March 03, 2005

Get the Shots Already

Posted by Belle Waring

Now that the link between MMR jabs and autism have been debunked for the tenth time, could people please start having their children vaccinated? Because when their child gets a mild case of rubella, and then comes in contact with a pregnant woman her child may suffer from fatal or debilitating birth defects? Thanks.

Scientists have examined rates of autism among children in Japan, where the MMR vaccine was withdrawn in 1993. They found that the number of children with autism continued to rise after the MMR vaccine was replaced with single-shot vaccines.

I have to say that living in a place where any random person on the street might have arrived from a polio-endemic part of India the night before really focusses the mind. I like to take my children to rural Indonesia, too. I’m ready for extra shots. Sign me up!

February 28, 2005

Mother Drive-By's

Posted by Belle Waring

Via Making Light, an amazing series of posts and threads from Chez Miscarriage. The most interesting one is the thread in which Chez solicits tales of “mother drive-by’s”, horrible, critical comments from other mothers on parenting. It will take ages to read them all, but I couldn’t turn away.

Some are truly, unforgiveably evil: “At the funeral for my 16 year old daughter who took her own life. My mother in law asked how we could have let Marrissa die.”

Or this:

“I was out and about with my then two year old Sara, who has Down Syndrome. A complete stranger asked me about her “condition”. I told him she had Down’s. He made some “tsk, tsk” noise and told me that I should have had an abortion, and how she would be a drain on society, and then walked off. My jaw was completely on the ground by that point and the tears were not far behind.”

Perhaps this is the worst:

The worst drive by happened to a friend of mine. Her six year old was hit by a car and killed. Someone she knew said, “Well at least it wasn’t one of your “real” kids” (Sean was adopted)

Others just plumb the depths of tactlessness:

the worst was an experience when I went with my second son (who was then less than a year old) to hospital. He had very bad recurrent otitis (yes I DID bf him!) and I told the women next to me that the doctor recommended surgery. She looked at me and said: ‘And you take your child there to be murdered? Don’t you know how many children don’t wake up from such surgeries? Do you want to KILL him?”

There are breastfeeding Nazis aplenty:

“From a realtor who was showing us houses. I pulled out a bottle for our 9-month-old and she flipped out. “I want to know why this baby isn’t being breastfed! Do you work?”

“Well I — we were breastfeeding, and now we’re done.”

snort “Let me tell you something. My four year old daughter still breastfeeds sometimes, and my toddler is going strong. And I work full time. I’m a member of La LEESH.

Hey, great, good for you lady. I’m hoping that while my children are missing out in terms of the nutritional benefits of long-term breastfeeding, they will benefit greatly from the fact that I know how to pronounce the word leche.

There are anti-breatfeeding Nazis: “That’s sick!” (said of nursing a 4-month-old.) Or this:

I ended up letting my son self-wean, which happened at four and a half years of age. Oh, the comments I endured - “How long are you going to let him nurse?” (I guess until he goes away to college but then again, they do have co-ed dorms), “You’re only doing that to satisfy yourself!” (Yes, I’m pretty satisfied that I have a healthy, well-adjusted child), “Why are you doing that? It’s not like you live in Africa!” (Why should only African children have the benefits of breastfeeding? My American child deserves it too!)

I think this may be my favorite:

After I had my third baby I took a shower (at the hospital, literally within an hour of his birth) and there were no towels, so I rang for the nurse. She comes in with some tiny, threadbare towels for me, looks at my naked, wet, just-had-a-baby body, and says, “You sure haven’t lost that belly yet!”

This is great, too:

Upon telling my mom I was pregnant her second response (after “oh dear”) was “well don’t use this as an excuse to get fat.” Damn, busted, I was SO hoping I could get fat and blame it on the pregnancy. Halfway through first pregnancy a friend’s mom said “you are getting round in the front AND the back.” Ok now that I’m pregnant it’s socially acceptible to tell me I have a fat ass?

I could go on, but you should just go check it out yourself. The Making Light thread is (as always) good too.

The animosity between mothers who work outside the home and stay-at-home mothers is amazing. I hate to get all blaming the patriarchy, but it certainly seems as if all this mental energy could be more profitably directed towards trying to change society to make life better for parents, rather than in vicious intersororal strife…

November 25, 2004

Voting dogs

Posted by Chris

Via Butterflies & Wheels I came across the following ludicrous and offensive argument against gay marriage from Keith Burgess-Jackson, the self-styled AnalPhilosopher :

I have said in this blog many times that the very idea of homosexual marriage is incoherent, which is why I put the word “marriage” in quotation marks. I do the same for dog “voting.” If we took our dogs to the polls and got them to push levers with their paws, they would not be voting. They would be going through the motions of voting. It would be a charade. Voting is not made for dogs. They lack the capacity to participate in the institution. The same is true of homosexuals and marriage.

