Michael Moynihan: Is this the last generation of kids free to walk about on hottest days?
Or It’s Children Often Freedom Everywhere Act Changing Exercising Up, The Working Conditions, A Behavioural Are To Norms Heats Own Their Of To World Different That’s As For Matter Conforming Adults But
On a recent trip into town, I ducked out of the heat and into Vibes and Scribes second-hand shop, where I happened across , Seán Ó Faoláin’s autobiography. On offer for the extremely reasonable sum of €5.99, it found its way into my arms and off home with me (I paid, don’t worry).
Ó Faoláin was born in 1900, so the book is as ripe in places as you might imagine, but among other gems, I was struck by his memory of boredom as a child, when his mother would hunt him and his two brothers out the door for a walk around the town.
No entertainment of any kind was on offer for the three of them — or anyone else — apart from this stroll, always along the same route: “After dinner, eaten in the kitchen ... we were sent off, again in a bunch, for the usual walk up Wellington Road and down Saint Luke’s, dropping in along the way to some church to say the Stations of the Cross ... did I even know at the time that my childhood and first boyhood really was dull?”
This is not a specifically warm-weather experience, but in my head, I equate this to my own experience as a kid, when we ended up roaming into town during the summers. Bored, restless, when all else failed we headed for the city. Walking.
Even then we knew that it was hotter in the middle of town. We didn’t need to be told by scientists that cities amount to heat islands absorbing and then irradiating their citizens with warmth. We knew well that walking two miles in the sun from home to loiter in Golden Discs or the Mercier Bookshop for an hour would leave you drenched in sweat.
We were bored, though. What else was there to do? Eighty-odd years after Seán Ó Faoláin and his brothers were striding down Summerhill North to get back home to Half Moon Street, the entertainment options weren’t much better for us. Town it was.
(‘How did you know where to meet your friends if you didn’t have a mobile phone?’ asked one of my research assistants when I mentioned this. ‘Easy,’ I said. ‘You’d tell them during the week you’d be in town Saturday and you’d meet up.’ Cue research assistant observing me the way you might watch a salmon find its unerring way upstream to spawn.)
What interested me in the couple of weeks of warm weather that we enjoyed recently was the presence of plenty of kids roaming the streets in the same fashion, at the same age, the same look of boredom.
Granted, those milling around Paul Street seem to be consulting their phones — though they still bored, but the age profile is the same — on school holidays but too young to get part-time jobs, condemned as a result to swelter as they trudge around, melting slowly in the heat.
I came across a terrific piece by Emma Pattee in , which sold its thesis well with the headline: Summer Vacation Is Moving Indoors.
In the piece Pattee detailed a growing sense in parts of America like Texas and Florida — where summers have always been very warm but are now punishingly hot — that many open-air activities traditionally associated with summertime may now have to be moved indoors because of rising temperatures.
Pattee spoke to Aaron Bernstein, the former interim director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, for her piece, and he pointed out something I wasn’t aware of.
“‘The knowledge of heat and children is in the dark ages,’ (Bernstein) told me last month,” she wrote.
“Studies on the effects of heat have mainly focused on adults, primarily those in wealthy countries. ‘There were huge assumptions about what heat meant to children, which were largely wrong,’ Bernstein added.
“According to Bernstein, doctors have assumed for decades that extreme heat is a problem only for kids who are exerting themselves through sport or children with a health condition that is aggravated by heat, such as asthma — but this isn’t the full picture.
“During a heatwave, all children are more likely to be affected by heat illness, which can cause respiratory and kidney disease, as well as inhibit cognitive function.”
This only makes sense. Everywhere behavioural norms are changing as the world heats up, but that’s often a matter of adults conforming to working conditions, or exercising their own freedom to act.
For children it’s different. Pattee reported: “The question, how hot is too hot, presents two challenges. The first is that there is no national, or even state, standard for when kids should abandon outdoor activities, which leaves camp directors, sports organisers, and parents making these decisions for themselves ... The second challenge is that children respond differently to heat depending on their age, body size, acclimation to high temperatures, and preexisting medical conditions.” On the second point, in an Irish context, the HSE’s website carries helpful advice on looking after children in the heat, but there’s an echo of Pattee’s reporting on American guidelines: there doesn’t appear to be a cut-off temperature at which children should simply stay indoors and out of the sun because it’s too hot. Yet climate change means more and more hotter days during the summer.
Does it mean that that time is approaching — when the mercury hits a certain point — that children need to get off the streets? A sun curfew?
The importance of protecting children from the sun can’t be overstated — witness Jennifer Rock’s recent piece for this newspaper: “Research suggests that approximately 25% of the UV damage suffered by our skin during our lives occurs before the age of 20. This increases the risk of skin cancer later in life.”
Pattee’s first point, though, relates to the possibility that out-of-doors activities may just have to be abandoned. This raises an issue which crosses streams with everything else mentioned here — with Ó Faoláin and his brothers moping along the Wellington Road, with yours truly squelching through Blackpool in torrid July, with those kids squinting at their smartphones in bright sunshine while lolling around the little Paul Street plaza.
Is this the last generation of kids who will be free to walk around Cork on the hottest days of the year? While reading up on this I stumbled across the saddest neologism ever: solastalgia, which describes the sadness brought about by environmental change. It’s formed by the Latin sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek -algia (pain).
The presence of the Irish word solas? Just an apt coincidence.