views on both topics are fairly ordinary – I’m broadly convinced by the emergent realities of both. What interests me much, much more, is the development of orthodoxies around both topics. How are mainstream views constructed? How are deviant views presented? What’s normal? What’s not? What’s legitimate? What’s not?

Unsurprisingly, the final arbiter of all of these questions is some old fashioned ideas about power. Access to an ‘old fashioned’ education enabled me to broadly predict the shape of the discourse of both social issues. For example, in order to get a grip on the emerging Covid19 pandemic, I read a lot of scientific papers. Some of them were errant bullshit. Or, perhaps I should say, some of them were more ‘speculative’ than others. I used my general sense of scepticism to assess the veracity of these papers, but importantly, I could express my cynicism using some pretty ordinary language/notation that I learned as part of a fairly ordinary education in statistics. This is a privileged position.

Likewise, the gender debate. For the past few years, most western countries have broadly (and not uncontroversially) adopted a model of gender that relegated biological differences between humans as no more than a locus of potential discrimination – like having a particular skin colour (as one famous feminist, MacKinnon, recently stated). It followed, therefore, that our bodies could be seen as a kind of stage for our gender, and we could alter them in line with gender norms.

There are some obvious logical inconsistencies here. For instance, the ‘gender norms’ that one might attempt to bring one’s body in line with are based in a biological understanding of sex. Why would a person want to remove their penis in order to live ‘as a woman’?. In other words, if our physical bodies are incidental to our gender, why alter them?

Body modification is consequential. Removing one’s penis or breasts, or undergoing hormone therapy are interventions with long term ramifications. My ordinary education enabled me to look for other examples of body modification. This is, of course, not the first time in human history that we have sought to modify our bodies to bring them in line with socially defined gender expectations. Female circumcision/FGM is a long standing example of gender-affirming surgery, which of course, brings us full circle to anthropology.

Many western countries sanction FGM. Indeed, in Nordic countries, girls from African backgrounds are subject to spot-inspections upon return from overseas travel, as a deterrent against parents obtaining FGM for their daughters whilst overseas. That a western government would provide genital surgery to one group of young women to bring them in line with gender expectations, but outlaw it for another, is a perfect example of cultural relativism. What characterises many of the current debates are inconsistencies. In a system that is supposedly based on rationalism and equality, inconsistencies render the system fragile.

There are other historic examples – this is from the DES Action Group, a group representing women who were treated with synthetic hormones in order to prevent them from growing ‘too tall’. What was deemed ‘too tall’? Anything over 175cm, or about 5 foot 9 inches*. The shocking part of this particular story is the cavalier attitude with which the hormones were used – it has since emerged that this treatment resulted in a multi generational risk for particular cancers. To be clear – for a treatment to confer a cancer risk in not one, but two generations of daughters, is extremely rare.

So, it’s clear that the social discourse surrounding care for people who want to bring their bodies more in line with what they see as normal gender expression has a pretty patchy history – usually, but not always, because it has involved women’s bodies. Again – very old forms of power are extant.

And now, as 2023 rolls on, the social narrative around appropriate care for young people who express some discomfort between their own bodies and what they think the norms of gender are, is changing. I’m not across all the details, but the medical and legal protocols are changing and accessing this treatment is becoming more difficult.

Three years ago when I first found out about young people, mostly girls, having body modification treatment of some form or another, I thought of both of these examples – FGM and the tall girls. Both treatments eventually came to be socially sanctioned, both on the grounds that those involved were minors. It was very difficult for me to see how the current ‘affirmation model’ – where social and medical transition sat alongside one another as an inevitable ‘correction’ would not follow the same eventual fate.

I’m not personally invested – nor was a personally invested in the debate over the correct action to take during the pandemic, but I am absolutely fascinated by the way the discourse of what is considered legitimate, reasonable, knowable and ethical is developed and shifted over time.

I really feel that if anthropology has any value at all, it lies in its ability to look at our own social milieu as just as silly as everyone else’s.

*What’s really fascinating about this is that the estimates for the girls’ eventual height were inaccurate and that the ‘treatment’ actually did not alter the girls’ final height much at all (although for younger participants, there was a stronger effect). Researchers, in a retrospective study, compared two groups of girls – those who had received treatment and those who had not. The estimated the final height for both groups of girls. The average difference between the estimated height and the real height at adulthood was 1.1cm for the untreated girls and 1.4 for the treated girls.

from here – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18031324/

School bullshit

My kid went to our local public school. We live in a regional area, and when she started school, a good number of years ago, this place was quite a bit poorer than it is now. Gentrification, like lots of coastal Australia, is on the razzle.

That’s not to say our local school community was desperately poor, or particularly rough. Our neighbours still left their doors unlocked a lot, and although there was a burgeoning meth appreciation society, it wasn’t dire. So, off to school we went.

