The XX Factor: What women really think.

Daughters Devalued

A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:

If you're interested in reading a refreshing burst of honesty today, you could do worse than Aaron Traister's piece about the different reactions he received from people when he told them he was expecting a son and when he told them, a couple years later, that he was expecting a daughter. Americans tend to think we're above the prejudices that drive people in China and India to use sex-selective abortion, but as Traister's piece shows, we're far from the angels we'd like to pretend we are. ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Women Don't "Forget" To Have Children

A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:

While conceding that Huffington Post might write headlines for its celebrity bloggers, I still have to admit that I knew no good would come from an article titled "Don't Forget To Have Kids." This myth of the woman who "forgets" to have kids is so common that we don't stop to think about how sexist it really is, since the implication is that women are prone to such heights of stupidity that they could forget about the existence of marriage and babies, even in a world that has multiple cable channels (especially TLC) dedicated to marriage and babies. If you think about the myth of "forgetting" to have kids even for a moment, it falls apart, because the more common problem is forgetting to use contraception, and having kids because of it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Zero Tolerance Means Zero Critical Thinking

School is where we send our children not only to learn—reading, writing, arithemetic—but also, one would hope, to think. It’s hard to see how kids are supposed to do that, though, when they go to schools where the grown-ups appear incapable of engaging in any form of critical thought or useful decision-making ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

The Case Against the Case Against Having Kids

Anne Kingston wrote a Maclean’s cover story on “the case against having kids.” Then she wrote another Maclean’s story—on all the hate mail she received for making the case against having kids ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Traditional Childrearing: Send Them Away Before They Are Adolescents!

Dayo, you write that you were sent away to boarding school at age 14. In that, you had a more traditional upbringing than most Americans.

Contrary to popular opinion, American children now spend far more time living under the same roof with their bio-parents than have most children in Western history. Traditionally—by which I mean, until capitalism separated work from home—children were sent away to live with others somewhere between ages 8 and 14 (at the latest). The aristocracy sent adolescents off to be pages and maids-in-waiting, to get an education in manners. Working folks sent children off to be apprentices (boys) or domestics (girls—although some girls might instead work in laundry, spinning, or weaving). They'd work for about 7 to 10 years, when they'd finally be paid (no weekly wages!), giving them a lump sum that was enough to marry and start a little shop of their own. Working through adolescence was how most girls earned their dowries and boys learned their trade...and how most working women (and aristocrats as well) avoided being their own children's nannies. Adult women ran the house and shop, in partnership with their husbands. Diaper-wiping was the work of teenagers.

That was the system even if you were lucky enough to have two bio-parents who survived until you were an adult. Most lost at least one parent before then, and had to live under a step-parental regime (cf: Cinderella), or, for impoverished gentry, were sent off to be governesses or law clerks.

Which makes me wonder: Is it a healthy system for anyone, parents or children, to keep adolescents home until age 18? But I agree that boarding schools for poor children whose parents are in flux and financial distress might be a good—or at least, a very traditional—idea.

Charles Murray, Updated and From the Left?

I always feel queasy about such studies, Ann, because of the potential problem you mentioned, namely fatalism. These researchers are writing about the circumstances of poverty, which puts them on the traditional left of the poverty and social policy spectrum. But I'm not sure the effect is all that different from Charles Murray, who made many of us furious when he argued that differences in I.Q. were enduring and a predictor of success. Unlike Murray, the latest crop of brain researchers are careful to steer clear of race issues, or use words such as innate. Instead, they have recast the evils of poverty in the latest neutral neuroscience language. The NAS studies you mention focus on "cognitive development," and "working memory." Still, in reading the study one feels like by age 3 or 4, some permanent architecture has been erected that can't be undone.

In his great book, Whatever It Takes, Paul Tough does a wonderful summary of all the studies that come to a similar conclusion as the one you mentioned. The gist is that early intervention is crucial, because the circumstances of poverty leave children farther and farther behind. I suppose one can't elide or ignore this fact. And Tough's book is about a program—the Harlem Enterprise Zone—that grapples with the evidence. But that program is so comprehensive and well, expensive, that I can't help but think that in this economy, it won't be replicated so easily.

Send Them Away Already

I’m really glad Kai Wright wrote about a boarding school experiment for kids in poor public schools. He frets about disconnecting teens from their families—which could have particularly pernicious effects on black households. I dissent: Having attended boarding school hundreds of miles from home from age 14 on, I think the experience is well worth it. All other things (East Coast WASP culture, cough, cough) being equal, boarding school provides first-class, real-time instruction on how to fend for yourself—setting your own bedtime, developing study skills on your own, managing money—at an age when these skills are most prone to underdevelopment, perhaps losing out to after-school deliberations over whether to get plain or pepperoni from the local slice joint.

