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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:10
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I’m Pascual and with me right now is Celestia.

Celestia Ward: Hey, everybody. And Ben will be joining us shortly for the main segment. But what what are we covering this week?

0:00:50
CW: Well, we’re going to talk about stuff that relates to children. The holidays are upon us and it’s a time to spend quality evenings with your children and open presents and do stuff like that. And I don’t know, is there anything you’re skeptical of when it comes to the holidays?

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0:01:05
PR: Yeah, believe it or not, I am skeptical of Santa Claus.

0:01:17
CW: No! How dare you? No, that’s my sacred cow.

0:01:22
PR: Well, it is a lot of people’s sacred cow, but we’ve got to dig into it. We are a skeptics show.

0:01:30
CW: Santa Claus. To Santa or not to Santa? That is the question.

0:01:34
PR: That is the question, and that really is the basis of this Swayso because we, as skeptics, it’s a pretty broad spectrum of ideas around the concept of Santa Claus. I’ve read articles that are very pro-Santa. I’ve read articles that are very, very anti-Santa. And I’ve found in myself, as a parent, kind of coming into it one way and sort of being being in it a different way because you never know how the challenge is going to come out when you’re actually facing it. But first, let’s talk about the idea of whether a kid should or shouldn’t know about Santa because that’s a very debated topic.

0:02:21
CW: What do you mean by should or shouldn’t know about Santa? If they’re living in the US, they’re going to know about Santa. He’s all over the place.

0:02:29
PR: So we’ll talk about whether a kid should or shouldn’t just be told Santa is real.

0:02:35
CW: By their parents, yeah.

0:02:38
PR: And that is a really tricky one. When we were expecting our son, we had the idea that we would just be very transparent about it and just be matter of fact about it and say some people believe in it, we don’t and that’s how it is. A lot of skeptics are that way about religion, but you know, there is a lot more to it when it comes to children and the environment they’re in, especially in school and with their friends and things like that. And it has kind of led to us having to take a much more nuanced view of it once we’ve got in the thick of it.

0:03:14
CW: Yeah, and they had that substitute teacher a week or two ago that made international news because she told an entire classroom of first graders that there was no Santa. People were pissed.

0:03:31
PR: Yeah, and that’s kind of one of the first thoughts I had once I started kind of reconsidering how to approach parenting and the topic of Santa Claus because it occurred to me that I didn’t want to give a child the tools to ruin that many kids’ day.

0:03:54
CW: You don’t want your kid being that kid. Everybody is discussing what they want from Santa and your kid goes, well, actually.

0:04:03
PR: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it’s and you know, I don’t know, I feel like I recall there being, you know, as we were getting older and some kids were more or less skeptical, you know, it seemed like some kids were pretty immune to it. But, you know, and I was I we never really had an active kind of Santa Claus mythos in our house growing up, it was just sort of like a tongue in cheek thing that my parents didn’t really actively promote, but they also didn’t deny. And to that end, that’s kind of a little bit like how we do it in this house. And speaking personally, I think that for us, what ended up working because we now have a child in school was to, we didn’t say one way or the other.

0:04:56
CW: I pulled up a quote for us, Pascual. Sounds like you’re doing what Heidi Anderson recommended in a 2009 article for Center for Skeptical Inquiry. She writes, quote, It seems that many skeptics do what Michael Blanford, president of the Skeptical Society of St. Louis and father to three-year-old Adam, calls the half-assed Santa approach. You don’t tell the children there is a Santa, but don’t tell them Santa is fake either. When the child is old enough to ask questions, the whole thing is presented as an exercise in skepticism and the child is helped in drawing the correct conclusions through scientific inquiry.

0:05:34
PR: Yeah, and that is exactly, I believe I may have read that article, that is precisely how we’re doing it. We’re treating it as a mystery as opposed to any kind of fact in either direction. And so we’re not necessarily brushing off the discussion, but when it comes up, you give them the tools to figure it out. And because our son is only five years old, he’s not worldly enough to really know exactly what he needs to do to figure it out. So we just kind of let him sort of sway in and out of his stance. And it’s really interesting because children are so, they really are very smart on their own. And if you let them kind of accept something as a mystery. They’ll they will do their best to try to figure things out rather than just come to a conclusion And it’s it’s been actually a really fun kind of experiment if you will because it’s been neat observing kind of the way he’s been processing this and and and I I’m happy to say that he’s also kind of handled the discussion with his friends in a very nuanced way, because he hasn’t fallen on either side yet, and he’s able to kind of just say, well, I don’t know, you know?

0:07:03
CW: He’s Santa-agnostic already at the age of five. That’s pretty advanced.

0:07:09
PR: Yeah, yeah. But there are times that, you know, when the situation rewards it, he certainly isn’t scared to throw a little Santa credulity in there.

0:07:21
Yeah, there’s definitely a parallel with like Pascal’s wager there. I’ve run into a lot of kids, including my stepkids, who are older now, back when they were younger, they seem to believe in Santa and really get vocal about how much they believed in Santa, thinking, if I don’t pay lip service to believing in Santa, there will be fewer presents for me under the tree. Now Santa, in terms of critical thinking and figuring out whether or not Santa is real, it’s kind of stacked against kids, or for kids, depending on whether you want them to believe or not, in that all of society participates in the Santa’s room.

0:08:01
PR: Yes, sure do.

0:08:02
CW: The skeptical, the skeptic dictionary at skeptic.com, S-K-E-P-D-I-C, it full on goes whole hog into of course Santa’s real, this is the skeptic dictionary, Pascual. It describes Santa as an IFO, an identified flying object, and it says more people have spotted Santa than have seen UFOs Bigfoot or the Virgin Mary. So of course he’s real, you know Tongue-in-cheek the page just wholly endorses the existence of Santa and looking at another source junior skeptic officially takes no position on Santa’s existence and its editor Daniel Loxton says it’s a quote wonderful bit of childhood magic. And there’s even, if you want to get into the scientific realm, if you’ve got a kid who’s really into science websites, there’s a few physicists on phys.org, P-H-Y-S dot O-R-G, that have made a little tradition of explaining the physics, all through theoretical physics of course, of how Santa gets to all the children in one night and manages to deliver all the gifts. The latest theories I was reading about involve an ion heat shield and making use of 11 dimensional space. And lots of quantum stuff is thrown in there too for Deepak Chopra and his ilk. It’s really a neat parody of a goal-oriented theoretical science that you see being used by so many pseudoscientists where they start with the premise, okay, here’s the premises that Santa absolutely does exist. Let’s explain how.

PR: Oh, yeah.

CW: Rather than, you know, deciding, does he exist or does he not exist?

0:09:47
PR: Right, right.

CW: So I mean, and of course, you got NORAD, the tracking, they track Santa every night on, with using radar. So you have all these real world, like evidence points that can really fool a kid for a long time.

0:10:03
PR: Yeah.

0:10:04
CW: If you want to shield them from any other influences.

PR: Yeah. And it’s it is kind of funny how that is one of the sort of last bastions of woo for even the you know, some of the most strident skeptics. It’s, you know, as as you mentioned, like the, you know, skeptic dot com taking a rather positive approach to the existence of Santa Claus. I’m sure there are plenty of people who frown at that, but at the same time, it’s tricky. Do you want to be the ones putting a line in the sand for skeptics, or do you want to allow parents to be the ones to do that? I don’t know that I disagree with the rather kind of fun, tongue-in-cheek view of Santa, as long as skeptics at least can use it as a teaching tool, which I think is actually one of the best things society has given us, because there is so much to kind of systemic belief systems that are hard to break through.

0:11:24
CW: Well, I, I’m going to, I’m going to go hard line here. And my brother brought this up to me. I got to credit my brother with some of this, where he said, Oh, yeah, Santa is Jesus. Santa is God and you need to teach them about this and it’s perfect. It is an indoctrination vaccination.

PR: Yeah, yeah, that’s a perfect analogy.

0:11:46
CW: Well, he pointed it out and I have been full-on like, oh, yeah. Yeah, my kid’s gonna believe in Santa for a while. Absolutely. If you compare Santa to God, it’s a little atheist maker. Ready to go here. It’s a dry run of becoming atheist to teach your kid about Santa. Hey, there’s this old guy who lives in the sky, or at least the North Pole, who keeps tabs on everybody’s behavior, and he doles out rewards. He has special powers. He’s mostly benevolent, but he does have a naughty list. And you believe in him for a while, then surprise! Oh, it’s actually all made up But really doesn’t he exist in your heart and give you warm fuzzies at Christmas time. It’s like a super parallel to God.  And so so if you teach a kid all this stuff about Santa and they enjoy, you know the presence and they enjoy the the the fun of waiting for him at night and you know seeing if he came by morning and reading stories about him and then suddenly, oh, oh, wow, I feel kind of silly that I used to believe that back when I was six. Now that I’m eight, I don’t believe that anymore. Well, they’re gonna have the same thing happen with religion when they’re 16 and 18, if you let it run its course. To that effect, I actually, I know some Christian families that are dead set against never letting their kids think that Santa is real. From an early age they were like, no, Santa’s just a myth, Santa’s fake, no, Santa’s fake, Santa’s fake. And they actually told me that’s one of the reasons. They’re like, yeah, we don’t want our kids to think that we lie to them about stuff because then they won’t believe, you know, they won’t believe anything about the Bible when we take them to church. So I’ve got to respect their logic there.

0:13:38
PR: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s especially funny because it’s not that it’s hypocritical. It’s that it’s a failure to recognize the exact thought process when applied to them.

0:13:54
CW: Yeah.

0:13:55
PR: It’s very curious. I wouldn’t even say it could create cognitive dissonance until someone actually really points it out because I I doubt people, you know, really even see that when they’re you know, but I suppose that applies to just about any any poo-pooing of beliefs by anyone who believes, you know, anything else strongly

0:14:14
CW: Yeah, yeah, so have fun with Santa with your kids I don’t think you’re doing any long-term harm and and hey play around with evidence I look forward to being able to show my kids some of these websites that talk about the science of Santa and breaking down. OK, is this should we believe this? Let’s take a look at how this how this whole thing is set up here.

PR: Oh, yeah.

CW: So for our main segment, when we come back, we’re going to be talking with Ben and all three of us about who and how it applies to children and how it has harmed children and how it potentially has impacted us when we were children. Incidentally, when I was looking through the Googles for stuff about this episode, I discovered that there is a House of Woo clothing company out of L.A.

0:15:02
PR: Oh, wow.

0:15:03
CW: And, yeah, it’s at ilovewoo.com and it actually has as its first item that you can browse in the kids section an evil eye design on it, and they’re completely unironic about it. There seems to be no clues that they’re just… They don’t have a pareidolia or a sleep paralysis pullover. I don’t think they have any notion that woo is actually a derogatory term in the world of skepticism.

0:15:35
PR: Oh, and here I was hoping it was just a place where you could buy awesome Wu-Tang Clan shirts.

0:15:40
CW: For kids!

0:15:41
PR: Yeah!

