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Behavioral Sciences are WEIRD (and MYOPICS)

Posted on August 12, 2010
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The thought first occurred to me, back in the fall of 2008, as I was reading Dan Ariely’s very readable and fascinating book, “Predictably Irrational”. Chapter after chapter is peppered with conclusions drawn from experiments conducted on students studying at some of the best institutions in the US. I wrote an email to a couple of the authors of what I thought were well-respected blogs about the brain and behavior. I wrote:

“The more I read about our cognitive biases or irrationality, the more I’m struck by how many decisions have been reached using what seem fairly limited samples, many of them just college students. I don’t doubt that we’ve cognitive biases but I wonder are there any studies that go across cultures, socio-economic strata and age in determining the cognitive biases ? I googled and couldn’t find anything relevant. Is it that we all have the same cognitive biases but different ones are brought to the fore by culture ? ”

I did not get any responses to my question (they probably were optimistic that I’d learn to google better). But the feeling never went away as I encountered many new fascinating conclusions drawn from experiments conducted on college students in this country. As I was writing my entry about the death of languages, I noticed an article in that excellent blog, Neuroanthropology. While the title caught my eye, I didn’t really go back to checking the article until a few days later. The entry is titled: “We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?“. WEIRD turns out to be an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The article was based on a paper (then) recently published paper titled The weirdest people in the world? by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan.

There are two main points to this paper. The first is that a lot of conclusions in behavior science are based on experiments on WEIRD people, essentially undergrad students at Western, mostly American, universities. The second thrust of the paper is to show that WEIRD people are not representative of most of humanity when it comes to behaviors.

From the abstract of the paper:

“The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.  Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity.”

Two pieces of data from the article reflect the level of skewness in the papers related to behavior science:

  • “A recent analysis of the top journals in six sub-disciplines of psychology from 2003 to 2007 revealed that 68% of subjects came from the United States, and a full 96% of subjects were from Western industrialized countries, specifically those in North America and Europe, as well as Australia and Israel (Arnett 2008). The make-up of these samples appears to largely reflect the country of residence of the authors, as 73% of first authors were at American universities, and 99% were at universities in Western countries. This means that 96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population.”
  • “In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the premier journal in social psychology – the subdiscipline of psychology that should (arguably) be the most attentive to questions about the subjects’ backgrounds – 67% of the American samples (and 80% of the samples from other countries) were composed solely of undergraduates in psychology courses (Arnett 2008).”

These papers and their conclusions are not just academic papers published in academic journals for the consumption of academics. As the authors write: “In top journals such as Nature and Science, researchers frequently extend their findings from undergraduates to the species – often declaring this generalization in their titles. These  contributions typically lack even a cautionary footnote about these inferential extensions.”

The authors compare WEIRD people at four levels: western, industrialized countries vs what they term “small scale socieities”, Western industrialized countries vs non-Western, industrialized countries, American vs other western countries and finally university-educated Americans vs non-university-educated Americans. The authors base their comparisons on different aspects of behavior ranging from visual perception and spatial cognition to ideas of independence and inter-dependence and moral reasoning.

The main paper is a well written (I confess here that I only read sections of it, given my limited time and domain-specific competence) 22 pages or so. The reminder of the paper is a collection of responses from various peers to their paper and the authors’ response to the responses. Many of the responses apply the criticism to other areas such as neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy and the anthropocentric and ethnocentric attitudes related to comparing humans with other animals. Many responses question whether WEIRD is weird enough. For example, the author of the Neuroanthropology post writes:
“I worry that W.E.I.R.D. classification flatters the WEIRD, focusing on traits that Westerners typically highlight to describe themselves in ways that are, however inadvertently, pretty self-congratulatory. If we were to call the same group, Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary (MYOPICS)… you get the idea.”

A small section of the peer commentary argued against the conclusions of the article with one author even stating “WEIRD societies may be more compatible with human nature”.

In the main paper, the authors don’t attempt to explain the reasons behind the extreme differences in behavior of the WEIRD folks. But in their response to the various pieces of peer review, they touch upon this subject. They suggest two possible reasons. One is the primacy of the English language. They write: “English-bias may be impacting theorizing in the cognitive sciences, while Machery and Stich show that it has impacted philosophical inquiry”.

The second cause they speculate has to do with the relative strangeness of American middle and upper class child-rearing techniques. They write: “Lancy lays the groundwork by highlighting the relative strangeness, in a broad global and historical context, of modern middle- and upper-class American beliefs, values, cultural models, and practices vis-a-vis childrearing. Fernald and Karasik et al. review evidence that is beginning to document how these practices impact cognitive, linguistic, and motor development, including long-term cognitive outcomes.”

