Half Changed World

Today’s book is Because I Said So, an anthology of essays about diverse experiences of motherhood edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses.  Peri and Moses used to edit Salon’s Life section, back when it was called "Mothers Who Think" and some of the essays have appeared on Salon or elsewhere.

The essays are a mixed bag.  I think my favorite is Peri’s "Prayin’ Hard for Better Dayz" about how her son "went ghetto," in part as his way of coping with her cancer.  Ayelet Waldman’s essay about how she loves her husband (and sex with her husband) more than her kids is just as embarassing to read as it was in the New York Times on Valentine’s day.  I’m not sure if I’m relieved or horrified to learn that even Ariel Gore’s teenage daughter thinks that her mom is embarassing; if the original HipMama is un-hip to her kid, I might as well relax and not even bother trying.

But overall, I’m afraid I found the book to be less than the sum of its parts.  I think the upswelling of mommy blogs makes a book like this somewhat besides the point.  It’s no longer a relevation to hear the voices of smart, thoughtful, funny women talking about motherhood.  I read them every day.

Anyone who spends any time at a playground will discover that even at a very young age, gender differences start to show up between boys and girls in how they play. I’ve written before about how — in spite of the non-traditional gender roles in my family — my sons are both into traditional "boy things" like trucks and trains.

I also think that adults often notice behaviors that reinforce their preconceptions more than the ones that challenge them; we’ve gotten some odd looks from other parents when we point out what a spitfire some of the girls in D’s preschool class are.  I’ve commented before on how different personalities D and N are.  It must be very easy it is for parents of opposite gender kids to assume that the differences between their children are due to gender differences. (And as families get smaller on average, fewer have multiple kids of each gender.)

It’s clear that societal and cultural factors contribute a great deal to both gender differences and the perception of them.  Jo(e) wrote recently about the shoes that girls wear, which limit their ability to climb and run.  Mieke picked up on this theme, quoting a friend’s description of how other adults interacted with her daughters:

"They would talk about Rachel and Sarah’s clothes or their hair or call them "cute" and almost always, ask Rachel and Sarah if they had boyfriends (as I said this started at three). It was kind of a default question that adults had when they didn’t know what else to say to the girls. When the girls said no, the adults seemed stumped by what else to talk about, if they said yes, they would ask all about the boy."

But it also seems that there are some differences that can’t be so easily dismissed as cultural.  There seems to be a broad consensus  that boys tend to talk later and to be potty-trained later.  Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with autism and related disorders as well as with ADHD.  (I recognize that there are cultural factors involved in how these disorders are manifested as well as in what behaviors get boys v. girls referred to a psychologist.) 

Dawn and her very thoughtful commenters at This Woman’s Work had a wonderful discussion a few weeks ago about children, gender identity, and transgenderism. Like Dawn, my fundamental goal is to allow my children to pursue their interests and enjoy their desires whether or not they conform with traditional gender roles.  That means buying D "lipstick" when he asked for it after seeing one of his classmates with it (although I wimped out and bought chapstick rather than lip gloss — he was thrilled with it anyway), but it also means letting him play endless games about shooting "bad robots" (robots because we told him he couldn’t shoot people).  And yes, I probably struggle more with the latter than with the former.

But I also agree with Dawn that

"I don’t have a problem with a boy playing like a girl or even wanting to be a girl. But I start feeling challenged when a boy says that he feels he is a girl because of these girlish interests."

This past year, the principal at the local elementary school split the 4th graders by gender for their reading period.  Her argument was that the boys were more interested in nonfiction (e.g. books about cars, animals and sports) while the girls were more interested in fiction.  Such programs — which are increasingly common — make me intensely uncomfortable.  I worry about the boy who wants to read stories, or the girl who loves baseball.  But the truth is, the regular way was clearly failing the boys — the previous year, something like 30 percent of the boys passed their reading tests, compared to 80 percent of the girls.  That’s not acceptable.

On one of my parenting email lists (yes, I’m on several) someone recently asked about discipline strategies for two-year-olds.  I shared some of the basic approaches that we used — nothing terribly fancy, just stuff like leaving wherever we were when D’s behavior deteriorated, ignoring tantrums at home, validating the emotions even as we said that some ways of showing them were inappropriate.  The original poster then asked "how long did this stage last" and I realized that I had no idea.

