Skylar was born a girl, meaning they were assigned female at birth by their doctors. Today, Skylar identifies as male. Their preferred pronouns are he/him or they/them.

I raised Skylar as a girl. Up until a few years ago, they were, in my mind, unequivocally my daughter. Long hair and pretty dresses were their thing, but so were hunting for bugs, dreaming of dinosaurs, and digging in the dirt. I didn’t expect Skylar to play with dolls, or for them to be a princess on Halloween when they preferred Legos and Dracula costumes. Skylar’s preferences often swung toward what society might deem boyish things, but then again, they were a sucker for a skirt they could really twirl in.

Skylar didn’t come to me as a young child and proclaim that they were not a girl or that they felt like they were born into the wrong body. In fact, there were no conversations with Skylar regarding them not feeling in alignment with the sex and gender of their birth until puberty.

When Skylar did begin to express feelings of being transgender, it wasn’t easy for me. I felt incredible internal resistance, even loss. But I also knew that Skylar did feel safe enough to explore these feelings and to lean on me for guidance and support.

Now, Skylar is moving out, leaving California for Oregon. As they get ready to launch, it makes me question if my parenting, which looking back, might be labeled gender neutral, has prepared them for a world outside our family’s orbit—a world where gender roles are fraught with divisiveness.

The word neutral has many meanings: indifferent, impartial, disengaged. When you talk about neutrality in terms of parenting, it means something completely different. In the past few years, there has been a growing resurrection of the conversation around gender-neutral or gender-responsive parenting.

This kind of parenting was already a thing by the early ’70s, when I was a quintessential girl: shy and bookish, I hated sports, loved my dolls, and could spend a perfect summer afternoon watching soap operas with my grandma. My mom was an interesting mix of traditional and hippie who insisted on good manners and “ladylike” behavior, but who also wanted me and my sister to be original thinkers and stand on our own two feet.

When Skylar was growing up, Erin M. Eichinger writes that she always encouraged them to be “free” to be themselves: someone who loved to twirl in skirts and hunt for bugs.

Eichinger set out to raise Skylar (pictured) and her other three children with an awareness of gender identities that are “unique, fluid, and complex.”

Looking back, Eichinger writes that she wouldn’t change much about her parenting style, aside from being even more conscious and intentional around language and her attitudes surrounding gender roles.

When I was around 5, Mom gave me a copy of the children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which came out in 1972.

At the heart of the album was a message about gender-neutral parenting that encouraged kids and adults to see themselves in ways that broke loose from rigid notions of what it meant to be a boy or a girl. Boys can play with dolls. Girls can run fast.  And, it’s okay for all of us to cry.   Tapping into the Gloria Steinem-style feminism of the time, the album was a reaction to a hyper-gendered postwar America, where marketers painted everything in shades of pink or blue.

Free to Be You and Me provided a new vision of how things could be. I wore that record out, playing it on my white suitcase record player until I knew every song and story by heart.

About 25 years passed from the first time I listened to the album to when I became a mom myself. My approach to parenting my three step kids and Skylar, my first and only born, turned out to be fairly gender neutral. I taught my kids that boys and girls are a lot more alike than they are different. I encouraged them to be “free” to wear whatever they like; play however they like and be however they like.

I was winging it, with Free to Be You and Me as my compass.

Skylar hopes to be a parent themselves one day, and their thoughts on gender-neutral parenting are interesting: “I would keep things neutral when it comes to my child. I would use neutral pronouns, names, toys, and clothes.”

While Skylar realizes that total neutrality would be an impossibility, they would try, at least with those in the child’s inner circle, to maintain as neutral an environment as possible.

If this caused confusion, once the child had more contact with people outside their family group,  Skylar feels that it could be a launching point for communication. “It would be a way to talk to them about gender from a young age, like kids who are raised always knowing they are adopted. They may not understand the concept when they are little, but once they do, there is no fear around it.”

Many people seem to think gender neutrality is something completely new and foreign.

What I’ve come to believe is that we have a generation of young people who are giving us a new lexicon surrounding gender. They are not describing a new phenomenon; they are, as historian Laura Lovett has noted, “resuscitating an old movement, not creating a new one.”

As far as public discussions around gender go, we have made great strides, and yet with that, comes pushback. In 2024, there have been more than 600 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in 43 states. In Florida, the state board of medicine is acting to block any kind of gender-affirming care for people under the age of 18, even with parental consent. In California, Elon Musk announced he’d be moving his Space X headquarters out of the state. This, in response to a bill that bans teachers from forcibly outing transgender students to their families. Musk is the father of a transgender daughter from whom he is estranged, and he blames her California private school education for “making her trans.”

Gender roles are imprecise, constantly changing, and ever-evolving. Because of this nebulous quality, they are often confusing and even misleading. As a pushback to what they see as socially imposed rules, some parents today are taking the concept of neutrality in parenting even further, a strict concealment of their baby’s gender from all but a small circle of caretakers. In doing so, they aim to make the child’s formative years completely free of gender markers or stereotypes. Think gender-neutral names, clothing, and toys. Definitely no gender-reveal parties. At some point, the thinking goes, the child will naturally express their gender with no need for any outside influence.

This reminds me of the widely read short story about “Baby X,” a fictional child whose gender is revealed to only a select few. The piece was published in Ms. magazine in 1978, just a few years after Free to Be You and Me—and it pushed readers to question the impact gender roles have on children and society at large.

While my approach of raising children with an awareness of gender identities that are unique, fluid, and complex feels right, the idea of raising kids with total neutrality seems unnecessary to me. I wonder if the practice could be needlessly confusing, leading to misinterpretations and misunderstanding for the child and those who love them, not to mention the level of watchfulness required on the parent’s part.

If I had the chance to raise Skylar again, I am not sure I would change my parenting style. Maybe I would be more conscious around language or more intentional about my attitudes surrounding gender roles.

Here’s the tricky part about raising kids: If you do a good job, the reward is that they become one of your favorite people in the whole world. The other reward is that they learn to stand on their own two feet. And then, they leave you.

So, you help them leave. You break your own heart in service of their future and you wonder if you have prepared them for the world out there.

So, here I am, helping my child take their next step. As I look into the proverbial rearview mirror, to the kid Skylar was, and to the adult they are becoming, I can only hope I prepared them well. I hope too, that when they look into the mirror, they see what I see: a funny, loving, wicked smart, and compassionate person.

What else could a parent want for their child?

The post Parenting Beyond the Gender Binary appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959, 13-year-old José Azel joined the ranks of the underground opposition engaging in acts of sabotage. When Castro closed the country’s schools, José’s father became worried. So he sent his teenage boy on a brief trip to West Palm Beach in June 1961 on a cargo ship full of seminarians. It was the last time they saw each other.

From 2021 to June 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported just over 400,000 “encounters” with unaccompanied children. The quality of care for these kids has been dubious at best and abusive at worst. Today’s numbers may be unprecedented, but this group is not—in fact, they are part of a long tradition of young people finding refuge in the U.S. without their parents.

In the early 1960s, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare created the Unaccompanied Cuban Children’s Program to care for thousands of minors fleeing their country after its 1959 revolution. Colloquially, it was known as Operation Pedro Pan—a reference to the tale about the boy who could fly. Like today, in the 1960s a vocal contingent of naysayers balked at the newcomers: Some feared that there could be communists in the unvetted masses, while others asked why taxpayers should shoulder their financial weight. Yet drowning out these doubtful voices was a larger willingness to accept the children and to affirm the country’s tradition of sanctuary and freedom in doing so.

