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No strollers at the Obama inauguration? As a mother who once rolled her jogging stroller down crowded Market Street in San Francisco, front wheel blithely nipping at people's heels, I was all set to bristle over this. But you know what? That's an embarrassing memory. Strollers don't fit absolutely everywhere. Sometimes they cause trouble for other people, and sometimes, no matter how precious the children in them are, those other people's interests should win out. If the no-strollers proviso applied to the entire Mall, I'd be on the side of all those parents of toddlers out there who are now scrambling to figure out what to do with the 2-year-old. But it's only the 240,000 ticket holders for the swearing-in ceremony who are affected. If the Park Service thinks the space they'll be crammed into can't accommodate strollers or diaper-changing stations—well, maybe they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
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Michelle Duggar gave birth to her 18th 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.
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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.
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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.
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In the new Atlantic, Hanna has a fascinating, and unsettling, piece on transgender children, in which she examines how the issue is being reconceived by experts and parents. Following her through the maze of biology vs. culture, I found myself wondering what light, if any, history might shed on the debate. Girls spending at least part of their childhoods imagining, or wishing, they were boys seems a familiar—and culturally very explicable—drama. Greater freedom, more leeway for ambition and assertiveness, a sense of separateness from omnipresent mom: Certainly back in the day—and now, too—it's easy to see why energetic girls have seen advantages in being a boy—until the hormones kick in and other urges complicate the picture. I'm intrigued to know whether there is any data to suggest a more recent rise in boys wishing they were girls. If so, could that suggest anything about wider cultural, as well as family, influences—or does it perhaps point to possible gender differences in the transgender phenomenon? Could it be, say, that culture plays more of a role in "gender dysphoria," as it's called, among girls, and biology among boys?
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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!
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That's funny Ann, the one thing that never occurred to me was that Megan Meier's parents had struck an impossible bargain with her over MySpace. Perhaps because my kids still believe that Dora the Explorer actually lives inside my laptop I haven't yet thought through what a parent should be doing about monitoring social-networking sites. One of the ironies of the Meier story, beyond those we've already mentioned is that all these parents are simultaneously described as over-involved "helicopter" people and tragically checked-out.
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Dahlia, I'd say one of the most poignant lines in the New Yorker article-and there were plenty of them-comes from Mrs. Meier, Megan's mother, maturely drawing stark age distinctions. She feels for the teenagers who posted messages posing as "Josh Evans," the fake boyfriend. "If you don't think that child wishes she could go back and change that . . . It could easily have been Megan doing that." It's the adult involvement that she cannot forgive, not just her neighbor's but, I suspect, her own as well: she gave into her daughter's pleas for an account, imposing a rule she knew she couldn't enforce-that Megan never be on MySpace without a parent present. Part of what is so disturbing about this story, I think, is the image of a world ensnared by social networking technology, making middle schoolers of us all: needy, insecure, anxiously voyeuristic, socially hypervulnerable creatures for whom being alone, ever, is insupportable-is death.
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Just read Lauren Collins piece on the Megan Meier MySpace/Suicide story. We haven’t really covered this story at Slate, largely because it’s virtually impossible to wrap your head around it all. Collins doesn’t try to make sense of it all either, just sort of lays it out there in a read-it-and-weep piece that paints the kids involved as somehow old beyond their years and the parents as young beyond theirs.
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Juliet, your post on the Dutch couple who abandoned their adopted child is a nice bookend to this story I'd wanted to blog about: According to (also!) the Daily Mail, the world's oldest mother—she gave birth to her sons last year at 66—is seriously ill. Carmen Bousada , who apparently lied about her age to be eligible for IVF now faces the prospect of leaving her twin sons orphaned. She has no spouse or partner. The folks who criticized Bousada's decision to give birth last year are getting their "I told you so" moment early, and reigniting the big Wendy Wasserstein debate about single women who choose to have babies alone, later in life.
Frankly I don't know what it means to be too old to parent, or too culturally myopic to parent, or too selfish to parent. But your story of the Dutch parents has an extra layer of grossness to it, Juliet. Apparently the parents are "traumatized" and "in therapy" for their decision to ditch their 7-year-old daughter for not fitting in.
Oh barf. It's one thing to be hopelessly selfish but quite another to expect folks to pity you for it.
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Via the Daily Mail, a Dutch couple living abroad abandoned a 7-year-old South Korean girl that they had adopted as a baby. Apparently, the couple took in the girl after failing to conceive. Subsequently, they had two biological children, and then decided that their adopted child didn't "fit in" with their lifestyle—that she was struggling to adapt to their culture, and that they just couldn't take it anymore. Now the girl's in foster care in Hong Kong!
The Dutch couple's story just doesn't make any sense. The girl grew up with them, how could she fail to "adapt"? If I'm reading the story correctly, the couple's suggesting that the girl's innate South Korean-ness has made it impossible for them to care for her as a daughter.
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There's a great discussion going on in the Fray about the varying IQs of older and younger siblings, featuring Norwegian study author Petter Kristensen and psychology writer Judith Rich Harris. Check it out.
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I wrote last summer about a Norwegian study on birth order that was being treated as definitive proof that first-born kids have higher IQs than their siblings--and that the IQ edge is due to social rank, not biology. (Actually, the results are about brothers only, since the study was confined to boys, but much of the coverage generalized to girls, too.) At the time, I asked the authors about some numbers that were missing in the paper. I recently heard back from one of them, Petter Kristensen. He charmingly said that the omission "is embarrassing, but I have no one to blame but myself" and sent along a file with the figures.
I sent the numbers to psychology writer Judith Rich Harris, author of No Two Alike. She points out that the numbers Kristensen sent weaken the claim that social rank explains the IQ difference, if it exists. Here's the context from my piece last summer:
The report in Science relies on a clever comparison to prove its key point: that the average 3-point IQ difference between firstborn and second-born brothers comes from the boys' varying "social rank" in the family, not differing biology. Kristensen and Bjerkedal looked at second- and third-born brothers who had an older sibling (male or female) who died in infancy. They found that second-borns who grew up as the oldest child in the family, because of a sibling death, had average IQ scores equivalent to firstborns. And third-borns who moved into second place in the family had average IQ scores like second-borns (one point higher). This is supposed to show definitively that family environment and expectations account for the intelligence boost.
It turns out that the number of third-borns in the study is only 81, and that the data point is shaky because there's a wide confidence interval, which means that the conclusion drawn from the data is relatively unreliable. Harris also points out that Kristensen and his co-author controlled for birthweight, which is a mistake if whatever causes younger brothers to have a slightly lower IQ (if they do) also causes them to be smaller at birth. That's what a biological explanation might show (scroll down).
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Courtesy of Feminist Law Professors, a grain-of-salt study that suggests something pretty interesting: Little girls may want to play with boy toys more than Bratz or Barbies. Yeah, yeah the focus group was funded by Bob the Builder and his bosses. But I’m not all that surprised to see little girls wanting to play with things that do stuff. I saw the same thing in action last week over Thanksgiving: My sons and nieces happily kicking it with the boy toys, while the Hello Kitty paraphernalia slid between the sofa cushions.
Unlike Ann Bartow, I myself was an inveterate hair-brusher. And if they ever build a Sandra Day O’Barbie, I will style her ‘til the cows come home. But this is something that bears watching, I think.