0:15:42
CW: Alright, well, there’s a broad array of things we can talk about, so we’re going to sort of be picking and choosing, so don’t expect to hear, gosh, it would be like a ten-hour podcast if we had to cover everything from the anti-vax movement to Santa. But we’re going to talk about kids in woo in just a minute.

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CW: And we’ve got Ben and Pascual with us. Hey, Ben. Hey, Pascual.

0:16:21
PR: Hey, hey.

BR: Hey there.

CW: Well, now, Ben, you’re a good person to talk about some of this because you’ve written about some of the more extreme cases of children being harmed from woo. What comes to mind for you?

0:16:28
BR: Yeah, I mean, over the years, it’s usually things along the lines of faith healing. In some cases, they’re parents who, you know, fed their kids raw foods. So things like that. And not surprisingly, that can, you know, cause cause problems, especially for younger kids. It’s one of those tricky situations in America. We have freedom of religion, and many religions, including the followers of Christ Church, the Christian scientists and Scientology, they have doctrines that prohibit or discourage modern medicine. And so there’s a sort of delicate governmental balance between letting parents choose whatever they want to and not endangering their kids.

0:17:17
CW: And that feeds into the whole anti-vaccination movement where parents more and more these days want the right to just endanger public health by having their children forgo any vaccinations.

0:17:29
BR: Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, I just, I don’t have a whole lot to talk about. There will probably be, mostly you two will be talking more about it, but I’ve certainly over the years written about unfortunately, too many cases of parents who have in some cases had their children die because of neglect and choosing prayer, for example, instead of evidence-based medicine.

0:17:54
CW: Yeah, I actually, one of the cases that really stuck with me, and I don’t want to give anybody nightmares. nightmares. I mean, this really freaked me out when I read about this. It was a baby in Australia. Now, the parents were of Indian descent, and this child was a baby Gloria Thomas. She was only nine months old when she died, and she had been suffering from eczema for like four or five months. It just got worse and worse. Some of the articles I read said that they totally avoided modern Western medicine in treating her eczema. But one of the articles, one of the other articles out of Australia said that they saw doctors, but then just chose not to believe or do any of the treatments that the doctors prescribed. One of the doctors quoted said that it was the worst case of eczema she had ever seen, and it really, really stuck with her. The eczema depleted her immune system so badly that she couldn’t fight off an eye infection when she was struck with that and that, I believe, was eventually what killed her in just a couple of days. And when she died, although she was nine months old, she was only the weight of the three month old. She had actually lost a kilogram or something from the age of four months to the age of nine months, which is horrifying. I mean, she could not get enough nutrition. Just hearing about a baby existing like that for five months is just horrendous. And these parents believed they were doing the right thing. They honestly believed that what they were doing would save the child or would at least be the best thing for the child. And even after the child died, they held on to that belief. The father maintained that, well, the baby would have just suffered longer if she had treated with Western medicine. So really, they did the right thing by treating with homeopathy because she died quicker there. She died more quickly. And it’s just, oh, the cognitive dissonance involved with letting your own child die and then still maintaining that belief.

0:20:05
PR: Yeah, that’s outrageous. And you know, an eczema, you know, for those of you who are not too familiar with it, it’s called atopic dermatitis and it is a very, very, very common condition. I think something like 10% of the population will experience it more often than anyone, and as far as the typical case goes, it is not something that is usually cause for concern on its own. So to me, that’s what really grabs me about this, is that it isn’t like a child developing smallpox or something, where it’s an aggressive disease that can lead to death very often if you’re unvaccinated, obviously. But with eczema, it’s such a common non-issue that usually, I mean, they’ll treat it over the counter. I mean, there’s so little to worry about in most cases unless you let it, you know, complicate the health of the person who’s experiencing it.

0:21:09
CW: The skin is an organ we take for granted. And when it’s compromised really badly, it can kill you. I’m reading from the article here. It says, in the last months of her life, baby Gloria Thomas suffered such terrible eczema that her skin would weep and peel, sticking to her clothing when she was changed. And she suffered bleeding and crying and malnutrition. And all that was done was homeopathic treatments for her. Yeah, and the worse it gets, the worse it gets. Rather, there’s obviously a spectrum. Some kids are just going to get a little patch of rough skin and others are going to have what this poor baby endured.

0:21:52
BR: As you mentioned, it comes down to faith. And if you are dead set convinced that for example, diseases are caused by moral impurity or the devil or whatever else and that God will provide and God will take care if that’s truly what you think, then in that world view it makes perfect sense. Well, that’s part of Christian theology is redemption through suffering. So within that world view, it’s sort of internally consistent in a weird way.

0:22:26
CW: Well, yes, and that ties it directly to belief in the supernatural and belief in a deity that has something to do with all bodily ills. But then there’s that other type of faith, like, oh, well, everything’s caused by subluxations. And we’ve all seen that video of a chiropractor cracking the spine of a newborn baby. At least many skeptics have. If you haven’t, you can just search for it out there. It’s what again one of those other horrific things seeing a newborn suddenly stopped crying when the chiropractor wrenches his back and you hear this little spine crack and he he says see I’ve just alleviated the baby’s colic. No, you haven’t mother you have just startled that kid possibly hurt him and he stopped crying because he is in a state of shock.

0:23:14
PR: Yeah, yeah.

0:23:15
BR: Yeah, if you think high school football is bad for your kid, try having some quack chiropractor wrench his spine.

0:23:24
CW: Yeah, don’t do that listeners. Don’t ever take your newborn to a chiropractor, please.