The more than 14,000 Cuban minors who arrived to the U.S. between 1959 and 1962—then the largest group of unaccompanied children in U.S. history—were among the 250,000 Cubans who trekked across the Florida Straits during that period. In contrast to today’s migrants, the Cubans were cast as refugees and symbols of anticommunist heroism. President John F. Kennedy reminded the country that welcoming refugees was a Cold War imperative. In a letter to Congress, Kennedy heralded the U.S. as “a refuge for the oppressed” with a “long humanitarian tradition of helping those who are forced to flee to maintain their lives as individual, self-sufficient human beings in freedom, self-respect, dignity, and health.”

The Children’s Program resettled young people across the nation in group homes and with foster families throughout the country—from Helena, Montana, to San Antonio, Texas, to Dubuque, Iowa—largely paid for by state and federal coffers. At times, parents did not know where their children had been relocated.

The program relied on a vast network of federal and state offices and a long list of nonprofit church groups, child welfare agencies, and Pan American and KLM airlines, which would help procure seats for these children, as well as embassies, parochial schools, and a counterrevolutionary network in both nations. Those without immediate family support in the United States—more than 8,300 children—received care through the Catholic Welfare Bureau and other religious, governmental, and non-governmental organizations.

Some Pedro Pans found respite with Protestant, Jewish, and secular organizations, but the nucleus of the program was the Catholic Church, which assumed responsibility for 7,346 Cuban children. At the program’s helm was Bryan O. Walsh, an Irish priest who’d recently relocated to Miami, and embraced his mission with gusto. Walsh later called his role in Operation Pedro Pan “an opportunity given to me by Divine Providence to combat communism.” He had ample support from the Church, which also opened its doors to Catholic leaders isolated and banished by the Cuban government.

After arriving in the U.S. with a group of Catholic seminarians, José Azel jumped into the world of American adolescence. The transition was connected to the automobile, and he remembers the immense glee he felt registering for a driving permit. Football, rock ‘n’ roll, and an occasional cigarette rounded out the adaptation process for the young man.

Other Pedro Pans tell similar bittersweet stories of their crossings. Mayda Riopedre was a 15-year-old student at American Dominican Academy in Havana when she arrived in Miami. Mayda had lived a privileged and “very American” life in Cuba— she took classes in English and U.S. history, listened to American shows on the radio, took ballet and piano lessons, and had a French tutor.

After spending a month in a transitional shelter, Mayda Riopedre and her sister spent a month at St. Mary’s Home in Dubuque, Iowa, where they went bowling for the first time, before being sent to live with a family in Signal Mountain, Tennessee. She retains some very pleasant memories of her time there, but she also recalls a favorite outdoor spot where she would look at the mountains and cry inconsolably. The sisters and their parents reunited two years later, and today Mayda considers herself “lucky” and will be “forever grateful” for the foster family.

Why did so many parents choose to send their children away? The upheaval of the revolution—including school closures and new revolutionary pedagogy, nationalized property, and rumors that Castro’s government would dispossess parents of their children—was frightening enough to make the decision feel warranted for many Cuban families.

They also believed that the separation—and Castro’s reign—would be brief. But most Pedro Pans did not see their parents for months or even years —and in rare cases, like José Azel’s, ever again.

Now in their 60s and 70s, the former Pedro Pans—many of whom are part of Florida’s large Cuban community—find themselves ensconced in the vitriol surrounding today’s migrant children. Unlike the majority of Pedro Pans, who lived comfortable lives in Cuba, these young people come from locales ravaged by violence and economic scarcity.

And they are receiving a very different welcome. In 2019, 3,000 children were housed at a center in Homestead, Florida, five miles from the Florida City camp that had sheltered hundreds if not thousands of Pedro Pans. Then the Trump administration closed it, which drew criticism from those who argued that the state should provide suitable accommodation for children, as it had done 60 years prior with the Cuban Children’s Program.

More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis bickered with the Miami Archdiocese after he issued an executive order that curtailed the ability of Florida agencies to care for undocumented migrants, including children. Pedro Pans took sides: Some argued in favor of sheltering the minors while others sided with DeSantis and drew differences between today’s young migrants and the Cold War context of their own crossings.

As their hesitancy indicates, today many Americans are reluctant to support similar groups in need. The country took in just 11,411 refugees in the 2021 fiscal year, the lowest number since 1980. UNICEF estimates that a record 43.3 million children live in forced displacement worldwide. Those crossing the U.S. border often remain invisible or banished to the status of a national crisis rather than an opportunity to provide help. But the Pedro Pans, aided by government assistance and everyday American altruism, exemplify what is achievable when we harness our abundant resources and guarantee our healthy tradition of refuge for the world’s most vulnerable populations.

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At a children’s summer sleepaway camp in upstate New York in the mid-1920s, two young staffers, Artie and Larry, write a song for the annual camp play. It begins:

I love to lie awake in bed

Right after taps I pull the flaps above my head

And watch the stars upon my pillow

Oh, what a light the moonbeams shed.

Some years later, Artie—composer Arthur Schwartz—is writing numbers for a Broadway revue and gets stuck for a melody. He remembers his camp song, ditches the lyrics (written by Larry—Lorenz Hart—who is by then collaborating on Broadway musicals with Richard Rodgers) and gets wordsmith Howard Dietz to come up with new ones. The result is a hit and quickly becomes a pop standard that will be covered by Crosby, Sinatra, Bennett, Darin, Dylan, and many others:

I guess I’ll have to change my plan

I should have realized there’d be another man

I overlooked that point completely

Before the big affair began

Not all camp songs are written by such illustrious songmakers, nor have such a celebrated destiny awaiting them. But many songs sung at North American summer camps did and do become standards—in the lives of thousands of former campers who can still sing them years later and will remember them fondly all their lives.

What is a camp song—and why do they endure? Unlike “I Love to Lie Awake in Bed,” most of them don’t get composed at camp, nor is camp their subject.

For those of us who spent our summers at camps around Ontario, Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, “camp songs” were the songs we sang, year after year, in the dining hall during “singsongs”; in canoes on three-day trips; hiking in the woods; on bus rides; around campfires after the marshmallows had been toasted; and in the rec hall during rainy day programs. Not to mention the naughty or subversive songs we sang when our counselors weren’t around—mainly seditious parodies and scatological songs that made us laugh.

We learned songs from the staff and from each other; we brought them from home or we made them up for shows and all manner of activities, and to make each other laugh. Favorites included “Little Cabin in the Woods,” “Fire’s Burning,” “Down By the Bay,” and “Boom, Boom, Ain’t It Great to Be Crazy.” What made them camp songs was that we sang them at camp—some, nowhere else—where singing was a natural part of each day.

The children’s summer camp movement was established in North American cities in the 1870s, driven by the growing perception that modern urban society, especially its poorer classes, would benefit physically, morally, and spiritually from a closer relationship with the rapidly disappearing natural environment. Within the next few decades, youth-serving recreational organizations such as the YMCA, the Boy Scouts, and eventually religious and immigrant organizations acquired tracts of rural, wilderness land and organized “wholesome” and active experiences there for urban youth. Besides sports, many favored what were then called “Indian”-themed and -inspired woodland activities, along with programs promoting their own organizational goals.

Author (middle left) playing banjo and singing at Interlochen Arts Camp in 1962. Courtesy of author.

