My most precious Shosh and Jaialai:
Remember our numerous beach trips and hours of fun we’d have playing in the sand? Do you recall those sand art battles where each would draw figures in the sand to devour those of the others? Remember our skiing trips to Bachelor with your favorite cousins?
When I’m sad, memories of those happy times keep hope alive and give me the strength to fight on. I hope they do the same for you.
These are tough times. The pandemic forces social isolation in a country which had long struggled with social isolation, loneliness, and depression. The Loneliness Epidemic is real and has had adverse consequences for many Americans.
Loneliness and social isolation can be as damaging to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, researchers warned in a recent webcast, and the problem is particularly acute among seniors, especially during holidays.
Two in five Americans report that they sometimes or always feel their social relationships are not meaningful, and one in five say they feel lonely or socially isolated. The lack of connection can have life threatening consequences, said Brigham Young University professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who testified before the U.S. Senate in April, 2017 that the problem is structural as well as psychological….
The good news is that friendships reduce the risk of mortality or developing certain diseases and can speed recovery in those who fall ill.
https://www.hrsa.gov/enews/past-issues/2019/january-17/loneliness-epidemic (emphasis added)
The problem has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. With school closures, limited play dates, and prohibitions on large social gatherings, children as young as 9 years old have been known to take their own lives. https://kvoa.com/news/top-stories/2021/01/29/schools-across-us-seeing-rise-in-suicide-during-pandemic/. That is wrong on so many levels and is beyond sad.
Few countries have children living such isolated and lonely lives as ours. In America, parents and their children have been beaten down by mass media, biased child welfare agents, paternalistic parents and government officials, etc., almost to the point where parents and children are afraid of their own shadows. At a time when child mortality rates are at historic lows in America and reports of missing children are down by 40% since 1997 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/14/theres-never-been-a-safer-time-to-be-a-kid-in-america/), patronizing, nosy, and closed-minded busybodies rush to prohibit tag and other childhood games on school grounds, ban great literary classics from classrooms and school libraries for fear of kids being unable to think for themselves, and are quick to report child abuse/child neglect whenever they disagree with the parenting style or strategies of others.
Pandemic aside, we deny children the opportunity to engage in physical education and exercise, then complain about the epidemic of childhood obesity; we arrest parents for allowing their children to walk to the neighborhood parks, then complain about the inordinate amount of screen time kids engage in nowadays; we deny children books that would challenge accepted norms, prohibit teams from keeping scores at athletic competitions, and give all kids gold stars just for showing up, then mock them for being “snowflakes” and weak-willed, unable to withstand the challenges of normal life. How cruel! We set kids up for failure, then we blame them for the failure we cause! How insane! Is that not the ultimate form of child abuse … to destroy a child’s self-worth and sense of self? Is it any wonder youth suicide has increased by nearly 60 percent since 2007?!! See, e.g., https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/09/11/youth-suicide-rate-increases-cdc-report-finds/3463549001/.
Imagine being 10 years old and being led, along with your 6-year-old sibling, into the backseat of a police cruiser. The police promise to take you home to your parents. It’s only three blocks away, and you know they are searching for you frantically.
But instead of taking you home, the police detain you there, in the car, for three hours, without a meal or access to a restroom. The sun sets, night falls. Eventually the cops take you to a facility maintained by Child Protective Services where you’re kept for another several hours. You still haven’t had any dinner. You aren’t reunited with your parents until 10:30 p.m., nearly six hours after your ordeal began. [How is any of this “in the best interest of the children”?!!]
Your “crime”? Playing without parental supervision in a park less than a mile from home.
That all actually happened to the Meitiv children of Silver Spring, Md., on Sunday, according to the children’s parents. After a long family road trip, the children went to the neighborhood park with their parents’ permission, with strict instructions to be home by 6 p.m. They never made it, because the cops picked them up along the way after receiving a call from someone who saw the siblings walking down the street together.