We’ve been here before. Many times have we encountered the notion of researcher bias and skew caused by the nature of the samples studied.

I first encountered the idea of researcher bias many years ago when I was reading Dorothy Rowe’s insightful book, “Friends and Enemies: Our Need To Love and Hate”. She writes: “An American researcher observing a number of white, middle-class American babies, or an English researcher observing a number of white, middle-class English babies can easily fail to draw the simple conclusion that this is what American or English middle-class babies do and instead generalize their observations to say that this is what all babies do.”

A more tragic story is narrated by Robert Sapolsky in his essay “Poverty’s Remains” from his book, “The Trouble With Testosterone”. Much of our understanding of human anatomy was initially based on cadavers of poor people whose internal organs were differently shaped and sized because of the way they suffered and died. Sapolsky quotes several examples of this from the thymus gland which is very small in people who live in chronically stressful conditions to the adrenal gland which is much larger in people living under stressful conditions. So, at the turn of the 19th century, the doctors had a misconceived notion of the “normal” size of organs.

Before SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) was called SIDS, an Austrian pathologist named Richard Paltauf concluded – after several autopsies of healthy infants who had died of unexplainable causes in their crib – that the cause of death was an enlarged thymus that pressed down on the trachea, strangling a sleeping infant. SIDS, which had been nameless thus far, was called status thymicolymphaticus and as far as into the 1950s, the preferred preventive treatment for SIDS was to irradiate the throats of infants. While not helping SIDS, the treatment resulted in causing thyroid cancer in tens of thousands of people. Sapolsky writes: “It is a chilling experience to wander the dusty lower floor of a medical library, reading forgotten seventy-year-old pediatric texts with their dry discussions of status thymicolymphaticus. The technical details of the disorder, the plausible etiology, the photographs of the “enlarged” thymuses, the confident recommendation for treatment – all wrong, page after page.”

More recently, at the start of the year, NYT published an article titled “The Americanization of Mental Illness”:
“AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places.”

I cannot recommend the WEIRD paper highly enough to anybody engaged in an enquiry of human behavior, as a vocation or an avocation. I’ve saved a copy of the paper for a more thorough reading. I also recommend reading the post on Neuroanthropology for some additional insightful commentary.

Sapolsky concludes his essay “Poverty’s Remains” with a powerful and eloquent statement: “Be really certain before you ever pronounce something to be the norm, because at that instant, you have now made it supremely difficult to ever look at an exception to that supposed norm and see it objectively.”

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The Sorrows Of A Modern Parent

Posted on July 19, 2010
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“Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of the ‘empty next syndrome’ is increased smiling”.

I read this sentence back in 2006 or so, when I first encountered the brilliant mind of Daniel Gilbert in the pages of his bestseller, Stumbling on Happiness. The book was an eye opener on so many levels that I filed the sentence away in some corner of my brain’s attic and forgot about it. I wasn’t yet a father then and given the difficulty we were having conceiving, I probably sniggered at this statement, thanked my fate and moved on to the next eye opener.

Even then, however, the statement stayed with me because it flew in the face of the popular culture. Everybody I knew who had children thought the world of them and wouldn’t have it any other way. So despite my parent’s covert and overt references to how proud they were of having raised me, I attributed their pride to how I turned out, not their accomplishment in parenting a brat.

Last year, I noticed one of our neighbors, who had just entered the empty nest phase, look at Maya several times with what I thought was wistfulness and a little tear. The look in his eyes stayed with me.

Of course, parenting would be hard, I knew at some intellectual level, having heard that statement from my peers who were far more successful than we were in figuring out how to make babies. But I didn’t realize the depths of despair I could sink into sometimes, the relentlessness, the almost complete lack of time for myself and the total ennui of reading the same book over and over again. Being in the here and now with a child can be mind-numbing.

I attributed this difficulty to the insular life we lead here in the civilized, developed, West. Back in India, grandparents, neighbors, friends and other people pitched in to look after the baby, providing the parent with some much needed breathing time. Further, women of my mother’s generation were raised to expect the life they grew into. They had neither TV to glue their eyes to nor much money to spend. Cook, clean, make babies and raise babies was their life. They were not promised much and most didn’t expect much more. Here in the West, our expectations are much higher as is our sense of control and freedom.

