Half Changed World

Articles about two studies on the causes of childhood leukemia crossed my desk this week. The first reported on a study published in Cancer Causes and Control which links it to what mothers ate in the year before they became pregnant — the more protein, vegetables and fruit the mothers ate, the lower the risk of cancer. The other reports on a paper presented at a British conference suggesting that night-time exposure to light could be a cause of leukemia.

I have very mixed feelings about studies like these. Leukemia is a horrible disease, and of course we’d want to do what we could to reduce the incidence of it. But it’s bad enough having a child with a life-threatening disease without having to worry that you might have caused it. Parenting these days seems to be an endless litany of things that you shouldn’t do.

I confess — my 3 1/2 year old likes the light on at night, and since he and his brother share a room, that means the baby is being exposed to it too. Not only do I feed them YoBaby yogurt (which the puritans on my moms email list disapprove of because it has sugar added), I let them have cake and cookies too. My older son only eats vegetables when I hide them in muffins. He only brushes his teeth once a day, and we haven’t started brushing the baby’s teeth yet. Shoot me now.

I don’t know anyone who thinks they have enough time to do everything they want to, especially not working parents. The US government just released the first analyses from its new time use study, which attempts to figure out exactly what we’re all doing with the 24 hours a day we get.

As the New York Times points out, it didn’t exactly require a multi-million dollar study to tell us that on average, women do more housework and more child care than men. I’m also not exactly shocked to learn that employed mothers get less sleep on average than non-employed mothers.

They haven’t released the underlying data yet, but there’s still some interesting data in the appendix tables that they did publish, especially Table 6, which breaks respondents out by gender, employment status, and whether there are children of different ages in the household. I immediately turned to employed women, with children under age 6:

Caring and helping for household members (as a primary activity): 2.42 hours a day, versus 3.14 hours a day for non-employed women with young children in the household. That gap is actually quite small, in my opinion, but it’s consistent with previous research suggesting that employed mothers cut out sleep, housework and personal time, rather than giving up time with their children. (Table 8 says that women in households with children under 6 spend an average of 6.94 hours a day caring for household children as a “secondary activity,” while doing something else, but this isn’t split by employment status. First thing on my list of things I’d like to see analyzed when the public use data comes out.)

(By contrast, the numbers for primary care are 1.28 for employed men with young children in the household and 1.23 for non-employed. My guess is that means that non-employed men with children at home are still more likely to be home because they’re disabled or otherwise unemployable than because they’re choosing to take on child care responsibilities.)

Working: 4.34 hours a day. I think these figures include weekends, so this works out to about 30 hours a week. Women, especially those with young children, are more likely to work part-time than men, but Table 4 also shows that women working full-time work an average of about 2/3 of an hour per day less than men working full-time.

Personal care activities (including sleeping, showering, makeup, etc): 9.23 hours a day, less than non-employed mothers of young children, but more than employed men. I guess women really do take longer to get dressed.

Eating and drinking: 1.06 hours a day, exactly the same as non-employed mothers of young children. The key thing to note here is that at any given time respondents were only allowed to indicate one activity (except for childcare), so all the times that you eat while driving, working, watching tv, etc. don’t show up in the survey. Someone who works on the study told me earlier this year that when they were testing the instrument, they discovered that a significant number of people didn’t report any eating in the course of the day because it was never their primary activity.

Household activities (e.g. housework, cooking, etc.): 2.00 hours a day, substantially more than any group of men, employed or non-employed, with or without children, but less than non-employed women. A clean house and homecooked meals are among the things that get sacrificed to the time crunch. Interestingly, mothers of young children, regardless of employment, did slightly less household activities than mothers of only school-age children. Shopping is a separate category, coming in at 0.9 hours a day

Leisure and sports: 3.25 hours a day, the lowest of any of the subgroups reported. This is actually higher than I would have guessed. However, this figure has to be read in conjunction with Table 8, which says that women with children under 6 spend an average of 2.43 hours of leisure a day in conjunction with child care. The overall pattern for this one is pretty clear, with men consistently reporting more leisure than women, non-employed more than employed, people without children more than people with children, and people with only older children more than people with young children.

Tonight is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. May you and your loved ones be written in the book of life for a good and sweet new year.

(Why good and sweet? Because if you wish only for a "good year," you might get one full of what a friend of mine refers to as AFGE — Another F-ing Growth Experience. So may your year be both good and sweet.)

Thanks to RebelDad for the prominent mention in his blog. Reading his blog — and filling up his comments column — was one of the main things that inspired me to start writing this.