Richard Chappell at Philosophy etc says nearly all that needs to be said about Burgess-Jackson’s “argument”, so I wouldn’t even have bothered mentioning it if I hadn’t been in conversation on Tuesday with the LSE’s Christian List whose article “Democracy in Animal Groups: A Political Science Perspective” is forthcoming in Trends in Ecology and Evolution . List draws on Condorcet’s jury theorem (previously discussed on CT here ) to shed more light on research by Conradt and Roper in their paper Group decision-making in animals , from Nature 421 (155—8) in 2003. Conradt and Roper have this to say about animal voting:

Many authors have assumed despotism without testing, because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans. However, empirical examples of ‘voting’ behaviours include the use of specific body postures, ritualized movements, and specific vocalizations, whereas ‘counting of votes’ includes adding-up to a majority of cast votes, integration of voting signals until an intensity threshold is reached, and averaging over all votes. Thus, democracy may exist in a range of taxa and does not require advanced cognitive capacity.

[Tiresome, humourless and literal-minded quasi-Wittgensteinian comments, putting inverted commas around “voting” etc. are hereby pre-emptively banned from the comments thread.]

The Wrong Pie

Posted by Kieran

Thanksgiving is one of America’s best ideas. Appropriately it is intimately associated with one of America’s worst inventions, the Pumpkin Pie. I say “appropriately” because such antinomies are common in American life. North and South, Red States and Blue States, expensive gourmet coffee and never a spoonful of real cream to put in it what do you mean you only have the kind that sprays out of a can never mind no that’s fine. On such foundational tensions is America built. I’m sure Alexis de Toqueville has a line about this somewhere in Democracy in America. Something about the Pumpkin containing the Seeds of its own Destruction — no wait, that was Marx in Vol. III of Theorien über den Wurzelgemüse. For de Tocqueville, pumpkin pie is the fulcrum of the argument developed in Book II, Chapter 14 of Democracy in America, where he shows “How the taste for physical gratifications is united in America to love of freedom and attention to public affairs.” A taste for physical gratification that is fed with pumpkin pie is sure to kindle a strong love of freedom (from the obligation to eat any more) and a concomitant commitment to public affairs (especially the effort to ban the thing once and for all).

I admit this may be a minority reading of de Tocqueville, though surely a wholly plausible one of Marx. But a number of figures in pie scholarship may be against me. Although I have not been able to trace a specific pumpkin-related discussion by the best-known of the world’s two leading pie authorities (the other one is similarly silent on the matter), there is some evidence that Fafnir is strongly pro-pumpkin. (“If a pumpkin pie is not a pie, well then I do not want to live in a world with your cold mechanical robot pies!”) This is a worry. The pumpkin pie is generally neglected in the social science literature, in my view rightly so. Milton Friedman once commented that “Most economic fallacies derive … from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie”, but the pie’s actual substance was left unspecified by him. Neoclassical economics assumed away the pumpkin by fiat, a move that goes back at least as far as Walras. He found that the tatonnement process could not plausibly be completed as long as the auctioneer was left with a shitload of pumpkin that he couldn’t get off his hands for love or money. It re-entered the philosophical literature in Wittgenstein, who got it from Sraffa, but his solution is unknown — although in 2001 his grave in Cambridge was found to have a pork pie on top of it (no, really, it was), and also a Mr Kipling Cake — perhaps evidence of efforts at solution via reduction to problems already solved.

At any rate, my plan is to avoid the pumpkin altogether and make an apple crumble instead. I have a lot of things to be thankful for today, and I hope you do as well — and if one of them is the courage to face up to reality and just eat the nutmeg out of the jar this year instead of using pumpkin puree as a substrate for it, so much the better for you.

October 06, 2004

Family/Work Blog Conference in Session

Posted by Harry

Laura’s Family/Work blog conference is well underway, and I recommend going over there. The issues are difficult and fascinating. There’s a lot of food for thought in people’s stories about their own frustrations and joys — it is really interesting (to me, anyway) to see how other people work out the conflicts and tensions.

October 01, 2004

Work/Family Blog Conference at Laura's place

Posted by Harry

Laura promises that next week will be devoted to a really interesting-looking blog conference on Work/Family issues. She says

Here’s the tentative schedule for the event:

Monday — General Topics Related to Parents and Mothers and Work. What skills has you gained as a parent that will carry over into the world of work? Describe your typical day. Do you feel your work at home is undervalued by society and by the workplace? What obstacles have you faced in holding a job and having a family? What is your childcare situation? In an ideal world, what percentage of time would you spend with your kids and what percentage with work? Is parenthood too hard today?

Tuesday — Parenthood and Academia. What obstacles have you faced as an academic trying to balance family and work? For the singles, are we a big bunch of whiners? What changes could be made?

Wednesday — The Guys. What balance of housework/childcare have you arranged with your spouse? For the women, are the guys doing their share? What problems do stay at home dads face?

Thursday — Feminism and Politics. What’s the big deal about having a career anyway? For younger women, were you disappointed that other women never told you how difficult it would be to have it all? Knowing what you know, what advice would give young people? What political and social changes would you like to see? Is Sweden a good model? Are women their own worst enemy?

Friday — I’m not sure. Something fun, like telling the story of how your kid stuck breakfast cereal up his nose.

Go and enjoy yourselves there next week. For my part, I’m just glad that it wasn’t this week, in which work/family issues have kept me almost completely from thinking about work/family issues (if you see what I mean) or even from looking at Laura’s blog till now. I’ll fill you in on the bits that don’t have to do with the cat’s idiotic fight with next door’s dog (very expensive) later.

