The Flip-Side of the European 'Job for Life' Economy

Recently I've been enjoying the new longform, multimedia reporting that the New York Times has introduced. Combining lengthy in-depth reportage with video and audio features, this kind of reporting is perfect for lingering over with a pot of tea and a notebook. 

One of best reads I've had recently is their multimedia report on youth unemployment in Europe. They speak to people in their twenties across Europe, mainly in the peripheral countries like Spain, Greece and Ireland, about their experiences in a moribund labor market. Most of the young people featured have had to move out of their country to get a job or are struggling along on social welfare payments. 

This story really struck a chord with me because ten years ago, I was in a similar position to these young people. After graduating, I left my home country to work in Germany and while I found good career-building opportunities, I was only able to find short-term contracts, nothing permanent. This suited me at the time as I was planning to go back to graduate school so I didn't want a 'proper' job. On the other hand, it was a struggle to secure any work of value and I had to fight my corner in each job I had. 

It was not a great start to my career and I always regretted my decision to start out working in Europe rather than America. It wasn't that there were no jobs in Germany and in Belgium but the workplace was dominated by older people. Good work was a privilege heavily guarded by a generation of lucky Europeans, who enjoyed conditions and benefits that were rare for the younger generation. This is an aspect of the European labor market that the NY Times article overlooks. There are plenty of large corporations and successful businesses still in Europe. They are not hiring young people, however, or if they are, they are only hiring them on temporary contracts or as interns.

There is a two-tier labor market in Europe. For those who have been in their jobs for a long time, the older generation who are established in their careers, the benefits and conditions are impressive, the stuff of American liberal media legend. For those who are marginal to the labor market - young people, part-time workers, immigrants - conditions and pay are very poor. There is no dynamism in the labor market. Employers are conservative in their hiring policies and if you are hired at all, you are expected to serve your time rather than being promoted based on ability.

Yet there is no incentive for the trade unions and ordinary employees to campaign for change to create more dynamism in the labor market because the 'job for life' system works just fine for them. Once you do have a permanent job and are in it long-term, it is a job for life, more or less. The Europeans I worked with were terrified of changing jobs and risking unemployment, which made for a sluggish, dreary work environment. 

One of the main differences I have noticed between Europe (continental Europe) and the US is the dynamic labor market. Here in Silicon Valley at least, young people are entrusted with real responsibility and high-level work straight out of college. More often than not that college will be Stanford or MIT so we are hardly talking about a paradise of equal opportunity here but it is still encouraging to be in a place where young people are given a chance to prove themselves, to learn and to progress in their careers. 

Having a bad start to your career where you are looked down on for being young, expected to defer to your elders and be grateful for any scrap of work thrown your way crushes your sprit. Sure, the young people in this feature mainly had Arts backgrounds and were not exactly flexible in their approach to working life. Not finding employment in film production, arts curating or journalism, does not make you a victim of a weak economy, it is just a symptom of being in a very limited field. Still, my heart went out to these young Europeans as I remembered being in their position. It is not a good way to start your working life and the loss of talent and energy for European economies is saddening.

What I'm Watching and Reading: 'The House I Live In' and 'The New Jim Crow'

The House I Live In - Official Trailer 

Eugene Jarecki's documentary about the war on drugs was very unsettling. While I already knew about some aspects of American justice such as California's 'three strikes' law and the problem of overcrowded prisons in this state, I was unaware just how many life sentences are being served in American jails for relatively minor drug offenses. I was also unaware of how arbitrarily draconian drug laws can be and how unaccountable police forces sometimes are, depending on state laws.

Jarecki does a great job of peeling back the layers of the War on Drugs, revealing bit by bit just how out of control drug laws have become. And yet despite the waste of $1 trillion of tax revenue for a cause that is no longer even top priority for most Americans, no politician is doing anything to initiate reform. 

Part of the reason for this is that 'judicial reform' is such an abstract concept that it just doesn't have much real meaning for most of us. Drug crime is also an issue that makes us switch off. Nobody has sympathy for potheads and crack addicts who end up in jail, let alone drug dealers. They chose to take the drugs, after all, didn't they?

One speaker in Jarecki's documentary, Michelle Alexander, was convincing enough to make me reassess this attitude, however, and I recently read her book 'The New Jim Crow' for my book club. It is a great companion to Jarecki's documentary as it highlights how the 'War on Drugs' has disproportionately affected people of color in America.