Last week, New York Magazine carried an illuminating article that provided a comprehensive analysis of This Parenting Life. Titled “All Joy and No Fun”, it went behind the scenes to dissect Daniel Gilbert’s statement and in the process explores the cultural and psychological landscape of modern parenting.

The article, written by Jennifer Senior, starts with a study published in a scholarly journal last year that challenged Gilbert’s view. “Contrary to much of the literature, our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children”, said the paper. The kick in the story however is that the author withdrew the paper a few months later when he discovered that his analysis was based on a coding error.

The article posits that a large factor in this Unhappy Parent Syndrome is that the experience of parenting has fundamentally changed. From a time when we thanked the gods for letting our children see the light beyond the first year of their life, we’ve come to a place where anything less than admission to a top school, a high paying job and a trophy wife is considered a failure. And to this end, parents have to do everything. Nothing is too much. Thinking that we’re solely responsible for how our children turn out, we rush them to expensive private schools (or expensive homes with good public homes), swimming lessons, karate classes, dance and a host of other activities designed to give them a leg up over the others. The stress to be the perfect parent is one major factor in what ruins the joy of parenting.

Other factors that affect our experience of parenting include the the later ages at which we have children and the support we get as parents from society such as extended time off when babies are born and decent childcare and public schools. According to the author, the only study that showed happy parents came from Denmark, where the state provides substantial support for parents.

Another key observation of the article is that parents tend to be unhappy in the daily moments of parenting, but look back on parenting as a most rewarding time. The author quotes two studies that lead to this conclusion. One is a study in which people categorized activities along the dual quadrant of pleasurable and rewarding. Activities such as work were considered rewarding, but not pleasurable while activities such as eating and watching TV were considered pleasurable but not rewarding. Raising children ranked behind volunteering and prayer as activities that were both pleasurable and rewarding. Another study found that childless couples were more depressed than couples with children and that single fathers without the custody of their children were the most depressed.

The author thus questions whether all these studies that conclude with the happy empty nest syndrome are those that define happiness as the immediate experience of positive feelings instead of being concerned with eudaimonia, of having lived a good life.

I liken parenting to running a marathon. No one who runs it can consider the experience painless. But after it is over, the euphoria of accomplishment is so overwhelming that many rush to run another one.

In any case, do read the article. Highly recommended.

Happy Maya

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Spare The Rod, Spare The Child ?

Posted on January 13, 2010
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One tenet of parenting about which Shanthala and I have had no disagreement at all is spanking. We both agreed that unlike our parents’ generation, we wouldn’t spank Maya, no matter what the circumstances were. Why ? Because we thought that by spanking we were forcing our view on the child violently, that by using violence to enforce a behavior, we were telling her that it was OK to use violence to achieve your goals, that the act was humiliating to a child, possibly even terrorizing. Charity is not the only thing that begins at home. I also thought that once we thought occasional corporal punishment was OK, we would find it easier to spank when we were tired and Maya was cranky. Using the rod is easy, sparing it for an alternative option is not.

Besides these reasons, the data seems to show that spanking is not good for the kids w.r.t their cognitive development and social behavior. For example, a recent study by Duke University’s Center for Child and Family Policy concluded that spanking children when they were very young (1 year or less) slowed their intellectual development and led to aggressive behavior at an older age. Not everybody agrees with the data however. And this article in Wall Street Journal last October shows why:

“Statistical analysis of spanking’s effects on cognition are clouded by many complicating factors. Effects can be attributed to the wrong cause, statisticians say; rather than spanking causing problems in children, it is possible that their existing cognitive problems can make spanking more likely. Moreover, any effects of spanking are difficult to measure and probably small. And unlike, say, a study on prescription drugs that removes a misleading placebo effect, no ethical study can assign some children to be spanked. Instead, parents must be trusted to remember and share their disciplinary practices.“

The Duke University study was considered methodologically more sound than many other studies on the effects of spanking partly because it showed that kids who had more problems at age one were not getting spanked more at an older age. But still, not everyone is convinced, even if spanking is largely frowned upon in this US of A, an act liable to get you on the front pages if you’re a celebrity. In any case, my reasons for not spanking were not based on whether Maya’s cognitive development was affected.