July 07, 2004

No Exit -- What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents

Posted by Harry

Anne Alstott, co-author of The Stakeholder Society, has just published another book called No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents. The theme is one we’ve explored here before: what should the state do for people who decide to have and raise children? It’s a tremendously good book, written in a wonderfully accessible style, and very affordable for an academic hardback.

At the core of Alstott’s book is a proposal for a ‘caregiver’s allowance’ of $5000 a year, to be provided by the Federal government to the primary care-giving parent. The allowance would be a kind of voucher; the caregiver could use it for any of three purposes: paying for daycare while she goes out to work; supplementing her retirement savings, or investing in her own education. The grant would be paid to the parent annually until her last child turned 13, and would be save-able; if the parent wanted, for example, to save it during the toddler years and then spend it on full time education as soon as the last child started school, she’d be entitled to do that.

The book consists of an elaborate defence of this proposal (and another, supplementary, mechanism effectively insuring against the child having a chronic illness).

[What follows is basically a review of the book, timed to coincide with Laura at Apt 11D’s review so make sure you read her’s too. The Boston Review a while back carried an article based on the book which is still online.]

The defence consists of a moral case that the state should do something for parents; a conjectural case that the caregiver allowance, though imperfect, will have the kinds of effects the moral case calls for, and a case against 2 kinds of alternative measure: the standard mix of means tested benefits and regressive tax deductions the US currently uses; and mandatory workplace-based ‘family friendly’ policies.

What is the case for the State doing something for the primary caretaking parent? First, note that unlike standard child-friendly benefits like tax deductions and the Family Allowances in Europe (on which more later), the caregivers allowance is not aimed at the child. The standard family benefit targets the child but does so through the parent because the parent has de jure authority over, and shares her life with, the child. But Alstott’s proposal is grounded in the idea that parents, when they become parents, bear a certain kind of cost for which they should, themselves, be compensated.

The core moral idea is that parenthood is a lifelong commitment; a commitment from which, uniquely in our society, we are bound for life, regardless of any subsequent change of mind/circumstance. In this it is unlike our choice of job, friends, spouse, all of whom we are legally permitted to ditch, and ditching whom tends to incur little social disapproval. Whereas you can give up a baby for adoption at childbirth, continuity of care is (rightly, in Alstott’s view) regarded as so important that society has a variety of legal and social measures that enforce it.

Parents tend to distribute care between them, and the tendency is for the burden to fall primarily on one parent (genuinely equal-split parenting is rare), usually the mother. But along with the position of primary carer comes a range of disadvantages. The primary carer is, perforce, less available for paid work in the external labour market. She is also, by reducing her workforce participation (and unlike her husband), failing to enhance her future earning potential, and as well as diminishing her retirement income. This would matter less if she was not simultaneously facing a very high probability (something like 50%) of future divorce, in an environment in which the earning power accumulated during a marriage is not regarded as community property. The primary parental carer puts herself at a major disadvantage relative to both the non-parents and non-primary-caring parents by adopting a position from which she cannot extricate herself. Something should therefore be done to ameliorate the costs she incurs.

For those unfamiliar with the US tax code, it has three main measures designed to support child-rearers. First there is the small exemption for a dependent. This was $3050 for 2003, meaning that for earners in the top tax bracket it amounted to approximately $1300 per child (assuming a top rate of 43% Fed and State income taxes combined). A second measure is the deduction for daycare expenses of $5000 per child per year, which amounts to approximately $2100 per child for high rate taxpayers (some deductions phase out for very high earners, and I don’t know if this is one, but I do know that none of them phase out till gross household income is well over $100k.) Finally, there is the Earned Income Tax Credit (a negative income tax). The maximum credit is $2,547 for persons with one qualifying child, and $4,204 for persons with two or more qualifying children. But to qualify, a single parent has to earn no more than $33,692 ($34,692 for a married couple).

The problem with the deductions, obviously, is that they are highly regressive — the more you earn the more they are worth. And the problem with the childcare deduction and (in effect) the EIC is that they reward parents who choose to take paid work over those who would want to stay at home and provide care for their children themselves. But sometimes it is more efficient (in a number of senses) for parents to stay home and care for their young children, and those who do so more vulnerable, other things being equal, than those who don’t. Finally, even the EIC is ungenerous in the extreme — it would not, for example, pay for more than half-day day care even in the least expensive available options. (As a wage subsidy, furthermore, it’s not even clear how much of it actually benefits the recipient, and how much it accrues to the low-wage paying employer).

The allowance Alstott proposes is, by contrast, generous enough to pay for something close to full-time daycare (except in the most expensive areas in the US), is highly progressive (because it makes a much larger proportional contribution to the budget of a poor than to that of a rich family); does not skew the caregiver’s choice toward paid employment (because you get it whether you go out to work or stay home with the kids); and is targeted to reduce the long term risk to the primary caregiver of taking that role. If, like me, you think that there is something to be said for parents staying home with young children, this is a plus. Even if you don’t, but think that child-targetted subsidies should not be tied to paid employment, it is still a plus.

Against mandating family-friendly policies in the workplace she argues that they introduce all sorts of perverse incentives for employers, and, of course, require employment for the recipient, and risk economic efficiency. Her proposal has none of these drawbacks.

