A Brussels friend once said the Irish are so numerous in the European Commission because so many of the first wave of them were from big families and were therefore natural masters of deal-making and compromise. Until the last decade or two, probably most of the Irish population were middle children of large-ish families. We do seem to have a disproportionate number of countrymen in the European and other international institutions, and some of them have done remarkably well. (Alternative theories may include mass emigration in the 1970s and 80s and a bit of path dependence since whatever other qualities the Irish abroad may have, we love to give a leg up to our compatriots. Also, there are more people from big families because, well, there are more of them.)

More Hill staffers than I would have expected come from big families. (Alternative theories: lots are from recently immigrated families, or maybe the profile writers draw more attention to the big families because they’re unusual, or maybe beautiful people are inexplicably more likely to have many siblings…) Intuitively, people who’ve grown up in a large family will have been doing power-plays, coalition-building and breaking, and all sorts of tactical shenanigans since before they could talk. Perhaps the early practice gives them an edge?

I’ve never rated the emphasis placed in popular psychology on the roles of the Eldest Child, Middle Child and Youngest Child. I’m one of the 60% of my siblings who are middle children and I never noticed a particular bent towards peace-making amongst us. But maybe there’s something to it.

In any case, check out the Wyoming cowboy on page 2. I wouldn’t mind building a coalition with him.

Appearing on a billionaire’s luxury ship in the Bay of Naples on Monday, nine days before he hosts a Group of Eight summit, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, rejected reports that his government risked falling apart over his personal life. “My government is probably the most safe and secure in the west,” he said. He specifically rejected “foreign” press reports questioning its stability in the wake of allegations by escorts that they had been paid by a businessman to attend parties at the prime minister’s residences and that one had sex with him on the night of the US elections in November.

My acquaintance with Italian society and politics is mostly second-hand these days, and Berlusconi certainly been extraordinarily good at turning bad publicity into good in the past, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the one that finally sinks him. Cavorting with eighteen year old starlet wannabes was probably a mild net positive for Berlusconi, allowing him to project an image of continued virility etc. Over-excited Czech prime ministers bedecked with young women at his private villa not so good – but more awkward than genuinely embarrassing. However the most recent allegation – that he had sex with a prostitute (who claims to have recorded the whole thing) seems to me to directly undermine the image that he wants to project of a debonair and charming, ladies’ man, making him sound like a bit of a loser. Certainly, Berlusconi himself seems worried.

“I have never paid a woman,” Berlusconi said in an interview with the Chi weekly owned by his Mondadori publishing empire. I’ve never understood what satisfaction there is other than that of conquering (a woman),” he told the magazine, according to excerpts sent to Reuters ahead of publication on Wednesday.

I’m predicting (cautiously, and with fingers crossed) that he will be gone within 3 months.

[As an aside, my favorite bit of the story is that the prostitute (who was allegedly paid by a businessman to attend the party), seems not to have asked Berlusconi himself for money “because she was more keen on favors to obtain building permits.”]

The trigger for the social construction of childhood thesis was Philippe Aries’s claim in Centuries of Childhood that childhood was ‘discovered’ only after the middle ages ended. Working mainly from French manuscripts and iconography, Aries argues that there was no ‘awareness of the particular nature of childhood, that particular nature which distinguishes the child from the young adult’. Somewhere between the ages of 5 and 7, once they could survive physically without constant adult supervision, children were launched into the ‘great community of men’; there simply wasn’t a transitory period between infancy and adulthood.

Postman buys the Aries thesis wholesale. This is certainly a drawback to the book, since the Aries thesis is ambiguous (between the claim that childhood itself is socially constructed and the claim that the experience of being a child is socially constructed) and his evidence for the claim is modest. Most historians of childhood now seem to think that childhood as a distinct stage of human development is close-to-universal, and certainly that it was widely recognised in the middle ages. Postman argues that childhood emerged only when the spread of literacy enabled adults better to shield children from various aspects of adult life – particularly certain aspects of sexuality and certain horrors associated with death and disease – and that the emergence and increasing pervasiveness of a visual culture in the 20th century has brought about a decline in childhood and threatens, ultimately, to bring about its disappearance. Postman is a magnificently pessimistic writer; he overstates the case for the decline and threatened disappearance of childhood, and talks as if the world is going to pot. (I’m sure if he’d lived to see Facebook he’d have started to feel better).

On top of that, like most people I’ve read who talk about the social construction of childhood (or anything else), he is conceptually sloppy. He talks as if he literally mean that childhood is socially constructed, i.e. that there would be no such thing as childhood if we had constructed things differently. That isn’t necessarily false, I suppose, but what he really means is something much more intuitive and less controversial: the practices that create the lived experience of childhood are sensitive to the design of social institutions and to social norms the specific content of which is socially constructed. Childhood may be a universal; the kind of experiences that children have which constitute their childhoods and shape their development are not.