And that was when the violence started. My kid got bashed, every, single day . Some days she was just kicked or spat on, others she was knocked unconscious, requiring a 3 hour ambulance trip to the paediatric hospital. (That was her last day at the school). She also experienced sexual assault, from another 6 year old. She lost teeth, but also her sense of self. She could not understand why it was OK for kids to hit her, but not for her to hit anyone. ‘I guess I deserve it’ she told me once, through tears.

This is the logical conclusion for many kids who are bullied. The principal told me she was ‘quirky’, the implication being that she had it coming. It wasn’t just my kid either. Others were bashed, stabbed (rarely) and bitten (frequently). There was a special classroom for the especially violent kids, with bars on the windows and no sharp or heavy objects. This is a primary school. Many of these kids were, however, allowed ‘out’ of their enclosure during breaks, to hit and bite the other kids. One memorable child liked to pick up rocks about the size of a 2 litre bottle of milk, out of the garden, climb the tree and then drop them on the kids walking below.

To be clear, most children weren’t like this, but a few were, and if you happened to be the target (there seemed to be about 5 targets in every year), then you would cop it. One parent was attempting to get the NSW department of education to pay for her child’s physical therapy after he lost an eye during a particularly savage beating.

I was not aware how bad things were, until I pulled my kid out of school, and she felt she could tell me what was happening to her, in full. She was too scared to ‘narc’. I am ashamed to say that I let my kid stay at that school for a year and a half. Thankfully, the other local public school let her in, and although still bullied, she did not experience any more violence.

It would be easy for me to say that this was simply a better school, and it was. The principal was committed to her staff, and the school worked well. The teachers were happy, liked working with each other, and generally, things worked smoothly. The previous school was characterised by bullying, and the principal disregarded female teachers’ concerns in particular.

The fish rots from the head, as they say, but was this just a case of bad management? I don’t think so. The first school serviced a much poorer school population. There was a much higher number of kids with social and behavioural problems. 40% of the pupils’ caregivers were grandparents, not parents. A stressed, harassed and underfunded school environment is the perfect medium for growing lateral violence and workplace bullying. Every P&C meeting was completely dominated by discussions about violence, and how to manage difficult students. At the second school, every meeting was dominated by endless discussions about why the canteen wasn’t breaking even.

So, when it came to attending high school, we had two options – the online, ‘Aurora college’ (a selective school for regional kids, where my kid would sit in one room with about 10 others kids, and look at a computer all day, only leaving for lunch and recess, where these ‘nerds’ are relentlessly bullied, including physical violence. Or, I could send her to one of the two local private schools.

I chose to send her to the private school. And I’m not alone. Our local public high school is rapidly emptying, as its problems become more entrenched. People often say things like, ‘Oh it’s a shame when the good students leave because the poor students don’t have the company, help and inspiration of the good students’. This criticism is like lamenting the lack of oat milk in Goulburn SuperMax.

Not wanting to be bashed every single day is positioned as a boutique lifestyle choice.

I said to my kid’s previous principal,

‘If I had a boyfriend who bashed my child badly enough to knock out her teeth, or send her to hospital, I would be complicit in a crime. And yet, somehow everyone thinks it’s acceptable when it happens within the bounds of these four chain link fences?’

The reason that our two closest local public schools are losing students to the private schools isn’t because people are getting richer, or because they’re choosing a wholesome religious education, or because they’re snobs who think their child will ‘grow up with the right connections’ (the last one is particularly laughable – the kids all know each other here anyway). The majority send their children for two reasons; safety, and the ability to have a teacher in the classroom.

Until a few years ago, our local public high school had a program where violent students attended school ‘off campus’, at a facility about 2km from the main high school. This worked – these kids had a small gym, a teacher who was particularly good at dealing with them, and some tailored support – including lunch. It kept the rest of the high school population safe. And we’re talking about 500 kids (on the main campus), so it’s not like it’s a small number.

This program was cut, presumably due to inadequate funding. Now, I am told that the school goes into lockdown often, sometimes several times a week.

The second is staff – some kids go an entire year without a teacher. Maths, for instance, is something that actually requires a teacher, as many parents, even relatively well educated parents, don’t have knowledge of higher level maths. So, there are entire cohorts of children who just simply miss out on a maths education. There is so much angst about how to get regional students into university, but seemingly no recognition of the fact that these kids are emerging from regional high schools with a year 5 education.

There is so much prognosticating about education – how to improve scores etc. But the biggest, most obvious thing is the violence. If a student is constantly told that it’s OK for them to be beaten, they quickly learn that this is their self worth. And everything follows on from there. Everything.

Every time a school prioritises the rights of the abuser over the victim they send a clear message to both parties. It is the ultimate ‘teachable moment’.

