Half Changed World

This weekend, I watched 49-UP, the most recent in Michael Apted’s series of movies about the lives of a group of people who were first interviewed as 7 year old schoolchildren in Britain and have been reinterviewed every 7 years since.

Interestingly, Tony, who grew up in working class poverty and now appears to be solidly middle class (with a second home in Spain), expresses what I would consider the most "conservative" views about the appropriate role of government in society, saying essentially "I made it, why can’t they?"  Upper-class John, who always seemed quite the snob and is now a Queen’s Counsel, describes Tony Blair as a "conservative" and says that his concerns about the government are about the attacks on due process.  And upper class Andrew points out, as I did previously, that you can’t imagine any 7 year old today being able to confidently (and accurately) predict where he was going to go to university, the way they did now.

But overall, the whole question of class seems to have faded in importance.  The time-lapse aspect of the show — watching the same people at 7 and 21 and 49 — is just overwhelming.  (Among other things, it makes me want to grab the video camera and ask my kids what they want to be when they grow up and if they want to marry and where they want to live.)  It helps me imagine the next decades of my life far more vividly than anything else I’ve seen or read.

It’s also far more of a positive picture of middle age than is generally provided.  Those who are married (either still married or remarried) seem genuinely happy with their spouses, not just partnering off because it’s expected.  And those who are single mostly seem to have made their peace with that.  Suzy, who was so awkward as a teen and then seemed to disappear into the role of mother, finally seems to be comfortable in her own skin.  Nick’s research has hit a dead end, but he clearly loves teaching.  Bruce has compromised his ideals somewhat, but also thrives on teaching.  Lynn starts crying at the prospect of being pushed out from her job as children’s librarian.  Andrew has made a late-in-life career change.  Jackie challenges the picture of her from 42-Up as being overwhelmed by her physical limitations.

And Neil.  Neil, who was so bright and lively as a child, who wound up homeless and questioning his own sanity, has found a niche as a small town politician.  I can’t help but thinking that he’s a walking advertisement for the welfare state, since I have little doubt that he’d be homeless and addicted in the United States, if not dead.

If you’ve got the time, I recommend watching the whole series from the start. But if you don’t, there’s enough clips from the earlier shows to provide some context.  It’s worth watching.

I burned my thumb cooking tonight, so can’t type very much.  Instead, here are links to two surveys that I’ve taken recently.

• One is the WorkLife Wizard which collects information about people’s jobs, industries, and the types of organizations they work for, and then asks a set of questions about working conditions.  There were some interesting questions about perceptions of male and female coworkers, which I’m curious as to how they’re going to be used. It’s sponsored by the Labor and Worklife program at Harvard Law School, and my understanding is that a consortium of groups is doing similar surveys in several countries.  If you fill out the survey, you can get your work-life question answered by their advisor.
• The other, via Raising WEG, is the Moms as People survey being conducted by Suniya Luthar, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.  Luthar’s work is not only the basis for Judith Warner’s recent blog post on the dissatisfaction of highly educated and affluent moms, but also for the article a bit back on the drinking playdate. And yes, she asks an awful lot of questions about the various ways that one can self medicate.  As usual with these things, my experience doesn’t fit nicely into the categories available (she asks about in-person and phone contact with friends, but not about on-line connection), but it made me think.

I picked up this week’s book, American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, after hearing that it was the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award, for Best Book for Young Adults.  I probably would have liked it better if this hadn’t raised my expectations for it.

Even though there are three different plot lines, each story is relatively straightfoward, so it’s easy to keep everything straight.  The graphics are attractive, but not especially sophisticated — "cartoony" is the word that comes to mind.  The book has a pretty heavy handed, if well-intentioned, message: Be true to yourself; don’t try to be something that you’re not. 

Part of my disappointment with the book is that it felt like a bit of a period piece, set in the 80s or 90s, rather than today.  Will the target audience of today’s teens even get the references to Sixteen Candles?  My guess is not. 

Nearly two years ago, I wrote here about rumors that the Department of Labor was going to try to roll back the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)  There was some good discussion about the importance of FMLA, but DOL didn’t do anything.  It looked like the we might have nipped the attempt in the bud.

Well, on Friday DOL published a "request for comments" on FMLA.  DOL "invites interested parties having knowledge of, or experience with, the FMLA to submit comments and welcomes any pertinent information that will provide a basis for ascertaining the effectiveness of the current implementing regulations and the Department’s administration of the Act."