0:23:29
PR: No, no. In fact, woo baffles us all the time and the people that peddle it obviously constantly baffle us. But, you know, it’s one thing when you are a person who is engaging in a practice that willing adult participants are playing along with you. And, you know, but when you’re, I don’t know what kind of like, you know, maybe we have to blame the system that quote unquote certifies these people, you know, where it makes them feel confident that what they’re doing is safe for a child, but I mean the reality is that we should all at least have some sense that, okay, a chiropractor isn’t a doctor by medical definition and they are not qualified to do this stuff on children. I mean, it’s dangerous. You’re literally physically engaging them in a way that could easily cause great harm to them.

0:24:30
CW: Yeah, and well, I haven’t mentioned this on the podcast, but there’s only so much you want to talk about on a podcast about your own personal life, but my father was a chiropractor, and he was not, you know, how there’s a spectrum of chiropractic where some of them just relieve muscle tension and they’re more like a skilled massage therapist and physical therapist. And then there’s the full-on baddie subluxations cause everything and selling supplements and all this other stuff. My dad was on that side of the spectrum. He did not go for modern medicine in a lot of ways. And he wasn’t a big part of my childhood, but what I did observe in his office has stuck with me over the years. I was a kid. I was big for my age, so I helped out a little bit in his office when I was like 10 or 11. And this bled over into, you know, the fact that myself and my three siblings were all born at home. No medical care, no doula, just my dad and my mom, and we all survived. And little known fact, none of us were vaccinated.

0:25:43
PR: Oh, wow.

0:25:44
CW: Now, all four of us rectified that, like as possible when we got to be 18. And it’s not that my mother like forcibly tried to keep us from vaccinating. She’s not one of those moms that was like, I can’t believe you got your vaccinations. You’ve betrayed our whole mind view. No, no, no. It was more like it there’s just it just didn’t come up and then each of us went to college and we’re like, uh, yeah can I have that MMR, please? We yeah, I never got one. Could you just give it to me? Yeah, so yeah, so we all got it taken care of and you know, my mother was kind of a hippie She met my dad in a health food store. My dad was full on the chiropractic train there. So he thought everything could be treated with adjustments.

PR: Oh, wow.

CW: Yeah Including I believe if I believe I have the story correct here my sister sprained her foot and my father tried to adjust it to fix it and it ended up broken.

PR: Oh, wow Yeah, that’s that’s really interesting I have a friend whose wife is a chiropractor, but she’s also like a sports medicine physical therapist. And from what I know, she is a very above-the-line professional when it comes to her day-to-day work, so I don’t even know how chiropractic lends to that, if she just did it as part of her education. So it’s very interesting to me, and I have had a few debates with him. He’s clarified a few things for me as far as how there is a spectrum of what chiropractors are. It is really interesting because she’s obviously not a person who lights incense and starts chanting, and she’s a person who has the medical certification to treat sports injuries. I would assume that she’s not out to harm anyone, but then I don’t know how chiropractic really lends to her knowledge base, you know?

0:27:44
CW: Well, yeah, I’ve been using the term spectrum, and that’s how like Simon Singh and a bunch of other people who’ve written about chiropractic describe it, is there is a spectrum of chiropractic care. I would like to see there be a complete bifurcation where you have the sports medicine and physical therapist and massage oriented chiropractors on this side. And you know, they could maybe even drop the title chiropractor. And then you have all the nut buckets on the other side who are saying that subluxation is causing your kids asthma and you can have adjustments instead of vaccinations. And there was this thing I recall my father doing when I was younger. He was trying to determine whether or not I had allergies. And this is how he did it. He placed a piece of cotton on my belly as I was laying on a table, on one of the chiropractic tables, and he put little capsules of stuff on the cotton. So it’s like sitting on top of a cotton piece, on top of my shirt, on top of my skin. And he’s like, okay, this is a wheat germ. And he’d put it on and then he’d have his assistant hold a set of magnets to my neck. He had a red, it looked like a red felt tip pen and a blue felt tip pen, but they had magnets on the tip. He put them on my neck, and then he measured my legs to see if one of my legs was longer than the other. And apparently if your legs were out of alignment after you had a piece of some sort of encapsulated something or other on the piece of cotton on your belly, that meant you were allergic to it. And I was like 10 and I was like, what? No, how does this possibly work? And I asked him to explain it to me. And he’s like, well, it just your body knows it, it’ll be out of alignment. And I was like, but it’s not in my body. I’m not taking it. It’s not like I’ve even ingested this. Well, I didn’t use the word ingested, but and memories can be fuzzy. I was like 10, but I have a very in my head memory of having this quote unquote allergy test done in my father’s office. And I, even as a kid, I was like, this is bullshit.

0:29:53
BR: This is super sketchy, dad.

0:29:55
CW: I mean, I would, if you’re going to test an allergy, at least have me swallow the pill of stuff and then maybe test my alignment. But as I got older, I was like, OK, even the alignment stuff is bullshit.

0:30:06
BR: Yeah, well, that’s that’s the thing. I mean, especially for things such as intercessory prayer. I mean, you know, there’s all these books by Larry Dossi and Deepak Chopra and others that that claim that there’s some actual effective evidence based policies behind that. But in fact, there’s not. Steve Novello has written about this, Harriet Hall has, over on science-based medicine. There’s lots of data on this, and the fact is that intercessory prayer has never been proven to be effective. It’s not like it’s 50-50. It’s like zero and 100 percent. I mean, it’s a spectacular track record of failure. And so it’s not even as if the parents are trying something that has been shown to work in some people. It doesn’t work, period, at all. And that’s really what gets me is, particularly with prayer-based kid-woo, there’s nothing there. And yeah, I understand you may feel, you know, your faith may tell you X, Y, or Z that this is going to happen, but the data is there.

