Free Learner

Children as projects

I just finished reading the article "All Joy and No Fun -- Why Parents Hate Parenting."  The academic literature is apparently quite conclusive about the fact that having children diminishes happiness (in the aggregate; obviously not in all cases).  The author writes that there's a "possibility that parents don’t much enjoy parenting because the experience of raising children has fundamentally changed":

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed.

I'm not sure what she means by the "moral revolutions of modernity"; does she mean that we now consider it immoral to have children help with the family business?  John Taylor Gatto would argue that we now force children into being (in his words) more like parasites than participants in the community, by denying them any industry or tangible contribution.  That we deny them autonomy and mistakenly equate obedience with responsibility.  That we prolong childhood artificially so that when teenagers are clearly, according to historical example, of an age to participate as adults, we are still forcing them to passively follow the instructions of others 8+ hours out of the day.  And the "free range parenting" folks have numerous arguments to make about the harm done by over-protecting kids.  Furthermore, the demands being made on children today may be mental instead of physical, homework instead of chores, but the number of ADHD prescriptions indicates that they are strenuous demands indeed.  Not much of a moral revolution here.

What's never questioned in this article is whether the current system of parenting is better for the kids.  Yes, it's too bad that parents are (according to data) more and more unhappy with each successive generation, but it's all for the good of the kiddies.  In describing a videotaped conflict between a mother and her 8-year-old son over his not-yet-done homework, she writes:

Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, the director of research in this study, has watched this scene many times. The reason she believes it’s so powerful is because it shows how painfully parents experience the pressure of making their children do their schoolwork. They seem to feel this pressure even more acutely than their children feel it themselves....  [Seem to?  Could there be any doubt about this?]

Obviously, this clip shows how difficult and unpleasant parenting can be. What it doesn’t show is ... that this unpleasant task she’s undertaking is part of a larger project, one that pays off in subtler dividends than simply having fun.

But homework at age 8 does not have any dividends!  Alfie Kohn wrote a whole book on this subject and the data are clear.  Surveys indicate that homework is a major source of conflict in families with young children, and yet it has no academic (nor any apparent "character building") benefit.  If that seems hard to believe, read this interview or watch this one.

A lot of intensive parenting is actually more about the parents than the kids, I suspect.  Most of it seems directed at making sure the kids behave, as opposed to making sure that they have a good relationship with you, or that they're happy in life, or that they have empathy.  That's partly because bad behavior in your kid is acutely embarrassing and -- because we have a ridiculously competitive society -- is invariably seen as reflecting poorly on the parents.  We have expectations that are totally unrealistic, like that 2-year-olds should willingly share toys.  And if your kid isn't sharing, you should at least make a big show of talking to them about sharing (or giving them a time out or something) to let everyone else know that this isn't due to lazy parenting.  (Which, of course, it isn't; toddlers don't share for developmental reasons.)

Secondly, some of the satisfaction in parenting comes from feeling like you're being a good parent.  I feel that way when I have a really good conversation with one of my kids.  But the society implies that being a good parent involves buying them cognitively enriching toys and then getting them to use them, or from teaching them phonics at age 4, or teaching them the alphabet before 18 months.  You're a good parent if you're hauling them to sports or art class, doing extra teaching at home, and most of all, if you're enforcing the rules.  Americans are extremely concerned about not having spoiled children, which presumably will be the result if bedtime is not stuck to or if homework is blown off.

But so much of kids' learning, and the improvement in their behavior over time, is just due to natural development.  I imagine that the parent obsessed with getting their toddler to share later pats themselves on the back when that same child, at age 5, shares easily with other kids.  But they can't really know if it's due to all their hassling of their toddler, or just natural development.  Similarly, if your kid likes reading at age 7 you will never really know if it was the hours of bedtime reading every week and the phonics starting at age 3, or just genes and development.  But when parents have made themselves and their kids miserable with intensive parenting efforts, they're going to assume that all that hassling has paid off.

