Half Changed World

Congrats to Brian at RebelDad for his new gig as a regular guestblogger in the Post blog On Balance.  I’m a bit jealous of his exposure (# of comments I got for my post on labor force participation statistics: 1; # of comments Leslie Morgan Steiner got for her post on the same topic: 187), but also somewhat glad that I’m not the target of some of the nutcases who comment there.

Yesterday Brian pointed out a SF Chronicle article on stay-at-home dads.  He responded to a Salon post critical of the article by writing:

"What makes at-home dads interesting is not that they walk their kids to school or go to the playground or do laundry or whatever. It’s that they are refusing to play by the outdated gender roles. Parents should have a wide range of choices about how they balance work and home, and one of the largest obstacles to this free choice is the idea that there are certain things men simply don’t do (and that women, therefore, must do). At-home dads help shatter this idea, which helps not only SAHDs, but also go-to-work women (who face less of a "second shift" at home), go-to-work dads (who have additional freedom to ask for flexibility) and at-home moms (whose choice is validated by an expanded — and more diverse — peer group)."

I’m not sure that’s quite right.  I think that reverse traditional families (my term for families where moms work and dads are at home) very much challenge gender ideologies.  But we don’t challenge the "ideal worker" model — the idea that employers are entitled to employees who are largely unencumbered by family responsibilities, who don’t have to run out the door in the middle of the day when the daycare calls because a child is sick, who can stay late without hesitation.

My husband has been staying home for over 5 years now.  At this point, I’m tired of stories about stay at home dads that basically treat them as dancing bears.   I’m much more impressed by stories about other things — finances, transportation, whatever, that take stay-at-home dads for granted.

Blogging feels like work tonight, not fun, so I’m not going to do it.  I’ll be back.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned here that I’ve signed up for a triathlon that’s next month.  I’ve figured out that I just don’t carve out the time to exercise unless I have a goal.  Back before I had kids, I ran marathons.  I still have dreams of someday qualifying for Boston, but I knew I wasn’t willing to make the time commitment needed to train for one.  So I got this crazy idea that I’d do a tri.

What makes this really crazy is that I didn’t learn to ride a bike as a kid.  I grew up in NYC, and my parents were never going to let me ride in the streets anyway, so it wasn’t a priority.  They spent a few evenings running around hanging onto my bike while I tried to balance, but when I didn’t pick the trick up, they didn’t persist.

At this point, I’m neither sufficiently trained to be confident that I can complete the race, nor so untrained that I think it’s stupid to try.  My goals, in decreasing order of priority are:

• Have fun
• Don’t get hurt
• Finish
• Finish in less than 3 1/2 hours.

I went for a ride yesterday, and was really pleased that I made it up to the top of a hill where I had needed to walk the bike the previous time.

We had a pretty unscheduled weekend, so on Saturday I asked the boys what they wanted to do.  They both said they wanted to go to the water playground (which we did do) and I said that my priority for the weekend was to get a bike ride in.  D promptly said that he wanted to go for a bike ride too, and he wanted us to take his training wheels off.

So we’ve been running around hanging onto the back of his bike helping him get the feel of it.  He’s actually got pretty good balance for a 5 year old — he’s going a few feet at a time each time we help him get started.   The problem is that he’s getting scared as soon as he picks up some speed, so stops, and then promptly falls over.  The nice thing is that everyone walking by has encouraging words for him.

Meanwhile N is completely uninterested in pedalling his tricycle, but has decided he likes scooting it along like a flintstones car.

Today’s New York Times’ magazine has a long story about a family in the foster care system.  Marie has five children, the first of whom she had at age 13, and has a history of drug use, incarceration, and involvement with abusive men.  She’s completed a course of substance abuse treatment, is testing clean, and has jumped through the hoops the child welfare agency has asked her to.  But the agency is moving to terminate her parental rights, because they don’t think she has the emotional stability and personal resources to cope with the many needs of her troubled kids.

I’m not going to presume to second guess the agency based on a magazine article.  The one thing that’s clear is that this case falls in the awful grey range, where there aren’t clearcut right choices.  One of the things that was hardest for me to accept in my CASA training is that once families are in the child welfare system — particularly once they’ve messed up enough to have a child removed from the home — in many ways they’re held to a higher standard than families in general.  Things that would never get CPS involved in the first place are enough to prevent reunification.  But you can’t keep kids in limbo indefinitely while you wait for their parents to get their acts together.

