DADWAGON

I took my daughter to the Exploratorium in San Francisco on our trip out there last week. It wasn’t just a way to fill a morning. It was kind of a pilgrimage, since I used to go there when I was living with my dad in California, in the glorious 1980s, when the Golden State was on a break from Republican actor-governors and the 49ers were thrashing the Saints, making Who Dat Nation wear paper bags over their heads.

I’m just old enough that it’s not easy to find places that are still around from my childhood, so I was glad to find that the Exploratorium is essentially the same jumble of magnetized black sand and smoke tornadoes and infrared lights and other scientific gewgaws that it always was.

Dalia, a couple days shy of her fourth birthday, loved all that physics stuff. I did not expect that she would be as thrilled by the biology exhibits. Biology can be a goopy thing, and I thought she’d be a bit too young for the so-gross-it’s-cool appeal.

Some of it solved itself: she was too short to see into the terrarium filled with decomposing rats. But she sidled right up to the stainless steel dissection table, just as the orange-vested volunteer was bringing out a sacrificial cow’s eyeball. My stepmom and I asked if she really wanted to watch it, but she was totally transfixed. Yes, she had a few meandering questions about what had happened to the cow, but otherwise she was geeking out on the gels and films and various mushes inside the oversized eyeball. I mean, she’s already sort of fixated on death. Now she’s obviously ready to get some learning out of it.

I was reminded of her unexpected gameness for dissection by this great review at DadList, who looked at the seriously cool Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), a new book of projects for kids by Gever Tulley, founder of The Tinkering School.

I haven’t read the book, but I’m pretty sure it’s awesome, because it sent risk-averse publishers fleeing and some people in Australia even want it banned. It’s a remedy to over-protective parenting, with activities ranging from supergluing your fingers together to climbing trees to licking a 9-volt battery. They come with project-specific disclaimers like Frustration or Property Damage.

But really, the projects are all things that your kids are going to whether you want them to or not; so you might as well do it with them, show them how to do it right, and get some learning in while you’re at it. Fantastic. Thank you, DadList, for bringing the good stuff.

Mumps is back, in New York City and its environs. About 400 kids have got sick, most of them from an Orthodox Jewish summer camp where one child arrived bearing the virus. It appears that the large majority of infected children had been vaccinated.

How can that be, you say? Because the mumps vaccine (according to a CDC study) is about 85 percent effective. That’s enough when the disease is extremely rare. But once it gets a foothold, that’s not enough–and that, folks, is exactly the point I was pounding on a few weeks ago, about herd immunity. Add to that The Lancet‘s recent retraction of its much-discussed autism study, and you come to the only possible conclusion: It is profoundly senseless not to vaccinate your kid (the patient zero at the summer camp had come from the UK, where the mumps outbreak had reached 4000 mostly unvaccinated kids). Please, folks, let’s let this particular back-to-the-land instinct go.

Less than a month ago, in the town of South Hadley, Massachusetts, a 15-year-old Irish girl named Phoebe Prince killed herself. Apparently, she’d been the victim of intense bullying, of both the IRL and cyber varieties, and two days before a big high-school dance, she committed suicide. Pretty miserable.

For me, it hits especially close to home because, well, it is close to home: South Hadley is right next door to Amherst, where I grew up.

Sadly, this doesn’t feel all that new—and not just because the bullying reminds me of the crap that I experienced as a weird little kid 25 years ago: the jap-slaps that knocked me to the ground in the hallways, the cruelty and negativity that I too often turned back on the two or three kids who were even more mockable than I was. (Sorry, Seth. Sorry, Leah.)

No, in my time too there were some pretty miserable outcomes. A friend OD’d on heroin, others committed suicide or were killed themselves, a teacher was busted for child porn possession. It all kinda sucked (though strangely, I have generally good memories of my childhood), but none of this, as far as I can tell, was related to bullying.

I don’t mean to minimize Phoebe Prince’s death, but I suspect there’s more to this than just garden-variety childhood bullying. I don’t understand what’s changed between the taunting of my youth and the bullying of today. Is it really that much worse? How does humiliation-via-Facebook (or whatever kids these days are using) differ from the old-school humiliation in front of the entire school? Were we stronger back then, or just more accepting of the inevitability that the bigger, richer, better-looking, more sociable kids would pick on us? Did we just suffer through it all only to develop even more fucked-up lives? And how did Uma Thurman make it out okay?

Anyway, in the immortal words of Big Fun: