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A post from DoubleX writer Bonnie Rochman:
Well, fire up your engines, ladies, because now there’s a new bit of research supporting a third conclusion: that being married with children is the key to happiness.
In contrast to previous research that indicates an inverse relationship
between satisfaction and number of children, this particular study,
which tracked 10,000 British households over 15 years, found that the
more kids you have, the happier you are. I think that would come as
news to those parents who’ve decided to raise a singleton because they
also want to have a life of their own ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
More than half of adult women are mothers. It's not a lifestyle. It's
not a trend. It's just one of those things—you know, continuation of
the species and all that. A biological urge complicated by societal
factors that has been, not incidentally, the subject of great art and
literature over the past few centuries. Into that pantheon comes Motherhood: The Movie, promoted by a trailer full of worn tropes and painful moments. Want to silence Uma Thurman, the ruthless killer bride of Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2? Stick a binkie in her mouth. Motherhood, the Great Infantilizer. How did we come to this? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A guest post from DoubleX intern Jessica Dweck.
“Poor kid” is right, Emily. The Heenes are not only spectacularly bad parents, but they might soon become inmates
in Colorado state prison. In the span of one short weekend, the Balloon
Boy drama has turned out to be just that—an elaborate one-act
theatrical work put on by the Heene Family Players, staged on
television stations and computer screens across the country. We now
know that the Heenes' ordeal was just one more attention-grabbing stunt
in what appears to be an agonizingly protracted audition for a
TLC-style reality television show—the last act in a series of questionable parenting moves ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from Double X writer Hans Eisenbeis:
Taylor Swift is the biggest thing since I stopped caring what the next big thing is. I might never have noticed except that my 11-year-old daughter has now officially schooled me. Phoebe is an exceptionally sheltered child. Her mother is an ex-punk-rocker-turned-strident-Waldorfie. We forbade any screen time—no TV, no computers, and certainly no iPod.This is ironic, since pop culture literally paid our mortgage for many years back when I was a music critic in the post-Nirvana '90s. As I recall, music started to suck about the time I became a father, and I’d happily traded in my backstage pass. In my new role, I saw how messed up our culture is by age fetishism: Adults want to be kids and kids want to be adults, no one is ever happy where they’re at, and the media plays a huge part in this game ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
A little disappointment is inherent in parenting. Suzie doesn't inherit
her hockey-forward mom's stick skills; Johnny lacks Dad's engineering
bent. But a few women (and they all seem to be women) are disappointed
enough that Johnny isn't Suzie to spend thousands of dollars and endure
IVF, abortions, and even a divorce to produce the little girl of their
dreams (who, I suspect, had better damn well like pink) ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from Sharon Lerner:
Of course abortion and birth control
have a large role in bringing down our fertility rate in America, as
they have elsewhere. (I have spent much of the past decade-and-a-half
writing about both.) But there is no need to be reductive; this is not
an either/or issue. There are many factors contributing to the decline
in fertility, including both the ability to control when and whether to
become mothers and the policies that affect mothers’ quality of life ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Julia Felsenthal:
Many of the parents and teachers described in the New York Times article about letting your kids walk to school alone seem to be misdirecting their watchdog inclinations. Our communities have become vigilant about monitoring and admonishing “negligent” parents for letting their kids escort themselves to school. But shouldn’t that energy be going toward watching out for the kids themselves?
I walked to and from school every day from the time I was 8 until I graduated from high school, usually alone. It was a mile’s walk through a nice residential neighborhood in downtown Chicago. Most kids at my school got a ride. I griped about walking when the weather was terrible, but I appreciated the time by myself and the sense of freedom I had. One spring day when I was 13, I was mugged by three older boys from a nearby high school. They held me up at knife-point, emptied out my backpack, frisked me, and ran off when they realized I had nothing but (really) dirty gym clothes to offer them. I sobbed the rest of the way home ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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In last Sunday’s New York Times Modern Love column, author Joyce Maynard wrote about trespassing
into the e-mail account of her 22-year-old daughter, Audrey. The
daughter had temporarily relocated to the Dominican Republic when her
communications home were abruptly and, to Maynard, ominously silenced.
From reading the correspondence, Maynard learned that her daughter was
embroiled in a personal dilemma—one that she apparently needed to
resolve without involving her mother. After justifying the invasion of
her daughter's privacy ("I dreamed my daughter was running ... her face
a mask of grief"), Maynard goes on to tell Modern Love readers the
details of her daughter's very emotional crisis, including results of
her HIV tests.
Maynard has, apparently, always had difficulty with boundaries. In 1972, when she was 18, the writer published a confessional essay in the Times
about her generational perspective (sample: “Marijuana and the class of
'71 moved through high school together”) that brought her national
attention. She was later criticized about her 1999 memoir that excruciatingly detailed her teenage affair with then 53-year-old novelist J.D. Salinger. Maynard also auctioned off her love letters from the reclusive author.
Even had Maynard not been notoriously ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
This year marks the 10th Anniversary of Putumayo Playground, the series
of albums from the famed world music compilers created especially for
kids. Fans credit it with being part of a revolution in kids' music
which, along with artists like Dan Zanes and Laurie Berkner, turned
what had been a wasteland of painful ditties into music kids and
parents could enjoy together. Indeed, there's some catchy stuff out
there, but you won't hear it playing in my car. What's wrong with Bruce
Springsteen? If ABBA isn't kids music, what is? Is there anyone out
there whose kid doesn't rock out to Flo Rida's "Jump?" ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Emily, if you’re still collecting anecdotes from parents who are envious of their children, and children who outshine their folks, I can add to your list ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Emily, you wrote yesterday about the tricky feeling of watching your son outperform you,
and finding it discomfiting. But kids can be just as uncomfortable in
the surpassing role as the parents are about being bested. My all-girls
basketball team used to gather every Sunday afternoon to scrimmage our
parents. It was mostly dads who took the bait ... (Read more in Double X.)
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It is not easy to stop being somebody's mommy, but there comes a time
when your kids are done. The five-year-old gets on that damn carousel
and only two or three horses go up and down before she has a tattoo and
a boyfriend. Mimi Swartz in her Double X Empty Nest column wonders how she will restart her life as her son Sam transitions away to his own adult life. Over the next few months... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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In the spirit of Meghan's stated desire that the XX Factor blog remain a site of amicable cacophony, I'm feeling the need to stand up for my girl Dooce.
Well, the blogger who goes by that name, Heather Armstrong, is "my
girl" only in the sense that, like millions of her readers, I've been
following her life online for more than five years now on an almost
daily basis. But after reading Susannah Breslin's recent takedown of the "bad mommy" phenomenon, Ann Hulbert's review of a spate of recent confessional parenting memoirs, and a terrific discussion of those same books between our beloved Double X editors and the redoubtable Stephen Metcalf, it strikes me that something obvious is going unsaid... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Sara, I agree with your defense—in response to Katie Roiphe's piece about women hiding behind their children on Facebook—of a woman's right to put her kids first. I'm 25 and enjoying my selfish years now, because, as Judith Shulevitz pointed out
in her piece about the seasons of a woman's life, I fully expect them
to end when I have kids. And I think that's natural. Just as natural,
in fact, for fathers as it is for moms.
My mother once relayed to my sister and me a hypothetical question... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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The other day, Dana posted about Tom Hodgkinson's series on the "idle parent." According to Hodgkinson's new book, The Idle Parent, if more parents, well, just parented less, their kids wouldn't be so, well, crazy. Reading it, I couldn't figure out if Hodgkinson was being serious or pulling some sort of Swiftian joke. I asked Lydia Netzer, a busy mother of two, homeschooler, and writer, what she thought of this strange vision of the 21st century idle parent. Her response follows.
