Half Changed World

Yes, that’s my book review in the new Brain, Child.  My hard copy arrived yesterday, and I keep fondling it.

I’ve blogged here about most of the books that I discussed, but it was fun to put them all together.  It was also a lot of hard work; I’m sure I earned less than the minimum wage, even if I don’t count the time I spent reading the books in the first place.  The experience simultaneously reminded me of why being a writer was a childhood dream, and made me grateful that I’m not depending on my writing to support my family.

For those of you who are just arriving here via my "author’s note," welcome.  This is a blog, a frequently updated website, with the most recent postings appearing on this pages.  Older posts can be found either chronologically, or by subject, as listed in the sidebar to the right.  I write about a book I’ve recently read almost every Tuesday.  I write a lot about work/family issues and politics and gender.  And, yes, sometimes I write about my kids.

Comments, questions, suggestions?

I’m wiped, so this is mostly going to be a few pointers to some links I found useful in putting that Times article about Yale women and their future plans in context.

• Gelf Magazine has the full text of the "survey", showing that many of the questions were fairly leading.
• Mediabistro reports that the students quoted in the article are pretty unhappy about it.  Am I being too cynical when I think that maybe they just realized that this is the first thing that’s going to come up when anyone — a potential employer or a potential date — googles them for a long time to come.  (Via Alas)
• Jack Shafer at Slate hit the ground running last Tuesday with an article pointing out Story’s use of "weasel words" like "many" in the article.  Friday, he followed up with a second article, noting that the Times had run a very similar article back in 1980.  I was particuarly amused by that, since the last time I went hunting for statistics on mothers’ labor force participation, I found a 1994 BLS article entitled "Are women leaving the labor force?"  Some things never seem to change.
• There’s been a ton written about this article around the blogosphere, but I think Fred Vincy at Stone Court does a particularly good job of sorting out the different questions that can be asked.
• Judith Stadtman Tucker at Mothers Movement Online offers a thoughtful response to the article that goes beyond pointing out its flaws.
• Finally, I think it’s worth noting that none of the family-oriented young women quoted in the story seemed at all interested in David Brooks’ and Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s advice that they get busy having babies right away.

I’m also working on a post about SAHMs and welfare, but I know too much about welfare and so keep getting lost on tangents…

Lots of people are picking up on the New York Times’ series on class, and in particular, their interactive calculator that lets you find where you fit on their class scale.

Both Geeky Mom and Angry Pregnant Lawyer are questioning whether they really deserve the class labels that calculator came up with.  Both of them commented that they don’t feel rich because there are people around them who consume much more, especially luxury goods.  Laura wrote:

"We’re just missing some of the markers: big house, nice car, lots of vacations. What we have instead is: lots of degrees, multiple computers, lots of books, "enrichment" activities."

The Times calculator doesn’t include consumption at all.  It’s not exactly clear how consumption and class are related. The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley argues that there’s an inverse correlation between real weath and conspicuous consumption; he claims that most millionaires drive old cars, cut coupons, don’t take extravagent vacations, etc. It’s also clear that plenty of people who are driving fancy cars don’t have a whole lot of cash assets.

The calculator also doesn’t control for location, and house values.  We make it into the top quintile on wealth, but only because we had the luck to buy our house before the market got totally out of control.  It doesn’t do us a whole lot of good unless we’re planning on moving someplace outside of a major metropolitan area.  Conversely, I know a lot of people who are easily in the top quintile for earnings, but are priced out of the housing market in much of the area.  They sure don’t feel rich.

If we wanted to make the labels more correspond with people’s subjective impression, I might call the bottom quintile "poor," the second quintile "working class," the third quintile "lower middle class," the fourth quintile "middle class," from the 80th to the 90th percentile "upper middle class," from the 90th percentile to the 95th percentile "rich," and from the the 95th to the 100th percentile "filthy rich."

