Half Changed World

I’ve been watching the movies in the 7 Up series of documentaries (7 Up, Seven Plus 7, 21 Up, etc.)  They’re interesting on many levels.

• As a parent of young children, it’s painful to watch the transformation between age 7 and age 14.  The 7 year olds are all bursting with energy and charm, while two of the 14 year olds seem physically incapable of looking directly at the camera.  It reminded me of Anne Lamott’s line that "worse than just about anything else is the agonizing issue of how on earth anyone can bring a child into this world knowing full well that he or she is eventually going to have to go through the seventh and eighth grades."
• These are, in some ways, the first "reality TV" shows.  It’s hard to imagine how much of a novelty it must have been in 1963 to have a camera crew showing up in an elementary school.
• One of the children in the series is Black, but there don’t seem to be any other non-white kids in any of the classrooms shown.  Twenty-one years later, one of the subjects has become a primary school teacher and his students are highly diverse.  It made me realize that for all the books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen showing Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in London, I know almost nothing about when and how that wave of immigration happenend.
• The filmmakers are very interested in class, and how it shaped the experiences of the children.  They ask the upper-class kids what schools they’re going to, and almost all of them were able to accurately state which public (e.g. private/exclusive) schools and universities they’d be attending.  I wonder whether that’s still the case in England.  In the US, upper-class families can generally count on their kids getting into a "good" school but even money and "legacy" status can’t guarantee admission into a specific one.  Class may have as strong an effect as in the past, but it operates through the "meritocracy."  (Although even in the 70s, one of the upper class students complained that the documentary didn’t show any of the work involved in getting into the schools that he was expected to attend.)

I’m up to 28 Up now, and am looking foward to the rest. (They’re on DVD through 42 Up — 49 Up was filmed this spring.)

So last night, I watched FX’s new reality show 30 Days.  It’s produced by Morgan Spurlock, of Super Size Me fame, and the idea is that each show is about someone immersing themself in a different way of life for, you guessed it, 30 days.  In the opening episode Morgan and his girlfriend, Alex, try to live for a month on what they can earn in low-wage jobs (the show says minimum wage, but Morgan at least earns a bit more).

The show wasn’t profound but I think it did a decent job of showing some of the hardships that low-income families face, the tradeoffs they have to make, and the ways that even a small splurge (like going out to dinner) or setback (needing to take a taxi because the buses stopped running) could make a big difference to the bottom line.  And the comments on the US health care system — how you can walk into an ER and be treated if you’re sick, but preventive care is hard to get — were totally on line.  The only thing that I think was unrealistic was that they both went to the doctor when they felt sick; most low-wage workers wouldn’t go to the ER for a sore wrist unless the bone was sticking out through their skin, and I’d guess that most would have let the UTI Alex got run its course for a few days to see if it would go away on its own before seeking medical treatment. 

And then at the very end, in wapping up, Morgan said something like "this experience has made me a better person."  I was curious as to what he meant by that.  I’m not in the school of thought that holds that poverty and suffering are inherently ennobling.  And while he certainly knows more than he did before about what it’s like to be poor, I don’t think that necessarily makes him a better person.  (I don’t think that I’m a better person than I was before I did my own one month experiment of living under the Thrifty Food Plan; less ignorant, but not a better human being.)

Turns out Spurlock has a blog, and he amplifies the comment a bit there:

Meeting people who are struggling everyday just to survive made me see that I myself didn’t do enough to help those around me. Since then, I have done more to volunteer, to reach out, to give a "hand up."

I don’t think that’s quite accurate.  I think it was the combination of meeting the people in great need and meeting the people at the Free Store, who gave him and Alex furniture, and made doing more feel possible.

I’ve mentioned before that I was a Mets fan during the early 80s. I still remember the excitement over Darryl Strawberry and his amazing natural athleticism.  I also remember the days he seemed to call his performance in, causing the stands at Shea to erupt with derisive chants of Daaaaa-ryl, Daaaaa-ryl.

Today’s book is The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw, by Michael Sokolove.  It grew out of a NYTimes Magazine article Sokolove wrote about Strawberry, but broadens the focus to look at all the members of the 1979 Crenshaw High School Cougars, possibly the most talented team to ever play high school baseball.  (Chris Brown was also on the team, and several of the players told Sokolove that Strawberry was only the 3rd or 4th best player on the Cougars.)