It was an era when group singing was a popular, possibly universal pastime—in homes around a piano, in bars and theaters, and eventually in cinemas. What would be more natural, then, than to include it as an activity at camp, shaped to meet camp’s particular ends, be they recreational, religious, ethno-cultural, nature-centered, or socio-redemptive? Singing offered children self-made entertainment within the self-contained camp environment, and singing led by grown-ups was a superb collective activity for children. Singing could open and close a day, focus energies for rest hour after lunch, entertain in rainy weather, inspire hope or reverence around an evening campfire, promote solidarity, and raise spirits during team games.

From its inception, then, the summer camp was, or was made into, a setting friendly to song. Not all children’s camps may have been singing camps, but my bet is there was singing at every camp in some contexts, regardless.

Camp songs came in many different forms. They included the child-friendly—cumulative songs, make-up-each-verse songs, rounds, action songs with simple lyrics, and funny, silly themes—like “You Push the Damper In,” “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea,” and “Junior Birdmen.” Then there were the ones that were, paradoxically, not simple or funny at all, but youth-accessible and inspiring: songs of world peace and civil rights like “Listen Mr. Bilbo” and “We Shall Overcome.”  Most of all, they had to be group-singable—with easy choruses (labor songs like “Union Maid”) and refrains (sea shanties like “Haul Away, Joe”), or call-and-response structures (“The Green Grass Grew All Around”), with harmony-inviting melodies (spirituals and folk songs like “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “On Top of Old Smokey”).

Many of the songs that spring first to my mind as “camp songs” aren’t the usual ones. They are old pop standards from the Great American Songbook that we sang at Camp Katonim, a day camp near our summer cottage just outside Toronto, when I was 7 or 8 years old. At Katonim, singing was the day’s first activity. I walked into the dining hall, took a seat on a bench around the perimeter with 60 other kids and counselors, and joined right in as Joanie led us all from the piano. Occasionally, they were “kid-friendly” songs like “I Went to the Animal Fair” and “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour.” But mostly, they were what I later knew as my parents’ songs: “For Me and My Gal,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” “Side by Side.” They were great fun to sing, even if some of the lyrics were over my head. I came to understand them later, but I’ve remembered them ever since, and even just thinking about them takes me back, as camp songs do, to the place I sang them, and the people I sang them with.

Summer camp actually helped me become a musician. It was at camp that I learned to play the ukulele, then the guitar, then the banjo; as a counselor, I honed the song leading lessons I’d learned from Pete Seeger records. At one camp where I also taught swimming, the junior boys I bunked with came up with a chant they yelled after every dining hall singsong: “Well DONE Shel-DON Po-ZUN!” Soon, “Well Done” became my camp moniker, then a family nickname, and then—well, Well Done Music is the name of my recording label.

Like Larry Hart and Arthur Schwartz, I found camp the perfect place to create and perform music where music was welcome. Like them, I went on to other musical arenas, but in my case, camp songs and camp singing remained part of my musical life—whether on stage teaching a chorus to an audience, leading a choir, or making up a silly song with my granddaughter as I bounce her on my knee.

The post What Makes a Song a ‘Camp Song’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I was a child, the border between the natural world and me was so thin it was transparent. I looked into my dog’s eyes and felt that I knew her. I knew I wasn’t a horse, surely, but also, I was a horse—I ate salad for lunch without utensils, galloped down the street, whinnied. I spoke to trees.

Shortly after entering my teenage years, I grew up, grew out of all this, stopped growing. My dreams became human dreams—love, money, career, family. I was never a horse anymore, or a dog, or a cat, or a bird; I only spoke to people. I was a human woman, and an intensely practical one. I had set aside childish ways.

In 2017, decades into my adult life, I stepped in as editor-in-chief of Stone Soup, the magazine of writing and art by kids under 14. While I was a writer and an editor, writing by kids—or for kids, for that matter—was decidedly not in my wheelhouse. In fact, kids were not in my wheelhouse.

Like many other childless adults, I was awkward around them: I forced a smile, asked the usual questions (How old are you? What’s your favorite color?), hesitated to pick them up when they cried. I knew I wasn’t “good with kids”—and watching my husband horse around with his young cousins over Christmas, I wondered if I ever would be.

It never occurred to me that the idea of being “good with kids” was itself a problem. That the phrase implied there was only one way to be “good” with kids, as if all kids liked the same things and had the same interests. That to be “good” with kids, I would need to be someone else around them—not myself. That I would need to lower myself to their level—in the same way that texts are “leveled” to match a child’s reading ability, “reducing exposure to books that might surprise or challenge [them]” in the process.

When I first started reading submissions for Stone Soup, I remember asking myself, Is this good “for a kid”?

Over the next three years, I read thousands of poems, stories, and personal essays by kids, and I looked at hundreds of pieces of their art.

I saw that kids could be wise:

It is said in the Hindu scriptures that only if you open your mind to knowledge will you receive the knowledge. I understand how this can be true. When I was like my parents— not believing God—I didn’t know the things I know today.

That they could make surprising observations, ones that made me see the world a little differently:

[The coin] was a memory from a war of great misery, yet it still gave me a happy feeling. It was as if the memory wanted to be happy.

That they could write rich, imaginative, non-didactic fables and long, moving, complex stories. That they could make me cry. That they could write political allegory. And visionary poems. And poems that haunted me and ones that I wished I’d written.

That they could feel and think and see as deeply, or sometimes, often, more deeply than any adult. Because they were closer to the world: to nature and to animals, to the imagination and the soul. To God—whatever that is.

I realized how wrong, how misguided my initial criteria for acceptance to the magazine had been. That I was not accepting what was good “for a kid” but rather what was good. Period.

In 2020, I became a mother.

At the time, I was living in Santa Cruz, California, a hippie-ish beach town; I was surrounded by mothers who practice RIE and Montessori parenting. Through them, I learned to treat my child, then just a baby, as an individual, a person worthy of my respect.

Before picking her up, I asked for permission. If I needed to interrupt her play, I apologized. When I buckled her into the car seat, I explained where we were going. When she babbled, I listened closely, and replied seriously, so she would know I had heard her, even if I had not understood.

I began to notice how many adults treated children as if they were animals. How they talked about my daughter as if she wasn’t present when she was right there. How they commented on her looks when we walked by—“How adorable! Just beautiful!” How they called her “fussy” when she was simply having a bad day. As if they—those same adults, rolling their eyes at my daughter’s outburst over my choice of snack—had never cried over something similarly trivial that had pushed them over the edge at the end of a long day.

And through all this—parenting and reading and observing—I realized that I could be “good with kids” simply by being myself with them. That this was, in fact, one of the highest forms of respect. There is a reason children identify so closely with animals: They too are treated as Other, and inferior. I began to see how important my newfound approach to kids was in allowing them to feel respected and recognized—and (hopefully) in shaping them into conscientious adults. I began to see my work as a parent and editor as political.

The best way to select work for the magazine, then, was to be myself—to rely on my own literary and artistic sensibilities, and to treat each submission with respect. At Stone Soup, we take kids seriously; we see their art and their ideas as real and worthy. Like most “adult” publications, we don’t accept everyone who submits, in order to uphold the value of the accepted work. Or as one parent wrote in a personal letter to me, “Stone Soup treats young writers like human beings, not intellectually deficient and emotionally fragile adults.”