Unschooling families would seem to suggest that maybe it doesn't really take that much effort to learn things.  And, to cite another Alfie Kohn book, Unconditional Parenting draws on research to show that common disciplinary techniques like time-outs and charts with stars on them and just plain bribery do not work in the longer term, and have detrimental effects on children's relationships with their parents.  My own kids are reasonably well behaved (okay, excepting housework, which I am largely unsuccessful in getting them to do)... they are, at any rate, quite considerate and respectful of other people.  I attribute that to the fact that I am respectful and considerate of them, and I do not use Skinnerian techniques like time-outs.  I don't "use techniques" at all, actually... we negotiate things via lots of talking.  One of the themes of Unconditional Parenting is that good behavior should be based in social contracts, not economic ones.  Of course, if your kids attend school this can be tough, because schools exclusively use economic contracts (rewards and demerits, or if you will, credits and debits) to manage classroom behavior.

Meanwhile, in traditional parenting land:

[R]esearchers collected 1,540 hours of footage of 32 middle-class, dual-earner families with at least two children, all of them going about their regular business in their Los Angeles homes. The intention of this study was in no way to make the case that parents were unhappy. But one of the postdoctoral fellows who worked on it, himself a father of two, nevertheless described the video data to the Times as “the very purest form of birth control ever devised. Ever.”

It would be nice if New York magazine would do a feature on alternative parenting, or the unschooling lifestyle, or questioning whether American yuppie parenting is actually beneficial to anyone at all.  Because if watching parents with their children is "birth control," it looks to me like something has gone horribly awry.

Can strep bacteria cause psychological problems?

Some years ago, when my daughter was a little more than 3 years old, I started sending her to preschool two afternoons a week.  (At that time, we didn't know we would be homeschooling.  Or anyway, I didn't realize it would be until college, though I'd always thought of it as a "fallback" option if school wasn't working.)

Two months into the preschool year, she suddenly developed the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Now, I realize 3-year-olds all have their moments when one is reminded strongly of OCD, like when they throw a screaming tantrum because you cut their sandwich the wrong way.  But this was different.  Waaaaaayyy different.  All of a sudden, I couldn't flip a light switch, turn the TV on or off, turn the microwave on, open the refrigerator, let the cat out, or operate the thermostat-- Anya had to do all those things and more.

Getting her some orange juice, as an example, was like a 25-step process.  She couldn't open the fridge by herself but her hand had to be on the handle before I opened it.  Her hand had to be on the OJ before I removed it.  She took the cap off.  She pointed out the cup she wanted in the cupboard, and I had to remember to hand it to her so she could put it on the counter; I couldn't put it there myself.  And it went on.  One time I got all the way through the process correctly but I forgot to let her close the fridge.  She looked at me with the utmost frustration -- she didn't like the rules any more than I did, but she was trapped by them -- and she took her cup to the sink, dumped the juice out, and yelled "We have to do it again!"  Like she just couldn't believe I had screwed it all up at the eleventh hour.

This was a very bad time, needless to say.  I only lost it and hollered at her a couple of times, because I knew, I could see that she didn't want to follow these rules any more than I did.  I knew it was most definitely not her fault.  But man was it hard.  I had to go visit my mom a couple of times, unable to cope on my own.  Thankfully, after two months a lot of this had gone away, and after maybe 4-5 months most of it had gone. 

During this time I read an interesting thing.  (I wouldn't be divulging all this except that maybe someone else might benefit.)  Let me quote from an article:

Studies show that antibodies that are supposed to attack streptococcal infections mistakenly attack a brain enzyme and disrupt neuron interaction in children's brains. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health and collaborators at two universities have confirmed the likely method in which bacterial infections can trigger obsessive-compulsive disorder as well as symptoms of Tourette's syndrome and nervous tics.

I think we all know what happens when a kid first goes to day care or preschool and is around a large group of kids for the first time.  They get sick... constantly.  The chances that Anya was exposed to strep -- which does not always lead to strep throat -- are quite high.  Luckily, when the symptoms are triggered by strep they seem to fade over time.  Also, you can have your doctor test for strep (there are different ways of doing this), and immediate antibiotics may shorten the period of OCD or other symptoms.