Sokolove argues that the 1979 team was part of the last cohort of US-born black kids to consider baseball their game.  Their fathers had grown up playing baseball, worshipped the Dodgers as the team that had given Jackie Robinson his chance, and their love of the game was one of the only legacies they had to give their children.  And Crenshaw was lucky enough to have Brooks Hurst as its coach, a former minor-league ballplayer who loved the game and loved the kids who played it, but was tough enough to handle their attitudes.

Sokolove talks about the members of the team, what they were like in 1979, where their baseball paths took them (Strawberry and Brown were the only ones to make it to the majors, but several were drafted and played minor league ball), and what they’re doing today.  Some have achieved middle-class lives through other careers — cooking and plumbing.  Brown, whose baseball career ended after a series of hard to diagnose injuries left him with a reputation as a malingerer, is a crane operator.  Others found stability through military service.  One, Carl Jones, is in prison with a 25 years to life sentence for three non-violent crimes under California’s rigid "three-strikes" law.  Others are drifting along on the economic margins of society.

And then there’s Strawberry, who is pretty much unclassifiable.  His baseball career is finally over, after more second and third chances than most players get, thanks to both his undeniable talent and Steinbrenner’s love of publicity.  He seems to have blown through pretty much all of the millions of dollars that he made playing baseball, some on drugs, more on the entourage of hangers-on he accumulated, but still has his famous name, which opens doors.  He’s been in and out of rehab, and finally wound up serving jail time after breaking the terms of his probation.  The cancer he was treated for is a kind that tends to recur, but so far he’s doing ok.

The book is a quick read, although the attempt to fit so many stories into a 279 page book often left me turning back trying to remember who different people were.  Sokolove provides ample evidence of how poverty and racism limited the players’ opportunities in life, without making excuses for their failures.  And he notes that American literature — from Updike’s Rabbit to Springsteen’s Glory Days — is full of (white working-class) high school athletes for whom everything else in life is downhill.  He argues that given the limited opportunities in life open to a poor inner-city kid, going for the lottery shot of professional sports isn’t an unreasonable proposition.

My favorite line in the book comes after Sokolove has visited Jones’ family, which acted as surrogate parents to many of the Crenshaw players whose own parents were absent or messed up.  While he’s talking to Carl’s sister, Tahitha, her godson, Marvin, is playing nearby. 

" ‘His mom is out there on crack, so I keep him with me most of the time,’ Tahitha says.  ‘I love him like he’s my own.  He’s three, so we’re just starting him on baseball right now.’ "

"The Joneses are their own little social service agency.  Faith-based.  When they see someone in need, they try to give them baseball."

After reading the NYTimes series on class, and my post about it, a reader emailed me to suggest that the discussion of inherited position within a "meritocracy" was ducking the question of genes and IQ.  For example, one of the strongest predictors of how well kids do in school is their mother’s level of education.  Is this because well-educated mothers read to their kids a lot and use more extensive vocabularies, or because they continued in school because they were good at it, and they passed those genes onto their kids?

It’s a fair question, and the truth is almost certainly a bit of both.  A paper by Erik Turkheimer et al. a few years ago found that among very poor families, the environmental conditions were more important than genes in predicting IQ, while among middle- and upper-income families, genetic factors were dominant.   The published article is pretty technical, but there’s a nice layperson’s discussion of it and interview with Turkheimer available from Connect for Kids.

This research suggests that there’s a threshold level below which children aren’t able to develop to their full genetic potential.  But above that level, what parents do isn’t as critical (at least with regard to IQ) as we often think.  As Turkheimer says in the interview:

“In the range where a lot of people spend their time…you know, ‘Should I hang the black and white mobile over my kids’ crib?’ kind of thing, it probably does not matter.”

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.

I went to a conference today for work, and John Edwards was the dinner speaker.  He’s now the director of the Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina.  He didn’t say anything terribly new or profound, but it’s amazing these days to hear a major political figure actually talking about poverty, and arguing for things like raising the minimum wage, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, even revitalizing the American labor movement.

He wasn’t my first choice in the 2004 primaries, but I think I may be signing up for Edwards 2008.

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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**************************

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

I’m writing about welfare today.  Since I do work on this issue, I feel compelled to state  — just in case it’s not blindingly obvious — that this is my personal opinion, and not that of the Administration or any portion of the federal government.  I’m writing it on my own free time, on my personal computer.  OK?

