Half Changed World

Laura at 11d’s thought–provoking review of Mary Eberstadt‘s Home Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Subsitutes inspired me to get the book out of the library and read it myself.

I have to agree with Laura’s conclusion that this book is a methodological "disaster area." Eberstadt is totally scornful of social scientists’ attempts to distinguish between correlation and causation. At times she cites studies that support her arguments – although if you track the footnotes, she’s often looking at popular summaries of the research, rather than the researchers’ own papers — but she totally ignores studies that disagree with her.

In a mindboggling twist of logic, Eberstadt argues that the fact that "the country’s leading child care experts have all revised downward over the years their estimations of just how much young children need their mothers" couldn’t possibly mean it’s true, but rather that even pediatricians are hopelessly misguided, even corrupted. Only she is the voice of compassion, crying out in the wilderness. Similarly, she cites the attention paid to vaccines as a possible cause of autism as society’s desperate attempt to avoid environmental (non-physical) explanations for the increase in autism in recent years, but totally ignores the painful history of the "refrigerator mom" theory.

But Eberstadt makes enough interesting points that while the book infuriated me at times, I kept on reading it. While the discussion of day care has gotten the most attention, I think it’s the weakest part of the book. Her argument for busy parents as at least one of the explanations for increased childhood obesity was convincing, although she oversells her case by ignoring many of the other factors (suburbanization, expanded tv and video game options, increased perception of crime). Her analysis of the spread of Ritalin and other psychoactive drugs is much less controversial than she implies, but seems basically accurate to me. The data she presents on the spread of STDs among teenage girls is horrifying. The overall picture she paints of parental absence from the day-to-day lives of adolescents is on target. (See Patricia Hersch’s fascinating ethnographic study of middle-class teenagers, A Tribe Apart, for an in-depth portrait of this problem.)

Eberstadt concludes her book not with policy solutions (she acknowledges the absence of "quick fixes" to the problems she identifies), but with a defense of guilt. She argues that if parents (she means mothers) who have the choice whether or not to work or whether or not to stay married make choices that are good for themselves, but bad for their children (or for society), they ought to feel guilty. Conversely, she says that guilt isn’t a factor for those who truly don’t have the choice (e.g. need the money in order to house or feed their kids, are in an abusive marriage). I think that’s simply not true. Not having choices may free you from wondering whether you’re making the best choice, but doesn’t stop you from feeling guilty that you can’t do what you feel you should.

So we went to Disney World last week.  Yup, the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when it’s totally packed and insane.  With a not-quite-four-year-old and a fourteen-month old.  I was afraid it was going to be awful, but we actually had a really good time — D adored the race cars at the "Indy Speedway,"  N was fascinated by the shows and gentle rides (although he fell asleep on the spinning teacups), and I was totally blown away by Mission: Space.  And my in-laws bought our tickets, so I didn’t have constant heartburn over the prices for everything.

But then there was the "Hoop De Hoo" show, a vaudeville dinner theater show with a western twist.  Its grand finale was an extended sketch on the Davey Crockett theme song.  I watched in bemusment, mostly hoping that they’d bring out the ice cream before my boys melted down, and then they got to the Alamo.  Except that in this version, Davey and his pals beat that mean Santa Anna.  I started to sputter, looked around at all the smiling faces, then concluded that the only thing I could possibly say in response was "more sangria, please."

My older son (almost 4 years old) is suddenly fascinated by toy guns.  We’re not thrilled, but are allowing them, subject to the rule that he’s not allowed to point them at people, only at things.  D doesn’t quite get it, and keeps wanting us to pretend to be dinosaurs or monsters so that he can shoot us.  We usually go along with his pretend games, and he doesn’t understand why this one isn’t ok.

He doesn’t get it, because he’s never seen a real gun and what it can do.  We don’t watch the television news when the boys are around, and he hasn’t started paying attention to the radio news that I sometimes listen to.  He doesn’t know that we’re at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that over a hundred thousand people were killed by the tsunami last week.  No one he knows has died in his short life, and the concept of death isn’t real to him yet.  (When the fish in our tank die, he just wants us to replace them.)

