Half Changed World

In the comments to my review of Unequal Childhoods, Jen asked me what I think of Lareau’s use of the term "entitlement."  Entitlement is a bit of a dirty word these days: professors complain about how their students feel entitled to endless extensions on assignments and good grades; conservatives who think welfare is evil complain about recipients who feel entitled to food stamps or health care. 

But, is entitlement always a bad thing?  Lareau argues that the middle-class children in her study are raised to feel entitled to:

• participate in a range of activities, whose cost is rarely discussed in front of the kids;
• receive a significant amount of parental attention to their questions, interests, and accomplishments; and
• to receive a level of service from outside institutions, such as schools.

This rang true to me.  And I’m fairly comfortable with the idea that I’m raising my children to feel entitled in these ways, especially the second and third. If they’re assigned to a crappy teacher, yes, I’m going to be in the principal’s office complaining.  Ideally this would result in either for the teacher being replaced or receiving some backup and remediation, but if that’s not possible, I’ll admit that I’ll probably be arguing for my kid to be in the other class.  So shoot me. 

At the heart of the objection to entitlement is the sense that things — good grades, material success — need to be earned.  And I agree, I don’t have a lot of patience for people who expect to receive excellent grades, interesting jobs, nice cars, etc. without working for them.  But I believe that the opportunity to explore interests, parental attention, and respect and reasonable accomodation from authorities are not goods that should be limited to the privileged few.

As David Shipler and Jason DeParle have both pointed out, as a group, the poor feel less entitled than you could imagine.  They don’t feel entitled to safe housing, adequate health care, or paid sick leave.  When the welfare caseworker loses their paperwork, or when their child’s learning disability isn’t diagnosed until May, they rarely complain.

If too much entitlement makes you think that you deserve good things without earning them, too little entitlement makes you think that you don’t deserve good things and you’ll never get them no matter how hard you work, so you might as well not try.

I went to a conference today for work, and John Edwards was the dinner speaker.  He’s now the director of the Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina.  He didn’t say anything terribly new or profound, but it’s amazing these days to hear a major political figure actually talking about poverty, and arguing for things like raising the minimum wage, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, even revitalizing the American labor movement.

He wasn’t my first choice in the 2004 primaries, but I think I may be signing up for Edwards 2008.

Last year, all I wanted for Mothers’ Day was for T. to take the boys out for the morning so I could sleep in and read the newspaper in peace for once.  This year, I’m not so desperate.  Not sure what that means.  D. keeps telling me that he made something for me at preschool, but he can’t tell me what it is because it’s a secret.  He also thinks he should make me a cake, having watched the Dora mother’s day episode.

The Washington Post’s obligatory Mothers’ Day story actually does a nice job of pointing out that "working" and "stay-at-home" mothers are points on a continuum, not polar opposites. 

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with my new toy.  I’m totally addicted to Village Sim, but it annoys me that the women do absolutely nothing else during the two years that they nurse.  All of our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have starved to death if that were really the case.

On Sunday, May 22, at 1 pm, I’m hosting a house party for Miriam Peskowitz, author of The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars.  If you’re in the DC area, and would like to join us, email me, and I’ll give you directions.  She’s also reading at the Olssen’s in Bethesda on Saturday.

Miriam’s blog is Playground Revolution, which is what she wanted to call the book. There’s also a great interview with her up at Mothers Movement Online. Check it out.

This morning, I went to a briefing on the "Maternal Wall" organized by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.  Much of it covered ground that I was already familiar with, but I really enjoyed the introductory speech by Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Wasserman Schultz is a freshman Representative from Florida, and I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of her before.  Her bio is quite unusual.  She’s 38 years old, and was first elected to the Florida state legislature at 26.  She’s also the mother of 6-year-old twins and a 20-month old.  And during the campaign, her opponent, a woman with adult children, consistently charged her with being a bad mother for running for office. 

Wasserman Schultz won me over with a story of how, at one event, she couldn’t find a pen and so took notes with a crayon.  Her opponent seized upon this as evidence of her "frazzledness" and lack of fitness for office.  When asked about it by a reporter, Wasserman Schultz responded "I may not always have a pen in my purse, but I always have crayons."   Me too.

Wasserman Schultz pointed out that there are only 4 women in Congress with children under 15, and only 2 with children under 10.  The classic women’s path in politics has been to get involved later, when children are in high school, or out of the house. Politics is a time-intensive career, but not one that requires a linear path of achievement. 

