Half Changed World

Via 11d, I read "Jane Galt’s" take on the Mommy Madness articles.  As you might guess from her pseudonym, Jane is pretty negative about the idea of government intervention to address any of the problems that Warner mentions.  But then she writes:

"The economic pressure affecting middle class families seem to me to come largely from seeking scarce resources for their children: housing in good, safe school districts, and a good college education."

I think that’s basically right — and that’s also what Warren and Tyagi argue in The Two-Income Trap (discussed here).  It’s easy to make fun of moms who are so obsessed about their kids that they stay up all night hand-painting paper plates for a preschool party.  It’s not so easy to make fun of parents who line up at 4 am for a shot at a charter school to get their kids out of DC’s failing public schools. 

Galt argues that no amount of government redistribution is going to change the fact that the people with the most money (and power) are likely to win out when it comes to a bidding war over scarce resources.  Fair enough.  But she accepts as a given that decent, safe schools are a scarce resource.  And I don’t. 

The post on "mother drive-bys" at Chez Miscarriage is now up to over 300 comments and still growing.  It’s funny and sad and bizarre.

I’ve gotten my share of comments about my parenting, but I’ve never taken them too seriously.  When D was a newborn, we were given two baby books:  What to Expect The First Year and The Baby Book.  These two books agree that you should use a car seat and that breastmilk is the ideal food for babies, and disagree on just about everything else.  This drove me crazy for a few weeks, and then I had the liberating insight that no matter what we did, someone would say we were doing it wrong.  So there was no point in trying to do it perfectly — we just had to do our best and accept that even so, we’d get criticized by strangers (or family) occasionally.

I think that’s the key insight that the miserable stressed-out parents Judith Warner talked to are missing — that no matter how hard you work at it, there’s no such thing as perfect parenting.   If you’re a good parent, you what you think is best, but sometimes your best just isn’t good enough, or what you thought was the best turns out in hindsight to look like a mistake.

There’s a Jewish tradition that you’re supposed to carry a slip of paper with a message in each pocket.  On one side, you carry "You were created in God’s image" and on the other side, you carry "You came from dust, and to dust you shall return."  When you get depressed you look at the first, and when you get cocky you look at the second.

I think the parenting version of this is that on one side you carry the start of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: "Relax.  You know more than you think you do," and on the other side you carry the start of Philip Larkin’s This be the verse: "They fuck you up, your mom and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do."

Today’s book is Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs, by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers.  It’s an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) discussion of what’s wrong with all the claims that men and women are fundamentally different — at work, at home, as partners, as parents.  They take on everyone from Carol Gilligan to John Gray, and argue that the media has totally oversold the claims for gender differences, and that these beliefs about gender differences become self-fulfilling prophecies.  They quote Sarah Blaffer Hrdy — a biologist whose research is often cited in support of such claims — as saying:

"What begins as a scientist’s cautious speculation moves rapidly into a headline in USA Today and from there becomes received wisdom that directs public policy and influences girls’ career choices."

I generally agree with Barnett and Rivers’, so I’ve been trying to figure out why I can’t summon up more enthusiasm about the book.   I think there are two problems.  First, the book is mostly about what’s wrong with other people’s studies and how they’re represented in the mass media rather than presenting any new information.  There’s only so many different ways you can say "very small non-representative sample" and "generalization" and they quickly run through all of them.  The book is thus more useful as a reference to look up the flaws in a specific argument than as a book you’d want to sit down and read all the way through.

Second, I think Barnett and Rivers’ go too far in denying the reality of differences between how men and women behave.  At times I felt like they were allowing their ideological stance to blind them to the evidence in front of their noses. 

This is particularly frustrating because I don’t think their main thesis depends on such a claim.  In fact, in other parts of the book, they do make several arguments that don’t deny that there are such differences:

• The differences between men and women are the results of socialization, rather than biological differences.  (Barnett and Rivers offer counterexamples to the claim all other primates have similar gender roles to humans.)
• The differences between men and women are falsely attributed to gender, when they should be attributed to differences in power.  Powerful women behave in typically "male" ways and subordinate men behave in typically "female" ways.
• While there may be differences on average between men and women, there is more variance within each group than between groups.  In other words, the curves showing the distribution overlap significantly.  Therefore, the average difference doesn’t tell you much about the abilities or interests of any given individual of a certain gender.

I think these arguments are much more persuasive than trying to argue that there are no differences beween men and women. 

Today I’m writing about Federal budget rules, a topic that can put even the most dedicated policy wonks to sleep.  But the Republicans in Congress are counting on the MEGO (my eyes glaze over) factor to get away with some outrageous rules that will hamstring any attempts to improve entitlement programs (Medicaid, Food Stamps, Veterans’ benefits) while letting tax cuts get a free pass.  So it’s worth keeping your eye on the ball, even if it takes an extra cup of coffee to stay awake.