Yes, there are other differences between the private and public school, but again, these mostly flow from the violence. The public high school, for instance, has no functioning doors on any of the toilets now, because they are constantly smashed, so there’s no point in repairing them. There are no plants in any of the gardens because caretaking staff spend all their time (and more) fixing the damage from violent students. There are limited facilities because they all get smashed.

Teachers leave because they are fearful of the violence, and know that teachers/staff cannot physically touch any students, so the students cannot be restrained if they attack someone. There are almost no volunteers to run all the usual things that happen at school, because older women (the majority of volunteers) are too scared.

And anyone who reads this and says, ‘Oh just expel the bad students’ doesn’t understand that this is not how it works. Students cannot be expelled. And, they shouldn’t be. But equally, they shouldn’t be in an environment where they can harm others. This is why the ‘off site’ school worked.

There are solutions to this stuff, but no one is remotely interested in them, they would rather resuscitate the endless culture wars about why people who send their kids to private schools must be rich wankers etc., etc., a conversation almost entirely furnished by those who have paid millions of dollars for a house that just so happens to be located in the zone of an excellent public school that they attend for free, in postcodes so exclusive they might as well be gated communities.

COVID19, childhood leukaemia and nuclear power plants.

How’s that for a title? It’s literally got it all.

I LOVE a conspiracy theory. Just when I despair at humanity’s thundering lack of imagination, someone joins the dots in a completely new way, and reveals a picture that doesn’t look like a cat at all. It’s like watching the X-Files in real time.

Epidemiology is also about joining the dots in creative ways. And, if you’re not into felting, it’s a serviceable hobby for the middle aged, ‘creative’ thinker. Nowadays, of course, everyone is an armchair epidemiologist, but only when it comes to COVID19. I’ve yet to notice the Twitter shut-ins hold forth on diabetes. YAWN.

Back to conspiracy theories.  Have a look at this town.

Pretty, isn’t it? This is Thurso, in the Thurso-Dounreay region of northern Scotland. It’s a lovely wee spot with good surfing, if you can eat enough shortbread to maintain a thick enough layer of insulation.

Here’s another picture:

This is Dounreay, just along the coast. Dounreay is The Capital of Scottish Ping-Pong.

OK, it’s not. That big round thing is a nuclear reactor.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Dounreay-Thurso’s children started getting sick. More specifically, the region surrounding the power plant had a statistically significant increase in cases of childhood leukaemia;

 Observed numbers of cases of leukaemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and observed to expected ratios with expected numbers based on Scottish national rates were determined. In 1968-91, 12 cases were observed compared with 5.2 expected in the zone < 25 km from the Dounreay plant (p = 0.007). In the latest period, 1985-91, which has not previously been examined, four cases were observed compared with 1.4 expected (p = 0.059). (from here)

Now, if you’re living in the shadow of a nuclear reactor and children start getting sick with leukaemia, it doesn’t take long to cast an eye towards Giant Ping Pong Ball of Doom. Which is, of course, exactly what everyone did.

I’m not going to get into the definition of clusters because that would be exceedingly dull and require another cardigan, but the short version is, you work out an average number of cases per kilometre (or some other metric) and then see if your cluster exceeds what’s expected. And Dounreay did.

Radiation is a bit of a bugger. So much so, that humans have been looking into it for quite some time. In the case of Dounreay, scientists measured the amount of radiation and unequivocally found that it was too low to be causing the cluster of disease. What they did notice, however, was that the region had experienced an influx of workers, which lead them to suspect another culprit;

Population mixing.

Population mixing simply describes the effect of one population with a more robust immunity mixing with another with a more naive immunity. It describes the process where anything from polio to influenza to measles wreaks havoc on a naive community.

Infectious diseases are a dead-set bummer, as 2020 has reminded us with startling alacrity.  Suddenly we’re all feeling a bit less Sex in the City and a bit more Inca.

As we’re all very aware, death is the infectious disease’s primary side effect, but there are other effects too.

It’s long been known that infectious diseases can cause other illnesses, long after the initial illness has passed, like rheumatic fever (which I have personally had the pleasure of experiencing) or the flu and its (still controversial) role in the development of adult onset schizophrenia.

Indeed, everything from diabetes to leukaemia gets the glad-eye from the infectious disease weirdos.

In Dounreay-Thurso, epidemiologists suspected that workers from outside the region were bringing novel infections with them, infections to which the children had little background immunity. It’s long been suspected that infectious disease has a role to play in childhood leukaemia. In 2018 British scientist Professor Mel Greaves released a hypothesis that argued that childhood ALL (the most common type of leukaemia) was likely caused by a combination of genetic predisposition and the timing of novel infections. It looks pretty promising, but then what would I know?

The idea is partly based on the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ – children aren’t exposed to the right kind of viruses and bacteria at the right times.

