Half Changed World

squeaking by...

Can someone please tell me why the Washington Post thought that this story ("Squeaking by on $300,000") deserved to be on the front page of Sunday's paper?  It's not a terrible story, not like the Times' claim that pot bellies are hip, but I don't think it qualifies as serious news by any standard.

It's clear that almost everyone the reporter talked to was totally unwilling to be quoted for the record.  That probably showed good judgment -- it's hard to imagine any possible upside to being featured in this story.  It made me wonder what Steins was hoping to get out of it, since she struck me from the article as being more or less sane and having some sense of perspective.  She has to have known that she's going to get trashed by a significant share of the people who read the article.

Moreover, it's not at all clear to me that Steins is really all that affected by the recession.   Ok, so her bonus is less.  But if she's pulling $50,000 a year out of savings to make her budget balance, it sounds like she'd still have a hole of $30,000 to $40,000 even with her usual bonus.  Her real problem is that she and her ex-husband bought a house that she just can't afford on her own, even with very generous alimony/child support.   And she bought him out in 2006, close to the peak of the market.  If the real estate market was better, maybe she'd downsize and get out of the hole. But it also sounds like she doesn't want to move her kids out of their school.

Fundamentally, I thought this article mostly illustrated the logic to the 60 percent solution.  If your fixed expense are such a high fraction of your income, you can squeeze the little things to death -- not buying a fancy cell phone for your kid, going longer between hair colorings -- and it doesn't fundamentally change the big picture.  Unless Steins has enough savings to keep pulling out $50k a year for the next decade, she needs to bite the bullet and go after the big things -- the house, the nanny, the second car.

Time to retire the "Mr. Mom" references

Today's New York Times had an article on unemployed financial-industry men who are spending more time with their kids.  It's all too typical of the Times' coverage of parenting, in that the reporter seems to have noticed a pattern among her neighbors and decided that it was a trend.  Far more interesting than the article is that pretty much every comment posted on the article said:

• It's called being a father.
• Why is this worth invisible when done by women but newsworthy when done by men?

And seriously, it's time to retire the "Mr. Mom" references.  It's just lazy copyediting.

thin news

I was shocked by how thin today's Washington Post was.  The Book Review section, which is ending as a stand-alone section in a few weeks, had essentially no ads.  The car ads were a single folded sheet, so 4 pages.  The help wanted section was a sheet and a half, 6 pages.  I don't see how they can survive like this.

I guess I'm one of the people responsible for the collapse of print newspapers.  I subscribe to the Sunday Post only, read both the Post and the NY Times online.  (We also get hard copies of both, plus the Wall Street Journal, at work, but I usually wind up reading online anyway.  It looks more like I'm goofing off when I'm reading in the lunch room than when I'm in front of the computer.)

media and the election

After an election that was dominated by new media (blogs, youtube, twitter), the end turned out to demand the old media.

We watched the results come in on television, and our guests nearly rioted when at one point T revealed that we were actually ten minutes behind live thanks to TiVo and channel switching.  I had my laptop on, and occasionally looked over to check things like which counties had reported in the states that had only partial results, but the focus was definitely on the big screen. 

And then, yesterday, it seems like everyone wanted a newspaper, the dead tree kind, to hold in their hands and put away in the closet.  Papers all over the country sold out, and people were lined up waiting for the special editions to come out.

When I drained the battery on the car last week, I set off the anti-theft device on the audio system, so I can't listen to the radio until we manage to get to a dealer.  Listening to the previous day's podcast works ok for Planet Money and This American Life, less well for the more newsy shows.*

*It's almost like having a TiVo for the radio.

Low-wage workers

I've got several long thoughtful posts that I'd like to write, but I've just been crashing before I get to my blogging time.  So go read the first article in the Washington Post's series on low-wage workers, and then we can discuss.

world news

A few months ago, I received an offer to get the Economist for airline miles.  Since I an unlikely to use them for anything else, I signed up.  The Economist offers two things that I find interesting:

• A very distinct take on US politics, from a point of view that is quite different from either of the US political parties -- very pro-market, but without the social conservativism of the Republicans.
• In depth coverage of world news.

That said, I have to admit that I often find myself skimming past many of the international stories -- oh, there are protests in Albania, who knew?-- but not really caring a whole lot about the details.

The world news story that I'm following most closely right now is the elections in Zimbabwe.  With no official results 4 days after the elections, it's hard to believe that Mugabe's people aren't cooking the books.  (The opposition is claiming that they've won, but the government says that just saying that is an attempted coup.) And today some journalists have been arrested.  I don't have any particular insight into how it's going to turn out, but I'm watching with my fingers crossed.

Why do I care about this story?  Like Becca at Not Quite Sure, I've been there.  For two days, which doesn't make me any sort of an expert.  But I know how desperate people were then for our American dollars, and I just can't wrap my head around what a million-fold inflation since then means.  It's a heartbreaker of a story, and a reminder that much (most?) hunger in the world is political, not (just) the result of natural disasters. (And yes, we all had serious misgivings about our tourist dollars going to support Mugabe's government, but we went anyway.  I don't know if we did net harm or good.)

But I think I'd care about Zimbabwe even if I hadn't been there.  I wrote a report about it in 6th grade, shortly after it achieved independence.  I can't remember many of the details, but I know that I wrote to the embassy asking for information and they sent me a thick envelope with newspapers and other material. At the time, I think I was most intrigued by all the cities whose names were changed.

One concern I have about The Economist as my source for international news is that I don't know enough to know where their biases and blind spots are.  For example, they had a story about Zimbabwe last month, in which they argued confidently that Simba Makoni is "no joke for the incumbent." But it looks like he's a distant third, getting less than 10 percent of the vote from the unofficial figures that have come out so far.   Morgan Tsvangirai is the candidate who appears to be leading.

All the news I don't have time to read

Yesterday, I saw an article somewhere about Brijit, a new website that abstracts newspaper and magazine articles down to 100 words or less, and rates them.  The idea is that it's news for people who don't have time to read, or something.  Anyone can sign up to write abstracts for them, and they pay $5 a pop if they use them.

It's certainly true that my to-read pile grows far faster than I can keep up with.  But I'm not convinced that this is a solution.  For one thing, it covers mostly sources that I actually do keep up with -- I don't read the NY Times cover to cover, but I usually look at the front page, and scan the list of  "most emailed" articles, and I think I get as much out of that as I would out of the Brijit summaries.

My favorite source for telling me what I would like to read if I had another 5 hours a day is Jenny Davidson at Light Reading.  She almost never suggests things that I've already read, and often includes a few paragraphs that capture the heart of the article.

On a related note, she recently linked to an interview with Pierre Bayard, the author of the wonderfully named book "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read."

(No book review today -- I'm in the middle of 3 different books, and not far enough along to talk about any of them.  I did watch the movie of Maurice last week; I think it was a mistake to watch it right after reading Birdsong, because all I could think about was that they were all doomed.)

 

kill a catalog, save a tree

The holidays are still 2+ months away, and we're already drowning in catalogs.  It's clutter that we don't need, and it's bad for the environment.

I went to the Direct Marketing Association website and asked to be taken off their lists.  (They charge you $1 for the privilege, which ticks me off.)  That helps with the random catalogs from companies I've never heard of, but doesn't stop catalogs that you've bought from in the past.  The problem is that I do like ordering from companies like LL Bean and Oriental Trading Company, but I do so from their website, and I don't need (or want) to get a monthly catalog from them.  So I've been calling one or two companies a day and asking them to take me off their lists.

In general, the process has been pretty painless.  But Lilian Vernon was sufficiently annoying that it makes me far less likely to order from them in the future.  You call, and get an electronic voice that asks you what you want to do.  Then it asks you to read it your customer number off the catalog.  Then it asks you to confirm that your address is... (whatever they have in the system.)  Only then does it connect you to a live operator... who proceeds to ask for your customer number again, and for you to repeat your address to her.