Another article says:

For approximately 25% of children who have OCD, the sudden onset of the OCD is exacerbated or triggered by strep throat, in which the body's own immune cells attack a part of the brain, the basal ganglia, rather than the strep. This does not occur in all children, but only those who have a genetic predisposition to OCD or tics.

I think that a fair number of people can recall a few slightly OCD quirks from their childhood.  Such as not wanting to step on the sidewalk cracks, or being very particular about those sandwiches well into elementary school.  It's not everyone, but it's a sizeable minority -- one which includes both myself and my husband.  And perhaps these people's kids tend to have this bad reaction to strep exposures.  In fact, maybe the reason we had the OCD symptoms in childhood in the first place was because we reacted to strep in that same way.  You don't have to get sick when you're exposed to strep bacteria; you may fight it off.  You may never even know you were exposed.  But it's those antibodies themselves -- the ones that keep you from getting sick -- which disrupt the brain and cause the symptoms.  At least, this is apparently true in some kids.

I'm blogging about this now because Anya's recently had a major flare-up of severe anxiety and OCD.  At first I thought it was because we'd been studying history, and even though I tried to soften it and tone it down as much as I could, there's really no getting around the evil of Cortes or Columbus, or the disappearance of Native Americans due to massive pandemic when they were exposed to the rather filthy Europeans.  I thought she might be feeling extremely anxious because she was becoming aware of the evil humans are capable of (and maybe that did play a role).

But we've also been sick, not just once, but with a whole string of colds and sore throats.  And the OCD which had been gone for many months came back extremely suddenly.

On the plus side, for any of you who have kids with strong anxiety and/or OCD, there are some things that seem to help in my family:

• huge doses of fish oil (there are fruit-flavored chewables, but Anya's taking 1800mg of DHA/EPA per day, which is not really reasonable with chewables)
• phosphatidylserine (only in pill form as far as I know -- helps repair the brain & helps with sleep)
• valerian root extract (mild sedative)
• melatonin if they have trouble sleeping

And then, we've been watching "The Life of Birds" and "Life in the Undergrowth" nature videos together.  We cuddle on the couch and remember to take big breaths.  Or as I like to call it, "Deep Breathing with David Attenborough."

I also had a brainstorm a couple of days ago and looked for that guy who did those painting shows on PBS and always spoke in that soft, calming voice: Bob Ross.  Both of my kids will sit and watch this show, even though my son is 5 and is usually bouncing off the walls.  We sit there in zen mode, absorbing the painting therapy.  "Let's put a happy little tree right here," and "If you've painted with us before, you know we don't make mistakes, we have happy accidents."  And "Just let the brush go where it wants to, just work with that," and "You make your painting the way you want, everyone sees things differently."  Considering that Bob Ross is free and psychotherapy is $90/hour or more, I think we'll stick with Bob Ross, at least for now.

More on the criminality of bullying

I actually hadn't read any details about Phoebe Prince, who hung herself as a result of bullying, until today.  So I have to amend my last post, it seems, because a Massachusetts District Attorney has filed charges against 9 teenagers in that case, for criminal harassment, civil rights violations, and stalking.  It seems that in rare cases we do pay attention to criminal bullying.

The spin in this Boston Globe piece is that the DA is making too much of a fuss:

With sharp words and a strikingly aggressive prosecutorial stance, authorities yesterday spelled out a litany of charges against nine teenagers accused of subjecting 15-year-old South Hadley student Phoebe Prince to months of tortuous harassment before she hanged herself in a stairwell at home.

. . .

The nature of the charges... hints at a forceful strategy of taking many legal avenues in the pursuit of convictions, legal specialists said.

“It’s an aggressive approach," said Robert Griffin, a former Suffolk County prosecutor. “They are casting a wide net."

Yeah, you can see how it would surprise people, to suddenly start seeing charges brought against illegal behavior which has been completely ignored up till now.  I can imagine the same sort of whining about "strikingly aggressive" prosecutions for sexual assault, domestic violence, or harassment of racial minorities, in years past.  You know:  Hey, what's she expect if she goes home with him?  Men will be men, and nice girls wouldn't do that anyway.  Or:  Hey, I just slapped her around a little, what do you expect, I had a bad day and she pissed me off.  Or:  What does a black family expect, moving into an all-white neighborhood?  They brought it on themselves. 