In my experience prior to reading Postman, the social construction of childhood thesis was accompanied by a quite determined moral relativism about the nature of childhood (coming, I guess, out of the intellectual influences that attract people to the social construction thesis). Obviously there is no necessary connection between the two: nobody thinks that because income inequalities are socially constructed they are beyond moral evaluation. So there was no need to read Postman to learn that the two claims (childhood is socially constructed; there are no universal moral norms governing childhood) are not related to one another. But reading Postman was such a powerful experience because he implies, without every being explicit about it the way that an analytical philosopher would, a quite rich normative theory of what a childhood should be like. It helps that it is, to me, a very plausible theory, but frankly even an implausible one with some rich detail is welcome. Whereas a lot of moral and political theory treats childhood as just a stage on the way to adulthood, Postman thinks of it as containing distinctive goods that are much less readily available (and in some cases would not even be goods) later in life (what Samantha Brennan calls the intrinsic goods of childhood), as well as being valuable for development into a flourishing adulthood. For Postman, carefreeness from consideration of the burdens of adult life, and temporary innocence about adult sexuality are key components of a good childhood, as are freedom from heavily burdensome work, sobriety, and ample time for spontaneous play. A society that could facilitate these goods, but doesn’t, is thereby subject to harsh criticism. Here’s a passage discussing the then-remarkable phenomenon of young teenagers being trained to become world class sport competitors:

The 1979 Wimbledon tournament, for example, was marked by the extraordinary performance of Tracy Austin, then not yet sixteen… In 1980 a fifteen year old made her appearance. In 1981, a fourteen-year-old…..Twelve year old swimmers, skaters and gymnasts of world-class ability are commonplace. Why is this happening? The most obvious answer is that better coaching and training techniques have made it possible for children to attain adult level competence. But the questions remain: Why should adults encourage this possibility? Why would anyone wish to deny children the freedom, informality, and joy of spontaneous play? Why submit children to the rigors of professional-style training, concentration, tension, media hype? The answer is the same as before: The traditional assumptions about the uniqueness of children are fast fading. What we have here is the emergence of the ida that play is not done for the sake of doing it, but for some external purpose, such as renown, money, physical conditioning, upward mobility, national pride. For adults, play is serious business. As childhood disappears, so does the child’s view of play.

The discussion at PEA Soup suggests a slightly different, and expanded, menu. But there is more work to be done here. And what struck me after responding to Daniel, was that it is implausible to me philosophical reflection on what a good childhood consists in at an interesting level of abstraction could get very far without engagement with a wide range of non-philosophically trained literature and voices. As in many areas of moral philosophy, philosophers are bound to read novels, history, sociology, and anthropology in order to get material to reflect on and in order to develop accounts of the goods in question in which it is possible for them to have any reason to be confident.

insurance covered prenatal care, the birth of their children and after-care, which began with seven days of five-hours-per-day home assistance. “That means someone comes and does your laundry, vacuums and teaches you how to care for a newborn,” Julie said.

I thought that this sounded great myself, having gone through the ‘oh my god, they’ve sent us home with a baby and what the hell are we supposed to do now’ panic with our firstborn. Dan, not so much. Matt Yglesias and Matthew Continetti discussed the same article a few days later. Diavlogs below …

One day, while nursing my baby in my pediatrician’s office, I noticed a 2001 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association open to an article about breast-feeding: “Conclusions: There are inconsistent associations among breastfeeding, its duration, and the risk of being overweight in young children.” Inconsistent? There I was, sitting half-naked in public for the tenth time that day, the hundredth time that month, the millionth time in my life—and the associations were inconsistent? The seed was planted. That night, I did what any sleep-deprived, slightly paranoid mother of a newborn would do. I called my doctor friend for her password to an online medical library, and then sat up and read dozens of studies examining breast-feeding’s association with allergies, obesity, leukemia, mother-infant bonding, intelligence, and all the Dr. Sears highlights.

After a couple of hours, the basic pattern became obvious: the medical literature looks nothing like the popular literature. It shows that breast-feeding is probably, maybe, a little better; but it is far from the stampede of evidence that Sears describes. More like tiny, unsure baby steps: two forward, two back, with much meandering and bumping into walls. A couple of studies will show fewer allergies, and then the next one will turn up no difference. Same with mother-infant bonding, IQ, leukemia, cholesterol, diabetes. Even where consensus is mounting, the meta studies—reviews of existing studies—consistently complain about biases, missing evidence, and other major flaws in study design. “The studies do not demonstrate a universal phenomenon, in which one method is superior to another in all instances,” concluded one of the first, and still one of the broadest, meta studies, in a 1984 issue of Pediatrics, “and they do not support making a mother feel that she is doing psychological harm to her child if she is unable or unwilling to breastfeed.” Twenty-five years later, the picture hasn’t changed all that much. So how is it that every mother I know has become a breast-feeding fascist?

