Preschool vs Daycare

Our youngest son went to a preschool in Evanston and goes halfday to a nursery school here. The kids muck about with Lego, go to a playground in both settings and the only difference is that the nursery school has an all day option which some kids in the morning class (or their parents!) take up.   Therein lies the rub.

Anyone who values the all day option uses the nursery school as daycare as both spouses work and do not have a nanny.   The parents’ are sometimes forced to drop off a child with a cold or the beginnings of flu.  On the other hand, if your child goes to preschool you must have some afternoon solution, a solution you can employ if your child is sick.  So, halfday nursery school leads to more infections than preschool, as we are finding out.

Should Kids Learn Cursive?

That’s the question taken up at Wired’s GeekDad blog.  My third-grader gets weekly “homework” which is supposed to teach her cursive writing.  I am sure that a lot of time is being wasted.  But I am not sure that it’s cursive that should go.  Handwritten text is losing its practical purpose, so if we are going to retire something, perhaps the fancy stuff should surive.

Album of The Summer: Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans

Summer is over.  But that’s old news. My buddy Dave maintained a tradition of polling us for the album of the summer around the time that the season was drawing to a close.  Of course in SoCal, summer never really ends, but at some point you have to start climbing the fence to get into the neighborhood pool and that’s as good a demarcation line as any.

The album of the summer is not necessarily one that came out that summer.  Its not even necessary that you listened to it that summer.  But it should be the album that will always remind you of that summer whenever you hear it.  This summer I had my midlife crisis and the background music was Seven Swans by Sufjan Stevens.

I spent the first 25 years of my life a few miles from the Pacific Ocean and never really learned to surf.  I am a fine body surfer and boogie boarder but around the time that most of my buddies got into surfing I was spinning my wheels playing chess (I suck.)  I turned 40 last fall and now I live on the shores of Lake Michigan.  There’s no surf here.

Fortunately I spend a month in California in the summer and this summer it was time to learn.  My buddy Dave gave me a surfboard.  It’s about twice as tall as me and weighs more than my 8 year old.  Its also about 5 inches thick which made it impossible for me to get my arm around it to carry it like a regular cool surfer dude.  I looked like a dork carrying it on my head.

But I can’t imagine a better board to learn on.  Its more like a canoe than a surf board.  It was hilarious to me looking at all of these really cool surfer guys sitting on their tiny little boards that sunk from the weight until they were submerged nearly to their shoulders.  Meanwhile I could dip my toes in the water as I lounged around on my Steve Behre (pronounced berry) cruise liner waiting for waves.  Dave said “It’s massive, its dangerous, and its embarrassing but just in terms of having fun surfing… the next one’s going to be a lot better.”  Thanks Dave.

I got myself a wet suit.  The water stays around 70F in San Diego in August so I probably could have got by without one but (again relying on Dave’s advice) since I was going to be surfing in the morning and since, thanks to Steve Behre, my most temperature-sensitive parts would be afloat and exposed to the morning air, I broke down got myself a spring suit.  When I tried it on, the dude at the surf shop (Rusty’s in Del Mar) says “Its a little loose in the arms, but you’ll grow into it.”  He either thought I was 13 years old or he could just tell that I was going to grow tremendous muscles from paddling.

So I was set. Every morning at 5AM I would start my day with these objects:

You will notice the Advil which is pretty much indispensible when you are a 40 year old man trying to paddle a barge through crashing waves by yourself in the dark.  OK not exactly dark, but I was in the water every morning before sunrise.  I would surf until about 7:30 and then head back to the apartment, usually before the kids were awake.  Parenting advice:  arriving at breakfast with your wetsuit on and harrowing surf tales makes you the coolest Dad in the world. Not to mention the tremendous muscles.

I stood up the very first day.  Fleetingly.  By the end of the first week I could consistently catch waves and stand.  They were small waves thankfully.  I was bragging to my buddy Storn and then I got this email back.

