Half Changed World

Today’s book is The Price of Privilege, by Madeline Levine.  Levine is a psychologist in Marin county, California, and she writes about how she’s seeing more and more affluent teenagers who are depressed, anxious, anorexic, using drugs, cutting themselves, or otherwise acting in self-destructive manners.  She argues that this isn’t in spite of their privileged backgrounds, but because of them. 

In particular, Levine suggests that affluent communities are characterized by:

• intense pressure to perform, in both grades and extra-curriculars
• materialistic values
• very busy parents who don’t have time for their kids (whether or not they work outside the home).
• isolation and lack of social supports.

She claims that the result is kids who don’t have a real "sense of self."  They know what is expected of them — and depending on their personality, may either conform or do precisely the opposite — but don’t know who they are and what they really value in life.  Or, as the subtitle says, "How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids."

Levine argues that parents need to both take a step back from their kids’ lives — let them make more decisions on their own, and learn to deal with the consequences — and be more connected with them as persons and let them know they love them for themselves, not just their accomplishments.  This rang true to me.  I know that my husband is still dealing with the message that he got from his parents as a teenager that they believed that if he was left to make his own decisions, he’d ruin his life. 

The book also helped me articulate some of my irritation with the Post magazine article on "toxic parents" from a couple of weeks ago.  The article seemed to suggest that the only parenting alternatives were to a) let your kids do whatever they wanted, including buying alcohol for them and letting them have unsupervised parties, and b) to track their whereabouts every minute.  I’m pretty sure that the right choice is c) set clear expectations, provide freedom within reasonable limits, and let there be consequences if the kid screws up.  (Levine admits that in spite of her best efforts, some of her son’s friends snuck alcohol into a party at her house, and she got busted by the police.)

That said, I’m not convinced that the people who read this book will be the ones who need to, or if they do, that they’ll recognize themselves.  I suspect it’s more likely to be read by people who enjoy tssking at other people’s bad parenting, and feeling virtuous by comparison.  (And who wouldn’t feel virtuous compared to the dad who wanted Levine to fix his kid’s drug problem, but wouldn’t give up using himself?)

This morning, the Census Bureau released the 2005 poverty figures, as well as data on income and health insurance coverage.

• The official poverty rate was 12.6 percent, statistically unchanged from the 2004 level (12.7 percent).  The Administration may try to spin this as good news, but it’s really a sign of how little the benefits of this "recovery" are spreading.  As my friends over at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities point out, it’s unheard of for poverty to still be higher four years into a recovery that it was at the low point of the recession.
• Median household income increased slightly, even though median earnings of year-round full-time workers, both male and female, fell slightly.  I think that has to mean more people per household were working, or were working more hours.
• I think the biggest story in this release is the decline in health insurance coverage.  46.6 million people in the US didn’t have health insurance, for an uninsurance rate of of 15.9 percent.  And that figure would look much worse if there hadn’t been a big expansion of public insurance for children in the 1990s.  I just don’t see anything turning around the movement away from employer-provided coverage.  I read something recently (in the New Yorker, maybe?) that argued that the campaign to require WalMart to provide health insurance benefits is really a back door way to try to get universal coverage, by getting employers to push for it.  Makes sense to me.

For those of you looking for a Tuesday Book Review, I’ll be posting about The Price of Privilege tomorrow.

I went out with some of my colleagues for drinks after work this evening.  We had a good time, drinking and schmoozing, and also had a very illuminating conversation about the culture of the office.  It started out as a discussion of the annual holiday party, and how it’s been somewhat of a focus for culture clash issues in the past, and eventually it turned into a discussion of socializing and work.

What I learned is that the two senior people in the organization are both strong introverts, and tend to think that everyone should be sitting in their office working and not "wasting time" standing around in the halls and talking.  At the same time, they’ve spent a lot of time over the last year trying to figure out formal ways to break down some of the organizational silos.  It hasn’t occurred to them that ordering in Chinese and letting people have informal conversations about what they’re working on might work better than more meetings.

What’s really strange about this is that this is not an organization with a high emphasis on clock-watching.  People work from home or flex their schedules all their time, and with very little supervision.  There’s very much an expectation that we’re all professionals and will get the job done.  If anything, people tend to work more hours than they’re paid for, since they care about the mission.  So it seems very odd to me that they’re worried about staff "wasting time" through socializing.

Of course, this conversation was precisely an example of the kinds of things that you learn through informal conversation that make you better at your job.  And while I don’t object to having a Berry Lemontini every so often, I shouldn’t have to stay late to learn these things. Landismom wrote the other day about wishing that there were other working moms in her office.  There are actually lots of moms with young children in my office — as noted above, the powers that be are very open to flexible schedules — but of the other two in my particular division, one telecommutes from another state and the other is out on maternity leave.  So there’s no one else to say "hey, I really need to get home for dinner, let’s do something that isn’t drinks after work."

As it happens, T and the boys were elsewhere tonight, so I wasn’t missing out on family time, but in general, I’d rather have these conversations at lunch.  I think I’ll try posting a menu for takeout and seeing if I can convince others to order with me some day.

