Half Changed World

I was reading an economics paper today on "consumption commitments" and risk.  Postlewaite, Samuelson, and Silverman argue that long-term financial commitments have risks, making people more vulnerable to negative effects of sudden drops in income, but that they are often worthwhile, because they provide access to goods at less expense, or to a higher quality of goods.  And then — mostly as a form of economist humor, I think — they write "Having a child is similar to committing to a long-term mortgage, but without the default option" and note that "the rental market for children is thin, if it exists at all, with a long-term commitment being the norm."

Actually, Greg at DaddyTypes just posted about a company that is supposedly offering kids for rent, aimed at men who think they’ll be more attractive to women if they pretend to be divorced fathers, along the lines of About A Boy. 

But, if you can look past the issue about treating kids as consumption commodities, I think there’s an important point here.  There’s way too few options* in middle class society** between becoming a parent — and making a 24/7/lifetime commitment — and not having any significant contact with kids.

Take me as an example.  I literally can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I held a baby under the age of one before I gave birth to my own.  That’s nuts, isn’t it?  But I was both a youngest child, and the youngest of my cousins, so there were no babies in my family when I was little.  I babysat when I was in high school, but almost never for infants.  And I was among the first of my friends to become a parent (at 29 — which counts as young in the circles I hang out in).  I was a camp counselor for a summer, and volunteered as a tutor, so I had some contact with older kids.  But pretty much the only infants and toddlers I ever spent time with were those at the shul I attended.  And I don’t think I’m some bizarre anomaly.  (Am I?)

I wish there were more accepted ways in our society for people who don’t have kids, or whose kids are grown, but who like kids and enjoy their company to have ongoing nurturing relationships with other people’s children.  I think it would be good for the children, good for the parents, good for the honorary aunties and uncles (or whatever you want to call them).  But I have no idea how to encourage such relationships.  Maybe they’re easier when kids are older, more verbal, and able to do things without their parents around.  I don’t know.

*I recognize that there are some options short of parenting that I didn’t pursue — short-term foster care, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, even babysitting.

** I qualify this statement with the "middle-class" statement after reading Promises to Keep, where Edin comments on how much more hands-on child care experience her young subjects had than she did when she became a mother.

Via 11d, I found this interesting debate between Amy Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias about whether it’s appropriate for politicians — especially liberal politicians — to speak out about the ways that pop culture coarsens our society and presents constant challenges to those of us trying to raise children.

The posts are worth reading in full, but the key statement of Yglesias’ position is "liberals are characterized by the belief that the state shouldn’t have substantive views about these things."  Given that, he believes that it is pure pandering for politicians who oppose censorship to use their position to criticize movies and television.  He writes:

"If Dan Gerstein wants to write op-eds decrying Friends then let’s have at it. Friends is not above criticism. But Joe Lieberman shouldn’t be doing this. If he wants to be a movie critic, or a rabbi, or whatever he should leave the Senate and let someone else write the laws."

As several of the commenters on his post point out, however, citizens look for politicians to do much more than pass laws.  We vote for candidates who seem to understand us and our problems, who invoke the aspects of America that we care about.  As much as Clinton’s "I feel your pain" has become a cliche, it worked.  And he was the master of proposing microprograms that didn’t cost a whole lot of money, didn’t do very much good, but sent the message that the government cared.

As Sullivan responds:

"I think that acknowledging the concerns of many Americans–even if you can’t fix them with a policy–is sometimes just the obvious and right thing to do, and shouldn’t always be given the perjorative label of pandering….sometimes it’s not about policies. It’s about proving that you’re not hopelessly out of touch with the real anxieties and concerns of many Americans."

I’d also like to see more people — politicians, sure, but also clergy, athletes, bloggers — helping people come together to develop ways to resist the onslaught.  Because there really is an onslaught.  I’ve written about the impact of advertising on my kids, and it’s only going to get much much worse as they get older.

NewDonkey writes:

"It’s not just about sex and violence; it’s also about consumerism, fashion-and brand-consciousness, and a generally superficial approach to life…. Matt is simply wrong to assume this is all about some "New Prudishness." As a parent of a teenager, I am not that worried that the ever-present marketers will turn him into a sex-addict or a sociopath; I’m more worried that he will turn into a total greedhead whose idea of the good life is stuff, and whose idea of citizenship is to demand a better personal cost-benefit ratio on his tax dollars."

It’s not enough to just say "turn off the TV."  It’s everywhere.  My son watches very little television at home, and we TiVo out the commercials.  But when we go to the doctor’s office, there are TVs in the waiting room, and when we go to the bookstore, the Dora books have ads for video games in the back.  And then there’s the matter of the other kids at school, as well as in the neighborhood.

As Jen commented on 11d, we’re seeing more and more parents — secular liberals as well as religous conservatives — feeling like the media is contrary to their values, and pulling the plug.   We’re also seeing more homeschooling for much the same reasons.  But the culture is pervasive and — unless we decide to become Amish — our children will eventually be exposed to it.  We can’t raise them in a bubble, even if we wanted to.

When I posted this week about D’s case of the "I wants,"  Parke commented:

"We also spend a lot of time in a church community with lots of other parents who are raising children in a similar way, so our children have many friends who also don’t get all the toys they want."

