Half Changed World

Today’s book is Life, by Gwyneth Jones.  It’s science fiction, although it’s set in the near future of a world not too different from ours.  It plays with issues of gender and sex, feminism, love, parenting and science.  I enjoyed reading it, but was ultimately somewhat disappointed by it, as it never really delivered the climax it had promised.

As I mentioned previously, the main character is a working mother, a scientist, and her husband is a househusband and at-home-dad.  This isn’t really the main focus of the plot, although it gives Jones the opportunity for a few zingers.  Attending his kid’s soccer game, Spence comments to one of the moms, "It hasn’t been too bad.  I got to hear about Delilah’s mastitis, the hail isn’t right in our faces, and I managed not to be linesman."  Jones (as narrator) concludes: "They laughed together. There’s definitely something Ivan Denisovich about being a full-time parent.  You learn to take comfort in small mercies."  Come on, youth soccer can be bad, but comparing it to a Stalinist labor camp seems a bit over the top. 

Jones’ theme is that in spite of feminism, the sexual revolution, post-feminism, girl power and everything else, things stay pretty much the same.  And even if you erased biological differences (or rather, recognized that there’s more of a continuum than a dichotomy), things would still say much the same.  I agree with her that gender is a powerful cultural construct, even beyond biological sex (just as race is a powerful cultural construct, even though most scientist agree that there is little biological reality behind it).  But I think things are changing more than she suggests, although not as fast as I might hope.

Laura at 11d’s thought–provoking review of Mary Eberstadt‘s Home Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Subsitutes inspired me to get the book out of the library and read it myself.

I have to agree with Laura’s conclusion that this book is a methodological "disaster area." Eberstadt is totally scornful of social scientists’ attempts to distinguish between correlation and causation. At times she cites studies that support her arguments – although if you track the footnotes, she’s often looking at popular summaries of the research, rather than the researchers’ own papers — but she totally ignores studies that disagree with her.

In a mindboggling twist of logic, Eberstadt argues that the fact that "the country’s leading child care experts have all revised downward over the years their estimations of just how much young children need their mothers" couldn’t possibly mean it’s true, but rather that even pediatricians are hopelessly misguided, even corrupted. Only she is the voice of compassion, crying out in the wilderness. Similarly, she cites the attention paid to vaccines as a possible cause of autism as society’s desperate attempt to avoid environmental (non-physical) explanations for the increase in autism in recent years, but totally ignores the painful history of the "refrigerator mom" theory.

But Eberstadt makes enough interesting points that while the book infuriated me at times, I kept on reading it. While the discussion of day care has gotten the most attention, I think it’s the weakest part of the book. Her argument for busy parents as at least one of the explanations for increased childhood obesity was convincing, although she oversells her case by ignoring many of the other factors (suburbanization, expanded tv and video game options, increased perception of crime). Her analysis of the spread of Ritalin and other psychoactive drugs is much less controversial than she implies, but seems basically accurate to me. The data she presents on the spread of STDs among teenage girls is horrifying. The overall picture she paints of parental absence from the day-to-day lives of adolescents is on target. (See Patricia Hersch’s fascinating ethnographic study of middle-class teenagers, A Tribe Apart, for an in-depth portrait of this problem.)

Eberstadt concludes her book not with policy solutions (she acknowledges the absence of "quick fixes" to the problems she identifies), but with a defense of guilt. She argues that if parents (she means mothers) who have the choice whether or not to work or whether or not to stay married make choices that are good for themselves, but bad for their children (or for society), they ought to feel guilty. Conversely, she says that guilt isn’t a factor for those who truly don’t have the choice (e.g. need the money in order to house or feed their kids, are in an abusive marriage). I think that’s simply not true. Not having choices may free you from wondering whether you’re making the best choice, but doesn’t stop you from feeling guilty that you can’t do what you feel you should.

Today’s book is Should We Burn Babar: Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories, by Herbert Kohl.  In it, he discusses the ways that racism, sexism, and classism are maintained by both fiction and non-fiction written for children and how progressive teachers can help overcome these -isms by promoting critical reading skills.