If you are just standing in front of the whitewater after the wave has broken then it doesn’t technically count.  (Not that it isn’t fun.)

How did he know??  In my defense, the Steve Queen-Behre was almost impossible to turn.  I guess that’s the tradeoff.  Storn came down from the Bay Area and he brought his board, which while still technically a longboard was about half the width and weight of mine.

We swapped boards and I could actually get my arm around his (that’s me on the left.)  Didn’t catch any waves though.  Turns out that if you want a surfboard with some degree of maneuverability, you also have to paddle with some finesse.   I put that on the todo list for next summer and went back to my trusty Steve Buoy.  (When you can’t catch a wave you can’t ride the last one all the way in.  “The paddle of shame” is what Storn called it.)

That day was the only time I surfed in daylight so I had Jennie bring the camcorder.  Here’s some shredding on video.

Not video of me, mind you, Jennie was too busy making drip castles with the kids.  Anyway, I don’t need help from no jet-ski.  By the end of the month I could turn and ride the shoulder.

Sufjan Stevens was in my CD rotation that whole month.  It’s a powerful album and one that was made to be played before sunrise.  In your rented Toyota Sienna with a boat strapped to the top:

What’s your album of the summer?

Bad Times Are Good Times For Makin’ Whoopee?

Iceland is seeing a small baby boom.

The Icelandic press buzzed with the good news. One article quoted a midwife in the town of Húsavik who noted a bump in births in June and July — an auspicious nine months after the worst of Iceland’s meltdown. Wrote blogger Alda Sigmundsdóttir: “I think many, many of us must have sought solace in love and sex and all that good stuff.”

Italians too, and condom sales were brisk at the low point of the recession in the US.  But historical pattern has been procyclical procreation*

“total fertility” — roughly, the average number of children per woman during her childbearing years — was 2.53 in 1929 and had slid to 2.15 by 1936. Then came the baby boom of postwar prosperity: The birth rate crossed 3 in 1947 and remained above that threshold until the mid-1960s. The next trough, 1.74, came in 1976 — a year earlier, unemployment had hit a postwar peak of 8.5%.

The article is in the Wall Street Journal.

__________

*The pun involving “hump” is an exercise left to the reader.

How To Teach a Three-Year-Old To Swim

Start when he is 13 months old:

(sorry for the low quality.  two years ago = ancient technology.)  Yes at that age a child can be taught to float.  In fact almost no teaching is required.  You place the child on his back, he floats.  He cries too, it turns out.  A lot.  That’s why its not me there teaching him to float.  Instead it is a highly trained swimming teacher and one of the most inspirational people I have ever known.  That year was our kids’ first year of swimming lessons with him and we have been spending the summer in La Jolla, CA every year since primarily because of him and these swimming lessons.  10 minute lessons, daily for four weeks.

Here is what he learned last year when he was 2. (rss readers probably need to click through to the blog to see the video.)

A 2 year, 2month old child can learn to kick with his face in the water, roll over onto his back when he needs to breathe, and then continue on.  And at this early age he learns something which is subtle but which is central to swimming at every level:  looking at the floor to point the top of your head in the direction you are swimming and getting a breath by rotating on that axis.  The hardest thing to teach the child is not to look where he is going.  Looking where you are going means tilting your head up and that pushes your body down and makes you sink. For a two-year-old that is a deal-breaker, but even among adults head orientation is what distinguishes good swimmers from the best swimmers.

Here is how you teach a two-year-old to look at the floor.

Many repetitions of placing the child in the water, putting your hand deep under water and tell him to swim and grab the hand.  He has to look down to find your hand.  The typical swimming teacher hold out his hands near the surface of the water which instead trains the child to look up, a disaster.  This tiny difference has an enourmous impact on how smoothly the child can learn to swim.

It also teaches the child to go slow.  Another subtlety with swimming is that moving your arms and legs faster usually makes you go slower.  Slowing down all of the movements teaches him how to move more efficiently through the water.

