Half Changed World

Today’s Washington Post has a front-page article about the use of long-term “perma-temp” workers in manufacturing. It’s a well-written, thoughtful article about a serious problem. The temps make less money, get less benefits, and have less job security than the permanent workers they share the assembly line with.

It does annoy me, however, that this article, like the previous one in the Post’s series on the Vanishing Middle Class, exclusively talks about male workers, even though women are significantly more likely to be temps than men. It’s not like the authors couldn’t find any women workers — in each article, one of the men is maried to a woman who works or worked for the same company.

What the articles get right, I think, is the degree to which the “decline of the middle class” is not about income declines, but about the increase in insecurity.

The good blue collar jobs are gone or going fast, but even higher education isn’t a guarantee of a good lifetime job. The overall numbers on health insurance obscure the number of people who are uncovered for short periods of time, or who have to keep changing doctors because their insurance provider shifts. Divorce rates are high. Bankruptcy rates are high. Young people don’t believe that Social Security will still exist when they’re ready to retire. More retirement plans are “defined contribution” and fewer are “defined benefit.” People are afraid that the good life is going to slip out from under them.

File it under "it must be a trend if it’s in the New York Times." Today’s City section has an odd little article with the headline "Dr. Spock Meet Mr. Mom," which tracks the increased involvement of fathers in hands-on parenting by noting the increase in fathers showing up in pediatrician’s offices. Where 15 years ago, a father arriving in the pediatrician’s office — without his wife — was "startling," today "there are days when more fathers than mothers show up."

The article is about as stereotypical as it gets, complete with a cartoon of a man in an apron, holding a baby in one arm and a toddler with the other hand, with a bucket and mop nearby, and the obligatory references to Kramer vs. Kramer and Mrs. Doubtfire. The one novel comment is the suggestion by one of the doctors that he sees more involved fathers because the parents of his clients are older, and the women less willing to give up their "well-established professional identity." Certainly, older mothers are more likely to be earning enough to allow their partners to step back from paid employment.

The overall tone of the article is definitely "look at this odd little phenomenon." The author (Anemona Hartocollis?) is careful to note "for the record" that the one female physician quoted has four children and a nanny. The parental status of the two male physicans quoted is not mentioned.

This afternoon, I took an “artist’s date.” As described by Julia Cameron, this just means spending an hour by yourself, doing something you wouldn’t ordinarily do, just because it appeals to you.

I was amazed at how hard it was for me to do this, to take time purely for myself, not to work, not to do one of my volunteer activities, not to do something I “ought” to do like exercise. Even though I had signed up for this lecture in advance, I nearly didn’t go, because I’m going to NYC tomorrow and will have some “me” time there, so thought I ought to get stuff done today.

But I went anyway, and I’m glad I did. It was a talk by Sam Maloof, who makes beautiful wooden furniture. It was just lovely to meet someone who has spent his life doing exactly what he chooses, who makes beautiful things, and who has gotten all the money and societal recognition one could want as a result.

[This post is my entry in The Zero Boss’ Blogging for Books #4 contest. The assignment is to “write about a time you were pushed to the brink of insanity (figuratively or literally), and how you lived to tell the tale.” It’s a bit more personal than my usual postings here, but regular readers will be reassured to see that I do have some policy conclusions at the end.]

You need to know that I was badly sleep deprived at the time. This all happened on Sunday evening. Wednesday night I had been having trouble falling asleep, enough that I had gone downstairs to sleep on the futon so that my tossing and turning wouldn’t keep Tony awake. I had been asleep for no more than an hour or two when I woke up to discover that my water had broken. Daniel wasn’t born for about another 25 hours, and the closest I came to sleep during that time was drifting off a little between contractions after I finally accepted an epidural and kicked in. I got a few hours of sleep Friday morning, before the nurses came into the room to try to explain to my roommate, a teenager with limited English skills, that they couldn’t release her from the hospital until she went to the bathroom and proved that everything was still working. Friday (in the hospital) and Saturday nights (at home) I had gotten almost reasonable amounts of sleep, reasonable that is for someone caring for a newborn who woke up every 2 or 3 hours and needed to be breastfed. I certainly hadn’t gotten enough sleep to make up for the previous two sleepless nights and the work involved in giving birth.