One day in 2022, a few months after my second child was born, my husband paid me the highest compliment he could have given me: He said until he’d seen me parent, he’d always thought there was only one way to be “good with kids”—to be silly, permissive, and fun. He said I had shown him a different, quieter path. One that is true to who I am.

Now, I watch my daughter whinny and gallop. I watch her talk to rocks and trees. And on days when I am having trouble relating to her, when I feel myself rolling my eyes at her latest outburst, I read submissions for Stone Soup and am reminded that her inner world is as complex as mine. As yours. That we are all of us, animals and humans and dirt and trees and sofas and sky, here together.

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The sea is stormy, please help me!

My wings are small, please help me!

The butterflies are afraid, please help me!

My world is ignored, please help me!

Parwana Amiri, a poet from Herat Province, Afghanistan, was 16 years old and living in Ritsona, a refugee camp north of Athens, Greece, when she wrote these words. Her poem “Fly With Me” challenges us to look and beckons us to listen. We do. And we feel her desperation, her hope, her anger. But we also anticipate this narrative. Her words fulfill and breathe life into our expectations of the experiences of a teenager displaced by war. But what happens when we move beyond passively receiving a work like this? What happens when young people, in particular, consider these works with more context—about the artists, their life histories, and even the more mundane aspects of their everyday lives?

Getting past the immediate expression of knee-jerk empathy—as human as that feeling may be—and creating an experience of deep reflection rooted in knowledge and personal connection is a core operating principle of the Stone Soup Refugee Project, which I direct. In collaboration with organizations around the world, we publish young refugee artists in Stone Soup, a literary magazine by and for children, facilitate creative writing workshops, and connect young people living in refugee camps to those living outside of such precarious situations as artists and writers. Through sharing creative works produced under starkly different circumstances, the young people gain dimension and nuance to one another, and move beyond dominant narratives of war and suffering.

Young people, like most of us, approach the art and writing of young refugees from a place of empathy. When we see the tear-streaked face of a father cradling the smiling head of a dismembered body, limbs strewn about while bombs drop debris overhead, in a drawing by a 13-year-old Syrian girl, we feel empathy. When we see 12-year-old Ali’s painting of a lone boat floating beneath a smiling sun on an otherwise empty, rolling sea, its passengers’ stick-figure arms outstretched in desperation, we feel empathy.

Indeed, Jack*, a British participant in our pen pal program, expressed this sentiment in his correspondence with Sammah, a young refugee in Kenya. “I know that you have a hard life. You must be so brave to survive,” Jack wrote. “I can’t believe that you have an alien identity. I live in a solid house, with a passport. I wouldn’t survive in your condition.”

Sammah responded with a picture of her coffee grinder and explained, “We’re Ethiopian, we like coffee.” Alongside a picture of her house, she wrote, “This is what the houses here look like.” Her letter closed with an echo of Jack’s sentiments. “I will not give up” sits wedged between a drawing of a tree and her thatched roof house. Amid the vivid imagery and enthusiastic descriptions of the material objects that comprise her daily life, these words feel like an afterthought.

Through personal contact, a different, richer story emerges between young people. A story grounded in context wherein school work, friendship, and family life emerge with deeper significance against the backdrop of a starker reality of which Jack was already, perhaps vaguely, aware. Through these kinds of exchanges, young writers and artists, like Jack and Sammah, become people to each other.

Another project, the “Half-Baked Art Exchange,” a joint initiative of the Stone Soup Refugee Project and U.K.-based My Start project, allowed South Sudanese boys living in Kakuma Refugee Camp to create a piece of artwork in collaboration with young members of the broader Stone Soup community based in the U.S. and the U.K.

We began with a workshop where Kakuma Camp participants created an original piece of artwork, reflective of their lives, with a My Start project facilitator. Meanwhile, Stone Soup participants attended a workshop to learn about life in Kakuma Camp and various aspects of their partners’ cultural practices and lived environments. Following this, Stone Soup participants received the works created in Kakuma Camp and added to them in ways that sought to highlight the original piece while creating a dialogue between two people and two worlds.

Akech, from Kakuma Camp, began “Silver Specks” by layering found objects, colored packing paper, and thick glue baked in the desert sun to depict a line of yellow, green, and red squares with scattered flecks of silver against a brown background. His U.S.-based partner, Georgia, interpreted the colored squares in “Silver Specks” as a road, and added shadowed silhouettes, and little bits of sticks tied with wire to represent a fence. “I wanted to show joy, bright and bold,” she said, “but still trapped in the brown land, caught by the sharp threads of a barbed wire fence.”

For participants like Georgia, the workshop offered an opportunity to humanize and gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of young people displaced by war, social collapse, and climate crisis. As part of their workshop about life in Kakuma Camp, Georgia and her fellow Stone Soup participants had viewed a video showcasing the lives of Akech and other Sudanese artists. “Most people imagine [a refugee camp] to be a toxic wasteland full of sadness and hunger and a weary thirst for escape,” Georgia explained. But the video “showed people dancing, laughing, hugging, and going about their daily lives.”

For the young refugee participants, this workshop, and other Stone Soup initiatives, offer a platform to tell their own stories, in their own voices, for an audience of their peers. Lobola, a Sudanese boy, said his piece, “Full Pink Sun Half a Yellow Sun,” depicted how being in the camp “is like being in another world [apart] from the rest of the world and the sun is in the middle because it is so so hot here.” His collaborative U.S.-based partner, Anika, added a piece of paper with the word “Home”—because it is not just a place of abstract suffering, but a home, and for many, including Lobola, the only one he’s ever known.

This storytelling has powerful effects. Parwana Amiri, the 16-year-old writer of “Fly With Me,” says that for her, “writing is immortality.” By immortalizing a young person’s experience of war and trauma, and providing a deeper connection and context for their art, we move beyond the simplistic initial response of empathy that war narratives provoke. And in forging deeper solidarities, our own sense of agency comes into being—a sense of agency from which we might disrupt hollow deflections of suffering in favor of imagining alternative possibilities.

The post When Kids Make Art, a Richer Story of War Emerges appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Modern childhood is less than 150 years old, and so is our way of talking about children as being fundamentally different from adults. This care and concern for the young has flowered in a variety of ways in modern society, and emerges in a mix of public emotions and policy advocacy. But sometimes, as with QAnon, it can also lead to outright conspiracy theorizing. We can, in turn, learn a lot about QAnon—and our vulnerability to conspiracy theories—if we trace its focus on children to its roots.

Our cultural training to be outraged over threats to childhood emerged in the decades after the Civil War, as mechanized industry, growing cities, and American childhood collided, literally. Children playing in streets were no match for motorized vehicles. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American city newspapers regularly reported children killed by streetcars and automobiles, and by the time the 1890s rolled around, outrage over children’s deaths led social reformers in Chicago and other cities to open private playlots and urge city leaders to build public playgrounds so children could play off the streets. Children on the streets were not a new concern. But setting aside public space so children could play safely? That was new, and this early advocacy reflected a changing attitude toward childhood, one that posited that it was a unique life stage requiring special protection.

The growing public stance of care and concern for the young was broader than public safety regulations, extending to morality concerns, such as in the mid-1950s when psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent. The influential text argued that both violence and sexually suggestive images in comic books led to juvenile delinquency. Wertham’s argument fit into a postwar pearl-clutching panic over so-called crime comics, stoked on the national stage by Senator Estes Kefauver, whose hearings on juvenile delinquency fed local efforts to censor mass culture, and presumed that parents were losing control over their children.