When much of the blogosphere was freaking out over Judith Warner, Jody and I (and others) pointed out that Warner had interviewed a very narrow subset of upper-middle and middle-class parents in Washington DC and other major urban areas, and decided that they were representative of all American parents.  Today’s book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life, by Annette Lareau, explicitly uses the lens of class to examine parenting practices.

Lareau and her field workers observed classroom interactions, interviewed parents in 88 families, and eventually conducted intensive home observations of a selected sample of 12 families with third graders.  The book is structured with each chapter describing a specific child and family, each one illustrating an aspect of parenting behavior.

Lareau’s basic argument is that middle-class* families use a parenting strategy that she calls "concerted cultivation."  This involves intensive verbal interactions, including explanations of the reasons behind decisions, lots of scheduled activities, such as sports and music lessons, and parental intervention with outside institutions, especially schools, to get them to accomodate children’s individual needs and preferences.  By contrast, working-class* and poor families use a very different parenting strategy, that of "the accomplishment of natural growth."  These parents see their responsibility as making sure that their children are fed, housed, appropriately clothed, clean and attending school.  (As Lareau notes, these are not small tasks, especially for the poorest families.)  The kids spend most of their time in unstructured self-directed play with relatives or neighbors, in mixed age groups, and watch lots of television.

Lareau bends over backwords to describe the differences between middle-class and poor and working-class parenting approaches without judging one as better than another.  She notes that the middle-class children were more likely to argue, whine and talk back to their parents, to complain of boredom, reject food offered and demand alternatives, and even to say they "hated" their siblings. She argues that both approaches have strengths and weaknesses, but that our society privileges "concerted cultivation" and rewards the skills it teaches more than the skills taught by "the accomplishment of natural growth."  For example, organized activities teach kids how to talk to and work with new adults, but unstructured time teaches kids how to entertain themselves.  But the first is more likely to be helpful in the job market.

Lareau’s criticisms of middle-class parenting styles hit home.  There are times I find myself on the verge of tears, wondering whether, just for once, D might do something just because I asked him to, without a fifteen minute discussion and explanation.  My children are too young to participate in the huge number of extra-curricular activities Lareau describes, but I definitely see it happening around me, and know it will be easy to get sucked in. 

At the same time, there are still good reasons to choose concerted cultivation. In particular, I’m thinking about the study that found that a middle class hears more than three times as many words per hour as a child in a family receiving welfare, and almost twice as many as a child in a working class family.  This is quite consistent with Lareau’s findings.

I want to think it about it some more, but there also appears to be a significant overlap between "concerted cultivation" as described by Lareau and the "nurturant parent" model of the family as described by George Lakoff.  (The overlap between "the accomplishment of natural growth" and the "strict father" model isn’t as strong, in part because many of the lower-income families were led by single mothers.)

* One of the problems in talking about class in the US is that just about everyone considers themself "middle-class."  I had an interesting exchange with Amber at Listening to Myself about this.  She commented that Warner doesn’t describe what she sees in her neighborhood:

"Around here, we tend to practice something I’ve heard described as "benign neglect". The moms I know read a lot to their kids, but they don’t play with them. The kids play by themselves or with their siblings, with minimal parental intervention (mainly for really out of bounds behavior). "

Since I was reading this book, I asked her about the socio-economic mix in her neighborhood.  She answered:

"I would say that these people are middle-class, but in the more realistic definition of it – not upper-class masquerading as "upper middle-class". These are mostly stay-at-home moms (like myself) who’s husbands are police officers, teachers, lower to middle level techies (generally not managers) and the like."

Lareau would probably consider that working-class, since the men aren’t managers or supervisers, or people with advanced degrees.  But I’ve hardly ever heard anyone in the US describe themselves as "working class."

No real post tonight, because I’ve been futzing around figuring out how to use my new Palm as a MP3 player.  (My old one was about 7 years old, and had taken to draining its batteries and losing all of its data without warning, making it worse than useless.)

Now, if I can only convince the _____s who are in charge of our tech support to install the upgraded Palm software on my work computer.  (They’ve imposed a policy under which no users are given the permissions to install any software on our own machines.)

The owner of the MAWDAH email list (moms at work/dads at home) received an announcement about an academic conference this fall on "21st century motherhood: change."