The Senate Finance committee reported out a welfare bill today.  Or, rather, the Finance committee having rules and procedures unlike anyplace else, they reported out a description of a bill which staff will later fill in with actual legislative language.

The welfare law actually expired in September 2002, but Congress has been too deadlocked to pass a new law.  So they’ve been passing 3 and 6 month extensions to keep it running ever since.  This is not necessarily a terrible thing, as Bush and the House Republicans are the only people in the world who think welfare reform didn’t push recipients to work hard enough, so they’re trying to make it tougher.

But it’s hard for states to run a program never knowing what the rules are going to be next year, and the proposed bills also include some important child support reforms that would encourage states to pass through more of the money they collect from non-custodial parents to the custodial parents and kids, instead of keeping it to offset their welfare costs.  And, in the current budget climate, locking in the block grant at current levels for another 5 years is looking like a smarter and smarter idea.

The bill the Finance committee reported out has bipartisan support, which is a rarety these days.  It makes the work requirements somewhat tougher, and includes money for marriage promotion, which is one of the Administration’s big priorities.  But it also includes an increase of $6 billion over 5 years for subsidized child care, which has been a huge priority for Democrats.  It’s not perfect, but it’s probably about as good a bill as I could hope for in the current Congress. 

So, the big question is whether the Republican leadership is willing to bring this bill to the floor for a vote by the full Senate?  And if so, will the Democrats vote to refer it to conference committee, without some sort of agreement that they won’t get screwed over in conference?  My best guess is no.  So don’t expect this bill to become sausage,  I mean law, any time soon.

Sidenote:  I googled the quote about "Those who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either being made."  Different sites attribute it to Mark Twain and Otto van Bismarck.  Anyone have an authoritative citation?

Today marks the end of our one month experiment in restricting our food spending to what we’d be allowed under the USDA Thrifty Food Plan.

As it turns out, we finished well under our $434.40 budget.  Our total spending on food groceries totalled just $340.84, with just under $40 in purchased meals (including one full dinner, one fancy coffee, and a couple of lunches at the very cheap cafeteria down the street from my office).  Even if I accounted at a fair price for the spices and such that we didn’t have to pay for because they’re in my basic pantry, we’d make it in under budget.

Following the suggestions of some of the commenters, I drove out to the Grand Mart supermarket on Little River Turnpike last weekend, which serves a largely Asian clientele.  I was mindboggled by the array of vegetables they offered — four different kinds of eggplant (American, Italian, Thai and Japanese) — and the prices.  If someone can explain to me why Giant or Shoppers can’t have half as good produce for twice the price, I’d be very grateful.  Unfortunately, after I had loaded up my cart and got on line, the manager announced that their computers were down, they couldn’t run the cash registers without them, and the store was closing.  And I didn’t have the time or energy to return later in the week.

We ate pretty close to our typical diet, although a bit heavier on the eggs and homemade pizza than an average month.  Although I didn’t track it, I’m sure we didn’t come anywhere near meeting the food pyramid recommendations for fruit and vegetables.  I’m not sure we do that much better in mid-winter even when we’re not on a budget, as I find the seasonal offerings awfully uninspiring.  (Although worries about the budget did stop me from buying some of my usual mid-winter healthy treats, like frozen cherries.)

The time-money tradeoff was a big factor in the budget, both in the shopping (do I make a separate trip to another store that has a better price on specific items?) and in the preparation (is the two dollars saved buying regular spinach v. the prewashed stuff worth the time involved in preparing it?).  And I truly can’t imagine doing this if I didn’t have access to a car, or had to bring my kids along on every single shopping trip.  (Shopping with kids can be much more expensive, both because you don’t want to spend the extra time studying price labels when they’re getting restless and because they constantly ask for things that aren’t on the shopping list.)

Although I wasn’t tracking our expenditures on non-food items, this experiment made me much more aware of all of our spending.  Friday we took D. to the doctor because his cough was getting worse, and came home with a nebulizer and two kinds of medicine.  Even with our quite good insurance, the copays totalled $60.  For us, that’s not a terribly big deal.  But if every dollar that comes in is already spent, an unexpected expense like that has to come out of somewhere.  And food is almost always the most flexible part of poor families’ budgets.  That, rather than the cost of food, is why so many American families are "food insecure"