Prometheus 6

Sorry, not feeling clever about this. 

And empathy appears to me now, in much of what I read, to be in particularly short supply, not only among different groups of parents (all those “wars,” Mommy and otherwise) but in the increasingly punitive attitudes of school systems and legislators toward parents and, by extension, their kids. Frequently, I find, there seems to be a kind of studied harshness in the air, an in-your-face obtuseness that tries to pass itself off as some sort of virtue or push for justice. I’m thinking particularly now of the “war on obesity,” which in some school districts is being waged through letters home to parents or in report cards bearing the bad news about students’ body mass indexes. The ostensible goal is to make parents aware that their children’s health is at risk, but the real effect has often been, as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have reported, to scold parents and humiliate their children.

[TS] Mean Grown-Ups

There’s an absolutely horrifying article in the current issue of Child Magazine about the food fight now raging between parents of children with life-threatening food allergies and parents of the allergy-free. The latter, apparently, have started to push back against “peanut-free” school regulations to assert their children’s natural right to eat whatever they darn well please.

The stories are downright chilling: One parent joked on a message board about having his daughter dress as “the Death Peanut” on Halloween. A North Carolina father at a parent-teacher organization meeting said he’d continue to send his child to school with peanut butter sandwiches and “tell his child to ‘smear’ the peanut butter along the hallway walls.” Another father sent his child to school with a “disguised” sandwich that had peanut butter hidden in the middle of the bread.

There are many ways to read this behavior. On the one hand, it reflects widespread ignorance about the scope and severity of some food allergies, and it also reveals plain old laziness. Some parents and educators sense that peanut worries have come to verge on paranoia. And then there’s a sense that some parents are going nuts about food generally.

I sympathize with that feeling – up to a point. There was a time a few years ago when I, too, conflated the anxiety of the merely food-averse with the fears of those whose kids were threatened by potentially fatal allergies. A teacher once told me about a preschool mom who took to following her daughter room to room, and screamed at staff members if they didn’t walk the halls with EpiPens strapped to their bodies. The teacher felt that this mother was ridiculous, and I did, too. It’s easy to turn a quasi-mocking eye on someone who behaves in this way.

That is, it was easy for me until another mother described to me the experience of watching her son nearly die in her arms after an accidental peanut ingestion. Getting into her skin – feeling the fear and vulnerability that drove her to, she admitted, sometimes maddening behavior – changed everything for me. I’d like it if all parents could at some point force themselves to do this kind of mental exercise. Empathy can be painful – but a little goes a long way.