This summer, at age 3 years 2 months he reached the stage where he could swim by himself without an adult in the pool with him, keeping himself going with the swim-float-swim sequence.  Then he began to learn to swim with his arms.

Next summer:  how to tech a four-year-old to snorkel.

Birth Order and Behavior

Its easy to make up just-so stories to explain differences across siblings as being caused by birth-order.  This article casts doubt on the significance of birth order.

But we can ask the question of whether birth order should matter and in what ways.  Should natural selection imply systematic differences between older and younger siblings?  Here is one argument that it should.  Siblings “share genes” and as a consequence siblings have an evolutionary incentive to help each other.  Birth order creates an asymmetry in the ways that different siblings can help each other.  In particular, oldest siblings learn things first.  They are the first to experiment with different survival strategies.  The results of these experiments benefit all of the younger siblings.  (Am I a good hunter?  If so, my siblings are likely to be good hunters too.) Younger siblings have less to offer their older siblings on this dimension.

As a result we should expect older siblings to be more experimental than their younger siblings and more experimental than only children.

Here is evidence that older siblings have more years of education than younger siblings and more years of education than only children.

How to Teach a Three-Year-Old to Ride a Bike

Start by removing the pedals.  Learning to ride a bike involves a chicken-and-egg problem:  you need to learn to pedal in order to learn balance, but before you learn to balance you can’t practice pedaling.  You can break these out by taking off the pedals so that he can straddle the bike easier and learn to balance by “scooting.” (These videos are in hd, to see the hd quality, click on the HD icon.  For some reason I can’t get wordpress to embed the hd version directly.)

Once he has balance, learning to pedal is easy.  Here is his first try (and second try) on the very next day.

Here is a previous installment.  Next week, how to teach a 3 year old to swim.

Revelation Principles

At Legoland, admission is discounted for two-year-olds. But a child must be at least three for most of the fun attractions.

At the ticket window the parents are asked how old the child is. But at the ride entrance the attendants ask the children directly.

The parents lie. The children tell the truth.

Endogeneity

Smartphones are valuable because they make it possible to substitute tasks over time and across locations.  As a result we are freer to be where we want to be when we want to be even if we have work to do.  So when you see, say a parent thumbing away on his iPhone at an otherwise family function, before you judge him remember that without his iPhone he might not be there at all.

You’re Pregnant Right?

Never ask a woman if she is pregnant right?  The explanation given to me is that if it turns out she is not pregnant you are in big trouble.  But, what if I keep quiet and she really is pregnant.  Then she’s thinking “he doesn’t think I am pregnant.  That means he thinks I am actually fat in real life.  Bastard.”  So I am not sure I agree with the conventional wisdom here.

Maybe you are just being cautioned against equivocation.  If you ask then you don’t know and whatever the answer is, your uncertainty reveals that you considered it a possibility that she’s fat.  Under this theory the right strategy is to use your best judgement and just come out and pronounce it with no hesitation.

Left, Right, Then Left Again

Kids are taught that when crossing the street, they should check for oncoming cars by looking left, then right, then left again.  Why left again?  Isn’t that redundant?  You already looked left.

You could imagine that the advice makes sense because during the time he was looking right, cars appeared coming from the left that he did not see when he first looked left.  But then wasn’t the first left-look a waste?  Maybe not because at the first step if he saw cars coming from the left then he knows that he doesn’t have to look right yet.  But then shouldn’t he insert a look-right at the beginning in hopes that he can pre-empt an unnecessary look-left?

I thought for a while and in the end I could not come up with a coherent explanation for the L-R-L again sequence.  When you can’t find an example, you prove the counter-theorem.  Here it is.

Take any stochastic process for arrival of cars.  Consider the L-R-L again strategy.  Consider the first instance when the strategy reveals that it is safe to cross.  Let t be the moment of that instance that the L-R-L again strategy looks to the left for the second time.