That's about where we are in what I hope will be a new campaign against bullying.  We're still in the "Boys will be boys," "They're just kids," "What's the big deal" phase.  (I think some adults don't realize that the hostility of school culture has intensified far beyond what they were used to as kids.)  What this DA is doing will become the example for other egregious cases, and similar actions will be pressed for by parents and others in the community.  Hopefully this is the start of something.

And I hope this puts fear into the hearts of bullies.  Gee, maybe nobody ever told them that much of what they do is against the law, and they can and may be prosecuted for it. 

I was at a site called "Please Fire Me" the other day (recommended!).  A woman reported that her boss had told her to "buy some heels" and take better care of herself because her looks had gone downhill since having the baby.  Commenters immediately pointed out that this is illegal.  One day I hope this legal savvy will exist in the world of teenagers.  If some kids threaten physical violence and block the door, that is illegal.  If they taunt you during class to the point where your ability to learn is impaired, that is illegal.  If they repeatedly follow you home from school or in your car, that is illegal.  And obviously, if they grope you or beat you up, that's illegal.  Maybe we need some teenaged activism here... a stream of them showing up at the police station, asking to file a report.

Criminal offenses

This is Desire Dreyer, who committed suicide at the age of 16 due to bullying and consequent depression.  As her mother describes it:

These girls threw things at her in classrooms (while the teachers turned their heads and walked out of the classroom), chased her into the girl’s restrooms at school and told her if "it" didn't happen inside of school it would outside of school. There were other incidents of a group of girls that followed her home from Homecoming in 2005 and threatened her in front of our house. The bullies even went as far as to be waiting on her one night when the school bus she was on (the cheerleaders had to ride the bus to away football games) arrived back at her High School. They followed her to a local restaurant and surrounded her car. My daughter called the police from her cell phone.

...I was told by the small school principal that the problem was taken care of, only to find out the group of girls did not stop. My daughter did not want to go to school, her grades dropped drastically, she became severely depressed. I did not know that the bullying was the cause; if only I had known then what I know now, if only I had known that all the signs she portrayed were signs of being bullied, which lead her to depression, which in turn led her to suicide.

This is a fate which is reserved for children in our country.  Among adults, we actually pay attention to such legal definitions as:

Criminal harassment is defined as "engag(ing) in intentional conduct which the actor [harasser] knows or has reason to know would cause the victim, under the circumstances, to feel frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated; and causes this reaction on the part of the victim. (M.S. § 609.749, Subd. I).

Yet our society feels little obligation to protect children from this same criminal behavior.

NEW YORK (WABC) -- Monday was a heartbreaking day for a local family, who had to bury their 12-year-old daughter.

The young girl took her own life, and her family says she decided to commit suicide because she was bullied at school.

. . .

"They used to beat her up, they used to harass her, curse at her, call her 'train tracks' because she had braces, they used to cut her hair," mother Mercedes Herrera said. "I went to the school, they didn't do nothing about it."

Mercedes found Maria hanging by a belt in a closet of their home last week. She died later at Brookdale Hospital. The family blames bullies for Maria's death, but they also blame the school, PS 72.

"She made a statement last year that she wanted to kill herself to the guidance counselor, and he never got help for her," Mercedes Herrera said.

Mercedes made no fewer than 20 visits to the school to complain about bullying and ask for help, but there is apparently no documentation of those visits.

. . .

"It's hard to understand how there isn't any record of it," father Eduardo Esparra said. "We want justice."

. . .

Research shows that girls who are frequently victims of bullies were 32 times more likely to be depressed and 10 to 12 times more likely to think about or attempt suicide compared to girls not affected by bullying.

Let me say, having worked with many datasets in the fields of social work, public health, and medicine, that a risk or odds ratio of "32 times" or "10 to 12 times" is virtually unheard of.  If I saw such a number in the SPSS or SAS software output my first thought would be that something had gone wrong with the model, that that just couldn't be.  So if this study they're referencing is true, it indicates that bullying is devastatingly harmful to young people.  And it means that we are allowing young people to be killed by crime -- by what would be known as "criminal harassment" or a "hostile work environment" -- if only it were happening to adults.

