An infuriating story yesterday reminded me of a long standing bias, which is in truth not my greatest problem with the tragedy that occurred in Oregon, Ohio.
Police responded to a call about a 4-year-old boy outside, apparently alone except for a dog. When they they found the child and returned him and the dog back to their home, the police learned that the mother had been asleep. They reminded her of “safety measures that need to be taken to ensure the well-being of her children,” the news accounts say.
Somehow, I don’t think this is sufficient when a mother allows a toddler to wander out of the house unmonitored. Good dog, though…
For some reason, the mother never mentioned to the officers that her younger son, 2-year-old Marcus Hall, had also apparently wandered off. Why wouldn’t she do that? Was she afraid of getting in trouble, as she should have? Did she forget she had two boys? Was she stoned?
About 45 minutes later, sleepy mom called 911 to report that Marcus was missing. Again officers arrived, began a search, and found the little boy dead—drowned— in a neighbor’s above-ground pool directly behind the Hall family’s property. The pool was not fully enclosed. “Police noted that Marcus’ unidentified 4-year-old brother was unharmed in the incident,” the news story says.
That’s nice. I wonder for how long he’ll remain unharmed.
The story concludes with a police official saying that charges are likely to be filed against the owners of the pool, and mentioning that Children’s Services have met with the family.”We are all mourning the loss of a young boy in a very tragic accident,” the official said, “which was avoidable with the correct safety measures. I truly hope that this situation will open the eyes to other parents and those who have pools to the dangers presented in this situation and that everyone takes the steps to ensure the safety of children in the community.”
It seems that the “dangers presented” include an incompetent, neglectful mother and police who did a poor job assessing the situation. Too bad that dog couldn’t talk.
Speaking of communication, here is the actual source of my bias, the GoFundMe appeal placed by Marcus’s father, Anthony:
Marcus Anthony, Hall (aka MAR MAR) was just a baby.. i don’t know how to explain this but i will try the best way i can my name is Anthony Hall, Marcus’s dad. His life was taken form him early afternoon on 10/4/2023 there was a incident where his mother was sleeping and the kids snuck out of the house unfraternally Marcus climbed into a Swimming pool and drown this story break my heart every time i have to tell it he was only two years old this is not fair to baby Marcus so please anything help i just want my baby to be able to rest, i cant imagen what was going though his mind during all this.
I wouldn’t contribute a cent based on an appeal like that, and not just because this was more of a crime than an accident. I don’t trust the writer: how do I know the Halls will use the money to bury the kid they allowed to die? I generally don’t hand money over to people who caused their own problem.
Compared to the fact that their surviving child may be dead by now after wandering into traffic while his mother was sleeping, the depressing illiteracy of Anthony’s appeal seems like a minor matter, but it has serious and troubling implications. What kind of public school system does the U.S. have if a man can graduate from it without being able to write better than that? I was taught capital letters and rudimentary punctuation before the 6th grade, as I recall. Who were his teachers? Why were they paid, if that was the best they could do? Could they write any better than that?
How many books can someone read and still not be able to compose a literate paragraph? Any? One, i the book was a collection of e.e.cummings poems? If the father can’t write at a 7th grade level, I assume his parents couldn’t either, or just didn’t care. Maybe they also slept while he was in diapers, and it was just moral luck that Anthony didn’t end up floating face down in a neighbor’s pool.
Is the man not aware that he is illiterate? It seems not, which suggests to me, as horrible as this thought is, that his wife also can’t write basic English, and worse, that he doesn’t know anyone who does. He is asking for money: wouldn’t you have your most educated and articulate friend or relative check your work before publishing it, just to make sure you didn’t write “unfraternally” instead of “unfortunately?”
Well, the appeal did its job anyway; it raised $305 more than the $2500 goal. I do hope Anthony gets some writing help before he asks for the next $2500 to pay for the burial of the other boy.
Ethics Alarms 
There are some small things I will say in the mother’s defense. First, raising children is exhausting, and sometimes taking a nap is absolutely needed to function. I forget what the estimates were for how many lost hours of sleep children incur, but it is significant. I cannot blame a mother who told her 4-year-old to play with her 2-year-old, and perhaps watch the digital babysitter, while she collapsed for an hour. I know my wife struggled with that a great deal while our two eldest were that young. It became a little easier by the time our third came, because then our eldest was 5, and able to handle her younger sister quite a bit better.
Second, children can be like raccoons. You think you have everything locked up and bolted down, and then they surprise you by pushing a chair over to the counter, climbing up, breaking through the child lock on the cupboard doors, grabbing the prescription medications, and opening the child-proof lid. At that point it is a crap shoot whether you’re searching for the floor for all the spilled pills, or calling poison control to see how to handle a potential overdose. And that was when you felt you could risk two minutes to use the bathroom.
On the other hand, a certain paranoia around swimming pools should be in place. When we were house-hunting last year in the greater Cleveland area, we were shocked to see so many swimming pools, and so few fences between neighbors. (Yes, our last house in Wyoming didn’t have fences, but we were on the very edge of town, and our backyard was the cactus and sagebrush wilderness typical of southern Wyoming. And no one in the neighborhood had anything close to a place where children could drown. Water is scarce in Wyoming, after all.)