The children were detained ostensibly to protect them from the dangers of walking home in a wealthy suburb of D.C. recently rated the “Most Caring Suburb in America” by real estate blog Movoto. But you have to wonder which is worse for a child’s well-being: walking down the street without an adult, or being detained by the cops and family services for nearly six hours?
Fortunately, we have some data to answer that question. The first thing to note is that the overall child mortality rate in the United States has literally never been lower. In 1935, for instance, there were nearly 450 deaths for every 100,000 children aged 1 to 4. Today, there are fewer than 30 deaths for every 100,000 kids in that age group — more than a tenfold decrease….
Long story short: for a kid between the ages of 5 and 14 today, the chances of premature death by any means are roughly 1 in 10,000, or 0.01 percent.
But parents typically aren’t thinking about disease or general morality when they fret over unattended kids — we’re worried about all the terrible things that could theoretically happen to a child out on his own. Chief among them is the threat of abduction, or of the child simply disappearing without a trace.
The FBI has several decades of data on missing persons now, and those numbers show that the number of missing person reports involving minors has been at record low levels in recent years. Overall, the number of these reports have fallen by 40 percent since 1997. This is more impressive when you consider that the overall U.S. population has risen by 30 percent over that same time period, meaning that the actual rate of missing person reports for children has fallen faster than 40 percent…. In fact, only 0.1 percent of missing persons cases were what we’d think of as a “stereotypical kidnapping” — where a complete stranger tries to abduct somebody and carry them off by force.
Another thing parents worry about when it comes to their kids — traffic. If they’re left to wander on their own outside, won’t they run out in front of a car or get hit by an irresponsible driver? In short: almost certainly not.
Data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that between 1993 and 2013, the number of child pedestrians struck and killed by cars fell by more than two-thirds, from more than 800 deaths to fewer than 250. The number of traffic-related pedestrian injuries in this age group fell by a similar percentage over the same period. Again these are raw numbers, and as the population has grown over that period, the actual rate has fallen even faster….
But couldn’t it be the case that kids are less prone to terrible tragedies these days because concerned parents are keeping them locked up at home, and calling the cops whenever they see someone else’s kid walking alone down the street? Probably not.
“It’s hard to say that much of the decline [in mortality and abduction rates] comes from stricter parenting,” said Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University who’s written about child safety statistics.
When it comes to child mortality, “crime and accidents were never that big of a deal to begin with,” he said. And there are a lot of factors driving those trends downward — better safety standards for cars and better pedestrian infrastructure, for instance. Declining rates of violent crime overall also likely play a role.
Asked about the Meitiv’s case, Caplan said, “it’s crazy, people are being persecuted for doing things that are extremely statistically safe just because other people disagree.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/14/theres-never-been-a-safer-time-to-be-a-kid-in-america/ (emphasis added)
Also, see, e.g., https://www.cbsnews.com/news/protective-services-called-on-mom-for-letting-child-play-outside/ (“I think when it comes to children, you have to give them the experience of life,” Roy said. “It’s doing them a disservice if we keep them trapped in the house until they are 16 and then they are off to high school.” Diane Debrovner, deputy editor at Parent’s Magazine, says this is a debate largely fueled by fears, like kidnapping by a stranger, which statistically is very low.); and, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/neighbor-calls-cops-child-services-texas-mom-letting-son-play-article-1.1943118.
As anyone with common sense and an understanding of rudimentary statistics knows, what is possible and what is probably are often separated by a WIDE CHASM. The Meitivs, for example, were twice investigated by the police and CPS, suffered incalculable and immeasurable damages as a result of the unwarranted intrusion into their family lives, and were ultimately found to be “responsible for unsubstantiated child neglect” for permitting their children to walk by themselves to the nearby neighborhood park when the chance of child abduction is only 0.1 percent. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/has-child-protective-services-gone-too-far/. [How, under our legal system IN A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC where we are “innocent until proven guilty,” can someone be found guilty of an unsubstantiated offense?!!!!]