0:31:22
CW: Yeah, yeah, so it’s not even as helpful as a placebo, guys. Come on. Well, the other thing, America is very do-it-for-yourself and pick up a book of home remedies and take care of things yourself and gosh darn it, we shouldn’t have to buy insurance if we don’t want it. There’s a big string of pull yourself up by your bootstraps thought in America. And I think sometimes that lends itself to taking care of your kid’s health and distrusting doctors and thinking, well, I’m a mommy, so I know best. And one of the other types of woo that I’ve seen seeping into child health care is essential oils. Have you seen any of this go on, Pascual or Ben?

0:32:04
PR: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, especially being from Santa Fe, which as far as, you know, as far as wooey Towns, we’re kind of like right up there with Sedona. And, you know, you just get a lot of that. I mean, growing up there, obviously, I knew a lot of kids that had some really out-there parents who would just go through, I mean, they’d use all these things like aromatherapy and other things for illnesses and stuff. At least from my perspective, it rarely, if ever, worked. But I wasn’t really counting the days they were sick or anything. But yes, long story short, that’s something that I definitely am familiar with just by virtue of being from a place where this is very popular.

0:33:05
CW: Well, one of the – I don’t have the article in front of me, but since many people I saw on Facebook were selling essential oils, constant ads, constant, you know, somebody from high school would get into it once a week it seemed like. I was noticing articles that were warning of asthma problems with kids. It goes against your instincts how these essential oils can harm because one of the selling points of essential oils that moms push is, oh, it will really soothe them at bedtime and this scent works for this and that scent works for that and whenever Billy has an asthma attack, peppermint really helps. And what doctors had noticed is that the kids kind of, you know, they got soothing attention from mom and yes, they would feel better. But the problem was while they were feeling better smelling this essential oil, their asthma was actually geting worse. So you’d have this almost like reverse placebo effect where they would feel better, but the condition would be worse. So you actually had a higher incidence of asthma attacks getting worse and happening and catching the kids off guard because they would start to feel like they were feeling better even though their condition was not being improved by what was being applied.

0:34:31
PR: Yeah, I can speak to that. I do have asthma and I can tell you that one of the earliest things I learned about it, I didn’t develop it until adulthood or at least I didn’t notice it until adulthood, but the thing I noticed most was that the best thing for it was just calming down. Anxiety would always aggravate it. And so, you know, if you put a kid in a soothing situation, there’s a very good chance that the acute symptoms are going to reduce. And so, yeah, I can see how that kind of correlation can happen. And then also speaking as someone with a lot of allergies, I can say that I have come in contact with essential oils before and they have aggravated an allergy. So it’s, you know, I can imagine, I mean, I would never want to experiment with it myself just because of my breathing issues and I can see how that could greatly aggravate, you know, someone who’s sensitive to it.

BR: And let me just add, Pascual, thank you for using aggravated correctly.

0:35:32
PR: You’re welcome.

0:35:33
BR: As in exacerbated, not irritated, although, of course, these days. Anyway, sorry.

0:35:48
CW: But yeah, essential oils, just as multi-level marketing schemes go, and we really should do a whole show on multi-level marketing schemes.

0:35:54
PR: Oh yeah, I can’t wait to do that.

0:35:57
CW: But as those go, I mean, that whole area of home sales really bothers me because, yeah, there is a big push towards moms as there are with most MLMs. And they’re telling you to slather this highly concentrated scenty stuff on your baby, on your toddler, on your kid. I mean, Vicks VapoRub is bad enough. And essential oils comes in all these different varieties and they’re not exactly tested and it’s just a whole potential bag of problems with your child.

0:36:34
PR: Yeah, as a matter of fact, direct contact with certain essential oils can cause chemical burns and that’s become an issue with some people. I will admit that I do use peppermint oil from time to time. I put it in boiling water and breathe in the steam when I’m really stuffy. It does work in the sense that any mentholated steam will do that. But I’ve gotten it on myself and I have, like I said, I have really bad allergies and I’ve even seen a small rash break out. But there are actually stories of people putting it in their bathtub and then getting in and then developing these horrific rashes. And because this stuff isn’t regulated or even really looked at by the FDA, there’s very little to warn people that this is a possibility.

0:37:25
CW: Yeah, yeah. And well, you can always put a drop on a piece of cotton and measure your legs.

0:37:31
BR: If all else fails.

(MUSIC)

0:37:43
CW: Now, we kind of wanted to start off by talking about the woo that will endanger a child’s life, which hopefully, and in many cases, you will read about authorities intervening when things get too bad. I mean, it seems like we lose a couple of kids a year to preventable things because their parents had, you know, had determined that they knew best and they were going to avoid medicine or only rely on their homeopath or a prayer or, you know, alien intervention or something besides chemotherapy or something that would cure their child. But there’s all, like chiropractic, there’s a whole spectrum of woo. And one of the reasons we thought about doing this topic at all was a very heartfelt letter from a listener. Now, I’m not going to mention her name, but she knows who she is. She said that she really appreciated skepticism in our show and that she had had a long journey from being a child in Canada who had for a time been in the care of the child and family services department there. And going through a number of social workers, one of the social workers she really clicked with was heavily into woo, like an indigenous healer type, a shaman, a psychic of sorts. And apparently in the course of helping this young lady, she also filled her head with a ton of really wrong ideas. And as an adult now, this person, hello person, thank you for writing in, she really feels like she was kind of cheated as a child and had all this junk put in her head. And she’s like, it did harm my ability to function for a while. You had all these wrong ideas about how the world works. And so we started thinking about, well, how does exposing a child to woo, what effect does that have? I mean, oftentimes you end up creating a skeptic, as happened eventually with this young lady, as happened with me, as happened with a lot of people. I’m kind of reminded of the way Nick West said, if you can pull somebody out of conspiracy theory thinking, sometimes you get a skeptic who will fight against conspiracy theory that much harder because they were once taken in by them. So I mean, what comes to mind for you guys when you think about woo that is routinely given to children by well-meaning parents or relatives or anything like that and how it affects them not in a physically dangerous way but just in terms of a critical thinking way.