"Interested parties having knowledge of, or experience with, the FMLA…."  That means me.  And probably you.  So let’s do it.   Comments are due by February 2, 2007. Email them to: whdcomments@dol.gov (the notice also lists a US mail address, as well as a fax number.)

DOL lists a range of topics on which they are particularly soliciting feedback, including the definitions of an eligible employee, a "serious health condition" and a "day," the interaction between paid leave and unpaid FMLA leave, the medical certification procedures, and the impact of FMLA on productivity, morale, and retention.

Based on my reading of the notice, I think they’re trying to make a case against allowing workers to use "intermittent, unscheduled" FMLA.  It’s clear that employers have complained about it, arguing that workers who are late or just don’t want to come in are claiming that it’s due to depression or other hard-to-disprove ailments and covered under FMLA.  I hear that, and I’m sure there are cases of employees who abuse the law.  But there’s plenty of legitimate reasons why one might need to take intermittent, unscheduled leave to deal with personal or family illness.   I would guess that there are far more people with medical conditions where the need for care is unpredictable — like asthma or lupus — than those where people have regularly scheduled appointments, like chemotherapy or dialysis.

The Federal Register notice is fairly dense and technical, but don’t get intimidated by it.  What they’re asking for is personal experience — your stories.  Tell them about how you needed leave when your or your child, spouse or parent was sick.  Tell them about your coworkers who took leave, and how you managed to cover for them.  If you’re an employer, tell them how the FMLA has affected you.

Also let them know when FMLA hasn’t worked for you.  Tell them if you had to go back to work 6 weeks after you had your baby instead of 12 because you couldn’t afford to do without your salary any more.  Tell them about the problems you had because your kids passed the same damn cold back and forth all month, but the FMLA regulations say that "a cold or flu" doesn’t count as a serious illness.  Tell them if you’re a doctor and find the documentation requirements a burden.

Let’s spread the word.  MomsRising already picked the story up, but I haven’t seen much else about it. 

Additional resource: National Partnership for Women and Families

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about D and his limited diet.  I still worry that he’s going to develop scurvy or something, but I’ve pretty much come to peace with Ellyn Satter’s division of labor — we decide what food to put in front of him; he decides what he’s going to eat of it.  For Thanksgiving, he had a miniscule taste of the cheese biscuits and pumpkin muffins.  He’s decided that plain spaghetti is acceptable, so I guess we’re making progress.  He’s active, he’s happy, he’s at a higher percentile on the growth curve than I was at his age, so we’re trying not to worry.

As I commented to Phantom Scribbler this week, dealing with kids’ food issues is incredibly frustrating, in part because everyone has really good advice.  Except that, like us, she’s tried almost everything you can think of, and it hasn’t made a difference.  (And Baby Blue isn’t gaining weight, so she’s under a lot more pressure than we are.)

One of the standard pieces of advice that people give is that kids will be more willing to eat different things if they’re involved in cooking them.  That hasn’t worked so well for us.  D loves to cook dinner, but only because it lets him control the menu — so we all wind up eating peanut butter on ritz crackers, with sprinkles.  So tonight, I told him that if he wants to cook dinner, it has to involve a protein and a vegetable, as well as a starch. 

He promptly pulled out Pretend Soup, which a friend gave him quite a while ago and he ignored, and started perusing the recipes.  We didn’t have the ingredients for most of the recipes, but we did have carrots, and he said that he wanted "carrot pennies."  So we sliced up a few carrots — and miracle of miracles — he ate some. 

About a month ago, T noticed that the ceiling in our dining room was a bit saggy.  Turns out that we had a slow leak from the upstairs bathroom.  We had the leak fixed, but the ceiling is still saggy.  We’ve learned the hard way that neither of us is able to repair drywall in ceilings even halfway decently, so we’re going to have to get someone in to do it.  That’s ok — we’ve got a long list of odds and ends that should be fixed and that we’re clearly never going to get to, so it makes sense to do them all at once.

