Half Changed World

Tertia writes about her impending return to work.  She notes that the economics of the SAHM/WOHM choice plays out very differently in South Africa than in the US; because domestic help is so cheap there, it almost never makes financial sense for a middle class parent to stay at home.

Bitch, PhD writes about the economic risks of staying home, especially in the case of divorce.  As she notes, these were among the rallying cries of second-wave feminism; she wonders why more women don’t worry about them these days.

Today’s book is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcom Gladwell, which has been hanging out on the bestseller lists for a while.  Like Gladwell’s last book, The Tipping Point, Blink is an accessible look at an interesting psychological phenomenon, in this case, why people are (sometimes) able to make highly accurate snap judgments.

Gladwell’s a good writer, and his essays for the New Yorker are always worth reading.  He can take the unlikeliest of topics and make it interesting for 20 pages or so; his examination of the history and science of disposible diapers remains one of my favorites.

Unfortunately, Blink is over 200 pages, and while it covers topics from modern warfare to detecting art forgeries, from emergency room protocols to the Diallo shooting, it only has slightly more substance than the article that it started out as.  That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the book.  I did (and read it in a matter of days).  But I found the core argument of the book somewhat lacking.

Gladwell argues that humans have a great ability to make accurate judgments in a flash, based on limited information.  Except, of course, when we fail.  Gladwell argues that quick judgments fail when they’re based on the wrong kinds of information (race, gender, height) or when we try to incorporate too much information and get overwhelmed.  Fair enough, but in the real world it’s almost impossible to know whether we’re in a situation where it’s good to trust our instincts or one where we’re reacting out of bias.

The NYTimes ran a bunch of letters in response to the article about childless cities.  One of them wrote:

"As someone who lived in San Francisco with two small boys, I think I know why there are few children in that city: It just isn’t a great place to be a kid.

My oldest son couldn’t learn to ride his bike on the hilly and congested streets. We didn’t have a backyard. And our neighborhood was barren on Halloween. (We drove to a friend’s suburban neighborhood to trick-or-treat)."

I grew up in the heart of Greenwich Village.  It was an amazing place to be on Halloween (the parade was over the top even then, and a 30 story apartment building is heaven for trick-or-treating), but overall it wasn’t a great place to be a small child (or to be the parent of a small child).  It’s true that someone always had to be with me if I wanted to go out to play, and I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was an adult.

But it was a terrific place to be a teenager, because you could get anywhere without a car.  I started taking the subway to school in 7th grade.  I totally took for granted a diversity of people, of languages, of foods, of experiences.   Firefighters and drag queens were equally likely to be waiting on line in front of me at the supermarket.  And yet it was also a real community, where the butcher would have my parents’ order out for me without my saying my name.

One summer at camp, a kid made fun of me because I called McDonald’s "McDonald’s" rather than "Micky D’s" or "the Golden Arches."  I thought he was an idiot.  McDonald’s just wasn’t important enough in my life to warrant a nickname. Instead, I could make a passionate argument for why the Ray’s across the street from Jefferson Market library was the only one worth going to (inch-thick layers of toppings) and could go out to dinner in Chinatown with my Chinese-American boyfriend’s family without totally humiliating myself.

I have nothing against backyards.  I enjoy puttering around trying to grow tomatoes in our postage stamp of a backyard, and am sometimes envious of my friends who have yards big enough for swingsets or impromptu t-ball games.  But to say that San Francisco or New York is a bad place to be a kid because you won’t have a backyard displays an awfully limited view of childhood.

The New York Times had an article Thursday on the disappearance of families with children from otherwise thriving urban areas.

This topic certainly resonates around the blogs I read, from 11d to finslippy.  Lots of people have either moved out of cities or are struggling with the decision.  Between the cost of housing, and the low quality of many urban school systems, many sworn city-dwellers start to hear the call of the surbubs after a kid or two.

Res Ipsa wonders "is it necessarily a problem if there are neighborhoods or communities where there aren’t a lot of children?"

It certainly matters to those of us who value city living and who have kids.  I know I feel a stab of pain every time I see a family with young kids moving out of our neigbhorhood.  Their moving is one less family to advocate for the quality of the schools, one less family using the playgrounds and keeping them safe and clean, one less family with which my kids can spontaneously play. 

If you think (as I do) that our dependence on gasoline is a threat to both the world environment and to our national security, anything that forces people into suburban sprawl is a bad thing.

I also think it’s probably better for the education of poor kids in urban school systems when there are also middle-class kids in the same school systems, even if they rarely attend the same schools.  Having middle-class kids in the system brings both attention and money.  Affluent childless singles and empty-nesters may pay income and property taxes, but they tend to ignore the schools and — if anything — fight for lower tax rates.

Last weekend, we bought D a bicycle with training wheels and a bell and a fierce looking bee painted on it.  He couldn’t be more pleased with it.  Of course, we have him wearing a helmet — we even made him wear one with his tricycle.