The other thing to know is that I had thought breastfeeding was going fine. Daniel had lousy initial APGARS from being so tangled in the cord, but by five minutes, he was pink and fine, and within 10 minutes I was holding him and offering him my breast. I had gone to the newborn breastfeeding class in the hospital, and the nurses had approved of Daniel’s latch. My only problem was that I seemed to require a lot of pillows, and wasn’t sure how I was going to manage this once there wasn’t someone around all the time to hold the baby while I got myself settled.

My dad and brother had driven down from New York on Friday to see the baby, but they had left on Sunday morning, needing to be back for work. So by Sunday afternoon it was just Tony and I, home with our baby, wondering if we were really ready to be parents. Sunday evening, Daniel woke up crying. I picked up him, and immediately realized he had a fever. We called our HMO’s advice line and they said to bring him in to their urgent care center, even though we had an appointment scheduled for the next morning (as recommended for babies who spend less than 48 hours in the hospital after delivery). We grabbed our newly packed diaper bag and rushed out the door.

When we got to the center, they took Daniel’s temperature, weighed him, and immediately told us that he down more than a pound from his birth weight, he was seriously dehydrated and we needed to give him a bottle right away. My milk hadn’t come in, and he wasn’t getting enough to drink. I burst into tears. My baby’s sick, he’s thirsty, of course he needs to drink. But what about nipple confusion? Does this mean that we’re never going to be able to breastfeed? And am I a terrible mother for worrying about my desire for an idealized breastfeeding relationship at the expense of my baby’s health?

So they brought us a little bottle of formula and Tony fed it to Daniel, who sucked eagerly, even desperately at it. And I sat and sobbed and tried to stop and hiccupped and cried some more. The doctor told us that she wanted to send Daniel to the hospital to rule out sepsis, and she’d do the paperwork so that it could be a direct admission and we wouldn’t have to go to the emergency room. So we were left alone, Tony feeding Daniel from the bottle, and me crying.

And then the receptionist stuck her head into the room, and told me that I had to stop crying because the baby can tell when I’m sad and it makes him worse. If I wanted him to get better, I needed to stop crying.

Almost 4 years later, my blood pressure still goes up just thinking about the stupidity of this woman. (Tony uses a different word when referring to her.) My crying wasn’t hurting anyone, and even if it had been, I can’t think of anything she could possibly have said that would make it harder for me to stop crying.

Eventually we got to the hospital and got assigned a room on the pediatrics floor, with Daniel hooked up to IV fluids. The residents were very kind and reassuring, although they looked extremely young. I was still sniffling, and I think they thought I was convinced Daniel was dying. They told us that Daniel’s fever had dropped significantly already, and that he was probably fine, but that in order to rule out sepsis, they needed to do a spinal tap, start him on antibiotics, and keep him in the hospital for at least 48 hours while they did cultures of his blood and spinal fluids.

And I lost it again. I was sorely tempted to take the baby and tell them no thank you, we’re going home. But I didn’t. Tony went with them to wait in the hall while they did the spinal tap. I called my parents and wailed at them. Between sobs, I asked them how I was supposed to be a parent when I felt like I was about 3 years old myself and wanted them to tell me that everything was going to be ok.

Once Daniel was back in the room, Tony and I decided that one of us should go home and try to get some rest, since it was about 1 am and we were both incoherent from exhaustion. As we were no longer in the maternity ward, there was only one fold-out chair for the two of us. We argued a little, each thinking that the other should leave, but I agreed to go. But I was so messed up I was scared to drive, afraid I’d kill myself on the beltway, so I went to call a cab. The cab company said it would be at least an hour and a half before one came, so I went back to the room and told Tony he had to drive home, I’d stay.

Daniel hated the hospital crib, which was a full-sized metal cage, not the plexiglass cradles they provide on the maternity ward, and refused to sleep in it. So I spent essentially the whole night sitting up, holding him, watching him sleep, nursing him when he woke, and studying his hair and ears and fingers.

After that it got better. Even though I had to go back to the maternity ward and beg for menstrual pads, since I hadn’t brought anything with me. Even though both Tony and I caught a hideous stomach virus at the hospital and were miserably sick. Even though it took another 3 days before my milk came in. Daniel was ok. And there’s nothing like actually spending several days on a children’s ward at a major hospital to make you count your blessings.

Some takeaways, since I am a policy wonk:

1) I know some people see this as a story of the consequences of a short postpartum hospital stay. I’m not convinced. With both of my babies, I was eager to get out of the hospital, which I found incredibly unrestful, and did so even though my insurance would have paid for another day. And we had a follow-up visit scheduled for the next day, which is what is recommended. I do support the idea of having nurses pay home visits to newborns. Just this morning, I read of a study which found that such visits totally eliminated ER visits within the first 10 days of life — compared to a surprising 3.5 percent of newborns in the control group. Jaundice and dehydration were the major reasons for such visits.