Today’s book is Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power, by Rhona Mahony. This is an absolutely fascinating book, published in 1995, that I don’t know anyone else who has ever heard of. I encountered it through a footnote in another book, perhaps The Second Shift.

Kidding Ourselves is almost two books in one. The first two-thirds is an attempt to answer the question of why so many smart ambitious feminist women in egalitarian marriages have kids and all of a sudden find themselves responsible for more than half of the child care and household work. As Naomi Wolf puts it in Misconceptions:

"Our generation did not think we were marrying breadwinners; we thought we were marrying our best friends. But the husbands were pulling rank in a way that best friends don’t do."

Mahony’s answer is that it’s a matter of power, and negotiating positions. And she goes through an interesting list of negotiating strategies that women can use to try to persuade their husbands to do more: Telling them how unhappy the current situation is making, make moral arguments about equality, offer other things in return that will make them happy, nag, threaten to leave. Some of these are more or less effective. Wolf makes similar points, and grimly concludes that men simply aren’t going to make real career sacrifices unless forced to, and women aren’t going to be able to force them to do it, because their threat to leave isn’t serious.

I found Mahony a more optimistic read, even though she also thinks that — on average — women are going to lose these negotiations, necause she believes that there are things that women can do to increase their leverage. The key point, however, is that these are mostly choices made long before the children are born — what career to enter, what spouse to marry.

Mahony argues that as long as women choose careers that don’t maximize their earning potential and that give them flexibility, marry men who have more earning potential and less flexibility, and care more for their children as infants, they will always wind up doing more of the child care and housework.

Is it Ms magazine that used to refer to "click" moments? CLICK.

The earning potential part is generally understood. The marriage point is interesting, because it’s not just about money. It’s that if you want a husband who is intensely involved in child-rearing, you have to marry someone who values it, even if it has a career cost. And career-oriented ambitious women tend to marry equally career-oriented ambitious men.

The child care is a point that I keep making to everyone I know. Child care is not an inherent skill. You can get some ideas of how to do it by reading books or taking classes or talking to other parents, but mostly you learn how to do it by doing it. And you make some mistakes — forgetting to bring a change of clothes on an outing, bouncing the child too much after a feeding — but you learn from them. Most fathers spend ridiculously little time on their own with their infants, which puts them behind. And once one parent is "the expert" and the other "the assistant" it becomes far too easy to maintain that role.

The last third of the book, much to my surprise, is a vision of a world in which breadwinning mothers and caregiving fathers are as common as breadwinning fathers and caregiving mothers. Like me (!) Mahony rejects the goal of having all families divide breadwinning and childrearing equally. She writes:

"Not all fathers can do half the child rearing, or want to, or should. Much more to the point, some fathers can do lots more, and want to, and should. People give the incorrect answer [a 50-50 future[, I think, because they can’t boost their imaginations over the hump of the present to imagine a future in which there really exists no sexual division of labor. "

I haven’t been able to figure out whether there was some recent statistical release that led to the publication of three articles about fertility statistics in three different publications in the past couple of weeks. It’s interesting to see the different takes on the same subject.

The New York Times’ article appeared in the Week in Review two weeks ago, noting that population growth has slowed worldwide, leading the UN to lower its prediction for the plateau level of world population to 9 billion, down from its 1968 projection of 12 billion. Most of this decrease is driven by poorer countries, where the combined effects of urbanization, women’s education and employment, and reduced child mortality have all acted to drive fertility down. While noting variation in fertility levels from country to country, the article’s main thrust is about how widespread the overall downward trend is.

The Economist emphasized the divergence in the trends between Europe and the United States. They point out that while American fertility rates fell during the 60’s and 70’s, by the mid 80’s, they had started to rebound. At present, the U.S. has fertility rates just below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, while Western Europe’s fertility rates are around 1.4 children per woman, and projected to keep dropping for another 10 years.

The Economist article discusses some possible consequences of this divergence in detail, which I won’t rehash (although it’s worth reading). I’m intrigued by the causes, and the relationship between fertility rates, women’s labor force participation, and government policies to subsidize the costs of childbearing (e.g. paid parental leave). It strikes me as ironic that the U.S., which doesn’t have a child allowance, nonetheless has a higher birthrate than many countries that do. In some cases, such as Singapore, the causality may run in the other direction — governments adopted pro-child policies BECAUSE their birthrates were low — but my impression is that the child allowances in Europe date to before the recent declines in fertility.

