Loving, friendly staff provide a great environment for fun and development for babies through preschoolers. Failed an Ofsted inspection in 2016 but were swiftly able to act upon the
report and make the necessary changes and have since gone from strength to strength (once this is out of recent memory, I’d upgrade my review to 5 stars).
Of particular credit to them is the diversity of play and learning activities they provide and their thorough feedback to parents on their children’s development.
I’m not sure that there’s any age that’s too-young at which to try to cultivate an interest in science. Once a child’s old enough to ask why something is the case, every
question poses an opportunity for an experiment! Sometimes a thought experiment is sufficient (“Uncle Dan: why do dogs not wear clothes?”) but other times provide the opportunity for
some genuine hands-on experimentation (“Why do we put flowers in water?”). All you have to do is take every question and work out what you’d do if you didn’t know the answer
either! A willingness to take any problem with a “let’s find out” mentality teaches children two important things: (a) that while grown-ups will generally know more than them, that
nobody has all the answers, and (b) that you can use experiments to help find the answers to questions – even ones that have never been asked before!
“Why do we make jewellery out of different things?” Thanks to the Pitt Rivers Museum for inspiring this question… and helping us to find an
answer.
Sometimes it takes a little more effort. Kids – like all of us, a lot of the time – can often be quite happy to simply accept the world as-it-is and not ask “why”. But because a fun and
educational science activity is a good way to occupy a little one (and remember: all it needs to be science is to ask a question and then try to use evidence to answer it!), I’ve been
keeping a list of possible future activities so that we’ve got a nice rainy-day list of things to try. And because we are, these days, in an increasingly-large circle of breeders, I
thought I’d share some with you.
You don’t strictly need a cement mixer full of custard to demonstrate dilatant (non-Newtonian) fluids, but messiness is engaging all by itself.
Here’s some of the activities we’ve been doing so far (or that I’ve got lined-up for future activities as and when they become appropriate):
Measuring and graphing rainfall
We’ve spent a lot of time lately taking about calendars, weather, and seasons, so I’m thinking this one’s coming soon. All we need is a container you can leave in the
garden, a measuring jug, and some graph paper.
Experimenting with non-Newtonian fluids
You can make a dilatant fluid with cornflower and water: it acts like a liquid, but you can slap it and grab it like a solid. Fine, very wet sand (quicksand!) demonstrates
pseudoplasticity which also explains how paint ‘blobs’ on your brush but is easy to spread thin on the paper.
Magnets
I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to play with magnets: we’ve started already with thanks to Brio wooden railway and talking about the fact that the rolling stock will
attach one way around (and seem to jump together when they get close) but repel the other way around, and we’ve also begun looking at the fact that if you remove a carriage from the
middle of a train the remaining segments are already correctly-aligned in order to be re-attached.
Different kinds of bouncy balls
We’ve had fun before measuring how high different kinds of balls (air-filled rubber football, large solid rubber ball, skeletal rubber ball, small solid rubber ball) bounce when
dropped from a stepladder onto a patio and talking about how ‘squishy’ they are relative to one another, and speculating as to the relationship between the two.
Spotting different subspecies of ladybirds is a great springboard to talking about heritable characteristics and phenotypic variation. Snails are another good candidate.
Demonstrating capillary action/siphoning
Two containers – one with a fluid in and one without – joined over the rim by a piece of paper towel will eventually reach an equilibrium of volume, first as a result of capillary
action causing the fluid to climb the paper and then using a siphon effect to continually draw more over the edge.
Illustrating the solar system (to scale)
It helps adults and children alike to comprehend the scale of the solar system if you draw it to scale. If you’ve got a long street nearby you can chalk it onto the pavement. If not,
you’ll need a very small scale, but doing the Earth and Moon might suffice.
Electricity
Batteries, wires, and LEDs are a moderately safe and simple start to understanding electricity. Taking a ‘dead’ battery from a drained toy and putting it into the circuit shows the
eventual state of batteries. Connecting lights in series or parallel demonstrates in very simple terms resistance. Breaking or joining a circuit illustrates that switches function
identically wherever they’re placed on the circuit.
Vortices
I’m interested in trying to replicate this experiment into making different kinds of standing vortices in water, but I might
have to wait until our little scientist has slightly more patience (and fine motor control!).
Water, tissue paper, and patience is all you need to demonstrate capillary action and siphoning. Food colouring’s an optional bonus.
Centripetal force
We’ve been lucky enough to get to talk about this after using a whirlpool-shaped piece of marble run, but if we hadn’t then I was
thinking we’d wait until the next time it was sunny enough for outdoor water play and use the fact that a full bucket can be spun around without spilling any in a similar way.
Bug counting
Take a quadrant of garden and count the different kinds of things living in it. Multiply up to estimate the population across the garden, or measure different parts (lawn versus
bedding plants versus patio, direct sunlight versus shade, exposed versus covered, etc.) to see which plants or animals prefer different conditions.
Growing plants
Caring for different kinds of plants provides an introduction to botany, and there’s a lot to observe, from the way that plants grow and turn to face the light to the different stages
of their growth and reproduction. Flowers give an attractive result at the end, but herbs and vegetables can be eaten! (Our little scientist is an enormous fan of grazing home-grown
chives.)