Update: Via Aggregating the Fascinating, I found Catalog Choice, a free online site to submit requests to be removed from a catalog.

Framing

Via Margy Waller at Inclusionist, I've been reading some reports about the "framing" of low-wage work in the media.

I have to say, I'm sort of dubious.  The media consultants (Douglas Gould and Co) are saying that it's bad when newspaper articles or magazine reports start off with stories about individuals or families who are struggling to get by.  The argument is that even if the subjects are highly sympathetic, this pushes the reader into a frame of "sympathy for the poor" and they get stuck on the merits (or flaws) of the individual example, rather than looking at the social and economic system that leads to the problem.

Ok, they're the experts, and this is based on research on the subject.  And I know that when newspapers run these stories about, for example, people who are about to lose their homes because of medical bills, they often get donations for that specific family.  But my question is how many people read the stories -- my guess is it's higher for the ones that start off with the compelling story.  As Gould and co acknowledge, reporters certainly think that it's better journalism that way, and that more people will read the stories than if they lead with straight economic analysis.  And a story that no one reads doesn't do you much good, right?

I was also a little dumbfounded by the statement that it's "highly advantageous" that welfare has essentially disappeared from news stories "as welfare tends to call forth negative stereotypes about low-wage work and workers."  Wow.

I did think that it was interesting that they found that stories about family leave and low wage work were disproportionately likely to be framed as personal rather than as a question of workforce policy.  I'm not sure if this is a statement about the issue per se, or about the lack of specific legislative proposals that encourage the use of a systemic frame.

Linda and Leslie

So, Linda Hirshman has a book out, and the Washington Post gave her op-ed space over the weekend.  I'll take a look at the book if either of my local libraries gets a copy, but so far, I haven't heard her saying anything that wasn't covered in her original American Prospect essay or responding to any of the substantive criticisms that I and others made at the time.  (I do feel compelled to point out that Julia's post in which she says that she's not a capital F Feminist is a precise illustration of the point that I made about the dangers of litmus test feminism.)

I'm somewhat amused by Hirshman's defensive reaction to the criticism the article got in the blogosphere -- and her implicit assumption that "mommybloggers" are all stay-at-home moms.  And I really don't understand why she's so hung up on Miriam Peskowitz's roof.  (And yes, it's a sign that I spend way too much time on blogs that I knew exactly who Hirshman was referring to, even though she didn't mention her by name.)

Via RebelDad, I read this post by Jeremy at Daddy Dialectic in which he criticizes Leslie Morgan Steiner, editor of Mommy Wars, and author of a blog on the Washington Post website.  He begins:

"To my way of thinking, the Washington Post's Leslie Morgan Steiner represents everything that's wrong with the way the mainstream corporate media cover children and parenting: she's shallow, blind to anything that falls outside her cultural and economic comfort zone..."

As I mentioned yesterday, I got a chance to have dinner two weeks ago with Steiner, Devra Renner and a group of working moms as part of a Women's Information Network event.  While I share many of Jeremy's frustrations with Steiner's blog, and the "mom v. mom" framing of her book, she charmed me.  She was gracious, listened as well as talked, and was quite funny about the way her personal life gets dissected by the posters on her blog on a regular basis.  Moreover, she seemed to get the fact that professional-class parents enjoy a huge amount more flexibility and freedom than lower-income families, and argued that those of us with time and influence should be working to benefit all families, not just our own. 

So why doesn't she push this harder in her writing?  Steiner claimed that the "Mommy Wars" framing was pushed on her by the publisher.  And she also pointed out that that day's post, in which she talked about the huge settlement that Verizon had made in its class-action pregnancy bias lawsuit, got fewer comments than almost any post she's made.

newspaper

Sometime last year, I gave up my daily newspaper subscription.  It was piling up unread, and was adding to my sense of being always behind, and T was unhappy about the mess.  (My mother has huge piles of newspapers in her apartment, and I think he's afraid the trait is genetic.)  I was suprised at how little I missed it -- I still caught up on the headlines on the web, and I devoted my metro reading time to books and magazines instead.

But last month, the Post offered us one of their special deals where it only costs about $0.35 a week more to get the daily paper delivered than to get just the Sunday paper (which we had never dropped).  And so I signed up, and it started last week.

From an economic point of view, it's definitely worthwhile -- there was a $4 off coupon this week from CVS that pays for the subscription for several months.  From an environmental point of view, I feel guilty about the dead trees.  I read a somewhat wider range of stories with the paper in front of me than I do on the web, which has its pluses and minuses.

Do you read a daily paper?  Which one?

Judith Warner's back... and I agree with her

Judith Warner's back blogging in the New York Times, and this week she takes on Caitlin Flanagan:

"The Caitlin Flanagan interview turned into a knock-down-drag-out fight. I had entirely misunderstood her book, which is, in large part, a paean to traditional wife- and motherhood, and which I had read as an extended metaphor, given that — as Flanagan makes exceedingly clear — she is a modern working mother who does no housework whatsoever."

"I’d taken her book — which begins and ends with chapters about Flanagan’s mother’s death and the author’s own bout with breast cancer — to be about love and yearning and identity and desire and memory, when, in fact, it is about cooking and cleaning and sex and child-rearing (sometimes a pressure cooker is just a pressure cooker)."

And she concludes:

"I will start by saying: I disagree with Caitlin Flanagan. I believe that the enormous investment we bring to things like “home” and “motherhood” — as to things like birthday parties and profiteroles — is metaphorical. It’s about ideas, not reality, and those ideas can’t be taken at face value. Our lives are material. We have to mine that material for the deeper truths it can reveal about ourselves and the world around us. And we have to have a sense of humor about it. For the other way, madness lies."

I didn't think I'd ever find myself agreeing 100% with anything Warner wrote, but this comes pretty close.

I really appreciated the thoughtful comments that people left on the post about the MotherTalk event.  I don't think Flannagan makes a serious argument that any of us should feel compelled to respond to.  (And if you're really looking for a book about the satisfactions of ironed sheets and vacuumed floors, I recommend Cheryl Mendolson's Home Comforts. )  Hirshman at least makes a case, although I think she's fundamentally wrong in her claim that women who succeed by following traditionally male career paths are necessarily going to be better for women's rights than their male counterparts.

Blogs and the MSM

I've been getting a bunch of hits today from people searching for "Annette Lareau" or "Unequal Childhoods" because David Brooks wrote about the book today in his NYTimes column.  Time to break out the "I blogged about that last year" bumper stickers. 

The Washington Post has a new work-and-family blog, by Leslie Morgan Steiner, of course  It's frustrating that they've got this huge built-in audience and are covering so much of the tired old mommy wars ground.  (On a technical note, like the NYTimes, the Post blogs allow comments, but don't let you link to your own blog.  Kudos to the Business Week bloggers for acting like a real part of the blog community.)

The April Working Mother magazine has an article by Arianna Huffington that lauds the advantages of blogging as a career that lets you work from home.  Yeah right, if you're already a celebrity, or started blogging before 2003 (cf. Dooce).  I emailed off a letter to the editor, telling them that they missed the point.  If you're looking for a way to quit your day job, blogging probably offers only slightly better odds than a lottery ticket.  But if you're looking for ideas, laughter, and comraderie, and you can only do it when the kids have gone to bed, I don't think there's a better place to look.

Can we have a cease-fire?

I can't decide if I'm more pleased with all the recent attention that work-family issues have been getting in the mainstream media these days or frustrated that so much of the coverage is stuck on the same old groove, setting working (for pay) moms against at-home moms, and ignoring dads completely.

