Comments on: Good Childhood

By: Crooked Timber » » Conservative Copyfights

Crooked Timber » » Conservative Copyfights — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 23:26:30 +0000

[...] 8217;t they be able to take the sex out of Hollywood movies that their kids watch (just as leftwingers might want to protect their kids from rampant consumerism)? On the other, there ar [...]

By: ginger

ginger — Sat, 14 Feb 2004 14:34:38 +0000

It just isn’t good (…) to use your sexuality for personal gain, to idolize sports stars, celebrities, the rich, or to indulge one’s desires without judgment or self-restraint. But if you don’t get to do at least some of those things while you’re young, you’re going to spend your whole life regretting it ;) Seriously, I think it’s a matter of measure, as in all things. Excessively spoiling kids and buying them everything they want is bad, but too much parental control can be even worse. I don’t even think the society we live in can be characterised as only a matter of consumerism and money-grabbing materialism. I see far more pros than cons to it. Certainly I don’t see how the kind of shielding done by religious fundamentalists can provide a good alternative to free individual experience. If you’ve given your kids some values, and trust your own ability as a parent, then you’ve got to trust them to develop their own personalities on thier own terms. Which includes acting silly, exploring sex (it doesn’t have to be such a traumatic or purely exploitative experience, does it?), idolising celebrities, and dealing with consumer and peer pressure. It’s not a war against some dark powers of totalitarian control. It’s about growing up, today as fifty years ago. Kids need rules but they also need some unrestricted outlets all to themselves.

By: harry

harry — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 18:05:59 +0000

That’s interesting Carla. As I say, we watched a lot, but it was good. I watch less than I would like to now, partly because of busy-ness, and partly because of paucity of easily available good things to watch. Our library has a fantastic on-line search capacity and I’ve used it to supply my kids with videos of old TV shows (some of which are, they and I both think, fantastic—Top Cat is much better than I remember it, Pink Panther is as good, and (not TV) we’ve been indulging in old Popeye cartoons which they love (but makes me break into a cold sweat because of the hieghts involved). My 7 year old absolutely has loved watching Life on Earth and The Living Planet. The other thing is listening to kids stuff on the radio—go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listings/ and explore.

By: carla

carla — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 17:30:43 +0000

I have to throw my two cents in about TV. My mom restricted the TV viewing of especially me and my sister; she was more lax w/ my brother, mostly because he’s younger. And i don’t watch much now, I have to say—I just don’t have time. But the Kid watches TV, at Mom’s, and Pop’s (her dad, who watches Kid after school), and sometimes at our house, too, and he plays computer games and Nintendo (I still say a 6-year-old does NOT need a PlayStation or a Nintendo, but I had no say in that matter). I can’t do much in that battle. So I do what I can, which is read books before bedtime, and read longer books when we can (hard, cause we don’t have him enough for that), and see movies that are more challenging, and Dad and I both try to involve him in other stuff—cooking, writing his own stories, go to the lake in the summer (we live two blocks away), even housework. Basically, expand the horizons beyond the world of TV, and do what we can. he also sees how we live, and I hope that helps, too, as he gets older and more aware. But probably I’m just trying to reassure myself here . . .

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:03:32 +0000

Amelia, that’s an important dynamic you’ve articulated, and you did so very well; thank you. For what it’s worth, my oldest is now seven, and all this year (as she has ended second grade) my wife and I have noted the building up of the sort of pressures which you identify so well. “Protectionism” changes—must change, should change!—in relation to one’s socio-economic position and how one’s children are (or aren’t) internalizing the ways that position situates them in the world. Look around and you can find hundreds, thousands of stories of people who, at a certain point looked at what the world is doing to their children (and what their children are doing in the world) and say: “The previous arrangement isn’t working, I’ve lost control!” And then they pick up and move or do something radical, and good for them: they’re putting the kids first. Harry, thanks for the wise, moderate words on “protectionism” in general. Of course no one who takes these kind of issues seriously is a tyrant in the home (I hope), just as no one here would let their children run entirely wild in the name of “independence” (or so I trust). If there is any real disagreement (as opposed to diversity; there’s plenty of that), it probably comes down to how one wants to, or thinks one ought to, collectively apply your observation that “excessively non-protectionist practices abound, and…in order to get similarly good experiences for my kids as my parents got for me I have to be much more protectionist [of both] obvious things like letting the kids play in the street or dawdle home form school…and less obvious things like letting us watch TV as and when we wanted.” This can lead to some heated debates, but it does suggest that ultimately we’re all debating with shared goods in mind. Also, ditto all the good things you said about t.v.’s wise words. T.V., you nailed perfectly the degree to which the efforts of those of us who stress about getting “the good stuff” to our kids are, as you put it, perhaps “less different from the productivist scheduling of soccer lessons and toddler premed camp than you might like to think.” Touche! My oldest is moving on in her reading habits to a lot of the fine stuff my wife has collected as part of her passion for youth literature (we recently read Burnett’s “The Little Princess” together, and she loved its, yes, crudely Victorian and sentimental but nonetheless powerfully moral story), while my middle daughter is still quite the fan, like Harry’s son, of the Berenstain Bears. Is it simplistic bourgeois stuff? Damn straight it is, and more power to it. The Victorian bourgeoisie were wrong about a great many things, but they got a lot more right, especially in regards to the family, than the left ever gave them credit for.