0:40:32
BR: Well, I can think of one example, I mean I can think of many examples, but one that jumps to mind was a piece I wrote about in 2015 and it was about a four-year-old in Virginia and his name was Andrew Lucas. And I actually wrote a skeptical inquiry column for SI in case anyone’s interested. The reason he came to people’s attention was that he was profiled on reality and put reality in quotes folks, a TV show called Ghost Inside My Child. Now again, with a title of a TV show called Ghost Inside My Child, you can perhaps guess the problem. And basically what had happened was that the parents of this four-year-old encouraged the boy to believe that the spirit of a dead soldier, a dead Marine, who was killed in 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon, was inhabiting his body. on it and basically if you sort of take a close look at the interactions and what the kid is saying, what little Andrew is saying and his mom, it is pretty clear that they in some cases his mother is feeding him information about this alleged, about this Marine who was killed. I mean we know he was killed. I mean there is historical record of that but there is no real evidence or reason to think that the spirit of this dead marine is in this boy. And so in researching it, I sort of give examples of how the kid was led by leading questions and suggestibility, and in some cases repeated back comments that his mother made. And so one aspect is a sort of, you know, is this really a past lives reincarnation thing? But the deeper problem that I saw was you had, either for the sake of TV shows or certainly were exploited by TV shows, this idea that this four year old was being encouraged to believe that someone else’s spirit and mind and presence was in his body. And that’s got to be terrifying. You know, we’re not talking some, you know, we’re not talking some cartoon or some fantasy or where the wild things are. We’re talking about in real life, presumably both in front of and behind the cameras, this four-year-old’s parents earnestly telling him, yes, we believe that a dead Marine who you never met is inside your body. And that’s just, that’s bizarre.

0:43:12
CW: Even if the kid wasn’t terrified by it, and I’m assuming the kid was dealing with it okay on camera, that’s going to mess with formation of identity and sense of self in a child that young.

0:43:22
BR: You would think so. I mean, again, it sounds sort of cute, I suppose, you know, in capsule form, or if you’re just watching the episode, but if you take a minute to think, well, hold on here, this four-year-old is being encouraged to think that the spirit of a dead stranger is in his body, that’s unhealthy.

CW: Yeah, to say the least. Yeah.

PR: Yeah, I mean, children are just so, you know, credulous by nature. I mean, I think that’s really part of, you know, our evolution as a social species is that, you know, children will believe parents and adults in general, and that’s sort of the authority dynamic that we have with kids. And it really is often such an insidious thing because even adults who don’t think they’re doing too much harm, they don’t realize how much they’re kind of etching into stone some of these ideas and the amount of work it takes to reverse that. We can get into how religion does that and everything, but when it comes to these very specific little things like this, especially where there’s not a lot of worldview around it to help the person deal with it, that can be a really damaging thing.

0:44:50
BR: Absolutely. And especially if these prescriptions from the parents are being lumped in with others, right? Don’t play with matches. Don’t wander off. Don’t go in cars with strangers. Oh, and by the way, a dead marine is inside your head. Children rely on parents to guide them in navigating the world and good things, bad things, dangerous things. If you see boiling water, don’t pull it off the stove. And if all these things are sort of being presented to the kid as self-evident truths, that’s a problem. If you one thing, if it’s like well You know some people believe this some people leave that some people even God or Santa Claus or if you want to present it to the kid as something that’s a curiosity that somebody believe in some people don’t that’s one thing but it’s another thing to say Oh my god, you know you’re you have this going on and you know, I have to I have to hope it wasn’t just for the cameras Yeah, well, yeah, or it was just for the cameras depending on how you look at it. But there’s no acceptable angle to this. Whether it was a put-on for hoping to be profiled in a reality TV show, or whether it was sincere, it’s wrong either way.

0:45:53
PR: Definitely.

0:45:54
CW: I don’t know if you guys have any personal memories of being exposed to woo as a child and what you thought of it. But there was a thing that happened when I was about 11. My best friend from middle school had a big Halloween party and her parents and parents of a couple of the other kids that put this party together, they decided it would be really cute and really fun to get a fortune teller. Now this fortune teller that they quote unquote hired was just one of the moms dressed up in a really dark room with candlelight and like wearing this veil so that the other kids wouldn’t recognize her. And the parents all thought this was really cute. What do you think all the 11 and 12 year old kids thought about this?

PR: They thought there was a real fortune teller, I imagine.

CW: Oh yeah, we were and it had an unintended consequence that the parents did not like dealing with because, you know, I’m still friends with these people. They got, you know, they sent each of the kids into this room to talk to the fortune teller. And these kids fully buying into it and being even more taken into it because this was one of the moms. She had information on each and every one of us. Somebody walked in there and, oh, I see that you are very good at track and field. Your favorite sport is the hurdles. I remember my friend Nikki came out and she goes, that woman knew everything about me. And what ended up happening is these children unburdened their souls to this woman and asked all sorts of really personal, horrendous questions, like about their family life, about their father’s drinking problem, their this, their that. And this poor mother, who had decided to be the fortune teller, was suddenly feeling like, oh, shit, I’m not a licensed therapist. I don’t know what to do about this.

