I’ve got two kids, both boys. They’re three and one respectively.

The oldest is incredibly high energy and leaps first and thinks later. He loves making people smile and is always performing.

The younger one is much more methodical. He’ll slowly ease his way into things so he does get hurt. The youngest also doesn’t give a crap about performing. If he wants to do something, he’ll do it, and if he doesn’t want to, best of luck getting him to do it.

I love both of my kids, but almost every day there’s at least one moment where I want to put them in a box full of fruit snacks and packing peanuts and mail them to grandma’s house for a week.

You see, the thing about kids is they’re dumb.

I don’t mean they’re unintelligent. My oldest will talk your ear off and the youngest has found ways to convey fairly complicated ideas without yet uttering a word.

What I mean is that their teeny tiny brains are not fully developed, and frankly, won’t be fully developed for another decade or two.

This isn’t unusual. In fact, it’s normal. Study after study shows that human brains take a long time to mature and develop.

We’re used to giving kids more and more responsibility as they age, which is good, but we oftentimes forget that they’re still undeveloped hoodlums that can’t always think things through.

Hence the packing peanuts.

Because their noggins are undeveloped, and we’re civilized human beings, we have rules in our family so we don’t end up killing each other.

The kids are allowed to have their doors open at night, but if we catch them outside of their room for a non-bathroom-related reason those doors get shut for the rest of the night. They can have a pb&j for dinner if they have at least one bite of whatever we made and they decide they don’t like it. Alexa’s timer setting is the ultimate authority of when it’s time to stop or start doing a thing.

That’s right, we worship at the house of Bezos. That’s what happens when they cancel normal church.

These rules are there because my kids aren’t old enough to make their own decisions yet. Their brains are still made of pudding. Not only do these rules keep them safe, but they help us (the parents) out as well.

Naptime rules are important. They give everyone a break to cool off, get some chores done, and they give us some added daylight hours to work from home so we don’t have to work as late into the evening as we would otherwise.

We can’t do any of those things if the kids aren’t in their rooms. This means everyone’s more on edge, the house looks more like a disaster than usual, and the work piles up for my wife and me.

Everyone loses.

As the kids get older, they’ll hopefully spend less of their time sneaking into the van at night to play during bedtime (a real thing that has happened) and those rules regarding staying in their rooms can change. But first, they have to earn those open doors.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the argument of whether or not masks should be made mandatory in the state.

When all of this COVID-19 stuff started in the U.S., it barely seemed to affect Utah. So much so that we started opening up the economy a lot faster than some other states like my home state of Michigan.

The problem is, so many Utahns have taken the reopening as an end of the pandemic, and not an indicator of trust.

Now we’re at a point where our hospitals may be overtaken by COVID cases, nobody wears a mask, and Typhoid Gary still hasn’t quite gotten to the point where he’s willing to make some hard decisions about mandatory facemasks.

Where we were once sitting pretty while Michigan was taking a hit, we’re now about to be overwhelmed and Gov. Whitmer has the coronavirus almost completely under control.

Their longer-term precautions worked where our early reopening has seemed to fail.

Now, I’d love it if the state didn’t have to require its residents to wear masks.

It’d be great if we all just did it because it was the right thing to do. Between masks and social distancing, we could mostly eliminate our COVID problems like everyone else who’s adopted that strategy.

But we clearly can’t be trusted to do it on our own.

The numbers show that much.

I think we can all agree that there are a lot of dumb laws and policies that are just dumb.

But making sure people wear masks during a pandemic that threatens to overwhelm our hospitals isn’t.

Maybe after we’ve collectively shown that we can be trusted not to spread disease, the rules can change, but until then, something needs to.