bearing blog

This seems a little… excessive:

Advocates for an 11-year-old girl who was arrested on a deadly weapon charge for throwing a 2-pound rock during a water balloon fight say the charge in no way fits the crime.

But Fresno’s mayor and police chief say Maribel Cuevas’s case was handled appropriately, and that assault with a deadly weapon is the proper charge for an act that might have had fatal consequences.

I’m relieved to see she’s actually being tried as a juvenile.

This kind of thing gives me some cognitive dissonance, though.  Most of the time, my vivid memories of life as a child lead me to have sympathy for the way that children see the world, or at least the way that children who thought as I did see the world. 

I have memories of being a child, set upon by various bullies, and wishing that someone would take seriously other children’s threats of violence:   "If we were working together in an office, instead of being kids at school, I could sue that girl for assault."   It was miserably wounding to know that the frightening prospect of being punched or even humiliated by some powerful other kid would be dismissed as kid stuff by all the adults who were supposed to protect us.  Maybe what was wounding about it was the whole idea that "kid stuff" was, at heart, dismissible.

And here it is, what I wished for as a child, coming to pass:  A child placed under house arrest, made to wear monitoring bracelets, facing the prospect of four years’ incarceration because she threw a rock.  A big rock; indeed, she could have injured him badly.  And it’s taken seriously by everyone involved:  no kids’ scuffle, this is a felony assault.  Just what I would have wanted.  So why does this bother me so?

Maybe because the other kid started it, at least according to the news reports.  He pelted her with water balloons and taunted her first.  She fought back.

Yeah, water balloons—that’s the "kid stuff."  She fought back with a rock.  That’s the "serious stuff."

But:  Does a humiliated, furious eleven-year-old have the kind of control of the will to stop, to calculate whether throwing a rock is a disproportionate response to being taunted and hit with a water balloon?  I suppose that is one of the questions that the juvenile court will weigh.  I hope so.   Another thing I remember about childhood is that the sense of proportion is very, very different from the one we develop as adults.  Part of that is because children, out of our programming as human children, value connections, welcoming, and inclusion—the opposite of humiliation—more than almost anything else.  Humiliation is indeed worse, for a child, than common physical injury.

The boy she struck, Elijah Vang, supposedly taunted her and soaked her with water balloons.  Nothing physically wounding, of course.  Kid stuff.  But do you think: those weren’t fighting words?  You want to tell me: that wasn’t incitement?  Is it fair to put Maribel’s stone-throwing in an adult context, and not Elijah’s?

I can’t help but think that Maribel is being punished not for simple assault, but for fighting back.   

Never, never, never fight back:  the zero-tolerance mantra.

Feministblogs agrees. 

Amy Welborn wants to know,

…why do you think the mouth is a baby’s primary sensory organ?

… it seems so unsafe, on the face of it. The only thing I can figure is that it ensures the baby will get some kind of food even if it’s neglected, as it shoves everything into its mouth. But that still doesn’t seem to compensate for the danger factor.

In a "natural" environment the hazards of, say, choking would be reduced. There are no such things as coins or marbles—slippery little trachea-plugging spheres and discs that they are—in the wild. Nor are there sliced-up apple chunks. Few foods (grapes are the only example I can think of, and wild ones, of course, are tiny) are actually choking hazards when presented whole, unprocessed, uncut.

Most rocks of the right size, that is, are rough and textured and unlikely to be choked on if a baby decides to roll it around in his mouth.

Healthy babies that are allowed to stick the normal sorts of things (not marbles) in their mouths develop a pretty good gag reflex. Remember, gagging isn’t choking. A baby who gags on a rock, stick, or leaf isn’t in any danger, even if it *looks* scary. That’s just part of the oral exploratory process.

And poison isn’t likely to be a problem either, as in the wild most poisonous substances are terribly bitter.

The point is only that the serious hazards we associate with babies sticking stuff in their mouths are mainly created by our modern life, to which evolution has not had a chance to catch up.

It helps to know the difference between what gagging looks like and what choking looks like.  After H., who used to work in a day care, explained that to me (and demonstrated, which was mildly amusing—she lay down on the grass and waved her arms and legs to show me ‘choking baby’)—I got a lot more relaxed about babies mouthing things.

My babies have gagged on lots of stuff.  I only ever saw one choking once (on a slice of apple)—he was sitting on the floor flailing his arms in a panic—and he had brought it up by the time I got to him. 

If I know that what he’ s just stuck in his mouth is a marble or a coin, though, I tend to do the Face-Down Finger Sweep.  Pick him up, hold him face down (gravity should be your friend, not your enemy—contrary to what you might think, you do not need to see what you are doing), pry the jaws open and do one sweep across the tongue with the index finger.

Check this out, and be sure to read the comments.   

Viewing the tale of the Lorax through an institutional lens, ruin is not the result of corporate greed, but a lack of institutions. The truffula trees grow in an unowned commons. (The Lorax may speak for the trees, but he does not own them.) The Once-ler has no incentive to conserve the truffula trees for, as he notes to himself, if he doesn’t cut them down someone else will. He’s responding to the incentives created by a lack of property rights in the trees, and the inevitable tragedy results.

I agree with one commenter that this makes me happier about reading The Lorax to my kids, mainly because the economic moral is much more nuanced than the famous, scraping-the-surface environmental one.

H/T The Volokh Conspiracy.