This kind of rhetoric has been recycled, decade after decade, focusing on different issues and with different cadences, but always highlighting putative dangers to childhood and youth. Arriving a decade after Wertham, and feeding into a backlash to desegregation, bilingual education, and sex education was conservative journalist John Steinbacher’s, 1970 bestseller The Child Seducers, which started with a controversy over sex education in Anaheim, California, and spun a tale of 50 years of worldwide conspiracy that would first provide “sex instruction” to children and then somehow turn libertine impulses into the destruction of America.

The spinning of conspiracy theories coexisted in each decade with a more serious focus on policy that addressed children’s needs. Importantly, both were expressions of the modern idea of childhood. Take the work of lawyer Marian Wright Edelman, active at the same time as Steinbacher, who founded the Children’s Defense Fund. An expert in both claiming the moral high ground and advocating specific policies, Edelman began with a 1973 report on children denied schooling, and moved on to almost every material issue touching children: poverty, education, healthcare and beyond.

The increased overlap between serious concerns and conspiracizing may have been an artifact of the Baby Boom. Children born at the peak of the Boom graduated high school in 1974. So, of course, public attention focused on this generation—not just Steinbacher’s ravings and Edelman’s serious concerns but panics and arguments over the effects of divorce, the trends of teenage pregnancy, advertising on children’s television, misbehavior in high school, and more. But the aging of the Baby Boom after the 1970s just meant that they became parents, dominating the discourse of childhood from a different perspective, bringing their experience as postwar consumers, including as consumers of their own parents’ concerns.

As Boomers were becoming parents, and dominating American demographics as young adults, President Ronald Reagan helped promote concerns about strangers and child kidnapping. Pictures of missing children appeared on milk cartons, thanks to private milk distributors choosing to contribute to the public discourse about stranger danger. Private companies encouraged parents to fingerprint their children, just in case they became victims of gruesome crimes.

As Paul Renfro describes in his new book on the era, Stranger Danger, this moral panic obscured the fact that the vast majority of children reported as missing were (and today remain likely to be) either teenage runaways or taken by noncustodial parents. Rather, what this campaign really did was obscure the more probable dangers of domestic violence and sexual abuse perpetrated by adults already known to their victims.

The birth of the internet only added a new layer to these concerns: the danger could come from anywhere in the world, at any time of the day. In the 1990s, parents could read fearmongering headlines like “Youngsters Falling Prey to Seducers in Computer Web” or “Cyberporn … Can We Protect our Kids—and Free Speech?” While most child abuse is local, with the abuser well-known to the child and family, these stories suggested that emails and chat forums would connect children and youth directly to strangers who would abuse or kidnap them, and the initial connections could happen in their own bedrooms. In turn, this public panic has sent policymakers of all political stripes scrambling after boogie monsters—such as with the Communications Decency Act of 1996, an attempt to criminalize indecency online that the Supreme Court struck down the following year as unconstitutionally vague.

The so-called bathroom bills of recent years contain one of the most crucial tells about the rhetoric of childhood, or the pairing of rhetoric about precious children with public rage. Driven by legislators in North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Georgia, bathroom bills intend to closely regulate which children go in which school bathrooms—just like states mandated racial segregation in schools and public bathrooms a century ago—and they target transgender children in the guise of protecting other children. This outrage was never over the safety of all children’s bodies but the need to decide which bodies belong where.

Every decade or so, we have an opportunity to refocus on what matters most to children instead of what triggers adults. But this long history of public panic shows that we have not redirected our outrage. We are still too easily distracted by our passionate promises to childhood. Not children, but childhood in the abstract, most commonly symbolized by white children, who are portrayed as being pure.

An ugly symmetry of modern American childhood pairs public outrage on behalf of children with public and publicly acceptable rage at children. Here childhood is protected, childhood is sacred, childhood is something to rage about if threatened. But not every child. We must remember: In 1955, the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till. In 1989, Donald Trump placing newspaper ads demanding the return of the death penalty in the middle of the Central Park Five case involving false prosecutions of a 16-year-old, two 15-year-olds, and two 14-year-olds. In 2014, police killing Tamir Rice at 12. This spring, Adam Toledo, 13.

Until we start to resist our cultural training, we will continue to be triggered into public outrage, which serves our feelings as adults, not our responsibilities to real children. Our vulnerability to that outrage did not expire with the Trump administration, nor did our capacity to be distracted by moral panics, nor our ability to simultaneously proclaim that we would protect childhood in the abstract while also raging at living, breathing, individual children.

Already, the QAnon conspiracies of 2020 have morphed; we hear fewer nonsensical allegations in public about Hillary Clinton and more about COVID vaccines, and bills in multiple states to restrict how we teach about the history of racism in the United States.

But a good portion of the conspiracizing in 2021 still revolves around children, because of that long history of modern childhood ideology and training for outrage. This readily available passion is part of modern public discourse—and it is not just among QAnon adherents. It is all of us, vulnerable to mistargeted outrage that distracts us from larger, systemic dangers to children.

The post The Cycle of Public Panic Over Childhood That Got Us to QAnon  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why barstools? If our kids are going to get back to education and socialization anytime soon, their best shot lies in restaurants and bars—the places that adults care most about keeping open these days.

Yes, St. Nick, I realize that turning the bars—at least those with outdoor seating—into havens for those too young to drink legally is not a great idea. But it’s way better than anything California has offered its kids during this pandemic.

The policy of our state’s grown-up Scrooges is transparent: let’s make the kiddos more miserable than we are. That means giving short shrift to data about the low risks and low transmission rates of COVID for kids and missing few opportunities to damage children’s academic, social, and mental health.

To that end, Santa, we naughty adults closed the schools (and, at times, playgrounds), failed to develop the testing and safety regimes needed to reopen them, and imposed distance learning that produces educational regression and screen addiction. We’re advising children not to visit their friends, their coaches, their mentors, and even their beloved grandparents, aunts, and uncles. (Also, on the banned list: you, Santa!)

And parents who dare to defend their kids have been attacked as deniers of science, or racists who don’t understand COVID’s disparate impacts, or heartless haters willing to put teacher health at risk.

The message is unmistakable: adult wish lists are the ones that matter this COVID season. Furthermore, no Elf on the Shelf is watching as the elected representatives of these same adults (who won’t let children, even 17-year-olds, vote), flout the COVID rules of their own making.

This dismissal of child interests isn’t radical or new. It’s long been visible in government budgets that privilege old age, in public indifference to school shootings, and in our go-slow approach to climate change. And it isn’t going away. Barring an organized resistance by children, our only hope for better serving kids is to smuggle their interests into policies that protect adults first.

Which is why my three sons, and kids across the state, need those barstools for Christmas. Since this is a society that prizes small businesses over schools and other public infrastructure, let the kids dine out!

I recognize that may not be possible for the next few weeks, with restaurants and bars required to be closed for service. But with lawsuits and local governments challenging these closures, you can bet that these establishments’ outdoor spaces, at least, will reopen well before schools do.

Under a bars-into-kids-club policy, the food and drinks children order could be paid for by federal school lunch funds—a double subsidy for hungry youth and business owners. While schools have been unable to exploit their ample outdoor space and our warm weather to remain open safely, bars and restaurants have grabbed any sidewalk or parking spot they can—space that could be used for kids to study or for teachers to hold classes. Plus, BYOB—bring your own barstools—would make sanitation a cinch.