The article raises the fact that poor kids are disproprortionately likely to be removed from their homes by CPS, that the same types of problems are much more likely to result in termination of parental rights when the parents don’t have other resources to draw on.  It needs to be read together with another article from the same magazine, After the Bell Curve, which discusses the evidence that being raised in poverty stunts kids’ intellectual development, so that they don’t achieve their maximum potential. 

The article about Marie quotes a DFS official as saying "Some people just should not be parents."  I’m sure that’s true.  But the article raises the possibility that Marie isn’t one of them, that she loves her children and with enough support could be a good parent to them.  But that support isn’t there, not from the child welfare agency, not from anyone in Marie’s life, and not from society at large.

I had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance the other day.  She was talking about how she had prepped her daughter for the first day of camp, explaining that her daughter doesn’t cope well with loud, chaotic settings, and is also quite short.  So, they’ve been going over strategies, such as bringing a quiet toy to play with, and telling the other kids how old she is when they meet.  I commented that my son, D, is also short for his age, but that I don’t think he’s noticed.

It’s hard for me to know whether it would be helpful to try to give D some social skills advice before he starts kindergarten  — try to learn the other kids’ names, don’t sit there waving your hand every single time the teacher asks a question.  As a parent, there’s a desire to protect your child from obvious traps.  And yet, it’s not clear that such warnings would be helpful.  D’s much more of an extrovert than I ever was, and makes friends easily with kids on the playground.  He’s convinced that everyone he meets wants to be his friend, and his belief often makes it true.

There’s also the complicating factor that, based on the school’s demographics, D is likely to be either the only white kid in his class, or one of just a couple.  And he may well be the only Jewish kid in the school.  So, he’s going to stick out.  I can’t help but worry that it’s going to make any social sins he commits much more obvious.

Any thoughts, stories, suggestions?

I keep starting posts about the fighting in Israel and Lebanon, then discarding them, and starting again.  It seems wrong not to acknowledge the fighting and the heartbreak it is bringing to people on both sides, but I’m not sure what I have to add to the conversation. 

Lisa at Global Voices Online reports that this is probably the most blogged war in history.  I’ve been reading Allison Kaplan Sommer, who discusses such homely details as her decision whether to send her kids to camp this week. 

I think Allison is right that the US would be totally unrestrained in a comparable situation.  I don’t think even W. is nuts enough to go nuclear, but pretty much everything else would be considered fair game if US cities were the target of missile attacks.  But that doesn’t mean it would be right.  There’s basically two arguments for hitting back with everything you’ve got.  First is the purely political consideration that anything less would be considered week and make the government vulnerable to criticism.  The second, and more significant, argument is the idea of deterrence — that if everyone knows that you’re going to respond immediately and hard, they’ll be less likely to attack in the first place.  But the problem here is that Hezbollah wants Israel to respond out of control, because that response stirs up the mass hatred of Israel in the Arab world.

I do think the US would have been slower to react to the kidnapping of American soldiers.  For better or worse, because we don’t have a draft, I think there’s more of a sense of "they’re professionals and knew the risks that they were taking."  Because an Israeli soldier could be, quite literally, anybody’s child, I think there’s more of a commitment to doing whatever it takes — from commando raids to exchanging prisoners — to get them free.

Let me start with full disclosure: I went to college with Peter Beinart, the author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win The War on Terror and Make America Great Again.  We were friendly acquaintances, but not close, and I didn’t stay in touch with him.  I heard about him, of course, when he was named editor at the New Republic just six years after graduation and have followed his career from afar with a combination of wonder, admiration and envy.  And then last week, with his book in my bag, I ran into him waiting for an elevator.  Go figure.

The Good Fight is a frustrating book.  In the acknowledgements, Beinart thanks Marty Peretz who "saved me from an unpromising academic career."  In the first third of the book, he seems to have disinterred all the research he had done and tried to put it to good use.  He argues that liberals need to reclaim the strong international outlook they had in the late 1940s and 50s, the legacy of the anti-communist Democrats who founded Americans for Democratic Action.  Unfortunately, these chapters are pretty dull going.  Beinart tells the story of the founding of the ADA, how its values came to dominate the Democratic party and then declined, in chronological order, getting bogged down in more detail than is needed, but not enough to bring the huge cast of characters to life. 

What makes this frustrating is that I think Beinart’s basic idea is right.  He argues that Democrats need to articulate a vision for foreign policy that is neither knee-jerk isolationist nor Republican-lite.  Without such a vision, what we wind up with is muddled messes like Kerry’s attempt to explain why he voted for the war before he voted against it (or was it the other way around)?  The anti-war wing of the party has an easier job articulating its position, but doesn’t stand up effectively against the evil of the world.  Beinart argues that Democrats are so (justifiably) furious about the way that Bush has abused the idea of a war on terror that they often seem to forget that there really is a terrorist threat that needs to be combated.