By: amelia

amelia — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:26:58 +0000

As many have already said, what an immensely fascinating discussion. It’s also a discussion that makes me feel dangerously close to my own childhood. Many of you are parents already, but I think it’s very interesting that most seem to have one or a few young children. I wonder how long you have all been parents, and how that experience changes with time. Professor Burke, for example, notes that “I’m almost inclined to take a number and get back to you when I have a nine-year old girl instead of a three-year old, and see how I react when she wants to wear some slutty, sexualized outfit to school.” Here’s another time problem: what happens as parents gradually become more affluent, more able to participate in consumer culture? Will they be able to “hold the line,” as it were, when their kid feels alienated without, and knows there are means to provide, some stupid or disgusting piece of consumer culture? I am young enough to remember being deeply and genuinely miserable about my lack of Barbie dolls in the late 1980’s, and old enough to know that playing with them really wasn’t any good for me. Living in a consumer culture, as most of us must, means that (especially from the child’s perspective) a “good childhood” exists in a fairly constant state of tension. On the one hand, there’s a social world saturated with consumer items and appearance politics and weird gender norms, and we need to be able to live there in a certain amount of peace. On the other, living too much in that world means that we (and perhaps, I would venture to say, especially we girl-children) have a smaller chance of being healthy, well-adjusted, priorities-straight adults. Like this: since my parents were poor teacher-folk at the time, I grew up largely without television, so missed completely quite a bit of the commercial socialization that goes with TV. Somewhat relatedly, I was socially miserable in elementary and middle schools. My nine-year-old brother, on the other hand, came along after my parents’ careers were well-established. He lives in a house with two TV’s, multiple DVD players and computers, a VCR, some video games and lots of commercially licensed toys. He has lots of friends because he looks and acts and plays the same way that most boys his age do (loudly, in a Spiderman mask, as it turns out)…and he has attention problems in school, is less curious about words and concepts than his older siblings were, reads less, plays less music, and is snobbier about brands and the way things look. Parents, especially reasonably affluent parents, are faced with two related difficulties. First, where do I put my kid in that delicate balance? Second, what does that choice imply about my sense of the purpose of childhood? What is it for? The choice has been expressed in this thread as “enjoyment/discovery versus adult competencies.” However, kids, as amply noted above, can enjoy and discover lots of things that adults find awful or boring or insipid, and most aren’t going to grow up to be soccer players or concert pianists or any of the other things that parents seem to spend time programming. Instead, I might frame the problem as one of present happiness and adjustment versus (present and) future critical analysis and cultural independence. Despite mom and dad’s best intentions, I think their choices are going to be constrained by the amount of money they have, and the way that changes over time.

