Half Changed World

Today’s book is I’m Not The New Me, by Wendy McClure.  It’s the story of her popular weightloss blog (although she doesn’t call it that) Pound and how it affected her life.  (The link is valid — but McClure is mostly blogging about the book now.  She also writes for Television Without Pity.)  I have to admit that I had never heard of Pound before I picked up the book, but I had seen the infamous 1974 Weight Watchers Recipe Cards that she found and scanned.  (If you haven’t seen them, check them out.  They’re scary.)

The book is partially about body image and weight loss, partially about the weirdness of interacting with people who think they know you because they read your site.  As the title suggests, McClure didn’t really feel like the success story her readers were looking for, and worried that she was letting them down when she plateaued short of her goal.  The book is a quick read, interesting without being profound, amusing without ever being hysterically funny. 

It made me think a bit about the different genres of blogging.  Some of them — weight loss blogs, race training blogs, infertility blogs, and some illness blogs come to mind — are organized around a specific goal and therefore have, if you will, a narrative arc that draws the reader in.  Whereas other blogs — political blogs, most parenting blogs, most craft blogs — meander around a theme or themes.  You read them because you enjoy the writing, are interested in the topic, or care about the person, but there’s not the "what happens next" hook to keep you coming back.

On Sunday, May 22, at 1 pm, I’m hosting a house party for Miriam Peskowitz, author of The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars.  If you’re in the DC area, and would like to join us, email me, and I’ll give you directions.  She’s also reading at the Olssen’s in Bethesda on Saturday.

Miriam’s blog is Playground Revolution, which is what she wanted to call the book. There’s also a great interview with her up at Mothers Movement Online. Check it out.

When much of the blogosphere was freaking out over Judith Warner, Jody and I (and others) pointed out that Warner had interviewed a very narrow subset of upper-middle and middle-class parents in Washington DC and other major urban areas, and decided that they were representative of all American parents.  Today’s book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life, by Annette Lareau, explicitly uses the lens of class to examine parenting practices.

Lareau and her field workers observed classroom interactions, interviewed parents in 88 families, and eventually conducted intensive home observations of a selected sample of 12 families with third graders.  The book is structured with each chapter describing a specific child and family, each one illustrating an aspect of parenting behavior.

Lareau’s basic argument is that middle-class* families use a parenting strategy that she calls "concerted cultivation."  This involves intensive verbal interactions, including explanations of the reasons behind decisions, lots of scheduled activities, such as sports and music lessons, and parental intervention with outside institutions, especially schools, to get them to accomodate children’s individual needs and preferences.  By contrast, working-class* and poor families use a very different parenting strategy, that of "the accomplishment of natural growth."  These parents see their responsibility as making sure that their children are fed, housed, appropriately clothed, clean and attending school.  (As Lareau notes, these are not small tasks, especially for the poorest families.)  The kids spend most of their time in unstructured self-directed play with relatives or neighbors, in mixed age groups, and watch lots of television.

Lareau bends over backwords to describe the differences between middle-class and poor and working-class parenting approaches without judging one as better than another.  She notes that the middle-class children were more likely to argue, whine and talk back to their parents, to complain of boredom, reject food offered and demand alternatives, and even to say they "hated" their siblings. She argues that both approaches have strengths and weaknesses, but that our society privileges "concerted cultivation" and rewards the skills it teaches more than the skills taught by "the accomplishment of natural growth."  For example, organized activities teach kids how to talk to and work with new adults, but unstructured time teaches kids how to entertain themselves.  But the first is more likely to be helpful in the job market.

Lareau’s criticisms of middle-class parenting styles hit home.  There are times I find myself on the verge of tears, wondering whether, just for once, D might do something just because I asked him to, without a fifteen minute discussion and explanation.  My children are too young to participate in the huge number of extra-curricular activities Lareau describes, but I definitely see it happening around me, and know it will be easy to get sucked in. 

At the same time, there are still good reasons to choose concerted cultivation. In particular, I’m thinking about the study that found that a middle class hears more than three times as many words per hour as a child in a family receiving welfare, and almost twice as many as a child in a working class family.  This is quite consistent with Lareau’s findings.

I want to think it about it some more, but there also appears to be a significant overlap between "concerted cultivation" as described by Lareau and the "nurturant parent" model of the family as described by George Lakoff.  (The overlap between "the accomplishment of natural growth" and the "strict father" model isn’t as strong, in part because many of the lower-income families were led by single mothers.)