Yes, turning restaurants over to kids might make them crowded—but not nearly as cramped as the small dwellings which kids occupy in a housing-starved state. Restaurant wait staff might not be trained educators, but they’d at least represent some adult supervision for the many California children who are left alone at home, or are supervised by older siblings.

Plus, bars and restaurants often have better Wi-Fi than many of the communities where our kids can’t manage to connect to online lessons. It’s a logical extension of the kids you see sitting with school Chromebooks outside McDonald’s, Starbucks, and other fast-food chains that offer free, dependable Wi-Fi.

Now, Santa, adults love to argue that all of the COVID chaos will be over soon, and that kids’ lives will soon be back to normal. But that talking point is a monstrous lie, and you should dump an enormous lump of coal on anyone who uses it.

For one thing, companies have only just started to explore testing vaccines on children, so kids will be among the last to be vaccinated. For another, while the pandemic may end, the damage to children will remain, and adults have shown little interest in repairing it.

Santa, perhaps you could bring California real plans to make up missed instructional time, to give extra support to the majority of kids performing below grade level, to address declining social skills and soaring anxiety (including an escalating suicide rate), and to find all the student dropouts.

Because our state and schools don’t have such plans. Instead, they are using the pandemic to justify doing less for kids.

The most blatant example is the just-released Master Plan for Early Learning and Care, prepared by consultants at the state’s direction. It’s supposed to make real Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature promise of a “cradle to career” system for child development, but it’s actually a betrayal of 25 years of promises for universal child care and preschool—and an example of why kids simply can’t be too cynical about adults.

The master plan offers no real plan. Instead, it proposes onerous new requirements and confounding consolidations of existing programs, a titanic shifting of deck chairs that could damage those pre-schools and day-cares that close for good during the pandemic. The plan even reverses previous commitments to provide universal pre-school (only some 3-year-olds would get it, and 4-year-olds would get it only after an endless phase-in). Worst of all, this master plan proposes no public funding source for expanding early childhood services, other than imposing complicated new fees on overburdened families.

If California cared about its kids, we’d be making child care universal, seriously enforcing mask mandates, and vaccinating teachers and child care providers first. And we’d have plans to compensate for this useless year: free before- and after-school tutoring for kids, and a new schedule to keep public schools open for the next four summers, from 2021 to 2024, until students have recovered all of 2020’s lost instructional time.

But in California, a place of progressive talk and regressive action, such ideas will be dismissed as too costly and unrealistic.

In that case, Santa, I have one request. Could your elves design a new version of our state seal? It would be just like the old one, except that it replaces “Eureka” with our real motto: “Screw the Kids.”

The post Give California’s Kids Barstools for Christmas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One girl, a 3-year-old Australian, has been in the Kurdish-run refugee camp al-Hol and was about to lose her fingers to frostbite because of the lack of heating and infrastructure at the camp. The other Amira, a Canadian, was discovered last year walking through the rubble of Baghouz after both her parents were killed in the aerial bombardment that heralded the end of ISIS’s territorial control. This Amira was also held at the al-Hol camp until international pressure forced the Kurdish authorities to move her to a safer location.

These parallel cases have ignited new debates about what to do with children from war zones, who now find themselves without country, citizenship, protection—or much compassion. The countries from which ISIS children originate are confronted with a grave humanitarian crisis. Leaving children to languish and die in refugee camps and prisons is an unconscionable abuse of human rights. The longer the children remain, the more they could be exposed to trauma and deprivation, and now, even face the threat of an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, all factors compounding the problems of their eventual adjustment. Furthermore, there is concern that children enduring harsh conditions of refugee camps will be even more vulnerable to radicalization in the future.

These children had little or no say in whether their parents took them to ISIS territory in Syria and Iraq. Governments debating whether to allow those children to return must understand what they experienced as a first step to reintegrating them into society. What were the children coerced to do while they were the so-called “Ashbal al Khilafah” or ISIS “cubs,” the name given to them by the terrorist group? What did they witness as observers of ISIS war crimes? And what might have been done to the children themselves? ISIS would not be the first violent extremist organization whose members sexually abused children they recruited.

The historical context of children in violent extremist groups is complicated. The numbers of such children mostly declined in the two decades following the 1996 publication of the United Nations’ Machel report, which described the impact of armed conflict on children. But in more recent years, groups that once avoided using children on the front lines began to revive the tactic in new ways, with children as car bombers and executioners.

ISIS heralded its exploitation of children. In ISIS propaganda, children were featured giving their “about to die” eulogies; ISIS also distributed propaganda videos of executions carried out by boys as young as 10. ISIS’s tactics led to an urgent call by Western governments and security agencies for increased efforts to prevent radicalization and violent extremism across the globe. But so far, there is little empirical evidence for effective prevention of such radicalization and violence around children. Prevention is challenging because armed groups employ so many various methods of indoctrination for children, and use children in so many different roles in conflict. ISIS’s approach to educating children demonstrates the breadth of the challenge.

By 2014, ISIS had assumed de facto control over schools in the areas under its control in Syria, which had been in chaos since its civil war began in 2011. The chaos came to the classrooms. Female teachers were dismissed immediately from all of their duties. While many male teachers remained in their positions, they were forced to teach an ISIS-controlled curriculum to gender-segregated pupils. These lessons included weapons training and intense ideological conditioning in which every element of education was imbued with military imagery to routinize violence. The mathematics textbooks had the students counting bullets and tanks, and students learned to tell time with clocks fastened to bundles of dynamite.

The schools provided ISIS recruiters with the opportunity to scout for talent or specific traits. For example, children with an aptitude for communication were deployed as recruiters themselves, adopting public-speaking roles to conscript other children, as well as adults, on the Dawa caravan. The goal of child recruiters was to engender a sense of pride, prestige and competition among what ISIS referred to as the “cubs of the caliphate” to increase their status. Students earned this “cub” status in one of the dedicated training camps where they learned the military, tactical, and combat skills needed to become a militant.

The evidence of how children were brain washed is chilling. Between May and July 2015, ISIS released three videos featuring children aged between 10 and 15 years old. A video from February 2015 showed 80 children—some as young as 5—wearing camouflage, standing in formation and engaging in military exercises with guns. They were taught how to behead people and use AK-47s. Clearly, ISIS pioneered a form of individual resilience by combining intense physical and military training with deep levels of ideological and psychological indoctrination. The group designed a systematic process of education, religious indoctrination, and physical training to generate competent militants who were not just mindless drones, but who embraced every aspect of its teachings.

Many people have argued that ISIS’s exploitation of children is no different than the past creation of child soldiers in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Darfur. Yet ISIS’s strategic use of child recruits is very different than the way child soldiers in African were employed. On that continent, such children were recruited throughout the 1980s and ’90s not for the future, but for the immediate exigencies. Most of the children fighting in African militias were killed in battle and few survived to progress through the ranks to become leaders.

This difference between the ISIS approach and the African example has important implications for the rehabilitation of former child soldiers. What may have worked for several Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs in Africa—trying to transform children’s roles with the aid of family, community, educational and religious authorities—may not work as seamlessly in Syria and Iraq, where the religious and education institutions were thoroughly co-opted, controlled, and distorted by ISIS’s control from 2014 to 2018. As a result of post-traumatic stress disorder, these children will likely lack empathy, suffer from attachment problems, and struggle with socialization.