The first thing to say about the proposal itself is that it does not promise to do anything to undermine the gendered division of labour. Some feminists (like Susan Okin) argue of equal-split parenting, as an alternative to mother-centered parenting. Alstott dismisses this as unfeasible, rather than as undesirable. (See Dick Arneson’s objections to equal-split here). But her proposal also does not actually promote the gendered division of labour — it does not, in itself, stand in the way of cultural movement away from the so-called traditional division. It is a freedom-enhancing proposal, relative to the existing arrangements.

The second thing to note about the proposal is that it’s not clear how revolutionary it is, outside the United States. European welfare states tend to eschew means-tested benefits (and reverse means-tested benefits, which is what the tax deductions amount to), for universal cash payments. I did a quick back of the envelope calculation concerning the UK’s Child Benefit, and it compares pretty well with Alstott’s proposal. Someone who has 2 kids, 2 years apart, will get a total of about 26k sterling ($40k) over the next 18 years in the UK, rather than 75k over the next 15 years on Alstott’s US based scheme. For people with just one kid, or kids substantially further apart, it’s a bigger difference (and for people with more kids closer together Child Benefit is bigger). Now, Alstott’s scheme is technically more restrictive: it demands that you spend the money on doing something to enhance your future income prospects. And it is targeted (in intention) toward the carer herself not the child for whom she is caring. But in practice it is really hard to distinguish from the European style-schemes, especially if people can borrow against the future income, in which case they can effectively convert the voucher into current consumption.

This connects with the objection that it will be impossible to restrict the schemes use to future-income-enhancement. Alstott is right to acknowledge that this will be difficult. But it is not clear to me why she is even so worried about restricting use of the funds this way. Yes, that’s the aim of the program. But why should the state expend lots of energy (and licensing activity) to ensure that it is actually spent that way? Its pretty clear you can’t – not only, as she herself points out, is it hard to distinguish between prospective-income enhancing programs and fun programs, but what is frivolous fun for one person is income enhancing for another. Are German classes for business, or for dating, or for seeing good movies without subtitles? Is cooking for employment or for eating well? Even keep-fit classes have more than one aim: being thin and good-looking helps you get a higher paying job; having the energy that comes from fitness makes you more productive)). It seems to me that variability of use is a reasonable cost of a program that has the desired level of flexibility.

I’m very well-disposed toward the proposal in the US; I share Alstott’s hostility to tax-deductions, and her skepticism about mandating workplace benefits; and I like the open character of the scheme, even though I don’t see it being quite as revolutionary as it might at first appear. I am much more skeptical, though, about her more fundamental argument for the state doing something-like-this for parents. This is because I don’t see the choice to become a parent — or even to become the primary caregiver for a child — as a restriction on one’s autonomy — or perhaps, to put it better, as a restriction on one’s autonomy that the state should compensate for.

Lifelong caring commitments, if voluntarily entered into, can be expressions of, rather than restrictions on, autonomy – any other view presupposes a kind of frivolous conception of autonomy. Abortion and contraception are widely available in the US, as is adequate information about where babies come from. So is information about the legal and socially-encouraged role o the parent. Maybe some very young adults haven’t got a clue what they are getting into, but the median age of first childbirth in the US is well into the twenties, and most people who have children know what they are doing. For a choice to count as autonomous, or as something we should be held responsible for, it does not have to be fully informed; the person making it just has to be the kind of person it is reasonable to hold responsible for their choices, and the choice in question must be made under certain favorable conditions. These conditions typically hold for adult child-bearers. Furthermore, parents get something that non-parents don’t get – a loving intimate relationship of a certain kind which makes a distinctive contribution to their flourishing for which nothing else could substitute. And the primary caregiver enjoys a particularly close relationship with the child in its youngest stages which is, in favourable conditions at least, potentially extremely rewarding. So I’m not persuaded that there really is a loss of autonomy involved, or if there is it is not one which grounds a claim on the rest of us, as it is just of a kind with other autonomy losses consequent on voluntary choices. So I think that what Alstott calls the ‘libertarian’ objection gets much more grip than she treats it as having. The libertarian objection simply takes the institutional status quo as authoritative, and says ‘Look, you know what the circumstances are, or you should know, and if you make this choice in these circumstances, you’re on your own; why should other people have to help you out?’ Understanding the situation of the primary caretaker as one of diminished freedom or autonomy simply concedes to the basic thrust of this argument; and once it is pointed out that the parent is not lacking in autonomy, there are no further resources to respond to it.

I am more moved by a quite different, and much more openly perfectionist, kind of argument for subsidizing primary caregivers, which I can only sketch here. It is grounded in the idea that the structure of social institutions unnecessarily and contingently penalizes the primary caretaker and makes it the case that she/he faces ongoing disadvantages relative to her spouse (and relative to other non-primary caregivers). There is simply no reason to take the institutional status quo as authoritative. The idea is that we want to set things up so that primary caretaking does not have a set of costs attached to it such that one who takes it up is massively disadvantaged within the marriage and if the marriage ends. Why? First, we think that primary care-giving for children is a good thing to do. It is not just one choice among others, but something which has distinctive and intrinsic value, and should be socially validated and encouraged. Second, it will be more rewarding, other things being equal, for both the caregiver and the child if it is done in ‘favourable conditions’; circumstances in which the caregiver is not putting his or her future security excessively at risk. So it is wrong for social institutions unnecessarily to attach great disadvantages to this choice. If some downside is an unavoidable aspect to choice (high risk of death attaches intrinsically to skydiving); or if removing that downside would have unacceptable opportunity costs; or if the choice is one that we don’t think it is a good one for people to make, then it seems fine to retain the drawbacks; but the risks attached to primary care-giving are not unavoidable, and the choice is not undesirable. Alstott’s proposal (or something like it) is justified because it diminishes the unnecessary risks attached to a (very) valuable choice about what to do with a large part of one’s life, and thereby enables people to live more fulfilling lives.