2) Some of the advice offered by advocates of breastfeeding was truly unhelpful. With hindsight, I really wish we had given Daniel some water or formula at home, before rushing him to the hospital. But I had been told that breastfed infants never need supplemental liquids and giving it to them will only make them less eager to nurse. And I wish that I hadn’t been so worried about nipple confusion. I don’t dispute that breastmilk is the ideal food for babies — I went to great lengths to provide it for both my children even after I returned to work. But it seems like much of the pro-breastfeeding message is totally missing the large number of women who aren’t even trying to breastfeed, and just succeding in making those who do try more anxious.

Following on the heels of yesterday’s review of The Two-Income Trap is this article from today’s New York Times, about the disastrous consequences of Texas’ Robin Hood system to equalize school finances.

The basic problem (which the Robin Hood system was designed to fix) is that most public school funding in the United States comes from local property taxes. Rich areas have much more of a valuable property base, and so are able to put more money into their schools. As a recent study from the Education Trust showed, nationwide, there’s a gap in school funding of more than $1,000 per student between the highest- and lowest-poverty school districts.

The Robin Hood system was implemented after a group of school districts sued the state, claiming the old system of school funding was unconstitutional, and won. It attempts to overcome this inequity by taking money from the wealthiest school districts — those with property value above a threshold — and distributes it to the poorest. The New York Times article, based on an analysis by Harvard economists Caroline Hoxby and Ilyana Kuziemko, explains what went wrong. Hoxby and Kuziemko argue that the problem is that part of what determines the value of property is the quality of the schools. As the quality of the schools went down (for a given level of taxation), the property values also dropped, so the state’s share of taxes went down. In order to provide the level of funding they had promised to the poor districts, the state had to lower the threshold and therefore affect more districts. And the spiral continued. They conclude that the Robin Hood system only reduced inequality between school districts by about $500 per student, but destroyed thousands of dollars per student in property value.

What are the implications of this study?

First, it both supports Warren and Tyagi’s argument that access to quality schools is a significant portion of what drives up property values, and emphasizes how unlikely it is that their proposal to delink residence from access to schools could ever be implemented. The disruption, as home values in previously “good school districts” plummeted, would be monumental. I can’t imagine the circumstances under which such legislation would pass.

Second, it’s a strong rebuttal to those who argue that how much money a school district has doesn’t matter. Homebuyers in Texas certainly valued access to schools in rich districts less when their funding dropped, even though nothing else about the schools had changed. Thus, it could support an argument for either a minimum floor on school spending per student or for some version of equalization or both. Hoxby and Kuziemko are quite clear that they don’t want their paper used as an argument against equalization in general.

Third, as Hoxby and Kuziemko argue, it suggests that lawyers shouldn’t be allowed to design tax systems. They claim that the Robin Hood system was designed solely in order to avoid a legal ban on a statewide property tax, and that it does pretty much everything wrong from the standpoint of creating an efficient tax system.

What none of these studies do is tell you what to do if you’re a parent and a good liberal who believes in public schools and can’t really afford private school anyway and enjoys living in a diverse urban (or semi-urban) area but isn’t quite sure that the schools where you live are as good as you want them to be and doesn’t want to sacrifice your kid to an abstract principle. (Here’s a link to a friend of mine’s much funnier and slightly obscene rant on the same subject. Don’t click if cussing offends you.)

Tomorrow night we’re off to a pizza party being held for parents of preschoolers who are zoned for our local elementary school (which is literally 3 blocks from our house). Part of the goal is to discuss how we can help the school, but another part is just to hold each other’s hands and convince ourselves that we’re making the right choice.

Yesterday got away from me, so we’re having a Wednesday Book Review this week. The book is The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (With Surprising Solutions That Will Change Our Children’s Future), by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi.

First, let me say that in spite of the title, the book doesn’t bash two-income families. It’s about how more and more American families are only one setback away from financial disaster and bankruptcy. The authors (a mother-daughter team) argue that two-earner families (and single-earner families) who are spending up to their income actually have less of a safety net than families with another earner “in reserve” in the form of an at-home parent.