Given that ISIS indoctrination in many cases started at very young age, the children have to unlearn their knowledge of the Islamic faith that was profoundly distorted by ISIS and re-learn basic life skills. They also should participate in vocational training to facilitate their transition to everyday life. This transition requires a long-term process, longer than the standard three-month rehabilitation program that exists in the Kurdish camps where so many ISIS children go.

If Western countries, human rights organizations, and civil society are to have any hope of reintegrating the children who survived being used by ISIS, there must be a level of coordination and creativity not previously employed in any DDR program. Demobilization of the children demands a multi-pronged approach that combines vocational training, psychological intervention, and religious reeducation to address the trauma suffered by witnessing executions and participating in acts of violence. Normalization will be all the more challenging if members of their own families encouraged or exposed them to violence.

In Pakistan, there exist successful programs to treat children who were members of violent extremist organizations (for example, the Pakistani Taliban TTP). The child’s family is expected to play a positive role in their reintegration. However, in the case of ISIS, the families who encouraged and exposed the children to the violence in the first place are less than ideal. To prevent recidivism or re-engagement, the children might have to be separated from their family members. That is far from standard practice, but there is little that is standard about the challenges of reintegrating children of ISIS fighters.

Mia Bloom’s research is supported in part by the Office of Naval Research “Documenting the Virtual Caliphate” #N00014-16-1-3174. All opinions are exclusively those of the authors and do not represent the Department of Defense or the Navy.

The post The Forgotten Children of ISIS Fighters  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our kids should not lose one day of school, not a single day of instruction, to the coronavirus.

Let me be clear: I’m not arguing against closing schools right now, in the midst of the pandemic. Flattening the curve of infections comes first.

But the coronavirus must not be an excuse for permanently losing critical days of actual instruction.

Here’s the principle we need: California must guarantee that our schools will make up every single day of instruction now being missed. Those days could be made up with mandatory summer school if public health officials say it’s OK to open—or by adding days to the next school year.

But California school districts are pointedly refusing to make any such commitments. Instead, 99 percent of our districts, serving 6 million students, have canceled instruction indefinitely, without any plans—or apparent intentions—of making them up.

We tell ourselves that California is a global capital of innovation fueled by education, and that children come first. But our actions don’t show it.

With Governor Newsom saying that schools likely won’t reopen during this school year, the Golden State is hurtling toward the permanent cancelation of more than 50 days of instruction. That’s nearly one-third of the 180-day school year.

Losing those school days would be a betrayal of our children.

In education, nothing is more important than instructional time with good teachers. Research is clear that the more time kids get with the teachers, the more they learn. Studies show that kids often never catch up after missing extensive amounts of school; poorer kids are most at risk.

Even in good times, California fails to give its children enough instructional time. The state refuses to provide full-day kindergarten, despite promises from generations of progressive politicians to do just that. And for the older grades, a full school day here really only takes half the day, with five hours or less of daily instruction through grade eight. (High schools are supposed to get six hours.)

Officially, California is supposed to provide 180 days of school, but the state habitually does less than that. During the Great Recession, the school year was shortened to 175 days (and some districts cut back even more days). And, as the nonprofit news site CalMatters has shown, individual school districts have made additional cancelations of instruction routine. The reasons for such cancelations vary—from wildfires, to shooting threats, to classrooms in disrepair—but they have reached record numbers in the past two years.

Even in this context, the speed with which California’s education leaders have abandoned instruction during the COVID-19 crisis is stunning. Before many schools had closed, the top education lobbies—including associations representing school superintendents and school boards, and the unions for teachers—were aggressively lobbying for two things. First, they demanded the cancelation of instructional time. And second, they sought guarantees that school districts would get all their state funding and teachers would get all their pay, even if they didn’t actually teach anyone.

Given the power of these education lobbies, it didn’t take long for the state to agree to keep up funding for school days without any school. Of course, Newsom and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond have publicly demanded that schools find way to keep teaching students online. But these are rhetorical fig leaves.

It’s clear that little education will happen with the schools closed. Many students, especially poor ones, don’t have the technology or parental supervision to take classes from home. And teachers also lack technology and time, particularly since they are stuck at home dealing with their own families.

Another reason why online education won’t work now is that Newsom, Thurmond, and other politicians previously supported rules and regulations to discourage online education, including a moratorium just last year on virtual charter schools.

Indeed, one irony of this situation is that the state’s most dependable online infrastructure for education is its system of state assessment tests. And state officials, seeking to please the unions who despise such tests, already canceled this spring’s exams, claiming they wanted to spare students the stress of taking tests during the COVID-19 crisis. The tests should be reinstated, precisely so we can determine what this lost instruction time cost kids.

Taken together, our educational decisions during this pandemic send two unmistakable messages. First, education is a non-essential service in our state. Second, when it comes to education in the pandemic, Californians are not all in this together—we are on our own.

I have three boys in our local public elementary school, and in their communications to me, district officials and teachers have made clear that I must be the boys’ instructor for as long as the schools are out. My wife, a health care journalist covering the COVID-19 story, understandably cannot assist me.

Even with the advantages of a college degree and experience leading university courses, I am failing as a teacher.

All three boys attend the same public elementary school, but they are in different grades with different teachers. Forced to learn together here at home, these brothers too often prefer fighting to focusing on their schoolwork. On my first day as instructor at the Mathews Home Academy, my first grader shoved my fifth grader into a coffee table, leaving a massive gash that forced me to cancel afternoon classes and take the injured party to urgent care.

So far, I haven’t been able to get my boys to complete the handful of assignments that their teachers have sent home. Heck, I can’t even get them to watch more PBS, as Newsom and L.A. Unified superintendent Austin Beutner advise parents to do. One problem: I am frequently distracted by having to do my own job from home.

My sorry “teaching” and the uneven instructional efforts of other parents, siblings, grandparents, babysitters (or, in the reality for too many, children home alone) are no substitute for actual instruction. But that won’t matter to the state and local school districts who will end up counting this time as instructional. (Note to parents and other home instructors: Don’t hold your breath waiting to get paid for your teaching hours.)

Our kids will never get these days back, unless we demand the only effective replacement for lost days of instruction: more days of actual instruction.

The politicians will respond by pleading poverty. They will say it will cost the state billions more to make up what’s being lost now. And they will say the new recession has dried up the revenues the state would need to do this.

But education is the state’s constitutional duty, and California owes it to its children—and our collective future—to find that money. Put this way: if this crisis justifies billions in bailouts to businesses from airlines to banks, then there’s no financial or moral reason why our kids should lose any of the instruction time they’re owed.

Not one day.

The post Canceling School for COVID-19 Cheats California’s Kids appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How did this major abdominal surgery—which poses significant risks—become mainstream in less than a generation? Many factors, including new obstetric technology, the effect of that technology on malpractice threats and costs, and changes in the way doctors are trained converged to make cesareans seem less risky than vaginal births, changing both obstetricians’ and pregnant women’s notions of what constitutes “normal” and “necessary” medical treatment during childbirth.

To see how quickly pregnant women’s attitudes toward childbirth changed, consider two contrasting stories about a woman’s reaction to her cesarean birth—one in 1971 and the other in 1984. Both women were first-time mothers. Both enjoyed problem-free pregnancies. And both were carrying full-term babies, facing head down, when they gave birth. In other words, they each experienced classically low-risk pregnancies—even though both women had a cesarean.