I was surprised, however, to read that children who were never spanked fared worse than children who had been spanked. In the (now discontinued) blog by the authors of “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children”, the authors write:

“For decades, research on spanking was challenged by the lack of a control group to compare against – almost all kids (90+%) had been spanked at least once, at some time in their early lives. New research shows that now up to 25% of kids are never spanked, so it’s a fair question: How are they turning out? Are they turning out better? Surprisingly, they’re not.“

They quote the newly published work by Dr. Marjorie Gunnoe, a Professor of Psychology at Calvin College. She looked at data from a new population study, Portraits of American Life, that is underway that involves 2,600 people and their adolescent children who are interviewed every three years for the next twenty years. Some 25% of the teens in the study say that they’ve never been spanked. She looked at the data for bad outcomes such as antisocial behavior, violence and depression as well as good outcomes such as academic aspirations and rank, hope for their future and volunteer work. They write in the blog:

“those who’d been spanked just when they were young—ages 2 to 6—were doing a little better as teenagers than those who’d never been spanked. On almost every measure.

A separate group of teens had been spanked until they were in elementary school. Their last spanking had been between the ages of 7 and 11. These teens didn’t turn out badly, either.

Compared with the never-spanked, they were slightly worse off on negative outcomes, but a little better off on the good outcomes.

Only the teenagers who were still being spanked clearly showed problems.”

The authors speculate that a possible reason for this is that progressive dads (defined as dads who can function as moms) are inconsistent when it comes to enforcing discipline. They quote the work of Dr. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, a developmental psychologist at Ohio State University:

“Schoppe-Sullivan found that children of progressive dads were acting out more in school. This was likely because the fathers were inconsistent disciplinarians; they were emotionally uncertain about when and how to punish, and thus they were reinventing the wheel every time they had to reprimand their child. And there was more conflict in their marriage over how best to parent, and how to divide parenting responsibilities.

I admit to taking a leap here, but if the progressive parents are the ones who never spank (or at least there’s a large overlap), then perhaps the consistency of discipline is more important than the form of discipline. In other words, spanking regularly isn’t the problem; the problem is having no regular form of discipline at all.“

In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Po Bronson, one of the authors of “Nurture Shock” elaborates further the mindset of progressive dads:

“Progressive dads – they imagine this wonderful, you know, tight bond with their kids, and they  haven’t really thought about the fact that disciplining their kid is going to be part of the job. And they don’t necessarily – they know how to be great to their kid and nice to their kid but they don’t necessarily have a strategy for disciplining. And as a result they experiment as discipliners. They – one day they’ll say well, you know, no dessert. And the next day they’ll act really mean to their kid or angry or offended, trying to show their kid what they’ve done is wrong. And then the next day they’ll withdraw some other privilege or say you have to go to bed early and it becomes very inconsistent.“

I admit that I find myself vacillating about when to punish or enforce my view. Some cases are easy. For example, wearing a helmet when riding a bike or sitting in the toddler car seat. But others, I’m much less certain about. For example, in India Maya sometimes protests wearing a diaper. I’m not sure what makes her protest. Is it because she feels hot ? Or because she doesn’t want to go out ? If going out is not critical, I let her not wear the diaper and we don’t go out either. I tell her several times: “Maya, no diaper, no park”. Is this being inconsistent ? In our first week here, Maya would insist that she was not tired, going to sleep only when I sat on a stretch out chair holding her. This was troublesome, but I chalked her demand to her being disoriented and jetlagged. Past that first week, she didn’t insist on that behavior. 

When do I take her point of view into consideration and when do I not ? Life is not predictable. Should my response to the situations Maya objects to be that fixed ? I remember reading in a book about non-violence that non-violent alternatives to a situation are difficult to conjure up because we have so little practice. Similarly, finding options that work for both the parents and child are harder than just doing what the parents want. Sigh. Work life seems such a breeze compared to parenting. No wonder many hand the problem over to the mom.

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Effects of TV On Children

Posted on November 30, 2009
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Last week, a new study reported that the TV time for preschool children maybe as high as one-third of their waking hours. The sudden spurt is not caused by some epidemic surge in watching TV, but because previous studies did not account for the time spent at daycare. According to the study, at-home daycare centers were particularly egregious in this matter, with almost three-quarters  reporting they let the kids they cared for watch TV and DVDs while the number was only one-third for the non-at-home daycare centers. More alarming was the amount of time spent watching TV. On average, preschoolers spent 2.4 hours, toddlers 1.6 hours and infants 12 minutes at a home-based day care while the respective numbers for daycare centers were 24 minutes and 6 minutes; non-home daycare centers said they did not allow infants in front of the TV.

