Sunday: anti boredom measures have been prepared

There has been some Boredom in the household, so last night I looked at recent streaming releases to see what we could watch, since last night, A. rewatched Sonic the Hedgehog 2, a movie with which she has issues. We watched it “together” (I was playing Birzzle), and she kept wanting to point things out to me, so I really need to find something we can both actually enjoy watching. Lego Star Wars Summer Vacation looks good, as does Luck. So we have a plan! Also, there’s a portal playdate and family zoom later today.

Also! Happy 18th Anniversary to R. and me. I should go buy some kind of celebratory booze or something. I’m hoping to finally make risotto today. Maybe a cake? Carbs can be celebratory.

M. came over for a visit, but did not care to walk because by 10 am it was already mid 80s and quite humid.

ETA:

Beds have been stripped, sheets washed, most of them dried and half back on the beds. The rest are in progress. I made risotto! First time for me. I used up the chicken broth and the mushroom broth, with a cup of glutinous rice (I didn’t have arborio or whatever). Turned out great — I used the lion’s mane and some of the pre-sauteed mushrooms. I also cooked the last of the cauliflower from 3 weeks ago with a bunch of the various dried peppers. I am calling those murder cauliflower, because they are at the exciting end of the spicy spectrum.

A. and I watched a little over half of “Luck”, but then I had to go retrieve T. from the movie theatre where he went to see Paws of Fury the second time. R. is out on a bike ride. A. is now on her portal playdate; we’ll finish up “Luck” probably after Family Zoom. No boredom today. A. also read today’s blog posts and asked questions to clarify things.

Also, I took a nap at about 4:15. Delightful!

ETAYA:

I took a 1 mile walk by myself — it got down to the mid 70s. Still very, very humid, tho.

Portal playdate and family zoom were delightful. We finished watching Luck and then watched the Lego Star Wars Summer Vacation, which was fun. So, boredom measures were successful! I had some of the pulled pork R. made for dinner with a torta roll.

A Few Remarks About Burying the Lede

I like to walk and talk. For a variety of reasons — heat, geography, and covid fears (not mine), mostly — I haven’t been able to walk in person with other people hardly at all lately. So I call people on the phone and they walk with me virtually while doing whatever it is they are doing. With my sister, I usually catch her winding down with an adult beverage. With R., it’s often the commute home, or dinner prep or chores around her house in the evening.

It’s all good.

I rarely have any goal in these conversations, other than to chat with someone I love while I walk. And all kinds of things come up. My sister is a nurse in home care and currently has a school case, so she’s in a school context most of her work days (not right at the moment, obviously) and the family of her case includes people who currently or in the past worked for a school district in various capacities, as well as having children of their own who are or were in the school system. Sometimes, we talk about what’s going on in schools. In the most recent version of this conversation, my sister launched on the topic of how the children who are in first or second grade have never been in in person school until recently and so don’t know how to behave / listen / comply / wtf. Her district was one which stayed remote for a long time. However, I _know_ my sister, so rather than listen to paragraph after paragraph of Kids Don’t Know How to Listen, I asked, have the kids you are talking about (not her cases) done anything to anyone that resulted in an ER visit? The response: children or adults?

To summarize: the start of the monologue is about Kids Can’t Listen. The gist is that someone had to go to the hospital. More than one someone.

The next component was: was anything done. The short answer was, “No”, which is obviously implausible. What actually happened? Parents who had spent an extended time resisting a behavior plan abruptly complied with the request to put the kid on a behavior plan. That’s not nothing.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is a My Sister Is So Nutty story. It’s really not. A lot of people really struggle with which parts should be presented in which order. My sister has a tendency to come to sweeping conclusions that have no obvious actionable element, and are often extremely vague and somewhat blame-y. They are satisfying to her — it’s obviously someone else’s fault — and undemanding of her — there’s nothing she can do about it. They are unsatisfying to me in every way. I’m largely uninterested in blame, and I am interested in fixing problems independent of whether or not they are “my” problem, and participating in politics (mostly as a donor, and a person who engages in lots of conversations with lots of people, which, as incredible as it seems, is actually a political activity. In fact, it is arguably _the_ political activity. When nerds say they hate “politics”, what they are saying is, “Don’t make me communicate with other people. I find it overwhelming.”).

My sister _leads_ with these conclusions, and I used to then ask, but how did you get to that conclusion and the story would come out in pieces and I’d be very confused and really struggle to validate what sounded like a tempest in a teapot and then boom, out would come the yeah, that’s not a teapot tempest, that’s a category 5 wtf. I’m learning tho! I just straight up ask at the beginning who had to go the hospital, and then I follow it up for what precisely happened next.