The issue is the "Pay As You Go" or "PAYGO" rules.  In the 1990s, determined to get the budget deficit under control, Congress adopted a set of rules that said that you couldn’t pass a tax cut or expand an entitlement program without finding an "offset."  If these rules were applied to your household budget, it would mean that if you wanted to sign up for cable, you had to give up your weekly pizza night to pay for it.  If you wanted to buy a car, you might have to get a Saturday job to cover the payments.  Everything had to be paid for. Everyone kicked and screamed about the hard choices that it forced, but it was fair and it worked: by the late 1990s, we were running a surplus.

Since last year, however, the House Budget Committee has been using a new version of these PAYGO rules that only applies to entitlements.  Tax cuts are "free" under these rules — Congress doesn’t have to find any offsets, but can run the deficit up as high as they please.  Entitlements, however, still require offsets — and they can only be offset by cuts in other entitlement programs.  So if you want to improve access to Food Stamps, for example, you have to cut access to another entitlement program.  In the household example, this is equivalent to saying it doesn’t matter to your budget if you get another job and bring in more income, or if your hours are cut in half.  All that matters is that any increased bill is offset by a decrease in another bill.  It just doesn’t make sense.

The best source of information on this sort of budgetary maneuver is the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.  Here’s a link to their paper on the PAYGO rules and here’s one to an overall discussion of ways in which the Administration is playing games with the budget process.  Read ’em and weep.

Thanks to Ann Douglas for the very nice mention of this blog.  She’s the author of several books on pregnancy and parenting, and her blog focuses on these issues.  And welcome to anyone stopping by as a result of her mention.  I’m afraid the place isn’t quite as up-to-date and "neat" as I’d have liked with company coming over, but I’ve been somewhat distracted from writing about parenting by… actual parenting.  So, don’t pay any attention to those dustbunnies, put the stack of books on the floor so you can sit down, and make yourself comfortable.

That’s usually the way I respond to in-person unexpected guests as well.  We’re not total slobs, and we generally stay on top of the dirty dishes and the laundry, but vacuuming is generally pretty low on our list of priorities.  I think the problem is that it doesn’t really get any harder if you postpone it a day or a week.  If you don’t do the laundry for two weeks, you have a huge mountain of dirty clothes to face when you run out of underwear.  But if you don’t vacuum for two weeks, it’s not really any more work than if you had been doing it all along.  And there’s always kids to be read to, and blogs to be written, and little things like sleep. So the vacuuming tends to slide…

That said, my husband and I have actually spent much of today taking turns vacuuming and dusting.  We don’t know what triggered the asthma attack, but the level of dust and cat hair in the house is something that’s within our control.  They’re probably not the major cause — if D. were really allergic to them, he wouldn’t have made it to age 4 without showing symptoms, not the way we keep house — but my understanding is that triggers are additive, and so it’s worth doing what we can. 

Jen commented in a thread on excema over at finslippy that her doctor "seemed floored that I was not willing to run home and scour our house from top to bottom every 3-4 days in order to keep a few bumpy spots from coming up on my kid’s arms and legs."  I’m totally on her side — but not being able to breathe is another story.  If vacuuming the heck out of the house keeps us out of the pediatric ward, somehow we’ll manage to do it.

D. had a full blown asthma attack (his first) yesterday afternoon and spent the night in the hospital.  He’s doing well now, and we hope he’ll be home later today, but I’m obviously not going to have a chance for a while to respond to the very thoughtful posts on Warner’s articles.  I will second the recommendation to check out the dicussion at Chez Miscarriage.

One thought before I shower and head back to the hospital.  I have a job where I can take leave on short notice, with pay and without risk of losing my job.  I have an extremely involved spouse.  And I have good health insurance.  And this is still really hard.  Lots of people are missing at least one of these, and there’s a significant number of parents who don’t have any of them.  And poor kids are disproportionately likely to have asthma, probably due to environmental factors.

Update: We’re all home, and D is breathing easily (although with regular nebulizer treatments).  We need to meet with his regular pediatrician next week to figure out where we go from here with identifying the trigger and deciding whether he needs ongoing maintenance treatment.  But the immediate crisis is over.  Thanks for the good wishes.

Dang, Judith Warner must have a good publicist.  She has no less than three different articles out in major publications, all based on her new book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.

Her Valentine’s Day op-ed in the New York Times asks "Is our national romance with our children sucking the emotional life out of our marriages?"  She concludes that it is, and urges readers to stop making construction paper cards for their children’s classmates and to go on a real date with their spouses.  While she’s at it, she blames the family bed and extended co-sleeping for a decline in physical intimacy.

The second story is the cover article in Newsweek, entitled Mommy Madness.  In this Warner describes a generation of miserable mothers, driven to desperation by their own high expectations and lack of societal support:

"Life was hard. It was stressful. It was expensive. Jobs—and children—were demanding. And the ambitious form of motherhood most of us wanted to practice was utterly incompatible with any kind of outside work, or friendship, or life, generally." 

Warner then tries to tie this in to an argument that we need societal supports for parenting — tax incentives to promote family-friendly work, high quality day care for both full-time working parents and as occasional relief for at-home parents, more opportunities for part-time work.  I generally think these are good things, but it’s not clear how they’re going to solve the problems of the women featured in the article, who can’t sleep at night because they’re worried about the preschool party they’re organizing.  What they need is to get a grip. 