By: harry

harry — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:23:56 +0000

Maurinsky, there’s no entrance fee here, and as you can tell knowing lots of technical terms in no way qualifies anyone better for participation! I agree with so much of what so many people have said. And the various comments from Matt, Maurinsky, t.v., Russell, Laura and adm illustrate well the plurality of good childhoods. I’m really finding what people are saying interesting. There’s way too much to respond to, so I just want to add a couple of comments. I suspect that the protectionists are less protectionist than they sound in this conversation, just as the non-protectionists are probably more protectionist than they sound. It seems to me that excessively non-protectionist practices abound, and my conjecture was that in order to get similarly good experiences for my kids as my parents got for me I have to be much more protectionist than they were. Obvious things like letting the kids play in the street or dawdle home form school (in which I was a master); and less obvious things like letting us watch TV as and when we wanted. Something that most of you have revealed is that you share your own particular enthusiasms with your own kids. I suppose everyone does this. When some aspect of popular culture is your particular enthusiasm its entirely possible that participating in it with your kid makes it very different from them than when they are thrown into it. I feel, personally, deeply alienated from the cultural world I around me, and have been able to inhabit a slightly different one (enabled, of course, to do so by modern technology). I’ve always loved listening to radio drama, documentaries, and comedy, and my elder daughter shares a lot of that with me (though within the genre she has certainly developed enthusiasms that are specifically hers—viz, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and the Great Gildersleeve). Its good in itself, and its good because its part of the relationship. Cooking too. I think that for most (but certainly not all) kids the reality of the news is much less disturbing than the kinds of thing that t.v. talks about (as Laura’s anecdote suggests). Honesty and straightforwardness are important in exposing them to the reality of the world—war, death, poverty, etc. It is, again, hard to know how to expose them to the news—mainly, for me, because of the quality issues, not the protection issues. I’d happily have her watch the TV equivalent of the Economist. But not the drivel they actually show. On the topic of childhood reminiscence I recommend Michael Foreman’s lovely two-parter War Boy and After the War, both published in the US, about his childhood in East Anglia during and after WWII. It’s short, a bit rambling, beautifully illustrated, and completely accessible to kids 6 and up I’d say. I read it to my daughter about a year ago, and there is one fantastic passage where he describes a typical day in which he and his friends played on the sand-dunes and in the underground passages which had been dug for soldiers resisting potential invasion. He says something like this: ‘We were allowed to play on our own all day long, without adult supervision, because there were no cars, and everybody knew who we were’. My daughter just sighed and said ‘I wish my life was like that’ and then added, very quickly, ‘well, without the rationing’. I think most kids long for the freedom that Thomas talks about. In fact, in some ways, the protectionists among us are only partly protectionist—we want to shield the kids from the worst aspects of popular culture, but we are pissed off that the physical (and social) environment has been made such that we cannot allow them the kind of freedoms and responsibilities that we ourselves were granted as children. Finally, I agreed so much with t.v. about so much, which is so brilliantly articulated that I thought ‘who the hell is this?’, went to his/her site, and found Patrick McGoohan giving me the brilliant answer.. My younger adores the tiresome Berenstein Bears (who make me sick); but otherwise I am delighted by my two’s enjoyment of the quiet, non-sassy, non-clever, stuff. And I guess I should just be more honest and say that I think lots of kids (and lots of adults) would benefit from more so-called bourgeois values. Bourgeois values are, of course, not bourgeois values; they are the values that my working class great grandparents and grandparents held.

By: carla

carla — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:15:05 +0000

And, Thomas, I agree. One of the things I remember from my childhood, though, is going to the Y and to the local Youth Center and just . . . doing stuff. (I walked to school, too, but lived in a small town.) We had backyards to play in, etc. Maybe your daughters can go to the Y or something like that?

By: carla

carla — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:12:55 +0000

One of the few advantages of being a stepparent (and part of the noncustodial household, at that, though he does spend Wednesdays and every other weekend with us) is that there’s no point to me trying to “programmatically produce desireable life outcomes,” as Timothy so accurately puts it. Mom and Dad have way more say than I do, and because Kid lives with Mom most of the time, Mom has the most say. Dad is extremely involved, though. In any case, all I can do—with Dad’s assent—is try to provide Kid with tools that I think are useful and that he may not be getting elsewhere in his life. (And Mom has ceded to me the responsibility of teaching Kid to cook and teaching him athletic-type stuff, which is fine with me.) The fact that the two households have different beliefs in some arenas—and I’m pretty damn clear about what my beliefs are—provides him with information about variety in the world. And I think he trusts me to not lie to him, and not to push away questions that are inconvenient or difficult. About a year and a half ago we had a very intense conversation about the Trade Center attacks—clearly no one had talked about it to him before. After I talked a bit, we digressed a little, and then he said, “I want to talk more—you go first.” Amusing though that was, it told me that he’s capable of getting some of this stuff. The same with the god conversation. And trying to make my core concepts understandable to a six-year-old is an exercise in really knowing what concepts are important—my brother’s formulation about not lying, cheating, or stealing is very helpful in that regard. And, lately, I’ve been challenging him to evaluate his own behavior in light of the standards he knows we have in the household, which is interesting, too.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 07:34:53 +0000