N is approaching two, and developing some bad behaviors (throwing things being the most frequent).  So we’re starting to figure this out again.  The boys are sufficiently different that I’m not sure that our experience with D is going to be much help.  Except that I think it will help to know that there will come — and sooner than I might have expected — a day when I can’t remember how long this stage lasted.

One of the things that I like best about blogging is the ability to pull together different conversation strands.

Via Jackie’s blog, I ran across Yes! Magazine, and this article about the characteristics of great public spaces.  I was still mulling that over when I ran across Toronto Mama’s post about empty suburban playgrounds.  So I’ve been thinking about what makes some playgrounds successful.

Obviously, geography writ large is an important factor.  Manhattan playgrounds are always busy, even when it’s bitterly cold out, because apartment dwellers are desperate to let their kids burn off some energy.  Playgrounds in neighborhoods with mostly working parents are likely to be empty during the workweek.  But there are also lots of other factors at play.

We live about 2 blocks from the playground of our local elementary school, so we go there fairly often.  We’re often the only ones there, and there are rarely more than a handful of kids, except on Saturday mornings when the soccer league is using the adjacent field.  Why isn’t it more popular?  It’s not available during school days, for one thing, and doesn’t have any swings.  I also think a lot of parents of toddlers and preschoolers are scared off by the middle-school aged kids who sometimes hang out there.  There’s also a critical mass problem — because it’s lightly used, we often go to other more distant playgrounds because the chances are better of finding kids to play with.

The Yes! article says that public spaces are best when they’re visible and accessible.  I’m not sure that’s always true — the playground in the area that’s most popular with parents of toddlers is set back from the street.  Parents like it because it’s fully enclosed, so kids can’t wander off easily, and shaded.  And it’s just a few blocks from the all-important Starbucks.

On the other hand, we’re not the only ones who bring our kids in the evenings to play on the "stage" in the plaza in front of City Hall.  Yes! would approve of the plaza, which usually has a mixture of tourists, couples, parents and kids, homeless people, dogwalkers, skater-punk teens, and people who have business to do at City Hall.  The stage is just a raised platform, with a ramp on one side and steps on the other, but my kids will run around on it for hours.

In discussions about the issues involved in choosing a school for one’s children, Bitch, PhD has raised the example of the black kids who faced both emotional and physical danger as they attended previously all-white schools:

"I’m torn on the question of whether one sacrifices one’s kid’s safety and future: I keep thinking of the Little Rock Nine. Black parents and black children made *enormous* sacrifices to integrate schools; part of the reason integration hasn’t been as successful as it should have been is because white parents didn’t."

She’s right, but I don’t think this is an unambiguous moral choice.  As a parent, you have obligations to your child as well as to the world, and sometimes they conflict.

I was reminded of this quandry today reading this post at From 0 to 5 (via This Woman’s Work).  The writer of this blog (Holly) and her partner are adoptive and foster parents to some extremely troubled kids, and sometimes these kids act out in ways that hurt the other kids in the family.

I’d really like to be a foster parent someday; I think it’s incredibly important work.  But I’m not sure it’s fair to my kids to bring into their home a person who would take so much of our emotional energy and who might well hurt them.  I know, there are no guarantees in life — either of our kids could turn out to have extremely high needs, and the other might feel that he got the short end of the stick.  But there seems to me a difference between such things happening by the luck of the draw and such things happening because you sought them out.

I hope this doesn’t come across as critical of either the parents of the Little Rock Nine or of Holly and her partner.  I think they’ve made good choices, even heroic choices (although Holly cringes at being called a saint and I don’t know how she’d react to be called a hero).  But I don’t think those choices are the only good choices.  I’ve never heard anyone talk about the tradeoff between parental and societal responsibilities, and I’d love to hear it discussed.

Someone recently shared with me a link to this essay on BabyCenter about the maternal instinct.  One paragraph jumped out at me with a vengence:

"My other fear was that the instinct would kick in fast and furiously, and I’d become a brain-dead turbo-mommy with a Kleenex tucked in my sleeve rattling on about nothing but constructive play and growth percentiles. I’d stop working and simply gaze all day at my miraculous progeny. I’d lose my friends and start hanging out only with other mothers who snacked Cheerios out of tiny plastic bags, smelled faintly of baby vomit, and carried fat wallets stuffed with photos of startled-looking infants."