I know that we can’t shelter him forever, but I’d like to give him a little longer of innocence.  And yet I worry that the brutalities of the world may come crashing in.  Even as I reassure him that "mommies always come back,"  I know that some mommies don’t, no matter how much they want to.  When he learns the truth, I hope he’ll forgive me my gentle lies.

In looking around the blogosphere, I noticed several people wondering why the devastation of the tsunami didn’t get more coverage in the US media (specifically compared to 9/11, when all other stories disappeared from the news for days) and/or complaining that the news focused on the experience of Americans or Europeans, rather than the vast majority of the victims, who were Thai, Indian, Sri Lankan or Indonesian.  (Sorry, didn’t note the URLs and I can’t seem to find the posts again.)

I actually think it’s gotten a lot of media coverage compared to the "typical" third world natural disaster.  The sheer number of people killed and displaced is just mindboggling, but I don’t think that’s the primary reason it’s captured so many people’s imagination.  There’s something about the nature of a tsunami — both the way it comes without warning, and the way that its horror is unevenly distributed — so that there are survivors who witnessed its full fury, even as the people they were sitting with were killed.

Plus, the wide geographic distribution of its effects — and the many nationalities of the victims — means that a very large share of the world feels identified with some or all of the victims.  Someone I know online from Norway wrote recently that in a country of 4.5 million residents, there are about 500 Norwegians missing or known dead from the tsunami (Thailand is apparently a popular vacation destination), so everyone is no more than two degrees of separation away from someone affected.  That’s how New Yorkers felt after 9/11.

I’m horrified by the effects of the tsunami.  But I don’t think it makes me a terrible person to admit that I suspect I’d be more deeply affected if 130,000 people had been killed off the coast of New Jersey.  There’s a natural human tendency to be more affected by that which is closer.  When I visited India as a tourist several years ago, I was deeply disturbed by the huge contrasts of wealth and poverty.  And I found myself angry at well-off Indians for accepting it, because on some level I consider them more responsible for the well-being of their countrymen and women than I do well-off Americans.

I find myself circling back to Rabbi Hillel’s famous questions:

Im ayn ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

U’chseani latzmi, ma ani? If I am only for myself, what am I?

V’im lo achshav, eymatai? If not now, when?

I’m having a quiet New Year’s Eve, even quieter than usual.  I’m tired from travelling, have a bit of a cold, and am subdued by the thoughts of the millions of people mourning the loss of their loved ones in the wake of the tsunami last week.  So I’ll probably be heading to bed soon.

I’m generally not one to pick up on memes, but I like the idea of picking my five favorite posts of the year.  In chronological order, they are:

The Personal is Political:  One of my first posts on this blog, I attempted to describe where I’m coming from as I talk about work and family and gender.

The Dark Side of Flexibility:  A contrarian take on the value of flexible working conditions.

Who’s Opting Out? One of my most data-oriented posts, as I searched through reams of statistics in search of evidence to support the often-cited claim that more mothers are staying home.  I learned a lot in the process.

Targeted v. Universal Programs:  I’m pleased with this post, because I think I did a good job of fairly laying out the case on both sides of the argument.  I think this is a useful background piece for anyone thinking about how public programs should be designed.

Babar, George and Lisa: A recent post looking at the subtexts of children’s literature.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Yes, I’ve read Jennifer Medina’s article in the New York Times on "Desperate Househusbands."  It’s a lousy article, worth notice only because so many people read the Times.  (Earlier today the article was on the list of top 15 emailed articles.)  Obviously, the editors there were hot to get out the door for vacation too.

As Greg at DaddyTypes notes, Medina seems to have forgotten that Desperate Housewives is fiction.  If she can cite it as evidence that stay-at-home moms are busy having affairs while a "man loaded down with diapers" isn’t sexy, I could cite Tom Perotta’s Little Children to make the opposite argument.

And as Brian at RebelDad points out, most of the dads quoted in the article are actually pretty content with their gig.  One of them even responded to his post, objecting to how his comments had been edited.  Sigh.

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I’ve been noticing a fair number of search engine hits to this blog.  Based on the terms, I’d guess that many of them are from students working on assignments.  If you’re thinking of plagarizing, don’t.  It’s wrong, you won’t learn anything, and you’re probably going to get caught.  Teachers know how to use google too, you know.  On the other hand, if you’re doing research and find this site a useful source of info, I’d love to hear about it.  Post a comment and let me know what you’re writing about.