Which brings me to COVID19. Is COVID19 novel enough for our children’s immune systems to recognise it as a novel pathogen, thus causing an increase in childhood leukaemias in the near future? Or is it close enough to other coronaviruses that children already have some extant immunity?

I’m pretty sure the children of Dounreay-Thurso had some immunity to the kinds of infections that were being introduced into their communities. I mean, northern Scotland is remote, but it’s not Mars.

Conversely, as children are sequestered at home and sanitised like a Woolies chook every time they step outside the door, will this result in an increase of leukaemia, as young children fail to acquire exposure to every day viruses and bacterias? Obviously, in some countries, self-isolation is strongly delineated by class. Will this show up in the years to come?

Will we see a rise in childhood leukaemia as a result of widespread infection with COVID19?

Or, will we see a rise in childhood leukaemia as a result of the precautions we’ve taken against COVID19?

Or is childhood leukaemia simply too rare for these effects to form a signal above the noise?

This is the kind of thing I wonder when I’m lying in bed at night. It may also be why I don’t get invited out to dinner very often.

Mothered

I don’t often write about parenting. Actually, I don’t write about much of anything anymore, except books,

Lately though, I’ve been receiving cute videos of my niece, and remembering the days when we took videos of our toddler all day long. And then, just like that, we stopped. Kids stop being ‘cute’ in the simple, heart-melting way. But they keep being wonderful.

My kid is changing right now. She’s nine, and there’s an appreciable acceleration in her maturity and approach to everything. She’s just entering the cusp of adult-ness – peering into the exciting world of self-direction and mastery. I recently recounted her terrible sleeping habits as a toddler and small child to a friend. And then I remembered how when she started school she grew out of them.

First, there were the years where I would gently wake her up for school and help her get dressed, and then one morning I woke up to the sound of drawers being opened. She emerged, wooly haired, in her school uniform. I thanked the tunic’s designers for their oversight with the zipper – she still needed my help to get dressed. (There are multitudinous times that I reflect on my own childhood – mornings in my childhood house were dominated by getting out the door for my Mum to get to work. I had to dress myself and now I take simple pleasure in finding a pair of matching socks or brushing my kid’s hair).

After a change of school, she really got into springing out of bed, ready to charge into another day of tearing around the playground and crapping on about unicorns.

And then, about a month ago, she started hopping into bed with me in the morning, just for five minutes or so. Just to lie there and look at me, to trace her finger down my nose, to ask me gentle, silly questions about the day, or to tell her a story about goats, ‘in a funny way like you do’. My best guess is that she is calibrating herself for another busy day, and, after a quick cuddle, we get up and crack into things as normal.

Parenting is not always the same. I felt acutely aware of my role when she was a baby (obviously) and then a young toddler. I was a full time Mum and although her Dad was very involved too, I felt like she was oriented to me in a very basic, essential way. And then she grew older and more independent. I started working more, and her life was more structured around Dad. And now, as she grows into a new stage, she is reaching out to me more again. Partly this is for added security (I’m guessing this explains a bit of the morning cuddles) but partly I think she is watching me to see how it is to be a woman.

None of us are the perfect woman – I’m a bit of a shambles, I get distracted easily, I’m always going off on some bender about some random thing. I’m both focused and unfocused. A lot of the time I’m not well (physically that is. Mentally I’m SANE AS A FUCKING JUDGE).

I study lots of different stuff – sometimes all at once. Sometimes I worry that I’m not providing a very good model of being ‘focused’.

And I feel her watching me when I’m around other people – to see how to be with them, how to make friends, how to manage other people. Sometimes I’m troubled by this – as women we’re trained to consider the emotions of others constantly. But then again, I don’t want to erase my femininity, just to hold it to account.

The other day she asked me about a friend who kept trying to be nice to another girl who sometimes bullied her. I told her that if a boy is mean to another boy, he just thinks, ‘Well that guy’s a dick, I won’t play with him’. But when a girl is mean to another girl, the victim thinks, ‘I need to make this mean girl like me, because making people like me and affecting their emotions is something that I should do’.

How else can you explain why girls go back to their abusers, be they schoolyard bullies or loseroo boyfriends?

I’m going nowhere with this, other than to suggest that this parenting thing changes massively over time, but it’s pretty fabulous.

 

 

 

Conversations

Yesterday

Kid gets off bus buzzing and happy.

K. N says I’m her friend and she gave me this friendship ring. It’s because we’re friends!

M. Cool.

K. She also says I should wash my hair and conditioner it, because she said she could smell a funny smell and she thought it was me. She said I would look heaps better with shiny hair.

M. Well, you have a shower every day, and you’ve been swimming a lot, so I doubt you’re stinky. But OK, you can use conditioner if you want.

This morning

K. Mum, can I wear talcum powder today?

M. No, we’re walking out the door, it’s too late for that conversation Wait, is this cos N said you smelled bad yesterday?