At some point, when I was a little bit obsessed with this topic myself, I looked a handful of studies and my experience was like Roisin’s; they all showed very small benefits, but I noticed that none of them tried to control for the socio-economic status of the mothers. Ever since I have been rather skeptical about the benefits, but have dutifully supported the breastfeeding of my kids, despite the difficulties that both they and their mother endured. Breastfeeding meant that for the first several months of each of their lives their primary relationship was with their mother, and everything I did with them had to be scheduled around the need for them to feed. With the first two, both of whom screamed pretty much constantly while awake for 4 months, I—and my wife—frequently went against our instinct that they were hungry, and refrained from giving them any formula (as the books tell you to), causing, I suspect, far more misery for all of us than was necessary.

My favourite La Leche League story (frequently referenced in Rosin’s article) is a from a friend who teaches high school. She asked a La Leche League counsellor how she could pump, given the brief breaks between classes, and the time it takes to let down. “well”, said the counsellor, “that’s easy, you just massage your breasts for 10 minutes before you pump”. “But I’m teaching in front of 30 teenagers in that 10 minutes before I pump, I can’t massage my breasts in front of them”. “Oh yes you can, they’ll soon get used to it”.

Siobahn, to whom I owe the link, says that her favourite line of the article is this:
“This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.”

Update: see Laura’s excellent follow-up/summary, and ensuing discussion.

According to Wikipedia, yesterday was the 100th International Women’s Day (I started writing this post yesterday, but spent most of that day at a feminist meeting and having a women’s night out. Sorry. But here it is – better late than never). Last year, here at CT, we discovered that in some countries this is not celebrated as a social or political event (as it is in Europe) but rather as a day to give your wife or girlfriend chocolates or flowers. So I felt it’d be good to post an old-fashioned political poster, stolen from the very same wikipedia site. Isn’t it awesome?

International women’s day originated from political activism related to women’s rights, especially their rights as workers. With the current economic crisis, several of women’s concerns, such as wage discrimination and gender segregation, or parental concerns that in reality often boil down to mothers’ concerns, such as family-friendly working hours, paid maternity leave etcetera, are probably not very high on the agenda of labour unions and other types of workers’ interests groups. Yet why should we keep considering care issues as luxury issues, or as complicating factors – rather than the core business of politics? So yesterday, on international women’s day, I thought that what we really need is to put the world on its head, and ask how the relevant policies and sciences would look like if, when we are theorizing and designing policies and reflecting on life and society, we would start from care and than add what is now standardly conceived as the core issues of policies and the socio-economic system, namely the formal economy in which money goes around and GDP is measured.

Of course, care issues are not synonymous with women’s issues – there are enough women who try to make their lives as carefree as possible, and there are men whose interests would also be better served if we were to put care central. Moreover, there are many women’s issues that are not care issues – problems such as domestic violence and sexual aggression may be somewhat linked to care, but are in large part about other issues.

Perhaps all these musings reflect my own shift in research interests from issues of gender to issues of care. Not that I think the former are any less important than I felt when I wrote my PhD dissertation on gender inequality around the turn of the century. Yet they are of a different nature. In the case of gender, one could reasonably argue in favour of abolishing gender as a system of social stratification. But we will never be able (or willing!) to abolish care. So it’s a fundamental issue, and we need to take it much more seriously than we do. Perhaps we could also start celebrating an International Carers Day, if that doesn’t exit yet?

(Irritating fact: when I got to the last page of the book, I was confronted by two further pages with the title “Reading group questions that have arisen from publication of We Need to Talk About Kevin in the USA.” Eva Khatchadourian would have been disgusted.)

Commenters please avoid plot spoilers.

The number of places is strictly limited – please register early.

Confirmed speakers:
Joel Anderson (Utrecht University)
Samantha Brennan (University of Western Ontario)
Harry Brighouse (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Daniel Engster (University of Texas at San Antonio)
Anca Gheaus (University College Dublin)
Eva Kittay Feder (SUNY-Stony Brooke)
Pauline Kleingeld (Leiden University)
Ingrid Robeyns (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Adam Swift (Oxford University)
Joan Tronto (CUNY-Hunter College)
Daniel Weinstock (University of Montréal)

Conference description:
This conference aims to reconsider and deepen theoretical work within political and moral philosophy on questions of care and justice in and between families. The speakers explore and/or reconsider some of the following questions: What is the nature of justice and care within families? To what extent are there conflicts between care and justice within families, and between families? When and how do such conflicts arise, and are they inevitable? Are conflicts of interest between different family members inevitable, and if not, how they can be avoided? What do family members owe to each other, especially with respect to care?
Are there normative issues about these relationships that go beyond duty? Which questions have been relatively neglected when thinking about justice and care in and between families? What are the gender, race/ethnicity and class dimensions to these issues? How does a proper appreciation and understanding of disability make a difference to these questions? Do these issues differ for different types of families, and how can we prevent our theories from leading to misleading generalisations? Which policies or other forms of social change are normatively recommendable to deal with some of the related moral problems?