I didn’t have an unusual or unusually happy childhood. But when I think back on it, many things about my childhood were wonderful, and those things are difficult to re-create now. The challenge for me, as a parent, is to translate those experiences, or the opportunity for such experiences, into this age. For example, I walked to and from elementary and jr. high school. Early on, I walked with my older brother, and in later years, I walked with friends. I enjoyed that—we walked unsupervised, on the edge of supervision. The neighborhoods now just aren’t set up for that. There’s always the old neighborhood—but the suburban attitudes seem to have invaded there as well, based on the long line of minivans and SUVs waiting at the end of the day. How do I go about translating that small taste of freedom on the edges of the structured day into today’s world for my daughters? I don’t know—I worry that I can’t, and I worry that my kids will be cheated (and I also worry that my fondness for that part of my childhood is misplaced or unusual, and that my kids wouldn’t enjoy it anyway).

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 00:51:30 +0000

Yow, a six-year old and “Spirited Away”. Now that’s bold—but damn cool too. I agree, sort of, that we don’t know why kids like what they like, and it is precisely that which leads me to argue that I have a root level trust in the intelligence, imagination and adaptability of children. On a great many things, perhaps not just media, we worry too much, and hubristically believe too much in our ability to programmatically produce desirable life outcomes by adopting carefully designed strategies of parenting. To some extent, we ought to regard childhood the way Geoffrey Rush’s character in “Shakespeare in Love” looks on the success of the performance that comes at the end of the film: “it’s a mystery”. I do think that there are ways to understand, a bit. Some of it involves a genuine attempt to remember our own childhoods experientially—a book that I find oddly, remarkably moving in that regard is Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, even though it is about a childhood radically unlike my own—I just admire the clarity with which Fuller recreates her childhood voice and frame of reference. Another book I found to be fascinating and powerful was Under Deadman’s Skin, which is about how children use violence and images of violence in their play in creative ways.

By: carla

carla — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 21:50:53 +0000

My upbringing resembled the medievalist’s in significant ways (hey—I usually see you at Invisible Adjunct!). My parents are atheists and working class (by origin and by their own education and experience) and far-left politically. However, there were definitely RULES in our household. We did chores. We took responsibility for our actions. We were honest. As a result, my brother (who’s not nearly so far left) is teaching my nephews that the three things they don’t do are lie, cheat, and steal. And my nephews—who are 4 and 6, I should add—can tell you what those rules are. I, on the other hand, am a part-time stepparent of a 6-year-old. Mom is sending the kid to catholic school, gets the kid the latest Disney videos, and lets her dad take the kid to movies that I definitely would not. And fighting Mom strikes me as a bad idea, especially for the kid. So we make it clear: here are the rules in our house. We insist that he help with chores (when we do them)—and even if he fusses at first, he actually gets into it, leading me to suspect he likes being involved in the life of the household. I’m teaching him to cook (neither Mom nor Dad cooks much), and he loves it—he totally gets into learning new stuff, and reading the recipe, and so on. It’s really cool. I expose him to movies that don’t clearly delineate good and evil (Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away particularly entranced him). We read to him. And he and I had a very serious discussion about whether there is a god or not. He got upset when I said I didn’t believe there is one—he thought I was saying he was lying—so I tried to explain that different people believe different things. And I agree: Milk or fuzzy water? not What do you want to drink? (Actually, these days, he can get it himself if it’s fuzzy water (club soda); the milk is in a heavy glass bottle.) I agree about the sleep, and I would add the necessity for some exercise (in the form of just plain running around is fine). Sorry; much rambling here. But I think good parenting—whether one is the biological or full-time parent or not—is about setting concrete rules and being willing to enforce them—AND being willing to demonstrate them. Honesty is important for everyone in our household, not just him.

By: T. V.