According to an article in the British daily, The Guardian, four month old infants in the US gaze at the idiot box for an average of 44 minutes a day. The number shoots up to 1.2 hours for those just under two. Similar data for Australia and the UK also point to significant amounts of time spent viewing TV by young children. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends zero TV and video time for children under 2 and suggests a maximum of 1-2 hours a day for older kids. The Australian Academy of Pediatrics is considering doing the same.

Is this Ludditism or is this news of increased TV time alarming in some way ? Does data back up AAP’s recommendations ? After all, AAP also opposes co-sleeping, the custom of having the infants share the bed with the parents. The answers to these questions are based on several considerations.

The primary concern of most parents with their kids watching TV or DVD is the nature of harm, specifically the effects on cognitive and social skills. Aren’t Baby Einsteins popular ? Aren’t they credited with making kids smarter, increasing some cognitive skill such as language acquisition or spatial reasoning ? The ineffectiveness of these so-called educational DVDs is well documented. They’re so ineffective, Disney, the makers of Baby Einstein, started offering refunds because their products failed to live up to the marketing. Dr. Dimitis Christakis, a paediatrician and researcher at the Seattle Children’s Hospital is oft-quoted for his work on the effect of media on kids. Dr. Christakis became interested in the subject when as a father, he found his toddler son mesmerized by the TV.

His research links too much TV during the preschool years with poorer language acquisition, obesity,  violent behavior and reduced attention spans. One study surveyed 1000 families with children under 2 in Minnesota and Washington. Their conclusion, published in 2007: “for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Baby DVDs and videos had no positive or negative effect on the vocabularies on toddlers 17 to 24 months of age.”  Another study, based on data accumulated over 40 years across 8000 families linked boys between 2-5 years of age who viewed violent programs (cartoons, movies, even football) with a higher probability of aggressive and anti-social behavior later in their life (specifically 7-10 years); examples of such behavior include cheating, being mean, lacking remorse, being destructive, being disobedient at school and having trouble with teachers. An earlier study by his group, in 2004, linked excessive TV watching with attention problems at age 7. An independent study by a group of New Zealand scientists on the same subject concluded: “childhood television viewing may contribute to the development of attention problems and suggest that the effects may be long-lasting.”. Events unfold at a faster pace in TV and videos than they do in real life which sets them up to them expect events in real life to unfold at the same pace. Ergo the lowered attention span.

A little over half of households with kids under the age of six report TV being always on, mostly on or at least on half the time in their house. Studies from Univ of Massachussetts Child Study Center said background TV “may have negative consequences for speech development, playtime and parent-child interaction”.  Another set of data and studies is quoted in the book: “Thinking and Literacy” which looks at data from various educational departments such as the 1980 California Assessment Program and the National Assessment of Educational Progress to conclude that TV viewing leads to reduced academic performance.

Some researchers speak of a media diet to account for quality as well as quantity. For example, programs such as Sesame Street were created with children in mind and by consulting with child development experts. Some studies done on children who viewed such programs show that the children developed a general understanding of the world faster. But none of these studies included infants, only much older kids. Also, how much faster ? Does faster imply better ? Does this faster development continue in later life or do the other kids catch up ? Another criticism of these media studies is that higher socio-economic status and greater educational qualification of parents far outweigh the effects of TV when it comes to measuring the cognitive development of children. That is no criticism. It reminds me of how unfair the advantage is to poorer children, in surmounting their disadvantages in competing with their more well-to-do peers.

Another facet on the effect of media on young children is the contribution to the consumerization of childhood, a subject about which I’ve written in the past. The majority of advertisements to children involve food and toys. The advertisements for food all involve unhealthy food such as sugary drinks (like Coke), sweets (candies, sweetened cereals etc.) and fat (potato chips, nachos etc.). Like the perfunctory warning sign posted on the outside of cigarette packs and tobacco stores, some advertisements exhort children to eat vegetables and fruits, to eat healthy, by the way. But the combination of advertisements, school vending machines and peer behavior make it almost impossible for kids to stay off these unhealthy food. To top that, young children’s brains crave sweet, salt and fat; even their own biology makes it hard for them to avoid sweets. Other advertisements start promoting fashion at an early age. The US market for infant, toddler and preschool kids clothing is about $15 billion dollars according to a report published in 2003. Specifically girls begin to develop an skewed, abnormal sense of their bodies. A growing body of work documents the commercialization of childhood and its effects, a body that includes books such as Juliet Schor’s Born to Buy, Pamela Paul’s Parenting Inc., Sharon Beder’s This Little Kiddy Went to Market,  online essays such as “Commodifying Kids” and online websites such as “Campaign For a Commercial Free Childhood” and movies such as “Consuming Kids”. A good summary of the effects is narrated by Henry A Giroux in  “Commodifying Kids”:
“American society in the last thirty years has undergone a sea change in the daily lives of children – one marked by a major transition from a culture of innocence and social protection, however imperfect, to a culture of commodification. This is culture that does more than undermine the ideals of a secure and happy childhood; it also exhibits the bad faith of a society in which, for children, “there can be only one kind of value, market value; one kind of success, profit; one kind of existence, commodities; and one kind of social relationship, markets.”(2) Children now inhabit a cultural landscape in which they can only recognize themselves in terms preferred by the market.”