Time and Venue:
The conference will be held at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands), Campus Woudestein.
The conference will take place on Friday 26 June (10 am – 5.30 pm) and Saturday 27 June (9.30 am – 5pm).

Registration:
The number of places is strictly limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

Fees:
Full Registration fee (including refreshments and lunches on both days): Euro 100.
Reduced registration fee for students (including refreshments and lunches on both days): Euro 50.
Optional conference dinner on Friday: Euro 35.

How to register:
Please send an e-mail to conferences@fwb.eur.nl with your name, title/position, institutional affiliation, address, telephone number, e-mail address, the type of fee that is applicable and whether or not you want to join the conference dinner. Please let us know if you have any special requirements such as dietary constraints or special needs.

After registration you will receive information regarding payment, accommodation, and other practical issues.

Contact: Queries can be sent to Ingrid Robeyns at conferences@fwb.eur.nl

This conference is financially supported by the NWO VIDI programme ‘Social Justice and the New Welfare State.’

One of the first times I taught about the gendered division of labour in my Contemporary Moral Issues course, a student articulately challenged the relevance of the issue to her. I had assigned the key chapter of Susan Okin’s classic Justice, Gender, And The Family, which argues that the gender system is in violation of fair equality of opportunity, because girls are socialized to be carers (and boys aren’t), therefore end up disproportionately in caring (and therefore lower paid) labour, and, because they take the lion’s share of the burden of caring labour in the home, end up lower paid than their spouses; and yet face a high probability of a divorce after which they will not be able to share in their spouse’s greater earning power (I disagree with Okin about Rawls, but agree with her that if the mechanisms she identifies are at work there is a social injustice—more on that another time). For her empirical case, she relies heavily on Lenore Weitzman’s study of divorce. My student said this research was not relevant to her generation. Putting aside the methodological worries about Weitzman’s study, I was rather unnerved to figure out on the spot that the women she studied were in the generation of my students’ grandparents. I wouldn’t want to draw conclusions about my own life course from studies of my grandparent’s generation either, especially if I had had it drummed into me both by parents and teachers that my own circumstances were entirely different from those of my grandparents, and even more if I were aware (as some of the girls are) that so soon after admitting girls as equal participants universities now have to practice affirmative action for boys in admissions to get close to equal sex-ratios. I pointed this out, and then, again on the spot, tried to figure out a way of showing that the issues, if not the figures, probably are relevant to my students nevertheless. I was pretty happy that in 5 minutes I had them convinced that at least it might be relevant. Here is a slightly refined version of the exercise.

1. Are you male, or female. (If you’re not sure, just pick one, if you reject the question, sit out the exercise).
2. During your teen years did you get paid to do babysitting more than 10 times?
3. Do you anticipate having children? If not, sit this out.

Here are three kinds of parenting arrangement.
A)Father led parenting: the father spends substantially more time than the mother looking after the children and thinking about their wellbeing over the course of their childhoods
B)Mother led parenting: the mother spends substantially more time than the father looking after the children and thinking about their wellbeing over the course of their childhoods
C)Egalitarian parenting: the mother and father spend roughly the same amount of time looking after the children and thinking about their wellbeing.

4. Think just about yourself for the moment. Which of A, B, and C best characterizes your expectations for your prospective family life.
5. Now think about your FIVE best friends. Which of A, B, and C best characterizes your expectations for most of their family lives? (eg, you expect 3 or more of them to be Father-led, answer A).

I get my TA to collate the answers, and then read back the answers to the students.

I only recently added question 2), so I have less confidence about the answers to that one than the others. The one time I’ve done that in a large class, about 5% of the boys answered “yes”, whereas about 65% of the girls did. (The point of that question is abut socialisation, which has a key role in Okin’s argument).

But for 4 and 5 I get almost exactly the same numbers almost every time. Here they are.

4. Boys: A 0%; B 85%; C 15% Girls A 10%; B 25%; C 65%
5. Boys: A 0%; B 85%; C 15% Girls A 0%; B 75%; C 25%

When I present the answers to question 4 I point out that if they want to marry each other they might think about discussing these issues beforehand. When I present the answers to 5 most of the girls seem convinced that the gendered division of labour might possibly be an issue for their generation and, possibly, for them.