Hugo Schwyzer wrote last month about adults riding bikes on the sidewalk in his neighborhood:

"I’ve never seen any of these young men wearing helmets.  I have no doubt that they can’t afford them."

D doesn’t seem to have noticed yet that almost none of the big kids in the neighborhood wear helmets when they ride bikes.  I’m not looking forward to the arguments we’re likely to have when he does.

The kids I see riding their bikes are mostly African-American; many of them live in a nearby subsidized housing project. I’m not sure how much the issue is that their parents can’t afford helmets, how much it’s that they’re less inclined to believe they can protect their children from all of the world’s ills.  I don’t want to make D think that his friends’ parents love their children less than we love him — but I also don’t want him to think that wearing a helmet is negotiable. 

One nice thing about D attending a Jewish preschool is that they totally ignore most of the secular and Christian holidays.  So we didn’t have to run around making valentines for all of his classmates last month, and this month he’s not bringing home Easter baskets or talking about Easter eggs.  Instead, they’ve been making hamentaschen and singing Purim songs.  I’m particularly fond of "Harma Harma Haman" sung to the tune of "Little Bunny Foo Foo."

But the Purim story isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world to explain to a 4-year-old.  He likes being Haman and saying "bow down to me" and I get to be "the Jewish People" and say "NO!" and then we both laugh.  But last night he was thinking about all the characters, and he couldn’t quite figure out why there were two Queens in the story.  I simply said that Vashti is the queen at the beginning of the story, and Esther is the queen later on, and left it at that. 

I think I’m going to get away with it this year.  But at some point, he’s going to notice that Vashti gets the kibosh for refusing to dance in front of all of the King’s friends.  And while saying "NO!" works out ok for Esther and Mordechai and "the Jewish People," it doesn’t turn out so well for poor Vashti.  (I guess I’ve always been a fan of the underdog; I used to dress up as Vashti for Purim when I was just a bit older than D.)

Someone emailed me after reading yesterday’s post and asked me about the statement that children born to unmarried parents do worse than their peers on a range of measures.  The measures include things from physical health, to how well the children do at school, to drug use, to how early they start having sex and becoming parents themselves.  Here’s a link to a set of charts from the conservative Heritage Foundation, and here’s a summary of the literature by MDRC, a moderately liberal research organization.

There are two important caveats to keep in mind as you look at these studies.  First, all of the studies are looking at group averages.  So they don’t tell you anything about any given individual who is a member of a group.  There are millions of children of single parents who are healthy, do well in school, have healthy relationships, don’t get involved in any sort of criminal activity, etc. 

Second, there is a huge correlation between single parenthood and low incomes.  This is both because single parents typically only have access to one person’s earnings and because people with lower earnings are more likely to have children while not married.  And so, when you just look at the simple average differences between children of single parents and children of married parents (as Heritage does in the link above), most of the gap is probably driven by differences in income.  However, more sophisticated studies do suggest that marital status matters, even after controlling for income.  (One particularly interesting study supporting this comes from Sweden, which has a much more generous economic safety net for single parents than the US.)

Maybe I’ve been working for the Bush Adminstration too long, but I don’t think their Healthy Marriage Initatiive is an inherently evil notion, as most mainstream feminist organizations do, although I do think it is overly narrowly focused.   Instead, I support the Marriage-Plus proposals, which combine support for marriage and stable relationships with job training and other economic supports as well as programs to combat teen pregnancy.  (Heritage and its ilk consider Marriage-Plus to be heresy.)  During the CLASP audioconference last week, Kathy Edin mentioned a "service-learning" program that had suprisingly good results at reducing teen pregnancy; she suggested that it was because it gave the participants a sense that they could contribute to society in a way other than parenting.  That seems like a worthy goal.

Today’s book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas.  Over one-third of children in the US are born to unmarried mothers, a figure that has been steadily increasing for decades.  This trend worries a lot of people, both because children born to single parents are disproportionately likely to be poor, and because there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests that such children do worse on a range of measures than their peers, even after you control for income.  But while this trend is very well documented, little is known about why.

Questions about why are generally very hard for researchers to answer; it’s not possible to get at them with administrative data or big national surveys.  Edin and Kefalas are sociologists and ethnographers and so to try to answer the title question, they spent 3 years living and working in low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Camden, talking to 162 low-income single mothers about their lives.