0:47:47
PR: Man, that’s a way to get a phone call from me when my kid’s going to a sleepover.

CW: Yeah, well, this was back in the 80s and nobody got, there was no repercussions so far as I can recall, no angry phone calls or anything, but it was certainly a misstep. And I think the kids being grown up, me being one of them, I look back going, yeah, that was embarrassing. I shouldn’t have shared all that stuff with my friend’s mom. And the parents involved were like, yeah, those kids were, they took it a bit more seriously than we thought they would.

0:48:27
PR: Right.

0:48:28
CW: It doesn’t take that much to fool a kid. It really does not.

0:48:32
PR: No, no, it doesn’t.

0:48:34
CW: Hot reading will certainly do it. A cold reading will do it too. That’s why I think most of the people who watch those ghost hunting shows are children.

0:48:44
PR: Yeah, I think I would tend to agree.

BR: Yeah, I mean, nothing would be creepier to me than to be you know a 10 or 12 year old and have a psychic saying you know I can look into your soul suddenly you’re you’re confessing in front of everybody. You know impure thoughts and And self-pollution and all of a sudden like oh, I’m just joking.

0:49:16
CW: I don’t really have a life-size poster of Sailor Moon on my wall.

PR: Oh boy.

0:49:25
CW: Well, I’m a very new parent. Pascual, you’ve got many years on me, but I do have a little bit of experience prior to having this kid in that I married a guy with kids. And we had the split household where, you know, the kids were under our roof for five days a week, and then they went weekends to mom, and then, you know, back and forth and all that stuff. And when you have a split household, and when you’re trying to help educate and bring up kids, there are going to be issues that come up for any skeptic. And I recall one teachable moment that I’m sad to say we missed out on, but we were very concerned with helping the kids improve their education and catch up to peers. They had some catching up to do. I’m not going to use names or anything, but one of the kids, we’ll call them Kid. They’re like college age now, so hopefully they’re not… I don’t think they’re going to be listening, so I could probably talk about anything I want. But anyway, for the sake of anonymity, we’ll say Kid.

0:50:25
BR: The one with the lazy eye, right?

0:50:27
CW: Yeah, that one. Kid is having problems in math. Needs to work harder in math. Needs to study for math tests. Comes back after spending time with well-meaning adult relative. Again, not naming any names. And kid proclaims, I don’t have to study. Look what I got. Look what so-and-so gave me. Shows us a necklace that has some sort of little like spiritualistic figure on it. And this relative who is a shamanistic Wiccan, it’s hard to really pin down their beliefs, they’re all out there.

0:51:00
PR: Someone who didn’t grow out of their goth phase.

0:51:03
CW: Yeah, has given the kid a necklace, I forget the name of the spirit, but it was some sort of spirit and, oh, this spirit will look after you, will help you get a good grade on your math test. So in the kids mind, it’s like, huh, I don’t have to study anymore. I have a magic necklace. Yeah. And what do you think we did?

0:51:25
PR: Hmm. You burned sage and wished away the spirits.

0:51:31
CW: Well, we said, well, that’s all fine and good, but you’re going to have to study too because you don’t know this stuff. And there’s not a spirit in the world that’s gonna help you if you don’t know this stuff. So we pounded it into them anyway. But looking back, you know, one totally failed math test would have been a real teachable experience.

PR: Oh yeah.

0:51:52
CW: Would have completely cured any thoughts of, oh, I can rely on a magic necklace. And I kinda regret not just letting that kid completely fail. I think it is important to let a kid test out little different belief systems and deal with the consequences. Make sure there are some sort of consequences to getting stuff wrong like, oh, well, you want to bet on this? Well, okay, well, if that works, cool. Let’s see what happens.

0:52:23
BR: Let’s test this, shall we?

0:52:26
CW: Yeah. Yeah, I have found that it’s good to sort of be a bit of a politician when dealing with certain questions from kids. Yeah. In that, you know, when you ask a politician, what’s your position on abortion? They’ll be they’ll totally waffle and you won’t actually get their position, but they’ll tell you a bunch of talking points. So sometimes you don’t want to give the kid any direct answers. You dodge, dodge, dodge, but in a fruitful sort of way, get your skeptical talking points in that emphasize critical thinking. Okay, well, how would we test this? What do you think? Why do you think that? What’s your evidence? You know, don’t just be an authority and say, the sky is blue because of blah, blah, blah, or there is no God, or there’s no Santa, or people come from monkeys. Don’t just pronounce things. Say, well, how would we find that out? What do you think we should look up to find an answer for that?

0:53:19
BR: Yeah, it sounds nerdy, but one of the phrases I do like to bring up to kids is say, you know, that’s a falsifiable question. We can – and I’m not in a condescending way. It’s like, no, really, that’s an interesting question, and as it happens, we can find out. Let’s do that.

0:53:38
CW: Yeah. And then hijinks ensue.

0:53:41
BR: Exactly. And shenanigans if you’re lucky.

0:53:45
CW: Yes. Now, schools have not really done a really good job of teaching critical thinking.

0:53:56
BR: Where did that come from?

0:53:58
PR: Impossible.