K. Yeah, she said I should wear perfume, but I told her that my Mum only lets me wear talcum powder, and that’s only sometimes.

M. Ok, let’s get this straight. Sometimes girls tell one another that they should change something about how they look so they look prettier, or that they should smell different. They seem like they’re being nice and being your friend, but it’s actually called; ‘Being a bitch’.

[perhaps could have toned this down a bit, but the kid is used to this kind of straight talk chances are she’ll survive]

M. It’s a bit like bullying where someone tries to make you feel bad, but in this case they’re not necessarily trying to make you feel bad. It’s just a thing that girls learn to do to make other girls feel like they’re inadequate and that they need to do something to themselves to improve themselves.

K. But why do they do it at all?

M. There are a couple of main reasons. The first is that it makes money. Companies do this thing where they tell you there is something wrong with you when there isn’t. But then they make you think there is, and then they tell you they have a product that solves the problem. But there wasn’t a problem in the first place.

Have you got two legs? Are you tired of having two perfectly operational legs? Are the bottoms of your legs always in shoes? Yes! Well, we’ve got the solution, the new Suzuki 1000!

K. I don’t know what you’re on about Mum [exasperated but increasingly common look]

M. Look, companies tell you that something normal about your body isn’t normal. And then they sell a product that will change it. And then they become rich, by solving a problem that wasn’t a problem in the first place. That kind of thinking has become quite normal, so that’s one reason that girls think it’s OK to tell other girls that there is something wrong with them when there isn’t. Make sense?

K. Yep

The other reason is a thing called sexism. Have you heard of sexism?

K. No.

M. It sounds like sex, but it’s really just the old fashioned idea that girls should be pretty and smell nice, and play with dollies, and that’s all they can do. No science. No Operation Ouch. No maths. 

K. No maths? Whaaaat? But we all do maths at school.

M. Yeah, but with sexism girls think it’s OK to not be good at maths, because what’s really important is that they look pretty and smell nice. Imagine if you couldn’t go to the Physics Learning Labs because you were a girl.

[Look of abject horror as this freaky alternate reality sinks in]

M. Yeah, so that’s sexism. The important thing to remember is that N probably isn’t trying to be horrible when she tells you there’s something wrong with how you look or smell. It’s just something some girls are trained to do. So you can still be friends with her, but just be aware that you’ll hear this kind of stuff from time to time. What’s important is that you are aware that there is nothing wrong with you, and you get to decide if you want to change something about yourself. 

A good thing to ask yourself is; would this friend still say this stuff to me if I was a boy? Would N tell a boy that he smelled bad or should use conditioner in his hair?

K. No, I don’t think so.  

M. Ok, that’s sexism, consumerism and body politics covered. Now, try to remember to get your jumper out of your tote tray please, and have a look for missing containers. Here comes the bus.

 

Wooly thinking part two

Does autism correlate with high IQ?

Or is this simply a form of reverse stigma?

I’ve mused about the apparent paradoxes in the diagnoses of autism before but I’ve yet to find anything that’s making me think that most people with autism are bloody geniuses.

There is a study which suggests that many of the genes implicated in autism are also those implicated in high IQ, but, as anyone who knows anything about genetics will tell you, it’s very difficult to identify ‘a gene for X’. Basically, this is the equivalent of searching for The Bachelorette gene.

I particularly enjoyed this article that told me that people with ASD are brainy because compared to the general population,

Nearly half of children (46 percent) who have been diagnosed with ASD have an above average intellectual ability, however, it differs from person-to-person.

That’s right, almost fifty percent of those with ASD fall above the average! Which I guess means that 54% fall below the average. Which tells me nothing except that as a population people with ASD are slightly dumber than those without ASD. It depends, I suppose, on how they define ‘average’ – for me, I take a pretty straight up mean/median approach, (the sample was 10 000) but maybe they decided that the top of the curve was actually a table top.

I see you, kurtosis, and I place a plate and some chips on top of you!

How good is science reporting? I mean, really. This shit is top drawer.

Vote to marry a year ten brachiosaurus!

To begin – this shit, from the ABC, no less. IT’S NOT A FUCKING VOTE, it’s a survey.

The whole point of a survey is so the government doesn’t have to have a vote. I note however that this article comes to us from ‘Hack’, the Millennial’s ABC, so one doesn’t expect it to be remotely accurate because, like, facts are like so, like lame or something, meh.

Second – the NO media campaign ads.

Apparently these ads are going to be popular, because they have women in them. Women who don’t make any sense. Seriously, there are some coherent arguments against SSM (depending on your point of view) but these ads don’t encompass them.

Here’s a snippet of the dialogue;

If same sex marriage is passed it will be like overseas, where we don’t have a choice anymore….

That’s right, everyone will be forced to marry gay people.

