Family Life

In the last ten years, most of my friends became parents. One thing I observed was that many of these New Parents, both men and women, changed their character a little. Of course, people didn’t suddently become different persons by moving into parenthood; but the more I watched them, the more evidence I gathered that people who become parents somehow soften a little. Character traits such as being very assertive, being bossy, being easily irritable, all lost their sharp edges. In addition there were the changes in character, values and worldviews that these New Parents noticed themselves (and that are generally not observable to outsiders). Writing deadlines became much less important, work could wait till another day. What once looked like an almost unbearable cost of parenthood (like getting up at 5.30 am every morning) suddenly was of little importance.
Am I deluding myself when I believe to observe that the move into parenthood softens characters and makes many previously Really Important Things suddenly look rather trivial?

The open letter on childhood written by a bunch of academics, authors, celebrities and others (including Harry’s dad) seems to me causing a bit of a stir. Why did they send it to the Telegraph I wonder, rather than the Times (the traditional place) or the Guardian (read by more people who work with children, I imagine). Perhaps they think that Cameron’s Tories are going to win the next UK election and that they might make more impact on policy via the Telegraph. Anyway, it is hard not so sympathize with their sentiments even if the list of issues is an odd assortment:

Well what do you expect? If you make a lot of noise about having to have a competitive and flexible labour force — as NuLab have — then mum and dad are going to be working all hours to pay the mortgage, and when they are at home are going to slump in front of the TV after they’ve heated the ready-meals in the microwave. It wasn’t alway like this, of course. Look at _Astérix chez les Bretons_ (1965) and you’ll see the Brits being ridiculed by the _French_ for their relaxed pace of life, for taking time off for tea, and for keeping the weekend sacred. I guess we had time for children then too.

The Netherlands is rightly regarded as one of the most gay-friendly countries. But in recent years there has been a growing concern about increased intolerance towards gays. The Dutch Parliament has therefore asked the “Social and Cultural Planning Office”:http://www.scp.nl/english/ to conduct a study on the acceptance of gays in this country, which was published last Friday. Is the Netherlands really a good place to be gay? [click to continue…]

David Velleman has a riveting paper on his website called Family History (via an independently interesting post about the influence of genes on identity formation). The paper is an extended argument for the wrongness of having a child by an anonymous donor (including by an anonymous surrogate mothers). The argument goes something like this (sorry David, I’m trying to be terse): children have an extremely powerful interest in knowing who their genetic forebears were, because that knowledge plays a vital role in their identity formation (not, interestingly, because it plays the more mundane role of giving you information about your probabilities with respect to health prospects, etc). People who deliberately have children via anonymous donors thus deliberately have children for whom a vital interest cannot be met. So they do a wrong. He does not explicitly call for the prohibition of anonymous donation of various kinds (and rightly not; establishing that some behaviour is wrong falls short of establishing that it is appropriate to prohibit it), and it is not clear what the public policy consequences are of his argument. He dispatches various objections rather well – you should read the whole thing. But I’m interested here in the central premise – that having acquaintance with one’s biological forbears plays a vital role in identity formation and maintenance.

What evidence does Velleman marshall for this claim? It seems to me that he has 2 main reasons for believing it.

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I recently heard some figures about the number of Dutch women who receive spinal puncture anaesthesia when giving birth. The figure would be around 15 percent. This is probably the lowest percentage among all affluent countries. According to the same newspaper article, in Belgium the figure would be 70%, as it is probably also in many other European countries.

The exact figures don’t matter: this post is about the remarkable low percentage of women who receive spinal puncture anaesthesia in the Netherlands. I think these low figures are a scandal. Why? Because in the Netherlands most women have effectively no choice to give birth with effective painkillers. The figures are not low because there is no demand; rather, the figures are low because there are so many barriers,  that it is effectively impossible for most women to choose to give birth without suffering immense pain. [click to continue…]

Can anyone point me to a really good article, by someone philosophically sophisticated, which argues against gay marriage? I’d like to teach the topic in a class, and have some good pro-gay marriage resources, but am a bit stumped for anti-gay marriage stuff. I want something that does not rest on religious foundations, or at least doesn’t explicitly do so. If you have a sense of my sensibilities try to recommend something you think I’ll actually like. Oh, and I do have a good paper by my colleague Claudia Card which opposes gay marriage from an anti-marriage perspective, so that side of things is covered.

Thanks for the introduction, and thanks for the opportunity to blogg about some issues that have been keeping me awake at night. I’m really glad to have this opportunity to write about them and discuss them on this forum, since my 8-months old does smile back but still it’s hard to get a good discussion going with him.