Mechanics and force
We’ve taken to occasionally getting bikes out of the shed, flipping them upside-down, and observing how changing the cogs that the chain runs over affects how hard you need to push
the pedals to get movement… but also how much the movement input is multiplied into the movement of the wheel. We’re not quite at a point where we can reliably make predictions based
on this observation, but we’re getting there! I’m thinking that we can follow-up this experiment by building simple catapults to see how levers act as a force multiplier.
Cooking provides opportunities for exploration, too. Bake some bread and you’ve got an excuse to talk about yeast!
Chromotography of inks
I’ve been waiting to do this until I get the chance to work out which felt tip pens are going to give us the most-exciting results… but maybe that’s an experiment we should do
together, too! Colouring-in coffee filter papers and then letting them stand in a cup of water (assuming a water-soluable ink) should produce pretty results… and show the composition
of the inks, too!
Colour mixing
Mixing paint or play-doh is an easy way to demonstrate subtractive colour mixing. We got the chance to do some additive colour mixing using a colour disk spinner at a recent science
fair event, but if we hadn’t I’d always had plans to build our own, like this one.
Structure and form of life
Looking at the way that different plants and animals’ physical structure supports their activities makes for good hands-on or thought-driven experimentation. A day at the zoo gets a
few steps more-educational for a preschooler when you start talking about what penguins are able to do as a result of the shape of their unusual wings and a walk in the park can be
science’d-up by collecting the leaves of different trees and thinking about why they’re different to one another.
Stabbing balloons
The classic magic trick of poking a skewer through a balloon… with petroleum jelly on the skewer… lends itself to some science, so it’s on my to-do list.
Subtractive colour mixing can be demonstrated by mixing paint. Colour and spin a wheel to demonstrate additive mixing.
Surface tension
Water’s such a brilliant chemical because it’s commonplace, safe, and exhibits so many interesting phenomena. Surface tension can be demonstrated by ‘floating’ things like paperclips
on top of the surface, and can be broken by the addition of soap.
Astronomy
In the winter months when the sun sets before bedtime are a great time to show off stars, planets, satellites and the moon. Eyes or binoculars are plenty sufficient to get started.
Life cycles
I was especially pleased when our nursery kept an incubator full of chicken eggs so that the children could watch them hatch and the chicks emerge. We’d looked at this process before
at a farm, but it clearly had a big impact to see it again. Helping to collect eggs laid by my mother’s chickens helps to join-up the circle. Frogspawn and caterpillars provide a way
to look at a very different kind of animal life.
Putting baking soda into things
Different everyday kitchen liquids (water, vinegar, oil…) react differently to the addition of baking soda. This provides a very gentle introduction to chemistry and provides an
excuse to talk about making and testing predictions: now that we’ve seen what cold water does, do you think that hot water will be the same or different?
“Why do some animals have sharp teeth and some have flat teeth?” was a question I posed. We found the answer together (and were wowed by the size of the T-rex skeleton behind the
camera) at the Natural History Museum.
Bubbles and foams
Blowing bubbles through different types of mesh (we just used different kinds of tea towels elastic-banded to the cut-off end of a plastic bottle) demonstrates how you can produce
foams of different consistencies – from millions of tiny bubbles to fewer larger bubbles – because of the permeability of the fabric. And then we wrecked the last tea towel by adding
food colouring to it so we could make coloured foams (“bubble snakes”).
Phase transition
Start with ice and work out what makes it melt: does it melt faster in your hand or in a dish? Does it melt faster or slower if we break it up into smaller parts? If we ‘paint’
pictures on the patio with them, where does the water go? I’m also thinking about ways in which we can safely condense the steam (and capture the vapour) from the kettle onto e.g. a
chilled surface. Once we’re at a point where a thermometer makes sense I was also considering replicating the experiment of measuring the temperature of melting snow: or perhaps even
at that point trying to manipulate the triple point of water using e.g. salt.
Dissection
Take apart the bits of a flower, or look in detail at the parts of a bone-in cut of meat, and try to understand what they’re all for and why they are the way they are.
What floats?
Next time the paddling pool is out, I’d like to start a more-serious look at which things float and which things don’t any try to work out why. What might initially seem intuitive –
dense (heavy-for-their-size) things sink – can be expanded by using plasticine to make a mixture of ‘sinking’ and ‘floating’ vessels and lead to further discovery. I’m also thinking
we need to do the classic ‘raisins in a fizzy drink’ thing (raisins sink, but their rough surfaces trap the bubbles escaping from the now-unpressurised liquid, causing them to float
back up to shed their bubbles).
Get some hands-on biology at your nearest petting zoo. No science in this picture, but plenty of hugging.
So there’s my “now and next” list of science activities that we’ll be playing at over the coming months. I’m always open to more suggestions, though, so if you’re similarly trying to
help shape an enquiring and analytical mind, let me know what you’ve been up to!
At a little over 590 thousand words and spanning 1,349 pages, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is almost-certainly among
the top ten longest single-volume English-language novels. It’s pretty fucking huge.
I’ll stick with the Kindle edition: I fear that merely holding the paperback would be exhausting.