Also, Concerned Mum of Tuggeranong (she’s the slightly cross eyed lady looking upwards towards the camera in faux penitence) says;

If same sex marriage goes ahead my year seven boy will be told it’s OK for him to wear a dress to school next year

Yep, that’s right – this survey will have far reaching consequences that may or may not bear any resemblance to the original fucking issue. Here’s the outtake,

If same sex marriage goes ahead my year seven boy will be told he can wear a fur-suit and marry a brachiosaurus! Won’t someone think of the children?

Quite. So let’s think about those children….well, while everyone was working themselves into a state about the ‘damage’ same sex marriage will do to children, these two stories emerged, one about toddler Braxton Slager who drowned in his foster carer’s illegal backyard pool, and the other, Braydon Dillon, the nine year old boy who was killed by his father in Canberra;

I heard Slager’s mother and father complaining vociferously about their son’s death on the radio. Apparently the state services had ‘let them down’. Even the Minister, Prue Goward, called them to apologise. The system is broken!

The media intimated that the toddler should have never even been placed in foster care. His mother said she didn’t want him placed in foster care, and that she was already the primary carer for other older children. Surely he could have stayed in the loving embrace of his mother?

But let’s be clear-eyed about this – FACS don’t remove toddlers because Mumsy doesn’t have the latest Wiggles DVD. In fact, a recent report showed just how hard it is to get FACS to do anything at all,

It shows in July 2012, the St Mary’s office closed 60 per cent of “risk of serious harm” reports without assessment due to competing priorities, while in June 2013 at Mt Druitt 86 per cent of reports were closed without assessment.

I’m prepared to entertain the idea that FACS thought the toddler was in immediate danger if he stayed with his mother.

It’s worth noting, given the statement above, that  FACS in Western Sydney might appreciate a lazy 122 million dollars, but no, we need it for the government sponsored survey that’s going to tell us exactly how bad it would be to officially recognise gay people who are already raising children perfectly well, as married.

Which brings me to Bradyn. I was thinking about him as I heard the ‘No’ campaigner telling ABC’s Patricia Karvelas that the best environment in which to raise children was with a mother and a father. Bradyn Dillon’s father hit him in the head,

…multiple times between December 2015 and February 2016.

The final beating, which caused previous brain injuries to re-bleed, was sparked over an accusation Bradyn had stolen lollies from his father.

Dillon had just beaten Bradyn with a belt as he was bent over naked on a coffee table.

“Bradyn told the accused he didn’t want to live with him anymore and that the belt did not hurt,” the documents said.

Dillon then forcefully hit and kicked his son in the face and head.

Bradyn’s mother had contacted authorities multiple times to report this abuse, although for some reason Bradyn couldn’t go and live with her. I won’t speculate as to why. Once again, we witness the failure of authorities to protect a child at risk. 122 million probably wouldn’t go astray there either.

Then, still on the subject of children, I see this morning that the Catholic church has come out against same sex marriage. Yep, the catholic church has defined gayness as an act of moral turpitude. Let me get a pen.

And final salvo in this weird, stupid and offensive campaign that seems to know no bottom, goes to the frankly weird campaigning of the Greens – I received an email from them with the subject line;

You’re enrolled to vote YES!

This is ridiculous. IT’S NOT A FUCKING VOTE.

The Greens shouldn’t tell anyone they’re going to vote yes, it’s smug and presumptuous, and finally, people who aren’t enrolled might think this means that they are, and therefore not bother to check (yes, the email came before the cutoff to update your enrolment details).

Opposing same sex marriage because it might damage children is patently fucking ridiculous, as there are thousands of gay men and women raising children already. People’s ability to provide a loving home isn’t dictated by their sexual orientation. It just plain isn’t. You might oppose it for other reasons – mainly due to western-judeo christian something-or-other and that’s a matter of religion, but the ‘community is just thinking-of-the-children’ argument rings hollow in the light of the horrors above.

If you’re that fucking concerned about the welfare of children, put all your efforts into stopping parents from hooking into the methamphetamine. 122 million dollars might help with that.

 

 

 

My inner critic.

Interesting or troubling? This article popped up on my facebook feed.

I’m wary of articles that suggest that caring, loving parents should constantly fret over ‘doing it wrong’.

The article itself even acknowledges this pressure – referencing the ‘Shitty Guilt Fairy’ before racking up a couple of lines of coke for the aforementioned fairy.

I’ve got some issues;

First; the author tells us that we shouldn’t tell our children off in a negative way. Here she is describing her daughter pretending to tell the adults off in a stern way,

I decided she must have picked it up from someone. But who? She spends most of her time with me and I know I don’t shout like that. I certainly don’t use that horrible inflection at the end of my sentences. Who the hell could she have picked it up from?