This is, as I say, a much more perfectionist argument than Alstott’s. But I think it is hard (or maybe impossible) to avoid some moderate perfectionism when thinking, as we are here, about how the state should structure family relationships, so there’s no reason to resist it on anti-perfectionist grounds. The alternative is to presuppose a conception of autonomy on which restrictions on one’s freedom are limitations on autonomy even when they have been freely embraced and are a morally necessary feature of a morally valuable role.

My remarks have been moderately critical of the foundation of the argument. So I should emphasize that the book has incredibly rich discussions both in political theory and institutional analysis. Read it yourself.

May 21, 2004

Timber & Twigs in Singapore

Posted by John Holbo

Kieran and co. came to visit. Pictures here.

May 03, 2004

The Decline of Marriage

Posted by Harry

I was in the middle of preparing my lecture on the gendered division of the labour when I saw Laura’s post on the decline of marriage. Laura says

I’m convinced that one of the reasons behind the dual income family is the fear of divorce and not greed. You never know for sure that your partner will be around to support you in the future.
It is also one of the reasons that mothers are starting to demand pay and benefits for the unpaid work of raising kids. There is just no guarantee that your spouse will take care of you. Taking time out to raise kids is very risky

And the facts bear her out. Divorce courts typically recognise material assets accumulated during a marriage as jointly belonging to the couple. But the earning capacity accumulated is regarded as belonging individually to the person who has it. I just worked out that a teacher working in our school district who took a 1-year leave to look after a first kid at age 28 would lose $57,000 in future earnings (assuming a retirement age of 64, and not counting the year of earnings she loses by taking the year off, and also not counting the foregone pension contributions and SS contributions on that $57,000).

Warning: this is a long post which takes a long while to get to the point…

The problem is that long working hours themsleves might contribute to a deterioration of the marital relationship. In the course of my preparation I have been reading James Tooley’s book The MisEducation of Women. The book is a bit of a rant against feminism, but bear with me. In the course of an argument that the traditional gendered division of labor is good for women James expresses a worry rather like Laura’s, but says that this might be a bad strategy because women who work are less desireable, and hence their husbands are more likely to leave. Please, bear with me. He indulges in a wonderful speculation about what Milton and Rose Friedman’s traditional, and seemingly satisfyng, marriage would have been like had Rose been a career woman. In the real case Rose seems by her own testimony to have had an incredibly fulfilling life, contributing to the reproduction of her husband and their kids, and also discussing ‘his’ work with him. He imagines a modern feminist Rose, who decides to make room in her life for her own, independent intellectual and public life. Would this have been a god thing for the relationship? Tooley asks ‘How would he (Milton) have got on with Rose Mark II, a modern career woman?’. He then answers:

A man in this position may have been resentful of the long hours that he had to put in with the children or domesticity were stopping him from getting the Nobel Prize which he felt he deserved or could have won with a little more work. Or he may have worried more about the children, knowing that they were at some child-minder whom he did not trust rather than with his wife whom he did. Or he may just have been psychologically uncomfortable with his successful wife, and increasingly resentful of her, without really knowing why, feeling that something was not right, but not being able to express it to her, or even to himself… like many men, if Rose had been such a career woman, the husband may have felt that she was not unique any more, that she was, in Graglia’s marvelous word, fungible, more easily replaced (113-114).

Two things are going on here. One is that Tooley assumes that men in some sense need the traditional division of labour for their own psychological wellbeing. The other is that he is worried that the independence women achieve from men by working outside the home makes men less inclined to be long-term monogamous.

Now, two things strike me about the passage. First, it is entirely implausible that anything would have these effects on all men. At most, it will be many, or most men, who suffer these consequences. The traditional division of labor is almost certainly as oppressive for some men as it is for some women: some men are in their basic constitutions better suited to (ie will get more fulfillment from) the work of rearing children than ‘public’ work and also than some women are. For any given regime of dividing up labour some people will lose out. Maybe Friedman would lose out with Rose Mark II but perhaps some other man would gain.

The second thing to say is that Tooley has a very low estimation of the capacity of people to adapt themselves to circumstances. The concerns he describes are emotional challenges: emotionally capable people negotiate such challenges and have different, but not necessarily worse, relationships. And if inter-connectness is valuable for men as well as women, men might gain from having to share in, and therefore negotiate with their spouses, the tasks in the domestic sphere, rather than not having to think about, or contribute to, it at all.