I’d like to start with a puzzle. A family of three who are living in Utrecht (the Netherlands), is driving home from a visit to Brussels, the capital of Belgium. Let’s call this family the family Pierik-Robeyns (yes, my family indeed). In Brussels, two Pieriks and one Robeyns get into the car. Two hours later, they arrive in Utrecht. They have not made a stop. No-one has left the car, and no-one has been picked up. In Utrecht, one Pierik and two Robeyns’s leave the car. How is this possible? [click to continue…]

Do people oppose gay marriage because they dislike gay people, or because they’re in favour of marriages with traditional sex roles for blushing brides and chivalrous grooms? Richard Thompson Ford wrote a “piece”:http://www.slate.com/id/2145620/nav/tap2/ for _Slate_ last week suggesting that the latter is more important than people think and that opposition to gay marriage doesn’t necessarily stem from homophobia. My colleague John Sides has taken a quick look at the survey results on this – I append his findings below the line. Short version: Ford is likely right that attitudes to traditional sex roles help explain attitudes to gay marriage, but it’s a much less important explanatory factor than basic like/dislike of gay people.
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“Jenny Turner”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n12/turn03_.html in the latest issue of the _London Review of Books_ (or, to be more precise, the latest issue to arrive in print on my doorstep).

bq. ‘All lazy writing about Doctor Who,’ Kim Newman writes in his ‘critical reading’ of what he calls ‘the franchise’, ‘trades on the stereotypes of children watching “from behind the sofa”’ – exactly what I remember doing, though in our house we called it the settee. So do I really remember it, or do I just think I do, because I want to join in? Newman confesses that he can ‘confirm the authenticity’ of the sofa stereotype in his own case; so culturally embedded has the trope become that when the now defunct Museum of the Moving Image curated a Doctor Who exhibition in the 1990s, they called it Behind the Sofa

Me too! I remember the specific episode (if not its name) – it involved Cybermen and a back-and-forth between Earth and Mars where the two light minutes between the planets proved to be a crucial point in the plot. I dove behind the sofa, and refused to come out until my parents told me that the scary part was over. We were living in Darlington for a year and I was six – I then went back to Ireland, escaping the reach of BBC forever (you could get it on the East coast, but not in the wilds of Tipperary). I haven’t been exposed to Dr. Who culture or to Dr. Who itself since, so I don’t think that this can be a false memory. Is this one of those experiences that people from a particular generation share, but don’t necessarily talk about?

(and speaking of cybermen, Michael Bérubé can be “vewy, vewy cwuel”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/what_kind_of_transhuman_are_you/)

Linda Hirshman wrote what seemed to me to be “quite a dreadful op-ed”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/16/AR2006061601766.html for the _Washington Post_ over the weekend, defending her claim that stay-at-home mothers are betraying the feminist movement, and (I really don’t think I’m exaggerating here) suggesting that her critics were dominated by a congeries of vomit-eulogizing housewives and Christian fundamentalists. And, which I suspect was the main point of the exercise, touting her new book (Hirshman’s professed surprise at the controversy that she’d created didn’t ring true at all to me – I read her original article as a quite deliberate exercise in bomb-throwing). I don’t want to start a discussion over the merits of Hirshman’s arguments; I’m quite sure that this would degenerate into the usual bloodbath . What I’d like to do instead is something that I tried a while back on Israel/Palestine issues without much success – to have a meta-debate about _why_ it is that this is such an emotive topic both for women who have decided to stay at home to raise kids and women who’ve gone to work instead (I note that the element of choice here is mostly only present for middle class and upper middle class women, but that’s another debate). So to be clear – what I’m interested in is why the bombthrowers like Hirshman (and Caitlin Flanagan on the other side of the debate) have become the dominant voices. I’m _not_ interested in back-and-forths about the merits of the two sides of the argument (we’ve had that in response to quite innocuous previous posts “such as this one”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/20/mommy-tracking-the-ivy-leaguers/ and it hasn’t been very helpful) – rather in argument about why this is such a loaded and painful subject matter in the first place, for women who have made either choice. I’ll keep an eye on the comments section and – be warned – will vigorously delete comments which seem to be wandering off-topic in an unhelpful direction, which seem interested in laying the blame on one side of the debate etc etc. People may sincerely hold such views, and may even be right under the gaze of Eternity, but for the purposes of this argument, I’d like to take these claims as being stipulated. One place to start is this “FT article”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b700b1be-f7a4-11da-9481-0000779e2340,i_email=y.html (likely subject to rapid linkrot) from the week before last, which concludes:

bq. The real problem, it seems to me, is the notion that we can’t all be right if we are making different choices. My mother taught me never to say anything un-pleasant about the food other people chose to put on their plates. It might not look good to me but that doesn’t matter – it’s not my plate.

