Bandwidth

When someone dies, you notice new things about the space they filled in the world, because you keep noticing the shape of the hole that’s left behind.

When Jeff and his sisters were young, their parents carved out odd-shaped schedules to have time with them during the week. As the kids got older, their father filled his schedule back up with work, but Suzie kept working part-time.

Sometimes she filled the extra time with knitting and watching costume dramas, but when needs arose she had time to help. When her daughter was studying for medical school, Suzie was ready with the flashcards. When the neighbors needed catsitting, she took care of it. When I got so sick at work I couldn’t walk to the subway, she was there to pick me up. She was the best hospital visitor: calm, reassuring, knitting quietly if you didn’t feel like talking.

Most of the rest of us in the family have filled our lives very full with work, school, parenting, and projects. Now we’re noticing some of the hundreds of tasks she quietly took care of.

Early feminists loved to hate the “Angel in the House” ideal of womanhood: docile, endlessly patient. Suzie wasn’t a doormat, and was always active in her profession and in political campaigning. But she was an exceptional homemaker and, in many ways, the glue holding the family together. Much of that was because she had time for the unexpected things that come up.

In thinking how to use time, my first preference is still that people remember that their time and money can go a long way to helping people in great need. But if you’re not going to do that, I think Suzie’s method was a lot smarter than the default of working full-time and having more money but less time. Having capable people with bandwidth is really valuable to a family and to a community.

How much should you protect your child?

Before I got pregnant, I read Scott Alexander’s excellent Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting and was so excited to have this knowledge. I thought how lucky my child would be to have parents who knew and cared about how to protect her from things that would damage her brain.

Real life, of course, got more complicated. It’s one thing to intend to avoid neurotoxins, but another to arrive at the grandparents’ house and find they’ve just had ant poison sprayed. What do you do then?

Here are some tradeoffs Jeff and I have made between things that are good for children in one way but bad in another, or things that are good for children but really difficult or expensive.

Germs and parasites

The hygiene hypothesis states that lack of exposure to germs and parasites increases risk of auto-immune disease. Our pediatrician recommended letting Lily playing in the dirt for this reason.

While exposure to animal dander and pollution increase asthma later in life, it seems that being exposed to these in the first year of life actually protects against asthma. Apparently if you’re going to live in a house with roaches, you should do it in the first year or not at all.

Except some stuff in dirt is actually bad for you.

Scott writes:

Parasite-infestedness of an area correlates with national IQ at about r = -0.82. The same is true of US states, with a slightly reduced correlation coefficient of -0.67 (p<0.0001). . . . When an area eliminates parasites (like the US did for malaria and hookworm in the early 1900s) the IQ for the area goes up at about the right time.

Living with cats as a child seems to increase risk of schizophrenia, apparently via toxoplasmosis. But in order to catch toxoplasmosis from a cat, you have to eat its feces during the two weeks after it first becomes infected (which it’s most likely to do by eating birds or rodents carrying the disease). This makes me guess that most kids get it through tasting a handful of cat litter, dirt from the yard, or sand from the sandbox rather than simply through cat ownership. We live with indoor cats who don’t seem to be mousers, so I’m not concerned about them giving anyone toxoplasmosis. If we build Lily a sandbox, we’ll keep it covered when not in use.

The evidence is mixed about whether infections like colds during the first year of life increase or decrease your risk of asthma later. After the newborn period, we defaulted to being pretty casual about germ exposure.

Toxins in buildings

Our experiences with lead (and lessons learned about how to reduce risk). Our experiences with mercury.

In some areas, it’s not that feasible to live in a house with zero lead. We live in Boston, where 87% of the housing was built before lead paint was banned. Even in a new building, we’d need to go far out of town before reaching soil that wasn’t near where a lead-painted building had been.

It is possible to do some renovations without exposing kids to lead. Jeff recently did some demolition of walls with lead paint, very carefully sealed off and cleaned up, while Lily and I spent the day elsewhere. Afterwards her lead level was no higher than it had been.

But Jeff got serious lead poisoning as a toddler while his parents did major renovations on their old house. If I didn’t think I could keep the child away from the dust, I wouldn’t renovate.