But why is the psychologistic passage from Tooley so jarring? As I said, he doesn’t give much acknowledgment to the adaptability of human beings to their circumstances. Sure, if MF has been socialized to expect a wife who will organize all the trivial details of his life for him — wait on him — then he is entirely likely to find her emergence as a career woman threatening and difficult, especially when this is not the prevailing norm of womanhood. But this is a transitional problem — if he is raised to expect that his future spouse might play any of a number of roles, and that he too might do the same, his response might be entirely different.

The other reason the passage is jarring is that Tooley entirely neglects the possibility that what he is describing might be exactly what many women married to male breadwinners and engaging in the traditional labour might be feeling. There is no reason at all suppose that women are not prone to these feelings. Why should we care about the men, and not the women?

Of course, within in marriage, people will do things that upset the other person. Public policy should not be directed to eliminating all the bad feelings people have to each other. But it might do well to try and ensure that public policy is not the direct cause of unnecessary bad feelings.

If you’ve borne with me to this point, I want to elicit the point that I think is, despite Tooley’s stringent anti-feminism, worth taking very seriously (though it is a gender-neutral point). There’s another way of expressing the wory that men are more likely to leave women who work many hours outside the home. When both partners in a marriage are focused for 40-60 hours a week outside the home, a great deal less energy is being devoted to the maintenance and enjoyment of the relationship. In the traditional companionate marriage one spouse was devoted, more or less full time, to maintaining the emotional infrastructure and physical space of the marriage. If you like, the stresses and demands of the outside world which once absorbed 50 hours a week of their joint time now absorb 100 hours a week of their joint time. Less time is left for companionship.
Similarly, it is unlikely that the 50 hours a week of work will be entirely simultaneous. If they are not, then the couples experience a serious time-squeeze. There is just a lot less time and energy available to devote to each other. Then the relationship is more likely to fracture, because relationships need time and work to succeed — that is, to be lasting sources of mutual flourishing.
One lesson you could take from this is Tooley’s — push women back into the domestic sphere. But another would be: push everyone back into the domestic sphere. We live in the wealthiest world in history, and what makes people flourish is not consumption (above a certain level) but lasting and intimate human relationships, and rewarding labor. So we should just encourage people to work less for pay — both men and women.

March 19, 2004

The Mommy Myth

Posted by Harry

Great post by Laura about The Mommy Myth. The book is apparently about the sense of guilt mothers have about not spending 24/7 with their children. Laura says this:

What is the source of this more demanding style of parenting? The authors blame a vast right wing conspiracy, which they intelligently call the Committee for Retrograde Antifeminist Propaganda or CRAP. (Call me an academic snob, but I was really irritated by this. Also, trying to be cute, they call the former Soviet Union, those pesky Russkies. Finger nails on a blackboard.)

Laura disagrees, and instead blames the vast conspriacy of parenting experts

Unless the Sears are in league with CRAP, I think that the new style of parenting has other sources. Child development experts, safety experts, and parents themselves have brought about these changes.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Sears books, they are the ones that tell you that you should be enslaved to every whim of your baby/toddler, and that if the baby ever cries its your fault because you are not in skin-toskin physical contact with them As the parent of two children who spent every waking hour of the first five months screaming their heads off, no matter what we did, I always thought they were in league with the devil myself.

Anyway, go read the whole post. One thing I hate about these sorts of post is that they frequently make me buy the book in question and not infrequently make me read it.

February 26, 2004

A True Story

Posted by Belle Waring

I have posted an all-true tale from my youth in Dixie at our weblog. Old times not forgotten, even in the land of rice and indigo. Didn’t seem quite the CT thing, but you may read nonetheless.

February 18, 2004

"Twenty or thirty years ago..."

Posted by Chris

I was at a meeting the other day where the question of “normal” boy and girl behaviour came up. I mean by this what girls and boys, especially teenagers, take to be normal behaviour for those of their own and the opposite gender. I don’t mean what they ought to do. The opinion was voiced by others present that these norms had shifted appreciably in the last twenty or thirty years. Wearing makeup, for instance, they thought, was far more acceptable for boys today that for boys “twenty or thirty years ago”.

Since I was myself a teenager thirty years ago, I think I can say with some authority that this is mistaken, at least for the UK. Sexual intercourse was, as we know, invented in 1963 , and by the early-to-mid-1970s glam-rock in the shape of David Bowie and Marc Bolan had made all kinds of flirting with cross-dressing and ambiguous gender identity acceptable for teenage boys. Punk followed almost immediately afterwards. (I’m told that things were different and more backward in the US, which, for James Miller, in his magisterial Flowers in the Dustbin , explains Bowie’s initial lack of success over there — until he toned things down.) But my guess is that, in the UK at least, teenagers were more ready to play with mixed sexual signals in the 1970s than they are today (and have been since the advent of “new laddism” in the 1990s).

My reading of the evolution of teenage mores may, of course, be wide of the mark. But my point in making it is just to observe how common is the notion of a “dreamtime” about “twenty or thirty years ago” when 1950s moral and cultural norms are supposed to have applied. Probably such standards didn’t obtain in the 1950s either, but people look on the past with a permanently moving horizon before which things were different, everybody was straight, lived in conventional families and playing with sexuality (and indeed being serious about it) was the preserve of intellectuals, poets and German cabaret artistes. It wasn’t like that.

