Table of contents for June 2019 in Reason

WHY DO PARENTS still read The Cat in the Hat to their children? The cat gives terrible advice, after all. His risk assessments are poor. He urges reluctant kids to break rules. His games are unstructured and seemingly pointless; “UP-UP-UP with a fish” is certainly not going to get anybody into college. He’s a stranger who has broken into their house while they are unsupervised, bringing unsuitable companions with him. All in all, the book seems to cut against everything today’s parents stand for. Perhaps Dr. Seuss now functions as the Grimm Brothers once did, offering fantastical tales of transgressive horror swathed in comforting repetition. As in classic fairy tales—and even in their Disney adaptations—parents must be gotten out of the way before kids can come into their own. All…

“TOO MUCH SCREEN Time Damages the Brain,” says Psychology Today. “A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley,” announces The New York Times. “Finally, we’re all wising up about the dangers of screen time for kids,” adds the Los Angeles Times. Then there’s the New York Post, which in 2016 ran a Nicholas Kardaras column headlined “It’s ‘digital heroin’: How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies.” As is often the case, the headlines are overblown. The papers cited in Psychology Today aren’t simply about “too much screen time”; they’re about people who were dysfunctional enough to be diagnosed with internet addiction. (Not that it’s even clear what internet addiction means—researchers haven’t come up with a standardized definition of the disorder yet, and not every scientist…

AS THE FATHER of a toddler, I am uncomfortably familiar with parenting in an age of fear. I bristle when my son runs (always without looking) out of my sight, even though I know that parents over-estimate the risks to their children’s safety. And while I’m familiar with the reasons that parents shouldn’t always solve their children’s problems for them, I confess that when some kid snatches something from my son, I have to suppress the instinct to intervene. So I looked forward to reading Kim Brooks’ Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear, and the book did not disappoint. Brooks is a mother of two who, faced with a time crunch and an uncooperative 3-year-old, went into a Target store for around 10 minutes while her child played…

THE “WALKING WINGS Learning to Walk Assistant” is a vest that goes around your baby with long straps on the top that you can yank to pull him or her upright, like a marionette. According to the product website: “When the child is strapped into the safety harness, they can be held up by an adult walking behind them. This encourages the child’s natural instinct to use their legs and develop muscle strength.” A set of emotion flash cards boasts: “Teach your student emotional intelligence (EQ). IQ gets you through school but EQ gets you through life!” According to the product description, “a high quality photograph on the front of each card teaches a child to label emotions” while “the back of each card teaches a child how these emotions…

BETWEEN 2012 AND 2016, the number of children placed annually into foster care in the U.S. increased by 10 percent. A significant driver of the rise was opioid addiction. According to the most recent U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) annual report, out of the nearly 269,000 children who entered foster care in fiscal year 2017, some 96,000 were removed from their homes due to parental substance abuse—the second largest category behind neglect. In many cases, HHS reports, officials could not avoid placing children in foster care because so many extended family members were also addicted to opioids. Lurking behind this figure is another sad truth: As the opioid crisis exploded, treatment options and nonpunitive public policies for dealing with substance abuse lagged far behind, while zero-tolerance attitudes…

LIKE SO MANY of the best socialist products, Marcus Pfister’s The Rainbow Fish has been a runaway capitalist success. The children’s classic, in which the most brightly colored fish in the ocean finds happiness only after handing over all but one of his glittering scales under duress to the gray grumps around him, has sold since its 1992 debut more than 30 million copies worldwide. Whereas Rainbow Fish achieves transcendence through literally becoming colorless, the exact opposite was the case for The Rainbow Fish. Using an expensive and novel combination of holographic foil stamping and watercolor, the Swiss-born Pfister and his publisher, NorthSouth Books, produced a striking visual package that proved irresistible. “The effect of the stamping was so nice that all the bookshops here in Switzerland put it in…

IN RECENT YEARS, dangerous trends and ideas about speech have been spilling from academia into the world beyond campus. Walking on eggshells, exercising extreme caution about respecting taboos, reporting colleagues for jokes overheard, and deflecting substantive arguments with ad hominem counter-attacks may soon be common features of corporate and community life. College-bound students who want to master those skills can choose from a wide range of America’s top schools. But perhaps you (and your kids) would prefer a different kind of academic culture: one that exposes students to a variety of views, teaches them skills of critical thinking so they learn to habitually ground claims in evidence, and emboldens them to speak up for what they think is true, good, and beautiful, while being open to arguments from their peers…

15 YEARS AGO June 2004 “So, how’s it going in Iraq? No, really. As we learn to measure the U.S. engagement there in years and (let’s face reality) decades, only this much seems absolutely beyond question: On a very basic level, it’s virtually impossible to know whether the occupation is going well or horribly wrong. This is above and beyond the question of whether we should be there in the first place.” NICK GILLESPIE “The Age of Uncertainty” “Flexibility and freedom are vastly better than the alternatives. By and large, for the new generation of parents, rigid division of gender roles is obsolete—and so is the stark dichotomy of Superwoman vs. Supermom. That’s a good start.” CATHY YOUNG “Opting Out” “Burke, the patron saint of social conservatism and the scourge…