Edin and Kefalas’ main findings are:

• Motherhood was highly valued by the low-income women they talked with.  It was their main source of identity, their main way of leaving a mark in the world, of creating hope for the future.  The idea of not becoming parents — or even of delaying parenting until their 30s, as is common for middle-class women — was horrifying to the women in the study.  One reason, although not the only one, is that many of the other opportunities that life offers to middle-class women are out of reach for these poor women.
• The women in the study valued marriage, and hoped to be married some day.  But they set very high standards for marriage — wanting both an emotional commitment and for themselves and their partners to have achieved some level of economic success — which they were unlikely to reach anytime soon.  If they held off on having kids until they had partners they saw as marriage material, they might never have kids.  This was an unacceptable possibility for them.  Having kids with men they weren’t willing to marry wasn’t their first choice, but it was a lot better than not having kids.
• Early parenting has very little economic opportunity cost for these low-income women.  The earnings path for such women is so flat that having kids doesn’t hold them back very much.  And many of the women told Edin and Kefalas that they were on the fast track into trouble until they got pregnant and turned themselves around because they wanted to be good mothers.
• Being a good parent didn’t seem like an unachievable task.  Even before having kids of their own, they had spent a lot of time taking care of children and mastering the physical skills.  They defined being a good mother as "being there" for the kids, and doing your best, not as providing a certain level of material goods.
• Some of the moral hierarchies advocated by the women in the study were directly contractory to those that dominate middle-class American society.  The one that surprised me the most is that they consistently believed  that having a child out of wedlock was  greatly preferable to marrying and then getting divorced.  They also felt rising to the occasion and dealing with whatever hardship life dealt you was a significant virtue; thus, having an abortion or giving up a child for adoption were both seen as signs of weakness, even selfishness.

This brief summary doesn’t realy do justice to the book, however.  Poor women are often the objects of others’ moral scrutiny.  Even generally sympathetic books like Random Family and American Dream portray their subjects as sort of buffeted by the winds of life, rather than as rational actors and the protagonists of their own stories.  Edin and Kefalas assume that these poor women’s choices make sense by their own values and priorities, given the constraints that they face, and let the voices of the women carry their story.  It’s worth reading.

Jody has two interesting posts up about why she doesn’t blog much about politics.  I write about politics when something is really making me crazy, or when an issue that I care about is being overlooked, or when I feel like I have something to say that’s different from what everyone else is saying about the same thing.  I generally don’t write about things like Social Security that I feel have been talked to death.  I think Jody’s right in saying that political blogs are no more "valorous and valuable," no less self-indulgent, than mommy blogs or sports blogs or dating blog.

Jody said that she doesn’t believe "that political discussions on blogs have much spill-over effect."  Most political blogs do seem to act primarily as echo chambers, reinforcing the participants’ confidence that they are the keepers of the truth, but not affecting anyone in the outside world very much.  They may have done in Dan Rather, but I’m not sure they changed anyone’s opinion of George Bush’s service in the National Guard.

Ironically, I think that mommy blogs may be more effective politically than political blogs.  Mommy blogs reach an audience that isn’t all choir no congregation, and they also personalize issues in ways that move people.  I could post until my fingers fell off about poverty policy and not get as many hits as I did for my series of posts about following the thrifty food plan for one month.  Maura’s story about HB1677 on Democracy for Virginia didn’t really take off until Grrrl picked it up at Chez Miscarriage and all heck broke loose.

Nightline totally missed this in their story about blogging, even though they devoted a lot of time to the HB1677 story.  They’re too worried about whether bloggers are "real journalists," which just doesn’t strike me as that important a question.

Ogged seems to have gotten it right in his post about mommy blogs:

"The mothers are profane, and horny, and pissed, and funny, and, still, devoted, and protective, and nurturing. What’s more, they write intelligently and in detail about how a particular bill, or urban plan, or school board, affects their lives. The real speech of mothers, and their commentary as mothers on what we’re used to thinking of as "the political" is, suddenly, itself part of political speech."

A few months back, I wrote about how I didn’t think I would ever have gone down the path of assisted reproduction.  Many people responded that I shouldn’t be so confident that I know how I would deal with the situation; several said that they wouldn’t have imagined in advance that they would make the choices that they eventually did.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation this weekend, and its implications for advance directives. Rivka at Respectful of Otters has a long and thoughtful post up about Terri Schiavo.  One particular comment she made about one of the 17 affidavits jumped out at me:

Dr. Eytan would seemingly reject any pre-injury statement about the conditions in which a person would prefer to refuse medical treatment, "because we are all in the process of changing." In the greatest unintentional irony of the entire stack of affidavits, she remarks that "Ms. Schiavo is not the same person as she was when she made her alleged remarks about not wanting to live in a certain condition." By this logic, she would apparently argue to invalidate any Living Will or advance directive.

I have a living will, in which I spell out how I’d like to be treated in the event that I was no longer able to make these decisions.  I’ve given copies to my parents and my husband, as well as registered with the US living will registry.  Even though I tried to be specific, I know that the most important part is who I designated to make decisions for me (my husband), because it’s just not possible to lay out every contingency in a document.

We allow people to bind their future selves in all sorts of ways — by marrying, by having children, by signing contracts to deliver goods and services.  But there are limits — at least in the US, you can’t sell yourself into slavery.