Recently a house across the street from us was gutted, with workers throwing debris out the windows and creating big plumes of dust (presumable lead-laden) that blew all down the street. Later I realized I should have called city building inspection services, which would have at least made them carry the debris into the dumpster instead of throwing it from the second story.

Floor varnish releases formaldehyde and other nasties as it cures. We kept Lily out of the house for a few weeks after Jeff redid the floors. We found it worthwhile to pay rent at our previous house in order to not have to live in the new house while this kind of work was happening.

Pressure-treated wood was treated with arsenic and chromium until around 2004 in the US. It often has a greenish tint, though it may not be obvious after fading or staining. Playing on playsets or decks made of such wood increases children’s cancer risk. It should not be used for furniture (I thought this would be obvious, but apparently it wasn’t to some of my handyman relatives).

I found it difficult to know how to deal with fresh paint and other fumes in my building at work while I was pregnant. Women of reproductive age have a heightened sense of smell, and many pregnant women have heightened aversion to smells, so you can literally smell things some of your coworkers can’t (or don’t mind). The most critical period of development is during the first trimester, when most women aren’t telling the world they’re pregnant (because it’s also the time when a miscarriage is most likely, and if you do lose the pregnancy you might not want to have to tell everyone). During that period, I found it difficult to explain why I was concerned about the fumes from the roofing adhesive being used in our building. I didn’t want to seem like a princess who thought she was too good to work in conditions that everybody else found acceptable. (After I told them I was pregnant, my coworkers were very understanding about such things.)

Food

Recommendations usually focus on what you should eat during pregnancy, but obviously children’s brain development doesn’t stop there. I’ve opted to take precautions with the food Lily and I eat for as long as I’m nursing her.

Claims that pesticide residues are poisoning children scare me, although most scientists seem to think the paper cited is overblown. Other sources say the levels of pesticides in conventionally grown produce are fine. We buy organic produce at home but eat whatever we’re served elsewhere.

I would love to see a study with families randomly selected to receive organic produce for the first 8 years of the kids’ lives, then looking at IQ and hyperactivity. But no one’s going to do that study because of how expensive 8 years of organic produce would be.
The Biodeterminist’s Guide doesn’t mention PCBs in the section on fish, but fish (particularly farmed salmon) are a major source of these pollutants. They don’t seem to be as bad as mercury, but are neurotoxic. Unfortunately their half-life in the body is around 14 years, so if you have even a vague idea of getting pregnant ever in your life you shouldn’t be eating much farmed salmon (or Atlantic/farmed salmon, bluefish, wild striped bass, white and Atlantic croaker, blackback or winter flounder, summer flounder, or blue crab).
I had the best intentions of eating lots of the right kind of high-omega-3, low-pollutant fish during and after pregnancy. Unfortunately, fish was the only food I developed an aversion to. Now that Lily is eating food on her own, we tried several sources of omega-3 and found that kippered herring was the only success. Lesson: it’s hard to predict what foods kids will eat, so keep trying.

In terms of hassle, I underestimated how long I would be “eating for two” in the sense that anything I put in my body ends up in my child’s body. Counting pre-pregnancy (because mercury has a half-life of around 50 days in the body, so sushi you eat before getting pregnant could still affect your child), pregnancy, breastfeeding, and presuming a second pregnancy, I’ll probably spend about 5 solid years feeding another person via my body, sometimes two children at once. That’s a long time in which you have to consider the effect of every medication, every cup of coffee, every glass of wine on your child. There are hardly any medications considered completely safe during pregnancy and lactation—most things are in Category C, meaning there’s some evidence from animal trials that they may be bad for human children.

Fluoride

Too much fluoride is bad for children’s brains. The CDC recently recommended lowering fluoride levels in municipal water (though apparently because of concerns about tooth discoloration more than neurotoxicity). Around the same time, the American Dental Association began recommending the use of fluoride toothpaste as soon as babies have teeth, rather than waiting until they can rinse and spit.

Cavities are actually a serious problem even in baby teeth, because of the pain and possible infection they cause children. Pulling them messes up the alignment of adult teeth. Drilling on children too young to hold still requires full anesthesia, which is dangerous itself.