Tom Hodgkinson, principled idler and haughty bastard, has delivered his latest installment of parenting advice: "Don't take your kids to amusement parks or museums." The piece, at first read, is a trifling bit of silliness. Hodgkinson posits with strange earnestness, for example, that playing with your child when you really don't feel like it might give you cancer.
Idle silliness notwithstanding, Hodgkinson has actually figured out something really important. He just doesn't know it yet. Maybe reading his article, backward, starting from the end and working toward the beginning, will shed some light.
Let's begin with his conclusion: As a parent you must always consider yourself and your own happiness first. Putting your children first will cause resentment and ugliness. Moving from this backwards to his hideous opening anecdote, with the screaming children and the raging parents, the deathly detachment of parent and child, and the "interminable torture" of leaving the house, can't one perhaps infer a cause-and -effect relationship?
Maybe, just maybe, this laissez faire parenting isn't working out so well in practice. If my children behaved the way this man's children do, I wouldn't take them anywhere either. But it doesn't take me an hour of screaming to get out the door with my kids. I must admit that on many occasions I have put their happiness first, put their development, their ability to ride in a car without causing the driver to strike the windshield with his fist, ahead my own interest in reading a biography of William Morris. Now we can go to a museum without drawing repeated comparisons to hell. Good for me.
Look, you can make an argument for the simple life when it comes to children. Wooden toys, rural pleasures, and all that. We can all appreciate the value of a quiet afternoon at home. But this practice of idleness rings a little false as a philosophy when accompanied by the assertion that a little healthy boredom will prepare children for prison. In this context it becomes apparent that the real reason you don't leave the house on a weekend is that you've ignored your children for so long that you can't.
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Give ScienceDaily credit: Next to the write-up of the new study that found a correlation between autism in kids and advanced maternal age (oo, rotten phrase) is a link to the 2006 study that found that "children of men age 40 and older have a significantly increased risk of having autism spectrum disorders compared with those whose fathers are younger than 30 years." There is so much scientists don't understand about the autism spectrum, which may very well turn out to be a constellation of related but different disorders, with their own or overlapping genetic links. Maybe these apparent correlations between the disorder and older parenthood will prove unimportant in the end, or as you suggest, Jess, a proxy for other underlying factors. But at least it's equal opportunity bad news in the meantime. And the findings about older dads reminds me of a Lisa Belkin's argument about why men might want to start worrying about their biological clocks, too. She cited the autism study and another one showing that the children of older fathers have slightly lower IQs. Now maybe focusing on all of this is wrongheaded, because people shouldn't decide when to have kids based on preliminary findings about slight upticks in risk. But since Meghan is right about how much more often women's marketability is on the line, I'm glad to have a reason to bring up men's, too.
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Wait a sec, Hanna, you're not a conservative because the Buckleys were self-absorbed, screwy parents? What does that have to do with Pat Buckley's "appalling scenes," as her son Christopher put it? I can think of plenty of liberals who are equally appalling in their dealings with their children. This one is about fame and notoriety and narcissism I think, not politics.
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Sam and Hanna’s conversation about breastfeeding and its correlation with women’s earning power has me thinking about the series on “idle parenting” currently being published on Slate, excerpted from Tom Hodgkinson’s new book The Idle Parent. Much as I enjoy Hodgkinson’s magazine The Idler (and its accompanying website), with their pleasingly old-fashioned design and good-humored endorsement of the art of loafing, there’s something about this parenting series that’s been bugging me, and I think it has to do with gender. Hodgkinson’s argument, that our family lives and personal happiness would be better served by slowing down and doing less, makes intuitive sense to any working parent, but in practice, it's a lot easier to slow down when one has already established a career to do less of. Given that the period during which women have young children corresponds with the time when they’re building their work identities—and given our cultural assumptions about reduced hours and the “mommy track”— maternal “idling” might read very differently to employers than its paternal counterpart. Choosing to quit or radically downsize one’s job (like prioritizing extended breastfeeding over full-time work) could mean the difference, not between making partner next year or doing so in five years, but between having any meaningful paid work as an adult and having none at all.