I love RebelDad's suggestion that we should googlebomb the term "mommy wars" to refer to Miriam Peskowitz's excellent book, The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars.  It's a much more productive contribution to the discussion than the new book by Leslie Morgan Steiner that's been getting a bunch of attention.  (See also Miriam's blog, where she's had some interesting posts this week about the NYTimes article on trends in women's labor force participation.)

RebelDad's ready to write off the Steiner book because of her stupid comments about dads in the interview with her posted on the Business Week working parents blog.  (He also points out this strong piece from Time online called "Bring on the Daddy Wars.")  I agree, if she can only find men "whose lives haven't changed as much dramatically" it's because she hasn't been looking.  (She also said she couldn't find any interesting blogs that talk about work-family issues -- I posted some of my favorites in the comments section there.)

And yet, I don't want to dismiss the book entirely, both because I want to take advantage of the big Random House publicity machine's efforts to get these topics aired, and because Steiner gets some things exactly right.  In the Business Week interview, she says:

"I thought the battle was between stay-at-home and working moms. But women don’t fall into these neat categories. Most women see it as a continuum. A mom who left a hard-driving job may be at home now, but she plans on being back at work two years from now."

Yup.  And in the Post article she makes the point that the biggest mommy war is often internal, and tells a sweet story about the lift she got when her daughter's preschool teacher complimented her:

"Did anyone ever tell you how beautiful you are?" Mrs. Rahim whispered so that the swirling crowd of stay-at-home moms, lingering by the school door, couldn't hear. "You are a happy mom. Your face glows with it. That's what matters most to your kids. I think you should have 10 more children. Now go to work."

So, it's hard to know what to expect from the book.  One taste is provided by the excerpt from one of the essays published in Newsweek.  It's by a woman who suggests that her children's overall meltdown was due to her not being home to meet the school bus (even though she did in fact work from home two weeks a month, and her husband was home the rest of the time).

As I've said before, I'm generally sceptical about the degree to which you can draw a straight line from parental choices to children's outcomes.  But even setting that aside, my reading of the essay is that, to the extent that Hingston contributed to her kids' problems, it's not because she was working, but because she felt so guilty about working that she had trouble setting limits, even when her son's therapist and teachers all agreed that they were badly needed.  I'm quite curious whether Hingston draws the same conclusion in the full version of her essay.

Magazine musings

This week, the new issue of Parenting magazine showed up at our door, addressed to my husband.  Our best guess is that the subscription is a gift from T's parents, replacing the Money magazine that they've given us for several years.  T's reaction is somewhat mixed.  On the one hand, as RebelDad has been complaining for ages, Parenting clearly doesn't see fathers as a real part of their audience -- the subtitle is "what really matters to moms".  On the other hand, it's kind of nice to have his parents acknowledge that parenting is the biggest piece of what he's doing with his life right now, and he takes it seriously.

The funny thing is that I think I'm going to continue the Money subscription. The first year we got it, it helped me catch a major mistake in our taxes that would have cost us several thousand dollars. It hasn't saved us anything like that since, but it's generally interesting and reminds me to think about things that I'd otherwise avoid.

Money is also consistently progressive on family issues.  The current issue includes an article on how a same-sex couple can best protect each other and their young daughter, given that Maryland doesn't recognize their civil union.  In the February issue, a feature on Fix Our Mix helped one of the featured families "save enough so that Mom or Dad can stay home with the kids."  (I see that I pointed out a similar article last year.) In an article on spouses who travel separately, the authors acknowleged that "very few couples earn equal paychecks" and went on to say:

"Frankly, that shouldn't matter. If one spouse is the sole or majority earner, does that mean he or she should be able to dine on steak and caviar with the gang while the other orders takeout with a friend? Of course not."

What I'm most impressed about is the matter of fact tone in which these issues are discussed.

I also wanted to point out Business Week's new Working Parents blog, which I also found via RebelDad.  They're still getting their blogging legs, and the posts are somewhat uneven, but I'm encouraged that they're giving it a try.  The most recent post is about one of the writers' battles with their insurance company over her son's medical bills.  One thing that I hadn't thought about until I read it was that one of the advantages of employer-based health insurance is that it offers some means of leverage in claims disputes. 

On that note, I do want to point out that Annika's donations page is now up and running.  It's through the Children's Organ Transplant Association (COTA), which makes contributions tax-deductible, and assures that they'll be spent on medical expenses. (See this post for background.) 

Work and family, European style

I'm surprised that the blogs I read haven't lit up yet with discussion of the Newsweek International Edition cover story on how the generous European family benefits aren't all they're cracked up to be.  The headline is "Stuck in Place: The Myth of Women's Equality in Europe" over a photo of a woman's legs with skirt, high heels and ankle chains.

The article makes a reasonably strong case (heavily drawing on this OECD report) that the generous paid leaves that American women drool over come at a cost to women's professional accomplishments.  As in the United States, women who take several years off of work find it hard to get back on to the fast track.  Many wind up returning to work on a part-time basis, in jobs that are less prestigious and pay less per hour than full-time work.   (As Jennifer pointed out in her comment on my post about part-time work, national health insurance doesn't make the problems with part-time work go away.)  And employers blatently discriminate against women of childbearing age -- even those who plan to return to work quickly, or not to have children -- for fear of having to carry them during extended leaves.

The Newsweek article includes a recommendation that European countries should shorten paid maternity leaves to 6 months to a year.  I'm not entirely convinced this would change things dramatically, but even if it would, it raises some interesting distributional issues.  All women, not even all mothers, don't have monolithic interests; what's best for some isn't what's best for others.  It it reasonable to ask women who don't have any ambition to have a "career" rather than a "job" to give up some of their benefits in order to improve things for the elite who do? 

I'm more intrigued by some of the proposals that would make a portion of the parental leave only available to fathers.   I do think that even short periods of full-time childcare both dramatically increase dads' confidence in their parenting skills, and give them a better appreciation for the work that's involved.  And they might even the professional playing field a little bit.

Welcome NYTimes readers

As Landismom was kind enough to point out, this blog was mentioned in the New York Times this morning, in Patricia Cohen's article about Hirshman and "choice feminism."   (No, I hadn't seen it -- leisurely reading of the Sunday paper is one of the things that went out the window for me when I had kids.)

If you're looking for my reaction to the Hirshman article, the post that Cohen quoted is this one -- The domestic glass ceiling.  I also wrote several posts about other aspects of the article, focusing on Hirshman's Rules and Litmus test feminism.

Gender and domesticity is definitely one of the recurring themes of this blog, and I recently made a list of the posts from last year where I discussed it.

• Vacuuming
• Your mommy hates housework and your daddy hates housework
• Division of Labor
• Marriage and compromise
• The domestic glass ceiling
• Cleanliness is next to...

And if you're wondering where the title of the blog comes from, as I explained in my very first post, it's from the subtitle of a terrific book called Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World by Peggy Orenstein.  And my thanks to Orenstein, who was very gracious when I emailed her to ask permission to use it.

Welcome, and I hope you'll continue the conversation.

Books of the year

I read Zadie Smith's On Beauty last week (yes, the boys were good enough that I was able to read on the airplane), and enjoyed it, but don't have a whole lot to say about it.  As with her debut novel, White Teeth, I think Smith is better at creating characters than building a plot, but the characters are interesting enough that I'm willing to go along for the ride.   I've never read Howard's End, which it riffs off of, so I probably missed some of her cleverness.  (I'm sure I saw the movie, but can't remember any of the plot.)  In general, I think it's hard to write a really good novel about academics.  Wonder Boys was disappointing and Moo was clever but nothing more.