Then, in the car park of Pak n Save, she did that thing that I’ve asked her not to do a thousand times. That thing where she lets go of my hand and runs off. It scares the shit out of me for obvious reasons. Coupled with my fear is also my anger: she knows better than this. Our subsequent conversation went something like this:

Me: Hey, you know not to run off in car parks. That really scared mummy!

Her: [eyes looking somewhere above the top of my head]

Me: You know you must hold my hand when we’re near cars!

Her: [eyes looking off to the right as she starts humming a little tune to herself.]

Me: What do I say about cars? You must hold my hand, okay?  OKAAAAAAY?!

Ugh. So that’s where she’s been getting it from. That’s one harsh penny dropping right there.

I don’t know about you, but I find hearing my own shitty communication mirrored right back at me through my angelic two year-old’s mouth particularly hard to swallow. I feel not just ashamed but also incredulous at how oblivious I was to it. I literally spent two weeks trying to work out who she’d modelled her behaviour from and I had ruled myself out almost instantly. I’m a conscious parent for God’s sake! I care about this stuff! I read parenting advice on communication! WTF?

The other particularly horrible thing is that I’ve had a successful career as a life coach for the last 12 years; I get paid to help people be happy. And there’s one major thing that makes all the difference to how happy someone is and it’s not about earning the highest income. It is our inner dialogue…

This inner dialogue eventually develops into your Inner Critic. You know, that little voice that beats you up, and says really unhelpful things to you like: Who do you think you are applying for that job? You suck at your job.  You’re a crap parent. You’re a lazy parent. You really screwed up today. It’s your fault your partner left you. I can’t believe you buggered that up again – idiot. Don’t be silly, why would they like you?

In summary, there are two main categories of feedback being played inside your head: Who do you think you are? And: You’re not good enough. If you pay attention to your Inner Critic for a while you will see this for yourself.

You can see how treating yourself this way has an erosive impact on your wellbeing and happiness and holds you back. Our aim in coaching is to transform the Inner Critic to Inner Coach. The Inner Coach is far from Pollyanna positive. We don’t want you going around giving yourself high-fives for making a sandwich, or looking in the mirror saying, “yeah, you shouted at your child – AWESOME!’ We want you to have a reasonable voice in there, a logical one, a kind one. You want to help yourself manage your life, make good decisions, and recover from adversity, be resilient. You want to learn from your mistakes and encourage yourself to grow. You want a reasonable, logical, truth-telling voice that helps you learn. You want to say: ‘Charlotte, that wasn’t your best parenting moment. I know you can make improvements.Why don’t we do it this other way tomorrow…?’

The question that everybody asks is why? Why does it evolve to become your inner critic, rather than your inner coach? Why does it evolve to be negative and not positive?

From my own experience and my work with clients, I subscribe mostly to theory that we model language from those around us and unfortunately some of those people weren’t or aren’t always kind. We learn to talk to ourselves in the same way we are talked to and around.

This last point means that we all do what my daughter did: we talk the way we got talked to. Our brains can’t help it – we have to learn language by modelling as there is no other way to do it. That same language eventually gets used to communicate to ourselves inside our head.

This means that way you talk to and around your children will become their inner dialogue.

So, saying, ‘No! Don’t run into the traffic!’ will give your child an inner critic. An inner critic that screams; ‘Hey, loser! Run into the traffic!’.

You know what? I’m not buying it. Almost everyone I know was brought up with ‘No! Don’t do that!’ usually promptly followed by; ‘Or you’ll get a smack’. As the Dunedin study tells us, almost all children of the 1970s were brought up with physical punishment – almost entirely gentle, but physical none-the-less. And yet, most of the children in the Dunedin study turned out fine.

Which brings me to the author, a ‘life coach’ whose experience is wrestling people’s ‘inner critics’ into submission. Let’s talk about selection bias. Life coaches do not deal with people who think they can solve their own problems.

When you’re dealing with losers, improvement is a relative function. It does not prove the author’s ‘theories’ as useful for the rest of us.

Let’s be clear. It’s bloody great to have an inner critic. No, not an ‘inner coach’. An inner critic. Sure this critic can get out of hand. But it can also tell you things you don’t want to hear, but really, really fucking need to. Your inner critic gives you guilt, shame, fear and heartbreak, all of which are far more motivating than anything your lame-o “Inner Coach” could come up with.

Your inner critic will enable you to work harder towards your goals. It might enable you to be more considerate of the other people in your life. Tenacity is the result of a robust debate with your inner critic.

We have turned to a world of wooly booly psycho-babble that places the individual at the very core in every facet of life. Personally I think this is an effective way of depoliticising young people, as we turn critical thinking inwards like a perverse 1980s board game;

Hey, young people, make sure your identity matches your sexual preferences AND your gender! Come up with your own acronym to win the game! 

In this way young people internalise the message that they can control themselves, but nothing else. It is designed to replace political activism with faux activism – to wit, endless comment threads about who is more disempowered/outraged/wronged than who vis a vis gender/identity/personhood.

