Half Changed World

Yesterday I went on a field trip with D’s preschool class.  Thousands of parents do it every day, but it was a big deal for me.  As a working mother married to a stay-at-home dad, it’s hard to justify taking off from work in order to volunteer at the preschool.  It’s a half-day preschool, and they typically have class parties and family snack in the middle of the day, so in addition to whatever time I spent at school, I’d lose another hour and a half to commuting.  So I usually let my husband pass out the muffins, even if I was the one to bake them.  It’s a bit strange, because if we both worked in offices, I’d be eager to take my share of mornings off.

But that means there’s a whole part of D’s life that I’m totally not a part of.  It’s better this year than last, when he was so nonverbal that the only way we knew what he had done in school was the crafts stuffed into his backpack, but I still feel like I’m missing out.  So when they asked for volunteers to go to a nature center with the kids, I checked my work calendar (December is usually fairly quiet), put in for leave, and signed up.

As it turned out, yesterday was a lousy day for me to be out of the office in the morning.  Somehow, even though Thompson announced his resignation two weeks ago, it didn’t occur to the powers that be that we’d have to pull together a briefing book for the new Secretary, whoever it might be, and maybe they didn’t have to wait until the nomination was announced to think about the format etc.  So we’ve been scrambling all week.  This sort of urgent flailing is among my least favorite parts of my job, but I felt bad dumping it on my coworkers.  Fortunately I’m not high up enough to get issued a blackberry, so no one could send me drafts to review en route.

I was bizarrely nervous about the field trip — worried that I’d get into a car accident driving the kids or something.  It was fine, of course.  It was freezing cold, so they stayed inside the center, but got to see a puppet show about how animals deal with the winter, see a live frog and turtles, etc.  No one got lost, and the only blood that was shed was mine.  (D jumped onto my lap and smacked his skull into my mouth, bloodying my lip.)  Everyone seemed to have a good time.

I find it deeply challenging, even frightening, to publically admit to ambition.  Some of the issue is that I have a darn good life already, and it seems greedy and ungrateful to ask for more.  Some of it is that if I acknowlege ambitious goals, I will be one step closer to doing the often scary things needed to further them.  And some of it is the fear that if I stick myself foward as special, someone will unmask me as an imposter, an ordinary person pretending to be the wizard of Oz.

Anna Fels, in Necessary Dreams, (which I’ve discussed previously) argues that such ambivalence about ambition is a rational response to a society in which ambition is still seen as unfeminine and in which overt displays of ambition and self-promotion can be costly to women.  I’m not convinced that’s what’s going on here, though.

I usually am pretty good at locking my ambitions up, but occasionally they escape and give me a good kick in the teeth.  This often takes the form of a blinding flash of envy when I hear or read about someone doing what I’d like to do.  I’ll admit to feeling such a flash when I read in Ms. Musings that Amy Richards has a book deal for Opting In: The Case for Feminism and Motherhood, “an exploration of the anxiety over parenting that young women face today, mixing memoir, interviews, historical analysis, and feminist insight to bridge the seeming gap between everyday moms and the feminist movement while providing advice on how women can forge their own path in parenthood.”   

The New York Times has an article today about bloggers with book deals, including one story of a minister-blogger who was approached by an editor after just three weeks of blogging.  I think I’m still hanging onto the fantasy that someone is going to read this blog and be so blown away by my brilliance that they offer me a book deal, or a series of columns in a major magazine or "the standard rich and famous contract."   It’s not just that self-promotion is scary; it’s that I’m in the school of thought that devalues anything that seems to be the result of self-promotion. 

A few weeks ago, Salon ran an article about Iris Chang, in which one of her peers writes about envying Chang her articles in major newspapers, before learning what she terms "the Iris code."  Paula Kamen writes: "I had finally cracked it. And it was so simple: Think big. Almost to the point of being naive."  Is that the secret to success?  And if so, what to make of the fact that Chang killed herself at age 36?

Today’s book is Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.  It’s a sympathetic portrait of a group of people who represent pretty much everything society condemns about ghetto life — drug use, drug dealing, violence, teenage sex, welfare receipt, girls having babies with multiple boys and vice versa.  LeBlanc spent ten years with the members of one family — primarily Jessica, her brother Cesar, and his girlfriend Coco — tracking their lives in and out of jail, in the Bronx and upstate New York, following the tangled threads of their relationships, and describing their lives and their children’s.