***

Today’s story in the series is about how class affects health.  It compares the experiences of three New Yorkers who had heart attacks last spring.  I was seriously afraid that I was going to witness a repeat of the poor woman’s experience from that story tonight — two minutes into tonight’s PTA meeting, one of the mothers suddenly put her head on the table and said she was having chest pains.  But she wouldn’t let us call an ambulance, or even let the paramedics (who were only a block away) take her blood pressure, because "last time it cost a fortune."  She did let one of the other parents drive her to a pharmacy to get her prescription filled.  I hope she’s ok.  She’s a quiet woman who is studying for a nursing degree.  I often see her studying in the playground in the evening while her sons play.

So the New York Times is also thinking about what class means these days.  They’re kicking off one of their multi-day series of articles — today’s offering is "Class in America: Shadowy Lines that Still Divide."

The paragraph that immediately jumped out at me is:

"A paradox lies at the heart of this new American meritocracy. Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards. When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned."

Yes, exactly.  And I think that’s a big piece of why concerted cultivation has become such a dominant parenting practice among middle-class parents who themselves were raised by strategies much closer to the accomplishment of natural growth, or "benign neglect" as some of my readers phrased it.

"The scramble to scoop up a house in the best school district, channel a child into the right preschool program or land the best medical specialist are all part of a quiet contest among social groups that the affluent and educated are winning in a rout."

Forty to fifty years ago, the only people who practiced concerted cultivation were those who were determined to improve their children’s status compared to their own.  (Condoleeza Rice’s family strikes me as an example of this, as does the stereotypical Jewish parents who want their children to be doctors.)  Today, most middle-class parents believe that concerted cultivation is needed just to ensure that their children are as successful as they are.  And I tend to agree.  George W. Bush got through Yale on what was called "the gentleman’s C."  That doesn’t exist anymore.  (Although of course, there are specific practices that parents do in the name of concerted cultivation that I think are unnecessary, ridiculous, and even harmful.)

I’m sure I’ll have more to say as I read the rest of the series.

Also, reading this article online, I see that the Times has attached hyperlinks to the names of most of the researchers citing, linking to their professional web pages.  This is the first time I’ve noticed them doing this — have I just been oblivious or is this something new on their part?  I definitely approve.

Dang, Judith Warner must have a good publicist.  She has no less than three different articles out in major publications, all based on her new book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.

Her Valentine’s Day op-ed in the New York Times asks "Is our national romance with our children sucking the emotional life out of our marriages?"  She concludes that it is, and urges readers to stop making construction paper cards for their children’s classmates and to go on a real date with their spouses.  While she’s at it, she blames the family bed and extended co-sleeping for a decline in physical intimacy.

The second story is the cover article in Newsweek, entitled Mommy Madness.  In this Warner describes a generation of miserable mothers, driven to desperation by their own high expectations and lack of societal support:

"Life was hard. It was stressful. It was expensive. Jobs—and children—were demanding. And the ambitious form of motherhood most of us wanted to practice was utterly incompatible with any kind of outside work, or friendship, or life, generally." 

Warner then tries to tie this in to an argument that we need societal supports for parenting — tax incentives to promote family-friendly work, high quality day care for both full-time working parents and as occasional relief for at-home parents, more opportunities for part-time work.  I generally think these are good things, but it’s not clear how they’re going to solve the problems of the women featured in the article, who can’t sleep at night because they’re worried about the preschool party they’re organizing.  What they need is to get a grip. 

As Jody at Raising WEG points out, this cult of the hyper-parent is very much a middle-class privilege, and far from the universal state.  Most parents are plenty busy just from doing the basics — earning a living, keeping their kids clean and fed and the homework done — not from participating in a million afterschool activities or distressing store-bought pies to look homemade.

As I see it, the middle-class stress of extreme parenting is driven by several factors:

First, as Warner correctly points out, there’s been a decay of the parenting "commons."   Organized sports with registration, and schedules and fees have replaced pick-up games.  You can’t count on the local public school being good unless you deliberately pick a place to live based on the schools. 

Second, as being an at-home parent has become a deliberate choice rather than the default position, some at-home parents feel the need to justify their decision by giving their kids every bit of attention and stimulation possible.  This is how they prove that they’re not wasting their expensive educations.

Third, some working parents feel the need to justify their decision by making sure their kids aren’t suffering at all from their absence.  They try to cram as much attention and activities into the weekends and evenings as an at-home parent might do all week, and give up sleep instead. 