Since several of the things on the repair list are patches from electrical work we had done 3 years ago, it occurred to us that we should get someone in to do another round of electrical work BEFORE we get all the walls patched and painted.  So today we had new fixtures installed in the dining room and over the stairs.  The old stair fixtures were just really poorly designed — the typical life span of a light bulb in them was about two weeks, and they were enough of a pain to change that we usually just managed in the dark.  So we had new ones put in, with florescent bulbs that are supposed to last 8 years.

The problem is, with all this light, all the dings and dirt on the stairs show up really well.

Lesson learned:  if you’re an indifferent housekeeper, dim light is your friend.

Last year I reported on which of the NYTimes’ notable books of the year I had read.  The 2006 list is out, so I figured I’d do it again:

• Digging to America, by Anne Tyler.  (Yes, I did eventually get to the top of the holds queue.) I really enjoyed this.  Like most of Tyler’s books, it’s about character not plot.  But the characters weren’t as much hapless misfits as in the typical Tyler book.  A gentle exploration of what it means to be American.
• Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Adichie.  Stunning and horrifying.  I wrote about it here.  I read her first book, Purple Hibiscus, as well, and liked it, but not as much.
• Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel.  I wrote about it here. 
• The Omnivore’s Dilemna, by Michael Pollan.  I wrote about this one here.  This was a bit of a disappointment for me.  I liked Peter Singer’s take on the topic better.
• Self Made Man, by Norah Vincent.  I thought I had blogged about this, but can’t find it in my archives.  My memory is  that I didn’t think it was very interesting, so maybe I just decided I didn’t have anything interesting to say about it.

So, I’ve read 5 books, out of the 100.  Fewer than last year, although I think I did just as much overall reading.  I also read The Glass Castle (discussed here) and The Year of Magical Thinking, which were on the 2005 list.  Of all of them, The Year of Magical Thinking is probably the only one that I’d say is a must-read.

The NY Times Magazine cover story yesterday was on the disadvantage faced by low-income students and what it would mean to take seriously the idea of "no child left behind."  It’s an interesting article, pulling together a lot of different strands of research and thinking.  I want to try to pull the different strands apart, though, because I agree with some of the assumptions behind the article, but not all.

1)  The first claim is that low-income children enter school at a significant disadvantage compared to middle-income children.  I think there’s pretty much broad consensus behind this one.  Anyone care to argue it?

2) Next, Tough argues that this disadvantage is primarily due to differences in parenting styles, especially the use of language.  There’s not a consensus on this one.  On the one hand, there are those (cf. The Bell Curve) who argue that the differences in performance are larguely genetic.  I think that’s wrong — there’s good evidence that genetics is a strong driver of differences in IQ among middle- and upper-class children, but that poor kids often don’t get to develop up to their full potential.  On the other hand, there are a lot of liberals who would reject Tough’s claim that parenting style matters more than the material deprivation that poor kids experience.

(Tough doesn’t entirely dismiss the role of poverty, but concludes that parenting matters more: "True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey.")

As Jal Mehta points out at TMPCafe, this isn’t just an academic dispute — it has real policy consequences.  If you think that material hardship is the main reason poor children are lagging, it points you in the direction of child allowances and other income redistribution schemes.  But if parenting matters more, just giving poor parents more money won’t solve the problem.  You either need to somehow change their parenting practices (possibly through some form of home visits), or compensate for them (through programs like Head Start and redesigned schools).

I think the evidence that there are class-based differences in parenting practices is strong (I’ve written about Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods here before), but am not quite willing to write off the role of money. 

3)  The next question is whether poor kids are entering school so far behind that they couldn’t succeed if given schools with the resources of the average American public school.  Tough suggests that they can’t, because there are so few examples of schools that are succeeding with overwhelmingly poor, minority populations.  I’m not convinced that makes his point — as Kozol argues in Shame of the Nation, it’s essentially an experiment that has never been tried.  The best argument for Tough’s position, I think, is that the small number of low-income kids in predominently middle-class schools have generally not done particularly well.  (And I think the strongest part of NCLB is the attention that it has forced school administrators to pay to that achievement gap.)

Tough argues that the kinds of schools that have succeeded — and are needed for widespread success — provide three key components: extended school days and years, highly structured lesson plans, with frequent testing to make sure that the desired skills are being aquired, and an explicit focus on affecting the behavior and values of the students by "teaching character."  He writes:

The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.

But is this a better education?  It’s certainly a more costly education, once you burn through the supply of true believers who are willing to subsidize such schools by working extra hours for no extra pay.