The third article was a slightly bizarre op-ed piece in the Washington Post, about how religous conservatives have a competitive advantage over liberals, because they have more children. The article struck me as mostly a way for the author, Philip Longman, to promote his book about how declining birthrates are, contrary to conventional wisdom, bad for the world. The article struck me as misleading because it ignored both the role of immigrants, who tend to support Democrats, and the electoral college. It also included the statement that “African Americans, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, now have a lower average fertility rate than whites.” I haven’t been able to find this anywhere on the NCHS website and it’s not consistent with anything else I’ve read.

****
Follow-up: I emailed Longman to ask him about the statistic and here’s his reply:

“Thank you for your query. Since I wrote the piece, I have become aware that NCHS has revised its fertility statistics. The latest numbers show the Black, total fertility rate at 2,051.0, and the White at 2,040.0. This amounts to a difference of just over one-one-hundredth of a child per woman, so if I were writing the piece today, I would say that the Black fertility rate has fallen to point that it is virtually the same as the White rate.

“For more information, see: Revised Birth and Fertility Rates for the 1990s
and New Rates for Hispanic Populations, 2000 and 2001: United States, National Vital Statistics Report, Volume 51, Number 12, Table 3: Crude birth rates, general fertility rates, total fertility rates, and birth rates, by age and race of mother based on the 1990 and 2000 censuses, and percent difference: United States, 1991-2001.

“By the way, this same revision shows that Black fertility has fallen 17 percent since 1991, while White fertility has risen by 1 percent.”

I read a nice article last week about how writing the Portraits of Grief that the New York Times ran after September 11 affected one of the journalists. She wrote:

“The profiles were about love – not the usual subject of daily newspapers – and that is probably why the project is still remembered with such intensity and affection”

That sounds about right to me.

I ran a trail half-marathon this morning. It wasn’t one of my better races. I was undertrained for the extremely hilly course, I probably started a bit too fast, and I took a couple of nasty spills and more near-misses than I can count. By mile 10 or so, I was tired and hurting. At this point in races, I usually ask myself “ok, why exactly am I doing this?” But I knew why I was running this race. Because I’m alive and healthy and I can run is reason enough.

Today’s what the heck were they thinking award goes to the New York Times, for the op-ed piece they ran yesterday entitled “Mom vs. Nanny” in which working mom Jenny Rosenstrach discusses the ways in which she attempts to manipulate her calculations in order to come out ahead in the contest she’s holding with her children’s nanny for who spends more “quality time” with them. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be funny, or make other working parents feel sane by comparison, or what.

It’s not a contest. Being the working spouse of a stay-at-home dad has taught me a few things, and one of the most important is that it’s not a contest. If you decide that you’re competing with your partner to be the most-loved parent, you’re going to drive everyone crazy, starting with yourself and ending with your children. The goal of this whole effort is raise your children to be happy, and secure, and confident in the love of the people who take care of them. If they adore you, and adore their daddy, and adore their nanny or babysitter or grandmother, that’s a good thing (as Rosenstrach acknowledges at the end of her essay). The tricky part is that most working mothers tell themselves that their children may love the sitter, but they’ll always be number one. Mommies are special.

Well, at times I’ve been quite sure that I wasn’t number one. And I had to admit, it was only fair that my son should love his father best, as he was the one with him all day, climbing on the jungle gym, making silly faces, reading the same stories over and over again. But it forced me to confront my hidden assumption that being a good mother meant being number one.

Like Rosenstrach, I carefully counted the hours I spent with my son. Parenting is challenging, and it’s often hard to know if you’re doing the right thing. It was all too easy to seize on anything quantifiable as a measure of my devotion. For months, I tandem pumped in the mornings, attaching myself to a pump on one side while my son nursed in the mornings. With hindsight, I regret the time spent fussing with a machine instead of paying attention to the moment, but I took the number of ounces I produced as another sign of my maternal commitment.

As I mentioned in Why blog? I frequently find myself wondering “where are the men?” in reading stories about parenting issues. So I was pleasantly surprised to pick up the new issue of Brain, Child, my favorite parenting magazine, and see that the feature story is about fathering, with a long discussion of stay-at-home dads.

[9/23 edit: The article is now available online. It’s also discussed today by RebelDad.]

I eagerly read the article, frowned, read it again and then brought it over to my resident SAHD for his opinion. His comment: “If I were the editor, and assigned someone a story about SAHDs, and she brought this article to me, my first question would be ‘how many stay at home dads did you talk to?’ And if the answer were ‘none,’ I’d tell her to go back and try again.”

That’s not quite fair, but close. The author, Stacy Evers, mostly seems to have talked with men who aren’t SAHDs about why they wouldn’t want to be SAHDs (concluding that it’s mostly lack of respect from other men) without ever talking to any SAHDs about why they would.