And finally, as Laura points out, there’s a natural tendency to measure what’s appropriate by looking at the people around you.  Moreover, the standard of comparison is usually the "best" of those around you, not the average.  So it just takes one family having a magician at their kid’s party for everyone in their social circle to start wondering whether they should be having a puppet show.  And the expectations creep up as each family joins in. (My personal act of resistance against this madness is to respond "YOU DON’T NEED A GOODY BAG" every time someone posts on the DC Urban Moms list asking what items are good for a goody bag for a 3-year-olds party.)

Third article is from Elle, and it mostly emphasizes the differences between American and French attitudes towards parenting.  It’s by far the most interesting of the three articles, making the point that the whole culture of intense parenting is a uniquely American phenomenon.  Warner concludes that the problem is an ideology that is so widespread that it’s hardly ever questioned:

"[It] tell us that we are the luckiest women in the world, with the most wealth, the most choices. It says we have the know-how to make “informed decisions” that will guarantee our children’s success. It tells us that if we choose badly, our children will fall prey to countless dangers—from insecure attachment to drugs to a third-rate college. And if our children do stray from the right path, we’ll have no one but ourselves to blame. To point fingers at society is to shirk “personal responsibility.”"

I’m intrigued enough to put Warner’s book on hold at the library.  I’ll report back when I’ve read it.  I’m wondering if there’s not an overlap with some of the arguments that Schwartz makes in The Paradox of Choice.

Via a chain of blogs, I found this flash photo-essay of "a day in the life of moms working at Mothering." (For those of you with slow connections, it’s a series of pictures of babies and children in the office, some being held on mommy’s lap while she types or talks, some playing on the floor, etc.)

Demi at Pilgrim’s Progress comments "There is no reason whatsoever to think that every office couldn’t look something like that."

The pictures are awfully cute, but I wouldn’t want to have to do my job while caring for small children at the same time.  My experience with working from home, while caring for children at the same time, is that I always felt like I was doing an inadequate job at both parenting and my paid job, with neither getting my full attention.  And I was totally frazzled, with never the opportunity to drink a cup of tea in peace — if it was naptime, I had to jump to get down to work.  Add to that a less than entirely childproofed office, and it sounds like a total nightmare.

I definitely could imagine this working with a tiny infant, especially one who slept a lot, or who was content hanging out in a sling.  It’s a lot harder for me to imagine bringing my toddler, whose favorite activities these days include: pulling things off shelves, taking things out of trash cans, putting things in trash cans, putting things in his mouth, and pulling on cords to see what happens.  Or rather, it’s far too easy for me to imagine what would result.  I could probably bring my preschooler to work in an emergency, but I’d have to let him use my computer all day (or bring in the portable DVD player) if I wanted to keep him out of trouble.

The discussion of this in the comments at Alas, A Blog also raise the question of whether this would be fair to other workers, as well as pointing out that not everyone works in an office.  They’re worth reading.

Does anyone reading this get Mothering?  The movie seems to go with the current issue, which features a cover story about bringing babies to the office, but it’s not available online.  I’d be interested in hearing whether the story is all about the positives (not forcing people to choose between work and time with their kids) or if it discusses the negatives as well.

Two links I wanted to share:

1)  The LA Times last month ran a series on the increase in income volatility — or family risk — that is the best piece of reporting I’ve read in a long time.  They commissioned original analysis of the data, talked to the right people to comment on it, and brought it to life by focusing on the experiences of a few families.  This is really about as good as it gets.   Kevin Drum pointed it out when the second article came out, and there’s a long series of comments on his post, some of which are also interesting (and some of which are the usual name-calling blather).

2) Tomorrow (Friday), the Center for Law and Social Policy kicks off their audioconference series on "The Family Squeeze" with a dicussion of a UK law that guarantees workers the right to ask for a flexible schedule.  CLASP is one of my favorite research and advocacy organizations, so I’m excited that they’re taking on work-family issues.  Should be interesting.

I get Granta because it was free with my subscription to Salon.com, but I rarely have the time to read it.  But the theme of the latest issue is Mothers, so I put it in my bag to read on my commute.   I’ve now read it cover to cover, and it’s left me somewhat stunned.