But Lily isn’t particularly at risk for cavities. 20% of children get a cavity by age six, and they are disproportionately poor, African-American, and particularly Mexican-American children (presumably because of different diet and less ability to afford dentists). 75% of cavities in children under 5 occur in 8% of the population.

We decided to have Lily brush without toothpaste, avoid juice and other sugary drinks, and see the dentist regularly.

Home pesticides

One of the most commonly applied insecticides makes kids less smart. This isn’t too surprising, given that it kills insects by disabling their nervous system. But it’s not something you can observe on a small scale, so it’s not surprising that the exterminator I talked to brushed off my questions with “I’ve never heard of a problem!”

If you get carpenter ants in your house, you basically have to choose between poisoning them or letting them structurally damage the house. We’ve only seen a few so far, but if the problem progresses, we plan to:

1) remove any rotting wood in the yard where they could be nesting

2) have the perimeter of the building sprayed

3) place gel bait in areas kids can’t access

4) only then spray poison inside the house.

If we have mice we’ll plan to use mechanical traps rather than poison.

Flame retardants

Since the 1970s, California required a high degree of flame-resistance from furniture. This basically meant that US manufacturers sprayed flame retardant chemicals on anything made of polyurethane foam, such as sofas, rug pads, nursing pillows, and baby mattresses.

The law recently changed, due to growing acknowledgement that the carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals were more dangerous than the fires they were supposed to be preventing. Even firefighters opposed the use of the flame retardants, because when people die in fires it’s usually from smoke inhalation rather than burns, and firefighters don’t want to breathe the smoke from your toxic sofa (which will eventually catch fire even with the flame retardants).

We’ve opted to use furniture from companies that have stopped using flame retardants (like Ikea and others listed here). Apparently futons are okay if they’re stuffed with cotton rather than foam. We also have some pre-1970s furniture that tested clean for flame retardants. You can get foam samples tested for free.

The main vehicle for children ingesting the flame retardants is that it settles into dust on the floor, and children crawl around in the dust. If you don’t want to get rid of your furniture, frequent damp-mopping would probably help.

The standards for mattresses are so stringent that the chemical sprays aren’t generally used, and instead most mattresses are wrapped in a flame-resistant barrier which apparently isn’t toxic. I contacted the companies that made our mattresses and they’re fine.

Ratings for chemical safety of children’s car seats here.

Thoughts on IQ

A lot of people, when I start talking like this, say things like “Well, I lived in a house with lead paint/played with mercury/etc. and I’m still alive.” And yes, I played with mercury as a child, and Jeff is still one of the smartest people I know even after getting acute lead poisoning as a child.

But I do wonder if my mind would work a little better without the mercury exposure, and if Jeff would have had an easier time in school without the hyperactivity (a symptom of lead exposure). Given the choice between a brain that works a little better and one that works a little worse, who wouldn’t choose the one that works better?

We’ll never know how an individual’s nervous system might have been different with a different childhood. But we can see population-level effects. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, is fine with calculating the expected benefit of making coal plants stop releasing mercury by looking at the expected gains in terms of children’s IQ and increased earnings.

Scott writes:

A 15 to 20 point rise in IQ, which is a little more than you get from supplementing iodine in an iodine-deficient region, is associated with half the chance of living in poverty, going to prison, or being on welfare, and with only one-fifth the chance of dropping out of high-school (“associated with” does not mean “causes”).

Salkever concludes that for each lost IQ point, males experience a 1.93% decrease in lifetime earnings and females experience a 3.23% decrease. If Lily would earn about what I do, saving her one IQ point would save her $1600 a year or $64000 over her career. (And that’s not counting the other benefits she and others will reap from her having a better-functioning mind!) I use that for perspective when making decisions. $64000 would buy a lot of the posh prenatal vitamins that actually contain iodine, or organic food, or alternate housing while we’re fixing up the new house.