I don't know tons about the sleepaway plan (read the Time piece), but Barack Obama has already come out and said that he favors a longer school day and school year (American kids spend less time in school than kids in just about any industrialized nation). Why not take it a step further and institute the faintly Colonial, but more rigorous six-day school week I had in high school?

The big knock on boarding school, actually, seems to come from clingy parents:

"It sounds very exciting, but the devil is in the details," says Ellen Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness in Newton, Mass. "What's it like to separate a third- or fifth-grader from their parents?"

My parents left for boarding school in Nigeria at age 11, and so at 14 I was definitely not allowed to whine about my “disconnected” educational experience. I know every child is different—but I think the option of greater discipline (and deeper relationships with teachers) should be available to more children, particularly from underserved and underperforming school districts. Maybe I'll feel different when I have my own chickadees, but for now, parents and policymakers shouldn’t brandish family ties as a weapon against what could be, as Kai writes, a “holistic education solution.” What do you think?

(cross-posted at the Browntable)

More on the Permutations of Parenthood

Let's Not Forget the Sugar Babies

Dahlia, I think you've introduced the missing ingredient that Dana, too, stirred into the equation: kids. And Hanna, mother of three, I wonder what you say to this: the fantasy of having the security (courtesy of a spouse with a regular, and large enough, paycheck or some other source of support) to mix being the person overseeing the kids and their care with being a freelancer who also pursues meaningful, if sometimes less-than-predictable, work.

Isn't that a reality that plenty of well-educated, lucky couples pursue, or would like to? (I'm not saying they choose each other with that in mind, or that it's the savviest course given the prospect of divorce, but it's where they end up.) I agree that it's more often the woman who gets the child + part-time work gig, while the man does the more regular breadwinning. And I would say that she may well sometimes publicly gnash her teeth that she isn't the one who's been able to pursue the "real" career while perhaps privately not really being so sorry that she gets to be with the kids a lot and have a more flexible, and often less stressful, work life. Does she face up to the contradictions of her predicament? Perhaps not; we all have our fantasies. But sometimes—increasingly, I would hope—the man may well be the juggler, and my bet is he's all but guaranteed to be belly-aching rather than thanking his sugar-mommy, whatever he really feels.

The Baby Vote

Big Family Values

Michelle Duggar gave birth to her 18^th child this week. The megamom is something of an icon in homeschooling and Quiverfull circles, but whenever I see her in the news, on the Today show, or on her family's numerous reality-TV shows and specials, I find myself frustrated.

I don't yet and may never have kids, but I do like them and respect the decision to have a big family if you're up to the challenge. But the Duggars bug, primarily because of their sanctimony. They talk about being debt-free as if it's a moral issue and brag about caring for the large family thanks to living frugally, but they also generate income from rental properties and, no doubt, from their TV shows and their recently released book. It seems dishonest to suggest that everyone can afford their lifestyle if they shop in thrift stores and buy in bulk when that's not what, presumably, actually keeps the Duggars financially afloat. Furthermore, while I respect their right to hold incredibly conservative views on dating (no kissing before marriage! handholding only when engaged!), gender roles, and childbearing, I hate the reverence for Michelle Duggar as some sort of supermom. According to their TV show, weaned babies are handed off to older children, usually the teenage girls, who cook all the food, do the laundry, and do the cleaning in addition to taking care of their "buddies." It seems that they do most of the work while their mother collects the glory. The girls say that they enjoy their lives and that people who think they're too sheltered should "get over it," but I wonder how many options they truly have.

Teen Parents in School

Did anyone else see the piece about teenage parents in high school in the Washington Post Outlook section on Sunday? It's rare to get the kind of close-up look offered by Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School, where 70 girls—almost all low-income black or Hispanic students—out of a 2,000-plus student body are either pregnant or already mothers and now have an in-school day care facility, Tiny Titans. He focused on an issue blurred in the Bristol Palin coverage: mainstreaming adolescent parents and its dilemmas. Welsh was unsettled less by the absence of stigma and more by the not-so-tacit atmosphere, and assumption by the girls, of approval. Sure, there is a required "family life" course at school that duly covers the dangers of teenage sexuality and pregnancy, and the Adolescent Health Center is a few blocks away. But as a social worker in the support network put it, "I don't personally accept it, but once a girl is pregnant, I have to be all open arms."

It made me wonder if schools have considered even more mainstreaming, with a twist. What might be the impact of having teen mothers—after they're done boasting about their pregnant bellies (as they evidently do) and deep into dirty diapers—help give those "family life" classes? Welsh quotes one mother who sounds ready to give her classmates an earful about "how difficult their lives are going to be if they have a baby." Are there enough others to be a group of peer advisers? If the adults can't convey disapproval, maybe the kids could help—and convincingly.

