Choice and Social Structure

“Perhaps we can both make better choices for ourselves and do better sociology if we take the complex interdependency of our system as a starting point, and then attend specifically to the ways that we go about simplifying or schematizing our understanding of it.” Um, yeah, one needs to accept the world as it is, rather than supposing the world is at should be one as one wants the world to be. In the country where I live, it is accepted that women with children work part-time. It is less accepted that men do so. So even though I would like to work part-time, and I am envious of my wife’s time off, I continue to work full-time.

You become what you do. Every day in every way we make choices that have consequences for ourselves and other people. Every time we say yes to some things we say no to countless other things. We make dozens of choices every day that are consequential for ourselves and others. We live embedded in opportunities and constraints created by other people’s choices, and we in our turn create constraints and opportunities for ourselves and others.

This is, I think, what ‘karma’ refers to. No sarcasm intended.

” He took the job because it was a dream job for him, a chance to do something exciting, fun and interesting. He was “owed” in our relationship because he had already moved twice for my job. His first choice would have been for him to have the good job without the travel, but that wasn’t an option. To be honest, I’m selfish enough that I would have preferred that he keep his bad job and make my life easier, but I cared about him, agreed he was owed, and knew why he really wanted to do it, so I signed off.”

Communication as contract: between the selfish and self-conscious (but not unself-aware) All the grey areas in a relationship described as lines. I’m sure she feels the children were “owed” too. It was unreadable.

“Um, yeah, one needs to accept the world as it is, rather than supposing the world is as it should be one or as one wants the world to be. In the country where I live, it is accepted that women with children work part-time. It is less accepted that men do so. So even though I would like to work part-time, and I am envious of my wife’s time off, I continue to work full-time”

One may need to act in the world as it is, but that doesn’t mean one has to blithely accept the world as it is. The fact that the wife’s time spent caring for children continues to be seen by spouse as “time-off” is precisely the kind of socially conditioned perception that gets in the way of creating more gender neutral social arrangements for balancing work/career with family.

“But why do you care what is generally accepted and what isn’t?”

Because if I want to continue working in the job that I’m doing, I have to do what is generally accepted.

Kieran, try reading the paragraphs as if they were the words of a narrator in a work of fiction. Don’t read the words as content, read them as form. Then think about what they might imply about the narrator’s relation to her role and to others.

I’m coming up with “he was owed” among other things.
Ideas are not implications.

Or is the point to only look for subtext in things you disagree with?

I feel a rant coming on, and it’s not a new one.

I’m out.

An affecting piece. But it’s true, as others have noted, that her conclusion — “Perhaps we can both make better choices for ourselves and do better sociology if we take the complex interdependency of our system as a starting point, and then attend specifically to the ways that we go about simplifying or schematizing our understanding of it” — is lame. Not to be drearily ideological, but isn’t it all capitalism’s fault? Aren’t Ruskin and Morris still the starting point for any solution to the contemporary epidemic of stress, overwork, and drudgery, with the resulting cultural and environmental blight?

There’s a Gordian Knot that needs to be cut.

Yeah, there’s nothing more annoying than someone who complains about a situation when there’s a simple, obvious solution staring them right in the face. Clearly, she should have… huh. I’m stuck. You?

Yeah, there’s nothing more annoying than someone who complains about a situation when there’s a simple, obvious solution staring them right in the face. Clearly, she should have… huh. I’m stuck. You?

Perhaps the only escape from this kind of situation is a kind of grace. I was, for several years, an untenured, divorced man who had my kids half time. An easier situation than a single mom with no man on the scene, and perhaps easier than what the author faced. I fell head over heels in love with the kids. That saved me. I’m not saying she ‘should have done’ this, because I didn’t do it. It just happened.

a particular, but common, personal reaction to finding oneself in a particular, but common, set of circumstances;

How common is it, really, to have the flexibility of a tenured faculty position, the financial security of a two-income household, and the domestic help of a “superspouse”? Or to react to this state of affairs by being consumed with selfish anger to the point of neglecting your family?

honest and insightful reflection on the substance of that reaction;

I give her credit for acknowledging the objective reality of that reaction. But for her reflection to be both “honest” and “insightful”, it would have to offer some introspective explanation as to why she responded to such incredibly privileged circumstances by retreating into a shell of angry, self-absorbed resentment and neglect of her loved ones. Such an atypical–even bizarre–reaction can only be explained by psychology, not sociology.

Her Scatterplot post is excellent. Thanks for the link.

I sympathize with the poster, and I’m sure my wife would, too. She works 10 to 11-hour days (5 days per week only, thankfully), the kid is in daycare up to 11-hours too, and we’re still stressed out at 7 pm when I’m cooking dinner, she’s trying to pay bills, and the toddler’s on a rampage.

She (Scatterplot) does not say that paid childcare or household help would have been cheap — just that she probably should have done it, given the troubles she faced without it.

I’ve told my wife, parents, and anyone else who asks about the possibility of a second kid. My response is the same: “If someone else is paying for 24/7 nanny coverage, sure.” I like playing w/ my kid, making her snacks, giving her baths, etc. But when you’re trying to read the Sunday paper, read a journal article, edit a book review, shovel the snow, read a few blogs, cook dinner, enjoy some music, shop for food, clean the house, and prep for Monday work (my day today) and two kids are on the prowl, well, if you have one spouse road-warrioring it on top of it — you’d be angry about not being able to do it all well, too.

“Your wife working part time does not mean she has “time off” that you don’t. It means she works at home in addition to working outside the home. She works at home so YOU DON’T HAVE TO WORK AT HOME. Last time I checked, raising kids (and/or performing other kinds of household labor) wasn’t “time off”… If you start counting household labor hours you might even find that she works more than you. Your envy sounds incredibly presumptuous to me.”

