157. Chaos

The recent surge in Covid cases and hospitalizations, CDC’s confusing “guidelines” on tests and quarantines, the airline turmoil over the holidays, the confrontations between teachers unions and school and city administrators in Chicago, schools and colleges dancing between in-person and virtual classes, job resignations and health care worker shortages, competition for hospital beds, and the open breaks between the masked and unmasked under the “Masks Required” sign in our local Safeway all bring chaos to mind. 

And “chaos” brings me to the book I am reading, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The two are married, and “Nic” Kristof is trying to run for Oregon governor from his childhood home in Yamhill. That is not the subject of this post! The book starts with the kids Kristof grew up with in Yamhill, and traces the severe declines in some families as blue-collar jobs are lost and alcohol, drugs, and violence increasingly permeate lives. The authors then go back and forth between Yamhill and other places in the country with stories of despair and others of hope. This morning, as I read this passage, the connection between Covid and Chaos and its impact on children sent chills:

“Evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and economics underscores that a crucial window for helping American children is in the first five years, partly because they often suffer lifelong brain damage when raised in chaos and deprivation… they are exposed to ‘toxic stress’ and their brains are flooded with cortisol, a stress hormone that changes brain anatomy.” 

With the pandemic, children are in school or daycare one day, and out the next. Rates of depression and suicide talk and attempts among teenagers are spiking. Parents are working from home one day, and not working at all the next. Parents disagree with each other or their neighbors on masks and vaccinations and Covid. My guess—although I have seen nothing official—is that stress levels in homes over work and child-rearing and housekeeping are on the rise. My guess is that alcohol and legal and illegal drug use are also on the rise.  

I don’t know where this leaves us, except to remember that the impact of our own actions and words on our children and grandchildren can be immense, and that kind words and caring for them and for all the small ones that are in our lives or just happen into them momentarily might be the most important things we do today. 

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