The book is full of statistics, and I’m not sure I believe all of them. For example, on page 6 they say that “if these trends persist… nearly one of every seven families with children would have declared itself flat broke…” and on the very next page, they cite a study that indicates that “for every family that officially declares bankruptcy, there are seven more whose debt loads suggest that they should file for bankruptcy.” These two figures together suggest that essentially ALL families with children should file for bankruptcy, which clearly isn’t the case. So I recommend taking the claims of the book with a grain of salt. But the arguments are interesting enough that the book is worth reading nonetheless.

For me, the most interesting argument in the book is the claim that housing prices — especially housing prices in neighborhoods with good schools — along with child care/pre-school and college costs, are the main factor driving up family spending, rather than the “overconsumption” that is typically blamed. I think they overstate their argument somewhat, but there’s a lot of truth to it. They focus on homeownership, but the rental market in urban areas is just as bad. And they’re right that the costs of food and clothing are unbelievably low by historical standards. (I’m not sure why they don’t discuss health care costs, which are growing like kudzu.)

Warren and Tyagi’s solution to the problem is to totally de-link housing location from access to schools, with a voucher system. Note that this is a much more radical proposal than most of the vouchers that have been considered in the US, which are essentially a safety valve for a limited number of children in certain school districts. Under their proposal, there would be no such thing as a default school that a child was entitled to attend based on where his or or her family lives. It’s hard to imagine that they seriously expect anyone to adopt their proposal, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

Another interesting section was their discussion of divorce. Warren and Tyagi note that historically, the reason that women and children were impoverished by divorce was: a) the women were less educated than the men and therefore had less earning potential and b) the courts did not enforce child support well. We’ve made significant progress on both fronts, but women and children are still often impoverished and at risk of bankruptcy following divorce. They argue that the problem is that, if a two-earning couple is just barely making ends meet prior to a divorce, the divorce will increase their total expenses as they need to set up two households, but not increase the total income available to the members. Moreover, parents are often unwilling to disrupt their children’s lives even further by taking the steps needed to cut expenses — selling the family home, moving to a less expensive neighborhood, pulling children out of pre-school or afterschool activities — so they wind up in debt.

The villians of this book are clearly the credit card and mortgage lending companies. The authors note that they are most eager to lend to people when they’re already in a little bit of trouble, because they make the most money from people who carry balances. Warren and Tyagi describe this as the “cement life raft,” arguing that borrowing allows people to postpone facing the harsh realities of divorce and unemployment, but puts them into a hole that they can’t dig out of.

The book concludes with some surprising financial advice. They particularly advise against the common practice of taking out a lower-interest home equity loan in order to pay off credit cards — most people simple run up the credit card balance again, and are now at risk of losing their homes. They also argue against the “no latte” strategy beloved of consumer finance magazines — they say you’re better off spending some money on non-essentials that can be easily cut in an emergency, than committing every last dollar to your mortgage or tuition bill, which are fixed costs.

In the online edition of the Washington Post, there’s an interesting article today on Six Ways to Be Happy with Your College Choice. It could just as easily have been called Six Ways to Be Happy With Your Work-Life Choices.

The list, based on a book called The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, is:

1) Listen to your gut instincts — don’t over-analyze.
2) Count your blessings.
3) Be happy about “good enough” and don’t worry that you might not have achieved the absolute maximum level of happiness.
4) Regret less.
5) Remember that the grass is always greener on the other side, and don’t take it as a sign that you’ve made the wrong choice.
6) Avoid conversations about your choices with people who don’t follow the above rules.

Or as our grandparents might have said “you pays your money, and you takes your choices.”

It’s good to remember that choices are rarely permanent — you can stay home for a while, then go back to work, or vice versa — but it doesn’t do anyone good to constantly second guess themselves.

In 1993, when the Clinton administration was just getting started, Senator Moynihan urged them to start work on welfare reform immediately. Clinton said no, he needed to take care of health insurance first, because how could you expect low-income parents to give up the guarantee of health insurance from Medicaid for jobs that didn’t provide health insurance. Well, as everyone knows, the health insurance proposal died, and by the time Clinton turned to welfare reform, the Republicans controlled Congress.

With that history, I’m reluctant to say that the health insurance problem needs to be solved before we can try to address work-family issues. But the linkage of health insurance to employment is probably the single largest barrier to high-quality part-time jobs. As the cost of health insurance doesn’t go up with the number of hours someone works, it makes sense for employers to want to get as much possible work out of their current workforce rather than to hire more people for fewer hours each.