The NY Times published its list of 100 Notable Books of the Year, so I thought I'd report on the ones I've read:

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, JK Rowling  A great improvement over the last one in the series.  I'm glad I just read it though, rather than making the huge time investment in reading it out loud with T.
• The March, EL Doctorow.  I'm in the middle of this, and liking it very much.  Not to be confused with March, by Geraldine Brooks, which is also set in the Civil War.
• Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.  I really didn't get why this one got such good reviews.  I just didn't care about any of the characters, or what happened to them.  I actually didn't finish the book, just skimmed the last chapter to see what the big surprise was.  If any of you read it and liked it, I'd love to hear why.
• On Beauty, Zadie Smith.  See above.
• Saturday, by Ian McEwan.  This one pulled me in neither by force of plot nor by likable characters, but by sheer brilliance of language.  McEwan captures individual moments absolutely perfectly, and also tips his hat to Mrs. Dalloway.
• Shalimar the Clown, by Salmon Rushdie.  I don't know if this one should make my list, since I only read about 10 pages of it before realizing that there was absolutely zero chance of my finishing it before it was due back to the library, so I stopped.  Midnight's Children is the only Rushdie book that I've really liked, but I liked it so much that I keep giving him more chances.
• COLLAPSE, by Jared Diamond.  Another one that I started but didn't get very far into.
• Freakonomics, by Leavitt and Dubner.  Some interesting ideas, but if you've read an article about it, you've heard most of them.

Hirshman's Rules

The blogosphere (or at least the corner of it where I hang out) is lighting up over the American Prospect piece by Linda Hirshman where she argues that the "Opt-Out Revolution" among elite women is real and that we should care about it "because what they do is bad for them, is certainly bad for society, and is widely imitated, even by people who never get their weddings in the Times."  I found the article incredibly irritating and off-base, even though Hirshman cites one of my favorite books about work-family choices, Kidding Ourselves.

Let's look at Hirshman's claims in order.  She says that staying home is bad for the women who do it because:

"Finally, these choices are bad for women individually. A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world."

I think "classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way" is Hirshman's convoluted version of the discussion we had here a few weeks ago about whether SAHPing is compatible with an intellectual life.  I've said all I had to say on the topic then, but I will note that even Amy, who never backed down from her original position that it's not, agreed that not all paid employment is compatible with an intellectual life either.

I agree that "having enough autonomy to direct one's own life" is important.  I think that Hirshman is right that women often make choices that make sense at the time, but that cut off future options and reduce their bargaining power in the process.  But I think that Hirshman is wildly off base in interpreting "autonomy" solely in terms of increased earnings capacity.  She's equally scornful of women who choose "indentured servitude in social-service jobs" as she is of stay-at-home moms, assuming that this makes them less autonomous than the big firm lawyer working 80 hours a week at a job he hates.  (Ironically, at the same time that Hirshman is saying that feminism failed by not making women more career-minded, David Gelernter is whining that feminism is the reason his students are excessively career focused.)

As far as "doing more good than harm in the world," this could score as a point in either direction.  Hirshman makes no case for why she thinks this is an argument against at-home parenting.

Turning to "bad for society," Hirshman writes:

"As for society, elites supply the labor for the decision-making classes -- the senators, the newspaper editors, the research scientists, the entrepreneurs, the policy-makers, and the policy wonks. If the ruling class is overwhelmingly male, the rulers will make mistakes that benefit males, whether from ignorance or from indifference. "

I agree with this, more or less.  BUT, I think it's true precisely because women often have different life experiences than the men who are making decisions.  To the extent that women can only become part of the decision-making class by being what Joan Williams calls the "ideal worker" -- fully available, without household responsibilities -- they will tend have the same perspective that the men do. 

My fundamental issue with Hirshman is that she assumes that there's essentially only two options -- full-time continuous commitment to the labor force in a job that pays as much as possible -- and anything else, including at-home parenting, part-time work, and any job that pays less than the maximum wage the worker could conceivably get.  And instead of arguing for more and better options -- meaningful part-time work, on-ramps as well as off-ramps -- she hands women a list of cookie-cutter rules to follow.  Hirshman dismisses those better options as "utopian dreams" but when Fortune magazine has a cover story on work/life balance -- one not framed as a women's issue moreover -- maybe they're not so utopian.

Brain, Child article

Yes, that's my book review in the new Brain, Child.  My hard copy arrived yesterday, and I keep fondling it.

I've blogged here about most of the books that I discussed, but it was fun to put them all together.  It was also a lot of hard work; I'm sure I earned less than the minimum wage, even if I don't count the time I spent reading the books in the first place.  The experience simultaneously reminded me of why being a writer was a childhood dream, and made me grateful that I'm not depending on my writing to support my family.

For those of you who are just arriving here via my "author's note," welcome.  This is a blog, a frequently updated website, with the most recent postings appearing on this pages.  Older posts can be found either chronologically, or by subject, as listed in the sidebar to the right.  I write about a book I've recently read almost every Tuesday.  I write a lot about work/family issues and politics and gender.  And, yes, sometimes I write about my kids.

Comments, questions, suggestions?

More on that Times article

I'm wiped, so this is mostly going to be a few pointers to some links I found useful in putting that Times article about Yale women and their future plans in context.

• Gelf Magazine has the full text of the "survey", showing that many of the questions were fairly leading.
• Mediabistro reports that the students quoted in the article are pretty unhappy about it.  Am I being too cynical when I think that maybe they just realized that this is the first thing that's going to come up when anyone -- a potential employer or a potential date -- googles them for a long time to come.  (Via Alas)
• Jack Shafer at Slate hit the ground running last Tuesday with an article pointing out Story's use of "weasel words" like "many" in the article.  Friday, he followed up with a second article, noting that the Times had run a very similar article back in 1980.  I was particuarly amused by that, since the last time I went hunting for statistics on mothers' labor force participation, I found a 1994 BLS article entitled "Are women leaving the labor force?"  Some things never seem to change.
• There's been a ton written about this article around the blogosphere, but I think Fred Vincy at Stone Court does a particularly good job of sorting out the different questions that can be asked.
• Judith Stadtman Tucker at Mothers Movement Online offers a thoughtful response to the article that goes beyond pointing out its flaws.
• Finally, I think it's worth noting that none of the family-oriented young women quoted in the story seemed at all interested in David Brooks' and Sylvia Ann Hewlett's advice that they get busy having babies right away.

I'm also working on a post about SAHMs and welfare, but I know too much about welfare and so keep getting lost on tangents...

Rich? Who, me?

Lots of people are picking up on the New York Times' series on class, and in particular, their interactive calculator that lets you find where you fit on their class scale.

Both Geeky Mom and Angry Pregnant Lawyer are questioning whether they really deserve the class labels that calculator came up with.  Both of them commented that they don't feel rich because there are people around them who consume much more, especially luxury goods.  Laura wrote:

"We're just missing some of the markers: big house, nice car, lots of vacations. What we have instead is: lots of degrees, multiple computers, lots of books, "enrichment" activities."

The Times calculator doesn't include consumption at all.  It's not exactly clear how consumption and class are related. The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley argues that there's an inverse correlation between real weath and conspicuous consumption; he claims that most millionaires drive old cars, cut coupons, don't take extravagent vacations, etc. It's also clear that plenty of people who are driving fancy cars don't have a whole lot of cash assets.

The calculator also doesn't control for location, and house values.  We make it into the top quintile on wealth, but only because we had the luck to buy our house before the market got totally out of control.  It doesn't do us a whole lot of good unless we're planning on moving someplace outside of a major metropolitan area.  Conversely, I know a lot of people who are easily in the top quintile for earnings, but are priced out of the housing market in much of the area.  They sure don't feel rich.

If we wanted to make the labels more correspond with people's subjective impression, I might call the bottom quintile "poor," the second quintile "working class," the third quintile "lower middle class," the fourth quintile "middle class," from the 80th to the 90th percentile "upper middle class," from the 90th percentile to the 95th percentile "rich," and from the the 95th to the 100th percentile "filthy rich."