I only discovered A Suitable Boy this week (and haven’t read it – although there are some good reviews that give me an inclination to) when, on a whim, I decided to try to get
a scale of how much I’d ever written on this blog and then decided I needed something tangible to use as a comparison. Because – give or take – that’s how much I’ve written here, too:
At 593,457 words, this blog wouldn’t fit into that book unless we printed it on the covers as well.
Of course, there’s some caveats that might make you feel that the total count should be lower:
It might include a few pieces of non-content code, here and there. I tried to strip them out for the calculation, but I wasn’t entirely successful.
It included some things which might be considered metadata, like image alt-text (on the other hand, sometimes I like to hide fun messages in my image alt-text, so perhaps they
should be considered content).
On the other hand, there are a few reasons that it perhaps ought to be higher:
Post titles (which sometimes contain part of the content) and pages outside of blog posts are not included in the word count.
I’ve removed all pictures for the purpose of the word count. Tempting though it was to make each worth a thousand words, that’d amount to about another one and a half million words,
which seemed a little excessive.
Another reason for not counting images was that it was harder than you’d think to detect repeat use of images that I’ve used too many times. Like this one.
Of course, my blog doesn’t really have a plot like A Suitable Boy (might compare well to the even wordier Atlas Shrugged, though…): it’s a mixture of mostly
autobiographical wittering interspersed with musings on technology and geekery and board games and magic and VR and stuff. I’m pretty sure that if I knew where my life would be now, 18
years ago (which is approximately when I first started blogging), I’d have, y’know, tried to tie it all together with an overarching theme and some character development or something.
Or perhaps throw in the odd plot twist or surprise: something with some drama to keep the reader occupied, rather than just using the web as a stream-of-conciousness diary of whatever
it is I’m thinking about that week. I could mention, for example, that there’ll be another addition to our house later this year. You heard it here first (unless you already heard it
from somewhere else first, in which case you heard it there first.)
Brought up in a world of tiny, bright, UHD colour touchscreens, Annabel seemed slightly underwhelmed by the magic of a sonograph picture of her future baby brother.
Still: by the end of this post I’ll have hit a nice, easy-to-remember 594,000 words.
She’s 16 months old and while she’s gotten the hang of a few words (notably “cat” – she’s very interested in cats), this morning she surprised and delighted us all as I took her off
to nursery by turning to her mother, waving, and saying “buh-bye mum-muh.” Totally adorable.
On Monday, Tiny turned 6 months old. For half a year now, I’ve been a parent. It still feels pretty weird to call myself that, though. Parent is a word that conjures up a mental image
of someone strong, nurturing, patient, and above all who knows all the answers. In many ways, I feel more like I’m discovering life alongside my daughter than guiding her along the
path.
…
Being out-and-about with a baby is a whole different experience. Strangers will strike up a conversation – and, more amazingly still, I don’t usually mind. Tiny is such a blessing
that I can’t begrudge others a few minutes of cooing. The biggest difference isn’t other people, though.
…
Ruth’s just written about her first six months of being a parent. It’s worth a read.
This is the second part of a three-part blog post about my vasectomy. Did you read the first part, yet?
My vasectomy was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, so I left work early in order to cycle up to the hospital: my plan was to cycle up there, and then have Ruth ride my bike back while JTA drove me home. For a moment, though, I panicked
the clinic receptionist when she saw me arrive carrying a cycle helmet and pannier
bag: she assumed that I must be intending to cycle home after the operation!
The Elliot-Smith Clinic lives in an old prefab building buried at the back end of the hospital campus. If you think it looks scary in this picture, imagine what it’s like when it’s
dark and you’re going there to be stabbed in the genitals.
It took me long enough to find the building, cycling around the hospital in the dark, and a little longer still to reassure myself that this underlit old building could actually be a
place where surgery took place.
My tweet upon arriving at the clinic.
Despite my GP‘s suggestion to the contrary, the staff didn’t feel the need to take me though their counselling process, despite
me ticking some (how many depends primarily upon how you perceive our unusual relationship
structure) of the “we would prefer to counsel additionally” boxes on their list of criteria. I’d requested that Ruth arrive at about the beginning of the process specifically so that she could “back me up” if
needed (apparently, surgeons will sometimes like to speak to the partner of a man requesting a vasectomy), but nobody even asked. I just had to sign another couple of consent forms to
confirm that I really did understand what I was doing, and then I was ready to go!
I’d shaved my balls a few days earlier, at the request of the clinic (and also at Matt‘s suggestion, who
pointed out that “if I don’t, they’ll do it for me, and I doubt they’ll be as gentle!” – although it must be pointed out that as they were already planning to take a blade to
my junk, I might not have so much to worry about), which had turned out to be a challenge in itself. I’ve since looked online and found lots of great diagrams showing you
which parts you need to shave, but the picture I’d been given might as well have been a road map of Florence, because no matter which way up I turned it, it didn’t look anything like my
genitals. In the end, I just shaved all over the damn place, just to be sure. Still not an easy feat, though, because the wrinkled skin makes for challenging shaving: the best technique
I found was to “stretch” my scrotum out with one hand while I shaved it with the other – a tricky (and scary) maneuver.