The most persuasive of these essays is his exploration of how history texts describe Rosa Parks in such a way as to de-emphasize the collective effort that led to the Montgomery bus boycott.  He offers an alternative version of the story that talks about group planning and persistence as well as her individual courage and describes her as a community activist, rather than a poor seamstress whose feet hurt after a long day of work.  I was convinced by his argument, and am curious to see whether it has changed the tone of books published in the 10 years since this essay first appeared.

The most provocative of the essays is the title one, in which Kohl takes on the classic Story of Babar, asking what should we do today with books that are charming, imaginative, and entertaining, but also include messages that are subtly (or not so subtly) colonialist, classist and racist.  He points out that a hunter in a pith helmet kills Babar’s mother, the elephants are portrayed as uncivilized until they are bought clothes and learn to walk upright, and that the Rich Lady has power because of her money, which is from sources unknown.  Kohl encourages directly discussing these issues with children, explaining the historical context, and getting their reactions but concludes that an "uncritical reading" of the stories is sufficiently damaging that he would not purchase them for a child or a library (although he does not go so far as to encourage actually burning the books, the title notwithstanding).

We currently have four Babar books in the house.  A friend gave us Babar’s Museum of Art as a gift.  This contemporary book (published 2003) uses the characters from the Barbar books, but all of the racism and sexism has been eliminated, to the point that I can’t imagine anyone objecting to the book.  The conceit of famous artwork drawn with elephants instead of people is more amusing to adults who recognize the originals than to children, but the book is a nice introduction to the concept of an art museum.

My parents found another Babar book, Meet Babar and His Family, in their box of old children’s books.  This one is essentially an introduction to the seasons, showing the elephants engaged in leisure activities appropriate to different times of the year.  Only the boy elephants are shown participating in sports, but otherwise it’s fairly innocuous.

The problems develop as we get into the older books.  In Babar and Zephir (purchased on sale from Daelalus Books without an advance read) all is well until the last two pages when the General who rules the monkeys "gives" his daughter to Zephir to marry as the reward for rescuing her.  In Babar and His Family (borrowed from the library), the sexism is more subtle, but also more woven into the story, as Flora is shown as delayed and not having the adventures of her brothers.  For now, our solution is to redact the text as we read it out loud, changing pronouns so that Pom is also a girl. (The fact that the General’s daughter is a Princess makes my husband and I shake our heads, but we’re not particularly worried that our sons will learn that military dictatorships are an appropriate political system.)

Alison Lurie, in a recent New York Review of Books discussion of Babar, is pretty dismissive of Kohl’s concerns, pointing out the many charms of the books.  (Article found thanks to DaddyTypes.)  I think she misses the point; if the books weren’t so charming, no one would care.  They would join the thousands of other books published in the 30s and 40s that are thrown away as their pages crumble and no one would think of reprinting today.  It’s because of their charm that we have to wrestle with their sins.

I have some similar issues with the Curious George books, which are huge hits in our household these days.  On what basis is the Man in the Yellow Hat, who kidnaps George from the jungle and puts him in a bag, considered George’s friend?  This bugs me every time I read the original Curious George book.  In Curious George Goes to the Hospital, all the doctors are male and all the nurses are female.  And I know this is affecting my older son’s view of the world; he’s told me that I have to be the nurse in our pretend hospital.  This is true even though his pediatrician is a woman.

In another essay in the collection, Kohl talks admiringly of some books that portray concerns from the everyday lives of working-class children and families, such as A Chair for My Mother, by Vera Williams.  I think he’s right that it’s valuable for children to read such stories and that they are remarkably rare in books for young children.  (There are plenty for teens).  Let me therefore say that the people who wrote the recent book Corduroy Makes a Cake are total idiots.  This is a story using the characters of Don Freedman’s classic books Corduroy and A Pocket for Corduroy.  These are lovely children’s books that happen to address Kohl’s concerns; Lisa, the protagonist, is an African-American girl.  She’s not poor — she’s saved enough money in her piggy bank to buy Corduroy, a teddy bear — but she’s not rich either — she lives in a fourth story walkup and she helps her mother wash their clothes at a laundromat with a multi-ethnic clientele.  So what’s happened in Corduroy Makes a Cake?  Lisa’s been gentrified!  She now lives in a suburban house big enough to have a "sewing room" and all the other children at her birthday party are white!  What were they thinking?