The stereotypes in that paragraph made me grind my teeth.  I often have tissues in my purse or my pocket (both clean and used), along with crayons and a matchbox car or two.  I’ve been known to eat cheerios out of little plastic bags, and when my kids were at the spitting up stage, I probably smelled of it.  (One definition of maternal instinct: when your kid throws up, and your first reaction is to stick your hand out to catch the puke rather than to jump out of the way.)  But I dare anyone to call me brain-dead.

My experience is that motherhood doesn’t change people’s fundamental personalities.  People who were smart are smart mommies.  People who were cynical are cynical mommies.  People who were overachievers are overachieving mommies. 

But yes, your interests do change when you become a parent.  Things that you never thought much about (cloth v. disposible diapers, the quality of local schools, how little sleep it’s possible to function on) become fascinating.  Things that once seemed essential (first run movies, parties that start at 10 pm) become distant memories.

So, it is sometimes hard to maintain friendships across the parenting divide.  (I know some people complain that it’s hard to maintain friendships when one friend is partnered and the other isn’t; I never had that problem, possibly because when I first got married, I hardly knew anyone else who was married.  If I didn’t want to hang out with my single friends, I would have been awfully lonely.)

Friendships that are based on circumstances — you work together, you go out to bars together — often don’t last when those circumstances change.  Yes, stay-at-home moms often hang out with other stay-at-home moms, because that’s who’s available to take a walk at 3 in the afternoon.  Working moms often want to get together someplace that’s kid-friendly because after being away from their kids all day, they’d like to see them.  But if your friendship is important enough, if it’s not just circumstancial, I firmly believe you can make it work even when one has kids and the other doesn’t.

For me, geography has been the biggest problem in maintaining friendships.  My friends from college live all across the country, and I  just don’t hop on a plane for a long weekend the way I used to before I had kids.  Four of the closest friends I made in DC moved away within a period of just over a year.  And I’ve found it much harder to make new friends since having kids; if it’s challenging to make the time to be with people who are already your friends, it’s triply hard to make the time to develop acquaintances into friends.  And trying to have a real conversation while also taking care of an active toddler or preschooler is nearly impossible, as Helen Simpson so acutely portrays.  (Parents of older children assure me that it gets easier when your role is reduced to spectator at their games or performances.)

In the comments to my review of Unequal Childhoods, Jen asked me what I think of Lareau’s use of the term "entitlement."  Entitlement is a bit of a dirty word these days: professors complain about how their students feel entitled to endless extensions on assignments and good grades; conservatives who think welfare is evil complain about recipients who feel entitled to food stamps or health care. 

But, is entitlement always a bad thing?  Lareau argues that the middle-class children in her study are raised to feel entitled to:

• participate in a range of activities, whose cost is rarely discussed in front of the kids;
• receive a significant amount of parental attention to their questions, interests, and accomplishments; and
• to receive a level of service from outside institutions, such as schools.

This rang true to me.  And I’m fairly comfortable with the idea that I’m raising my children to feel entitled in these ways, especially the second and third. If they’re assigned to a crappy teacher, yes, I’m going to be in the principal’s office complaining.  Ideally this would result in either for the teacher being replaced or receiving some backup and remediation, but if that’s not possible, I’ll admit that I’ll probably be arguing for my kid to be in the other class.  So shoot me. 

At the heart of the objection to entitlement is the sense that things — good grades, material success — need to be earned.  And I agree, I don’t have a lot of patience for people who expect to receive excellent grades, interesting jobs, nice cars, etc. without working for them.  But I believe that the opportunity to explore interests, parental attention, and respect and reasonable accomodation from authorities are not goods that should be limited to the privileged few.

As David Shipler and Jason DeParle have both pointed out, as a group, the poor feel less entitled than you could imagine.  They don’t feel entitled to safe housing, adequate health care, or paid sick leave.  When the welfare caseworker loses their paperwork, or when their child’s learning disability isn’t diagnosed until May, they rarely complain.