I found it interesting to compare this book to Jason Deparle’s American Dream, which I discussed in October.  From the back covers, they sound very similar — both ethnographic studies of poor inner-city minority single-parent families.  But they’re actually quite different.  DeParle focuses on three women, but frequently pulls back to provide a broader context on their experiences and to discuss what their experiences imply about the success or failure of welfare reform.  LeBlanc’s narrative stays relentlessly fixed on her chosen individuals, and she carefully avoids providing any context for the choices of her subject.

Around HHS, there’s a lot of focus these days on "healthy marriage" as a solution to many of the problems faced by families like those discussed in this book.  And the advocates of this approach like to cite a statistic that the majority of unwed parents value marriage and hope to be married in the future.  Well, one of the things I took away from this book was that valuing marriage is sometimes the problem — these girls were often excited about having children with their lousy boyfriends because they thought it might get them to marry them.

As I read about the experiences of the children in this book, I got  angry.  A lot of them were just passed from house to house, left with whoever didn’t duck the responsibility.  Little or no attempts were made to curtail their exposure to adult sexuality, violence, or drugs.  Several of them were believed to have been sexually abused.  Even the women who prided themselves on their good parenting seemed more concerned with appearances — keeping the kids clean and groomed, buying them expensive clothing — than making them feel loved and protected.  I had to keep reminding myself that the "adults" in this book were hardly more than children themselves, and presumably hadn’t had any better experiences than they passed on.

There’s an absolutely terrific discussion about child care going on in the comments section over at 11d.  It’s stimulated by Laura’s review of Home Alone America: The Hidden Cost of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes by Mary Eberstadt.  I’ve made several responses on Laura’s blog, but have enough to say that it deserves its own post.  (I just got the book out of the library, so will presumably have more to say when I’ve actually read it.)

As I’ve noted before, lots and lots of affluent parents who have either an at-home parent or a full-time nanny also send their kids to part-day preschool for the socialization and education benefits (and to get a break).  And there’s good evidence that high-quality preschools (such as the Perry Preschool) are often more educationally rich and stable evironments for at-risk (mostly very poor) kids than they’re likely to experience at home. 

So, I don’t think there’s a lot of controversy around high-quality part-day or school-day length care for preschoolers.  (If Eberstadt is going after that, she’s even more radical than Laura suggested.) Or rather, the real controversy is around whether it’s valuable enough that society should figure out a way to pay for it for all kids, or even just all high-risk kids.

Where there’s more controversy is about full-time care — which often means 50 to 60 hours a week, once you’ve added parental commuting time to a full-time workweek — and care for infants and toddlers.  Here’s where some of the rigorous studies (most notably, the NICHD-funded Study of Early Child Care) suggest there might be some negative effects.  But the effects are fairly small, not enough that I’d tell anyone to change their behavior based on them.

So, if we don’t think child care is terrible for kids, why are we forgoing the not insignificant amount of money my husband could be making building Oracle databases?  For one thing, he was bored to death by his old job.  And he really enjoys spending time with the boys (although, of course, some days are better than others) and values the close relationship he’s developed with them.

Our lives are a lot less stressful with him home.  We don’t have to rush to get the kids dressed and out the door in the morning, and when I get stuck in a metro delay on the way home, I don’t have to worry about late fees accruing at $1 a minute.  We didn’t have to get on waiting lists the minute I knew I was pregnant (literally what you need to do if you want center-based care in the DC area). We don’t have to deal with scrambling for coverage when the boys are sick, or when a nanny suddenly quits.  He does most of our errand running during the week, so I don’t have to face the supermarket on a Saturday morning.

Laura mentioned (in her comments, scroll way to the bottom) the recent study that found that women rated actually caring for children as a fairly low-pleasure activity, slightly above housework but below cooking.  That study was of working women; I’d love to see a similar study for stay-at-home parents.  There’s more time for their kids to get on their nerves, but I think their interactions are also less likely to be stressed by the pressures of trying to get kids fed, homework done, and ready for bed at a civilized hour.

We had a Hanukah party last night, which was a lot of fun.  The baked "party latkes" from Cooking Light were a disaster, but the fried latkes were a huge hit, both the traditional ones and the curried sweet potato latkes from Joan Nathan’s Jewish Cooking in America.  I like cooking and I like having people over.  Can’t say I love the hectic cleaning that’s needed to get the house ready to have company.  (I wish we had entertained more during the period when we were feeling flush enough to have a biweekly housecleaner.)