I don’t feel like I have such a community — and I think many people don’t believe that such a community is possible.  I think that there’s a power to talking about these issues in a way that makes people feel like they do have some control, rather than making them feel helpless and cynical.  The only people talking about this are the religious conservatives, and I don’t want to live in their community either.

I like what Anne wrote about this topic, although I’m not sure I entirely understand what she means:

"I became enamored with [the idea] a couple years ago, that to raise a family effectively today you must act counterculturally. That never fit quite right because I am too much a creature of our culture to turn my back on it entirely…. Instead, I can put myself and my family not against the culture, as ‘counterculture’ demands, but orthogonal (perpendicular in every dimension) to culture."

The post on "mother drive-bys" at Chez Miscarriage is now up to over 300 comments and still growing.  It’s funny and sad and bizarre.

I’ve gotten my share of comments about my parenting, but I’ve never taken them too seriously.  When D was a newborn, we were given two baby books:  What to Expect The First Year and The Baby Book.  These two books agree that you should use a car seat and that breastmilk is the ideal food for babies, and disagree on just about everything else.  This drove me crazy for a few weeks, and then I had the liberating insight that no matter what we did, someone would say we were doing it wrong.  So there was no point in trying to do it perfectly — we just had to do our best and accept that even so, we’d get criticized by strangers (or family) occasionally.

I think that’s the key insight that the miserable stressed-out parents Judith Warner talked to are missing — that no matter how hard you work at it, there’s no such thing as perfect parenting.   If you’re a good parent, you what you think is best, but sometimes your best just isn’t good enough, or what you thought was the best turns out in hindsight to look like a mistake.

There’s a Jewish tradition that you’re supposed to carry a slip of paper with a message in each pocket.  On one side, you carry "You were created in God’s image" and on the other side, you carry "You came from dust, and to dust you shall return."  When you get depressed you look at the first, and when you get cocky you look at the second.

I think the parenting version of this is that on one side you carry the start of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: "Relax.  You know more than you think you do," and on the other side you carry the start of Philip Larkin’s This be the verse: "They fuck you up, your mom and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do."

Today’s book is Dispatches From A Not-So-Perfect Life OR How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child, by Faulkner Fox. (Side note: until I started this project, I had never noticed how all of the nonfiction books I read about parenting have long subtitles.)

This is a hard book for me to review, because it’s such a personal narrative. It’s about Fox’s struggle with Motherhood and her attempt to keep her sense of self in the midst of the fatigue, messiness, and routines of being a mom to small children. She does a good job of identifying the problems she faced, but doesn’t really try to propose solutions or broad analytical frameworks. Her main goal is to provide a lifeline to other women in the same situation, to make them feel less alone, less crazy, less guilty. I wasn’t feeling any of those things before I read the book, so I’m probably not the target audience.

That said, I enjoyed the book. I didn’t find it laugh-out-loud funny, as some of the reviews I’d seen suggested, but it’s got a light touch and is well-written. Most of all, I liked the author and enjoyed spending a few hours in her company — if she lived nearby, I’d want to be her friend. She’s mastered the art of raising complaints/concerns about her life and the world without sounding either strident or whiny, which is a rare skill.

The book is divided into thematic chapters, some of which resonated more for me than others. The one that hit home the most for me was on friendship, in which Fox talks about her frustration with her inability to make friends with the mothers around her and the superficial levels of conversation she has with them, and comments that she wants to join an old fashioned consciousness-raising group to talk about motherhood, how it really felt, how it was often joyous but also frustrating. Me too. I found it interesting to see that on her website, Fox has set up discussion boards for women to talk about these issues — I’ve definitely found the internet, especially parenting email lists, my greatest source of support.

Fox thinks that it’s judgmentalism, and the fear of it, that keeps women from talking about these issues. That’s certainly part of it. I agree with her analysis that it’s hard to just put in the hours to make new friends. I also think the playground and coffee shops, those famous mother hang-outs, are terrible places to try to talk, because in neither one are small kids likely to safely self-entertain for long periods of time. My older son is now 3 1/2, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to learn if we have a playdate the kids now actually can play together for 20 minutes or more at a time and the adults can have something resembling a real conversation.

Fox would really like to be able to get together with mothers without the kids, and attributes the difficulties of this to men not doing enough child-rearing. I think she’s totally missing the perspective of the full-time working mom, who rarely feels like she gets enough time with her children. Sure, I’d miss an evening with them occasionally to spend with a good friend — but probably not for the awkward getting-to-know-you stage with someone who might someday be a friend.

Finally — at least in my experience — the biggest obstacle to friendship between full-time working moms and at-home moms is not judgmentalism but scheduling. Working moms want weekend playdates; at-home moms rarely do. For a while I was working a "compressed workweek" meaning I worked 80 hours a payperiod, but over 9 days rather than 10, giving me a weekday off every two weeks. So I’d have my day off and head out to the playground. I had fun with my son, but never really connected with the parents. They all seemed to know each other, and didn’t seem interested in meeting someone new, especially not someone who wasn’t going to be there on a regular basis.