I am really worried about this next school year. Not because of covid. I have a lot of concerns about staffing issues, which are really, really bad this year, even with relaxed requirements to be a teacher. Sure, I live in a district that is super lucky and able to staff, but … I also know people around the country, and I like to imagine that I care about kids everywhere in our country getting an adequate public education. I’m not sure what, if anything, I can do about this, but I’m at least trying to understand what is going on and a little bit of why. Which means I’m over at Education Week today reading about it.

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-why-i-left-teaching-spoiler-it-wasnt-the-students/2022/08

This sounds like a fairly young teacher, 4 years as a lead 2nd grade teacher. He has a twitter account that supports this idea. Losing young teachers while having staffing issues would seem to be salient. Why did he leave? Not the kids, he says. He does not supply a bulleted list, so my summary may not be accurate, but what I got was this: standardized testing / curriculum, punitive / behavioral disciplinary strategy, underresourced. Fair! These are all very, very real problems.

But I’m talking about this in a rambling post about “Burying the Lede”. So, what’s the lede?

“T was not a kid who “slipped through the cracks.” Everyone in the school knew about this 7-year-old girl. She had thrown things, cursed, called everyone names, hit kids, and screamed for hours. She was also brilliant, motivated, and curious. She had interests, friends, supports, and aspirations. T loved using her manipulatives in math, reading about princesses and the teen dancer and singer JoJo Siwa, acting, and teaching other kids.
But when it came to the curriculum, none of it got through to her. So, T rebelled, every year. My school’s positive behavioral interventions and supports system was the first response to her rebellion, but teachers lacked proper resources, and the system’s reliance on external motivation and discipline triggered her more.”

So, the _actual_ issue here is that this kid’s got a wrong placement. Straight up, this kid does not belong in this school. Since I’m not in Maryland, I have no idea _what_ alternative options are available to her. But I can tell you with not a _single_ doubt that in _my_ district, when parents resist appropriate placements, this is the kind of thing you wind up seeing. This very young, idealistic teacher who has great empathy and aspires to the best for everyone must have wound up exhausting everyone around him, while simultaneously solving absolutely no problems anywhere. We have 6 elementary schools in the now regionalized district, and they are each very, very different in how the schools work, even tho the curriculum is fully standardized. And I have gotten to know parents who feel passionately — and completely incompatibly with each other — about which schools are “good” and which ones are “oh I’m so sorry how did your kid wind up there?!?”. And that’s _outside_ of special ed — that’s just giving parents some choice for their kids about whether they have an “academically” oriented elementary school experience, a “high structure” school experience, a “discovery” approach to learning or whatever. Once you’re in the special ed system, there is simultaneously more and less choice.

Navigating this is _hard_ for parents and for teachers (kids realistically just can’t possibly), in part because there is a persistent tendency to reduce cognitive load by simplifying. We do this by binary labeling things Good and Bad. We do this by picking a strategy and trying to apply it to everyone and everything. Also, there’s not nearly enough information available to anyone about what other options are available. When kindergarten at Conant (in retrospect, every single year I am even more astonished about what a bad idea that was, and I thought it was a terrible idea at the time) did not work out for T., and he went over to CASE for several years, I returned to the district pre-school to better understand why CASE had not been offered as a kindergarten option. Turns out the answer was super simple: CASE had a terrible reputation within the preschool, partly because of out of date information, partly due to _lack_ of information.

Right now, everyone is new at their jobs. People are new to the work world. There has been a “silver tsunami” of retirements. Institutional knowledge is … gone. Which is _great_ because a lot of the people with the institutional knowledge were adamant that they were not going to waste time and energy learning new ways of doing things because they were going to retire soon. So now we are going through all kinds of transformations all at once and everyone is very stressed out about the whole thing.

In the meantime, if someone is really worked up about something and you’re thinking, _that’s_ the hill you’re gonna die on? Ask them who went to the hospital. Ask them whether anyone was unable to return to work because they were so traumatized by a physical attack or other crime committed against them, and they still haven’t figured out whether they should go file a police report or not. Because there’s a certain amount of that going around, and the people who are talking around those issues are not necessarily talking _about_ those issues in a way that a casual conversational partner is going to be able to make sense of.

A Few Remarks About Parenting and Personality Disorders

The APA has a phenomenal podcast series called “Speaking of Psychology”. I’ve recommended the recent episode about perfectionism to a number of people, and more recently, I listened to an episode about Borderline Personality Disorder. It does a great job of explaining the evolution of how Personality Disorder in general is conceptualized (on the “borderline” of psychosis and neurosis, the many, many, many distinct personality disorders, and the new to DSM-V alternative section in which it is a general personality disorder with a list of specific symptoms). It touches on standard therapies for Borderline Personality Disorder in the US and around the world, and also its heritability. The clinician scientist interviewed for this episode is part of the general vibe of the community, in that she doesn’t blame parents for “causing” psychological problems like personality disorder, while simultaneously making fairly onerous and specific suggestions for how parenting styles can connect with underlying personality / genetics / wtf to trigger a disorder.

