Daughter Knows Best
Kids have discovered a diabolical new use for science: rebutting their parents
- By Joe Queenan
- Smithsonian magazine, December 2010, Subscribe
A few weeks ago I made a last-ditch effort to get my son to make his bed in the morning. We'd been having the same argument for 23 years, and now that he was going off to law school I thought it was time for him to shape up. I honestly believed that people who left their bed unmade would never be successful in life—that an unmade bed signified sloth, indifference and lack of moral character. Winston Churchill always made his bed. Martha Washington always made her bed. Conversely, Helen of Troy never made her bed. Neither did Attila the Hun or Al Capone. I was sure of it.
One morning, I arrived at my office to find an e-mail from my son with the message, "Ha! The tables have turned!" Opening the attached document, I found an article discussing why sleeping in an unmade bed was healthier than sleeping in a made one. According to a study published by Kingston University in London, a disheveled bed enables pockets of moisture in a mattress to dry out faster—thereby dehydrating and killing dust mites and other massively annoying creatures. Since my son has allergies, making his bed in the morning could literally make him sick.
This was not the first time my son had pulled a stunt like this. For years he'd been citing studies that homework was bad for kids or that people who played video games were more attentive and thus made better drivers. If I fired back that playing video games wrecked one's eyesight, he'd trot out a study proving that they improved a person's field of vision.
What these experiences drive home is that the information age is the bane of all conscientious parents. If you try to tell your kid to mow the lawn, he will cite a study published in Geophysical Research Letters indicating that the amount of fuel used in cutting a small lawn does disproportionate damage to the planet, so it would be better to leave it untended. If you try to persuade your children that "early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise," they will dig up a study in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine indicating that students who get up at the crack of dawn lose their zip early in the day, while those who remain snuggled up beneath the covers long after sunrise maintain a high level of productivity well into the evening.
The worst thing about all this is the source of my son's information. His sister, who is in the neuroscience PhD program at Georgetown, is the one who funneled him the report about unmade beds. His sister is the one who found the study linking video games with improved vision. In discussions of this nature, his sister is both instigator and umpire, because she never allows an opinion to stand unless it can pass scientific muster—which wrecks things for people like me, who rely on conventional wisdom and common sense.
I have now officially given up trying to get my son to empty the dishwasher, put gas in my car or pay for the five boxes of cereal he eats every time he comes home. I know that he will merely text his sister and get her to produce a study proving that dishes are more germ-resistant if they remain in the dishwasher, that cars are more fuel-efficient when running on empty and that parents who constantly complain about their children's finances have short life expectancies.
This is what I get for having a daughter who's a scientist. If I return to this planet in some future life and again have kids, I hope they're a pair of screwballs. Maybe then I'll be able to get one of them to mow the lawn.
Joe Queenan, the author of nine books, writes regularly for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian.
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Comments (3)
Beverly, I think what made the difference is ACCESS to scientific information - by which I mean, the Internet. It's a wonderful thing!
Posted by fullerenedream on April 25,2011 | 10:52 PM
In the December 2010 issue of The Smithsonian, Joe Queenan recounts the story of his son's scientific justification for not making his bed. Scientists in Kingston University in London, was the son's argument, have provided evidence that a disheveled bed enables pockets of moisture in a mattress to dry faster, thereby killing dust mites and other annoying creatures.
Well, Joe Queenan's alternative to a disheveled bed is apparently a bed with sheets and blankets quickly pulled up, in an enactment of household mindedness.
This is not "making a bed"!
And for sure, neither Winston Churchill nor Martha Washington ever made their beds in this way.
When I was a child and a teenager, in Milan, Italy, in the 1950s and 1960,(and this was true everywhere else in Italy, Spain, France etc) every morning in every family, the sheets and blankets were removed from the mattress, the mattress was put in a window's frame and beaten with a carpet beater, allowed to rest perhaps half an hour in the frame of the open window together with the sheets and the blankets, and only the was the bed put together again, and actually "re-made"(the Italian word for this action of making the bed is indeed "rifare il letto"). Maids in Winston Churchill's or Martha Washington's residences probably "re-made" the beds this way.
The scientists of Kingston University did not compare a disheveled bed with a bed who was actually "re-made", they compared a disheveled bed with a bed which was only "made", and this in an epoch successive to the years of social progress which allowed many women to find jobs other than simple "house maid".
Sincerely yours
Paolo Giacomoni, Ph. D.
Posted by Paolo GIACOMONI on December 3,2010 | 05:47 PM
My husband and I absolutely loved this piece and agree. It does feel this exasperating at times. Are we now just experiencing what our parents of yesteryear felt when we also snubbed their knowledge in favor of the knowledge we were gaining during our time period or has technology and scientific advancement really made the difference? No matter which is true, it does make parenting more difficult when your children can counter your logic and beliefs with the 'modern' information they are accrueing 24/7!
Posted by Beverly Peacock-Barge on November 26,2010 | 08:11 PM