For those who are interested in critical examination of children’s books, a google search found this thoughtful discussion of these issues on a bulletin board at a site called ChickLit.

I find it deeply challenging, even frightening, to publically admit to ambition.  Some of the issue is that I have a darn good life already, and it seems greedy and ungrateful to ask for more.  Some of it is that if I acknowlege ambitious goals, I will be one step closer to doing the often scary things needed to further them.  And some of it is the fear that if I stick myself foward as special, someone will unmask me as an imposter, an ordinary person pretending to be the wizard of Oz.

Anna Fels, in Necessary Dreams, (which I’ve discussed previously) argues that such ambivalence about ambition is a rational response to a society in which ambition is still seen as unfeminine and in which overt displays of ambition and self-promotion can be costly to women.  I’m not convinced that’s what’s going on here, though.

I usually am pretty good at locking my ambitions up, but occasionally they escape and give me a good kick in the teeth.  This often takes the form of a blinding flash of envy when I hear or read about someone doing what I’d like to do.  I’ll admit to feeling such a flash when I read in Ms. Musings that Amy Richards has a book deal for Opting In: The Case for Feminism and Motherhood, “an exploration of the anxiety over parenting that young women face today, mixing memoir, interviews, historical analysis, and feminist insight to bridge the seeming gap between everyday moms and the feminist movement while providing advice on how women can forge their own path in parenthood.”   

The New York Times has an article today about bloggers with book deals, including one story of a minister-blogger who was approached by an editor after just three weeks of blogging.  I think I’m still hanging onto the fantasy that someone is going to read this blog and be so blown away by my brilliance that they offer me a book deal, or a series of columns in a major magazine or "the standard rich and famous contract."   It’s not just that self-promotion is scary; it’s that I’m in the school of thought that devalues anything that seems to be the result of self-promotion. 

A few weeks ago, Salon ran an article about Iris Chang, in which one of her peers writes about envying Chang her articles in major newspapers, before learning what she terms "the Iris code."  Paula Kamen writes: "I had finally cracked it. And it was so simple: Think big. Almost to the point of being naive."  Is that the secret to success?  And if so, what to make of the fact that Chang killed herself at age 36?

Today’s book is Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.  It’s a sympathetic portrait of a group of people who represent pretty much everything society condemns about ghetto life — drug use, drug dealing, violence, teenage sex, welfare receipt, girls having babies with multiple boys and vice versa.  LeBlanc spent ten years with the members of one family — primarily Jessica, her brother Cesar, and his girlfriend Coco — tracking their lives in and out of jail, in the Bronx and upstate New York, following the tangled threads of their relationships, and describing their lives and their children’s.

I found it interesting to compare this book to Jason Deparle’s American Dream, which I discussed in October.  From the back covers, they sound very similar — both ethnographic studies of poor inner-city minority single-parent families.  But they’re actually quite different.  DeParle focuses on three women, but frequently pulls back to provide a broader context on their experiences and to discuss what their experiences imply about the success or failure of welfare reform.  LeBlanc’s narrative stays relentlessly fixed on her chosen individuals, and she carefully avoids providing any context for the choices of her subject.

Around HHS, there’s a lot of focus these days on "healthy marriage" as a solution to many of the problems faced by families like those discussed in this book.  And the advocates of this approach like to cite a statistic that the majority of unwed parents value marriage and hope to be married in the future.  Well, one of the things I took away from this book was that valuing marriage is sometimes the problem — these girls were often excited about having children with their lousy boyfriends because they thought it might get them to marry them.

As I read about the experiences of the children in this book, I got  angry.  A lot of them were just passed from house to house, left with whoever didn’t duck the responsibility.  Little or no attempts were made to curtail their exposure to adult sexuality, violence, or drugs.  Several of them were believed to have been sexually abused.  Even the women who prided themselves on their good parenting seemed more concerned with appearances — keeping the kids clean and groomed, buying them expensive clothing — than making them feel loved and protected.  I had to keep reminding myself that the "adults" in this book were hardly more than children themselves, and presumably hadn’t had any better experiences than they passed on.