The issue is exclusively about Mothers as seen by their sons, or daughters, or sons-in-law, rather than about the experience of being a mother. (There’s one essay by Alexandra Fuller about her experience of being pregnant and post-partum in Zambia, but even that one isn’t really about her as a mother.)  And the Mothers in the stories and memoirs seem right out of a book of archetypes — the idealized recipient of worshipful love, or the evil ogress manipulating her children, the housewife whom the children underestimated or the self-centered career woman.  The writing is powerful, but the images are painful.

A very different vision of motherhood is offered by a coffeetable book I bought while I was pregnant with D., Jewish Mothers, by Paula Wolfson, with photographs by Lloyd Wolf.  I bought it in part because it was at a reading organized by people I knew, but also because I wanted to study the pictures to see if I could find myself in them, if these were women I could imagine myself becoming, if there was an alternative to becoming the punchline to a bad joke.

Tomorrow is D’s fourth birthday.  Today is the fourth anniversary of the day I spent in a hospital room, watching it get light and then dark again.  After four years, I’m comfortable and generally confident in my role as his (and his brother’s) mommy, more or less adjusted to being a mother.  But I’m still not ready to be The Mother, and I don’t think I ever will be.

Via Laura at 11d, I found this article from The Public Interest by Neil Gilbert on what makes a policy "family-friendly."  This article makes the policy case for the proposal from David Brooks that I discussed Friday a lot more convincingly than Brooks does, and deserves some of the attention that Brooks has been getting.  (I think the Brooks article is an attempt to popularize Gilbert’s argument, but could be wrong.)

Gilbert makes the obvious, but often overlooked, point that women don’t all want the same thing.  Far too many commentators look at a trend — whether the general trend of the past 30 years towards increased maternal participation in the work force, or the recent modest reversal of that trend — and act as if it says something about all women.  (Gilbert claims that "many feminists like to portray women as a monolithic group…." but this is a gratuitous slap; anti-feminists do the same thing.)

Gilbert argues that it’s useful to think of a continuum of work-family preferences among women in the US, from "traditional" women who "derive most of their sense of personal identity and achievement from the traditional childrearing responsibilities and from practicing the domestic arts" to "postmodern" women for whom "personal success tends to be measured by achievements in business, political, intellectual, and artistic life."  In the middle, he places "neo-traditional" women and "modern" women who fall between the two.  (Interestingly, Gilbert uses number of children, rather than labor force participation, to divide women into these categories.  I’m not convinced that’s the right measure; when I have a chance, I’d like to look up how strong the correlation between the two is.  Also, like Brooks, he totally ignores the role of men.)

This diversity has important policy implications, as I noted in my second post ever on this blog:

"Let me start by saying that I think we’ve made the right choice, for us, for now, but I don’t think there’s a single right choice for everyone, for all times. (This isn’t just a wishy-washy plea for tolerance, but a general statement of principle, which has implications when we start talking about policies to support families — but I’ll get into that another day.)"

I guess today’s that day.  Back to Gilbert.  He goes on to argue that most "family-friendly" policies  — specifically referring to day care subsidies and family leave policies —

"address the needs of women in the neo-traditional and modern categories—those trying to balance work and family obligations. The costs of publicly subsidized day care are born by all taxpayers, but the programs offer no benefits to childless women who prefer the postmodern life style and are of little use to traditional stay-at-home mothers."

Fair enough.  Gilbert then proposes several alternative "family-friendly" policies that are aimed instead at the needs of women in the traditional category such as tax credits, social security credits, tuition breaks, and hiring preferences, all targeted to stay-at-home parents.  In other words, pretty much the feminist agenda of Mothers Ought To Have Equal Rights. (A similar proposal has also been getting some attention on a thread over at MyDD.)

Where Gilbert makes a lot more sense to me than Brooks is that he doesn’t pretend that these credits are going to move women dramatically from the postmodern or modern groups into the traditional groups.  At most, he suggests that they might move some women from the neo-traditional category into the traditional category — and he argues that this would mostly overcome the existing bias of public policy towards women who are combining work and parenting.  He also acknowledges that women entering the workforce after 5-10 years of childrearing would be at a disadvantage, at least in some fields ("those careers that require early training, many years of preparation, or the athletic prowess of youth"), which Brooks blithely ignores.