* One of the problems in talking about class in the US is that just about everyone considers themself "middle-class."  I had an interesting exchange with Amber at Listening to Myself about this.  She commented that Warner doesn’t describe what she sees in her neighborhood:

"Around here, we tend to practice something I’ve heard described as "benign neglect". The moms I know read a lot to their kids, but they don’t play with them. The kids play by themselves or with their siblings, with minimal parental intervention (mainly for really out of bounds behavior). "

Since I was reading this book, I asked her about the socio-economic mix in her neighborhood.  She answered:

"I would say that these people are middle-class, but in the more realistic definition of it – not upper-class masquerading as "upper middle-class". These are mostly stay-at-home moms (like myself) who’s husbands are police officers, teachers, lower to middle level techies (generally not managers) and the like."

Lareau would probably consider that working-class, since the men aren’t managers or supervisers, or people with advanced degrees.  But I’ve hardly ever heard anyone in the US describe themselves as "working class."

I don’t have a new book to review this week, and Jody just tagged me with the book meme that’s been floating around for several weeks, so I’m going to play along.

1.  You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

I was initially confused by this question, but I now understand it to be what book do you want to memorize to keep alive.  Assuming that I could actually memorize a full-length book, I think I’d pick Don Quixote.  It’s an Important Book, but it’s also funny and tender.  It’s also well-suited to be read out loud, which many recent books are not.  (I’m terrible at memorization, so in reality, I’d have to pick something like Where The Wild Things Are.  Also a fine book that I’d want to keep part of the human legacy.)

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Of course.  Everyone from Adam from A Ring of Endless Light to Strider from Lord of the Rings. (Heck, I still have a crush on Strider.)  And I really wanted to be Arkady from Second Foundation and Lessa from Dragonflight.

3.  What was the last book you purchased?

As Jody and Brian have noticed lately, I read an awful lot.  Both for money reasons and space limitations (we’ve seriously reached the stage that for any book that permanently enters the house, one needs to leave), I’ve gotten very good about getting books from the library instead of buying them.  Both my local library system and the adjacent much bigger one have online catalogs, and you can place a hold on any book and have it waiting for you when you show up.  Very civilized.  So, the books I buy these days are mostly either for the boys, reference, or really obscure stuff that the library doesn’t have.

That said, I’ve got an order on the way with Zinn’s Cycling Primer, Conditioning for Outdoor Fitness, and (thanks to Jody), Voyage to the Bunny Planet.  The last new hardcover book I bought for myself was The Plot Against America.  (Excellent book.  Given those space limitations, however, I’ll send it on to the first reader who emails me with a snail mail address.)

4.  What are you currently reading?

As usually, I’m reading more than one book at a time.  With D, I’m reading James and the Giant Peach.  I’m reading Unequal Childhoods, by Annette Lareau, which I should finish in time to review next week.  And I’ve just started Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse.  The main problem is that it’s huge, and too much of a pain to haul back and forth to work, so I don’t read it on the metro.  I’m usually reading something lighter as well, but not just now.

5. Which five books would you take to a desert island?

As a teenager, I re-read books all the time, but I rarely re-read books these days.  Too many things I haven’t read yet on my list.  Hmmm. 

Assuming I’m not supposed to pick things like the Boy Scout Handbook or Peterson’s Guide to Desert Island Flora and Fauna, I’ll go with:

• Jody said to assume that we already have the Bible.  I’ll make mine a dual language, Hebrew-English, with a line by line translation, and bring along a dictionary.  I’ve always wanted to learn Hebrew well enough to read the Torah.
• Moby Dick, because my dad says it really is brilliant.  I read it as a teenager, when I got sick at camp, and didn’t appreciate it.  And I know I’m not going to make the time to read it anytime in the next decade or so unless I do wind up stranded on a desert island.
• Pride and Prejudice.  Challenging enough to be interesting, but fun enough not to feel like work. 
• The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman  A recent classic.  Sold as a fantasy for teenagers, but appropriate for thoughtful adults as well.
• Tales of Neveryon, by Samuel R. Delany.  A set of interlocking stories in a fantasy setting, playing on issues of sexuality, language, power, roles, and much more. 

6. Which three people will you tag to answer this next, and why?

Oh, Jody’s right that this feels awfully Junior High.  And I agree with Anne Lamott that it’s a horrible thing to look at this tiny baby that you’ve borne and realize that someday he’s going to have to go through eighth grade.