If I’d had a diagram like this, rather than an Italian street map, I might have stood a better chance of just shaving what I needed to shave.
After sitting in the waiting room for a while, I was ushered through some forms and a couple more questions of “are you sure?”, and then herded into a curtained cubicle to change into a
surgical gown (over the top of which I wore my usual dressing gown). The floor was cold, and I’d forgotten to bring my slippers, so I kept my socks on throughout. I sat in a separate
waiting area from the first, and attempted to make small talk with the other gents waiting there. Some had just come out of surgery, and some were still waiting to go in, and the former
would gently tease the latter with jokes about the operation. It’s a man thing, I guess: I can’t imagine that women would be so likely to engage in such behaviour (ignoring, for a
moment, the nature of the operation).
There are several different approaches to vasectomy, and my surgeon
was kind enough to tolerate my persistent questions as I asked about the specifics of each part of the operation. He’d said – after I asked – that one of the things he liked about doing
vasectomies was that (unlike most of the other surgeries he performs) his patients are awake and he can have a conversation while he worked, although I guess he
hadn’t anticipated that there’d ever be anybody quite so interested as I was.
Warning: The remainder of this blog post describes a surgical procedure, which some people might find squicky. For the protection of those who are of a weak stomach, some photos
have been hidden behind hyperlinks: click at your own risk. (though honestly, I don’t think they’re that bad)
With my scrotum pulled up through a hole in a paper sheet, the surgeon began by checking that “everything was where it was supposed to be”: he checked that he could find each vas (if
you’ve not done this: borrow the genitals of the nearest man or use your own, squeeze moderately tightly between two fingers the skin above a testicle, and move around a bit until you
find a hard tube: that’s almost certainly a vas). Apparently surgeons are supposed to take care to ensure that they’ve found two distinct tubes, so they don’t for example sever the same
one twice.
Next, he gave the whole thing a generous soaking in iodine. This turned out to be fucking freezing. The room was cold enough already, so I asked him to close the window while my
genitals quietly shivered above the sheet.
Next up came the injection. The local anaesthetic used for this kind of operation is pretty much identical to the kind you get at the dentist: the only difference is that if your
dentist injected you here, that’d be considered a miss. While pinching the left vas between his fingertips, the surgeon squirted a stack of lidocaine into the cavity
around it. And fuck me, that hurt like being kicked in the balls. Seriously: that stung quite a bit for a few minutes, until the anaesthesia kicked in and instead the
whole area felt “tingly”, in that way that your lips do after dental surgery.
Pinching the vas (still beneath the skin at this point) in a specially-shaped clamp, the surgeon made a puncture wound “around” it with a sharp-nosed pair of forceps, and pulled the vas
clean through the hole. This was a strange sensation – I couldn’t feel any pain, but I was aware of the movement – a “tugging” against my insides.
A quick snip removed a couple of centimetres from the middle of it (I gather that removing a section, rather than just cutting, helps to reduce the – already slim – risk that
the two loose ends will grow back together again) and cauterised the ends. The cauterisation was a curious experience, because while I wasn’t aware of any sensation of heat, I could
hear a sizzling sound and smell my own flesh burning. It turns out that my flaming testicles smell a little like bacon. Or, if you’d like to look at it another way (and I can almost
guarantee that you don’t): bacon smells a little bit like my testicles, being singed.
Next up came Righty’s turn, but he wasn’t playing ball (pun intended). The same steps got as far as clamping and puncturing before I suddenly felt a sharp pain, getting rapidly worse.
“Ow… ow… owowowowowow!” I said, possibly with a little more swearing, as the surgeon blasted another few mils of anaesthetic into my bollocks. And then a little more. And
damnit: it turns out that no matter how much you’ve had injected into you already, injecting anaesthetics into your tackle always feels like a kick in the nuts for a few
minutes. Grr.
The removed sections of my vas, on a tray (actually mine)
You can see the “kink” in each, where it was pulled out by the clamp. Also visible is the clamp itself – a cruel-looking piece of equipment, I’m sure you’ll agree! – and the discarded
caps from some of the syringes that were used.
The benefit of this approach, the “no-scalpel vasectomy”, is that the puncture wounds are sufficiently small as to not need stitches. At the end of the surgery, the surgeon just stuck a
plaster onto the hole and called it done. I felt a bit light-headed and wobbly-legged, so I sat on the operating table for a few minutes to compose myself before returning to the
nurses’ desk for my debrief. I only spent about 20 minutes, in total, with the surgeon: I’ve spent longer (and suffered more!) at the dentist.
Later, I would receive this “Happy Vasectomy” card from Liz and Simon. Thanks, guys!
By the evening, the anaesthetic had worn off and I was in quite a bit of pain, again: perhaps worse than that “kick in the balls” moment when the anaesthetic was first injected, but
without the relief that the anaesthetic brought! I took some paracetamol and – later – some codeine, and slept with a folded-over pillow wedged between my knees, after I discovered how
easy it was to accidentally squish my sore sack whenever I shifted my position.