T. V. — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 21:26:32 +0000

Some random friction for the wheel. 1. The early incarnations of the Christian channel mostly showed westerns, with lots of point-blank-range killings per hour, and there has always been a peculiarly freewheeling acceptance of violence in the Christian-scrubbed zone so long as it was in the context of oldtimey gender roles and/or in costume. Evangelical campaigns against violence seem to have been campaigns about—what—only “modern,” “urban” violence? Hard for me to figure out, but sex was clearly the worrisome taboo and maybe the only one that really mattered. 2. The problem is movie ads. Outside of the zones designed for kids only, there is literally no safe, friendly show you can watch anywhere on cable at any time without an ultraviolent movie ad literally depicting a murderous, throat-cutting, helicopter-blade-chopping, defenestrating act of sneering sadistic torture within the first 2.5 seconds of the commercial break—well before you can hit the mute button or switch the channel. Even Tim uses an extreme sexual instance (Last Tango in Paris) as the point where he would draw the limit, but it’s the flash images of denarrativized sadistic killing that I don’t want my three year old watching every ten minutes. It can’t be filtered by a parental lock, or even by you sitting right there in the room with the remote. Short of ponying up the money for Tivo, which I don’t have, there’s no control that can be exercised here. And when we all pony up the money for Tivo, they’ll find a way to make the ads intrude into the program time, the way screen-corner popups are being experimented with now. I can imagine a little ad for the evening’s Tom Clancy movie popping up in the corner while we’re watching Frazier at suppertime, with a mercenary drawing a knife across a woman’s throat. “Tonight at nine.” I’ll waive complaints about indoctrination into consumerism and gender roles, and I’ll let my kid watch Brando’s butter scene, if I can get rid of the frigging sadistic movie ads. Tim’s glorious free market ain’t going to solve this; it’ll just look for further “penetration,” and it will bankroll, directly and indirectly, lots of predictable polemic that fussy objections to movie trailers are pussified political correctness and/or Pat Robertsonism and/or the lingering socialist anhedonia of the Frankfurt School. 3. Doesn’t someone need to say that a lot of this conversation is probably just projective nonsense? We have no idea why kids like what they like or what they carry away, and I’m not sure we want to listen. The objection to Barney or Dragontales or The Wiggles being saccarhine and insipid, while true, comes from the parents who can’t stand to watch them for the umpteenth time—just as the hipass attitudinizing of Nickelodeon cartoons are directed at teens and adults, even if they’re projected into the animated bodies of kids. (Please, please, can’t we watch Shrek? say the parents. No, the kid says, I want to watch Berenstein Bears. O God please, no, the parents say, something from Pixar? At least Wallace and Gromit?) “Insipid” means “insipid to adults,” which further means “insipid to adults who have been socialized into late 20c. affective structures of hip irony.” Remember the old Burl Ives Rudolph special? There was an oldster discussion over at Invisible Adjunct about how horrible it is, compared to our glowing childhood memories, and some new parents were bragging that their kids were bored by it. Well, mine wasn’t. He liked it. Should I be embarrassed? To what extent is that just another competition, for having the hippest kid? Pierced tongue, little leather jacket. Less different from the productivist scheduling of soccer lessons and toddler premed camp than you might like to think. 4. The supposedly “saccharine” cooperative affect of prosocial programming has to be judged in a context. If it’s an alternative to some perfect full-bodied taxonomy of affect and ethical situation and narrative resolution, then okay: yuck. But television is very mean-spirited, and is becoming more so. Reality shows are all about rehearsing kill-the-loser screw-the-safety-net social Darwinist attitudes, encouraging radical selfishness as a preparation for an coming economy of scarcity. Hakim Bey once said that all the movies on the shelf of the video store give you only the choice of being a victim or a cop. Judged against that, prosocial programming looks a little less objectionable—at least the instant sniff at its “goodiness” starts to become suspect, if you can’t point to places in your culture where those affects are being trained in some better way. Phil Fisher (Hard Facts) once argued, correctly, that diatribes about the icky sentimentality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are hopelessly ahistorical because its intense melodramatic techniques were battling a loud proslavery propaganda campaign trying to prevent sympathetic identification with slaves from forming at all. The rhetorical excess only becomes available to us because the sentimental techniques succeeded in their historical task, by defeating the opposition—by making the extension of full humanity to slaves seem normal. It’s dangerous to think that advances in common citizen sympathy are permanent, that they can’t be rolled back. I get my dander up when academic lefties mechanically rehearse tired attacks on bourgeois sentimentality. The right is mounting a deliberate scorch-and-burn campaign to decivilize the public sphere for political and economic gain right now, and I think the snarky leftist attitude toward the “positive affects” is anachronistic and often thoughtless these days when such affects are not so much being used as a fake control tactic as being shown the door entirely. 5. An important contribution to the more general debate about culture & kids (audio file download, 2MB). (from Hapless Dilletante)