Another facet of the effect of TV on children are the consequences to parent-child interaction. TV is increasingly taking the place of active involvement of caregivers with their children. As Americans work longer and longer (a trend that seems to be also afflicting other parts of the world, especially India), they find themselves coming home tired and in need of a break. A TV provides a convenient cop out. Marketeers effectively use this knowledge to sell more products such as educational DVDs and programs to parents using techniques such as selective quoting of scientific publications, funding of studies to show results in favor of their products and anecdotal evidence. Parents rationalize the choice of seating their infants and toddlers in front of TV watching these so called educational programs. We’re all creatures of habit. Once we get into a habit of watching TV together as the way to spend time together, we have difficulty breaking this habit, especially since the habit is so easy to sustain. They take the place of conversations and other means of social interaction and enquiry. TV quickly subsumed all other forms of interaction when introduced in places like Bhutan, where TV was originally banned.

TV is the elephant in the living room. In a recent article about the deleterious effects of TV on children in the British daily, The Guardian, a telling paragraph discusses the size and nature of this elephant :
“Aric Sigman, a UK psychologist and author of The Spoilt Generation, a broadside against permissive parenting, says while governments are happy to offer advice on suncream and portions of fruit and vegetables, they are less willing to provide guidelines about TV. “Of course they don’t want to because it is a vote-loser,” he says. “It is society’s favourite pastime and it makes parents feel guilty. The convenience of us parents is seen as paramount as opposed to the wellbeing of our children. When it comes to our childrens’ wellbeing, our guilt as parents has to come second.”

Aw, you say, I grew up on a steady diet of love and TV. Did I turn out so badly ? TV for children today is a vastly different phenomenon than when I was growing up. Disney’s Mickey and Donald or Tom and Jerry were harmless, moral-empty romps in the park, the kind children usually indulge in. No pat messages about trusting your instinct, obeying your parents, loving your nation and such. Even the Lion King is hardly like the cartoons of the older days. Aric Sigman continues his missive in the Guardian article:
“Part of the problem, argues Sigman, is we have a nostalgic view of our own experience of television when we were young. “We say, ‘I watched Blue Peter and I’m OK’,” says Sigman. “But the editing speeds and the colours and the number of hours spent watching TV and the age at which TV watching starts are a whole different thing now. We can’t compare now with before.”

The debate is not completely over and more data points are always welcome. For Shanthala and I, however, this is enough evidence to throw TV out of our house. To own a TV or not was the first argument of our married life. She was against and I was for. For a while, we owned a TV exclusively  for movies. But when Maya was due, we got rid of it. So far, neither one of us regrets the decision.

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Ripples from The Swine Flu

Posted on November 9, 2009
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La Gloria village, Veracruz, Mexico

La Gloria village, Veracruz, Mexico, Image Courtesy of The Guardian

Mid-March, 2009. La Gloria, a town of about 2243 people, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Not much of town, though it looks pretty, perched amongst hills. About half of this small population works in Mexico City, about 200 kms away, during the week. About 60% of the town is sickened by a respiratory illness whose cause was unknown. Later, this illness is called the swine flu, caused by a virus, H1N1. Three children die, the cause unknown, because the swine flu has not been identified yet. Only one is later tested for swine flu, the other two buried before the disease is named.

End March, 2009. A nine year old girl living in a California county bordering Mexico is taken ill and is later confirmed to have suffered from the swine flu. Another 10 year old boy in nearby San Diego county also falls victim to the swine flu.

Mid April, 2009. The CDC receives mucus samples from the girl and the boy and identify the virus as a new strain of the swine influenza, A(H1N1).