Conclusion

There are times when Jeff and I prioritize social relationships over protecting Lily from everything that might harm her physical development. It’s awkward to refuse to go to someone’s house because of the chemicals they use, or to refuse to eat food we’re offered. Social interactions are good for children’s development, and we value those as well as physical safety. And there are times when I’ve had to stop being so careful because I was getting paralyzed by anxiety (literally perched in the rocker with the baby trying not to touch anything after my in-laws scraped lead paint off the outside of the house).

But we also prioritize neurological development more than most parents, and we hope that will have good outcomes for Lily.

Adventures in toxicology

Last week Jeff discovered a horrifyingly large mercury spill behind a closet wall in our new house (about half a cup, the amount in 2,500 mercury thermometers). Apparently it had been part of an early 20th century heating system, had been spilled during renovations in the 1970s, and someone decided to just wall it up instead of cleaning it up properly.

The good news is that none of us seem to have been exposed in any dangerous way, since we weren’t using the room and were evacuated quickly after the mercury was opened up to the air.

Lessons learned:

This document was the most helpful thing I found, being candid thoughts on how mercury is spilled and spread in houses and how to clean it up, by an environmental toxicologist. The one thing that seems to have changed since it was written is that there’s now a meter capable of measuring smaller quantities of mercury vapor in air (which is good, because the most conservative air vapor limit is an order of magnitude lower than the commonly-used Jerome meter can even measure).

When you’re being evacuated from your home, assume it will be for at least several days. When the fire department told us to leave, I took the baby, her carrier, my purse, my shoes, my phone, and a few diapers (thinking we would be in the front yard for an hour or two). That was a week ago and we still don’t know when we’ll be back. Luckily we have family nearby we can stay with, and Jeff was able to go back to get some clothes.

Obviously if there’s immediate danger you should get out as quickly as possible. But if it’s the kind of situation where you can take 10 minutes to pack medications, a phone charger, some changes of clothes, etc. — take a few minutes to pack a bag! With the caveat that if there’s something dangerous spilled in the house, you really don’t want to track it. Better and cheaper to buy more of whatever you need from the back room than spread the spill.

Previous adventures and lessons learned in lead paint.

Summer dinner party menu

I often struggle to come up with a menu for a mixed omni/vegetarian/vegan crowd, which is what you tend to get at Effective Altruism dinners. I try to publish the successes.

Dinner

• Fresh spring rolls 
• Peanut dipping sauce
• Red curry coconut soup with mushrooms and tofu

Dessert

• Key lime pie
• Coconut-lime popsicles 

Everything is vegan and gluten-free except the key lime pie, but I think it comes off as light and summery rather than oppressively vegan.

The food is served cold and can be prepped in advance except the soup, which could still be done in advance and just heated and garnished at the last minute. If you’re still working on the spring rolls when guests arrive, people like helping assemble them. This took longer than I thought, about 90 seconds per roll, including waiting for the wrappers to soak and finding room for trays as we filled them.

Total cost: about $90 in groceries for 18 people, or $5/person.

A previous menu.

Anger management curriculum for prisoners

When I first led an anger management group at the jail, most of the curricula I could find seemed pretty terrible: preachy and unrealistic. After leading the group several times now, this is what I’ve come up with. A few things are gleaned from the internet but much of it is my own. Feel free to use an alter any of the material that don’t have an author listed.

It’s an eight-week group meeting for one hour each week. Some of the classes don’t really last an hour, but people are fine with getting out early.

Session one: Intro
Group policies (attendance. responsibilities of facilitator and group members)
Discuss quote: “Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.” – Malcolm X
How can anger be used productively? List positive and negative applications of anger.
Discuss different ways of expressing anger (assertive, aggressive, passive aggressive, bottling up).
Homework: anger inventory

Session two: Neuroscience of anger
Explain that by looking at people’s brains with scans, scientists can tell that different parts of the brain are more active when people experience different emotions.
“Flight or flight” handout – discuss positive and negative applications of this reaction (e.g. rescuing someone in danger or escaping danger vs. fighting someone over a minor problem)
“How anger works in the brain” handout
Discuss other factors that affect how the brain works (sleep deprivation, hunger/low blood sugar, caffeine, alcohol, drugs) and how they affect anger
Discuss how general stress level predisposes you to overreact
Homework: anger incident