So, I’ll tag Tiny Coconut and Anne, and save the third slot for anyone who wants to play but hasn’t been tagged yet.  Post a comment if you’re doing it.

Today’s book is Michelle Kennedy’s memoir, Without A Net: Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in America: My Story.  It tells the story of how, at 24, Kennedy found herself living with her 3 small children out of her car in the small town of Stone Harbor, Maine.

Kennedy tells her story in easy, direct prose.  She moved to Stone Harbor after leaving her husband and the unheated cabin where they had been living,  She was quickly able to find a job as a waitress, but didn’t have enough cash to pay the deposit on an apartment.  It was summer, and so they slept in the car at the beach, with occasional stays at a campground for the showers.

She couldn’t afford a babysitter, so for a while she’d leave the kids in the restaurant parking lot while she worked, racing out at breaks to check on them.  (To her great fortune, she never got in trouble with child protective services; later she found someone who would take a reduced rate and keep the kids overnight.)  Without a kitchen, they had to buy small (and expensive) packages of food that wouldn’t go bad without refrigeration, pushing up expenses.  And even when she saved up some money, most landlords didn’t want to rent a 1- or 2-bedroom apartment to a woman with three kids.

To the extent that Kennedy’s book has a message, it’s that homelessness is closer than you think.  She emphasizes her middle-class background, her year of college at a good school, the way she and her family blended in with the tourists.  If this could happen to her, she suggests, it could happen to almost anyone.

Kennedy applied for public assistance (food stamps and housing vouchers) twice, and was turned down both times because she earned too much.  She asked her parents for help, and they said no — but she didn’t admit to them that she and the kids were homeless.  She comments at the end that she didn’t realize that she could have walked into almost any church and gotten some help.  (Charities love cases like hers, where a single infusion of cash can make a big difference.)

I found myself thinking that Kennedy’s middle-class background was as much a hindrance as a help to her.  It certainly helped her find a job, a babysitter, and eventually an apartment.  But a young mother from a poor background almost certainly would have known more about the potential sources of assistance, and how best to approach them.  And — more significantly — a young mother from a poor background probably wouldn’t have had the sense of failure and shame that burdened Kennedy and prevented her from asking for help.  She wouldn’t tell her parents that she was homeless because they felt that she had already screwed up — by marrying young and dropping out of school, by having three kids so young, by following her husband to that isolated cabin.  She didn’t want to confirm their low opinion of her by admitting that she didn’t have a place to live.

Interestingly, Kennedy never turned to the most common "safety net" of the downwardly mobile — credit cards.  Late in the story, she gets a job working for a credit card company, encouraging people to re-open closed accounts, and admits that she doesn’t have a credit card of her own.  It’s unclear whether this is a deliberate choice.

Ultimately, the story has a happy ending.  Kennedy gets an apartment, a better job, and remarries.  She’s able to look back on her time homeless with bemusement, but without deep pain. 

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If anyone reading this blog has suggestions of other personal memoirs of raising children in poverty, I’d welcome them — it’s for something I’m working on.

Today’s book is Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, by George Lakoff, better known these days for his slim spin-off volume, Don’t Think of an Elephant.  In this book, Lakoff attempts to answer the question that I was left with after reading What’s The Matter with Kansas?, namely why are Christian conservatives willing to mobilize to lower taxes?

Lakoff is a linguist, specifically a "cognitive linguist." This means that he studies how the language that we use to discuss things, and the implicit metaphors behind our choice of language, are shaped by — and in turn shape — how we think about the world.  His core argument is that the real difference between conservatives and liberals in contemporary American politics is that they use different models of the family as their central metaphor for thinking about society.  Conservatives use a "Strict Father" model, a metaphor that supports belief in authority, self-discipline and self-reliance, reward and punishment; liberals use a "Nuturant Parent" metaphor, a metaphor that supports belief in empathy, openness, cultivation of interests, promotion of opportunity, and second chances.  Lakoff argues that moderates (and swing voters) are those who apply both models at different times, depending on the specific issue at hand.