What Nebraska Learned (and Didn't) When it Allowed Parents To Abandon Their Kids

Everyone lusts after stories of bad mothers—the worse, the juicier. As you might recall, in the late 1990s, at the peak of the Clinton-era culture wars, a moral panic arose over "dumpster" or "toilet" babies—infants abandoned by panicked, often teenage moms who had told no one they were expecting a child. In the spring of 1997, the nation was riveted by an especially horrific case. In New Jersey, 18-year old Melissa Drexler gave birth to a baby boy at the senior prom, stuffed the child into a trash bin, and returned to the dance floor.The baby died, and Drexler served three years in prison.

"Safe haven" or "baby Moses" laws emerged as a response to such crimes. They allowed parents to abandon their children to the state at designated locations without being charged with a crime. The pro-life movement, which heartily supported the laws, contended that baby abandonment was on the rise because Roe v. Wade had eroded the "culture of life." That is doubtful at best—the abandonment of disabled, weak, and, in many cultures, female newborns has taken place throughout human history. Nevertheless, it's a good thing to provide a safe, anonymous way for struggling parents to turn an infant over to the state. Though safe havens are used extremely rarely, there's no reason for them not to be there.

But these laws had unintended consequences. As the New York Times reported last month, after Nebraska passed a safe haven law in July, officials were shocked that parents were abandoning children as old as 17. Sometimes the parents were suffering from mental illness; often the children were. Many of the families were uninsured or underinsured. But whatever the cause, in the midst of a financial crisis, and in a state with some of the lowest spending on mental health and child welfare services, dozens of parents seemed so unable to cope that they were ready to abandon their kids.

Today, Nebraska responded by amending the safe haven law to apply only to babies younger than 30 days old. And while that will prevent these other families in crisis from coming out of the woodwork, it will do nothing to address the underlying problems of poverty and health care. Just a reminder that while we obsess about freakish stories in our fervor for identifying society's "worst mothers," bigger problems are often hidden in plain sight.

Transgender Mysteries

But a Boob Job IS an Investment

In his "Human Nature" blog, Slate's Will Saletan rejoices over the recession's toll on the cosmetic surgery business and expresses horror at the idea that some suckers (social parasites?) still refinance their homes to get cosmetic surgery during economic downturns. Then these vain people justify their ill-gotten boobs and rhinoplasties on the grounds that their plastic surgery was "an investment." Saletan cries foul: "When you can't pay the mortgage, we're supposed to bail you out? And your surgeon calls what you did an 'investment'?"

But isn't that a perfectly reasonable perspective? Sad but apparently true: We live in a society that rewards beauty and punishes ugliness, often using the medium of cold, hard cash. A 2005 Federal Reserve study, for instance, found that attractive people—in all occupations—earned 5 percent more per hour than the physically average, while the ugly earn 9 percent less an hour than everyone else. So say you find yourself, through sheer genetic bad luck, stuck in the low-earning "ugly" category—why shouldn't you decide that putting down $5,000 for a nose job or $2,500 for a "chin augmentation" is a smart long-term investment? If you can go from "ugly" to "average," you've potentially got a lifetime 9 percent income boost right there! Even if you're utterly devoid of vanity, some wisely chosen plastic surgery might be a sound economic decision.

I'll go further: Research suggests that the benefits of physical attractiveness start at birth. Nurses in maternity wards spend more time with the cute babies. And even parents, God help us all, apparently take better care of cute kids than of ugly ones—in a 2005 Canadian study, researchers found that parents with unattractive children often didn't even bother to buckle the little tykes' seat belts. Clearly, parents, if you want your ugly kid to get a fair shake in life, you need to get him or her to a cosmetic surgeon, pronto. And this, comrades, should be our new rallying cry: high-quality, government-subsidized day care; universal preschool; and free pediatric cosmetic surgery on demand!

The Pressure To Feel Bad

Emily, if you are still awake and reading novels after tucking in the tender shoots, then you are so far ahead of the game that I see a best-seller along the lines of How To Be an Awesome Mummy and Still Read Great Literature in your future, and I'll pre-order my copy right now. Here's what puzzles me, though, and I'd really love to hear back on this: When did guilt become de rigueur? No kidding, I almost feel guilty that I don't feel guilty; though I definitely make my share of mistakes, I feel pretty good about myself as a mom, and I don't hear a lot of women willing to admit that about themselves. Was the bar always so high?