Session three: Anger scale
Introduction to anger scale. Draw scale 0-10 on a poster. If someone is at 0 anger, how do they feel? At 3? At 5? At 7? At 10? What might they do at these different levels? Discuss difference between the anger you feel and the actions you take: someone at 8 might feel like throwing punches but doesn’t necessarily do so.
Checkin: what was the highest you got on the anger scale this week? How did you handle it?
Activity: pass out slips of paper, each with a scenario that might make you angry. Each person reads theirs (allow people to pass or hand these off to a neighbor in case they’re uncomfortable reading). Discuss each scenario: How mad would this make you? What’s your interpretation of the situation? What would you do?
Homework: anger incident with anger scale

Session four: Hidden and open emotions
Check-in with anger scale: Each person (including facilitator) says the highest number they reached on the anger scale during the past week. They can tell about the situation if they want.
Group activity: each group has a poster with a scale of “least OK to show in jail” to “most OK to show in jail.” They have post-it notes with emotions (happiness, sadness, hate, love, homesickness, fear, humor/fun, anger.) As a group they position the notes along the scale. Whole class discusses why they placed the notes where they did.
Discuss how everyone experiences the above emotions in jail, but some are more acceptable than others. Fear or sadness may get expressed as anger because that doesn’t make you as vulnerable to being taken advantage of.
Homework and List of emotions

Session five: Resentment and forgiveness
Check-in with anger scale
Difference between in-the-moment anger and ongoing resentment/grudges
Reading aloud: Nelson Mandela on forgiveness. This reading is unfailingly popular because the group members are impressed with the horrific details of Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment and the fact that he then went on to be the leader of a nation.
Discussion of what it takes to move on emotionally from the experience of being imprisoned.
Discussion of how to handle long-lasting anger (e.g. against family members who neglected or abused you in childhood – many inmates have had this experience). When do you find you’re able to move on and still interact with the person? When do you decide it doesn’t work to have this person in your life?
Homework: grudges

Session six: Apologies
Check-in with anger scale
Dicussion: how can you tell when someone’s apology is fake? What makes you feel an apology is sincere? Can give examples of politicians’ or other famous people’s “non-apology apologies”, ones that lay the blame on other people for being upset rather than taking responsibility for their own actions.
Read aloud/summarize: The fake apology
What makes an apology go well or badly in your experience? How do you make amends when you have hurt someone? How do you reconcile when both people have wronged each other?
Homework: read Anatomy of an apology

Session seven: Anger in relationships
Check-in with anger scale
Reading aloud: Fighting fair: Rules for couples
Discussing this reading easily takes most of the hour. Try to focus the discussion not just on what participants’ partners have done wrong (this is where the conversation naturally goes) but toward how to handle unfair actions a partner has taken, how to handle your own impulses toward unfair behavior. What constitutes abuse? When is it time to break up? To me this is the saddest session because it becomes clear how few of them have been in a reasonably healthy relationship or even see that as a possibility.
Homework: What advice would you give to a young person on how to handle disputes with their partner?

Session eight: Anger and children
Check-in with anger scale
Discussion: For those who are parents, how do you handle anger towards your children? Amazingly to me, someone often says that children are too young to know better and he couldn’t get mad at his child. (I suspect many of my group members who are fathers have not spent much time, if any, with their children due to incarceration and separation from the children’s mothers.) I give the example of a toddler sticking their finger in your eye. Even if they’re too young to know that it hurts you, it still hurts and you’re probably surprised and angry for a minute, and it might take some effort to respond appropriately to the child. I also ask if anyone present believes their parents never got angry at them. If all of our parents got angry at us when we were kids, we will probably get angry with our kids too.
How do they feel about physical punishment? What’s the difference between spanking and beating? (Expect this to bring up strong feelings for some people, as it would be very unlikely to have a group of prisoners in which no one was physically abused as a child.) If you choose to spank your child, how do you keep from going overboard? To me, the upshot is that the parent has to be in control of their own behavior. Don’t spank your child if you’re too angry—whatever discipline you give must be for the child’s well-being, not for venting your own frustration. Time-out is not just for children; you may need some time to cool down before you’re able to respond appropriately to whatever your child did.