Kerry supports a number of changes that would expand access to health insurance, but doesn’t propose to break the basic link between employment and insurance. He would address the problem that Amy raised — that states aren’t enrolling all the eligible children under SCHIP — by providing incentives to states that expand enrollment.

The statistic that I’ve heard is that it costs the automakers over $1,000 more per car to build a car in Detroit than to build the same car in Canada, because of health insurance. I don’t understand why employers aren’t demanding that government take over their health insurance costs.

One of my fellow DotMoms recently wrote about being the mother to two daughters. Well, I’m the mother to two sons.

When I was in college, I read a book called X: A Fabulous Children’s Story, which is about a child raised so that no one at all knows if X is a boy or a girl, so X does all the boy games and all the girl games and lives happily ever after. This is the classic position of equality feminism, which denies that there are any innate differences between boys and girls.

Obviously, my husband the SAHD and I aren’t terribly big into gender roles, so we’re often a bit embarassed by how much our older son is into typical boy things — trucks and cars and trains and airplanes and construction equipment. (The younger one is too little to express such preferences.) We’re still not convinced that there are little trucks somewhere on the Y chromosome, though, as we haven’t raised our children in a vacuum — they’re exposed to books and television and other kids on the playground. (One of my friends likes to tell the story of how her son’s preference for pink went away after exactly one day of school.)

If you watch closely on a playground, you can see gender roles being created. Of course there are exceptions, but it seems that mothers are more likely to chase after little girls saying "be careful," while letting their boys explore more freely. David Reed suggests that mothers are more likely to hover than father — and if men are more likely to spend times with their sons than with their daughters, this reinforces the pattern.

At our encouragement, my mother bought my son a doll, which he occasionally undresses and redresses, but mostly ignores. But he often plays with the trucks as if they were dolls, taking them to the "tractor dentist" who cleans their shovels, and having them go to visit their friends.

I’ll be watching to see what happens as he gets older, and what his younger brother’s interests turn out to be.

In her comments on Tuesday’s post, Amy raised the issue of grandparents providing child care for children, and specifically whether this was compatible with the idea of delayed retirement floated by the Senate Special Committee on Aging.

A few thoughts:

First, the Committee on Aging is a “special” committee, which means that it doesn’t have jurisdiction over any real legislation. (Most of the programs that affect the elderly are under the jurisdiction of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP, Committee.) So its hearings are an opportunity for Senators to bring in some witnesses and jawbone about issues affecting the elderly, so they can write letters to their constituents saying how hard they’re working to protect them. Or, phrased somewhat less cynically, it’s an opportunity to raise the profile of issues in order to build public support for action.

Second, it’s clearly true that more and more people are going to be working past the traditional retirement age of 65. For one thing, 65-year-olds are more likely to be healthy and not to think of themselves as elderly. For another thing, most people can’t afford to retire at 65. This is especially true if you have — as most workers now do — defined contribution retirement plans (e.g. 401(k)s) rather than defined benefit plans. If you retire at 65, the odds are quite high that you will outlive your savings.

(Do you know the story of how the retirement age was set? It dates back to Bismarck in Germany. He wanted to offer pensions, but he didn’t want it to cost a lot, and his actuaries told him that most people were dead by 70, so that was set as the retirement age. It was eventually lowered to 65.)

Third, not all grandparents are in their 60s or older. Many are in their 40s or 50s — and this is especially true among low-income grandparents. (Age at first birth is highly correlated with education, and thus with income.)

Fourth, looking into the question of grandparent child care led me to this recent Child Trends Research Brief. Using some recent national surveys, they found that 47 percent of grandparents with grandchildren living nearby provided some sort of child care assistance. (Grandmothers provided child care more often and for more hours than grandfathers, but over 1/3 of grandfathers with grandchildren nearby provided child care.) Interestingly, employed grandparents were more likely to provide child care than those who were unemployed or retired. Presumably, this is because employed grandparents are less likely to have a serious health condition that precludes both work and child care.

So, while I agree with Amy’s general point that many members of Congress don’t have a clue about the lives of low-income parents, I’m not convinced that this hearing was evidence of it.

As for me, my parents live 300 miles away, and my husband’s are even further. After visiting my family last weekend, and watching my 3 1/2-year-old interact with his grandparents and aunts and uncles, I started having thoughts about moving back to NY. Then I saw the real estate section of the New York Times, and was brought crashing down to reality.