Why does it matter so much what is on other people’s plates? Why do we so often take other people’s choices as being value-judgements on our own in this area of social life? Have at it.

When little Reginald (as I’m insisting on calling him, Carolina) arrives, we shall have three kids of car-seat-needing size. One will need an infant seat, one a regular seat, and the third a booster. The second could have a booster right now, if necessary. Reg will convert to a regular car seat before the eldest outgrows the need for a seat (at least 2 years unless we stretch her on a rack or something). We have one car, a Toyota Camry.

Can anyone suggest a way of accomodating the three needed seats in the back of a 2002 Camry? We’ve done a good deal of research and can’t figure it out, and are highly resistant for numerous reasons, to exchange the Camry for a van.

One solution, of course, would be to let the eldest out of the car seat prematurely. I’ve calculated that in the 2 years to go she will be driven an a total of 3000 city miles max (almost all of them in daylight and not during rushhour) and exactly 2000 highway miles (those in 2 trips, for each of which we could hire a van). How much is it worth paying to keep her the amount safer that a booster seat makes her (this sounds like a question for Levitt, or Daniel — and the “car seats and booster seats are no safer because no-one installs them properly” gambit won’t work in this case because one thing I have learned as a parent is how to install just about any car seat in just about any car properly [to forestall comment on this, I do know that this is not a fair representation of Levitt’s argument, which is about public policy, and at that level has a ring of plausibility, but I’m interested in individual choice here]).

Anyway, I want an answer to the first question, but the second would be interesting at least.

I used to have a friend who was a very energetic adulterer. We never talked about it much, because I was too repressed to ask, but it seemed to me that he and his many partners, all of whom he met in ordinary social situations, were giving out signals that could only be detected by one another (ok, I have lots of stories that would reveal that my own social antennae are, well, deeply defective, but in my defence no-one else seemed to notice either).

I sometimes think that in a low-fertility society like ours something rather similar is going on among people who have children. Now, I should declare that I never doubted that I’d want children (only, for a very long time, that anyone would want to have them with me). But even I, away from children for most of my late-teens to late-twenties, as most childless adults are in these low-fertility times, was much more vividly aware of the downside of having children than of the upside. As Laura says:

Last week, we briefly talked about why people, especially Europeans, aren’t making babies like they used to. I’ve got a new theory. Childless people are having too much fun. They are congregating in urban areas and when they outgrow body shots and apple core bongs, they move on to nice restaurants, museums, and last minute trips to Anguila. The breeders get stuck going on the DisneyLand cruise and posing for pictures with Goofy. And why are the Europeans having even less kids than the US? Ibiza.

Kids really are fantastic, but you don’t really know it until you have one of your own. When you take the love for your kids out of the equation, all you have is a comparison between fun and no fun. And without the social pressure to procreate, many people choose no kids.

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Are divorced opponents of gay marriage hypocrites?

I suppose it all depends on the reasons why they oppose gay marriage, and on the reasons they divorced. So I can imagine lots of ways of consistently endorsing one’s own divorce and opposing gay marriage; for example, one might oppose marriage tout court and, having freed oneself of its bourgeois chains, be determined to prevent others from being enslaved by it. Or one might simply hate gays and want to prevent them to get at the good of marriage.

But neither of these are the dominant public reasons for opposing gay marriage.

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I’ve already let this slip out in a couple of threads, so I might as well announce that my wife is expecting our third child in September. We have two girls (9 and 5); they are thrilled. Some people will be relieved, and others shocked, that even in liberal Madison the number of people who have immediately said “A boy for dad” to one or other of us is now into double figures. I am neither relieved or shocked, but utterly bemused (this is apparently a common sentiment; I didn’t know). Anyway, we’re delighted, though only my 5 year old was gunning for a boy (why? No idea).

Naming a boy is going to be difficult, mainly because one of us (not me) doesn’t like many boys names, and the other (me), after coming up with two or three good names (Reginald, Alfred, Clement etc…) stops taking it seriously and starts proposing absurdities (Zebedee; Egbert; Canute etc…(no offense meant to holdrs of these excellent names, but you can see that someone who rejects Reginald wouldn’t even consider these)). Eszter sent me to this amazing site, which is no help at all, but a great time waster. So, there is a point to this post. Via the voyager I discover that my own name, which I have always liked despite its tendency to produce confusion, has completely collapsed in popularity since records began. What is amazing to me (but not at all distressing, is that its decline has not been halted at all since the arrival of on the scene of Henry Potter. Why would that be?