Lakoff acknowledges that there’s no real way to prove the accuracy of a cognitive model.  Instead, he suggests that readers evaluate his hypothesis by examining whether the model is a convincing explanation for the world we see around us.  I found Lakoff’s argument a plausible explanation for many aspects of American politics, including many conservative positions that I fundamentally find incomprehensible.  (For example, why do many conservatives feel that same-sex marriage is a "threat" to "traditional marriage"?   Lakoff argues "Metaphorically, someone who deviates from a tried and true path is creating a new path that others will feel safe to travel on.  Hence, those who transgress boundaries or deviate from a prescribed path may ‘lead others astray’ by going off in a new direction and creating a new path.")  I’d be very interested in knowing whether conservatives feel that Lakoff’s description is generally accurate.

The public debate regarding which Lakoff’s analysis seems least illuminating is that about abortion.  Lakoff accurately states that pro-life advocates view the fetus as a human life, and abortion as the destruction of that life, while pro-choice advocates view abortion as a simple medical procedure.  But his attempt to tie these positions back to the Strict Father v. Nuturant Parent models seems both weak, and deeply cycnical: he implies that adherents to the Strict Father model want to punish women for the lack of self-discipline and morality shown by having sex when they’re not prepared to parent, and therefore decide that the fetus is a baby, while Nuturant Parent supporters decide that the fetus is just cells because they believe in sex out of marriage, second chances, and heavy investments in all children.  This doesn’t ring true to me, and certainly doesn’t explain pro-choice Catholics like Frances Kissling or pro-life feminists like Hugo Schwyzer.

As someone who spends my professional life helping improve the research basis for social policy, I found Lakoff’s dismissal of the role of evidence in affecting policy choices both disheartening and plausible.  He argues that there is a small subset of both conservatives and liberals who are pragmatic enough to be moved by evidence, but that most people are too wedded to their cognitive models to listen to any evidence against the policies they support.  Much to my chagrin, I think that’s probably right.  Conservatives like full-family sanctions even thought there’s no evidence that they are more effective than partial sanctions, but because they seem morally right.  Liberals hate marriage promotion programs because they think it’s an illegitimate use of government power, even though the evidence that kids do better in married-parent families is fairly strong.

I want to talk a bit about Elephant, and the political implications of Lakoff’s arguments, as well as of the significance of the two models of families for parenting, but I think I’m going to save both topics for another day.

I sat down last night to write my Tuesday Book Review on A Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle, but then realized I didn’t have much to say about it. It’s a mishmash of a book, part memoir, part reflections on teaching and religion.  Someone recommended it to me when I was talking about books on being a mother.  (I thought the recommendation was a comment on this blog, but can’t find it any more.)

That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the book.  I did, especially the parts where L’Engle tells specific stories about her life.  It’s somehow deeply reassuring to read that L’Engle wrestled with what we’d today call "work-family balance" —

"I went through spasms of guilt because I spent so much time writing, because I wasn’t like a good New England housewife and mother.  When I scrubbed the kitchen floor, the family cheered.  I couldn’t make decent pie crust.  I always managed to get something red in with the white laundry in the washing machine, so that everybody wore streaky pink underwear.  And with all the hours I spent writing, I was still not pulling my own weight financially."

But I didn’t really have much else to say about the book.  And then today I read (via Mother Shock), the question posed at Literary Mama:

"As a child, were there literary mothers of whom you were especially fond? How did those mothers inform your idea of what motherhood is? How were they the same or different than your real-life mothering examples? Do they have an influence on you now?"

And I realized that the answers that jumped into my head were both from L’Engle books:  Mrs. Murry, Meg’s mother (from A Wrinkle in Time) and Mrs. Austin, Vicky’s mother (from A Ring of Endless Light).  (Do we know their first names?  If so, I’ve totally forgotten them.)

Thinking about what made them attractive, I see that they are both clearly loving mothers, mothers whose children can talk to them about the things that matter, mothers who believe in the redemptive power of hot chocolate, but they also both clearly have a life beyond their children.  It’s Mrs. Murry who makes the children nervous by cooking meals on the laboratory bunsen burner, right? 

It makes me wonder how much of herself L’Engle poured into these characters.  I like that even though they seem like very much idealized figures, they’re not perfect.

In googling to research this post, I discovered that Madeleine L’Engle is still alive, at 86 years old.  In spite of my resolution, I haven’t been writing letters to authors.  But I think I’ll write this one.

D and I are reading James and the Giant Peach.  It’s his first chapter book.

Well, actually, I read Charlotte’s Web to him when he was an infant, and a captive audience.  But I haven’t been able to get him interested in a chapter book.  I’ve tried both Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, but they both take a while to get moving, and the chapters are a bit longer than his attention span.  (I am boggled when I read Catherine Newman’s essays about reading the Little House books to her 5-year old.)

