Yawning is (Not) Contagious

And more about institutions

In the BBG times, I had no idea what a sleep regression was. Now. I. Do.

Welcome

Back in 2017, when I was part of the National Immigration Forum, we worked with the good people at World Relief to launch a program that engaged conservative white evangelical women on the issue of immigration. Our basic hunch was that this was a community that sought a different path on immigration and that with the right approach, we could offer that path.

Once we raised seed funding, we started to think about the right person to lead the effort. Which is when I met Bri Stensrud over lunch in Colorado Springs.

After years of serving as the Director of Sanctity of Human Life Initiatives at Focus on the Family, Bri was consulting with various faith organizations and was interested in getting more involved in immigration. Bri understood that by working on immigration she ran the risk of losing credibility among her peers. And while I really wanted Bri to lead this initiative, I did not want our work to create even more challenges for her.

To make a long story short, Bri took the gig, is now Director of the Women of Welcome and has a new book, Start with Welcome: The Journey toward a Confident and Compassionate Immigration Conversation publishing in February. In a front page USA Today article from last week, Lauren Villagren described the 130,000 strong community of Women of Welcome as, “By and large, conservative, anti-abortion and trying to square the Republican Party's razor-wire immigration politics with the compassion that their faith demands of them.”

Bri and the Women of Welcome have lost friendships and family relations because they want something different on immigration. Their work is more than compassionate — it is courageous. Hope you enjoy Start with Welcome.

More on Institutions

Kurt Ver Beek and his wife, Jo Anne, are Michiganders who found their calling in Honduras and, in 1998, partnered with local leaders to launch Association for a More Just Society (ASJ) to, “seek justice, work for peace, and lead systemic reform in Honduras.”

In 2019, I visited ASJ and spent time San Pedro Sula, Tegucigalpa, and with Jo Anne as my guide, traveled to the country’s beautiful highlands to sit with coffee farmers who had attempted to migrate to the United States. Whether it was in a church in San Pedro Sula’s most dangerous neighborhood, in a young man’s Tegucigalpa home who had lost his legs while trying to get to the US, or in the home of a young family who told me, “The most dangerous walk for a migrant in Mexico is the walk to the bus station - because they know you have money,” the conversations deepened my understanding of how a range of factors — from violence to corruption to climate change — were leading those with just enough resources to pay a coyote, to make the dangerous journey north.

The trip was the inspiration for my 2022 book, Crossing Borders: The Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants. (Where, FWIW, I also explored Senator James Lankford’s role on immigration.)

In any case, after my last installation of Cranky Dad, Kurt wrote to me, “Living in Honduras has taught me how HARD it is to build healthy institutions—police, democracy, courts….” Which made sense. During my brief trips to Honduras I saw how failed institutions allowed gangsters and politicians alike to act with impunity. How farming organizations prioritized bigger coffee growers over family operations.

The coffee highlands in Honduras

In a place like Honduras, where strong institutions were few and far between, the wealthy or the violent ruled the day. (This new report describes in vivid detail how the wealthy and the violent work together.) As a result, people made a perfectly rational decision to migrate to what they hoped were safer grounds for their families.

“Being in Honduras,” Kurt wrote, “I am often jealous of US institutions both sides are willing to tear down—I think people have NO idea how hard they were to build or how costly they would be to re-build.”

What would life in the US be like without the institutions we argue about so loudly? And, once they are gone, could we even rebuild them?

Which brings me to a finding from the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer: “Rapid innovation offers the promise of a new era of prosperity, but instead risks exacerbating trust issues, leading to further societal instability and political polarization.”

Moreover, “Trust in companies from global powers is in decline, worry over societal threats and establishment leaders misleading us is growing, while peers are as trusted as scientists for information on new innovations.”

Let me put it a bit differently. Trust in leaders and institutions is faltering, and the world is changing so quickly that we trust “someone like me” just as much as we trust a scientist. And I have to think that “someone like me” will eventually become whatever ChatGPT spits out in response to our questions.

So, if we continue to undermine our institutions and question expertise to the point where there is no shared political space - no institutions - to negotiate differences, how do we solve big problems?

More and more, I think it takes people like Bri who are courageous enough to engage their in-groups (in other words, “someone like me”) to offer a different way to think about big problems.

Baby Girl Don’t Care

Yes, parenting is a journey of entertaining, awkward and lovely moments. But, no one told me about sleep regressions.

After a sleepless six months, we took someone’s recommendation to sleep train Anisa at somewhere around the 9-month mark. Bedtime became much easier and she woke up only once a night. It wasn’t a full night’s sleep, but it was glorious.

Recently, she slept through a couple complete nights in a row. The excitement was palpable. “We are turning the corner,” Toya and I whispered to each other at 5:00 am, realizing all three of us had slept more than seven consecutive hours.

Of course, the following night, Baby Girl was up 1:00 am. The regression was upon us.

A friend laughed at us, “You got your hopes up.”

We went back to the research, did another round of sleep training, and, fingers crossed, it feels like we are on a path to a decent night’s sleep. (Famous last words.)

Along the way, I admit I tried to trick my daughter. Nothing insidious. But, I figured if I just kept yawning, she would start yawning. And, bam, everyone would be asleep.

Nope. Never worked.

At what age does a yawn become contagious? Because as many times as I have yawned in front of Baby Girl, she never catches the hint. Ever.

Well, in a rabbit hole I never expected to wander down, I learned that Ailsa Millen and James R. Anderson published a 2010 study, “Neither infants nor toddlers catch yawns from their mothers.”

After various rounds of testing, they found, “The absence of contagious yawning in very young children suggests that different or additional brain mechanisms underlie yawning in older individuals, and also that neonatal and infant imitation of facial movements are based on different neural mechanisms to those involved in contagious yawning.”

In other words, Baby Girl does not give a shit about my yawns.

Watching

The 1985 release of “We Are the World” was a global event. If you are old enough (I am), you remember hearing the song for the first time, watching the music video, singing along. In fact, in elementary school, I think I even played Stevie Wonder in some sort of lip synch rendition my class put on.

(Go ahead and sit with that visual for a bit.)

Netflix is out with a new documentary, The Greatest Night in Pop, telling the story how the song came about, the actual recording, and what it meant to the musicians who participated.

It was a pretty fun watch.