I did my first triathalon today, and I achievd all four of my goals.  I’m tired (had to get up at 5 in the morning), but don’t feel too bad overall — I have a feeling I may have trouble going down stairs in the morning though.

Someone asked me today what’s the appeal of doing a triathalon.  I have two answers, which are both true, although the balance between them varies:

• Signing up for a race is a commitment device, a way of forcing myself to prioritize getting to the gym to swim or out on my bike for a ride.  Without a goal, it’s too easy to say "not today, I’m too tired to get up early," or "not today, it’s too hot out."  Once I get out the door, I generally enjoy it, but getting out the door often requires a kick in the pants.  Meeting someone for a workout is also a good commitment device, if you can find someone whose schedule and fitness level meshes well with yours.
• Part of the appeal is precisely the fact that I wasn’t sure I could finish the race, that even lining up this morning terrified me.  I like pushing my limits, doing things that I’m not sure I can do, overcoming my fears. It makes me feel brave, and alive.  This morning I was walking around the set-up area saying to my friend "What am I doing here?  What ever made me think this was a good idea?" and I realized that what I was really saying was "Aren’t I brave for even trying to do this?  Isn’t this exciting?"

D’s been off his asthma medications for a couple of months.  He hasn’t had a real attack since the first one, in February 2005.  Last winter, we treated every cough as if it might be asthma-related.  He’s been totally symptom free since the spring, and his pediatrician agreed that we might as well see how he did without the steroids.  There’s pretty good evidence that long-term use of inhaled steroids retards growth slightly, and lord knows that he could use the extra inches.

He’s got a cold, and a little bit of a cough.  School’s about to start, and I’ve read the study showing the dramatic peak in attacks among school-age kids in September and October.  The doctors quoted in that article argue forcefully that asthma should be treated as a chronic, not episodic disease.  But a lot of kids also grow out of asthma.  No one’s been able to give me an answer as to how to find out of he’s outgrown it other than keeping him off the meds and seeing what happens.

Thanks to those of you who made suggestions in response to last week’s post about whether welfare reform reduced the stigma of poverty.  I think my conclusions are:

• The stigma of welfare, if anything, has increased over the past 10 years.  That’s one of the reasons that less than half of those who are eligible for welfare benefits now receive them.
• Clinton hoped that welfare reform would destigmatize poverty, but it’s not at all clear that it happened.  One of my colleagues argues that the stigma of poverty is declining, but it’s because middle-class people are feeling more insecure and that it could happen to them.

Bill Clinton had a self-congratulatory op-ed in the NY Times yesterday, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as the welfare reform law.  I had to shake my head at his defense of recipients’ opportunity to go to school, since a battle over that was probably the single most frustrating moment of my federal career.  (It was more depressing to work on welfare under the Bush administration, but it was more frustrating under Clinton, because I had higher expectations.) 

All in all, it was a lot more pleasant to commemorate the 10th anniversary of welfare reform now that I’m no longer a fed and don’t have to toe the party line.  (Oddly enough, the article that quoted me emphasized that I joined HHS just before the bill was signed, and didn’t list my current affiliation.  I hope no one called my former boss up screaming about how could they have let me talk to the press.)

For an assortment of progressive takes on welfare reform, check out inclusionist.org.  I’m not quite sure why they have it set up as a Drupal site, since they’re not opening it up for others to post, but they’ve got enough links to keep a wonk like me busy for weeks.

I really wanted to like today’s book, New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance, by Charlayne Hunter-Gault.  I’ve always admired Hunter-Gault’s journalism, and her personal story is heroic — she one of the two black students to integrate the University of Georgia.  And I agree with her point that western coverage of Africa is almost always limited to what she calls "the four Ds" — Death, Disaster, Disease, and Despair (plus one C, corruption).

But I found the book slow going (even though it’s only 142 pages).  Hunter-Gault spends a lot of time covering the relatively familiar story of the peaceful transition of South Africa from apartheid to democracy, and moves so quickly through a laundry list of other countries making progress that the details blur together.  Because she has so much ground to cover in a short space, she rarely gets into the details of the human stories that bring her reportage to life.  And she tries so hard to be even-handed that she winds up being almost mealy mouthed in places.  (I sputtered a bit over her statement that donor funding to Zimbabwe has declined "due to what Western agencies regarded as bad governance.")

The book is divided into three sections, based on three lectures that Hunter-Gault gave at Harvard in 2003.  The first section focuses on South Africa and its transformation since the fall of apartheid.  The second discusses the growth of (at least the forms of) democracy across the continent.  I found this the least persuasive section, with Hunter-Gault often having to point to the persistence of opposition movements in the face of brutal crackdowns as a sign of the people’s desire for democracy, rather than being able to point to significant progress.  The third section is where Hunter-Gault hits her stride, writing with passion about the African journalists who persist in the face of limited resources and often government censorship to report the news, both good and bad.