So, there’s that. But then there’s something more worrying about this article.

The author tells her toddler that her actions ’caused Mummy to be scared’.

Two year olds have enough trouble dealing with the concept that they have their own thoughts, feelings and sense of self. This is a completely non-controversial stage of child development. (It’s also the cause of much toddler angst and trantrumming).

The toddler struggle is working out when and how to be responsible for their own actions (as opposed to being simply part of someone else). Telling a toddler that they’re also responsible for Mummy’s feelings too is cruel.

Apparently, during these ‘telling offs’ the author’s daughter looks above her head, and then off to one side, and then starts humming to herself. This is completely consistent with a kid who is too young for the cognitive pressure of being responsible for an adult’s feelings.

Mummy is very, very important. And now I’m making her scared. I need to modify my behaviour so she isn’t scared. But it’s really hard to modify my behaviour. I’m working on it, but man, IT’S HARD. Cos I’m TWO.

Hey toddler, it’s your fault if Mum goes tits up. No pressure, kiddo.

 

This article is aimed at middle class mothers, who’re already at the pointy crescendo of Mummy-guilt. Hey, Mums, forget everything you know about mothering (that your learned from your own mother…..FIRST THE GINGER CRUNCH, NOW THIS!), you must change how you speak to your child. Every single utterance must be monitored, lest your comments become potting mix for the devastating inner critic. But hey no pressure!

The author also tells us that telling your kid off is bad, but gives no alternatives. I mean really, aside from telling her toddler she’s scaring her, I thought her admonishment was completely fine; DO NOT BUGGER OFF IN THE CARPARK is pretty straightforward.

So I’m wondering if the author is an adherent of the new fashion for ‘no negative talk’ parenting, where children are never told no. Bad behaviour is addressed by distraction,

Darling, I can see you really love the plasma cutter (validate their experience), but look at this! It’s tickle me Elmo! (distract child from imminent emasculation).

Of course, the no-negative-talk parents are middle class working parents, so they’re probably not the child’s primary caregiver anyway.

“Here’s his organic snack box and filtered water. Now, we don’t tell Oliver ‘No’, as we’re nurturing his inner coach, not his inner critic”.  

Good luck with that. Kids learn ‘negative talk’ pretty smartly in a maxxed out daycare centre.

 

 

 

 

 

Things we don’t talk about….

No, sadly it’s not sex. Everyone talks about sex like it’s running out.

I recently ran into a friend who has had gastric surgery to address her obesity. She was happy, very happy. Being obese saddled her with misery and social stigma, the likes of which I can only imagine.

Obesity is framed as ‘your fault’, but obesity – and by that I mean, proper obesity, not just overweight – is almost entirely the fault of something other than the triumph of the will. I’ve ranted about this before, but the idea that we are in the throes of an ‘obesity epidemic’ is often read to mean we’re a nation of irredeemable fatties.

Everyone loves a spot of moralising but we’re moralising in the wrong place.

The real causes of risk of obesity (note, I said risk, not direct cause) are pretty well known. The more fat you’ve got, the more leptin you’ve got. At a certain point you’re brain gets tired of listening to leptin and becomes resistant to its messages.

Yeah, you’re full. BORING. 

And, the more you eat, the bigger your belly gets. The bigger the top of your stomach is, the more ghrelin it produces. Ghrelin tells your brain you’re hungry.

And then there’s insulin.

Fat cells generate hormones. Getting fat is like an accelerator – the fatter you get, the fatter you become.

The answer is clear right? Don’t get fat in the first place. Step away from the chiko roll. Except what we should be saying is; step away from the baby bottle. Because formula fed babies turn into fatties before they even get a chance to puree a big mac and squirt it into a sippee cup. Their brains are set up to become fat before they can roll over. They ingest far more protein than breastfed babies. They’re hardly ever actually hungry, because formula ‘fills you up’. In other words, the amount of protein in formula makes them feel full for longer. This is why formula fed babies sleep through the night. This is why childhood obesity is such a predictor for adult obesity – regardless of what you eat, your body will tell you to eat more because you’re genuinely hungry.

It’s not all about formula. It’s food too.  Generations of babies grow up eating western food – high in protein, fat and sugar. Yeah you think they’re eating well, but actually almost all processed food has added sugar, or is processed in a way that human bodies will recognise as sugar.  Obviously, there are hard ways to address this problem – you can lose weight, a lot of it, and this will change your body chemistry, making it easier to stay thin. But it’s extremely hard. Not just ‘oh I don’t really feel like it hard’ – extremely hard nigh on impossible. 

Why don’t we ever hear about the clear link between formula feeding and obesity? Well who can breastfeed every twenty minutes when they’re at work?

Disclaimer – I was a formula fed and I turned out FINE!