The new issue of Brain, Child has an essay by Katy Read on "Mom Blame."  Read argues that society gives parents way too much credit — and too much blame — for how children turn out.  She bases this both on her experience as the mother of a "spirited" child, who was unruly regardless of how faithfully she followed the guidance of various parenting books, and on the findings from twin studies, which suggest that parenting styles have very little effect on children’s personalities.  In the "nature versus nuture" debate, she’s strongly in the nature camp.

In the author’s note, Read comments that she was recently interviewing "the author of a particularly reprehensible parenting book" who asked her if she’d "like some help changing them" when she commented that her sons were often difficult.  I’d bet dollars to donuts that this author was Phil McGraw and the parenting book Family First (see Tuesday’s post for my review).  McGraw explicitly states that he holds parents responsible for how their children behave — he thinks that if your children are unruly, it’s because you haven’t created sufficient consequences for such behavior.

My position is generally closer to Read’s side of the spectrum.   I’ll never forget the woman I once overheard at a party saying "I thought I had this whole parenting thing down cold until I had my second child."  She had mistakenly attributed the results of her first child’s compliant nature to her skillful parenting.  Children clearly have their own personalities from quite young, and they respond very differently to the same treatment. McGraw says that you have to model the behaviors you want your children to adopt.  Well, we model adventurous, healthy eating to our kids and have one who will eat anything that he can swallow and one who lives on peanut butter crackers and chicken nuggets.

But what Read seems to miss is that there’s a difference between personality and behavior.  I’m not sure where my older son got his extroversion — he sure didn’t learn it from my husband or me.  But I do know where he learned to say please and thank you.  So, if her kid is running all over the place in a fancy restaurant and bumping into people, I won’t blame her for not having the kind of kid who can sit quietly and draw for half an hour.  (Mine can’t either.)  But I will blame her for not taking him outside, or getting a sitter.

I’ve never read a book before because I hated the ad campaign.  But I did this time.  There was a big billboard at the metro station where I wait for my train every morning: "You couldn’t raise your children by the book because there wasn’t one…. until now."  This ticked me off immensely, but I decided that it wasn’t fair to give a book a negative review based only on the ad campaign, so I requested it from the library.

The book, in case you managed to escape the ads, is Family First: Your Step-by-Step Plan for Creating a Phenomenal Family, by television’s "Dr." Phil McGraw. 

However, when I got the book, much to my surprise, I discovered that I agreed with much of what McGraw says.  He opposes corporal punishment, supports listening to what your child has to say.  He promotes setting goals for your family, negotiation, and behaving in the ways that you’d like to see your children behave.  He discusses different types of personalities, and suggests adjusting your parenting style to match your child’s personality.  He tells you to limit your children’s television consumption and to establish family rituals.  Not exactly groundbreaking, but not horrifying either.

Perhaps the most controversial advice in the book is his advocacy of creating external consequences for whatever aspects of your child’s behavior is unsatisfying — whether it’s back talk, bad grades, or drug use.  He recommends figuring out what rewards and punishments are meaningful to the child, specifying exactly what behaviors are needed to get the rewards and avoid the punishments, and applying them accordingly until the desired results are achieved.  While he acknowleges that sometimes there are underlying causes that require professional help, he believes that in most cases it makes sense to address the "maladaptive behavior" directly.

I think there’s some truth to this argument.  I’m not in the camp that believes that any artificial incentives are wrong.  I used M&Ms to potty-train my son, and believe that it made all of our lives more pleasant.  And while I bitterly objected to my parents’ threat to not let me go to events that I valued as a teenager if I didn’t clean my room, my resentment was mostly because they’d spring this on me at the last minute.  (Hi Mom.)

But I aso think that there are major downsides to this approach, which McGraw glides past. Using such an approach — especialy for relatively minor misbehaviors — can poison a relationship and close down communications.  And, perhaps more importantly, I believe that such an approach can inhibit a child’s development of his or her own sense of judgement, which will be essential when the child is no longer under your control. 