The day after was somewhat better. I was walking like John Wayne, but this didn’t matter because – as the nurse had suggested – I spent most of the day lying down “with my feet as high
as my bottom”. She’d taken the time to explain that she can’t put a bandage nor a sling on my genitals (and that I probably wouldn’t want her to, if she could), so the correct
alternative is to wear tight-fitting underwear (in place of a bandage) and keep my legs elevated (as a sling). Having seen pictures of people with painful-looking bruises and swelling
as a result of not following this advice, I did so as best as I could.
Today’s the day after that: I’m still in a little pain – mostly in Righty, again, which shall henceforth be called “the troublesome testicle” – but it’s not so bad except when I forget
and do something like bend over or squat or, I discovered, let my balls “hang” under their own weight, at all. But altogether, it’s been not-too-bad at all.
Or, as I put on my feedback form at the clinic: “A+++. Recommended. Would vasectomy again.”
(thanks due to Ruth, JTA, Matt, Liz, Simon,
Michelle, and my mum for support, suggestions, and/or fetching things to my bed for me while I’ve been waddling
around looking like John Wayne, these past two days)
What’s no joke, though, is the human population explosion. There’re just too damn many of us, as I explained last year. That’s the primary reason
behind my decision, held for pretty-much the entirety of my adult life, to choose not to breed.
World population for the last 12,000 years.
I’m fully aware that the conscious decision to not-breed by a single individual – especially in the developed world – makes virtually no difference to the global fate of humanity. I’m
under no illusion that my
efforts as a vegetarian are saving the world either. But just like the voter who casts a ballot for their party – even though they know it won’t make a difference to the outcome of
the election – I understand that doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily have to have a directly quantifiable benefit.
Somehow, this delicious-looking BLT makes an appearance almost any time I talk about overpopulation or vegetarianism. This is the fifth time.
That’s why I’m finally taking the next obvious step. Next month, after literally years of talking about it, I’m finally going to put my genitals where my mouth is (hmm… maybe that
wasn’t the best choice of words)! Next week, I’m getting a vasectomy.
The “F” is for “Fuck me you’re going to put a scalpel WHERE?”
I first asked a doctor about the possibility of vasectomy about a decade ago. He remarked upon my age, and said – almost jokingly – “Come back in ten years if you still feel the same
way!” I almost wish that I still had the same GP now, so that I could do exactly that. Instead, I spoke about a year ago to my (old) GP here in Oxford, who misled me into thinking that
I would not be able to get the surgery on the NHS, and would have to have it done privately. Finally, a second doctor agreed to sign off their part of the consent form, and I was good
to go. The secret, it seems, is persistence.
I suppose I’ll be eligible for a Golden Snip Award. Click through for more information.
I’m sure that this is a decision that won’t be without it’s controversies. And believe me: over the course of the most-of-my-life-so-far that I’ve hinted at or talked about doing this,
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard all of the arguments. Still: I feel like I ought to pick up on some of the things I’ve heard most-often –
“Breeder Bingo” card. Complete a line, get a free case of contraceptives!
What if you change your mind?
Even despite medical advances in recent decades in vasectomy reversal, vasectomy should still be considered a “one way trip”. Especially when I was younger, people seemed concerned that
I would someday change my mind, and then regret my decision not to spawn children.
I suppose that it’s conceivable – unlike my otherwise potential offspring – but it’s quite a stretch, to believe that I might someday regret not having children (at least not
biologically: I have no problem with adopting, co-parenting, fostering, or any number of other options for being involved in the upbringing of kids). I honestly can’t see how that’d
come about. But even if we do take that far-fetched idea: isn’t it equally possible that somebody might ultimately regret having children. We take risks in our lives with
any choice that we make – maybe I’ll someday regret not having taken my degree in Law or Chemistry or Rural Studies. Well then: c’est la vie.
Do you just not like children?
Children are great, and I’d love to get the chance to be involved in raising some. However, I don’t define myself by that wish: if I never have the opportunity to look after any kids,
ever, then that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world: I’d just spend my years writing code in a house full of cats. I have no doubt that raising children is great (for many people),
but just like there are plenty of people for whom it’s not great, there are also plenty of people – like me – who could be happy either way. No biggie!
There are those who have said that this laid-back “take it or leave it” approach, especially when coupled with the more-recent act of rendering myself infertile, will make me less
attractive to women. Leaving aside the implicit sexism in that claim, wouldn’t a fair retort be to point out that a woman who is looking for monogamous breeding probably isn’t
my “type” to begin with!
But if only we could make sure only the RIGHT people breed…
But you should be breeding?
This argument’s usually based on the idea that I’m somehow genetically superior and that my children wouldn’t be such a strain on the world as somebody else’s, or that
mine would have a significantly better-than-average chance of curing cancer, solving world hunger, or something.
Only sterilisation can prevent the detonation of the planet. Maybe.
And let’s face it, any child of mine would be just as likely to be the one to build a really big bomb. Or create a super-virus. Or just engineer the collapse the world’s economies into
a prehistoric barter economy in a technophobic future anarchy. Attaboy.
In any case, I’m pretty sure that my personal contribution to the betterment of the world ought not to be a genetic one. I’d like to make a difference for the people who are around
right now, rather than hypothetical people of the future, and I’d far rather leave ideas in my wake than a handful of genes. I’m sure that’s not the case for everybody, but then – it
doesn’t have to be.
It takes balls to have a vasectomy. Literally.