Shamus – well, I think your whole blathering is presumptuous to me. Do you know what my wife does when she’s not working? Do you know who does household labor chores in my household? Do you know what I would do should I work part time?

Let’s just suppose that, if I were to work part-time, I would spend the time off by going to the casino and gamble. The fact remains that I can’t do that because I have constraints at my work which means I can’t work part-time.

” The fact that the wife’s time spent caring for children continues to be seen by spouse as “time-off” is precisely the kind of socially conditioned perception that gets in the way of creating more gender neutral social arrangements for balancing work/career with family.”

Who said anywhere that time spent caring for children is “time-off”? Of course it’s not. Anyway, despite the fine feelings exhibited in your comment, still the fact remains: society (or at least the society I live in) does not yet have these “gender neutral social arrangements.” By all means, try to change this and make a better world. On the other hand, when it comes down to choices that one needs to make in life (such as having children), one is apt to make a bad choice if one assumes that the world is already better than if one assumes the world as it is. Just to take a more gender-neutral example: given the prevalence of divorce and the facility which people go into it, it is reasonably foolhardy to assume when one is getting married that it will be forever.

And Kieran applauded the original post’s “honest and insightful reflection”. Can I ask how he knows it is “honest?” Does he know the person?

Perhaps we can both make better choices for ourselves and do better sociology if we take the complex interdependency of our system as a starting point, and then attend specifically to the ways that we go about simplifying or schematizing our understanding of it.”

Okay, I’m puzzled. I’m thinking of having kids myself, and would like a way of thinking about the trade-offs. But how are we meant to do this? And how will it be useful as a way for making better choices for ourselves?
I’m trying to think through the steps.
1. Complex interdependency of our system is a starting point.
Okay. Taken.
2. Attend specifically to the ways that we go about simplifying or schematizing our understanding of it.
3. Look up schematizing in a dictionary.
“To express in or reduce to a scheme”

4. Where now? Well, I learnt in university a number of ways of simplying, or schematizing a system. Pictures of blackboards and whiteboards come to mind. I can write an equation for daily time available from me and my husband:
No of hours spent working + no of hours of housework + no of hours spent in childcare + no of hours in personal care

Oh, I see another detail. My equation should add up to “less than or equal to 24”

#26 “If someone else is paying for 24/7 nanny coverage, sure.” Then they’re not your children anymore. Let the servants take them home. They have kids too: that they can’t take care of while they’re taking care of yours.

24/7 nanny coverage means hiring three full-time (8 hour shift) nannies, down to two when your kid is able to sleep through night regularly. Having a nanny on shift does not mean you never interact with the kid. It can mean that while your playing outside he or she is doing the kid’s laundry. It means that when a colleague returns your calls while your playing or feeding your child, you can take the call without yelling for your spouse to stop what she’s doing to watch your child. I’ve seen the stress-levels that dual professional couples with dual-nannies display around the house. It’s a lot less than the stress-levels at mine, where there are no nannies.

Why assume that nannies still have kids at home? Some have adult children or have not yet had children.

When both partners are active parents, when employers allow flexibility (in academia things like on-site childcare & stopping tenure clocks for childrearing), and when governments provide supports like universal preschool & after school programs, parents are less likely to be torn b/t kids and work and resort to the TV as caregiver for 10 hours a day.

So instead of the children watching TV for 10 hours a day they will be in state-provided childcare for 10 hours a day in utopia?

From my reading of her post, I don’t know if that would have helped OlderWoman and her husband. She said at the time that they didn’t want to hire full-time childcare, so presumably they wouldn’t want full-time government-provided childcare. She already had tenure by the time of their second child, so stopping the tenure clock wouldn’t have helped her in particular.

It sounds like a large chunk of their dilmmia was that neither her nor her husband wanted to give up their interesting jobs. The author turned down a lot of work possibilites to take care of her kids, so presumably she also had work flexibility. Her husband consciously choose a very demanding job with a lot of travel.

I don’t think government can do much to solve those sorts of problems.

And, incidentally, I was dispatched on a number of occasions in my childhood to after-school and holiday programmes. I preferred it when we had privitised childcare – either with people my parents had hired or us being dispatched around amongst our aunts as part of some complicated childsharing system my mum and her sisters had running. In a programme you are always being organised and entertained and educated, and there’s no allowance for curling up in a corner with a book or splashing around in the stream. If you splash around in the stream there is a workbook to fill out telling you to do things like “see if you can find these aquatic creatures!”. Aaarrrgh. Give me privatised childcare any day.

I was very impressed with that post and her capacity for self-evaluation. I suspect that from the outside looking in, I would think that she had done a great job at each facet she turned her attention to. I’m willing to guess that because her post reveals a lot of personal integrity, and people with integrity can simultaneously resent the circumstances that force them into constrained choices and do still do a good job at the task itself. Revealing one’s inner frustration is not the same as describing one’s outer behavior.

“…the structural constraints on her choices. Her story perfectly illustrates the fact that parents and children suffer the more we privatize caregiving.”

These seem like odd thoughts: human caregiving has always been “privatized” i.e., done first and foremost by kin of the one being cared for as opposed to strangers. Thus, it makes no sense to say “the more we privatize” it.

And, the phrase “structural constraints” is one of those massive generalities that just sweeps so much under the rug. Laments about ” no universal preschool” etc are irrelevant to the original post, most of which deals with events that occurred once the kids starting going to school. It is a structural constraint that one can’t have one’s cake and eat it too. One person’s “structural constraint” is another’s “real world.

“Ah, the good ol’ gender trap.”

The criticism is the same whether the author is male or female.