In 1971, the first woman—let’s call her Carol—checked into a big-city hospital at 2 a.m., shortly after going into labor spontaneously. Although only 20, she was not nervous. Her mother had given birth to nine children vaginally and Carol assumed that her own first birth would be a similarly “natural thing.”

In the labor room, someone came in periodically to check the baby’s heart rate with a fetal stethoscope. By dawn, Carol remembered, “they were having a little more trouble finding his heartbeat.” Nurses and doctors began to complain that Carol’s cervix was only two centimeters dilated. At 10 a.m., doctors decided to perform a cesarean, although they didn’t tell Carol their plan. Rather, they informed her husband, who was consigned to the waiting room—the custom in the early 1970s. Carol did sign a consent form to allow the surgery, but no one explained to her what she was signing and she didn’t ask. She was in labor and in no mood to question anything.

Consequently, when an orderly wheeled Carol into the operating room, she was bewildered despite having just consented to the surgery. “I’m going, like, ‘What’s happening?’” A doctor responded cryptically, “We’re going to operate.” Carol was flabbergasted. “Why?” Everyone ignored her. “It was like I was a non-entity.”

Only after her son’s birth did Carol learn the reason for the surgery. Facing difficulty finding a steady heartbeat, doctors feared fetal distress. But the explanation did not satisfy Carol. Her son’s Apgar score, a numerical rating of a newborn’s condition formulated one minute after birth by assessing five vital signs including heart rate and skin tone, had been first-rate. “There was nothing distressed about this baby! When they pulled him out there was nothing distressed!” Today, she remains certain the cesarean was unnecessary. “I really felt that it was clinic day. The doctors were going to make sure that they didn’t have to come in later.”

Fast forward 13 years. By 1984, when Leanne gave birth to her first child, the surgery had become common, constituting 22 percent of births in the U.S. Unlike in 1971, when Carol had her first baby, by the mid-1980s everyone knew someone who had had the surgery.

Leanne was two weeks past her due date when her obstetrician told her she had to come to the hospital. He ruptured her amniotic sac, hoping to jumpstart labor. By then, the electronic fetal monitor, a device that provides continuous information about the fetal heart rate, had replaced doctors’ intermittent use of the fetal stethoscope. Nurses connected Leanne to the monitor. Her baby’s heart rate began to fluctuate, probably in reaction to the drain of amniotic fluid. The obstetrician told Leanne, “We’ve got to get this baby out of here.” Leanne reacted unhesitatingly. “Just do what you need to do.”

After the birth, she harbored no regrets. She was certain that the surgery had been necessary given what seemed to be the potential risks to her child as indicated by the fetal monitor. “We got him out. We got him healthy. We didn’t lose me. We didn’t lose him. Everything was fine.” Leanne, unlike Carol, was sure her cesarean had been necessary. By the mid-1980s, due to the increasing number of cesareans, the notion that vaginal childbirth was risky had become common. Leanne’s favorable reaction to cesarean surgery had become the norm, Carol’s anger the aberration.

Cesareans can indeed be lifesaving. But the grave conditions that demand the surgery are rare—each occurs in fewer than one percent of births. These conditions include the umbilical cord dropping into the birth canal before the baby does, several different placental complications that include premature detachment and obstruction of the cervical opening, and a full-term fetus lying sideways in the uterus. Yet the electronic fetal monitor helped cement the view that vaginal birth is far riskier than it actually is.

In hindsight, it is clear that physicians and hospitals adopted the monitor too quickly. The monitor had been introduced in 1969 but the first clinical trial of the device was not published until 1976. By then, all but one of the hospitals housing obstetric residency programs in the U.S. had adopted the machine, making its use central to the training of new obstetricians.

The authors of the 1976 article that appeared in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that the monitor—although considered by most obstetricians to be a vital tool—did not change outcomes. Apgar scores; stillbirths; neonatal and perinatal deaths; incidence of cerebral palsy; and admissions to the neonatal intensive care unit were effectively identical whether the fetal heartbeat had been tracked constantly by the electronic monitor or intermittently by a nurse or doctor wielding a fetal stethoscope.

The only difference between the two groups was that the mothers connected to monitors had a cesarean rate of 16.5 percent while those checked intermittently with a fetal stethoscope had a cesarean rate of 6.5 percent. Seven subsequent studies, one of 35,000 births, confirmed these findings. But having been taught that the electronic fetal monitor was vital to their own professional success, as well as their patients’ well-being, obstetricians ignored the studies.

Edward Hon, the Yale University obstetrician who invented the monitor, complained of his colleagues around the country, “They’re dropping the knife with each drop in the fetal heart rate.” Before electronic monitoring, continual observation of the fetal heartbeat was impossible, so no one knew precisely how the fetus responded to the many nuances of labor. “As we started seeing these dips and things all over,” another obstetrician observed of the monitor strip, “it helped increase the section rate a lot.”

The monitor also helped to create the current malpractice climate in obstetrics. Since the mid-1980s, the continual record produced by fetal monitors has become a tool of trial lawyers to “prove” to juries that a timely cesarean would have prevented cerebral palsy, even though the cerebral palsy rate, at one in 500 births, has not decreased even slightly with the advent of the monitor. As one seasoned obstetrician explained, a lawyer can now point to a squiggle on a page and claim, “‘Well, that’s where the baby was damaged.’ How do you disprove that?”

The litigious atmosphere in obstetrics, aided in no small part by the unreliable but tangible data produced by the fetal monitor, has prompted an ever-increasing number of obstetricians to perform a cesarean in the face of even niggling doubt about the course of a birth. In the legal and medical worlds, no matter the outcome of the operation, an obstetrician who has performed the surgery is considered “covered.” And that has increased the cesarean rate further still.

Through the 1980s and ’90s, the surgery became the first resort for younger obstetricians treating virtually any complication of labor. As one obstetric resident at a large, urban hospital said recently of herself and her cohorts, cesarean section is “probably the skill that we get the most experience in.” She joked, “We could do a C-section on a desert island.” Significantly higher reimbursement rates for cesareans versus vaginal births add to the tangle of factors contributing to the rise in cesareans.

Forty years ago, Helen Marieskind, the author of a 1979 U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare report on the increase in cesareans and ways to mitigate it, noted, “The question must be raised as to how much a climate accepting of C-sections in and of itself promotes more Cesareans.” Marieskind’s “question” was clearly prophetic. Carol’s and Leanne’s contrasting stories indicate how quickly mothers came to accept cesarean surgery. The claim of the obstetric resident that she could perform a cesarean on a desert island demonstrates how casually physicians now view this major abdominal surgery.

And yet this dramatic change in obstetric practice has not been good for mothers. Cesareans carry risks, including intractable postpartum infections, that vaginal births seldom do. One of the most frightening downstream effects of a cesarean is placenta accreta, when the placenta grows into the uterine scar left by a previous cesarean. The condition, which causes life-threatening hemorrhage, has increased 55-fold since the 1950s. Accretas almost always require emergency hysterectomies; seven percent prove fatal.

Undoing the medical ethos that led to the epidemic of cesareans will likely take time and will require concerted effort from, and the education of, a number of players: obstetricians; hospitals, particularly hospitals with obstetric residency programs; insurers; and patients. But it can be done.

History demonstrates that changes in society and medical culture, rather than medical need, prompted the surge in the cesarean rate. There is a lesson here. As new treatments and diagnostic tools become available, no matter the field of medicine, it’s important to remember that medicine is not a dispassionate science, but an art continually shaped by changes in culture and society.

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