I also found the tone of the book painful.  It’s basic parenting advice, but delivered as a lecture, assuming that you’ve been doing a bad job of parenting until now, and need to be scolded until you change your ways.  But then I thought about the ad campaign some more, and realized that’s exactly the audience that it’s aimed at: people who feel like their families are, at best, not living up to their expectations, at worst, totally out of control.  It’s aimed at people who want someone to give them a simple list of things to do and promise them that it will turn things around.

Even while finding that tone irritating, I appreciate McGraw’s message that good parenting isn’t something that’s innate in some people and not in others.  He believes that everyone can be a good parent, and that it’s a learned skill.  He notes that many people were imperfectly parented themselves, and bear the scars, but believes that it is possible to choose to transcend those wounds.

I’m going to let McGraw have the last word today.  In the epilogue, he writes:

"I ask only that you weigh carefully that which I have suggested here.  If it will not withstand vigorous challenge, then you should reject it.  I believe that Families First will withstand the challenge, and I believe in you and your ability to make a difference by using the concepts and action plans in your own family.  But if you do disagree, then please seek answers elsewhere.  If you totally reject everything I have said to you in this book but it causes you to have a heightened sensitivity and awareness and to find better-fitting answers elsewhere, answers that improve your family life, then I have been successful."

This week, I read Reading L.lita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi.  It was an interesting read, although I’m not sure I can say that I liked it.  Much of the book is a discussion of the books her group of students read, and not having read most of them recently (and never having read any James), I felt quite at a loss.  And I still can’t remember who was who among Nafisi’s students.  But the description of her life as a westernized female intellectual in revolutionary Iran is absolutely fascinating.

Overall, it was a more pleasant life than I would have imagined.  External behavior, such as dress, was closely monitored, with penalties for such lapses as letting a bit of hair peak out from a veil.  But Nafisi never seems to have felt at risk for what she thought, said, or wrote.  While she talks about some of her students who were arrested, even killed, she never seems to have felt threatened herself.  It’s unclear whether this was due to bravado, wealth, connections, or just luck. 

Nafisi argues that reading and discussing these western novels was an act of resistance, not just because they were disapproved of by the authorities, but because the essence of a novelist’s work is to imagine the world through someone else’s perspective.  She suggests that the greatest sin of the fundamentalists in Iran was — like Nabakov’s Humbert — to deny others’ humanity by denying their points of view.  I’m not entirely convinced.  But I do believe that reading and thinking about literature were essential to Nafisi’s self-identity, and that she couldn’t have foregone them without doing fundamental damage to herself.

Last week, Elise asked me how I have time to read so much.  I’ve realized that reading is an important element of who I am, too.  So I make the time, at the price of less sleep and a messier house than I’d like.  It helps that I read fast and watch very little tv. 

(Updated 12/8: in looking at the google searches leading to my blog, I’ve decided to replace the Os in the word "L.lita" with dots to try to get rid of the folks looking for pix.)

Yesterday, I wrote about Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice.  In looking for further discussion of this book on the internet, I found a PSB Newshour interview with Schwartz from last year, in which discusses some of the political implications of his argument.

The interviewer explains "Now, politically Barry Schwartz is a liberal who finds himself running against what seems to be the tide these days, more choice for every citizen: The private Social Security accounts that President George W. Bush has pushed, for example, where we would decide how to invest our own money."  In fact, the Bush Administration supports increased consumer choice as the solution to everything from health insurance to primary education, to social security, to job training (they’ve proposed giving unemployed workers vouchers that could be used for job training — or taken as cash if they get jobs quickly).

And then Schwartz says:

"People don’t have the resources, the intellectual resources, the time to learn enough in all of these different areas of life to make wise decisions. The point of public policy, seems to me, is to improve welfare.

"But who decides what’s in someone’s best interest? And the answer that we have collectively embraced, driven, I think, largely by economists is maximizing choice is the way to promote public welfare."