Now, consider the alternative strategy R-L.  This strategy begins by looking right, then when there is no car coming from the right it looks left and if there is no car coming from the left he crosses.  If he is using R-L there are two possibilites.

1. The traffic from the right is not clear until time t.  In this case, by definition of t, he will next look left and see no traffic and cross.
2. The traffic from the right clears before t.  Here, he looks left and either sees clear traffic and crosses or sees traffic.  In the latter case he is now in exactly the same situation as if he was following L-R-L from the beginning.  He waits until the traffic from the left clears and then re-initializes R-L.

In all cases, he crosses safely no later than he would with L-R-L again, and in one case strictly sooner.  That is, the strategy R-L dominates the strategy L-R-L.  Three further observations.

1. This does not mean that R-L is the optimal strategy.  I would guess that the optimal strategy depends on the specific stochastic process for traffic.  But this does say definitively that L-R-L is not optimal and is bad advice.
2. He might get run over by a car if after looking left for the last time he crosses without noticing that a car has just appeared coming from the right.  But this would also happen in all the same states when using L-R-L.  Crossing the street is dangerous business.
3. I believe that the rationale for the L-R-L advice is based on the presumption that the child will not be able to resist looking left at the beginning.  Starting by looking right is very counterintuitive.  Under this theory, the longhand for the advice is “Go ahead and look left at the beginning, but when you see that the traffic is clear, make sure you look right as well before crossing.  And if you see traffic and have to wait for it to clear, don’t forget to look left again before starting out because a car may have appeared in the time you were looking right.”

Kid Trade Theorem

The No Trade Theorem says that two traders with common prior beliefs will not find a mutally beneficial speculative trade provided they began with a Pareto efficient allocation.  There is in fact a converse.  If the traders do not share a common prior, then they can always find such a trade.

My kids demonstrated this experimentally today in the car coming home from Evanston’s Dixie Kitchen and Bait Shop (Recommended by Barack Obama!)  Two kids have identical rubber alligator swag from the restaurant.  3 year old believes that 6 year old has his alligator and demands a swap.  6 year old insists that all gators are with their rightful owners.  There is common knowledge that they disagree about this and therefore by Aumann’s famous theorem they do not share a common prior.

Dad takes temporary posession of both rubber reptiles.  In plain view of the 6 year old, Dad pretends to switch but doesn’t.  Sleight of hand deceives 3 year old.  Alligators returned to original owners.  Viola, Pareto improvement.

I forgot to get my commission.

Joshua Gans on the Perils of Parental Incentive Mechanisms

He writes the blog Game Theorist and he is the author of the book Parentonomics.  Here he is on the BBC sharing his wisdom on potty training and peas.  (About 2/3 of the way in.)

Evidence of Pre-Natal Sex Selection Among Asian-American Parents

There is a summary of the research in the New York Times:

In those families, if the first child was a girl, it was more likely that a second child would be a boy, according to recent studies of census data. If the first two children were girls, it was even more likely that a third child would be male.

Demographers say the statistical deviation among Asian-American families is significant, and they believe it reflects not only a preference for male children, but a growing tendency for these families to embrace sex-selection techniques, like in vitro fertilization and sperm sorting, or abortion.

Here is the source article.  There is one small problem with the conclusion:

To reduce the probability that there was an eldest child not in the household, we also restricted our sample to families where the oldest child was 12 years or younger.

Here is the problem.  Let’s suppose that Asian-American parents have a preference for boys but do not engage in any manipulation, except that they keep trying until they get one boy.  Consider two families.  Both families have kids spaced 3 years apart.  The first family has a girl and then a boy and stops.  The second family has 4 girls before the first boy is born.  The first family is included in the sample, the second is not.  More generally, families whose first two children are girls are less likely to be included in the sample than the boy-girl families.  This statistical selection makes it look as if the parents are actively engaged in selection.