As Jody at Raising WEG points out, this cult of the hyper-parent is very much a middle-class privilege, and far from the universal state.  Most parents are plenty busy just from doing the basics — earning a living, keeping their kids clean and fed and the homework done — not from participating in a million afterschool activities or distressing store-bought pies to look homemade.

As I see it, the middle-class stress of extreme parenting is driven by several factors:

First, as Warner correctly points out, there’s been a decay of the parenting "commons."   Organized sports with registration, and schedules and fees have replaced pick-up games.  You can’t count on the local public school being good unless you deliberately pick a place to live based on the schools. 

Second, as being an at-home parent has become a deliberate choice rather than the default position, some at-home parents feel the need to justify their decision by giving their kids every bit of attention and stimulation possible.  This is how they prove that they’re not wasting their expensive educations.

Third, some working parents feel the need to justify their decision by making sure their kids aren’t suffering at all from their absence.  They try to cram as much attention and activities into the weekends and evenings as an at-home parent might do all week, and give up sleep instead. 

And finally, as Laura points out, there’s a natural tendency to measure what’s appropriate by looking at the people around you.  Moreover, the standard of comparison is usually the "best" of those around you, not the average.  So it just takes one family having a magician at their kid’s party for everyone in their social circle to start wondering whether they should be having a puppet show.  And the expectations creep up as each family joins in. (My personal act of resistance against this madness is to respond "YOU DON’T NEED A GOODY BAG" every time someone posts on the DC Urban Moms list asking what items are good for a goody bag for a 3-year-olds party.)

Third article is from Elle, and it mostly emphasizes the differences between American and French attitudes towards parenting.  It’s by far the most interesting of the three articles, making the point that the whole culture of intense parenting is a uniquely American phenomenon.  Warner concludes that the problem is an ideology that is so widespread that it’s hardly ever questioned:

"[It] tell us that we are the luckiest women in the world, with the most wealth, the most choices. It says we have the know-how to make “informed decisions” that will guarantee our children’s success. It tells us that if we choose badly, our children will fall prey to countless dangers—from insecure attachment to drugs to a third-rate college. And if our children do stray from the right path, we’ll have no one but ourselves to blame. To point fingers at society is to shirk “personal responsibility.”"

I’m intrigued enough to put Warner’s book on hold at the library.  I’ll report back when I’ve read it.  I’m wondering if there’s not an overlap with some of the arguments that Schwartz makes in The Paradox of Choice.

Since I haven’t had time to read this week, I’m going to cheat a bit and talk about a book I read years ago, Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, as well as to riff off Laura and Mel‘s   recent posts about money.

Robin and Dominguez’s argument is that by the time you add in all the real costs of working — taxes, commuting costs, business wardrobes, the meals we buy out because we don’t have time to cook, the toys we buy ourselves as rewards for getting through frustrating times — your true wages are quite low.  They advocate for cutting expenses and saving until you can live off the interest from your savings — which they call Financial Independence.

I have issues with many of their specific recommendations, but the basic point that money is a medium for exchanging "life energy" for goods and services, and that you should know where that life energy is going, has stuck with me for years.  Interestingly, the first time I did their exercise of tracking every cent you spend, I decided I wasn’t spending ENOUGH money on books.  (This was before the advent of the online library catalog, and the ability to put holds on books from home.  I’d say that 90% of my reading is from the library these days.)

I haven’t tracked every cent in a while, but the recent exercise of tracking our groceries made me confident that there’s not a whole lot of slack in our budget.  Travel is really my one expensive hobby, and we haven’t been doing much of that lately.

I make more money than I ever thought I would.  But I also didn’t expect to be the sole wage earner in my family.  A major factor that made it possible is that we were extremely lucky in our timing in buying a house; we couldn’t afford our house on one income if we were first-time homeowners today.  If my primary goal was not to have to work, we could move somewhere outside of a major urban center and live off our equity for a while. 

I’ve been job hunting, and most of the jobs that appeal to me pay significantly less than I currently make.  I’ve done a rough budget and figured out how low I think I can go without having an ongoing negative cash flow, but that doesn’t help with the emotional issues.  If I get a job that I love, I don’t think I’ll regret the money, but I’m afraid that if a job turns out not to be what I hoped, I’ll think "well, I could have been unhappy at work but making 30% more."

For Tess

Suppose I say summer,
write the word "hummingbird,"
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.

Raymond Carver, All of Us.

Two weeks out from the deadline, I’ve suddenly convinced myself to apply for a fellowship to work in New Zealand for six months.  So I need to pull that application together.  And just when D. is finally getting better, N. is getting sick.

So nothing new tonight.  You can read my latest DotMoms post if you want.

****

2/15 update:  Ok, sanity hit.  I can’t pull together a decent proposal in this amount of time.  If I’m going to apply for the fellowship, I need to apply because I’m excited about my project idea, not just because the idea of escaping from my job and living in NZ for 6 months sounds great.  So I’m not going to do it — at least not this year.