This post is getting long, so I’ll come back another day to discuss some of my concerns with Gilbert’s specific proposals. (I’m much more inclined towards something along the lines of the Simplified Family Credit proposed by EPI.)  But I think the underlying point — that people have different preferences, and public policy shouldn’t only work for the majority preference — is an important one.

So, David Brooks has noticed that it’s not always ideal to take a chunk of time off in the middle of the intensive phase of your career to take care of kids.  He thinks this is one of the reasons that people have smaller families than they’d like. So he’s got an idea:

"This is not necessarily the sequence she would choose if she were starting from scratch. For example, it might make more sense to go to college, make a greater effort to marry early and have children. Then, if she, rather than her spouse, wants to stay home, she could raise children from age 25 to 35. Then at 35 (now that she knows herself better) she could select a flexible graduate program specifically designed for parents. Then she could work in one uninterrupted stint from, say, 40 to 70.

This option would allow her to raise kids during her most fertile years and work during her mature ones, and the trade-off between family and career might be less onerous.

But the fact is that right now, there are few social institutions that are friendly to this way of living. Social custom flows in the opposite direction."

So he suggests tax credits for stay-at-home parents.  He thinks this will give people more options, encourage them to have more kids, and make everyone happier.  Why didn’t anyone think of it before?

Well, let’s consider some of the scenarios under which more women might choose to have children in their early 20s:

1)  The River Scenario.  As Springsteen sings: "Then I got Mary pregnant / and man that was all she wrote / And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat."  This is basically the scenario under which age at first birth reached historical lows during the late 1940s and 1950s.  It was dependent on two conditions, neither of which exists any more:  a social compact that expected young men who became fathers to marry and financially support their wives and children, and an economy that made it possible for a high school graduate to support a family.  Even if a young woman today could find a partner her age who wanted to start a family right away (which is pretty rare in the circles I travel in), it’s unlikely that he’d make enough money to allow her to focus exclusively on child raising.

2) The Older Man scenario.  Ayelet Waldman asks whether Brooks is really suggesting that 23-year-old women should marry 40-year-old men, who are more likely than their peers to be both emotionally ready to have children and financially able to support a stay-at-home wife.  And if your goal is to be a life-long at-home parent, that’s probably not a bad strategy (if neither divorce nor spousal death intervene).  But as Rhona Mahoney points out, we’re Kidding Ourselves if we think that after 10 years of childrearing, the women in such marriages are going to have much bargaining power when it comes to family decisions.  So, they’ll be able to go to grad school — if there’s a program in the city where their husbands work — and get jobs — as long as they’re still willing to do the majority of housework and child care in order to support their husband’s role as primary wage earner. 

3)  The Welfare scenario.  Alternatively, we could decide as a society that we value child rearing enough to create a program that would financially support people who do it, to the point that they don’t need to delay childbearing until they earn enough to support themselves and/or have a partner who does so.  Actually we used to have such a program, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), also known as "welfare."  Welfare never paid enough to lift families out of poverty, but if you were willing to get by on the pittance it provided, you could stay home with your kids.  However, as Mary at Stone Court points out, welfare reform was based on the premise that this was unacceptable behavior — that no one who is able to work for pay should receive public support for not working.  Maybe Brooks is proposing to reverse these changes — but somehow, I doubt it.  (I’m particularly bemused by the rave review Brooks’ column got from familyscholars.org, who generally line up with the folks who blame AFDC for promoting the dissolution of the American family.)

I’m actually quite sympathetic to Brooks’ more general point about examining the social structures constraining the choices that women (and men) have available to them.  But there’s a huge mismatch between the scale of the social structures in question and the policies he thinks are going to change them. 

Moreover, Brooks totally fails to question the assumption that workers ought to be available for 30-year continuous careers, whether from ages 25-55 or 40-70.  It seems particularly bizarre to try to restructure all of society to make childrearing compatible with such a career, just at the time when it’s less and less likely that any of us, regardless of our family choices, will have a continuous career with a single employer.