The 12 year cap may exclude very few families and so this selection effect may be too small to generate the statistics they are reporting, but it’s hard to know for sure.  The sample sizes are not large.   Here is a graph showing large and overlapping confidence intervals.

It is worth acknowledging that even my alternative story relies on Asian-American parents having a stronger preference for boys than the American population as a whole.  However, it doesn’t require the assumption that they engage in pre-natal sex selection.

Update: The ever-vigilant Marit Hinnosaar (are you noticing a pattern here?) has pointed out to me that I mis-interpreted their sample selection criterion.  As she puts it:

The situation you discribed would create a problem if their sampling method was: include in the sample each household iff the age difference of the children is no more than 12 years. But that is not what they did. With the sampling method they used, they included households, where the oldest child in the household was born not earlier than in 1988 (they used 2000 census data and excluded households that had a child older than 12). This does not lead to the biased sample that you described, since for the researchers these two households that you described are equivalent in terms of whether to include in the sample.

How to Teach a 2-Year-Old to Catch

Games Against Your Heirs

You write several novels and transfer copyright to a publisher in exchange for royalty payment.  When you die your heirs have a legally granted option to negate the transfer of copyright.  This option limits how much your publisher will pay you for the copyright.  So you attempt to block your heirs by entering a second contract which pre-emptively regrants the copyright.

Eventually you die and your heirs ask the courts to declare your pre-emptive contract invalid.

You are (or were) John Steinbeck and your case is before the Supreme Court. If I am reading this right the appelate court decision went against the heirs.  And remarkably the Songwriter’s Guild of America filed an amicus brief in favor of the heirs. (ascot angle: scotusblog.)

Coordination Failure

Parents today in the US worry too much about letting their kids play outside without supervision.  Are they paranoid?

The crime rate today is equal to what it was back in 1970. In the ’70s and ’80s, crime was climbing. It peaked around 1993, and since then it’s been going down.

If you were a child in the ’70s or the ’80s and were allowed to go visit your friend down the block, or ride your bike to the library, or play in the park without your parents accompanying you, your children are no less safe than you were.

But it feels so completely different, and we’re told that it’s completely different, and frankly, when I tell people that it’s the same, nobody believes me. We’re living in really safe times, and it’s hard to believe.

This ignores two crucial details.  First, if fewer kids are being left unsupervised then there are fewer crimes to commit so if the number of crimes committed is the same as in the 1970’s then in fact we are living in a more dangerous world.  Second, even holding constant the crime rate there is a coordination problem that parents must contend with.  If all of your neighbors kids are inside playing their Wii and you let your kid go to the playground then he is the only target so you would be right to pass and go out and get your own Wii.  In the 1970’s there were enough of us targets out there already that the marginal kid was safe.

The article is here.  Cap clap: kottke.org.

What is Political Science?

Family conversation at restaurant:

Wife: …her husband is a political scientist at U of C.

Son (7 years old): What is a political scientist?

Wife: Your father can answer that question better.

Me: Well, scientists who are physicists study physics. Chemists study chemistry and political scientists study politics.

Son: Oh, so they’re not really scientists.

Wife and I fall about laughing.

Me to son: Why do you say that?   What do they do?

Son: They study votes and stuff like pollsters.  That’s not science.

Out of the mouths of children…..

(True story, I swear.  Have yet to have a long conversation about economists.)

Hereditary Disciplines?

Robert Akerlof, the son of Nobel Laureate economist George Akerlof, was on the economics PhD job market this year from Harvard.  It raises the question of which academic disciplines are the most recurrent within families.  I see two arguments about the heridity of economics.

On the positive side, economics is a language and framework for thinking about things that come up in everyday life.  It will be more natural and common for an economist parent to explain economic concepts to their kids than it would be for parents in other disciplines, even other social sciences.  On top of that, being an economist probably shapes one’s style of parenting more than being, say, a chemist does and so there is an additional, covert, channel of transmission.