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Yahoo now allows you to add anything that has a RSS feed to your My Yahoo page.  That includes this blog!  Click on "Add Content" and then type "Half Changed World" into the "Find Content" box and it will come right up.  The advantage of adding blogs to a portal is that you can quickly see which of the blogs you’re following have added new content.

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I’m going to be on vacation next week, and probably won’t have access to the internet.  Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and I’ll be back around the New Year.

Best wishes.

Today’s book is Should We Burn Babar: Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories, by Herbert Kohl.  In it, he discusses the ways that racism, sexism, and classism are maintained by both fiction and non-fiction written for children and how progressive teachers can help overcome these -isms by promoting critical reading skills.

The most persuasive of these essays is his exploration of how history texts describe Rosa Parks in such a way as to de-emphasize the collective effort that led to the Montgomery bus boycott.  He offers an alternative version of the story that talks about group planning and persistence as well as her individual courage and describes her as a community activist, rather than a poor seamstress whose feet hurt after a long day of work.  I was convinced by his argument, and am curious to see whether it has changed the tone of books published in the 10 years since this essay first appeared.

The most provocative of the essays is the title one, in which Kohl takes on the classic Story of Babar, asking what should we do today with books that are charming, imaginative, and entertaining, but also include messages that are subtly (or not so subtly) colonialist, classist and racist.  He points out that a hunter in a pith helmet kills Babar’s mother, the elephants are portrayed as uncivilized until they are bought clothes and learn to walk upright, and that the Rich Lady has power because of her money, which is from sources unknown.  Kohl encourages directly discussing these issues with children, explaining the historical context, and getting their reactions but concludes that an "uncritical reading" of the stories is sufficiently damaging that he would not purchase them for a child or a library (although he does not go so far as to encourage actually burning the books, the title notwithstanding).

We currently have four Babar books in the house.  A friend gave us Babar’s Museum of Art as a gift.  This contemporary book (published 2003) uses the characters from the Barbar books, but all of the racism and sexism has been eliminated, to the point that I can’t imagine anyone objecting to the book.  The conceit of famous artwork drawn with elephants instead of people is more amusing to adults who recognize the originals than to children, but the book is a nice introduction to the concept of an art museum.

My parents found another Babar book, Meet Babar and His Family, in their box of old children’s books.  This one is essentially an introduction to the seasons, showing the elephants engaged in leisure activities appropriate to different times of the year.  Only the boy elephants are shown participating in sports, but otherwise it’s fairly innocuous.

The problems develop as we get into the older books.  In Babar and Zephir (purchased on sale from Daelalus Books without an advance read) all is well until the last two pages when the General who rules the monkeys "gives" his daughter to Zephir to marry as the reward for rescuing her.  In Babar and His Family (borrowed from the library), the sexism is more subtle, but also more woven into the story, as Flora is shown as delayed and not having the adventures of her brothers.  For now, our solution is to redact the text as we read it out loud, changing pronouns so that Pom is also a girl. (The fact that the General’s daughter is a Princess makes my husband and I shake our heads, but we’re not particularly worried that our sons will learn that military dictatorships are an appropriate political system.)

Alison Lurie, in a recent New York Review of Books discussion of Babar, is pretty dismissive of Kohl’s concerns, pointing out the many charms of the books.  (Article found thanks to DaddyTypes.)  I think she misses the point; if the books weren’t so charming, no one would care.  They would join the thousands of other books published in the 30s and 40s that are thrown away as their pages crumble and no one would think of reprinting today.  It’s because of their charm that we have to wrestle with their sins.

I have some similar issues with the Curious George books, which are huge hits in our household these days.  On what basis is the Man in the Yellow Hat, who kidnaps George from the jungle and puts him in a bag, considered George’s friend?  This bugs me every time I read the original Curious George book.  In Curious George Goes to the Hospital, all the doctors are male and all the nurses are female.  And I know this is affecting my older son’s view of the world; he’s told me that I have to be the nurse in our pretend hospital.  This is true even though his pediatrician is a woman.