This is beyond stupid. IT IS DANGEROUS. IT IS THE HEIGHT OF FASCISM. It is also highly violative of the core of our values as our Constitutional Republic where the Constitution protects our inalienable and natural (i.e., God-given) rights as human beings. These rights include — as recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court — the right of parents to raise their own children without interference from the state.
Despite the supposed legal protection, governmental fear-mongering and governmental intrusion into the bonds of parent-child relationships have only gotten worse. For example, in Oregon (a state founded as a White Racist Utopia, https://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040#_ga=1.41963365.1185351268.1409630183), the state proposed a mandatory and universal child visit by CPS caseworkers of every newborn in the state. https://www.ncregister.com/blog/oregon-to-become-first-state-to-require-home-surveillance-of-babies. The arrogance that public servants (often not drawn from the best and brightest among us due to the low salaries in the public sector — this is particularly true of CPS where low pay and high volume of casefiles keep many from applying) thinking they know and care more about the newborns than the newborns’ own parents is astounding! For these CPS workers, it’s just a 9-5 job. For parents, it’s a 24/7 and lifetime commitment. Naturally, mandatory and universal home visits of all newborns would grow CPS’s fiefdom significantly and require the hiring of many many more CPS caseworkers. It would also necessitate a commensurate increase in the agency’s budget. Given the state’s racist history, it is also not hard to imagine such intrusive tactics would impose greater burdens on members of the minority communities than the community at large when different cultural norms for childrearing could be easily interpreted as “child abuse” or “child neglect” because of how ill-defined those terms are under the law.
Advocates for families caught up in the child-welfare system [recognize that unwarranted interventions by CPS and/or the police are] … threats and intrusions that poor and minority parents endure all the time. Child-neglect statutes, says Martin Guggenheim, a New York University law professor and codirector of the school’s Family Defense Clinic, tend to be extremely vague, giving enormous discretion to social workers. “The reason we’ve tolerated the level of impreciseness in these laws for decades,” he notes, “is that they tend to be employed almost exclusively in poor communities—communities that are already highly regulated and overseen by low-level bureaucrats like the police….
“Certainly, prior to this, I don’t think most white people knew very much about the child-welfare system, or were afraid that someone was going to knock on their door and say, ‘Let me see your kids,’” says Dorothy Roberts, a University of Pennsylvania law professor and the author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. “Whereas in black neighborhoods, especially poor black neighborhoods, child-welfare-agency involvement is concentrated, so everybody is familiar with it.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/has-child-protective-services-gone-too-far/ (emphasis added)
These stupid scare tactics by foolish busybodies and public servants whose fiefdoms and budgetary interests grow in direct proportion to higher “victim” counts have largely resulted in a society where busy and already overly stressed parents are afraid to let their children out of their sight. This, in turn, has lead to the denial of childhood development opportunities and the growth of fragile children often derided as “snowflakes” by the very society that caused their stunted development in the first place.
Children need to run, jump, test themselves, compete against their peers, etc., to know what they are truly physically and mentally capable of and to grow. These processes are natural parts of child development. Remember how Little V used to always demand to be allowed to put on her jacket herself, or put on her own shoes? This is normal! Kids learn by doing and gain a greater sense of self by mastering life’s little challenges as appropriate for their age. A child who can jump up one step feels pride in his accomplishment and quickly challenges him to jump up a second step or even two steps at a go. This is how children learn the limits of their capabilities and learn to push beyond those limits to reach new heights. This is how they gain self-confidence and learn how to negotiate the strange and exciting world around them. We deny them this most of basic human rights by scaring them into living sedentary lives under the ever vigilant eyes of Big Brother.