But I’m reminded of Scrivenings’ post about his horror at a New York Times story about a kindergarten class that is operated along such lines.  While some parents would welcome the eased demand for after school care, I think an equal number of middle-class parents would be outraged if their kids’ schools added another 3 hours of classes a day, especially if that time were spent on core reading and math rather than "enrichment" activities.  I know that my biggest concern about sending D to a school with lousy test scores was fear that they’d adopt a drill-and-kill approach.

And I know a lot of good teachers resist such a highly structured approach, prefering the flexibility to follow the children’s interests and take advantage of teachable moments.  Kozol argues that schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods get caught in vicious cycles, where they get the least experienced teachers, so the administrators rely on scripted lessons, which makes the schools even less attractive for creative teachers.

***********

Edited to add that none of this says that any individual child can’t succeed.  There are certainly kids who overcome mediocre parenting and indifferent schools to achieve great things.  And there are poor parents who devote all their limited resources to making things better for their kids.  All this is about averages.

The pie (apple) and muffins (pumpkin) are baked, the stuffing is prepped, and the turkey is drying in the fridge after being brined (according to the NYTimes recipe that Libby recommended).  I’ve got two batches of cranberry sauce — I let the first one burn last weekend when we unpacked the Wii and I forgot it was on the stove.  I sort of like how that batch tastes anyway, but I don’t think anyone else will, so I made another batch last night. T is in charge of the mashed potatoes and I’ll make brussels sprouts in the afternoon.

My parents and one of my siblings and her husband are coming down to spend the holiday with us.  I am so very grateful that they’re coming.  The line that keeps running through my head is "bless this house, for we are all together."  I’m also grateful that after the boys woke up at 5.30 am from coughing, I managed to get them back to sleep and they slept until nearly 10 am.

Like Dawn, I accepted the UCC blogad even though I’m not Christian.  I’m embarassingly ignorant about different Christian denominations, but I can’t object to a request that we "pray for ‘all the people’ — our friends, family and coworkers as well as the vulnerable, the lonely and the outcasts."

May we all be filled with blessing this Thanksgiving.

Last week, MC Milker (from the Not Quite Crunchy Parent) commented that one of the advantages of wooden play kitchens is that they’re sturdy enough to last through several kids, and can be sold on eBay when you’re done with them.

I certainly know people who use the high potential resale value as a justification (excuse?) for buying high end baby and kid stuff, from Bugaboo strollers to Hanna Andersson clothing.  But I wonder how many of them actually wind up reselling things?  The most cost-effective thing to do is probably to both buy things used and resell them.

I’ve sold some baby stuff, but I’ve given away far more.  For t-shirts and the like, I just can’t be bothered to carefully wash, photograph, advertise, respond to questions, and then either schlepp to the post office or make arrangements to meet the buyers.  I’m  curious about the people who do find this worthwhile.  Some people are clearly doing this on a semi-professional basis, buying things at end of season sales specifically in order to sell them online the next year.  But others are just listing a few items, as their kids outgrow them.  It’s a high tech yard sale.

I try to give things to friends or family, but if they’re not interested, or if I’m just desperate to get something out of the house, it goes to Value Village.  We just gave our jog stroller to a friend who is expecting her first baby.  Yes, we probably could have gotten some money for it, but the money isn’t make-or-break for us, so we decided to just give it to her.  Things have to be pretty beat up before I just put them in the trash.

We buy the vast majority of the boys’ clothes on ebay.  I refuse to spend $8 on a t-shirt.  Some day maybe they’ll figure it out and protest, but as long as we can get away with it, we will.  I focus on the large lots, since otherwise the shipping makes it less of a bargain.  When I’m paying $2 each for pants, I don’t sweat it if one or two pieces don’t fit.  I know it’s more expensive than the thrift store, but I’m willing to pay a few dollars for the convenience.

I happened to be looking at my eBay profile today, and discovered that I’ve been a member since June 1999.  That surprises me — I wouldn’t have guessed that I’d been on it so long.  I’ve got a feedback level of 71, but I’ve probably bought closer to a hundred things (not everyone gives feedback).  Of all the things that I’ve bought on eBay, I’ve only really been disappointed once (by a used computer where the battery wouldn’t hold a charge).  At this point, I’m surprised when I run into people who have never bought anything on eBay.