Presentation of certificates
Discussion: suggestions for improvements to the class.
Thank class for participating actively in discussions.

Some other bits that get tossed in as appropriate:

A brief moment of CBT: It’s not just the situation itself that makes you mad, but your interpretation of it. If someone bumps into you and you think it was on purpose, you’re madder than if you think it was a mistake. At times we assume the worst and get angrier than is called for. How can we check our perceptions?

A frequent topic during check-ins is: why are some correctional officers such assholes? A good time to introduce the concept: “Hurt people hurt people.” If someone comes in to their job and acts rude and difficult, it’s probably not because all is going well in their life. We can’t know what’s going on, but we can guess they’re not feeling good inside. It doesn’t excuse their behavior, but it may help us understand better.

Self-disclosure on the part of the facilitator is really tricky. In the weekly check-ins, I don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t share. But I also can’t talk about a lot of possible causes of anger—disagreement with coworkers or my husband are off the table, for example, because they’ll start picking apart the mental health team or my marriage and none of that ultimately helps them trust that I am a person competent to help them. Also, a lot of the causes of frustration in my life are ones they would love to have. I’m grumpy because the baby was teething all night? They haven’t seen their children in weeks, months, or years. Traffic was bad? They dream about being free to drive again. Etc. I’ve found the safest strategy is to just give a number and be vague about the actual cause (which they are free to do also) or to have a gripe about my in-laws. Everyone is pretty much on the same page there.

Expect that some topics will bring up strong emotions. Anything about children is emotional for parents separated from their children. Topics about relationships are difficult for people who are worried about their partners leaving them while they’re locked up. In the exercise with slips of paper with anger-provoking scenarios, I recently had someone react very strongly to the slip he drew, which I thought of as something pretty minor. It turned out to have been a situation that kicked off a melee in which he was stabbed.

Address other topics as needed. The week that two buildings of people were crammed into one building while renovations were done, their anger about that was our main topic. The week of the Baltimore riots, we talked about how a situation that suddenly erupts may be a product of a long-simmering anger, and what makes a public expression of anger productive or unproductive.

Wrists

The other night I watched my client as an officer told her he would have to put her in a segregation unit for the night (which involves being handcuffed). She protested at first but he explained the reason and she got up from her chair and placed her hands behind her back. “Okay, I got it,” she said. He walked out of the room and she followed him, hands still poised behind her back, and turned to present her waiting wrists to the other officers who held the handcuffs. There are many sad things about her life but somehow this gesture was the saddest to me, her casual familiarity with preparing her own hands to be cuffed before anyone asked her to.

One of the stranger sights on a segregation unit is an Italian-American having an animated conversation while in handcuffs. One hand will gesture freely while the other follows limply behind.

A while ago I was walking to meet my client in the non-contact office (like you see in movies; two little boxes with plexiglass between). He was sticking his hands through the little slot in the door to let the officers un-cuff him. His wrists, pudgy from his antipsychotic medication, suddenly reminded me of Lily’s pudgy baby wrists that I pull sleeves over every day. His mother used to pull his sleeves over his arms, I thought. She cared for him like I care for Lily. Of all the thousands of ways we are all human together, I had never noticed this one before. Every person in the jail once was so young and helpless that someone helped them pull their sleeves over their arms.

Project: grippable crayons

Crayola sells egg-shaped crayons for toddlers, which apparently are very easy to grip. Unfortunately, I can’t stomach paying $6.99 for three crayons.

So I made my own. They look funny, but your toddler won’t know that, and they cost nothing (providing you have some old broken crayons). Lily likes them for banging on paper and gnawing.

Heat the oven to 275 F / 135 C.

Take the paper off some old crayons.

Break them up and put them in muffin tins or mini-muffin tins. You can do mixed colors or each one a solid color. You can line the cups with wax paper if you want.

Put it in the oven for 10 minutes or until the wax is melted.

Let cool until you can touch it comfortably but the wax is not fully hard. Roll the wax between your palms to make a rounded shape.

To get the inevitable wax bits off your muffin tin, put it in the freezer for a while and the bits will scrape off easily.