The Permanent Emergency
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
-
Child development stages
13 min read
The article extensively discusses toddler behavior, language acquisition, and cognitive development. Understanding the scientific framework of child development stages would give readers deeper insight into why toddlers behave the way Scott describes - their inability to regulate emotions, their obsessive categorization of objects, and their language limitations.
-
Evolutionary psychology
20 min read
Scott explicitly theorizes about toddlers running on 'evolved instincts that expect the ancestral environment' and proposes that our ancestors used toddlers as lookouts. This directly engages with evolutionary psychology concepts about how human behavior may be shaped by adaptations to ancestral environments.
-
Language acquisition
18 min read
The article humorously documents Kai's struggles to pronounce words correctly ('Asasa play Rogu Roku') and how the twins develop their own naming conventions for songs. Understanding the science of how children acquire language would enrich the reader's appreciation of these anecdotes.
One morning around 6, the police banged on our door. “OPEN UP!” they shouted, the way police shout when they definitely have an alternative in mind for if you won’t.
I was awake at the time, because the kids were up early and I was on shift. I opened the door. The cops seemed mollified by the fact that I was carrying twin toddlers and looked too frazzled to commit any difficult crimes. They said they’d gotten a 9-1-1 call from my house with plenty of screaming. Had there been any murders in the past hour or so?
I never did figure out how the police got called. My first guess was that one of the twins had gotten their hands on a phone and dialed random things, but neither my nor my wife’s call history showed anything incriminating. My second guess was that they’d screamed at Alexa so hard that it called emergency services, but the documentation says Alexa doesn’t have that function. Maybe a neighbor called and the police got the location wrong, I don’t know.
I do have a pretty good idea about the screaming, though. When Kai demanded “the sun song”, I had accidentally told Alexa to play Raffi’s version of Mister Golden Sun instead of SuperSimpleSongs’ version. Kai did not consider this a sufficiently faithful rendition, and made his displeasure clear to everyone in the neighborhood at six in the morning. Then Lyra didn’t like that Kai was screaming, and started screaming too. By the time I realized the song mishap, I couldn’t rectify my mistake, because they were screaming too loud for Alexa to hear my commands (and too loud for them to notice if the song changed anyway).
Again, I don’t know if this was why the police got called - maybe in a few weeks I’ll learn one of our neighbors got murdered within the GPS margin-of-error of our house. But I like to think that it was. My toddlers jointly calling 911 because I played a slightly different version of their favorite song is too perfect a metaphor to lose. Everything about having toddlers feels like a permanent emergency.
Often it’s the songs. They like songs, but rarely the same ones, and their tastes can change mid-note. I try my best to keep up, but after switching back and forth between a pair of songs three or four times, as ...
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.