This feels unhelpful.

I mean, she’s already noted that burnout for therapists who treat people with borderline is a real problem, and that the disorder is highly heritable, and therefore the parents being asked to do this extra work are themselves probably personality disordered and may or may not be diagnosed themselves and may or may not have been effectively helped.

NOT mentioned in the podcast is the tendency of people with personality disorders to choose partners on the autism spectrum. There are a bunch of reasons for this. Notably: people with autism don’t necessarily notice or understand what they are encountering in a person with a personality disorder, and won’t necessarily immediately run away; also, people with autism themselves have pretty limited choices for partners. Most importantly, a person with a personality disorder may find hanging out with a person with autism to be extremely calming and relaxing and un-triggering and so forth. In any event, I have personally noticed that a lot of people with autism tend towards the blunter end of the communications spectrum, so if the kid with the personality disorder is going to need a bunch of softeners and validating and so forth, and the not-personality-disorder having parent does have autism, that’s _really going to be a much bigger lift than the therapist is imagining_.

I’m really sorry to say that I don’t have a nice, tidy suggestion for what to do instead. I think this suggestion is a total non-starter. I applaud the high degree of realism reflected in the observation that personality is pretty set and stable even in toddlers (I have all kinds of additional observations to add along the lines of “or even earlier”). There’s a lot to learn from this episode and a lot to think about, but the industry continues to suffer from disproportionate resources being diverted to people with borderline personality disorder while simultaneously accomplishing absolutely nothing. Well, okay, they might be making it worse.

A Few Remarks about John Oliver and Mental Health

A recent episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver was about mental health. John Oliver is substantially younger than me, and this episode made me even more bitterly aware of that than episodes of his show usually do. The degree of outrage at the difficulty of accessing mental health care that he is capable of feeling is, honestly, astonishing.

It was _great_ to hear him acknowledge that, you know, we used to _have_ inpatient beds and we got rid of all of them. He blames the problem on the failure to provide in community care that was promised with getting rid of the inpatient beds. However, when he describes an insurance company that pre-authed paying for a residential stay and then cut it short (or maybe denied it entirely — it was not clear), and he also describes teens and other young people stuck in emergency departments for a month or more because there are no beds available in psychiatric hospitals, I’m just sitting here thinking: well, what kind of community care did you think was promised that was going to provide residential stay? When Republicans wanted to privative / get rid of Medicare / Medicaid / welfare / social security and leave it up to families and communities, everyone clearly understood: Nope. We do not want grandma back or disabled uncle back or whatever. We want grandma and uncle to get round the clock skilled nursing care in an appropriate facility. There was some debate on the details and we worked it out, so now, if someone wants to stay in a home and receive care there, that can be paid for; if they want to be in an institutional context, that can be paid for. Obviously, there is never enough money and nothing is never as good as one wants it to be because obviously we all want grandma to still be young and spry and able to babysit the grands, and we wish disabled uncle wasn’t disabled and blah blah blah. But we said absolutely NO to that nonsense. But we said yes to getting rid of psychiatric facilities across the board. That was fucking stupid and we need to revisit that decision and start building more. We can make them better. We can make it so people can stay in when they need and can be in the community when that is working for them. We can make sure that we monitor for abuse and bad care and neglect and someone lying to commit someone who does not need to be committed or whatever it was that worried people so much that they okayed getting rid of all the psychiatric beds.

But Oliver is not there yet. Which is simultaneously enraging and devastatingly sad, and I just can’t with those emotions at the same time in an unending way so I just laughed hysterically instead. It doesn’t really matter if you think that makes me crazy; no one locks anyone up for that anymore anyway.

I am still so angry that my aunt was de-institutionalized. There is such a straight line between sending her back to live with her aging parents and messed up older brother and her death a very short period of time later. Failure to provide residential care for people who need it because of mental health problems kills people. Sometimes that’s an accident. Sometimes that’s a suicide. Sometimes that is being homeless and dying of exposure, or being the victim of some other person’s violence which in turn of that other person’s mental health challenges. Sometimes that’s a result of police being surprised or confused or just plain awful and murdering them. People would live a lot longer, and be a lot healthier, and might actually get _better_ if we were willing to provide residential psychiatric care with compassion and generosity, instead of saying, oh, well, someone did something one time that was awful so no more residential beds for anyone ever.