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Today's story in the series is about how class affects health.  It compares the experiences of three New Yorkers who had heart attacks last spring.  I was seriously afraid that I was going to witness a repeat of the poor woman's experience from that story tonight -- two minutes into tonight's PTA meeting, one of the mothers suddenly put her head on the table and said she was having chest pains.  But she wouldn't let us call an ambulance, or even let the paramedics (who were only a block away) take her blood pressure, because "last time it cost a fortune."  She did let one of the other parents drive her to a pharmacy to get her prescription filled.  I hope she's ok.  She's a quiet woman who is studying for a nursing degree.  I often see her studying in the playground in the evening while her sons play.

Class in America

So the New York Times is also thinking about what class means these days.  They're kicking off one of their multi-day series of articles -- today's offering is "Class in America: Shadowy Lines that Still Divide."

The paragraph that immediately jumped out at me is:

"A paradox lies at the heart of this new American meritocracy. Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards. When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned."

Yes, exactly.  And I think that's a big piece of why concerted cultivation has become such a dominant parenting practice among middle-class parents who themselves were raised by strategies much closer to the accomplishment of natural growth, or "benign neglect" as some of my readers phrased it.

"The scramble to scoop up a house in the best school district, channel a child into the right preschool program or land the best medical specialist are all part of a quiet contest among social groups that the affluent and educated are winning in a rout."

Forty to fifty years ago, the only people who practiced concerted cultivation were those who were determined to improve their children's status compared to their own.  (Condoleeza Rice's family strikes me as an example of this, as does the stereotypical Jewish parents who want their children to be doctors.)  Today, most middle-class parents believe that concerted cultivation is needed just to ensure that their children are as successful as they are.  And I tend to agree.  George W. Bush got through Yale on what was called "the gentleman's C."  That doesn't exist anymore.  (Although of course, there are specific practices that parents do in the name of concerted cultivation that I think are unnecessary, ridiculous, and even harmful.)

I'm sure I'll have more to say as I read the rest of the series.

Also, reading this article online, I see that the Times has attached hyperlinks to the names of most of the researchers citing, linking to their professional web pages.  This is the first time I've noticed them doing this -- have I just been oblivious or is this something new on their part?  I definitely approve.

Three articles by Judith Warner

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.

Babies in the office

Via a chain of blogs, I found this flash photo-essay of "a day in the life of moms working at Mothering." (For those of you with slow connections, it's a series of pictures of babies and children in the office, some being held on mommy's lap while she types or talks, some playing on the floor, etc.)

Demi at Pilgrim's Progress comments "There is no reason whatsoever to think that every office couldn't look something like that."

The pictures are awfully cute, but I wouldn't want to have to do my job while caring for small children at the same time.  My experience with working from home, while caring for children at the same time, is that I always felt like I was doing an inadequate job at both parenting and my paid job, with neither getting my full attention.  And I was totally frazzled, with never the opportunity to drink a cup of tea in peace -- if it was naptime, I had to jump to get down to work.  Add to that a less than entirely childproofed office, and it sounds like a total nightmare.

I definitely could imagine this working with a tiny infant, especially one who slept a lot, or who was content hanging out in a sling.  It's a lot harder for me to imagine bringing my toddler, whose favorite activities these days include: pulling things off shelves, taking things out of trash cans, putting things in trash cans, putting things in his mouth, and pulling on cords to see what happens.  Or rather, it's far too easy for me to imagine what would result.  I could probably bring my preschooler to work in an emergency, but I'd have to let him use my computer all day (or bring in the portable DVD player) if I wanted to keep him out of trouble.

The discussion of this in the comments at Alas, A Blog also raise the question of whether this would be fair to other workers, as well as pointing out that not everyone works in an office.  They're worth reading.

Does anyone reading this get Mothering?  The movie seems to go with the current issue, which features a cover story about bringing babies to the office, but it's not available online.  I'd be interested in hearing whether the story is all about the positives (not forcing people to choose between work and time with their kids) or if it discusses the negatives as well.

Quick links

Two links I wanted to share:

1)  The LA Times last month ran a series on the increase in income volatility -- or family risk -- that is the best piece of reporting I've read in a long time.  They commissioned original analysis of the data, talked to the right people to comment on it, and brought it to life by focusing on the experiences of a few families.  This is really about as good as it gets.   Kevin Drum pointed it out when the second article came out, and there's a long series of comments on his post, some of which are also interesting (and some of which are the usual name-calling blather).

2) Tomorrow (Friday), the Center for Law and Social Policy kicks off their audioconference series on "The Family Squeeze" with a dicussion of a UK law that guarantees workers the right to ask for a flexible schedule.  CLASP is one of my favorite research and advocacy organizations, so I'm excited that they're taking on work-family issues.  Should be interesting.

TBR: Mothers

I get Granta because it was free with my subscription to Salon.com, but I rarely have the time to read it.  But the theme of the latest issue is Mothers, so I put it in my bag to read on my commute.   I've now read it cover to cover, and it's left me somewhat stunned.

The issue is exclusively about Mothers as seen by their sons, or daughters, or sons-in-law, rather than about the experience of being a mother. (There's one essay by Alexandra Fuller about her experience of being pregnant and post-partum in Zambia, but even that one isn't really about her as a mother.)  And the Mothers in the stories and memoirs seem right out of a book of archetypes -- the idealized recipient of worshipful love, or the evil ogress manipulating her children, the housewife whom the children underestimated or the self-centered career woman.  The writing is powerful, but the images are painful.

A very different vision of motherhood is offered by a coffeetable book I bought while I was pregnant with D., Jewish Mothers, by Paula Wolfson, with photographs by Lloyd Wolf.  I bought it in part because it was at a reading organized by people I knew, but also because I wanted to study the pictures to see if I could find myself in them, if these were women I could imagine myself becoming, if there was an alternative to becoming the punchline to a bad joke.

Tomorrow is D's fourth birthday.  Today is the fourth anniversary of the day I spent in a hospital room, watching it get light and then dark again.  After four years, I'm comfortable and generally confident in my role as his (and his brother's) mommy, more or less adjusted to being a mother.  But I'm still not ready to be The Mother, and I don't think I ever will be.

"Family-Friendly" Policies

Via Laura at 11d, I found this article from The Public Interest by Neil Gilbert on what makes a policy "family-friendly."  This article makes the policy case for the proposal from David Brooks that I discussed Friday a lot more convincingly than Brooks does, and deserves some of the attention that Brooks has been getting.  (I think the Brooks article is an attempt to popularize Gilbert's argument, but could be wrong.)

Gilbert makes the obvious, but often overlooked, point that women don't all want the same thing.  Far too many commentators look at a trend -- whether the general trend of the past 30 years towards increased maternal participation in the work force, or the recent modest reversal of that trend -- and act as if it says something about all women.  (Gilbert claims that "many feminists like to portray women as a monolithic group...." but this is a gratuitous slap; anti-feminists do the same thing.)

Gilbert argues that it's useful to think of a continuum of work-family preferences among women in the US, from "traditional" women who "derive most of their sense of personal identity and achievement from the traditional childrearing responsibilities and from practicing the domestic arts" to "postmodern" women for whom "personal success tends to be measured by achievements in business, political, intellectual, and artistic life."  In the middle, he places "neo-traditional" women and "modern" women who fall between the two.  (Interestingly, Gilbert uses number of children, rather than labor force participation, to divide women into these categories.  I'm not convinced that's the right measure; when I have a chance, I'd like to look up how strong the correlation between the two is.  Also, like Brooks, he totally ignores the role of men.)

This diversity has important policy implications, as I noted in my second post ever on this blog:

"Let me start by saying that I think we've made the right choice, for us, for now, but I don't think there's a single right choice for everyone, for all times. (This isn't just a wishy-washy plea for tolerance, but a general statement of principle, which has implications when we start talking about policies to support families -- but I'll get into that another day.)"