If too much entitlement makes you think that you deserve good things without earning them, too little entitlement makes you think that you don’t deserve good things and you’ll never get them no matter how hard you work, so you might as well not try.

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."

The owner of the MAWDAH email list (moms at work/dads at home) received an announcement about an academic conference this fall on "21st century motherhood: change."

They’re looking for papers to be presented for panels on:

• Economics
• Work/Family Balance
• Class/Race/Globalization
• Biology/Fertility Technologies
• Emergent/Innovative Forms of Motherhood

Abstracts due by May 15.

I’m tempted to try to pull something together on the MAWDAH arrangement, what I call Reverse Traditional Families.

I’m not an academic, so I’m not quite sure what goes into an abstract for a paper you haven’t yet written.  If any readers have advice, I’d appreciate it.  And, perhaps more importantly, am I crazy for thinking that this kind of conference might be fun?  I’d have to pay my own way/use vacation time to attend.

A few months ago, when Moxie solicited Bad Mommy/Daddy Confessions, she was looking for one-time horrors, and explicitly ruled out ongoing failings.  But, truth be told, I spend a lot more mental and emotional energy worrying about the fact that D doesn’t eat any vegetables than about the time I turned my back on him in the grocery cart and he fell on his head.  The fall scared the heck out of me at the time, but he survived, and I know that even the best parents have occasional lapses of that sort.  But deep down, I’m convinced that my son’s eating habits are a sign of my failure.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately around the internet about the health consequences of being overweight, the new Food Pyramid, childhood obesity,and Cookie Monster’s new message that "cookies are a sometimes food." I think it’s an important conversation to have as a society, but it drives me slightly insane on a personal level.  One of these days I’m going to stuff a little ziplock bag full of green pepper slices up the nose of a parent who smugly tells me that their child just loves vegetables because they’ve always set a good example. 

Things D will eat these days include all sorts of breads, muffins, pancakes and waffles.  Milk, juice, yogurt smoothies (sometimes).  Raisins.  Cheese.  Fish sticks (sometimes).  Scrambled eggs (sometimes).  Chicken "dinosaurs" and nuggets.  Ice cream, cookies, and cake.  But not icing.  Pizza crusts but not the part with sauce.  Hot dogs, although he prefers the bun with nothing on it.  Grilled cheese sandwiches. Peanut butter, but not jelly.  Apple slices when offered by his friend’s mother, but not when offered by me.  That’s about it.  He used to like blueberries, but won’t eat them now.  He’s the only 4 year old I’ve ever heard of who won’t eat plain spaghetti, no butter or sauce.  Pretty much the only fruit or vegetables he consumes are what we put into the muffins.  So we make a lot of muffins.

I’ve read Ellyn Satter’s terrific How to Get Your Kid To Eat — But Not Too Much and generally try to follow its principles.  We do more "short-order cooking" (e.g. microwaving one of his preferred foods) than she recommends, but the alternative would be his eating just bread for multiple meals, which doesn’t seem like an improvement.  We give him stars for trying new foods; five stars earn him small toys that he covets.  Last weekend, he threw up after we insisted that he take a single bite of mashed potatoes at the seder if he wanted any desert.

Is D overweight?  No.  If anything, he’s on the skinny side.  If one of his preferred foods isn’t available, he’ll generally do without eating.  He’s active and healthy, so we try not to worry too much.

Meanwhile N, at 18 months, will eat pretty much anything he can swallow.  He loves tomatoes, and screams with frustration if I try to eat one in front of him without sharing.  The only food I can think of that he’s rejected outright is avocado.  And — I swear — we haven’t done anything differently with the two boys.  If anything, N’s been exposed to more convenience foods.  Go figure.

Last week, Reuters ran a story under the headline First Week Critical in Childhood Obesity — US Study.  The article began:

"What you feed a newborn baby during the first week of life could be critical in deciding whether that baby grows up to be obese, U.S. researchers said on Monday."

and later explained:

"Writing in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, they said each additional 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of weight gained during the first eight days of life increased a baby’s risk of becoming an overweight adult by about 10 percent."

It sounds like this is a pure correlational study.  If that’s the case, I’m not convinced that this is about anything the parents do or don’t do.  I could make an argument that this might mean, instead, that even in the first week, humans have different thresholds for when they feel "full."