Narcissim Isn't the Whole Issue

Rebecca Walker may be a narcissist, but this quality alone is not what bothers me. Her mother Alice has been called the same, yet in the older Walker’s groundbreaking 1983 novel The Color Purple, she managed to forge some meaningful social commentary. The younger Rebecca has failed to muster career success beyond being a memoirist. In addition to her book Baby Love, Rebecca published a book in 2002 titled Black, White, & Jewish, in which she detailed how difficult it was to grow up the biracial girl of divorced parents, shuffled between coasts and homes.

As a child of divorce, myself, I get awfully tired of reading this stuff by people who blame a lifetime of issues on divorce. It’s a harrowing experience, sure, but does anyone else think Rebecca Walker probably had some issues outside of mom and dad splitting up?

Rebecca notes in the Daily Mail essay how difficult it was for her in 2004 when she told her mother she was pregnant. “[Alice] went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then she asked if I could check on her garden,” Rebecca writes. Elsewhere, she whines that Alice vaguely considered her “a calamity,” just as madness was an obstacle for Virginia Woolf and poor health a problem for Zora Neale Hurston.

Instead of moping over how her mother’s feminism ruined her life, the younger Walker should be most concerned with how wholly anti-feminist she herself is. She is apparently incapable of writing outside of her own personal experiences as a woman, which has the effect of making her scope as a writer unusually narrow (as if she is stunted by her pair of X chromosomes). Best to hold off on crafting autobiographies until one has achieved something worthy of reflection. Catfights with mom and years of uncertain sexual identity do not a worthwhile memoir make.

Walker vs. Walker

A few weeks ago, memoirist Rebecca Walker published an essay in the U.K.’s Daily Mail titled “How my mother's fanatical views tore us apart,” which has been making the American Internet rounds in recent days.

The mother in question is Alice Walker, prominent feminist and author of the beloved novel The Color Purple, whom Rebecca paints as a selfish, distant parent more enamored of her radical politics than her own child. Rebecca describes how her mother would leave her behind for days at a time to hole up in her studio, and how she once discovered a cruel poem her mother wrote comparing her to “various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers.” Alice’s actions left young Rebecca yearning for a “traditional mother” like her stepmother, Judy, “a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on.” (Ouch.)

The crux of Rebecca’s beef with her mom, though, is Alice’s conviction that motherhood is a “form of slavery,” a belief that caused a major rift between the two women when Rebecca announced she was having a child in 2004. The two women have not spoken since Rebecca gave birth to her son, Tenzin, and Alice has reportedly cut her daughter out of her will.

Rebecca, full of the kind of new-mommy bliss that makes us childless singletons simultaneously wistful and a bit queasy, is angry that she almost gave up on this transformative experience because she drank her mother’s “rabid feminist” Kool-Aid. “Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness,” she writes. “It is devastating.”

As opinions pour in about this essay—Is feminism really to blame? Is Alice Walker a raging narcissist? Is Rebecca?—it’s interesting to remember another recent Walker family controversy. When her memoir Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence, was published last year, Rebecca lit some crazy fires by confessing that she felt differently about her biological son than she did about the teenage son she raised (and is still parenting) with her ex-lover, Me'shell Ndegéocello:

"It's not the same. I don't care how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your non-biological child isn't the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood. It's different. ... It isn't something we're proud of, this preferencing of biological children, but if we ever want to close the gap I do think it's something we need to be honest about. ... Yes, I would do anything for my first son, within reason. But I would do anything at all for my second child, without reason, without a doubt."

Note to Rebecca Walker: Easy there—20 years from now, you might be the subject of an aggrieved essay yourself. 

Watching TV vs. Thinking

So glad that Ann pointed readers to the save-the-time-use-survey campaign. It would be heartbreaking to lose a source like that, which—like reports by the National Center for Health Statistics, and the Census Bureau—offer such valuable real-time snapshots into our lives, health, and well-being, all of which are affected by, and affect, policy. For a journalist there are few more productive (and pleasant) activities than curling up with a source that provides data on who is doing the housework, how much time working parents are able to spend with their children (or each other), how much time adults spend caring for elderly parents, etc. I wonder why the administration is anxious to defund it—it's so cheap! For my part, just glancing at the Web site and calling up the data for leisure time, it's interesting to know that Americans spend 2.6 hours a day watching television, but just 19 minutes "relaxing and thinking." I wonder how multitasking will eventually affect the pie charts: What if you are driving and applying mascara at the same time? Shopping and talking on your cell phone? Lying in bed in the middle of the night, worrying? They'll need more than 24 hours in a day. I wish they'd expand it to include more categories. It's hugely worthwhile social research, for policymakers, journalists, and future scholars, about the way we live now.   

Monitoring MySpace??