I guess today's that day.  Back to Gilbert.  He goes on to argue that most "family-friendly" policies  --- specifically referring to day care subsidies and family leave policies --

"address the needs of women in the neo-traditional and modern categories—those trying to balance work and family obligations. The costs of publicly subsidized day care are born by all taxpayers, but the programs offer no benefits to childless women who prefer the postmodern life style and are of little use to traditional stay-at-home mothers."

Fair enough.  Gilbert then proposes several alternative "family-friendly" policies that are aimed instead at the needs of women in the traditional category such as tax credits, social security credits, tuition breaks, and hiring preferences, all targeted to stay-at-home parents.  In other words, pretty much the feminist agenda of Mothers Ought To Have Equal Rights. (A similar proposal has also been getting some attention on a thread over at MyDD.)

Where Gilbert makes a lot more sense to me than Brooks is that he doesn't pretend that these credits are going to move women dramatically from the postmodern or modern groups into the traditional groups.  At most, he suggests that they might move some women from the neo-traditional category into the traditional category -- and he argues that this would mostly overcome the existing bias of public policy towards women who are combining work and parenting.  He also acknowledges that women entering the workforce after 5-10 years of childrearing would be at a disadvantage, at least in some fields ("those careers that require early training, many years of preparation, or the athletic prowess of youth"), which Brooks blithely ignores.

This post is getting long, so I'll come back another day to discuss some of my concerns with Gilbert's specific proposals. (I'm much more inclined towards something along the lines of the Simplified Family Credit proposed by EPI.)  But I think the underlying point -- that people have different preferences, and public policy shouldn't only work for the majority preference -- is an important one.

If it were that easy, we'd have figured it out already

So, David Brooks has noticed that it's not always ideal to take a chunk of time off in the middle of the intensive phase of your career to take care of kids.  He thinks this is one of the reasons that people have smaller families than they'd like. So he's got an idea:

"This is not necessarily the sequence she would choose if she were starting from scratch. For example, it might make more sense to go to college, make a greater effort to marry early and have children. Then, if she, rather than her spouse, wants to stay home, she could raise children from age 25 to 35. Then at 35 (now that she knows herself better) she could select a flexible graduate program specifically designed for parents. Then she could work in one uninterrupted stint from, say, 40 to 70.

This option would allow her to raise kids during her most fertile years and work during her mature ones, and the trade-off between family and career might be less onerous.

But the fact is that right now, there are few social institutions that are friendly to this way of living. Social custom flows in the opposite direction."

So he suggests tax credits for stay-at-home parents.  He thinks this will give people more options, encourage them to have more kids, and make everyone happier.  Why didn't anyone think of it before?

Well, let's consider some of the scenarios under which more women might choose to have children in their early 20s:

1)  The River Scenario.  As Springsteen sings: "Then I got Mary pregnant / and man that was all she wrote / And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat."  This is basically the scenario under which age at first birth reached historical lows during the late 1940s and 1950s.  It was dependent on two conditions, neither of which exists any more:  a social compact that expected young men who became fathers to marry and financially support their wives and children, and an economy that made it possible for a high school graduate to support a family.  Even if a young woman today could find a partner her age who wanted to start a family right away (which is pretty rare in the circles I travel in), it's unlikely that he'd make enough money to allow her to focus exclusively on child raising.

2) The Older Man scenario.  Ayelet Waldman asks whether Brooks is really suggesting that 23-year-old women should marry 40-year-old men, who are more likely than their peers to be both emotionally ready to have children and financially able to support a stay-at-home wife.  And if your goal is to be a life-long at-home parent, that's probably not a bad strategy (if neither divorce nor spousal death intervene).  But as Rhona Mahoney points out, we're Kidding Ourselves if we think that after 10 years of childrearing, the women in such marriages are going to have much bargaining power when it comes to family decisions.  So, they'll be able to go to grad school -- if there's a program in the city where their husbands work -- and get jobs -- as long as they're still willing to do the majority of housework and child care in order to support their husband's role as primary wage earner. 

3)  The Welfare scenario.  Alternatively, we could decide as a society that we value child rearing enough to create a program that would financially support people who do it, to the point that they don't need to delay childbearing until they earn enough to support themselves and/or have a partner who does so.  Actually we used to have such a program, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), also known as "welfare."  Welfare never paid enough to lift families out of poverty, but if you were willing to get by on the pittance it provided, you could stay home with your kids.  However, as Mary at Stone Court points out, welfare reform was based on the premise that this was unacceptable behavior -- that no one who is able to work for pay should receive public support for not working.  Maybe Brooks is proposing to reverse these changes -- but somehow, I doubt it.  (I'm particularly bemused by the rave review Brooks' column got from familyscholars.org, who generally line up with the folks who blame AFDC for promoting the dissolution of the American family.)

I'm actually quite sympathetic to Brooks' more general point about examining the social structures constraining the choices that women (and men) have available to them.  But there's a huge mismatch between the scale of the social structures in question and the policies he thinks are going to change them. 

Moreover, Brooks totally fails to question the assumption that workers ought to be available for 30-year continuous careers, whether from ages 25-55 or 40-70.  It seems particularly bizarre to try to restructure all of society to make childrearing compatible with such a career, just at the time when it's less and less likely that any of us, regardless of our family choices, will have a continuous career with a single employer. 

Reverse traditional families popping up everywhere

In the past couple of weeks, I keep seeing mentions of what I call "reverse traditional families"' -- families where the mother is the primary breadwinner and the father is a SAHD -- in all sorts of media.  I'm most intrigued by the fact that these aren't stories about SAHDs as such.

• The February issue of Money has an article headlined "Get the Life You Really Want."  One of the families profiled, the Davis family, describes their goal as "wanting their kids to be raised by a stay-at-home mom or dad."  Moreover, they've actually managed to take turns at the at-home role, which is a nice trick; I wish the article had talked more about Laurie Davis maintained or developed her work skills while out of the work force, such that she "was recruited for a lucrative job at a medical device company" after having been home for 4 1/2 years.
• In an essay in Working Mother about the value of having two involved parents, Courtney Nowell writes: "Carter and I talked about one of us quitting... "  While they ultimately decided to both work outside the home, I like the matter of fact tone in which she considered it equally possible for either parent to stay home.
• I'm in the middle of reading Life, by Gwyneth Jones. This book is largely about gender relations, so I'm very interested in seeing what Jones does with the fact that the main character is her family's breadwinner, while her husband is a househusband and SAHD.  So far, it's mostly been a device for commentary about how hard it is to be a mother and a scientist.
• In one of my favorite comic strips, For Better or For Worse, last week we heard that Liz's old boyfriend Anthony is taking a year off for parental leave.  Again, I'm looking forward to seeing what Lynn Johnston does with this plot thread; at the moment it seems to be just another way of showing what a great guy Anthony is and what a bitch his wife is: "Therese told Anthony that when the baby was born, it was HIS.  She said he was the one who wanted a family, so he could raise the baby, and he said he WOULD!"

In Kidding Ourselves, which I've discussed here previously, Rhoda Mahoney argues that reverse traditional families are a tipping point phenomenon.  More formally, she argues that men's willingness to be primary caregivers is in part a function of how many other men are (or are perceived to be) primary caregivers. So the fact that SAHDs (and their wives) are showing up in the media, and not just in stories describing them as exotic Desperate Househusbands may actually be making a difference in the choices that families consider for themselves.

A few thoughts before vacation

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.

Nature and nurture

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.

Depression

In reading one of the profiles in the new issue of Working Mother, I was interested to see Erica Carrasco's description of her husband, Stephen.  She works during the day as a technical writer; since their daughter was a year old, "he's been Mr. Mom, tending the home fires and working nights as a cashier."  Because she earns more than he does, they've decided to focus on her career, although they're hoping that she'll have more flexible hours when she starts her own business, allowing him to go to college.

