(That Time I Made Bombs…)
When I was 12 years old, I went to the library in our suburban town to learn to make bombs.
Neither an athlete nor star student, I didn’t have a peer group and was often ridiculed for my ideas and personality; a local group of kids started a “Get Merahn” club that terrorized me for years. I spent a lot of time in the library.
From readily available military and ordnance handbooks I created a private notebook of formulas and plans for explosives and devices. In my mind this notebook was actually the handbook, including training exercises, for a secret spy club — of which I was the only member.
After a while I took my lawn mowing money, rode my bicycle to the store, bought some chemicals and went home to mix up a substantial amount of some very dangerous stuff. I conducted some controlled experiments on the curb in front of our house and then made a few bombs which I exploded at a local sump. My parents had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, just wanted a sense of control over something, anything.
Then a kid I met suggested that instead of spending Saturday afternoon in the library, we could go to Manhattan on the train and be back without anyone knowing. After two or three secret trips, I lost all interest in bomb-making. I burned up my supplies in a pyrotechnic display for some neighborhood kids and buried my club’s handbook.
What happened?
In Manhattan, I found people like me. Well, not exactly like me, but the diversity of NYC imparted there was a place for me outside the confines of my suburban community. My clandestine exposure to the very thing my parents fled for the suburbs immunized me against isolation and social failure for the next five years.
A successful childhood demands diversity. As strange as it may sound, hanging out in the Times Square of “Midnight Cowboy” saved my life. Studies have shown that exposure to diverse cultures, environments and thinking is like a vaccine against long term social and interaction pathology. It assures that everyone will have sufficient social capital — those beneficial social relationships and affiliations — to protect against unfavorable environments.
Homogeneity is not safe for children and does not meet their developmental needs. Only exposure to diverse values, culture, aesthetics, ideas, and dreams can immunize children against social pathology. Children who emerge successfully from adolescence are those whose parents ensure their broader exposure to the world, including perspectives that differ from their own, so they ultimately can find their place in it.
Adolescence is a time of transformation and turmoil where you inevitably confront the disparities between the homogenous family narrative of your childhood and the heterogeneity of the broader world. Teens need to resolve those conflicts and decide on their own whether to embrace the family narrative or create their own story. Those who don’t remain conflicted, a psychological oblivion which, given teenage challenges of impulse control, increases the potential for dangerous behavior. Trust me, I know this moment well.
While restricting access to weapons is one approach to preventing accidental or deliberate violence; another is to understand why, beyond overt mental illness, children will reach for a weapon without restraint. Two reasons, curiosity and the fallacy of familiarity, can be managed with universal gun education of the kind we provide for tobacco use; a third, intent to harm, requires more than training.
Teens wrestle privately with their inner lives and are often reluctant to share; as we have seen from Columbine to Oxford, they will go to great lengths to hide intent to harm. Anger is an overwhelming emotion in adolescence, and a weapon might be perceived as a tool of relief and retribution. This is especially true where being victimized is an inherent element of your internal narrative.
Parents need to give their children the skills and permission to explore the conflicts between the family narrative and the ideas outside of it. And when parents are unable to reach their child, or unwilling to be developmentally responsible, our schools need permission to know more about children than their academic skills: how they are thinking, analyzing the world around them, interacting with others, not to shape the things they think or believe, but to help identify early children who need help connecting with others and exploring the notion of community.
Access to guns is not the only reason for children to cross the line from law-abiding to criminal. A developmental approach to understanding, interpreting, and interacting with children is far more powerful than punitive or didactic approaches that suppress curiosity, communication, and connection — the very things that we should be encouraging, the very things that could protect us from disasters like those represented by what happened in Oxford, Michigan.
Dr. Merahn is a pediatrician with special training in child and adolescent psychotherapy whose son is 15-year-old high school sophomore in an Oakland County, Michigan school district.