Ultimately, the book disappointed, because I didn’t feel like I knew any more about Africa when I finished than when I started.  Do any of you have suggestions for books to read?  I’ll admit that I took both The End of Poverty and White Man’s Burden out of the library this summer, and only got a few chapters into each of them before they were due.

Alan commented on my review of Get to Work with a link to his critique of Hirshman’s essay.  I promptly clicked over, and have to admit that he nearly lost me with the first paragraph, which begins:

"Ms. Hirshman, your complaint, strangely enough, makes me think of Henry Higgins’ lament, "Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” You refuse to consider that it may be differences in women’s and men’s brains (differences which evolved over eons–look into evolutionary psychology or sociobiology sometime) that account for some of their differences in behavior."

I have a pretty solid knee-jerk antagonistic reaction to sociobiological arguments.   After a moment, I realized I was doing almost exactly what I had accused Hirshman of — dismissing the argument because some (many? most?) of the people who make it are conservative anti-feminists.

I do think the science behind sociobiology is extraordinarily weak.  The fossil and artifact record tells us very little about how our ancestors organized their lives.  It’s a field where people seem to miraculously find confirmation of whatever they believed going in.  You find people arguing that women are biologicially wired to care more about housecleaning because they’ve got keener senses and people arguing that women are biologically wired not to notice how bad poopy diapers smell.  And Newt Gingrich arguing that men are biologically wired to wallow in the mud and hunt giraffes.

I also don’t think that you need to rely on sociobiology to explain gender differences in behavior.  For example, Rhonda Mahony does a perfectly good job of explaining how pregnancy, breastfeeding, and maternity leave can give mothers a "head start" in attachment to babies, which leads to decisions that perpetuate the inbalance. 

In yesterday’s post, Deborah Tannen reviewed a new book, The Female Brain, by Louann Brizendine.  She concludes her review: " But given the character — and rancor — of our dichotomous approach to the influences of biology and culture, readers likely will be fascinated or angered, convinced or skeptical, according to the positions they have staked out already."

While I’m skeptical of sociobiology, I do believe, as I’ve said before, that estrogen and testosterone do affect our brains as well as our bodies.  I’ll see if I can get the book out of the library.

Ok, I want to see if my wonderful readers can help me out with a work-related question.  On a draft paper, I wrote the following bullet:

• Welfare reform removed some of the stigma from poverty.  Welfare reform changed the popular image of a poor person from a long-term welfare recipient to someone who is working hard but having trouble making ends meet.

So, of course I was asked if I could find a statistic or a quote (from someone well-known) to support that statement.

The closest I was able to find via google was this article by Chris Jenks, where he argues that welfare reform made it possible to spend more money on poor people.  I also found this interesting paper from the National Center on Children in Poverty that discusses how people’s willingness to provide help varies based on the characteristics of the poor people.

Any suggestions?  Thanks.

Welcome to the "I read it, so you don’t have to" edition of the Tuesday Book Review.  Yup, I’m discussing Linda Hirshman’s Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, which is her somewhat expanded version of the American Prospect article that caused all the fuss last winter.

The tone of the book irritated me immensely.  Hirshman is so in love with her self-image as the lone prophet in the wilderness that she attacks her possible allies .  For example, she writes scornfully about "stay-at-home dads who contend that their decisions mean there is no such thing as a gender ideology about who should care for home and familiy."  Err, actually, SAHDs encounter gender ideology up close and personal every day.  And she quotes long passages from bloggers and others without attribution, which strikes me as intellectually dishonest.  (Bitch, PhD is one of the few bloggers who she cites by name.  Phantom Scribbler is also mentioned in the endnotes.)   Finally, she plays sleazy rhetorical tricks, such as painting all of her critics with the brush of a few of them (e.g. anti-feminist conservative wingnuts hated her article, so if you disagre with her, you must be an anti-feminist wingnut.)

I’m going to try not to repeat what I previously wrote in response to the original article, but most of my complaints at the time still hold.  In particular, Hirshman still doesn’t get that the problem isn’t just that gender ideology affects which of the available choices people pick, but also that the choices are far too limited.  So, what’s new in the book?

First, Hirshman expands somewhat on her advice to young women who want to have equal power in their relationships — get a practical degree, take work seriously, lower your standards for household cleanliness, have only one kid.  The only part of this that I thought was particularly interesting was her acknowledgment that having a job that you’re passionate about can increase your bargaining position as well as making a lot of money, as long as it doesn’t pay so little that you’d starve on your own.  But if you’re interested in understanding marital bargaining, reading Kidding Ourselves, not Get to Work.  (Hirshman does credit Mahony for much of this section.)  Ironically, this section reminded me a lot of Sylvia Hewlett’s writing — both of them are determined to save young women from the mistakes they don’t know they’re making.

Second, Hirshman does acknowledge that feminism would be smaller under her definition, but she argues that a smaller, more focused movement would be more effective.  In particular, she argues for a policy goal of removing the tax penalty on second earners.  (Interestingly, this is also the "marriage penalty" that the religious conservatives whom Hirshman reviles also oppose.)