The party was a nice mix of people we know from different settings — work, online communities, school, hobbies.  I think it worked because there were no big clumps of people who already knew each other, so people had to find different things to talk about.

I had an interesting conversation with one of our guests, a Christian married to a Jew, about why I am less than totally thrilled about celebrating Christmas with my in-laws.  Why, he asked, is it not a totally positive thing to have another holiday to celebrate?  I don’t have a really good answer.  I think I have this vague notion of Christmas as a big seductive force that will try to suck us all in if I don’t draw a bright line against it.  It is one of the ironies of the season that Hanukah is a celebration of resistance against assimilation, and it is the most assimilated of Jewish holiday.

If you hadn’t heard, Bernard Kerik has withdrawn his nomination to be Homeland Security Secretary, having recently discovered that he may have hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny and/or failed to pay her social security taxes.  I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for him — it’s been over 10 years since this issue blew up in Zoe Baird’s face and at least in the greater Washington DC area, anyone who claims not to know the rules is either lying or undertook a deliberate strategy of plausible deniability.  If anything, I’m feeling a certain grim satisfaction that men as well as women can get caught in this mess.

***

On a related note, those of us at HHS are starting to wonder why a new Secretary-nominee hasn’t been named.  The conventional wisdom around the Department (as well as in most newspapers) was that the nominee was likely to be Mark McClellen, currently head of CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — don’t ask what happened to the second M).   But if he was going to be the nominee, it seems likely that it would have happened by now — he’s already been Senate-confirmed once, so is unlikely to have any issues like Kerik’s lurking in his past.  So, we’ve got our fingers crossed that we’re not getting a wingnut.

I finally got a chance to look at the new Census report on America’s Families and Living Arrangements.  The data on SAHMs and SAHDs is all the same material that I discussed last month when I discovered the detailed tables on their website, so instead I’m going to talk about the big drop in the fraction of all households that contain children.

According to the Census, in 2003, families with children made up just 32 percent of households, down from 45 percent in 1970.  This is a  big shift, driven by a bunch of factors all working in the same direction:

• More people don’t have children at all.  In 2002, almost 18 percent of women ages 40-44 had never had kids, up from about 10 percent in 1976.  (About 0.3 percent of women have their first child in their 40s.)
• More people delay childbearing (so they’re childless for longer)
• People are having fewer kids, even those from cultures that have traditionally valued large families. (A family with 1 child will have a child under 18 for exactly 18 years, while a family with 3 children, 3 years apart, will have one for 24 years.) 
• People live longer after they’re done having kids.
• Affluence and mobility both result in more single people — both young adults and the elderly — living on their own rather than with their families.  In 2003, over a quarter of all households were people living on their own.  Less than 10 percent had five or more people, down from 20.9 percent in 1970.

I think these trends make it harder to convince businesses that they have to adopt family-friendly policies.  But, as I’ve said before, it strikes me as utterly insane that in a potential working life of 50 or more years, it’s not feasible to take 2 or 3 off to focus on childrearing.

The new issue of Brain, Child has an essay by Katy Read on "Mom Blame."  Read argues that society gives parents way too much credit — and too much blame — for how children turn out.  She bases this both on her experience as the mother of a "spirited" child, who was unruly regardless of how faithfully she followed the guidance of various parenting books, and on the findings from twin studies, which suggest that parenting styles have very little effect on children’s personalities.  In the "nature versus nuture" debate, she’s strongly in the nature camp.

In the author’s note, Read comments that she was recently interviewing "the author of a particularly reprehensible parenting book" who asked her if she’d "like some help changing them" when she commented that her sons were often difficult.  I’d bet dollars to donuts that this author was Phil McGraw and the parenting book Family First (see Tuesday’s post for my review).  McGraw explicitly states that he holds parents responsible for how their children behave — he thinks that if your children are unruly, it’s because you haven’t created sufficient consequences for such behavior.

My position is generally closer to Read’s side of the spectrum.   I’ll never forget the woman I once overheard at a party saying "I thought I had this whole parenting thing down cold until I had my second child."  She had mistakenly attributed the results of her first child’s compliant nature to her skillful parenting.  Children clearly have their own personalities from quite young, and they respond very differently to the same treatment. McGraw says that you have to model the behaviors you want your children to adopt.  Well, we model adventurous, healthy eating to our kids and have one who will eat anything that he can swallow and one who lives on peanut butter crackers and chicken nuggets.