LAST SUMMER, PRESIDENT Donald Trump was jumping with joy at news that the unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 16 and 24 had reached a worth-tweeting-about 50-year low. At the time of the president’s Twitter post, youth unemployment had dropped to 9.2 percent. It was later revised to 8.6 percent, then dipped to 8.1 percent in November—a rate unseen since February 1969. It currently stands at 8.9 percent. These numbers are a helpful indicator of America’s improving labor-market conditions, signaling that younger Americans looking for a job are having an easier time finding one. The United States has seen an overall decline in the youth unemployment rate from its Great Recession height of 19.2 percent in December 2010. But this happy figure doesn’t tell us everything we need…

THE FOOD AND Drug Administration (FDA), which responded to an “epidemic” of underage vaping by imposing restrictions on sales of flavored e-cigarettes, admits the policy may deter adult smokers from making a switch that could save their lives. According to the FDA, the price is worth paying to prevent teenagers from using e-cigarettes. But that goal is itself questionable on public health grounds. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who announced the flavor restrictions four months before he revealed that he’d be leaving the agency in April, said he worried that vaping might be a gateway to smoking. Yet there is little evidence of that. A study published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in January, based on a sample of 12,000 12- to 17-year-olds who were surveyed on two…

MY 7-YEAR-OLD SON asked me recently if I remembered a camping trip we took years ago. I felt guilty, realizing that I hadn’t taken him since. “I know, buddy,” I said. “We should do that again this year.” Then he said, “Can we have that chicken again?” I asked what he meant. He explained: “The chicken in a paper bucket.” I laughed as I realized that the highlight of the trip for him had been eating KFC by the fire. My guilt had me ready to spend hundreds of dollars and hours in the car on another trip to the mountains. With just a few dollars and a couple of hours, we could relive the memory in our backyard. Kids are a lot of work. But often, especially for those…

ROSE WILDER LANE was born on December 5, 1886, in the territory of South Dakota. Her early years were a hardscrabble settler’s life similar to that of her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose Little House novels defined the American frontier for many generations of young readers. After an early career writing for newspapers and penning popular biographies of figures such as Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Herbert Hoover, and Henry Ford, Lane worked with the Red Cross in Europe in the 1920s. She adventured through Albania and parts of the Middle East, usually with close female companions, then moved to the Ozarks in Missouri to care for her parents. Throughout the 1930s, Lane assisted her mother with her fabulously successful series of children’s books. Her role was an unusual one—part agent,…

ON MARCH 12, news of a massive admission scandal broke in the world of higher education. At least 50 people, including several celebrities, stand accused of paying a consultant named William Rick Singer to get their children into particular colleges by any means necessary. His alleged tactics included falsifying standardized test results and bribing coaches to fraudulently nominate students for athletic scholarships, sometimes in sports they didn’t even play in high school. The revelations have understandably provoked much wailing about the corruption of the university admissions process. But much less notice has been paid to another sea change that enabled this scandal to occur: It is still very hard to get into elite schools, but it’s not at all difficult to graduate. In a different era, obtaining a diploma from…

IF YOU’RE LOOKING for a case study in toxic internet culture, look no further than the online world of young adult fiction. That might seem surprising: After all, we’re talking about boy wizards and sexy vampires and mawkish coming-of-age tales here, right? Here’s the short version: In recent years, young adult, or Y.A., fiction has come into its own as a genre, reliably producing a small number of megahits that have turned their authors into millionaires. During that same period, it has begun to grapple with some difficult questions about diversity and representation. Y.A. fiction, like many other areas of publishing, has a bit of a diversity problem, despite being a liberal-minded industry located in New York City. But while the motivation behind the movement for more diverse voices is…

EXHIBITS AMERICAN ART AND THE VIETNAM WAR BILLY BINION Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War and Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue—two new exhibits at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.—are more different than they are alike. Their only common thread is the war they profile. The former emphasizes conflict here at home, as Americans clashed over the morality of U.S. intervention. It’s brash, imbued with flashy colors and gruesome sights that implore the viewer to look at things he or she might prefer not to. The confrontational nature of the show is epitomized by Chris Burden’s disturbing piece of performance art, documented in a series of still photographs. In 1971, he stood against a wall and had a marksman shoot him in the arm. Artist…

As adults, we tend to project our fears backward onto children. But the tendency to view everything new as a mortal threat not only leads to bad laws—it makes life pretty lame for kids and grown-ups alike. Rather than letting fear control his family, Jordan Shapiro is trying to buck the trend. His recent book, The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World (Little, Brown Spark), is unlike virtually any other book about kids and video games. A psychologist who teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia, Shapiro is upbeat about the many ways new technology is transforming childhood. “We want to make sure we all come together as a community, because that’s better for all of us,” he says. The question is: “How do we teach our…