0:53:59
CW: I’m just saying that as a parent, I’m not going to be relying on public school to teach my kid critical thinking. You have to do that at home. It’s almost like religion. It’s like they’re not allowed to teach critical thinking or something, but I think they should. One thing, one bit of critical thinking that is sadly disappearing from public schools and many other private schools across the country, and I don’t think people realize that it’s critical thinking, and I’m going to sound biased here because I make my living as an artist, they just don’t teach kids art anymore. And the art that you might find in some classrooms, I’m not talking about art like, hey kids, draw your favorite anime character, or here’s some finger paints, paint something that makes you happy. I’m talking about like a serious looking at a still life and trying to reproduce it, graphing out perspective, learning about color theory and why you just can’t add black to a color to make a darker hue, why you just can’t add white to a color, you know, learning how things work. I find that teaching kids how to make sense of the world can be really intertwined with learning art, because if you’re seriously trying to produce a picture of something, something or sculpture or any type of representation, you are opened up to this world, slowly but surely, of how what you think that thing looks like is not actually what it looks like. If you just draw a picture of a nose or an eyeball or a horse and you’re like, okay, I’m just going to, out of my head, out of my head, what I think a horse looks like, you’re going to come up with some animal that’s like janked up and not a horse. You need to actually look at the horse closely. You need to graph it out. You need to look at how the anatomy works. You need to ignore what your instincts or feelings tell you and your initial impressions because those are all going to be wrong. And you need to look very closely at the source to draw anything with any type of accuracy. And I wish that kids would learn some of that in school. I wish a good art teacher can actually do a tremendous bit of good for critical thinking with the right types of lessons to sharpen their artistic eye. You can also sharpen your critical eye at looking at how you view the world, your initial gut reactions, whether or not homeopathy works. Well, okay, look closer.

0:56:27
BR: Absolutely.

0:56:28
CW: Look at the anatomy. Just like you would deconstruct how a horse is put together to get the anatomy right, you need to break things down.

0:56:35
BR: I’m thinking more and more that your kid is going to be a brilliant, brilliant person.

0:56:40
CW: Well, you never know. Kids have their own trajectories that they very much decide on.

0:56:48
PR: Well on that I I think you know that like you described with with with drawing the same kind of Concept applies to music as well how you listen to music And how you you create music you know requires a lot more Critical thinking a lot more kind of you know you have to be able to pull up pull it apart You know in the same way that you have to pull apart ideas. When you listen to music, you’re listening to the collective sound and composition, and every individual piece has to be seen on their own and understood because what you’re hearing is not just one broad idea that you can just reproduce with a single keyboard or something. Again, pretty much all creative things lend really well to good critical thinking and good science too, because I think that anyone who understands the concept of theory understands that art theory and music theory applies in a very similar way to how the scientific method works and things like that. It’s a shame that it’s become such a problem to keep that in public schools because we are getting to a point where we are teaching people very matter-of-factly and in a lot of ways not teaching them how to think, but we’re just teaching them to repeat the formula we give you and repeat the set of texts we give you.

0:58:24
BR: That’s that’s that’s always been one of my one of my major complaints is and I’ve said this on the show before but that Going back to you know, Celestia’s and what you just said is that You know, we we tend to teach, you know, we teach mathematics. We teach geography We teach, you know, all these other different things But but you know critical thinking is the prison through which you understand all these other things. It’s the it’s the fundamental That’s you need that before you you do these other things. Unfortunately, with a lot of academia, in primary and secondary schools, the idea is that somehow kids will learn critical thinking through osmosis. Like in the process of studying history or geography or botany, that critical thinking will emerge and it doesn’t work that way. You need to, the critical thing is the prism through which we understand the world. And so it’s not, it shouldn’t be an afterthought, it should be the basis.

0:59:22
CW: The framework, yeah. Well, I am very glad to see the movement for adding that letter A to the STEM field. They’re calling it STEAM now, S-T-E-A-M. Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. So, yeah, hopefully, to the future.

0:59:41
PR: All right.

(MUSIC)

0:59:43
PR: Thanks for listening, guys. And then we got some news from your front I guess we have the right audience because you’re all listening to us right now for us this Christmas treat?

BR: I’m pleased to say that at long last the the audiobook version of my award-winning book investigating ghost the scientific search of spirits which is now out it’s out available on Audible and Amazon.com. It was available in paperback for about a year now. For those who prefer the ear candy, you can listen to my stammering and stuttering and mispronunciations of my own book. Anyway, if you’re interested, check it out. I have had a handful of people ask me when it’s available. It is finally out, so check it out, please.

1:00:51
CW: Just in time for the holidays, because you can give an audio book instantly for any people that you may have forgotten about.

1:00:58
PR: Yes, you can. And, you know, as I mentioned, you’re listening to a podcast, so I know you’re the right audience.

1:01:04
CW: Yes, you have ears and you have headphones.

1:01:08
BR: Then you’re who we need to reach.

1:01:10
CW: All right. Now, what are we talking about in two weeks for our next step in the first episode of 2019, guys.

1:01:15
BR: Well, I thought that it might be fun to do sort of a recap of the the year 2018 and the different stories, not just ones that we talked about in the podcast, but maybe a few that escaped the radar that came up that we just didn’t get around to. So sort of a fun grab bag look back at 2018 and skepticism and all that.

1:01:36
CW: Oh, I’m skeptical that there’s anything we missed. We covered everything. I think over the past year we’ve covered every possible skeptical thing that could have happened in the year.

1:01:46
PR: Yeah, we’re just on top of it, especially with me gone for a few months.

BR: It’ll be a very short podcast. Yeah.

1:01:54
CW: Well, tune in for that. We’ll have a skeptical potpourri from the past year. Take care, everybody. Bye bye. See ya.

1:02:10
We would like to thank our sponsor level patrons Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange every bit helps us keep the lights on here in strange studios and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support, head on over to iTunes and give us a 5-star review. Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts.

1:02:38
Thanks again, strangers.

1:02:50
Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio, LLC. Copyright 2018. Theme music by Shriekback. Additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pasquale Romero. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, Robert Sundin, and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions of Two Head Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations

1:03:22
and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo