Not your average kid

Benjamin turned eleven in November. He is not your average kid. For Christmas, he wanted a professional weather station and a gramophone. He collects weather radios, knows the brands and model numbers of them and can tell you what features each one has. He has always been interested in music and sound in general. He has perfect pitch and can perfectly mimic the tornado siren across the street from our house. Well, he could. Now, unbelievably, he is going through puberty and his voice is changing.   Worried about the parent he is being quarantined from who has the Omicron mutation of Covid-19, we stayed up talking about climate change and the history of the earth late into the night. I explained Amoc, or the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation to him as well as the TNC, or Thermohaline Circulation that interacts with Amoc. He had no trouble understanding it. We watched a couple of You Tube videos that explained the phenomenon and how it creates stable weather patterns with predictable outcomes.   I didn't explain tipping points to him. He worries about things enough as it is. But we discussed in general what will happen if the circulation of the ocean's contiguous patterns are disrupted. We already know that this has happened in earth's history before of course. It was this sort of disruption that caused the last ice age. Instead of alarming him by the very real possibility that the disruption of Amoc (Europeans tend to think of Amoc as the Gulf Stream but it's a bit more complex) could occur in his lifetime, I told him that if it did, a new ice age wouldn't spring up over night. Cataclysmic geological events like the meteor impact that 'killed off' the dinosaurs took some 10,000 years to do so. An ice age would take less time but the point is that these things don't happen over night.   It's a shame that the average adult can't quite fathom that their lifespan is miniscule and can't be used to measure geophysical change. It may very well be that because of the scale of events like climate change, the average adult doesn't understand and can only use as a frame of reference what the weather in their neighborhood has been like this month. Time is a funny thing. For instance, I wish I could go back in time, the time when people first began talking about climate change and present the facts without using terms like "global warming." What a misnomer. But of course, it's always easier in retrospect.   I've concluded that Benjamin is smarter than the average adult. He was upset about his parent who, since they had been vaccinated and had had Covid-19 the first time it swept through, felt they didn't need to wear a mask. He complained about this fact with some bitterness. He understands science better than the average adult.   Benjamin spent the first couple of months of his life in the NICU. Later we would learn that that is fairly typical of children who have mild ASD. He knows he is different. He talks about it openly but not often. Children with ASD thrive on routine. Unfortunately, his routine was severely disrupted in March, 2020. His life changed over night. I picked him up from school on a Friday for Spring Break and he never went back to school.   Luckily, he is very intelligent and faces his fears intuitively. When a couple of adults had a conversation about a terrible tornado outbreak that occurred when he was around 4 months old (he had no memory of the event) and all the people who had been killed, he became terrified of tornadoes. If the sky was merely overcast, he would become alarmed. He was 5 years old when that happened. One day I noticed he was looking at YouTube videos of tornadoes on his iPad. I worried at first, but his way of coping with his fear was to find out as much as he could about tornadoes. He found a tornado mod for Minecraft. He may still be somewhat fearful of tornadoes but he wants to be a storm chaser when he grows up.   In 2020, he became very worried about Covid-19 so I introduced him to the relatively new field of epigenetics. In 1976, a study on the effects of parents and children who survived what became as the Dutch hunger winter (Hongerwinter) during WWII, appeared to effect subsequent generations of the survivors in unusual ways. The report was met with skepticism. In the intervening years, evidence mounted through the study of other famine survivors, as well as Holocaust survivorsthat led to the incredibly exciting field of Epigenetics. Simply put, Epigenetics refers to factors that regulate the turning off and on of genes owing to environmental factors. Epigenetics may be the best hope for diseases like Alzheimer's which occurs when the genes that regulate learning are turned off.   Benjamin is very perceptive but he hasn't studied basic genetics yet. I merely planted a seed that gave his imagination a way to deal with the stress he has faced in the ongoing pandemic. The idea seemed to help him feel connected and less alone in his experience. He is not your average kid.