I’m not entirely convinced by Beinart’s overall theory of the righteous war (his ideal war seems to be a cross between the first Iraq war and the intervention in Kosovo) but his articulation of what’s wrong with the Bush approach — and how we could do better — is far better than I’ve heard from any elected official:

"George W. Bush has faithfully carried out the great conservative project.  He has strippped away the restraints on American power, in an effort to show the world that we are not weak.  And in the process, he has made American power illegitimate, which has made us weak.  He has denied America’s capacity for evil, in an effort to bolster America’s faith in itself.  And, in the process, America has committed terrible misdeeds, which have sapped the world’s faith in us — and ultimately, our faith in ourslelves."

As reported in the NYTimes over the weekend, the Department of Education released a report on Friday from a study conducted by the Educational Testing Service, comparing test scores of public and private school students.  While private school students have better scores, on average, the study found that after you control for various school and student characteristics there was no difference between the test scores of public and private school students.

This doesn’t really tell a parent trying to pick a school very much.  Among the things controlled for were school size and the composition of the teaching staff, which are precisely the sorts of things that fancy private schools pride themselves on.  And the schools that don’t offer these advantages aren’t necessarily competing on better educational offerings, but on safety (e.g. that they can kick the troublemakers out) and values.  But it does complicate matters for the privatization advocates who argue that private schools are going to do a much better job with the same population of students and the same resources as public schools.

The most entertaining part of the story is the Education Department’s attempt to claim that releasing the report on a summer Friday, without a press conference, wasn’t an attempt to bury it.  Yes, this may have been the first day it could have been released.  But if the results had been favorable to private schools, I’m confident that it would have been released in an event at a school where at least some students are attending through vouchers.

I spent this afternoon at the beach with the boys, my father and my sister.  It was perfect weather, sunny and warm without being unbearably hot.  The boys dug in the sand, collected bits of seashell and played at the water’s edge.

I can’t tell you how pleased I was to watch D dashing in and out of the water, getting splashed by the waves, and laughing like mad.  He cried a few times when a wave hit him full on and splashed into his eyes and mouth, but didn’t get hysterical, and was back playing minutes later.  It’s hard to believe this was the kid who wouldn’t walk on sand (even with shoes on) a couple of years ago.  Whatever sensory issues he had, he seems to have outgrown them.  (Well, he’s still a ludicrously picky eater.  We were listening to NO! in the car yesterday, and he asked "Am I a supertaster?"  I said "I don’t know.  Maybe.")

In looking through my archives, I realize I wrote a similar post about him playing in the snow this winter.  I’m not sure I’ll ever take these simple joys for granted.

Today’s book is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan.  It has a great deal in common with Peter Singer’s book, The Way We Eat, which I discussed last month.  Where Singer looked at the diets of three families — a conventional American diet, full of processed meat, a diet where the family attempts to eat organic and humanely raised meat, and a vegan diet — Pollan looks at four meals that he eats — a McDonald’s burger, an organic meal from large producers, a meal from Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm, and a meal largely of foods that he hunted (a wild pig) or gathered (morels) himself.

Pollan begins by discussing how the vast majority of the American diet comes from corn in one form or another — either directly processed, or fed to animals.  He visits a corn farm to see how it’s grown, but then points out that corn is a commodity — you can’t connect that corn to any particular cow, or any particular cow to a piece of meet.  Organic food from large companies is produced in a more sustainable manner, with less chemicals, but is equally a commodity.  By contrast, Polyface is a self-contained ecosystem.  Salatin isn’t officially "organic," but invites any of his customers to see what he’s doing.

Ironically, I found Pollan’s writing more preachy than Singer’s, even though Singer is the professional ethicist.  Singer tells you what he thinks you should do, and he tells you why.  He tells you what he thinks the ideal is (not eating meat at all), and what’s a good fallback position (not eating industrial farmed meat, unless there’s an overriding reason to do so).  Pollan doesn’t ever explicitly say "you should do this" but gives the impression that he thinks he’s more enlightened than you.

In the section on the meal that he hunted and gathered (which Pollan admits freely is interesting only as a one-shot exercise, not as a lifestyle), Pollan writes about the connection he felt to the food.  But I was left with the impression that the true gift he received was the relationships he developed with the people who took him hunting, who taught him to find mushrooms, and who shared the meal with him.  Conventionally farmed food, cooked and shared with love, can be pretty magical too.