* In a sidebar article on magazines, she mentions that her brother in law is a SAHD, but he’s not quoted in the main article.

* Evers quotes from author Austin Murphy’s book about being a stay-at-home dad, . She then inserts in parentheses a comment from Peter Baylies, the founder of athomedad.com, that the book is a “venting tool.” I read this as his polite way of saying that the guy is a jerk and shouldn’t be taken as representative of at-home-dads. She doesn’t ask Baylies anything about his experience as a SAHD.

* Evers discusses her friend Dan, who she identifies as “a freelance photographer raising two young children.” She says that he’s “shifted his focus from career to children” but never outright calls him a stay-at-home dad. She talks about three things that made it easier for him to make the shift — that he was already working from his home, that his wife made more money than him, and that he had a role model — but not about anything that made him want to do it.

My more fundamental complaint is that the article doesn’t seem to take the SAHD option seriously. What Evers really wants is for working fathers to take on more family responsibilities — and to fight for the workplace flexibility that is needed to do so. Towards the end of the article, she writes:

“No one’s really suggesting to merely swap stay-at-home mothers for stay-at-home fathers. But why not a more reasonable sharing of all responsibilities and tasks, whether it’s working or caring for children?”

It’s hard to argue against a “reasonable sharing” — but does that have to mean 50-50? Or even 60-40? In the author’s note, Evers comments that she and her husband are “both surprised sometimes at how traditional our arrangement has turned out to be, even though it’s what best suits our personalities.”

I’m arguing that we ought to be fighting as much for a world in which there are options open to both men and women — including being a full-time parent — as for a world in which all responsibilities are shared equally.

Today was my older son’s first day of preschool. It’s the same school he attended last year, and he was eager to get going, happy to see his friends and teachers. It’s amazing to me to think of how much he’s grown in the past year, and what he’ll be like a year from now.

One of the things that never gets talked about in the endless discussions of whether child care is good or bad for children — which are typically framed as being about whether or not women should work outside the home– is that non-employed parents use child care as well. We send our son to preschool because he likes it, because it’s a good opportunity for him to learn social skills (sharing, taking turns), because it gives our other son a chance to have some one-on-one attention, and because it gives my husband a break.

Child care is expensive, of course, so it’s mostly affluent non-employed parents who use it — full- or part-time nannies if their children are infants, preschool if their children are older. Very low-income parents may also be able to send their children to Head Start, which was explicitly designed to try to make up the gap in the learning opportunities available to poor children before they start school.

Since my review of Getting a Life, by Helen Simpson, was swallowed by technical problems last week, I”m trying again.

This is a collection of short stories. A few of the characters reoccur across stories, but the real linkages are thematic. With a few exceptions, the the stories are all about mothers — some employed, some not — in and around contemporary London. Not much happens in most of the stories, but Simpson captures the daily details and inner thoughts of her characters in almost painful detail. I do mean painful — at times reading the stories is like watching a dissection, with lots of bloody flesh hanging out until suddenly you see something that was hidden before.

My favorite story, by which I suppose I mean the one that resonated the most strongly with my life, is “Cafe Society” in which two women, who think that they might be friends, try to have a conversation over a cup of coffee while simultaneously dealing with one of their three-year-olds. Of course, they only manage to say a tiny fraction of what they’re thinking — enough maybe to sustain an existing friendship, but not to create a new one, to breach the walls of politeness and actually show a little of your real self.

I recommend skipping “Millennium Blues,” which may have been entertaining in 2001 but is now sadly out of key. It’s hard to read an ironic story about planes exploding overhead these days.

Some of the reader reviews on Amazon complained that the stories are unremittingly negative about motherhood. It’s true — the working mothers are mostly stressed and overwhelmed, the at-home mothers have lost touch with themselves, both groups are cattily judgmental about each other. But the stories are funny and sad, and sometimes sweet.

It does make me wonder about books like Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions and Susan Mausart’s The Mask of Motherhood, which complain “no one ever told me it would be like this.” Maybe I’ve been luckier than others, but I’ve found plenty of both books and people to tell me the downsides as well as the positives.

*****

A note on the links: Typepad automatically links the books on the sidebar list to Amazon.com (and I get a few cents if you buy them through them). I’m manually inserting links to Powell’s, which I love for being a real live bookstore, with employees who love books, and for selling (and listing) both used and new books. If you’re buying new books, Amazon is generally cheaper. If you’re buying a lot of used books, Powell’s is often a better deal, because you can get free shipping on orders over $50 while the Amazon marketplace charges shipping per item. My favorite source for comparison shopping is www.fetchbook.info.