On the negative side, I sometimes think that what inspires someone to go for a PhD in some discipline is when they discover that it allows them to organize and understand things in a new way.  If a child is raised to think like an economist at an early age, they will never have this kind of revelatory moment and so may never feel drawn to economics as an academic discipline.

Finally, the question of heredity conditions on the child going to academia at all.  It could be that having parents who are economists make you less likely to get any sort of advanced degree.

It would be interesting to see the data.

Child’s Play

It’s Sunday morning.  You are reading the Week in Review section of the New York Times and realize piracy still exists in the twenty-first century.  Who would have thought it? The Travel Section leaves you a bit wistful as you realize how many interesting places in the world you’ll never visit. Now you pack like a small army because you have two young children.  You wish you had done the Inca Trail in 1987 when you went to Peru.  That might have invited a kidnapping at the hands of the Sendero Luminoso, but maybe that’s better than grad school?

You hear the sound of Lego and see your kids building the John Hancock Building out of Lego.  You smile, thinking, “The Inca Trail can never compare to the joy I just felt seeing the kids playing together so happily.”  You turn to the crossword puzzle.  Your reverie comes to a screaming end as a fight breaks out behind you.  Who got one of diagonal bits that criss-cross the Hancock a bit wonky?  You will never know but each kid blames the other.

What to do?

The situation reminds you of the famous Moral Hazard in Teams paper by Bengt Holmstrom.  Someone clearly did not exert the cooperative effort level. But you cannot tell who it was as there is no kid-specific signal, just the aggregate signal of the building falling over and the fight.  First, you think that you should be fair and punish a child if and only if the weight of evidence is high. You realize you’re screwed as you never have that level of evidence.  You could ask the children what happened and cross-check what one did against the other.  In fact, this would give an opportunity to apply your own research and you’re excited about that.  It dawns on you that the 8 year old can always out-lie the 4 year old.   And the volume of the four year old’s cries is measured on the Richter scale.  Your research obviously did not take account of these practical matters.

Incentive theory gives the obvious answer: punish them both.  This works very well if there is nothing random that can cause the building to fall over.  Then, each child knows they get punished if they start fighting so no-one fights as long as the punishment is big enough.  If a fight can start randomly – and we parents know this can happen – sometimes you’ll punish them even though nothing truly bad happened.  This is unfair and inefficient but what can you do?  This second-best solution is still better than no incentives at all.

Briefly, you think about the theory of repeated games which claims to get cooperation even when the game is quite noisy and there is lots of private information about who did what to whom.  You  remember that Jeff has made important contributions to this theory.  You use your common sense and decide that using his research might take the application of game theory to family life a little bit too far.  You get up, confiscate the Lego and send the kids to their room to get out of their pajamas and put clothes on.  The ultimate punishment.  The lovely mother of your lovely children has solved the crossword puzzle by the time you’re done. Bugger.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

A recent Slate article “The messy room dilemma: when to ignore behavior, when to change it”  by By Alan E. Kazdin and Carlo Rotella tackles the important topic of when you should ignore your child’s undesirable behavior and when you should intervene.  The authors use a series of intriguing percentages to suggest that many childhood behaviors will change on their own if you just wait long enough.  Here’s an excerpt:

Many unwanted behaviors, including some that disturb parents, tend to drop out on their own, especially if you don’t overreact to them and reinforce them with a great deal of excited attention. Take thumb sucking, which is quite common up to age 5. At that point it drops off sharply and continues to decline. Unless the dentist tells you that you need to do something about it right now, you can probably let thumb sucking go. The same principle applies for most stuttering. Approximately 5 percent of all children stutter, usually at some point between ages 2 and 5. Parents get understandably nervous when their children stutter, but the vast majority of these children (approximately 80 percent) stop stuttering on their own by age 6. If stuttering persists past that point or lasts for a period extending more than six months, then it’s time to do something about it.