Or are there some arguments that I’ve missed? If you’re among the folks who feel really strongly about this, then you’ve got about seven days to make them, and then it’s off to the
clinic for me! Just remember: what’s right for me isn’t necessarily what’s right for you, and vice-versa. Just because I use Emacs doesn’t mean that some other, inferior text editor might not be the right choice for you.
I wonder what my surgeon might say to the possibility of me live-tweeting the process? Would anybody be interested? (I promise not to include any photos.)
(with thanks to Nina Paley for permission to use the comics)
[disclaimer: this post appears just days after some friends of mine announce their pregnancy;
this is a complete coincidence (this post was written and scheduled some time ago) and of course I’m delighted for the new parents-to-be]
In October, the world population is expected to reach seven billion. Seven fucking billion. I remember
being a child and the media reports around the time that we hit five billion: that was in the late 1980s. When my parents were growing up, we hadn’t even hit three billion. For the
first nine or ten thousand years of human civilisation between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, the world population was consistently below a billion. Let’s
visualise that for a moment:
World population for the last 12,000 years.
How big is our island?
Am I the only one who gets really bothered by graphs that look like this? Does it not cause alarm?
We have runaway population growth and finite natural resources. Those two things can’t coexist together forever. Let’s have a look at another graph:
Reindeer population on St. Matthew Island, from the comic of the same name.
This one is taken from a wonderful comic called St. Matthew
Island, about the real island. It charts the
population explosion of a herd of reindeer introduced to the island in the 1940s and then left to their own devices in a safe and predator-free environment. Their population ballooned
until they were consuming all of their available resources. As it continued to expand, a tipping point was reached, and catastrophe struck: without sufficient food, mass starvation set
in and the population crashed down from about 6,000 to only 43. By the 1980s, even these few had died out.
There are now no reindeer on St. Matthew Island. And it looks like this 40-year story could serve as a model for the larger, multi-century, world-wide population explosion that humans
are having.
Game Theory
Humans are – in theory at least – smart enough to see what’s coming. If we continue to expand in this way, we risk enormous hardship (likely) and possible extinction (perhaps). Yet
still the vast majority of us choose to breed, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that this is Not A Good Thing.
But even people smart enough to know better seem to continue to be procreating. And perhaps they’re right to: for most people, there is – for obvious evolutionary reasons – a biological
urge to pass on one’s genes to the next generation. During a period of population explosion, the risk that your genetic material will be “drowned out” by the material of those
practically unrelated to you. Sure: there might be a complete ecological collapse in 10, 100 or 1000 years… but the best way to ensure that your genes survive it is to put them into as
many individuals as possible: surely some of them will make it, right? Just like buying several lottery tickets improves your chances of hitting the jackpot.
A stack of lottery tickets. If I buy enough, I’m sure to win, right?
On a political level, too, a similar application of game theory applies: if the other countries are going to have more people, then our country needs more people
too! Very few countries penalise families for having multiple children (in fact, to the contrary), and those that do don’t do so very effectively. This leads to a “population arms
race”, and no nation can afford to fall behind its rivals: it needs a young workforce ready to pay taxes, produce goods, pay for the upkeep of the retired… and conceive yet more
children.
The same tired arguments
Mostly, though, I hear the same tired arguments for breeding [PDF]: cultural conditioning
and social expectations, a desire to “pass on” a name (needless to say, I have a different idea about names
than many people), a xenophobic belief that the world needs “more people like us” but “less like them”, and worry that you might regret it later (curious how few people seem to consider
the reverse of this argument).
For me, the genetic problem is easy enough to fix: if your children’s genes are valuable to you because of their direct relationship (50%) to your genes, then presumably your brother’s
(50%) and your niece’s (25%) are valuable to you to: more so than that of somebody on the other side of the world? I just draw the boundary in a different place – all of us humans share
well over 99% of our DNA with one another anyway: we’re all one big family! We only share a lower percentage with other primates, a lower percentage still with other mammals, and
so on (although we still share quite a lot even with plants).
The similarity between you and your children is only marginally more – almost insignificantly so – than the similarity between you and every other human that has ever
lived.
If you’re looking for a “family” that carries your genetic material: you’re living in one… with almost seven billion brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts! If you can expand your
thinking to include the non-human animals, too, well: good for you (I can’t quite stretch that far!). But if you’re looking to help your family survive… can you expand that thinking
into a loyalty to your species, instead, and make the effort to reduce population growth for the benefit of all of us?
My family tree. Have you met my great aunt baboon? Oh; sorry – that’s my sister before she brushes her hair on a morning…
The other argument I frequently see is the “replacement” argument: that it’s ethically okay for a breeding pair of humans to have exactly two children to “replace” them. This argument
has (at least) three flaws:
The replacement is not instantaneous. If a couple, aged 30, have 2 children, and live to age 80, then there are 50 years during which there are four humans taking up space,
food, water and energy. The problem is compounded even further when we factor in the fact that life spans continue to increase. If you live longer than your parents, and your children
live longer than you, then “replacement” breeding actually results in a continuous increase in total population.