Now, Lemuel and Righteous kindly alert me to a wonderful and old passage from Dinesh D’Souza:

Equal opportunity seems like a logical fulfillment of the equality principle in the Declaration of Independence. Yet it is an ideal that cannot and should not be realized through the actions of the government. Indeed, for the state to enforce equal opportunity would be to contravene the true meaning of the Declaration and to subvert the principle of a free society. Let me illustrate. I have a five-year-old daughter. Since she was born—actually, since she was conceived—my wife and I have gone to great lengths in the Great Yuppie Parenting Race. At one time we even played classical music while she was in the womb. Crazy us. Currently the little rogue is taking ballet lessons and swim lessons. My wife goes over her workbooks. I am teaching her chess.

Why are we doing these things? We are, of course, trying to develop her abilities so that she can get the most out of life. The practical effect of our actions, however, is that we are working to give our daughter an edge—that is, a better chance to succeed than everybody else’s children. Even though we might be embarrassed to think of it this way, we are doing our utmost to undermine equal opportunity. So are all the other parents who are trying to get their children into the best schools, the best colleges, and in general give them the best possible upbringing and education. None of them believes in equal opportunity either!

Now, to enforce equal opportunity, the government could do one of two things: it could try to pull my daughter down, or it could work to raise other people’s children up. The first is clearly destructive and immoral, but the second is also unfair. The government is obliged to treat all citizens equally. Why should it work to undo the benefits that my wife and I have labored so hard to provide? Why should it offer more to children whose parents have not taken the trouble?

There are numerous errors here, some, but not all, of which Timothy Noah’s comments briefly point out. Here are a few. First, it is entirely possible to believe in equal opportunity while pursuing maximal advantage for one’s own kid. For example, one might not make the mistake of believing that when two values conflict in a particular circumstance, the one that should give way has no value at all. Or one might believe that one’s own actions are morally suspect. Second, it does not follow from the fact that parents should have some freedom to pursue the good of their children, that they should be free to do whatever they want to pursue the good of their children. Would D’Souza be justified in bribing a jury to get his (innocent) daughter off a drug charge? Third, there are numerous reasons why the government should offer more to “the children whose parents have not taken the trouble”. For example, the fact the equality of opportunity is valuable. Or the fact that it is wrong to allow misery to persist that one can relatively easily, and costlessly alleviate. What freedom of D’Souza’s or his child’s, exactly, was the government undermining when it paid my wife to sit with that kid the other day? Fish in a barrel? Sure, but while almost no-one makes all of D’Souza’s mistakes at once, many people make one or another of them. [1]

Anyway, this is mainly an excuse for some shameless self-and-other promotion. Swift and I, regrettably ignorant of D’Souza, nevertheless point out his errors at great length in a paper we have just published legitimate parental partiality. It seems not to require a sub, or registration. I’m rather proud of it, more so than I would dare to be of anything I had done on my own. But then, of course, it’s much better than if I’d been doing it on my own.

[1] Note that I have refrained from worrying about his daughter’s well being on the grounds that with parents like that one might become very materially successful but an emotional cripple. That’s because I imagine he’s exaggerating the repulsiveness of his behaviour for effect, and if I’m wrong at least she’ll have funds to pay for therapy.

Is this morally problematic? Perhaps it is: shouldn’t parenthood and caring responsibilities be considered a normal state of affairs? (‘normal’ not in the sense that everybody has to pass through this stage, but rather that those who are in this stage should not be severely penalised for being parents or carers). Shouldn’t we design social institutions, including the labour market, in such a way that parenthood and other states of large caring responsibilities shouldn’t prevent us from also having labour market aspirations and opportunities?

On the other hand one should also try to look at this issue from the point of view of those who are childless (whether voluntarily or not). If you compare two job applications, and the nonparent has a stronger CV than the parent, then why should we hire the parent? After all, the nonparent could also have spent her time mountain climbing or watching TV; so should she now be penalized because she doesn’t have children?

So I think we’re in a dilemma. On the one hand parents should not pay too high a professional price for the fact that they are parents; on the other hand people who have chosen to devote their lives to their research should not be penalised for not being parents. It seems that the source of this little tragedy lies in the comparative principles of job allocation on the academic labour market. This is one thing that makes academia a worse labour market for parents and other carers than some other labour markets, especially for early-career people since they are the ones that need to be hired. I’m not sure I see a way out of this dilemma (if it really is a dilemma, that is).

Is this a women’s issue? In the current gender unjust world – yes, to a large degree. It is women who don’t have wives. It is women who bear and breastfeed the children and are paying the opportunity-cost-price for that. It is women who are subjected to stereotypes (including ‘unconscious’ ones) that discriminate against female professionals and that unjustifiably favour male professionals (Evidence? start with Valian). But gender egalitarianism wouldn’t solve this dilemma completely. Even in a truly genderegalitarian society, the parent-academic would not have what a nonparent-academic would have: lots and lots of time to passionately spend on their research – or be a workoholic, as some would say. There would be some redistribution of time between the two parents of the genderegalitarian household, but since they are parents they would still have much less noncare time at their disposal compared with nonparents and other noncarers. So gender structures are ‘gendering’ the dilemma and making it much worse for women than for men – but taking gender structures away would still not solve the moral tension between parents and nonparents on the academic labour market.