That said, I’ll probably read The Idle Parent with pleasure, if only to daydream vicariously about the enviable design for living the Hodgkinsons have worked out: Sleep till ten while your kids make their own tea and porridge, then sit in front of the farmhouse and watch the wild bunnies hop by.
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Communicating with boys is the theme of the day in the New York Times, which has a front-page article on how market researchers are communing with young guys to help Disney carve out a boys' entertainment niche, as well as the Science section column on how pediatricians tackle the sex talk with boys. Like you, Jessica, I like the basically egalitarian core of the message the doctors urge, which is an emphasis on respect and consideration; that strikes me as right, and something kids (especially teenagers) of both genders can't hear enough about. And I was surprised that the subtext of the Hollywood story seemed to be gender convergence, too. Forget the Girlz vs. Boyz approach to marketing, apparently. Expert "boy-whisperers" like Disney's Kelly Peña have discovered that boys aren't so into the stark winner-loser paradigm after all, and the no-girls-allowed ethos seems to be out.
But also like you, Jessica, I have my doubts about the adult presumption that all this communication is, or even should be, quite as open and revealing as it's cracked up to be. I'm dubious about the doctors' claims that if adults are at ease, the conversations about sex won't be awkward—and I wonder if it's a service to parents to suggest they can expect that. I'd say the Talk is easier to conduct with respect and consideration—qualities parents should model, after all—if adults aren't envisaging lots of cozy sharing and caring.
And based on the other Times article, I'd say the market researchers are kidding themselves if they think they've established great rapport with boys, whom I'd credit with doing a great job of keeping their own counsel in the face of those who want to snare them into endless show-based merchandizing. Certainly Disney's probing hasn't produced much in the way of insights: Show the underside of skateboards in movies, use check marks not Xs (which remind boys of bad grades). The boys aren't talking much, and it's not clear the adults are listening very well when they do. Disney seems to have concluded boys want "fun with a purpose," though the rare comment offered by a kid in the story did not exactly confirm that. The boy helpfully defined a popular boy pastime—to "crash"—for the nice, nosy lady. "After a long day of doing nothing, we do nothing."
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Primed by a bunch of reading I've been doing about the vogue in bad-mommy confessionals (here's an interesting piece in the American Prospect on the topic), I misread this tagline—"Broadway Star Now Runs Downtown Mommy Group"—as I skimmed through the XX morning memo highlighting assorted articles. I read "Runs Down Mommy Group." So I hurried to check out the New York Observer piece about a Broadway singer who founded a mothers' group called Bowery Babes: Here, I thought, was the latest bad-mommy thing to do—rain on the parade of communal mommying. And my gut reaction was: A woman after my own heart! When I hear about mommy groups—especially if they have chic names, and (I imagine) members whose cell phones are constantly ringing—I suddenly feel like I'm back in high school, facing a peer group out of my league.
In fact, the article was about an ultra cool mom with just that kind of BlackBerry-buzzing life herself, surrounded by an entourage of other moms lucky enough to land a spot in her "cozy, grass-roots" group (the sort, it seems, who take in stride an activity like a "Halloween soiree" for 100 at a neighborhood bar). Mothering can be a very lonely business, and I'm all for companionship; I'm always glad when I see nannies congregating, because a happy nanny is surely what every parent wants. Still, the hyper-scheduled mingling—"proactively doing, rather than chatting," as a member put it—intimidates me now as it did two decades ago when I ventured with my brand new firstborn into a neighbor's basement with a bunch of mothers I didn't know. I never went back.
Now that it's all behind me, I'll speak up for being a bit of a straggler, rather than plunging into the thick of a "strollercizing" brigade—not least because it's easier to muddle in your own way, and let your baby do the same, if you aren't constantly tempted to make comparisons, as (let's face it) we all are, even in a gathering designed to be soothing. Bowery Babes may well be "unspoiled," but here's hoping the article doesn't lure yet more new moms into the "somewhat of an application process" (oh dear) that the super-popular group has had to institute.