Even ignoring the above, “replacement” breeding strategies only actually works if they’re universal. Given that many humans will probably continue to engage super-replacement level
reproduction, we’re likely to need a huge number of humans to engage in sub-replacement level or no reproduction in order to balance it out.
It makes the assumption that current population levels represent a sustainable situation. That might or might not be true – various studies peg the maximum capacity
for the planet at anywhere between one and a hundred billion individuals, with the majority concluding a value somewhere between four and ten billion. Given the gravity of the
situation, I’d rather err on the side of caution.
Child sandwiches
“Do you not like children, then?” I’m sometimes asked, as if this were the only explanation for my notion. And recently, I’ve found a new analogy to help explain
myself: children are like bacon sandwiches.
I’m sure I’m overusing this picture of a BLT.
Children are like bacon sandwiches for five major reasons:
Like most (but not all) people, I like them.
I’d love to have them some day.
But I choose not to, principally because it would be ethically wrong.
I don’t want to prevent others from having them (although I don’t encourage it either), because their freedom is more important than that they agree with me. However, I’d like
everybody to carefully consider their actions.
They taste best when they’re grilled until they’re just barely-crispy. Mmm.
The reasons are similar, though: I care about other humans (and, to a much lesser degree, about other living things, especially those which are “closer” family), and I’d rather not be
responsible, even a little, for the kind of widespread starvation that was doubtless experienced by the reindeer of St. Matthew Island. Given the way that humans will go to war over
limited resources and our capacity to cause destruction and suffering, we might even envy the reindeer – who “only” had to starve to death – before we’re done.
I believe that it is ethically wrong to lie to children about the existence of Santa
Claus. And, as it’s a topical time of year – and because I know that this view brings me into conflict with the views of many others (I’ve certainly had more than a couple of
arguments about this before) – I thought that I’d explain my thinking.
"I'm not real... but don't tell anyone!"
Bias of background
I probably ought to come clean, first, about my own background. There’s a certain bias that people can have towards their own upbringing: the implicit assumption that the way one was
brought up is somehow the best or the most-correct way. I’d like to think that I’m speaking from a position of rationality as well as morality, but I can’t deny that my judgment
may be clouded by my own childhood.
I never believed that Santa was real, and was never encouraged to. My family played out a whole variety of modern, secular Christmas traditions, such as leaving out a mince pie for
Santa, hanging stockings, and decorating a tree. But these were always understood to be what they actually were. There was never an illusion that the mince pie wasn’t being eaten by my
dad just minutes after he’d checked that I’d finally managed to curb my excitement get to sleep (even without a belief in the patently mythological, Christmas can still be an
exciting time for a child).
What’s the harm?
When I was growing up, I came into contact with many children for whom the Father Christmas myth was very real. I gather that they’re still remarkably common… and who can blame parents:
perpetuating the Santa lie can provide a very easy and pervasive way to control the behaviour of their children!
For the vast majority of these children, the revelation of the lie was a harmless experience: over time, they developed doubts, from the childish (“We don’t have a chimney? How can
Santa slide down radiators?”), to the logical (“Reindeer can’t fly! And how big is a sleigh that can carry presents for every good child on Earth?”), to the profound (“Why does Santa
give the children of rich parents more expensive gifts than the children of poor parents?”). They’d hear stories from other children about the falsehood of the Christmas stories when
they spoke to other children or, often, older siblings. Many would eventually challenge their parents on these lies, and most of these parents would then come clean, correctly judging
that the lie had run it’s course. So what’s the harm?
There are some children who didn’t come off so well. I’ve seen children bullied at school and in social settings as a result of clinging to their belief in Santa. One kid I knew –
bolstered by his mother’s ongoing lies (she would later claim that she thought he knew, but was just “playing along”) – genuinely believed in Santa until he was 14 years old, defying
all argument to the contrary, and suffered so much that he ceased to gain any enjoyment at all from the festival for years to come.
I’ve spoken to parents who have attempted to justify their decision to lie to their children by dismissing it as only “a white lie”, something which does more good than harm, and I can
see their argument. But for some children, as we’ve seen, this lie can spiral out of control, and even if this were to happen with only one in a thousand children, I wouldn’t personally
want to take the risk that it was a child of mine.
One of Santa's biggest benefits is that he has a list of where all the naughty girls live.
That Magical Christmas Feeling™
A common response to my claim that lying to children about Santa is ethically wrong is that there is something particularly special (or “magical”, it is often said) about being able to
believe in Santa. Those who make this claim invariably come from a background in which they were encouraged to believe in him, and they frequently talk of wanting their children to be
able to have the same experience as them. (I would speculate that there’s a large crossover between this group of people and the group of people who would rather their children were
brought up with their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, than be given the opportunity to make their own choices, too).
Having experienced life as an a-santaist, I can say that there never for a moment felt like there was something missing from my childhood Christmases. Children have a rich and beautiful
imagination and a way of looking at the world which will find wonder and magic, if they want it, regardless of the untruths they’re told. Imposing false beliefs as truths on healthy
young minds does not result in a net addition of “magic”. At best, all that is achieved is that the child fantasies about a specific lie, perhaps one that the child’s caregivers can
relate to. We’ve discussed a couple of the worth cases already, and these aren’t isolated incidents.