H1N1 Virus, Image courtesy of Harvard University

H1N1 Virus, Image courtesy of Harvard University

April 21, 2009. The CDC alerts physicians of a new strain of an Influenza A virus, called A(H1N1). This news is the first report of the disease in an English media. The swine flu is also the cause of the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic in which 50 million people were killed and 500 million infected.

End April, 2009. An entire school district just outside San Antonio, Texas, is closed to prevent spreading of the influenza. About 53,000 students are out of school in Texas and more school closures are planned. Some schools in Chicago and New York close to prevent spreading of the disease. A 23-month old Mexican child in Texas dies, the first casualty outside Mexico.

May 1, 2009. Mexico shuts down for five days to battle the epidemic. Fear runs wild through the streets.

May 16, 2009. India confirms its first case of swine flu, in the southern city of Hyderabad.

August 4, 2009. A 14 year old girl in the western city of Pune dies of swine flu, the first reported death due to the disease. Her death is all the more shocking because it is caused by a delay in identifying her illness as the swine flu. The delay also means that a drug, Tamiflu, that could have saved her life, is not given. There is outrage over the incident. Ineffectual enquiries are launched as is the norm. Worldwide, about 800 people have died of the disease so far.

August 13, 2009. Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, begins a week long shutdown of all schools and colleges and a three day shutdown of movie halls to prevent the spreading of the epidemic. 19 people have died in India alone and 1,126 worldwide.

September, 2009. A second wave of the epidemic hits the US, prompting school closures in eight states.

October 23, 2009. US president Obama declares a national emergency over the swine flu.

Eight months after it first surfaced, the ripple effect triggered by the pandemic touches our house. Swine flu vaccines are in short supply and the demand is aplenty. Santa Clara county has received only 55,000 of the expected 211,000 so far. Pediatrician offices have not received any supply of the vaccine, and expect supplies to be delayed even further.

When the vaccine was first announced, Shanthala and I were skeptical of giving it to Maya. We were worried about the possible side effects of a new drug, hardly tested. In 1976, the US government provided mass immunization against a similar swine flu pandemic. 500 people came down with a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barré syndrome and 25 people died. The Daily Mail paper in the UK carried a story that said that a leaked letter by the Govt to senior neurologists linked the new vaccine to the possibility of acquiring GBS. The vaccine was withdrawn within ten weeks of its premiere and the US government paid out millions to settle with those who were affected by the vaccine. But despite intense scrutiny for possible side effects, the current swine flu shot seems to have no serious side-effects, at least not GBS. It’s well past ten weeks by now.

Shanthala is administered the vaccine in her hospital as she is a health care worker. We’re traveling to India shortly and she’d like Maya to get a shot as well. Shanthala rarely stresses on the need for medication and so when she does so this time, I take it seriously. Shanthala and I find out that the Santa Clara county is holding a vaccine clinic on Saturday in multiple places, including the Santa Clara county fairgrounds. We decide to try our luck at a local county clinic that is also participating in the vaccine program.

Saturday, 8:15am. I had read reports of vaccine clinics in New York city running quite empty as few people showed up to get the shot. So, even though Shanthala wanted to go early and wait in line, I dallied and we eventually ended up going around 8:15 or so. I expected some rush, but not the pandemonium that we encountered. The line had circled the building almost twice already. I drop Shanthala off and headed back home. Shanthala reports later that the line had started at 4 am that morning. By 6 am, the parking lot was full. The clinic was not slated to open till 9:30. At the main swine flu clinic at Santa Clara county fairgrounds, people started lining up at 3 am in the morning, according to reports.

9:45 am. Shanthala calls to say that there was chaos and that she and several others had approached the few police officers to fetch reinforcements. People were drifting in and trying to get to the head of the queue, to either sneak by or to ask questions and were pushed and wrestled by the people already waiting in line. She asks me to park the car some distance away and use a stroller to get Maya to the clinic.

10:15 am. Shanthala calls to report that about 70-80 pregnant women were first let in to be administered the vaccine and that the rest were waiting. She says that there was some talk of giving tickets to people in line with kids.

10:30 am. Shanthala asks me to head over right away with Maya because there was talk that the tickets would not be issued to people without kids, even though the shot was for a kid.

10:50 am. I park about half a mile away and walk to the clinic. Maya has had a little meal and is not very fussy, though she protested being put in the stroller. She wanted to push the stroller. As we approach the clinic, passersby tell me that the vaccine is over. When we arrive, Shanthala says that she got a ticket already. She is number 807. How long do we have to wait, I wonder. An hour ? I see an official looking announcer with a bullhorn and approach him for details. He says that only about a 100 people have gotten the shot so far. Someone else asks how long it would be till his turn came up. He has a number in the 500 range. At least four hours, says the official. Four hours ! Are those with a ticket at least guaranteed a shot, I ask. Yes, he says. There are a 1000 vaccines.