February 14, 2004

Calling Children Names

Posted by Harry

My daughter (who is reliable about these things) informs me that several girls in her school are called Madison. Now, I know it can be hard to think up a good name for a kid, but simply slapping them with the name of their birthplace seems excessively unimaginative. Its also seems like free-riding — what if everybody did it? I hope that they wouldn’t have done it if they’d lived in the Bronx, Bognor Regis, or Llandrindod Wells.

I should declare an interest. If my parents had engaged in this abusive practice, I would now share the name of an incredibly lame Radio 4 sitcom.

February 10, 2004

Good Childhood

Posted by Harry

Kevin Drum’s seemingly innocent question about why kids don’t walk to school anymore has prompted some interesting discussions about what makes for a good childhood. This is a discussion liberals often like to avoid because they don’t want to appear to be judgmental about other people’s parenting practices, and especially fear accusations of being racist, elitist, or culturally imperialist. For example, the claim that so-called ‘middle-class parenting practices’ (which include talking to your kids, reasoning with them rather than demanding blind obedience, ensuring, if one is divorced, that they maintain contact with their other initial parent) are responsible for success in school is often criticized not for being untrue but for blaming the parents (or the poor, or racial minorities).

But this is one of those areas where we have to make value judgments. We make them personally in our own decisions about how to raise our own kids, because we want to give them better rather than worse childhoods. And we have to make judgments about what makes for a better rather than worse childhoods for policy purposes. One comment in Keiran’s thread noted that new housing developments frequently have no sidewalks. The zoning board, in those cases, has assumed either that it is ok for children to be entirely restricted to private spaces, or that they will be so restricted anyway so why force developers to waste money on sidewalks? It is right to criticize the zoning board (not the developer) for failing properly to incorporate quality-of-childhood issues into their decisions.

How to think about what constitutes a good childhood? The Children’s Society of the Church of England recently ran a series of Good Childhood seminars that I was lucky enough to attend. They were surprisingly lively occasions, fraught with disagreement between paternalists (like me) and liberationists, but also between conservatives (again like me) who think there is an objective basis for saying whether childhoods are good or bad, and what I thought of as postmodernists who were very uncomfortable with making value judgments. (I think, but can’t say for sure, that in these cross-cutting disputes it was the Christians and the old left versus the rest). One exchange was very suggestive. One of the Children’s Society social workers waxed nostalgic for his own working class Liverpool childhood in the 50s when kids played for hours in the street, unsupervised by any particular adult; and said how frustrating the (very deprived) kids he works with find it that they don’t have safe public spaces in which to be unsupervised. He was rounded on for two things — nostalgia (‘we’ve moved on since then — what’s the point of looking backward’); and insensitivity (the 50s might have been good for white boys, but it was lousy for girls, ethnic minority kids, etc).

But it seemed to me that he was doing exactly the right thing: trying to think about different kinds of childhood, and isolating the particular features that were good about them; and then thinking about how, in contemporary circumstances, we might be able to replicate them. Lots of roads were safe public play spaces in the 50’s. They never will be again, but they haven’t been replaced by anything else; and as new houses get bigger, and physically farther from each other, and as the fertility rate plummets, it gets harder for kids to have that kind of benefit in their lives.

Recognizing that perfectionism about a good childhood doesn’t always commit us to blaming the parents can help get the conversation going. I can see why people are reluctant to say that it is better for kids to have a parent at home when they get back from school than if they return to an empty house; it smacks of anti-feminism or blaming single parents. But it just is better, other things being equal. Not because it keeps the kids out of trouble, or helps them with their homework, but because it is better for parents and children to spend time with each other. Saying this could equally well imply criticism for working fathers (a favorite theme of Keiran’s) or for employers who fail to institute flexible working hours.

None of this says much about what actually constitutes a good childhood (though I do say a fair bit about it here). But I do want to prompt a discussion about one thing — the exposure of young children to commercial culture. Evangelical Christians in the US seem to have developed a kind of counter-culture for kids which shields them from the worst aspects of commercial culture (as well as some of the better aspects of secular liberalism, no doubt). But I’m amazed at the scorn that secular leftist pour on them for this. It seems to me that they are doing what any sensible person would do (and I try to do with my daughters). Popular culture is infused with values that nobody would deliberately teach their children. It just isn’t good to spend your life trying to make lots of money; 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. Like the evangelical Christians, secular leftists hold contrary values; and like the evangelical Christians they want their children (and all children) to learn a different set of values than those which corporate America has a material interest in spreading. In fact all (or almost all) parents, in fact, resent the efforts of large corporations to manipulate their children into bugging them for more toys, more fast food, more candy, more, more, more.

(An aside: my experience of deeply religious Christians in the UK is that they are as likely to be on the political left as on the political right; and my experience of them in the US (which is intimate, but not extensive) is that their commitment to right-wing economics is not at all deep, and caused in part by a sense that the left is deeply anti-religious. Russell Arben Fox feels like an outlier in American political debate, for good reason — my guess is that he wouldn’t feel that way in most of Europe).