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 21:19:51 +0000

The book is, I must stress by way of lowering expectations, uneven. But Harry is right that this is American exceptionalism, at least when we’re talking about children’s TV. I think there’s more cases than just the US vs. the UK/Western Europe—Japan throws another history altogether into the mix. Children’s media in the broader span of things is less bounded to the US (or UK) and so is maybe an easier thing to talk about. If you compare Disney films that were made to be “safe” for parental advocacy groups from the 1960s-1970s with the Disney/Pixar oeuvre from “The Little Mermaid” to “Finding Nemo”, you can see the difference. Whatever my complaints about Disney’s work and about Disney’s commercialism (and brother, believe me I have some complaints about the latter), there’s not much doubt in my mind that watching “Toy Story” is a lot more fun than watching “The Apple Dumpling Gang”. On the issue of older kids, Harry may also have a point, or at least it’s a different kind of discussion. In part, I’m almost inclined to take a number and get back to you when I have a nine-year old girl instead of a three-year old, and see how I react when she wants to wear some slutty, sexualized outfit to school. I’d like to think that some of the protectiveness there is equally as problematic as the kind of protectiveness I know I’m critical of—but I have a sneaking suspicion that it may look different when I arrive at that point.

By: maurinsky

maurinsky — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 17:43:25 +0000

Interesting discussion. I have never taken a philosophy or ethics course (I dropped out of college ny sophomore year when I got pregnant, as a matter of fact), so some of the terms you are using are over my head, but I’ve been jotting down some bullet points that I want to respond to. brayden said that the “left” has found it politically incorrect to embrace family values. I agree that the term “family values” has been disparaged by liberals in the U.S., but my impresson is more that the term “family values” was hijacked by politicians who were promoting a socially conservative agenda. I think all parents embrace family values, but the values my family embraces may be different from the values George Bush’s family embraces, for example. joel b wrote that the left exhibits a great deal of anti-religious sentiment, an idea that is echoed by sebastian holsclaw. I don’t disagree that many on the left are anti-religious. I do think that much of that is related to the fact that religious organizations have morphed into political and/or corporate organizations that are engaged in fighting the ideals that liberals support. And there has been an increase in fundamentalist Christianity in this country that has contributed to the divide. It’s not one-sided – religion is moving away from liberals as much as liberals are moving away from religion. I think Christianity provides a good base for a value system, but I admit I shy away from the supernatural aspects of religion. My younger daughter, who is 6, loves Jesus Christ. I would be disappointed if that translated into denying people rights because of their sexual orientation, or if she worked to dissolve the separation of church and state, because I think those are inherently unChristian ideals. The abortion topic is an interesting one for me to think about as a mother. It’s hard, having felt life kicking around in there, to imagine making my womb the site of someone’s (a potential someone, anyway) death. But I don’t think banning abortion is an effective way of eliminating the need for abortion. I think the way the right deals with this issues is simply to ignore the reality of what happens in life. I have moved around a lot on this position, from being vehemently pro-life as a Catholic teenager, to being vehemently pro-choice as a young adult, to the present day, where I am pro-life and but pro-choice – I guess I put the life that is currently here on this earth ahead of the potential life. Obviously, the key moment to make a decision about abortion is before you have sex, but since I got pregnant while on birth control pills and while my husband (then boyfriend) was using a condom, I know that life sometimes throws you a curve. (Incidentally, after getting pregnant unexpectedly while using 2 different methods of birth control, I then experienced years of infertility when I wanted to get pregnant a second time. Ah, the rich irony of life.) I think sex is one of the greatest things life has to offer, and I don’t believe that people should have to be married to have sex (although I do think that if one is married, one should only be having sex with one’s spouse). russel arden fox discussed parenting productivity – this is something that I don’t think is really divided along political lines. I work a full time job and a part time job, the last thing I want my family time to be is productive. We spend a lot of time playing games and going grocery shopping and cleaning the house and cooking meals. My two girls also have scheduled activities, but those are activities that they chose and enjoy. To me, a successful life is one where you are happy and feel like you made a choice to be where you are. Maybe that means you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, maybe that means you’re a stay-at-home mother. I think there is some institutional feminism that thinks that one of these choices is better than the other, but I consider myself a feminist and I know that having a choice is the key.