But what Read seems to miss is that there’s a difference between personality and behavior.  I’m not sure where my older son got his extroversion — he sure didn’t learn it from my husband or me.  But I do know where he learned to say please and thank you.  So, if her kid is running all over the place in a fancy restaurant and bumping into people, I won’t blame her for not having the kind of kid who can sit quietly and draw for half an hour.  (Mine can’t either.)  But I will blame her for not taking him outside, or getting a sitter.

Hmmm, now that I’m no longer on my free trial period, and cut back to the cheapest Typepad plan, there doesn’t seem to be any way to arrange postings anyway other than in the order they were originally saved (even if not published).  So, if you’re a frequent reader and only look at the top posting, you might have missed my entry in the Blogging for Books contest which got hidden behind the review of Family First.

I’ve never read a book before because I hated the ad campaign.  But I did this time.  There was a big billboard at the metro station where I wait for my train every morning: "You couldn’t raise your children by the book because there wasn’t one…. until now."  This ticked me off immensely, but I decided that it wasn’t fair to give a book a negative review based only on the ad campaign, so I requested it from the library.

The book, in case you managed to escape the ads, is Family First: Your Step-by-Step Plan for Creating a Phenomenal Family, by television’s "Dr." Phil McGraw. 

However, when I got the book, much to my surprise, I discovered that I agreed with much of what McGraw says.  He opposes corporal punishment, supports listening to what your child has to say.  He promotes setting goals for your family, negotiation, and behaving in the ways that you’d like to see your children behave.  He discusses different types of personalities, and suggests adjusting your parenting style to match your child’s personality.  He tells you to limit your children’s television consumption and to establish family rituals.  Not exactly groundbreaking, but not horrifying either.

Perhaps the most controversial advice in the book is his advocacy of creating external consequences for whatever aspects of your child’s behavior is unsatisfying — whether it’s back talk, bad grades, or drug use.  He recommends figuring out what rewards and punishments are meaningful to the child, specifying exactly what behaviors are needed to get the rewards and avoid the punishments, and applying them accordingly until the desired results are achieved.  While he acknowleges that sometimes there are underlying causes that require professional help, he believes that in most cases it makes sense to address the "maladaptive behavior" directly.

I think there’s some truth to this argument.  I’m not in the camp that believes that any artificial incentives are wrong.  I used M&Ms to potty-train my son, and believe that it made all of our lives more pleasant.  And while I bitterly objected to my parents’ threat to not let me go to events that I valued as a teenager if I didn’t clean my room, my resentment was mostly because they’d spring this on me at the last minute.  (Hi Mom.)

But I aso think that there are major downsides to this approach, which McGraw glides past. Using such an approach — especialy for relatively minor misbehaviors — can poison a relationship and close down communications.  And, perhaps more importantly, I believe that such an approach can inhibit a child’s development of his or her own sense of judgement, which will be essential when the child is no longer under your control. 

I also found the tone of the book painful.  It’s basic parenting advice, but delivered as a lecture, assuming that you’ve been doing a bad job of parenting until now, and need to be scolded until you change your ways.  But then I thought about the ad campaign some more, and realized that’s exactly the audience that it’s aimed at: people who feel like their families are, at best, not living up to their expectations, at worst, totally out of control.  It’s aimed at people who want someone to give them a simple list of things to do and promise them that it will turn things around.

Even while finding that tone irritating, I appreciate McGraw’s message that good parenting isn’t something that’s innate in some people and not in others.  He believes that everyone can be a good parent, and that it’s a learned skill.  He notes that many people were imperfectly parented themselves, and bear the scars, but believes that it is possible to choose to transcend those wounds.

I’m going to let McGraw have the last word today.  In the epilogue, he writes:

"I ask only that you weigh carefully that which I have suggested here.  If it will not withstand vigorous challenge, then you should reject it.  I believe that Families First will withstand the challenge, and I believe in you and your ability to make a difference by using the concepts and action plans in your own family.  But if you do disagree, then please seek answers elsewhere.  If you totally reject everything I have said to you in this book but it causes you to have a heightened sensitivity and awareness and to find better-fitting answers elsewhere, answers that improve your family life, then I have been successful."