But children?  Eh, you know.  Whatever.  Can't be bothered, kid.  Roll with the punches.

I'm back!

Seems I wore out my interest in all-things-economic-all-the-time, and I'm ready to return to blogging on my other favorite topics as well.  Actually, I have a whole bunch of health-, school-, and homeschool-related posts built up, so hey, I might actually blog on a regular basis for a little while.

I came across this Onion article today, and although I love the Onion and I understand that this is supposed to be funny, I can't say I laughed much.

Increasing Number Of Parents Opting To Have Children School-Homed

WASHINGTON—According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home.

. . .

Thousands of mothers and fathers polled in the study also believe that those running American homes cannot be trusted to keep their kids safe.

. . .

Despite the trend's growing popularity, Miller said that school programs are often jeopardized or terminated because shortsighted individuals vote against tax increases intended to boost educational spending.

"The terrifying reality we're facing is that the worst-equipped people you could possibly imagine may actually be forced to take care of their children," Miller said.

Parents who have decided to school-home their children have echoed many of Miller's concerns. Most said that an alarming number of legal guardians such as themselves lack the most basic common sense required to give children the type of instruction they need during crucial developmental years.

Hard to laugh too much at that, considering how often people lament that "There's no license required to have children," or similar.  Or considering how many yuppie parents think a kid is screwed for life if they don't know the alphabet before age 4, or how to tie their shoes before entering kindergarten, or whatever.  Or considering how many people are against homeschooling because of the possibility of child abuse or neglect -- which is ironic, since harassment and possibly abuse from other students (if not the teacher), during at least some years of K-12 schooling, is virtually guaranteed.

The Onion's final commentary on our society's treatment of children:

Though school-homing has proven to be an ideal solution for millions of uninvolved parents, increasingly overburdened public schools have recently led to a steady upswing in the number of students being prison-homed.

John Taylor Gatto audio

For those of you who are homeschoolers (and those of you who aren't!), I discovered a treasure trove of downloadable John Taylor Gatto audio.  Gatto was a New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year, during a career in which he engaged in (as he puts it) "sabotage" against the system on behalf of his students.  In part, he provided official cover for them to escape school and pursue their own goals.  The year he won the New York State award, he quit--  publicly, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. (This page includes the op-ed / resignation letter.)

I particularly recommend The Guerrilla Curriculum and On the Scientific Management of Children.

Black and white

So I'm sitting here with Anya, reading the news while she's looking at her penny collection, and out of the blue she says "Well, I guess the Obama family is more white than McCain, anyway."

I said: "What?"

She continued on to explain that the Bushes are definitely a black family, but in her opinion, Lincoln was "mostly white".

Thankfully my brain kicked into gear and I remembered yesterday's dinner conversation, during which Anya got really mad at Seth for criticizing Lincoln.  This led to a discussion about how these things are not black and white, and most things fall into a gray area.  And then we got into what "black and white" means, and that the color white is equated with "good" and the color black with "evil".  Thus, the Bushes are a black family.

On top of that confusion, Anya doesn't know that "black" people are called black, because when talking about race I only use the actual skin color and geographic origin.  American slaves weren't black, they were brown-skinned people from Africa.  (The term "black" is itself racist if you think of how this word was used 200 years ago, as in "blackguard," an evil person.)

When Anya was about 3 she once said that a friend of ours was black, and he is African American, but I was shocked that she was using the term.  She had never before shown any awareness of race.  As it turned out, she wasn't talking about race after all.  This friend was "black and brown," while his Irish heritage wife was "orange and white".  She was just mentioning his hair.

Recently I've begun talking about race with Anya, but I never use the word "race," I just put it in really simple language.  Pale-skinned people took brown- and black-skinned slaves from across an ocean, but a few hundred years before that, other brown-skinned people (Persians) were taking pale-skinned people as slaves.  It's an unfortunate human trait that we dehumanize those who look different than us and live differently than we do.