I drift back to Shanthala to report the news. She’s gotten acquainted with the other folks in the line. There is a Chinese couple with a three and half year old son and an Indian couple with a four year old daughter. We decide to take turns to go get lunch and relax a bit. The Indian couple take off first, we next. There is a nearby Indian restaurant we’ve not been to. I see a few colleagues from work also waiting in line.

1:00 pm. Lunch is long over as is Maya’s patience. We’ve walked her several times, had her push the stroller a few times. It is her nap time now and she’s getting tired. I had shrugged Shanthala’s suggestion earlier that I take her to the park. People in line are eating take-away meals, mostly burgers and fries. A kid ahead of us plays a mouth organ (harmonica) and Maya watches him in fascination. The official announcer comes around announcing that they’ve vaccinated up to ticket number 450 now. It is a little nippy in the shade, but comfortable in the sun. A mom sits down on the sidewalk and reads a story to her son. A few other kids settle down next to her and it is story time all of a sudden.

1:30 pm. Maya is getting more restless and Shanthala asks me to take her home for a nap. I argue that I can put her down right there, but Shanthala thinks Maya won’t nap with all the noise. Maya really loses it now and I hurry away to the car with her strapped in the stroller. She’s miserable and wails as loudly as she can all the way to the car and all the way home. Her wailing sets me on the edge after a while and I yell at her to be quiet. She falls asleep just as we reach home. She’s exhausted from the crying. It is almost 2 pm. I put her down on the bed and lie down next to her.

2:35 pm. Shanthala calls to say that she’s nearing the head of the line and asks me to head over right away. I pull everything together first before waking Maya. I expect her to start wailing again, but she is quiet. I park in the parking lot of the apartment complex right opposite the clinic. Maya doesn’t want to get in the stroller. I hold her and pushing the stroller race across the street, jaywalking right in front of the cop patrolling the entrance. We reach the clinic closer to 3.

3:25 pm. Maya is given the vaccine, a shot to the thigh. She wails for an instant before quieting. We arrive home by 4, exhausted.

NYT is running an article today speaking of this rift in behavior between parents who’re lining up to receive the vaccine and those who remain skeptical and refuse it. A friend I spoke to expressed similar skepticism and said that most people recovered quickly even if infected and so she didn’t want her three year old daughter to get it. In the NYT article, a historian, David Oshinsky, notes that when polio vaccination was first offered in 1954, more than a million people showed up with their kids for the trial. Dr. Oshinsky says of those parents: “They also had lived through virulent epidemics. That to me is probably the biggest issue of all. You’re dealing with parents [the current generation] who’ve never seen a smallpox epidemic, a polio epidemic.”. A doctor is also quoted in the NYT article saying: Dr. Offit wondered if people were more comfortable with sins of omission than of commission. Rather than inject a foreign substance into your body, he went on, “you’ll take your chances with a natural virus infection, which may or may not kill you.”

Lest you think that this behavior is East Coast schizoid, LA Times reports that only 5% of Californians intend to get inoculated, a number that remains constant across the socio-economic spectrum. And the reason the Californians don’t want to get vaccinated ? Not safety, but convenience (though among the most vulnerable, blacks and Latinos, safety was the number one concern). In the article, a 24-year old is quoted as saying: “A lot of people my age have the mentality they’re invincible and nothing can happen to them”.

Part of what is prompting these fears seems to be the ghost of 1976. Part of it is the drivel in the media from the likes of Bill Maher who oppose even pregnant women (the riskiest category for getting the disease) from getting a vaccine. In the article reported in NYT, I had to support the Republican doctor from Tennessee, Dr. Bill Frist over the unsubstantiated statements of Bill Maher. Maher seemed to forget that scoring points against unscientific Republicans may drive up the ratings, but not just opposing any Republican and unscientific liberals don’t come off sounding any less inane. The pundits in the US are remarkably ignorant and unscientific, be it on the issue of global warming, evolution or in this case, vaccines (I hope I’m not tempting fate by laughing at the skepticism of these people). The LA Times article reported that people who identified themselves as conservative Republicans were twice more likely to suspect vaccine safety compared to liberal Democrats. I guess, Bill Maher wanted to even things out a bit.

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