They’re looking for papers to be presented for panels on:

• Economics
• Work/Family Balance
• Class/Race/Globalization
• Biology/Fertility Technologies
• Emergent/Innovative Forms of Motherhood

Abstracts due by May 15.

I’m tempted to try to pull something together on the MAWDAH arrangement, what I call Reverse Traditional Families.

I’m not an academic, so I’m not quite sure what goes into an abstract for a paper you haven’t yet written.  If any readers have advice, I’d appreciate it.  And, perhaps more importantly, am I crazy for thinking that this kind of conference might be fun?  I’d have to pay my own way/use vacation time to attend.

My in-laws are visiting, and we took advantage of the extra hands to do some long-overdue home maintenance.  Today we fixed the kitchen light fixture, moved the fridge so we could clean behind and under it (for the first time since we moved in almost 8 years ago), and disconnected and moved the washer/dryer so we could attempt to clean the dryer vent (it’s going to need professional help).  I’m too zonked to write a thoughtful post.  Instead, I’m going to get into bed and read Jaran, which I got out of the library following Jody’s recommendation.

A few months ago, when Moxie solicited Bad Mommy/Daddy Confessions, she was looking for one-time horrors, and explicitly ruled out ongoing failings.  But, truth be told, I spend a lot more mental and emotional energy worrying about the fact that D doesn’t eat any vegetables than about the time I turned my back on him in the grocery cart and he fell on his head.  The fall scared the heck out of me at the time, but he survived, and I know that even the best parents have occasional lapses of that sort.  But deep down, I’m convinced that my son’s eating habits are a sign of my failure.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately around the internet about the health consequences of being overweight, the new Food Pyramid, childhood obesity,and Cookie Monster’s new message that "cookies are a sometimes food." I think it’s an important conversation to have as a society, but it drives me slightly insane on a personal level.  One of these days I’m going to stuff a little ziplock bag full of green pepper slices up the nose of a parent who smugly tells me that their child just loves vegetables because they’ve always set a good example. 

Things D will eat these days include all sorts of breads, muffins, pancakes and waffles.  Milk, juice, yogurt smoothies (sometimes).  Raisins.  Cheese.  Fish sticks (sometimes).  Scrambled eggs (sometimes).  Chicken "dinosaurs" and nuggets.  Ice cream, cookies, and cake.  But not icing.  Pizza crusts but not the part with sauce.  Hot dogs, although he prefers the bun with nothing on it.  Grilled cheese sandwiches. Peanut butter, but not jelly.  Apple slices when offered by his friend’s mother, but not when offered by me.  That’s about it.  He used to like blueberries, but won’t eat them now.  He’s the only 4 year old I’ve ever heard of who won’t eat plain spaghetti, no butter or sauce.  Pretty much the only fruit or vegetables he consumes are what we put into the muffins.  So we make a lot of muffins.

I’ve read Ellyn Satter’s terrific How to Get Your Kid To Eat — But Not Too Much and generally try to follow its principles.  We do more "short-order cooking" (e.g. microwaving one of his preferred foods) than she recommends, but the alternative would be his eating just bread for multiple meals, which doesn’t seem like an improvement.  We give him stars for trying new foods; five stars earn him small toys that he covets.  Last weekend, he threw up after we insisted that he take a single bite of mashed potatoes at the seder if he wanted any desert.

Is D overweight?  No.  If anything, he’s on the skinny side.  If one of his preferred foods isn’t available, he’ll generally do without eating.  He’s active and healthy, so we try not to worry too much.

Meanwhile N, at 18 months, will eat pretty much anything he can swallow.  He loves tomatoes, and screams with frustration if I try to eat one in front of him without sharing.  The only food I can think of that he’s rejected outright is avocado.  And — I swear — we haven’t done anything differently with the two boys.  If anything, N’s been exposed to more convenience foods.  Go figure.

Last week, Reuters ran a story under the headline First Week Critical in Childhood Obesity — US Study.  The article began:

"What you feed a newborn baby during the first week of life could be critical in deciding whether that baby grows up to be obese, U.S. researchers said on Monday."

and later explained:

"Writing in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, they said each additional 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of weight gained during the first eight days of life increased a baby’s risk of becoming an overweight adult by about 10 percent."

It sounds like this is a pure correlational study.  If that’s the case, I’m not convinced that this is about anything the parents do or don’t do.  I could make an argument that this might mean, instead, that even in the first week, humans have different thresholds for when they feel "full."