I have very mixed reactions to this statement.  When I think about health insurance, and social security, I tend to agree with Schwartz.  I think about how much trouble I have figuring out what is the best health insurance option for my family — as a person with access to all sorts of information, and the time to sort it out, and a graduate degree in public policy — and I find it hard to believe that there are a lot of people who are going to find it much easier, while I’m quite sure that there are people who will find it much harder. 

But I’m also vehemently pro-choice.  And, as my father asked (rhetorically, of course) this evening, how come Democrats are only pro-choice when it comes to abortion and not when it comes to anything else?  And he’s right, there’s something fundamentally inconsistent about saying that we trust women — all women — to make the best decisions for themselves and their families regarding abortion, but not regarding where to send their kids to school.  Or how to save for their retirement.

(Note that rejecting Schwartz’ argument doesn’t mean that you have to support these proposals; there’s a separate problem that most of these proposals deliberately eliminate the risk pooling that is inherent in the current systems.)

Today’s book is The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz.  As my loyal readers may remember, this book was the source for the Post article that I discussed last month in How to Be Happy.  The article intrigued me enough that I requested the book from the library, and I’m very glad I did.  It provides a theoretical framework for all sorts of common experiences; as I read it, I kept on saying to myself "oh, of course!  That makes sense!"

Schwartz’ basic question is, at a time when we have more choices than ever before in areas from the trivial (what cut of jeans to wear) to the profound (whether to have children, what sort of careers to pursue), why aren’t people happier?  At its heart, the book is a psychologist’s response to the economists’ claim that more choices are always better than fewer.

An economist will say that if you have options A and B, and you prefer A, adding option C might make you happier — if you prefer it to A — and can’t make you worse off.  And the same applies for options D, E, F and so on.  Schwartz argues that more choices can make people unhappier for several reasons:

• Figuring out all the choices takes time and effort.  This time and energy may be more valuable to the consumer than the improvement offered by an additional choice.  Schwartz argues that in a situation where one is faced by a large number of similar choices (e.g. the cookie aisle in your typical American grocery store), happiness is best achieved by accepting the first option that meets your minimum standards, rather than doing an exhaustive search to determine the absolute best possible choice.  Some economic models recognize this issue; Schwartz notes that an economist, Herbert Simon, coined the word "satisficing" to describe this phenomenon.
• When you compare a bunch of options, it is likely that each will have some strengths and some weaknesses.  Schwartz argues that extensive comparisons make you more aware of the ways in which your choice falls short of an imagined ideal, combining the best features of all of the options, and thus reduces the pleasure that you take in it.  This is especially true when you continue to examine the alternatives after you have made your decision.
• When faced with too many options, even if many of them are desirable, some people are unwilling to commit to any (and give up on the other possibilities).  Schwartz describes a study suggesting that the more options a company offers for investing in its 401(k), the fewer people will sign up at all, because they get paralyzed by the prospect of choosing.
• Even choices that are real improvements only make people happier for a short period of time, because expectations catch up to reality so fast.  Thinking that a new and improved detergent, television, or even relationship will fundamentally change your life is almost always a mistake. 
• Schwartz argues that people are more upset by negative consequences of choices they have made than by equally negative events that seem to come out of the blue and couldn’t have been avoided.  More opportunities to choose lead to more chances for regret.

I found this book deeply liberating in some ways, because I’ve often felt guilty that I don’t spend more time researching the options before I make choices.  (See my entry on picking a health care plan, for example.)  I’ve felt like I was being lazy, letting "good enough" distract me from a search for the best.  Schwartz passionately argues in favor of "good enough" as a way to escape the madness of endless comparison shopping. At a deeper level, Schwartz argues that always being on the lookout for a better option in the big parts of our lives — relationships, career choices — is a prescription for unhappiness.

I’m not sure what my reaction to this book would have been if my natural inclination was more to "maximize" — to seek out the best possible choice — rather than to "satisfice."  I’m not sure how much this is within one’s voluntary control.  I was reminded of Jennifer Boylan and her description of her inability to accept her "second best life" as a man, no matter how hard she tried. 

Schwartz recommends the practice of keeping a gratitude list, so you don’t take the good things in your life for granted.  What are you grateful for this Thanksgiving week?