Christmas can be a magical time anyway. There’s time away from school (for children of schoolgoing age), a chance to see distant relatives, the giving and receiving of presents (how can
I have left this until third in the list!), following unusual and exciting traditions, eating special food, the potential for snow (at least in this hemisphere), and a time for telling
special stories and singing special songs. Special events are magical, and that’s true whether or not you subscribe to any particular religious or secular holidays. For a
child, birthdays are magical, bonfire night is magical (ooh! fireworks!), the summer solstice is magical: whatever you’ve got can be magical when you’ve got a child’s imagination.
Think back to whatever family traditions you had as a child, especially the ones you had to wait a whole year for. They’re all special, all by themselves. You can enjoy eating
delicious chocolate eggs without believing in either a magical rabbit with a confusing reproductive system, the crucifixion of the embodiment of a deity, or spring coming forth thanks
to the earned favour of the fertility gods. Sorry, what were you saying? I was still thinking about chocolate.
Santana - a full 100% more real, but only 95% less magical - than Santa
So, no Santa at all, then?
If you were paying attention, you’ll have seen that I said “telling special stories and singing special songs”. My childhood was a secular one, certainly, but that doesn’t mean that it
wasn’t full of stories of a jolly red man, songs about cervines with nasal photoluminescence, and so on. I enjoyed stories about a gift-giving magical man, just like I enjoyed stories
about anthropomorphic talking animals: and it’s okay to understand these things for just what they are: stories! There’s perhaps something a little special in stories about Father
Christmas in that they’re told pretty-much exclusively at Christmas time (and, perhaps, a little much – how many Christmas-themed movies are scheduled for television broadcast
this winter?), but we don’t have to treat them as if they’re real.
My rules are pretty simple. If you (a) know something to be false and (b) teach it to a child to be real with (c) the intent for them to believe it wholeheartedly and for an extended
period of time, you’re abusing the position of trust in which that child has placed you. (a) provides an exception for religious upbringing, (b) provides an exception for relationships
in which there is not a disparity of power, and (c) provides an exception for whatever so-called “white lies” you feel that you need: that’s a pretty hefty lump of exceptions, if you
need them – but still people raise objections.
Here’s what Santa means to me. To me, “Santa” is, and has always been, the embodiment of anonymous gift-giving: the genuine “spirit of Christmas”, if you like. And given my way, that
would be what I’d want to teach my children, too. I’m not for a moment denying anybody the magic of the season, I’m just saying that there’s a big difference between Santa as an
abstract concept (like a storm “wanting” to break) and Santa as a real, albeit magical, being (like Poseidon sending the storm†).
It’s a matter of trust
For me, this all comes down to trust. I don’t want to lie to my children. It’s not a difficult concept to understand: the only difference between me and a large number of other
people is that they choose a different definition of “lie”. For the virtually all children who discover that they’ve been deceived about Santa, their trust in their parents remains
fundamentally unharmed. For some, it’s dented for a short while but then comes back. But this still doesn’t make it right.
I want to be somebody who my children will always know that they can trust. I want them to know that I will not lie to them or deceive them. I want to be somebody who they can turn to
for advice. I want to be somebody who they know will put them first, even in spite of tradition and convention.
That’s where I stand. Let’s here what you guys think.
Now this is the kind of Santa that I can get behind.
But first, there’s one more argument…
…that I’ve heard recently. I’ve heard it put that it’s beneficial to lie to children about Santa because it teaches them not to trust everything they hear, teaches them to be critical
thinkers, etc.. That being taught a lie will toughen them against other lies that they will be given to them later in the big, wide, and cruel world.
This argument holds no weight with me. Do these same parents like to beat up their children “just a little” so that if they get into a fight at school, it won’t be so bad? Do they lock
up and abuse their kids so that if they’re kidnapped and raped that it isn’t so hard on them?
In my mind, a lie that you keep up for years on end is no longer a harmless lie. When I want to teach my kids about deceit, I’ll perform magic tricks for them. The first time you
perform a magic trick for a child, they genuinely believe it – how did he make that coin appear from behind my ear? Leave it for a minute or so (a minute can be an eternity
when you’re a kid). Then I’ll show them how it’s done. I’ll teach them to do the trick themselves, and they’ll see for themselves that magic is an illusion. Plus, they’ll have learned a
cool trick.
The world is full of many very clever illusions and tricks, and often you can’t see how they’re done, but that doesn’t mean that they’re magic. There’s no shame in not knowing all the
answers, but looking for answers is a noble and beautiful thing. I want to foster in my children a natural suspicion of magic, so that they’re better-able to avoid being conned by those
who would do them harm. And I can achieve this without lying to them for more than a few minutes at a time. Shove that in your stocking, Santa.
DISCLAIMER: THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THE NATURE OF SANTA CLAUS. IF YOU BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS, PERHAPS YOU
SHOULDN’T HAVE READ IT.
† No offence intended to those who genuinely believe that Poseidon is the master of storms, naturally.
This photo, taken 2 October 1982 and showing me at just 22 months old, might be the oldest picture of myself that I own on which I can pin a specific date. (Obviously) I didn’t
start blogging until much later: my first real “blog” began in late 1998; this photo was posted here retroactively on 25 May 2019.