Of course television is the most obvious medium through which children are exposed to this influence. But non-TV watching children get it to, because they are influenced by their peers and what goes on in their friends houses; because the public schools themselves mediate the influence, and because it pervades our physical space (billboards, for example). My own TV policy is simple: my children watch no TV at home (where all TV is commercial; as I’ve said before in comments, PBS KIDS devotes more minutes per hour to commercials than do the commercial broadcast channels in the UK). The cost of this is that I have to devote considerable energy and effort working out what videos they will enjoy. This has become an enjoyable joint task with my elder daughter (7) who understands that her family life is unusual, but does not object. If I were an evangelical Christian I’d be able to buy into their counter-cultural product-lines, and, of course, most of our kids (in the US) have some acquaintance at least with the bizarre VeggieTales which went mainstream toward the end of the 90s. Fortunately, with the advent of DVD technology (and the advice of a friend that UK DVDs will play on any computer) I have access to some of the culture of my own childhood, which now looks like counter-culture.

My own TV policy is quite unlike that of my parents. My own TV watching was pretty much unrestricted during children’s hour, with the qualification that my mother ridiculed us mercilessly for watching commercial TV (which, given her acid tongue, significantly raised the quality threshold needed for us to watch ITV). But there was, I think, a big difference. The programming was controlled by paternalists whose primary interest was in providing high quality education and entertainment, not in capturing market share. Sure, some of it was crap, but none of it was aimed at instilling materialistic values in me, or prematurely introducing me (or, more pertinently, my sister) to adult sexuality.

The problem — the way in which commercial culture makes childhod worse than it would otherwise be — has two aspects. We usually focus more on the (empircially unproven) claim that it is mis-shapes our children’s future characters, by inculcating acquisitiveness, a sleazy attitude toward sexuality, etc, in them, let alone making them obese. But less tendentious, and equally problematic, is the fact that it makes their childhoods worse — they could be having richer, more enjoyable, better, experiences. I don’t have any great policy solution. But I do think its worth having a discussion about what a good childhood is, and to do so in a less restricted way than secular people often do, especially in the US; in particular I’d welcome more of a mutually respectful dialogue between the secular left and the deeply religious on this.

February 06, 2004

More on framing effects

Posted by Daniel

Framing effects, again:

Question 1: Would you support the Canadian courts if they decided to “ban spanking in most circumstances?

Question 2: Would you support the Candian courts if they decided to tighten the current loophole in the law on common assault which allows some kinds of physical violence against children?

Question 2 is actually the better description of the facts; the question at issue is the definition of “reasonable chastisement” of a minor by its parents, which is a carve-out from the law on assault.

For additional credit, could someone explain to me why it is that my wife and my child are both insolent and disobedient to me, but I am only within my rights to impose reasonable physical chastisement on one of them (these days) , specifically the one who is less able to defend themselves and utterly unable to stop living in my house if they so choose? Don’t even get me started on the servants …

December 02, 2003

Do People NEED To Have Children?

Posted by Harry

Laura at Apartment 11D has a nice post on the non-voluntariness of having children. Of course, in some non-trivial sense having children is a choice. but it is not a choice like the choice of what career to have, or what breakfast cereal to have. She says:

I don’t think it is a choice to have kids or not for most people (though not everybody). Making babies is what we do. Having kids was not a choice for me or my husband. When and how many, yes. But there was no question that we needed kids in our lives. Just as one’s sexuality can’t be chosen, having kids isn’t a choice either. Being a parent is part of who I am.

I think this is about right. Of course, some people have no interest in, or need for, having children; and among that group some are better off without and some are better off with them. But a good majority of people experience the desire to have children as a need — the experience of raising children is something without which they could not fully flourish.

But then I’m not so sure about the following:

Having kids is an incredible sacrifice, and not only in the sleep department. My friends without kids may put in an extra couple of hours on a Friday night, but we work all weekend to feed the kids and keep them safe. It’s also a huge expense. Couples who work full time without the expense of childcare or diapers are much better off than we are. They have houses, while we live in a dumpy apartment. They take vacations and only pay for two plane seats. They have two full time salaries with benefits. Children are the leading predictor of poverty.

Again, she’s absolutely right that having children is a predictor of poverty (in rich societies; not in poor societies, especially agararian ones, where having children is an investment strategy). And Ann Crittenden argues that the financial sacrifice is massive — hundreds of thousands of dollars for middle class Americans, and that’s just in forgone income; it doesn’t include expenditure on the kids.

But is it an-all-things considered sacrifice? Not if the parent needs to have the child in order to have a fully flourishing life, as Laura says she does (and I feel the same way). To be charitable, perhaps, this is what people are thinking when they say having children is a choice. Laura, again rightly, says that children are a public good; but they are a public good that we produce for private reasons, which is why non-parents do not feel obliged to compensate us at all.

We need to separate two things here. 1) What is a sensible family policy from the point of view of non-parents? 2) What are parents owed? My guess is that parents aren’t owed that much, at least in terms of financial compensation, given that they are getting a good (being a parent) which non-parents either cannot get or have rejected as something that would not be good for them. But in rich societies, where we risk a serious undersupply of children it might be very good family policy to give parents a lot, so as to a) encourage child-rearing and b) enable people to do it better (so that we get a superior product).

(I am bracketing the gender inequality issues on which I have posted before; I believe, but shan’t argue, that we should try to mitigate if not eradicate the unequal prospects between men and women that is the predictable consequence of the gendered division of child-rearing labour).