In another essay in the collection, Kohl talks admiringly of some books that portray concerns from the everyday lives of working-class children and families, such as A Chair for My Mother, by Vera Williams.  I think he’s right that it’s valuable for children to read such stories and that they are remarkably rare in books for young children.  (There are plenty for teens).  Let me therefore say that the people who wrote the recent book Corduroy Makes a Cake are total idiots.  This is a story using the characters of Don Freedman’s classic books Corduroy and A Pocket for Corduroy.  These are lovely children’s books that happen to address Kohl’s concerns; Lisa, the protagonist, is an African-American girl.  She’s not poor — she’s saved enough money in her piggy bank to buy Corduroy, a teddy bear — but she’s not rich either — she lives in a fourth story walkup and she helps her mother wash their clothes at a laundromat with a multi-ethnic clientele.  So what’s happened in Corduroy Makes a Cake?  Lisa’s been gentrified!  She now lives in a suburban house big enough to have a "sewing room" and all the other children at her birthday party are white!  What were they thinking?

For those who are interested in critical examination of children’s books, a google search found this thoughtful discussion of these issues on a bulletin board at a site called ChickLit.

Jen at Buddha Mama has a thoughtful new post about The Consequences of Choice.  In it, she writes:

"In general, I’m not trying to make the world do it my way. But if there is no validity to making choices and having opinions (and in occasionally stating such), then why make choices? If I thought your choices were just as good as mine, why would I make any of the choices that I am making (from stay-at-home parenting to co-sleeping to homeschooling, etc.)? If any of my opinions disagree with your own, then how can I not think that I am doing what I feel to be right?"

This struck me as a deeply important question, because it’s at the heart of what is sometimes called the "mommy wars."  Almost all parents believe that they are making the right choices, doing the best they can for their children.  Does that inherently mean that other parents, who make different choices, are doing the wrong thing?  If so, can we ever find common ground?

For many parenting choices — including such significant choices as at-home parenting v. child care, whether and how long to breastfeed, co-sleeping v. crying it out, how much television to permit — I truly believe that there isn’t a single right choice for all parents and all children.  Parental and child personality, family expectations, health conditions, economic circumstances, all come together in different ways to result in different outcomes.

At the same time, I’m not going to say that I think all parenting choices are equally valid.  Whether reading my email lists and various blogs, or watching people with their kids on the subway, I often see people treating their children in ways that I think are short-sighted, selfish, lazy, or downright wicked. 

But I keep my opinions to myself, unless someone explicitly asks for them.  (I’ve never been in the position where I felt that a child’s safety was threatened by my inaction.)  I am constantly amazed by the number of people who feel compelled to share their opinions on everything from what babies are eating to how warmly they’re dressed.  In Carolyn Hax’s online chat last Friday, she responded to a woman who stated that she has become a "pariah" in her town for choosing to keep the baby she is carrying as a result of having been raped.  That’s not a choice I can imagine making.  But I also can’t imagine what would compel someone to make that woman’s life one bit harder than it already is. 

I honestly don’t understand what their motivation is.  Do they really think that someone’s choice regarding such an intimate decision is going to be changed by the unsolicited advice of a stranger on the street?  Or are they just making themselves feel virtuous and competent by finding someone who is struggling to compare themselves to?

The opposite of judgment is empathy.  I can glare at the mom with the screaming baby on the metro or I can play peekaboo and try to distract the child.  I can judge the young parents of Random Family for having too many kids, too young, and for not being willing to put their kids first.  Or I can try to imagine the gaping holes in their lives, and how desperate they are to be loved. 

Like Jen, I don’t always succeed at being non-judgmental, but I do think it’s worth trying.  Because when I step outside of my judgment long enough to view the world from someone else’s perspective, I always learn something, even if I don’t change my mind.

Today the Washington Post has the first in a three-part series about pregnant or newly post-partum mothers who are murdered.  It builds off of the interest in the Laci Peterson murders, and refers to the findings from a study a year or so back that found that homicide was the leading cause of death for pregnant women in Maryland, accounting for more than 20 percent of the deaths of pregnant or recently postpartum women over a six year period.  That’s a mindboggling statistic.

