I feel like 80% of the books I read have a blurb about "coming of age" on their back, and still I don't know what it means. My guess is that any book that features a teen but isn't for teenagers qualifies. If I were forced to come up with a definition, I'd guess that it means the point when a human being makes the transition from thinking that the world is a relatively safe and wholesome place to finding out that oh my gosh it is not.
I think about this a bunch because I have an 18 year old and my guess is that some of the messed up garbage I read in these books have happened to him or someone he knows personally and that's maybe the scariest thing I've thought about in my adult life. It's even worse thinking that it's probably similar for my 14 year old and maybe even my 12 year old. For the most part, my kids have lived a pretty sheltered life, media wise. I'm not saying that's the only way to raise kids, just how we do. I remember being in 4th grade and having kids tell me plot points from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies that gave me nightmares but they seemed fine about it and probably aren't serial killers (probably).
Once, when my daughter was in 6th grade, I helped her classroom during a party, and was reminded again at how vastly different the backgrounds are for various kids and how bananas it is that we put them all in the same room and expect them to behave the same. Class sizes are large in Utah, with an average of 25 per class in elementary schools compared to a national average of 16. In my kids' school, it's even higher than that. Child Protective Services estimates that the rate of child neglect or abuse is 9.2 in 1,000, which translates roughly to one kid for every one hundred. In my kids' school, that's one per grade.
And those are only the reported cases. It's estimated that one in four kids goes through some form of maltreatment in their life. Of those, 78% is neglect, 18% physical abuse, and 9% sexual abuse. If you're reading this and like me were lucky enough to not experience any of that but still thought that school was hard and sometimes terrifying, just imagine what it's like for a kid who is hungry, afraid, or emotionally traumatized. I honestly can't.
What I've learned is that you can't just look at a kid and know whether he or she is going through something that even us adults wouldn't be able to handle. I knew kids in high school who came from rich families and dressed like the only clothes they had were found in Eddie Vedder's dumpster. I also knew kids who were scrupulously clean and only wore designer clothes who sometimes didn't see their parents for days and ate cold spaghettios for dinner some nights and other nights ate nothing.
When I volunteer at the domestic violence shelter, a lot of the time I'm playing with kids. That sounds tough, but it isn't. It's actually super fun. Most of the time you'd never know that they'd been exposed to abuse of some kind; they're just regular kids. Some of them look unkempt and have messy hair (like my kids sometimes), and sometimes they look really skinny, but others look like they are always either on their way to or from a photo shoot for a sponsored post on a mommy blogger's Instagram. Sometimes they might be clingy or grumpy or whatever, but guess what? So are mine. I'd be willing to bet that unless they are licensed therapists, anyone who claims they can tell a child is in an abusive relationship just by looking at them has probably sent at least a thousand dollars to a Craigslist scammer at some point, too.
We complain a lot about kids growing up too fast and a lot of us parents spend much of their time trying to preserve the innocence of our young kids. Most of us have spent some time looking through pictures of our children, starting with when they were babies up until whatever age they are now, and watched their smiles fade over time. When they were toddlers everything was a delight and they laughed and laughed and the only time they cried was because their little cheeks hurt sometimes from smiling too much. They seem so sad now, we think. The light in their eyes is faded. Their shoulders sag from the combined weight of too much homework in their backpacks and the knowledge that the only time people care about fairness anymore is when billionaires expect something in return for their campaign contributions.
I wonder if the tragedy is two-fold for us. Like, on the one hand it's so sad to watch these little happy monsters whose sole existence is filled with joy while reality dawns on them. But also we're faced with the knowledge that we couldn't fix it. We're the adults now and it's still not safe out there and it feels even less safe sometimes and that's happening on our watch.
That's depressing. But this wouldn't be the Howie’s Optimism Club if we stopped there. The good part is that you and I still experience joy on the regular. Somehow in spite of all the headlines and horrible stories we read here in HOC of which you are a member just for reading (you're welcome), we still experience awe and wonder and intense love and super funny memes. Sometimes my cheeks still hurt from smiling too much, like all the times I've watched Thor: Ragnarok.
As a habitat biologist, one of my main goals for ecosystems is resilience. A resilient ecosystem is one that can be flooded, burned, dried, buried in snow, or any other number of natural disasters and still thrive. Healthy environments are, by definition, resilient. It's why sometimes you might go hiking with me and remark on how beautiful it is and get a lecture in return about how precarious that beauty is. "Don't fall in love with those trees," I might say. "If this place burns once you'll never see them again." It's one reason people don't invite me to go hiking with them (the other is my motto that when it comes to hiking shorts, there's no such thing as too short).
This is why there's such a premium placed on wetlands. One reason we think wetlands are so important is that they act as filters for polluted water before they go into larger water bodies. They also soak up floodwater like sponges, preventing damage to the surrounding areas. Americans used to call them "swamps," and converted them to farmland. Now a city in Illinois is engineering wetlands instead of spending millions on constructing and maintaining water treatment plants, because wetlands manage themselves.
Nature is like that. Many times when things are out of whack environmentally it's because we removed a part. Aldo Leopold said, "To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of the intelligent tinkerer." We get rid of wolves and we have too many elk; we drain the swamps and get fish-killing algae; you take the Jedi out of Rogue One and get... the best Star Wars movie in almost 40 years. OK, that last one doesn't work, but you get my point. The point is that human beings are animals and we're part of nature, even if your clever fashionista friend on Instagram insists that the only outdoors she's interested is the one opposite the "in" door at REI. We are the result of the same evolutionary pathway that created wetlands, aspen stands, poisonous snakes, and frickin' cheetahs. Our history is littered with war, disaster, and famine and our ancestors survived and passed the best on to us. Each one of us is built to weather the worst there is; it's all written there in our code.
A professor and a journalist tried to figure out why human beings laugh, and in their research found that there are two kinds of laughter. One is the spontaneous kind that happens whether we want it to or not, like if someone farts while saying a prayer. The other is social, and evolved in primates later:
This sort of laughter was a signal that things at the moment were OK, that danger was low and basic needs were met, and now was as good a time as any to explore, to play, to socialize. “What the humor is indexing and the laughter is signaling is, ‘this is an opportunity for learning,’” Gervais told us. “It signals this is a non-serious novelty, and recruits others to play and explore cognitively, emotionally and socially with the implications of this novelty.”
What that article tells us is that we've been laughing for somewhere between two and four million years. You guys, that's a shload of memes.
I think sometimes about a series of rolling hills my friends and I used to walk through on the way to the batting cages after school. As housing boomed, it was completely replaced at massive cost to the local environment. Then the batting cages were torn down for more houses. Landmarks of my childhood became more of the same cookie-cutter Utah mansions in a perfect metaphor for a transition from magical childhood where all possibilities are available to another string of stucco walls and injection molded Greek columns.
From the long-term, though, I think nature wins. It might take a hundred or thousands of years, but it always does. Like children still laughing while playing a game during a class party when home is at best empty and at worst violent, it survives.
A great read! I don’t think we can solve any environmental problems without understanding human behavior. Environmental anthropology is so fascinating!
Beautiful and insightful.