James is about perfect.  The chapters are only a page or two, and each of them ends on a cliffhanger.  D keeps asking me "what happens?" and I tell him we’ll have to read the next chapter to find out.  He doesn’t seem too traumatized by the parents getting eaten by a rhino, although he doesn’t understand why the Aunts are so mean to poor little James. It’s great fun.

Today’s book is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcom Gladwell, which has been hanging out on the bestseller lists for a while.  Like Gladwell’s last book, The Tipping Point, Blink is an accessible look at an interesting psychological phenomenon, in this case, why people are (sometimes) able to make highly accurate snap judgments.

Gladwell’s a good writer, and his essays for the New Yorker are always worth reading.  He can take the unlikeliest of topics and make it interesting for 20 pages or so; his examination of the history and science of disposible diapers remains one of my favorites.

Unfortunately, Blink is over 200 pages, and while it covers topics from modern warfare to detecting art forgeries, from emergency room protocols to the Diallo shooting, it only has slightly more substance than the article that it started out as.  That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the book.  I did (and read it in a matter of days).  But I found the core argument of the book somewhat lacking.

Gladwell argues that humans have a great ability to make accurate judgments in a flash, based on limited information.  Except, of course, when we fail.  Gladwell argues that quick judgments fail when they’re based on the wrong kinds of information (race, gender, height) or when we try to incorporate too much information and get overwhelmed.  Fair enough, but in the real world it’s almost impossible to know whether we’re in a situation where it’s good to trust our instincts or one where we’re reacting out of bias.

Today’s book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas.  Over one-third of children in the US are born to unmarried mothers, a figure that has been steadily increasing for decades.  This trend worries a lot of people, both because children born to single parents are disproportionately likely to be poor, and because there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests that such children do worse on a range of measures than their peers, even after you control for income.  But while this trend is very well documented, little is known about why.

Questions about why are generally very hard for researchers to answer; it’s not possible to get at them with administrative data or big national surveys.  Edin and Kefalas are sociologists and ethnographers and so to try to answer the title question, they spent 3 years living and working in low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Camden, talking to 162 low-income single mothers about their lives.

Edin and Kefalas’ main findings are:

• Motherhood was highly valued by the low-income women they talked with.  It was their main source of identity, their main way of leaving a mark in the world, of creating hope for the future.  The idea of not becoming parents — or even of delaying parenting until their 30s, as is common for middle-class women — was horrifying to the women in the study.  One reason, although not the only one, is that many of the other opportunities that life offers to middle-class women are out of reach for these poor women.
• The women in the study valued marriage, and hoped to be married some day.  But they set very high standards for marriage — wanting both an emotional commitment and for themselves and their partners to have achieved some level of economic success — which they were unlikely to reach anytime soon.  If they held off on having kids until they had partners they saw as marriage material, they might never have kids.  This was an unacceptable possibility for them.  Having kids with men they weren’t willing to marry wasn’t their first choice, but it was a lot better than not having kids.
• Early parenting has very little economic opportunity cost for these low-income women.  The earnings path for such women is so flat that having kids doesn’t hold them back very much.  And many of the women told Edin and Kefalas that they were on the fast track into trouble until they got pregnant and turned themselves around because they wanted to be good mothers.
• Being a good parent didn’t seem like an unachievable task.  Even before having kids of their own, they had spent a lot of time taking care of children and mastering the physical skills.  They defined being a good mother as "being there" for the kids, and doing your best, not as providing a certain level of material goods.
• Some of the moral hierarchies advocated by the women in the study were directly contractory to those that dominate middle-class American society.  The one that surprised me the most is that they consistently believed  that having a child out of wedlock was  greatly preferable to marrying and then getting divorced.  They also felt rising to the occasion and dealing with whatever hardship life dealt you was a significant virtue; thus, having an abortion or giving up a child for adoption were both seen as signs of weakness, even selfishness.

This brief summary doesn’t realy do justice to the book, however.  Poor women are often the objects of others’ moral scrutiny.  Even generally sympathetic books like Random Family and American Dream portray their subjects as sort of buffeted by the winds of life, rather than as rational actors and the protagonists of their own stories.  Edin and Kefalas assume that these poor women’s choices make sense by their own values and priorities, given the constraints that they face, and let the voices of the women carry their story.  It’s worth reading.