I'm leery of much of what people teach their kids about race because they tend to focus on recent US and British history, in which light-skinned people have constantly victimized darker-skinned people.  That's dangerous, no matter how sensitive and left-wing you are, because children will often come to either of these conclusions: 1) light-skinned people are evil, or 2) dark-skinned people are weak.  You can get around this problem by taking the broader historical view and explaining that a few hundred years earlier, the light-skinned people in northern Europe were the backwater of the whole planet, constantly being pillaged and enslaved.  And around that time or a little earlier, Baghdad was the center of the civilized world, whereas now it is a bombed out hell-hole.  In fact, every color of skin and every part of Earth has had its own Empire, at some point in history, and with few exceptions (usually mountain peoples) every part of the planet has at one time been decimated by foreign enemies.  The center of power moves.  And as it moves, those who have been colonized, pillaged, and then abandoned by a Major Power are doomed to internecine warfare, famine, and plague for centuries afterward.  (See Europe, post-Romans; or Africa, post-British/French.)

I actually object to the terms "black" and "white" when they indicate race, although I use the terms like anyone else because it's a losing battle.  But I've never used those terms to indicate race when talking to Anya, and I'm annoyed to have to explain them now.  I guess I have to, though, to prevent some spectacular misunderstandings!

On being prepared... mentally

The one thing that seems to get left out of "survivalist" or preparedness plans, on the blogs and sites I come across, is the mental health component.  I think, perhaps, that even the worst doom and gloomer suffers from a bit of romanticism.

"Suppose the power goes out," says the Doom and Gloomer.  "Wouldn't that be fantastic?  We could haul in some wood and snuggle in front of the fireplace.  No TV, no video games, no Internet-- it'd be just like camping!  We could cook all that wholesome oatmeal in the dutch oven and read to one another all evening.  Even use our fireplace popcorn popper!  Good times!!"

Yeah, I suffer from that too.  You try to be balanced, you know?  You say "Well, okay, jobs are disappearing like beers at a frat party, but we'll all be closer to our families."  Or: "Well, I may never eat clementines again, but I'll be developing a relationship with my local farmers."  Or: "If there's no TV for a week it will bring my family together."

It's mostly true, too.  But then again, last night my family was brought together -- all of us having a grand old time and laughing our butts off for 2 hours -- by The Simpsons Hit and Run video game, in which you not infrequently mow down cartoon pedestrians as you mishandle your vehicle.  (In my defense, that's not the point of the game and we try hard to stay on the road!  And if you hit someone, they just yell at you as they roll out of your way.)  To be honest, I just can't see Candyland or Chutes & Ladders (other games which all 4 of us can play) as being anywhere near that much fun.  When it comes to old-fashioned values, The Simpsons Hit and Run game fails miserably on all counts, but that much laughing together has to be good for us.  So I suppose I try to look on the bright side, but I also try not to romanticize things like a Depression, peak oil, power outages, or having to stay inside the house for 3 solid weeks because of H5N1.  The fact is, I kind of like the 21st century.  I can't help it -- that's what I'm used to.

My own (minor!) "crisis" experience, when I went without power for 4 days in August of 2003, was far from romantic or refreshing.  I huddled near the radio, clinging to our local radio station like a lifeline, praying the batteries wouldn't quit, because by the time I'd gotten to the grocery store (45 minutes into the blackout) they were totally sold out of batteries.  And ice.  And bottled water.  And any kind of meat you'd typically grill.

Let me tell you, if you're an Internet junkie -- and we know who we are -- you need radios.  I mean, you need a hand-crank back-up radio, a regular radio or two, alkaline batteries, and possibly rechargeable batteries and a solar battery charger, plus headphones or ear buds to save those batteries.  Maybe even a shortwave radio.  My MP3 player has FM radio and I can charge it in a few minutes off the car battery, without starting the car; if you have one, consider getting the car charger.  You might even consider one of those radios that picks up TV, even though supposedly they are always about to halt old-fashioned TV network broadcasting.  If you are the kind of person who checks the internet more than a couple of times a day, you need INFO and you need it YESTERDAY, and thank god the local station put on BBC at 10pm so I could go to sleep feeling connected to the rest of the world.

