Since Harry “recommended”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/12/david-brooks-on-unequal-childhoods/ Annette Lareau’s “Unequal Childhoods”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520239504/junius-20/102-8303545-9810554 I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking about it and related issues. Two questions seem particularly pertinent to me: first, I think that Lareau’s demonstration that different parenting values and styles impact on children’s life chances has implications for the way in which political philosophers view the social world since it suggests that social outcomes are not just the result of the the “basic structure” of society, but also of ingrained habits and dispositions that are reproduced from one generation to another. Second, I think that fact, if true, poses a problem to liberals in that state action to overcome disadvantage-reproducing “habitus” requires the state to take a stand on the relative value of different conceptions of the good.
From the category archives:
Family Life
Sue Gerhardt’s Why Love Matters
[Update: Sue Gerhardt’s comment at 46 below answers a lot of questions people have had — I’ll quote some of it at the end of the post]
[click to continue…]
This NYT Magazine article about women who are choosing to become single mothers by using donor sperm is very interesting. The article is entirely focussed on the women’s side; no sperm donors are interviewed. But I actually thought the strangest fact was this:
…the Aryan bodybuilder with the leaping sperm has fathered 21 children (and counting — he is still an active donor), including four sets of twins. These children are all 3 and under, and their families — four lesbian couples, three heterosexual couples and six single mothers — have formed their own Listserv, where photographs of the children (all blond, with a strong familial resemblance) are posted, and daily e-mail messages are exchanged about birthdays, toilet training and the like. They are planning a group vacation in 2007.
21 children? That’s a lot of children. Is there a limit to how many children the fertility clinics will allow a single man to father? These people seem to live in NYC, so the chances of two unknowing half-siblings turning Tristan and Isolde Seigmund and Seiglinde, duh (thanks Matt) are small (and this listserv forestalls the possibility in any case). Or, if he prefers younger women, could a reverse Holy Sinner situation loom in his future? I am most interested in what this guy thinks, though. I mean, he’s a bodybuilder, which at least implies a certain degree of narcissism. It can only enhance his self-image that he’s got such motile sperm and that he is so frequently chosen by the would-be mothers–he’s the man! I’m sure we can all spin a nice Darwinian tale about how he’s maximizing his chances for reproductive sucess (and boy is he ever!), but is that really the sort of thing that consciously motivates people? Does he turn and look at every tow-headed kid on the playground as he walks by, wondering? What will he feel like when he has a child of his own, and it’s his 28th child?
UPDATE: it has been suggested in coments that he might not even know–do they really not tell you at the clinic? Also, it occurred to me that this number is only of children whose parents have registered on this donor sibling list; he may well already have 50 kids.
David Brooks has discovered Annette Lareau’s book Unequal Childhoods
So what does Brooks get right?
I caught (the excellent) Stuart Maconie talking about Catweazle
Peter Levine wants to know what parents want their kids to be like. He reports the results of a decade-long survey asking parents what single quality they valued most for their child. The winner by far is honesty. For me, there’s no question: kindness. And you?
Interesting article by Steve Landsburg in Slate about how to calculate the opportunity costs for future income of becoming a mother. He’s reporting a study by Amalia Miller (pdf), who claims that delaying childbirth for a year in your twenties increases your prospective income by 10%. I was most interested in the method, and am even more interested in hearing what economists have to say about the method and the findings (open invitation). Landsburg on the method:
How does Miller know her findings are reliable? It would never do for her to simply compare the wages of women who gave birth at different ages. A woman who gives birth at 24 might be a different sort of person from a woman who gives birth at 25 and those differences might impact future earnings. Maybe the 24-year-old is less ambitious. Or worse yet (worse from the point of view of sorting out what’s causing what), maybe the 24-year-old started her family sooner precisely because she already saw that her career was going badly.
So, Professor Miller did something very clever. Instead of comparing random 24-year-old mothers with random 25-year-old mothers, she compared 24-year-old mothers with 25-year-old mothers who had miscarried at 24. So, she had two groups of women, all of whom made the same choices regarding pregnancy, but some of whom had their first children delayed by an act of chance.
Laura takes on Linda Hirshman, standing up for those of us who think there is more to life than making loads of money and accumulating power. Laura is really pissed, and on a roll. Comment there.
I was at a “talk”:http://obama.senate.gov/speech/051110-remarks_of_senator_barack_obama_at_the_national_womens_law_center/index.html that Barack Obama gave last week at the National Women’s Law Center, and came away very impressed indeed. The speech began with standard politicians’ folderol, but kept on getting better. In particular, it focused on some of the political issues that “Kimberly Morgan”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/author/kimberly/ wrote about here earlier this year, but that “Democratic”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/03/the_new_new_thi.html “politicians”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_03/005937.php seem to have done a fine job in ignoring. Not only that, but it linked these issues directly to economic inequality.
bq. And so women still earn 76% of what men do. They receive less in health benefits, less in pensions, less in Social Security. They receive little help for the rising cost of child care. They make up 71% of all Medicaid beneficiaries, and a full two-thirds of all the Americans who lost their health care this year. When women go on maternity leave, America is the only country in the industrialized world to let them go unpaid. When their children become sick and are sent home from school, many mothers are forced to choose between caring for their child and keeping their job.
bq. … In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it – Social Darwinism, every man and woman for him or herself. It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford – tough luck. It allows us to say to the women who lose their jobs when they have to care for a sick child – life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child born into poverty – pull yourself up by your bootstraps
Between this and John Edwards’ “work on poverty”:http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20051128&s=moser, I’m actually feeling hopeful about the US Democratic party. Centrists in the party actually seem to be getting interested in inequality again, and to be finding a language that can link it to moral values. It’s the kind of hope that knows it’s going to be disappointed, if not dashed completely, by experience – but still, that’s more than I’ve had for years.
