Sneaky Snakes
I was once hiking with a friend in the desert, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed something odd about a rock ten feet (3 m) away. Turning my head, I saw a large rattlesnake taking in the warmth of the sunshine.
I called to my friend, who was unfamiliar with the desert, to come and witness this scene. He came close to me but immediately and violently jumped back when he saw the snake I was pointing to.
“Why did you jump?” I asked, although the answer was obvious.
“I don’t wanna get bit,” he said, “and why are you just standing there like there’s nothing wrong?”
“It’s not the snakes you SEE that bite you,” I said. “It’s the ones you DON’T see.”
Then I asked him to imagine stretching the curved and coiled body of the snake to its full length, just as he would estimate the total length of a coiled rope. “That length,” I said, “is the absolute maximum that that snake could strike out from the point of its tail.”
Because this was a large rattlesnake, that meant that it could possibly have struck out three feet (1 m) from the present location of its head. Almost no snake can strike an object farther away from the head than 1/3 to ½ of the animal’s total length.
“This means,” I concluded, “that even though a rattlesnake is the fastest-striking poisonous snake in the world—moving half a foot in 70 milliseconds, or less than the blink of an eye—if you are outside its striking distance, you’re safe—not that I’d recommend experimenting with how close you can get.”
Protect Your Children from the "Snakes"
This principle applies beautifully to how we need to behave as parents and to what we need to teach our children. Often we are not aware—and certainly our children are not—of how many poisonous snakes are around us, or how close they are.
We fail to see the coiled fear, anger, social disapproval, porn, and endless influences that can suddenly strike out and bury their fangs in us or our children.
We don’t need to live in fear. No, we just need to be as aware as possible and respond before we’re within striking range. For example:
- When a child is using his phone behind a closed bedroom door, he may well be one click—or 70 milliseconds—from a bite of social disapproval, pornography, and more.
- When a child fails to complete an assigned task, the development of a damaging behavioral pattern is always lurking.
- When a child breaks a rule of the family, the potential dangers are often well beyond our immediate imaginations.
Solution? Again, awareness. Look ahead on the path, see the coiled snakes, AND assess the possible locations of snakes that could so easily be coiled under rocks, camouflaged at the base of a plant, or hidden in a dark but innocent-looking hole. Look for the holes and rocks where snakes often hide. Mostly you know where such places are.
Rattlesnakes have fairly predictable patterns of behavior, including hiding, and you can learn them and use them to increase your awareness.
The opposite of awareness ranges from unconscious oblivion to conscious inattention to denial, and those conditions can be deadly:
“Oh, it’ll be all right.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“They can handle themselves.”
“I don’t see a problem.” (Hardly reassuring)
“If there’s a problem, we can deal with it then.”
You can’t protect your children from everything. Sometimes dangers are so hidden that nobody could have anticipated them, but rarely is that true. Disasters are almost always preceded by denial or inattention.
Children who sustain severe head injury while riding a bicycle rarely were wearing a helmet, for example. Almost without exception, a child addicted to porn was left unattended and uninformed. And so on.
Be aware. Watch for the snakes sunning themselves openly on the rocks, but in addition we must look for the snakes we can’t immediately see, because those are the ones that bite you and your children.