There are a lot more behaviors, running the range from annoying to unacceptable, in this category. Approximately 60 percent of 4- and 5-year-old boys can’t sit still as long as adults want them to, and approximately 50 percent of 4- and 5-year-old boys and girls whine to the extent that their parents consider it a significant problem. Both fidgeting and whining tend to decrease on their own with age, especially if you don’t reinforce these annoying behaviors by showing your child that they’re a surefire way to get your (exasperated) attention. Thirty to 40 percent of 10- and 11-year-old boys and girls lie in a way that their parents identify as a significant problem, but this age seems to be the peak, and the rate of problem lying tends to plummet thereafter and cease to be an issue. By adolescence, more than 50 percent of males and 20 percent to 35 percent of females have engaged in one delinquent behavior—typically theft or vandalism. For most children, it does not turn into a continuing problem.

The logic would seem to be don’t worry about the thumb sucking, the stuttering, the lying and so on. It will probably go away on its own and look there are many statistics to back this up … but this is a total fallacy. Suppose all of the statistics are completely accurate.  It still doesn’t follow that they suggest you should just ignore behavior that you deem to be a problem.

I am guessing that most parents faced with unwanted behaviors like thumb sucking, stuttering, lying, and certainly, theft or vandalism intervene in some way, possibly many parents even “reinforce them with a great deal of excited attention.”  The percentages reflect the impact of this intervention as well — 50% of adolescent boys do something delinquent, their parents justifiably freak out and only a small number do it again.  This decidedly does not argue for doing nothing when you are concerned about your child’s behavior.  We don’t know what fraction of young vandals would become repeat offenders if their parents ignored their behavior.  All we know is that when the typical kid misbehaves and his or her parents react in a typical fashion, the behavior eventually goes away most of the time.  The statistics are mute on whether this is because of, or in spite of, parental intervention.

Toad, Wile E. Coyote, Obama

(I have taken to titling my posts in the style of an Alinea dish.)

I was reading one recent morning to my 2 year old boy a story from Frog and Toad.  In this story, Toad is grumpy about Winter but Frog talks him into coming for a sleigh ride.  Once the sleigh gets going really fast, Toad begins to forget all of his complaints and enjoy the ride.  Unbeknownst to Toad, Frog is knocked off the back of the sleigh as the sleigh starts to hurtle faster and faster down the hill.  Despite the sleigh being without a driver and completely out of control, Toad begins to feel more and more secure and at peace with the Winter.

Of course, something is going to happen to bring it all crashing down on Toad.  In fact, what happens is not that the sled crashes into a tree, at least not yet.  What happens is a crow flies by and upon hearing Toad describe what a wonderful ride he and Frog are having, points out to Toad that Frog is not behind him anymore.  Its only after learning that there is nobody at the wheel does Toad panic and cause the sleigh to crash.

This is a recurrent theme in children’s literature.  I think the quintessential expression of it is from the cartoons, especially the roadrunner/coyote cartoons.  Here is the image.  Coyote is chasing roadrunner through some rugged canyonland along a steep ridge and the chase brings Coyote to a cliff.  He is so focussed on finally nabbing the roadrunner that he does not notice that he has run off the cliff.  He keeps running.  In mid-air.  But then at some point he looks down and notices that there is no ground beneath his feet and at that moment that he falls to back to Earth.  (At which point he turns to the next page in his ACME catalog and the chase is on again…)

If you run off a cliff you should make sure you are running fast and that the opposing cliff is not too far.  It also helps to be like the roadunner: looking down is not in his nature and he always makes it to the other side.

I think of Obama’s first 100 days as running off a cliff.  We have a pretty good running start.  So far we are not looking down.  I hope we get to the other side before somebody does.  And please, pay no attention to the crows.

Pointers

The blog Lone Gunman is one year old, and here is my selection of his best pointers from the past year.

1. Lies told to a three-year-old. (Mine:  roads are paved to flatten out a spherical Earth.)
2. Planned Parenthood.
3. Days with my Father.