Recall on our annual Sons and Dads Camping Trips with our friends, how on that first trip, Jaialai followed you, Shosh, and the other big boys on your hike through the tree farm, and how he got caught when you boys walked across that fallen log over the tiny creek a few feet below? When he got back to camp, he said he was scared, but he did it any way. He overcame his fears and crossed the log on this own. He was so proud of himself for doing that … as I was of him for his achievement! Recall how he hated water when we first got to Okinawa and refused to get himself wet only to scream “I LOVE WATER!!!” a short while later as he took an outdoors shower after a swim in the ocean? He grew immeasurably in each instance!!!! How is it right for anyone — much less government busybodies who know nothing and care nothing about him as a person and an individual — to deny him those opportunities for growth?!! (I can attest to the benefits of this first-hand even as an adult. My first time skiing was with college friends, some of whom grew up on the mountains of Colorado. On my first day, they went off-trail and I was forced to follow. At one point, we came upon a steep drop. I had to make the decision of going forward or going back on my own. I opted to go forward, and it made all the difference in the speed at which I learned to ski. By the end of that day, I made my first trip down a black diamond run … mostly on my ass, of course, but I did it and was unafraid to do it again.)
We harm children by denying them the opportunities to grow into themselves and by brainwashing them into being fearful of what is often considered normal for other children worldwide. For example, unlike the U.S., children as young as first-graders are given opportunities to be independent in countries like Germany and Japan and are permitted to walk by themselves — and even take the subway or public transportation by themselves — to school. See, e.g., https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/08/12/339825261/global-parenting-habits-that-havent-caught-on-in-the-u-s; https://rethinkingchildhood.com/2013/01/14/children-freedom-england-germany/; and, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japanese-young-children-solo-commute-subway-school/.
Denying children their right to grow and develop naturally is the ultimate form of child abuse. It makes them weaker as adults and denies them the opportunity and ability to grow to their full potentials. That is wrong and violative of the basic tenets of our Social Contract.
Don’t allow nosy and stupid strangers and public servants only interested in proving their worth and improving their lot to impose their will upon you as they do so many others. Think for yourself. Mind yourself. Breathe. Go outside and get fresh air as necessary to clear your head, reconnect yourself to nature, and regain perspective. (In the age of Pandemic, remember to do your part to protect yourselves and the most vulnerable among us by WEARING MASKS. Don’t be a selfish jerk and make it all about you. If you do that, go live in a cave by yourself instead of society where our actions affect others.) Reach out to your favorite cousins and your friends. You are NOT alone. The idea that we live and die alone is stupid and pushed by insecure folks who fear social rejections.
Make time for family and friends. Numerous studies have shown the import and benefits of social connections, yet the American society moves in the opposite direction with more people reporting fewer friends and confidants than they had decades ago. See, e.g., https://www.livescience.com/16879-close-friends-decrease-today.html; and, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-happiness-usa-idUSL1550309820070615. That is wrong on so many levels. Humans are social animals and are meant to live in tribes, not isolated creatures confined to quarters and interacting with the world only through tiny smart phone screens or slightly larger laptop screens, disconnected from real life and real people.
As with everything in life, care and feeding is necessary to nurture that which you deem important. Social contacts are important; thus, make time to stay in touch, to reach out to others, etc. People in the Old World continue to do this much better than us in the New World. That is not a good thing for us. Be more like the Europeans and Asians than the lonely and isolated Americans.
It is unsustainable when children as young as 9 are taking their own lives due to to loneliness and isolation. We must change. Change starts with us … with you. Make the effort, my sons. Do not succumb to irrational fear and insecurities. Call and talk to your cousins, especially those on my side of the family, or friends. Talk to God. He’ll listen, even if His responses are often more muted and harder to discern.
Whatever you do, know this: suicide is NEVER the answer. You are loved and shall be greatly missed. I love you with all my heart and miss you with every fiber of my being. Your cousins and aunts and uncles do as well, and will miss you greatly in your absence. There is always hope. Don’t ever consider suicide: it is a solution to nothing.
Be strong. Be safe. Be healthy.
All my love, always and forever,
Dad
shoshandjaialai 