I was particularly struck by the comment that her husband has been depressed since before their daughter was born.  She also says that being at home is "good for our finances but hard on Stephen's ego."  I haven't seen any formal research on it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that depression is at least as common among stay-at-home dads as it is among stay-at-home moms (who are more likely to be depressed than working moms). Men don't have post-partum hormones complicating things, but they have less societal support for their role.

It's also likely that depressed individuals are less successful in the world of employment, and so they may be more likely to choose to stay home for financial reasons.  Unfortunately, there's some evidence that depressed parents are less responsive to their kids, leading to worse emotional and cognitive outcomes.

TGIF

TGIF: Thank God it's Friday. I'm looking forward to the weekend, to hanging out with my kids, to taking them trick-or-treating.

An article by Sue Shellenbarger that appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week, however, raises the question of how parents' attitudes towards work affect their children. Interestingly, the CareerJournal site carries the article, which talks about both moms and dads, under the neutral headline "Use Caution When Discussing Your Career with Your Children," while the original WSJ headline was "The Right Way to Answer the Question: Mommy, 'Why do You Have to Work?'"

The silliest part of the article is the statement that parents are "acting as if they don't have a choice" when they say to their children "Sorry, honey, I have to go to work." I say that several times a week, and Schellenbarger acknowledges that she said it too. Actually, most parents don't have a choice whether or not to work, not if they want to eat. And even if they do have an overall choice whether to work, they don't have a choice on a day-to-day basis.

Citing the Families and Work Institute, the article includes the statistic that an impressive 69 percent of the mothers and 60 percent of the fathers said that they liked their jobs a lot. I thought it was interesting that the mothers were more likely to like their jobs; my guess is that because of gender roles, women are more likely to be able to take jobs that interest them even if they don't pay as much, and are also more likely to drop out of the labor force if they're unhappy. The loss of this flexibility is the hardest part of the "reverse traditional" family arrangement for me.

Shellenbarger emphasizes the gap between the percentage of parents who said they liked their jobs and the smaller percentage (about 40 percent) of children in 3rd to 12th grade who thought their parents liked their jobs. She makes some good points about how people often fall into the pattern of talking about the day-to-day frustrations of our jobs, and rarely about what we like about them, and how this can give children a distorted sense of what work is like.

The article includes a quote from a portfolio manager at a hedge fund who tells his children that he loves his job. Is it too cynical of me to wonder if he'd still love it if it paid $40,000 a year? (I'm reminded of the scene in Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, where the hot-shot trader's kid asks him to explain what he does for a living. The kid says "so and so's daddy is a publisher. He makes books. What do you do, daddy?" And the wife jumps in and makes the analogy that he's passing out slices of cake and whenever he cuts a slice, some crumbs fall off, and he gets to keep the crumbs.)

The article doesn't, however, offer much in the way of advice for the 30-40 percent of parents who don't like their jobs "a lot." Should they worry about the example they're setting for their children? Shellenberger quotes a parent who says telling her child "we need to buy groceries" "didn't make a lot of sense," but I think there are worse answers. I don't think it's terrible for a child to learn that the way we get money to buy groceries and clothes and toys is to work, and that when you spend money you're really spending "life energy."

The role of research

In this week's New York Times Magazine, there's a nice article about the 22-year-old daughter of a lesbian couple. They suggest that she's one of the oldest children deliberately conceived and raised by a homosexual couple (as opposed to having been born before one of their parents came out). This seems plausible to me -- I grew up in Greenwich Village, and attended what is probably the only public elementary school in the US that is next door to a gay bookstore, but to the best of my knowledge, none of my classmates had gay or lesbian parents.

However, the part of the article that caught my attention the most was this comment by Judith Stacy, a sociologist who rejects the conventional wisdom that the children of gay and lesbian parents are no more likely to be homosexual than the children of heterosexual parents.

''My position is that you can't base an argument for justice on information that's empirically falsifiable in the long run,'' she said. ''If your right to custody is based on saying there are no differences, then research comes along and says you're wrong, then where are you?''

This point has wide applicability beyond the specific question raised in the article. One example that comes to mind is child care. The research at this point is pretty darn inconclusive. There's some evidence that kids in child care have better cognitive skills, some evidence that they are more aggressive (although within the range of normal kid behavior), some evidence that very long hours of child care in the early months may have negative effects, especially for shy kids. It's all based on observations, rather than on rigorous evaluations, so anyone who says that they have proof of causation is lying. (For a solid review of the data, my favorite recommendation is Working Families and Growing Kids, by the National Academy Press.)

But let's say a report came out next week that had solid clear findings suggesting that children who spend their first two years in child care have worse outcomes than children who spend them in primarily parental care. What would we do? Would we ignore the findings, saying that they're just another way to beat up on working mothers? Would we demand higher quality child care? Would we demand that the government provide childrens' allowance to enable low- and moderate-income parents to cut back on work? If no possible research findings would change the policies and practices that we support, we should acknowledge that they are based on our normative values rather than on facts.

Targeted v. universal programs

In Caitlin Flanagan's March 2004 Atlantic screed "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement," she suggests that upper-middle-class women are hypocritical in their calls for universal day care, because they would never use it -- they all use nannies.

Flanagan's a good writer, and she makes a persuasive case. But she's completely wrong -- in 1999, less than 5 percent of preschoolers were ever cared for in their homes by a non-relative. Even looking only at families with an employed mother, and family incomes of more than $4,500 a month, or $54,000 a year, the percentage only increases to 7.1 percent. Upper-income families are actually the most likely to use child care centers.

Flanagan concludes her article by arguing that professional-class working mothers (as usual, fathers are off the hook) should "devote themselves entirely to the real and heartrending struggle of poor women and children in this country."

One of the great debates among advocates of public support for child care and other benefits is whether to push for programs targeted at low-income parents (who can't afford them on their own), or if they should be universal. And, Flanagan notwithstanding, there are good arguments on both sides; there's not an obvious right choice.

The arguments for a targeted program are:

1) It's a heck of a lot cheaper to provide services for a few million low-income families than for the tens of millions of families who would use a universal program. In an policy climate where taxes are a dirty word, proposals for expensive new programs are unlikely to get very far.

2) It is hard to argue that middle-income families should be taxed in order to provide services to upper-income families. It's especially hard when some groups -- the childless, families with a stay-at-home parent -- feel like they're being taxed to support other people's choices.

The arguments for a universal program are:

1) Programs that serve low-income populations are stigmatized as "welfare," which makes people who qualify for them reluctant to take advantage of them. There are administrative costs involved in determining eligibility, and people may move in and out of eligibility over the course of a year.

2) Programs that serve low-income populations are typically underfunded and low-quality. Universal programs -- such as social security -- have deep popular support which fights any proposed cuts.

3) Any program that is means-tested has some sort of a cut-off above which families lose eligibility. This serves as a work-disincentive for families near the cut-off. Moreover, there is often deep resentment of means-tested programs from people who earn slightly more than the cutoff, but who are still struggling to make ends meet and who don't qualify for any help.

4) Many advocates of universal public child care believe on principle that caring for children ought to be a societal responsibility rather than that of the individual families. They explicitly reject the notion that only those who choose to have children should bear the costs involved.

Ahead of the Times

File it under "it must be a trend if it's in the New York Times." Today's City section has an odd little article with the headline "Dr. Spock Meet Mr. Mom," which tracks the increased involvement of fathers in hands-on parenting by noting the increase in fathers showing up in pediatrician's offices. Where 15 years ago, a father arriving in the pediatrician's office -- without his wife -- was "startling," today "there are days when more fathers than mothers show up."