There’s a follow-up article by Mary Ann Mason today at the Chronicle. She says that:

The number of young women who want to pursue careers in academic research declines by 30 percent over the course of their doctoral study, and the number of men by 20 percent. In explaining their decision, men are more likely to report that they do not like unrelenting work hours. One male student in the survey complained that he was “fed up with the narrow-mindedness of supposedly intelligent people who are largely workaholic and expect others to be so as well.” But most women give up on academic-research careers for family concerns. As one woman in the survey said, “I could not have come to graduate school more motivated to be a research-oriented professor. Now I feel that can only be a career possibility if I am willing to sacrifice having children.”

Before commenting, I should say that my own story is (in this respect, as in so many others) entirely privileged. I met my wife just before completing my PhD, and we waited about 5 years before having children, she having become a school teacher in part because the job allows a kind of flexibility for pregnancy and childbearing that many others do not. Although our first child came along 2 years before I got tenure, I already had no doubt that I would get it (having been hired in a department that made tenure requirements very transparent, and which, as far as I can tell, has long treated tenure decisions in a very responsible manner). I pretty quickly came to think (as I still do) that we should have started having kids earlier – something close to regret (though not actual regret, because I can’t get my head around the non-identity issues). So I just haven’t experienced the tensions between career security and parenthood that many people fear, despite being a fully equal parent over the course of my children’s childhoods (As I started this I was minding two children who are just hanging around the house because although their best friend has buggered off somewhere they like to stay here; as I finish I’m looking after a sick 7 year old who is being cooperative only because I have found an almost unlimited supply of The Clitheroe Kid). Additionally, children and family life have become my central research interests, so time spent deliberating about my children counts as work, in some way (I’d recommend more philosophers taking this strategy, but I do realize that not everyone can do it). Some people will think that all this detracts from the value of whatever comments I have, and they may well be right.

So, that said, here my the comments. The first is just to point to Samantha Brennan’s comment in the Leiter thread.

I don’t know if there is a best time but I did well having my first child while in graduate school writing my dissertation. I found that I didn’t have time to socialize with my fellow grad students—no more long lunches, coffees, and late nights—but I was easily able to get 5 hours of writing in a day. As I was on a fellowship I didn’t have any other commitments, no TA responsibilities, so it worked well. I had a very supportive thesis supervisor (Thanks Shelly!) who believed I could do that and that too made a difference. Having a baby during my PhD also meant that I interviewed with baby and partner in tow and hiring departments knew what they were getting. I think this also gave hiring committees the reassurance that I could combine my research with baby care, since I was doing it then. My other two children were born pre-tenure at a Canadian university with excellent daycare and parental leave. It’s also worth noting that I didn’t do this alone. My partner worked only part-time when the children were very young. Mine is the primary career in our house, a luxury most women don’t have. And I have to differ about family friendliness and university careers. Aside from the timing issue—biological clocks and tenure clocks both ticking at once—I’ve found universities to be great places to work while having children. There is the blessing and curse of flexible working hours and at least north of the border great daycare, nursery school, and summer camp programs close to my office. It’s not easy but compared to my women lawyer friends or my friends with are in medicine, comparable jobs in terms of prestige if not income, I think I’ve got a great deal. Anyway, given all of those people who think it’s a bad combo—parenting and an academic career—I just wanted to raise a voice from the other side. Now two academic careers and children…I don’t know but thankfully I haven’t had to deal with that.

(I should note that Brennan’s supervisor is notorious in the profession for the high quality of his supervising, and that Brennan’s post-PhD career has been entirely in Canada, not the US)

I strongly suspect that if you have a child because you really want one, and have substantial support from a spouse or some other person, then while parenting interferes with one’s social life (not always, as I often point out, a downside) it needn’t interfere with your progress in graduate school. Note, though, the antecendents of that conditional.

But another objection to having children is a bit different. More than one person has expressed to me the worry that being visibly pregnant while interviewing for jobs would be a problem. I’m really curious about this. As I was preparing the post I happened to have a meeting with a bunch of senior faculty in the humanities, most of whom are women with kids (because, absurdly, they are less likely to refuse to do this work than other people??). Before the meeting I just asked (because a number of people to whom the question is relevant have asked me) whether they thought that in their disciplines, turning up pregnant to an interview would be a disadvantage. One had actually done this, and said that although she didn’t get the job she thought had nothing to do with the pregnancy. Another echoed Brennan’s comments as follows:

“well, we assume that women are going to have children, and being pregnant shows that they are already confident that they can balance work and parenting”

In other words, it could actually help.