In the frenzy of house sales in the spring of 2022, when people were bidding $40k-$50k over the listed price and still losing out to people who bid higher, or bid equal in cash, we decided we would place a bid on two houses, expecting them both to fall through. Somehow, we ended up with a decent house with a fenced-in yard, on a cul-de-sac, right next to a park, so that ended up very nicely. But the other house had no fences, and the neighbor had an above-ground pool, with no safety-fencing, or anything. My wife worried herself sick about how quickly we could put up fencing, and how she would not be able to let the children outside at all until that fencing was up. There was simply too much risk that one of our children (especially our third, who we literally have nicknamed “The Raccoon” because she gets into everything, is far too clever for her own good, and knows no boundaries) would investigate the pool, fall in, and drown.
The literacy issue is doubly worrying. I also have a bias against people who are not able to write in grammatically correct, capitalized, and punctuated sentences. Typos are one thing, and writing in a hurry is another, but people who chronically write run-on sentences with no capitalization, no punctuation, and poor word choice make me think their intelligence is well below average. And I know some very nice, very industrious people who could not write above a second-grade level if it would save their lives. And unfortunately, that really downgrades my respect for them. Could someone like that remember to lock doors? Not leave knives where little hands could grasp them? Keep choking hazards well out of reach? This bias is unfair, because the ability to write cogently is not directly tied to common sense parenting.
But if it takes time to remember you have a second son and are only wondering where he is after the police have already returned one absconding child to you, what does that say? I’ll grant her the time to look through the house for little Marcus, to open the door and call his name, and check all his favorite hiding places, but shouldn’t she have immediately asked the police to wait for her to check if her other son was home, and if not, have them help locate him? It may have been too late by that point, anyway, since children seem naturally drawn to anything that will kill them, but I have a hard time believing it took an additional 45 minutes to reach the panic point for the missing 2-year-old. And I know that if we had a child missing, and there was a pool open to anyone in the neighbor’s yard, that would be the first place we’d check.
Thus I’m fighting the impulse to say these are two very dimwitted parents who probably should not be raising children. That is possibly very unfair to them. For most tragic incidents, there are all kinds of warning flags that are only recognized in hindsight, and were not at all obvious prior to the tragedy. Most people have red flags waving at them, and they are generally fortunate enough that each time there were still enough protective barriers in place to keep misfortune at bay. Mom probably had gotten away with taking an afternoon nap by sitting the boys down before the electronic babysitter, but this time, either the door was inadvertently left unlocked or the 4-year-old just recently figured out how to unlock it, and that very day was feeling adventuresome. Or maybe the dog needed to go outside to do his business, and the boy thought he would help Mom by taking the dog out.
So I’m ambivalent. Children are hard. Parents have to be responsible and struggle through their own discomforts and exhaustion to care for them, but even the best of parents cannot be attentive 100% of the time. The ability to write well does not imply anything one way or another about one’s ability to give a child proper care. But I keep thinking it does. Just as I keep thinking I’m an above-average parent. Maybe I need to go and check over some of the child locks in our house now…
Correction, children are actually literally racoons.
Ryan, this was excellent. It captures beautifully my hesitancy to point a finger; remembering vividly the time my neighbor returned my 18 month old to my home; my face completely draining of color upon finding the two of them standing at my open front door. My command of the language utterly failed me in that moment.
Now, the whole 45 minute thing to find the other child? That’s a problem.
And like Jack, when I see or hear bad grammar, I make assumptions; unflattering ones at that. Fair or not, I do.
This is what you get when educators believe social promotion takes priority over skill development.
I have long tired of the lament that we need more money to fund education. What we need is accountability in our public schools before any more money is spent to retain the “best and the brightest teachers”. How narcissistic is it of these teachers that they continue to turn out students who cannot read anywhere near grade level or perform even rudimentary arithmetic calculations without electronic assistance and then claim they are the best and brightest teachers.
With that said, I am not going to let the students and families off the hook. Teaching a class of students with varying degrees of competency is difficult and much of this differential is attributable to social promotion by schools to avoid “stigmatizing” the child. However, parents who spend their time in leisure activities that they enjoy and do not challenge themselves or the child to learn create the flawed raw materials for which teachers are expected to educate.
This is not an isolated example. In Baltimore City public school system, no student was grade level proficient in any of the major subjects last year, yet BCPS spends as much if not more money per pupil than our richer counties in Maryland.
Jack. Re: the father’s communication skills, or lack thereof. Half the world is below the fiftieth percentile. When I taught in an elementary school for a year, I had twin girls in my seventh-grade class who tested in the ninth percentile.
I also have concerns over the education – or lack of education – of these parents and millions of other US uneducated young people. The United States consistently spends far more money per school age student than any other country in the world, something like $11,800 per child compared with $4,000-$5,000 in comparable countries.
Critics regularly blast American public schools as little more than mind-deadening factories designed to propel working class white students into brain-dead jobs and minority students straight into the arms of the prison-industrial complex. From the other side, public schools are excoriated as retirement parks for lazy unionized teachers to indulge their habit of force-feeding the innocent on Marxist propaganda.
At the same time, US universities fairly consistently condemn their students with record levels of graduate unemployment, while burdening them with record levels of student debt. If there is any one thing that can be said about US education, it is that it is a complete failure.
What do US students get for all that money?
• The U.S. placed 11th out of 79 countries in science when testing was last administered in 2018.
• The top five math-scoring countries in 2018 were all in Asia. The US didn’t even place.
• U.S. students’ math scores have remained steady since 2003. Their science scores have been about the same since 2006.
• The IMD World Competitiveness Center reports that the U.S. ranked 10th in its 2020 Competitiveness Report.