Secondly, you need light.  Flashlights don't cut it, not even close.  A single night of reading by flashlight is enough to depress you and make your children crazed and creeped out.  I would aim for at least one small room that you can keep pretty well illuminated.  There are bright LED lanterns that are totally kid-safe, including some that are solar.  There's the old-fashioned kerosene lantern, the antique oil lamp (which we used in 2003-- thank you Grandma for giving it to me!), and there are 100-hour candles if you can manage those safely with the kids in your family.  (The 100-hour candles are round, squat, and hard to tip over.)  Hand-crank flashlights are a good back-up and kids think they're fun, and I'm glad that we own a couple.  But they do get tiresome, so I think recharge batteries with an AC and/or solar recharger are a good bet.  By the way, Costco sells a recharge battery set that has the "spacers" that convert an AA battery to fit a C or D slot.  This means that with one set of AA batteries and one AA recharger, you can put batteries into almost any flashlight.  Lastly, head-lamp style flashlights which strap onto your head may look ridiculous, but hey-- it's a no-hands flashlight.  Could be very useful.  Kids find them amusing.

So again, from my experience, a couple of flashlights somewhere in the house doesn't cut it.  It's not a matter of "Can I get to the bathroom without breaking an ankle?"  It's a matter of "Can I get through 4 days without power while not becoming depressed /creeped out by darkness every evening?"  Some kind of little battery / solar nightlight, or light sticks, are a good idea if you have kids in the house, as they can panic when waking up in pitch darkness.

And then, of course, you need entertainment.  If you can work out some way of listening to an audiobook, that's fairly entertaining and can be done on batteries.  Obviously someone can read aloud.  You can also put aside some "beach reads" for the adults & some previously unseen books for the kids -- I'll bet your local library has cheap paperback novels -- for emergency escapism.  I've also put aside sudoku, crosswords, cards, games, puzzles, etc.  Keep in mind that during crude oil disruptions schools will be closed, so whether you homeschool or not, in such a scenario you'd be (or someone would be) with your kids all day, and possibly without power.  (We take coal to our power plants largely by diesel truck-- brilliant, eh?)

And, for those who are stockpiling beans, barley, wheat, rice, and other wholesome Amish fare -- may I suggest Doritos and candy?  (Okay... organic non-GMO tortilla chips and fair trade cocoa powder?)  Don't forget junk foods as a treat.  Even if you very rarely eat junk food, your family may need something to cheer them up, make things a little easier.  Canned soups (Costco has good deals on Progresso), chewing gum, chocolate, potato chips, and so forth may compensate for other inconveniences and keep everyone in a cheerier state of mind.  (Whiskey or half a case of Charles Shaw doesn't hurt either, for extended disasters... for adults, I mean!)

So that's my two cents on crisis preparation, on the sanity front:

Connection, light, entertainment, and treats.

Garden warning

If you grow any kind of hot pepper in your garden and you have kids, make sure to frequently remind them which peppers NOT TO EAT.  Tristan bit off the end of a fire-engine red cayenne this evening.  He is okay, but I feel like I've been through one of those Poison Control Center directions: Flush with cool water for 15 minutes.

On the positive side, he didn't throw up, and I didn't panic even though he was panicking.  Poor little guy.

This is why I am loathe to grow medicinal herbs that can be poisonous or simply make you ill, like pennyroyal or lobelia.  I've watched Tristan eat purslane from the edge of the driveway, and seen Anya rub lemon balm between her fingers to inhale the scent, and seen both of them collect catnip for the kitties.  And I had resolved only to grow safe plants, because of the kids.  But the problem with this rule was made apparent to me tonight: I like spicy food, but cayenne peppers cannot be considered "safe" in a household containing small children.  Usually Tristan only picks veggies when I'm out there, with some guidance... but not so this evening.  A ripe cayenne, after all, is a gorgeous thing.

Perhaps next year I'll tie tinsel on the "dangerous" plants.

The mom song

This clip is hilarious, and worth listening to more than once in order to catch the lyrics.