Eugene Volokh strikes a blow against the “judicial activism=judgifying I don’t like” equation. The 9th Circuit determined that “there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children.” (The case involves a questionnaire administered to 7-11 year-old public school students in California whose parents had signed a permission slip. Among the questions were a number of a sexual nature. I agree with the plaintiffs that the permission slip was misleading, and many would regard the questions as inappropriate, and someone should get a slap from the human subjects board at their university. However, this isn’t a reason to divine new rights in the Constitution…)
Either my charitable nature has overwhelmed me, or my desire for someone to fight with whose arms I don’t have to prop up and swing around myself. It is easy to pin straw men to the mat, but it lacks something, somehow. Anyway, I have written the most convincing anti same-sex marriage post I could muster on my personal blog. Please comment there.
It hardly seems sporting to take another poke at Maggie Gallagher, the best-refuted woman in the blogosphere. So I won’t. Still, her Volokh posts reminded of something I read recently …
Roads To Ruin, The Shocking History of Social Reform, by E.S. Turner. (Published in 1950. You could google up a used copy for yourself somewhere. Amazon hasn’t so much as heard of it, although other curious titles
The book’s theme:
It is a salutary thing to look back at some of the reforms which have long been an accepted part of our life, and to examine the opposition, usually bitter and often bizarre, sometimes dishonest but all too often honest, which had to be countered by the restless advocates of ‘grandmotherly’ legislation.
What with “all”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/21/selecting-future-moms/ the “kerfuffle”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/20/mommy-tracking-the-ivy-leaguers/ about the “NYT article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ei=5090&en=6a8e0c413c09c249&ex=1284868800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all on Ivy League women and their labor market / parenting plans, I took a look at some “BLS”:http://www.bls.gov/ data on long-term trends in earnings patterns within families, and in mothers’ labor force participation. Here are a couple of figures I created that capture some of what’s been happening in these areas over the past thirty-odd years.
The first figure shows trends in earning patterns within families. (You can get it as a “PDF file”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/fe-trends.pdf.) Here you can see that even in 1967, when the series starts, families where the Husband was the only earner were already a minority of all families. By the 1990s, there were almost as many families with no earners as families where only the Husband was working. The percentage of families where only the Wife was working rose from 1.7 to 5.2 percent from 1967 to 2003. The percentage of families where both the husband and wife were working peaked in 1999 (at just over 60 percent) and has fallen slightly since then. Note that this figure doesn’t tell you how earning patterns change once families have children, just the absolute numbers of each type, whether they have children or not.
David Goldenberg at “Gelf Magazine”:http://www.gelfmagazine.com has a copy of “the survey”:http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/media.html#surveying_ivy_league_motherhood that Louise Story conducted as the basis for her “irritating”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/20/mommy-tracking-the-ivy-leaguers/ “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ei=5090&en=6a8e0c413c09c249&ex=1284868800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all about Ivy League women and their plans for motherhood. Doing a reliable survey is hard, and by far the two biggest difficulties are sample selectivity (when the probability of participation is related to the outcome you want to measure: this a very tricky problem) and poor design of questions (where you look for what you want to find). Here are the first few questions from the survey, which was emailed to a group of freshman and senior women at Yale:
When you have children, do you plan to stay at home with them or do you plan to continue working? Why?
If you plan to continue working, do you plan to work full-time in an office, or full-time from your house, or part-time in an office, or part-time from your house? Why?

If you plan to stay at home with your kids, do you plan to return to work? If so, how old will you wait for your kids to be when you return?
Was your mom a stay-at-home mom? Explain whether she worked, and how much she worked! Were you glad with her choice (to either work or stay-at-home or whatever combination she did)?

At what age do you think you’ll have kids? How many kids do you want?
More commentary “at Gelf”:http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/media.html#surveying_ivy_league_motherhood.
Here’s an “irritating piece”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?pagewanted=1&hp from the New York Times about how high-achieving women students at elite schools are planning to quit their jobs and have children when they’re a bit older:
Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: … So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom. “My mother’s always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time,” Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. “You always have to choose one over the other.” … Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.
Now, let’s be clear about why the article is annoying. I don’t begrudge these women their choices in the slightest. I hope they make happy lives for themselves. In many ways they get the absolute best deal possible. But as usual, the article is steeped with the standard way of framing the issue, viz, only women have work-family choices. It’s up to them to be “realistic”, while of course the male students do not have any work-family choices at all. The subtext of the piece is the indirect vindication of those crusty old bastards in the 1950s who couldn’t see why they should hire, say, Sandra Day O’Connor because she’d only be taking a place away from a man with a family.