My own thought when the question was first posed to me was rather different. One has almost no information at all about interviewees. But one can assume that there is some non-trivial probability that they are prone to mental health problems, that they will have disruptive experiences in their personal lives, or that other things will derail them, no matter how good they seem. Having children is perfectly normal, and most people in relatively advantaged circumstances seem to manage fine despite having children; it would be nuts to count obvious pregnancy against someone. That it would be nuts is not, of course, a reason to think that no-one does it! But it is a reason to think that it is something that cannot be given as a reason against you in a committee deliberation (even in an all-male committee).

None of my interlocutors were in Philosophy; all of them, I think, were in disciplines and departments that are much more evenly gender balanced than Philosophy, which still tends to have a smaller proportion of female faculty than most of the rest of the Humanities. My guess is that the family-friendliness of academia varies not just by institution, but also by discipline, and by discipline not only according to the gender balance in the discipline but also other factors. Mason:

When we asked women in the survey whether they viewed research universities as family friendly, their opinions differed significantly depending on whether or not it was common in their departments for female professors to have children. Where it was common, 46 percent of female respondents agreed that research universities were family friendly. Where it was uncommon, only 12 percent of women agreed.

Philosophy is not very gender-balanced, less so than, say, History or Sociology, and Philosophy departments are therefore less likely to contain women with children. On the other hand, the discipline does not involve long trips to archives, or fieldwork; it really is something that you can do at home. Anyway, I’m curious whether women who have experienced this as interviewers would have the same impression as my committee members.

Third, I agree with the people in the Leiter thread who say that having children can make you more disciplined about what you do with your time or, to put it less contentiously, the time and energy you give up for parenting is not necessarily taken from your academic work. In the decade before I became a parent I probably devoted as much time and energy per week to political organizing as I subsequently did and do to parenting (and experienced considerably more stress from that than I have from parenting, partly because I am probably better suited to raising kids than political organizing, and partly because my first two children have been, after the first hellish 4 months, remarkably easy). I don’t have hobbies, and my time is always constrained by work or family, but that’s because I’m pretty committed to both. I wasted a lot of time in my twenties, and if it weren’t for the fact that I couldn’t possibly have met my wife much earlier than I did I’d regret not having had a family to occupy me at that time.

Three caveats/pieces of advice. Don’t expect to get much done in the first 3 months after the baby arrives. (And this is one of the big gender differences; most babies are ok for the first 10 days or so, so men can actually get something done, whereas women have to recover). Some pregnancies, and some babies, are very difficult (same is true, by the way, of some lovers, spouses, dissertation supervisors, dissertation topics, friends, parents, automobile accidents, drug addictions, illnesses, etc). And don’t go into the whole thing without Ferber (Advisors: there are many things you can do to make it more possible for your advisees to get through graduate school than otherwise, and giving them this book is among them).

Another quote from Leiter’s discussion, from a woman who does not seem to be in philosophy, and has had 2 children and is now having a 3rd.

As a last point about family friendliness, I do feel as though some faculty in my grad program (an R1) have written me off—especially now that I not only have kids but I’m out of residence. The expectation that I won’t finish has been, at times, palpable. The concurrent expectation seems to be that I’m out of the running for the so-called “big” jobs. Likewise I live under the assumption that whatever missteps or problems I have in the program should be attributed to my status as a mother instead of more correctly attributing them to advising issues. That has been a real discouragement, actually, inasmuch as my status as a mother has acted as a I don’t want to be reduced to my reproductive status. But that’s being a woman.

I see no more reason why motherhood should put you out of the running for “big” jobs than that visible pregnancy should put interviewers off hiring you, and it is possible, of course, that the commenter is misinterpreting the signals from her department. But I know very well that it is difficult for women who are thinking about becoming pregnant to have this sort of discussion with their professors, and probably also with their fellow students. I also suspect that its not an easy discussion to have among faculty, and also that faculty are not well aware of exactly how to give useful support to graduate student parents even if it is needed, which is why I’m glad that Leiter hosted the discussion on his site, and why I wanted to extend its life over here.

I’d be very curious to hear further well-informed and experienced answers to the “interviewing when obviously pregnant” question. And also to hear from women, in particular, who have either managed to combine parenting with graduate school, or have felt that they had to give up graduate school, or academic prospects, because of their commitment to their children.

“(The Church) should also protect man from the destruction of himself. A sort of ecology of man is needed,” the pontiff said in a holiday address to the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration. “The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less.” The Catholic Church teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are. It opposes gay marriage and, in October, a leading Vatican official called homosexuality “a deviation, an irregularity, a wound”. The pope said humanity needed to “listen to the language of creation” to understand the intended roles of man and woman. He compared behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations as “a destruction of God’s work”.