The article is about as stereotypical as it gets, complete with a cartoon of a man in an apron, holding a baby in one arm and a toddler with the other hand, with a bucket and mop nearby, and the obligatory references to Kramer vs. Kramer and Mrs. Doubtfire. The one novel comment is the suggestion by one of the doctors that he sees more involved fathers because the parents of his clients are older, and the women less willing to give up their "well-established professional identity." Certainly, older mothers are more likely to be earning enough to allow their partners to step back from paid employment.

The overall tone of the article is definitely "look at this odd little phenomenon." The author (Anemona Hartocollis?) is careful to note "for the record" that the one female physician quoted has four children and a nanny. The parental status of the two male physicans quoted is not mentioned.

Walking the walk...

The new issue of Working Mother hit my mailbox yesterday, containing their new list of the 100 best companies for working mothers. I'm more than a little dubious about these lists, because there's often a big gap beween the official company policies that are captured in these formulas and practice on the ground, especially around part-time work and non-standard schedules.

My sense is that if you have a supportive boss, you can often get flexible arrangements even if they're not company policy, and if you don't, you're out of luck, regardless of what the manual says. I'd love to see data on what fraction of the workforce is taking advantage of these policies, broken out by gender (are they just creating a mommy track?), and on the career outcomes for people who work part-time or take extended leaves. I work for the federal government, which is overall reasonably family-friendly (with the glaring exception of ZERO paid parental leave), but I know people's experiences vary dramatically from department to department and even office to office.

If any of my readers work at one of these 100 best companies and want to comment on what it's really like, I'd love to hear your point of view.

Amy pointed out that in my discussion of flexibility on Monday, I didn't talk much about stable flexible arrangements, especially shifted schedules. She's right, and that's ironic, as such schedules are very common in the Federal government. People love them, especially people who drive to work and want to avoid the utter craziness of DC-area traffic during rush hour. Working Mother reports that flexible hours are among the most common family friendly benefits, with 57 percent of companies offering flextime, and 34 percent offering compressed workweeks.

Of the benefits discussed in the study, the most common offered nationwide are dependent care flexible spending accounts, offered by 73 percent of all companies and mental health insurance, offered by 72 percent. (These figures are attributed to a Society for Human Resource Management survey, which I think means that it's mostly large companies who were asked.) The least commonly offered benefits are take-home meals (3 percent), business-travel child care reimbursement (3 percent) and emergency/backup elder care (2 percent).

I'd also like to call attention to Corporate Voices for Working Families' efforts to increase flexible working options for low-wage and hourly workers.

Many companies -- even those that have very enlighted policies for their professional workforces -- offer much less flexibility to their production and support workforces. The National Partnership for Women and Families reports that only 47 percent of private sector workers have ANY paid sick leave. At a conference I attended, one woman explained how her company, a large food industry corporation, had just changed their policies so it was possible for production line workers to take less than a WEEK of leave at a time (but only if they could find someone to substitute for them on the line). I'm embarassed to admit that such a possibility had never occurred to me in my privileged professional position.

Brain, Child on SAHDs

As I mentioned in Why blog? I frequently find myself wondering "where are the men?" in reading stories about parenting issues. So I was pleasantly surprised to pick up the new issue of Brain, Child, my favorite parenting magazine, and see that the feature story is about fathering, with a long discussion of stay-at-home dads.

[9/23 edit: The article is now available online. It's also discussed today by RebelDad.]

I eagerly read the article, frowned, read it again and then brought it over to my resident SAHD for his opinion. His comment: "If I were the editor, and assigned someone a story about SAHDs, and she brought this article to me, my first question would be 'how many stay at home dads did you talk to?' And if the answer were 'none,' I'd tell her to go back and try again."

That's not quite fair, but close. The author, Stacy Evers, mostly seems to have talked with men who aren't SAHDs about why they wouldn't want to be SAHDs (concluding that it's mostly lack of respect from other men) without ever talking to any SAHDs about why they would.

* In a sidebar article on magazines, she mentions that her brother in law is a SAHD, but he's not quoted in the main article.

* Evers quotes from author Austin Murphy's book about being a stay-at-home dad, . She then inserts in parentheses a comment from Peter Baylies, the founder of athomedad.com, that the book is a "venting tool." I read this as his polite way of saying that the guy is a jerk and shouldn't be taken as representative of at-home-dads. She doesn't ask Baylies anything about his experience as a SAHD.

* Evers discusses her friend Dan, who she identifies as "a freelance photographer raising two young children." She says that he's "shifted his focus from career to children" but never outright calls him a stay-at-home dad. She talks about three things that made it easier for him to make the shift -- that he was already working from his home, that his wife made more money than him, and that he had a role model -- but not about anything that made him want to do it.

My more fundamental complaint is that the article doesn't seem to take the SAHD option seriously. What Evers really wants is for working fathers to take on more family responsibilities -- and to fight for the workplace flexibility that is needed to do so. Towards the end of the article, she writes:

"No one's really suggesting to merely swap stay-at-home mothers for stay-at-home fathers. But why not a more reasonable sharing of all responsibilities and tasks, whether it's working or caring for children?"

It's hard to argue against a "reasonable sharing" -- but does that have to mean 50-50? Or even 60-40? In the author's note, Evers comments that she and her husband are "both surprised sometimes at how traditional our arrangement has turned out to be, even though it's what best suits our personalities."

I'm arguing that we ought to be fighting as much for a world in which there are options open to both men and women -- including being a full-time parent -- as for a world in which all responsibilities are shared equally.

Who cares about the "Opt-Out Revolution?"

Last fall, the New York Times magazine ran a long cover story called "The Opt-Out Revolution," by Lisa Belkin which talks about the choices that some highly educated professional women have made to either leave paid employment entirely, or to leave the "career track." Belkin suggests -- while carefully noting both that this is an extremely selective sample, and that it is "dangerous and loaded" to suggest that women are inherently different from men -- that "women are rejecting the workplace."

Another day I'll come back to this claim and look at the statistics more closely, but for today I want to talk about why this article was so controversial, especially among working mothers.

1) They're worried that it will lead employers to be less likely to hire and promote women and mothers, because they'll think that they're not going to stay around after they have kids (what economists call "statistical discrimination.") No matter how much Belkin tries to insert caveats, the fact that this was on the front cover of the Times magazine gives it much more than the usual anecdotal weight.

2) Where are the men? There's absolutely no discussion of the husbands of these women -- whether they were involved parents, whether they ever considered cutting back the hours they worked, what they thought about being totally responsible for the family's income. Maybe they'd love to "reject the workplace" but don't feel like it's a viable option. Who knows? Not the reader of this article.

3) Almost in passing, through a quote from a single anthropologist, the article suggests that child care is bad for kids: "'At this moment in Western civilization,' [Sarah Blaffer] Hrdy says, "seeking clout in a male world does not correlate with child well-being. Today, striving for status usually means leaving your children with an au pair who's just there for a year, or in inadequate day care.'" Excuse me? There's plenty of inadequate child care out there, but the odds of kids whose parents earn this much being in it are pretty low. [Thanks to Salon's Ann Marlowe for pointing out the dishonesty of "I Don't Know How She Does It" in this regard.] Belkin doesn't necessarily endorse this point of view, but she doesn't offer any countervailing voices.

4) The article doesn't offer any hope or advice for the large numbers of working men and women who agree that the workplace is ludicrously unfriendly to families, but who don't have the luxury of choosing to just walk away. Maybe it's possible, as Belkin suggests at the end of the article, that large numbers of women walking away from the workplace will change employers' behavior, but I'm not holding my breath.

.......

A tip of my hat to Russ at the Daily Yak for noting my arrival in the blogosphere. This is a "journal" type blog, from the perspective of a SAHD. I wonder if SAHDs are more likely than SAHMs to blog, or if I'm just more aware of them...

.......

Tomorrow the Census Bureau will release the poverty statistics for 2003. I'll kick off my weekly statistical report by checking in on them. They're unlikely to be good news.