While some of these homicides are apparently unrelated to the pregnancy, the majority of them are committed by the soon-to-be-fathers.  The article quote Pat Brown, a criminal profiler, as saying:

"If the woman doesn’t want the baby, she can get an abortion. If the guy doesn’t want it, he can’t do a damn thing about it. He is stuck with a child for the rest of his life, he is stuck with child support for the rest of his life, and he’s stuck with that woman for the rest of his life. If she goes away, the problem goes away."

That quote comes across as perhaps more sympathetic to the murderers than Brown intended, but I think the general point is right.  I have no suggestions for solutions.  Giving the fathers the right to force an abortion seems deeply wrong to me.  Allowing them to opt out of paternal rights and child support just screws over the kids.

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I’m embarassingly addicted to The Amazing Race, but am increasingly disturbed by the abusive relationship being displayed by Jonathan and Victoria.  It’s painful to watch.  Maybe I’m giving CBS too much credit, but I assume that the producers didn’t see the signs of this when selecting them to participate.  If that’s true, I’m not sure what’s the right thing to do.  Does showing this behavior on a "reality" show make it seem normal?  Would editing the coverage to de-emphasize it be abetting after the fact?  Should CBS be including links to support groups on the show’s website?

This is a bit of a rambling post — I’ve got a bunch of ideas chasing each other around in my head, but can’t seem to make them line up into a nice argument today.

I’d like to start by picking up on something that Elise wrote in her comment on my post The Day Care Debate:

"Our day care providers are not at all strangers to us or to our daughter. She sees them every day and has grown to love them dearly. She smiles and jumps with joy when she sees them in the morning…"

I agree that it is offensive to describe sending a child to paid day care as "leaving them with a stranger."  Obviously, there’s not a built-in relationship from the start, but given time and a modicum of luck, a caring relationship will develop.  My husband is still in touch with the woman who was his nanny as a child, and we have taken our children to visit her.  In many ways, he uses her as a role model as he figures out how to care for them.

The whole question of the relationship between paid caregivers and their charges is a complicated one.  Society tends to sentimentalize unpaid caregiving, suggesting that it is superior precisely because it is unsoiled by a commercial transaction.  I think this is a mistake.  Parents frequently use unpaid (or poorly paid) relative and neighborhood caregivers not because they are especially loving or dedicated to the children, but because they’re affordable.

At the same time, parents using paid care have an incentive to overestimate the affectionate relationship between their caregiver and their child.  Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy provides a poignant description of the tensions of a caregiving relationship from an au pair’s point of view, and how she resents her employers’ attempts to cast her as a sort of younger sister, rather than an employee. 

When a transaction is purely economic, the rights and obligations of each side are clearly defined.  On the local parenting email list that I subscribe to, there is often discussion about expectations for a nanny: how much television viewing is allowed and what shows? how much housework is it reasonable to expect while the child is napping?  I always am somewhat bemused by these discussions, because I certainly don’t have this kind of control over the care provided by my husband.  I can and do share my opinions, but ultimately, he’s the one at home with the kids and I can’t micromanage him.

But even spelling all this detail out in a contract doesn’t protect against the uncertainty that creeps in when emotions get involved:  if your child loves her caregiver, are you really going to fire her because she was late for work all week because her car broke down? or because she turned on the Teletubbies all afternoon when she was having a bad day?  If so, what are you going to tell your kid?  The Nanny Diaries is a silly book, but makes a valid point that the same parents who insist that their nannies are part of the family can turn around and fire them at any time.

A while back Hugo Schwyzer wrote a post about dependency, in which he wrote:

"When I grow old and feeble, I hope to be cared for by those I love — up to a point. I would want them to visit me, but I don’t want some future child of mine helping me on and off the toilet."

I think a lot of people would agree with this.  But why is it embarassing for an adult child to help an elderly parent to use the toilet, but not for a parent to change a baby’s diaper?  Dependency is the natural state for infants, but is seen as a humilation for an adult.  So why is it less embarassing to be cared for by a paid caregiver than by a loved one?  The very fact that the caregiving is paid for gives the dependent adult a form of power that balances out some of the embarassment of needing help with a basic function.