No surprises here, I know. This is doctrine, at least for those as believe in papal infallibility. But what pierces me is the vehemence of the delivery. It tallies with the vindictive efforts of the Proposition 8 people to nullify marriages celebrated during the brief window of legality. Why would you do that except to inflict pain? Pope Benedict’s comparison of the natural instincts of people born to fancy and love each other with our bloody-minded destruction of the environment is just horrifying. It’s ugly and utterly unworthy. The violence of the rhetoric belies the strength of the reasoning. There can be no truly Christian argument against gay marriage. Even if you genuinely believe your own straight marriage is somehow lessened because gay people can marry too, why does it follow that you wouldn’t suffer it anyway in order to give other people that joy?

I think if the revolutionary Jesus of the New Testament ever thought his ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ message would be perverted and abused in this way, he’d have given us a few reminders like ‘judge not lest ye be judged’ or reminded his followers of the special power of religious hierarchy to corrupt. Oh, hang on, he did already!

I’ve sat with the Rick Warren inauguration thing for days, hoping to feel less angry and betrayed, hoping to see a chink of light in the reasoning behind it – anything beyond the tortuous over-thinking and callous calculation it betrays. I give up. Why couldn’t Obama give the people who voted for him one perfect day of happiness? God knows things are gloomy enough besides. And God knows too many people have spent the last 8 years excluded from the party. We live in a fully imperfect world the other 364 days, and reason says Obama can only disappoint us in the future, no matter how hard he tries. So why not share this one beautiful day of unadulterated happiness?

Here’s what it comes down to. The religious fundamentalists simply don’t want other people to be happy. The only joy they can conceive of is that which they allow. There’s no rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s for them. The law of their angry God is inadequate by itself, and needs to be enforced by the laws of men and the power of the state. Their joy is won only in a zero sum game. Sharing it destroys it. Why else do they fight so hard to exclude gay people from the ‘sanctity’ of marriage?

But we’re not two year-olds. We are grown-ups who know that sharing our precious toys doesn’t ruin them forever. If marriage is so great – and I think it is – then why hoard it? Why keep the light under a bushel? There is something so selfish and grasping about the religious right’s vendetta against gay marriage. It’s unworthy of anyone who professes to follow Christ.

I keep on keeping on in the Catholic Church, mostly because it’s what I was brought up in and where I most feel the pain and joy of just being alive. I’ve even been lucky enough to find a home from home in a Catholic community that not just welcomes but celebrates every person in it. But days like today force me to ask myself if it’s even the right thing to continue to associate myself with an institution whose leadership behaves so shamefully. If I believe Barack Obama should dissociate himself from Rick Warren’s Prop 8 hatefulness, what right do I have to keep going to a church I love but that doesn’t fully love all its members?

I can’t argue myself into it, or perhaps even justify politically and intellectually why I should go on enjoying my community of faith. But I do feel it comes down to the joy. The happiness for and amongst others I experience there, and the practical hope that I can keep on doing my bit (whenever I truly figure out what that is). Shutting down or shutting off that profound source of joy would make me feel the bad guys have won. The religious right don’t have a monopoly on happiness, and we shouldn’t let them think they can.

while many homeschool organizations and advocacy groups provide information and analysis, there are few places to go for a less partisan perspective.

Below the fold are the three key points he asks all journalists to read before starting to use the resource (I’ve cut some bits out, so its still worth reading his page). Can I suggest that responsible people might also link not to this post, but to Rob’s site, both to spread the word and to improve his google rating (if it really works that way) and, (very) eventually, public discourse about homeschooling.

1. We don’t have any comprehensive data about U.S. homeschoolers nationally: total number of homeschoolers, learning outcomes, or anything else.

The broadest set of data we have comes from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), but even that large-scale study likely doesn’t provide a full picture, as many homeschoolers are strongly opposed to any sort of governmental oversight of their efforts, and therefore refuse to participate in any data-gathering attempts (the 2003 NCES survey, for instance, had a 58% refusal rate).

2. Claims that the “average homeschooler” outperforms public and private school students are simply not true.

This is not to claim that homeschoolers underperform, either—the simple fact is that no studies exist that draw from a representative, nationwide sample of homeschoolers.
3. There is no such thing as a “typical homeschooler.”

Support and advocacy organizations serve almost every demographic imaginable. A quick check on-line, for instance, lists groups for handicapped homeschoolers, Jews, Latinos, Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, single parents, vegans, Native Americans, African-Americans, and Muslims (the latter two, among others, claim to be the fastest growing segment of homeschoolers). The growth of online communication seems likely to only increase the available opportunities for networking and support moving forward.