Alexander uses her considerable legal expertise through work at the ACLU, among other roles, to show how drug laws have been manipulated to corrupt the judicial system and condemn entire swathes of the poor in America to permanent social exclusion as felons. While the title of Alexander's book is inflammatory and the thesis that drug laws were deliberately engineered to oppress African-Americans not completely convincing, her point that the poor and marginalized are unfairly targeted for persecution under those laws is valid. 

As Jarecki points out too in his documentary, this is how police states start out. The Nazis didn't start with extermination immediately. Persecution in Nazi Germany started with a propaganda program to clean up society so that Germany could achieve its world-historical destiny as a great power. As part of that, certain groups were designated 'undesirables' whose removal from society would be a good thing.

Once these 'undesirables' became set apart from others, subject to different laws and sent to camps that were far away from the German heartlands, nobody really cared to ask what happened to them. It wasn't necessary for the Nazis to do very much to then progress to the extermination of these people. The apparatus of setting people apart, subjecting them to different laws and creating the camp apparatus in the first place was the key step, not the Wannsee Conference or the development of Zyklon B.

This for me was the main value in the work of Jarecki and Alexander. By highlighting the way that drugs laws can be applied arbitrarily or unconsciously to achieve very sinister social outcomes, it makes us all more aware of how fragile and precious our social freedoms are. 

Feel-Good Story of the Week: Expectant Models

Whenever I find stories like this one in the New York Times, it makes my day. It profiles Expectant Models, an agency that represents pregnant women as models to the fashion industry. The agency was set up by Liza Elliot-Ramirez, herself a model at the time, who found she was unemployable once she became pregnant.

Instead of throwing up her hands and resigning herself to 6+ months of confinement with no income, she decided to set up her own agency that would represent pregnant models only. 

I loved this story because it is a great example of how women can turn a sexist problem - nobody wanted to hire a pregnant model - into an opportunity that also changes the fashion industry mindset. 

So now, not only do I feel more empowered to change the world, I also finally know where all the beautiful sleek pregnant women come from who populate maternity clothing catalogs and Ergo baby carrier manuals.

Result: Feel-Good Story of the Week

The Perils of Life As a SAHM

Just when I thought I had made peace with my temporary status as a stay-at-home parent, along comes another article to make me groan inwardly and reach for the wine bottle. Writing in Salon, full-time parent to school-age children Jessica Stolzberg describes her upset at being asked by a mom at the bus stop: 'Can I ask you what you do all day?'

To my mind, it's a fair question. If you are an able-bodied adult without childcare responsibilities between the hours of about 9am and 3pm, then you can't be too surprised if someone wonders what you do all day. Maybe you do the gardening. Maybe you blog. Maybe you train for a marathon. It's entirely your own business but you can't be too surprised to get that question now and again.

Stolzberg didn't see it that way, however. Instead she felt that she was slighted, bullied even, by this fellow mom at the bus stop, who asked her a couple of more times after that about her day as an at-home parent. Stolzberg says that her 'blood boiled at being asked', that she felt her value as a SAHM , as a person even, was being questioned. 

This is not meant to be overly critical or belittling. Jessica Stolzberg has had her article published in Salon, after all, which is more than I've achieved after a couple of years of scribbling. This is meant to be a personal account in which the author openly admits that she is not at peace with her SAHM status and is overly sensitive about it.

What struck me about the article, however, is how self-involved it is. The article is full of 'I's and 'me's and 'my friend' and 'my life'. It even starts out as 'I think of her as...'. It is more like a journal entry than a magazine article written for an audience.

This is a great example of how life as a SAHM shrinks your world. It's easier to become self-involved when you don't have to deal with the world of work. Sanctimommies say that being a SAHM is the greatest act of self-sacrifice a woman can ever make, of course, to live for your children and martyr yourself for their needs. Nonetheless, life at home full-time, out of the workplace, away from other busy adults, does infantilize one somewhat. Instead of having to just get on with things, you have time on your hands to mull things over, nurse slights and ponder comments.

It's not that SAHMs have a lot of free time but there is a lot of empty time in the day. A spare ten minutes here and there is not enough time to build a career or do anything that requires focus but it is precisely enough time to worry whether that other mom at the bus stop hates you or not and if she does why she does and who she thinks she is anyway with her working-from-home career and her attitude.

This is one of the main reasons that I am keen to return to working outside the home in some form as soon as I can. The idea that one day, a decade hence, I might wake up to find myself nursing petty schoolyard (or bus stop) slights as outlined in Stolzberg's article is terrifying. Forget all the financial arguments and dire warnings of future bankruptcy: when you find yourself smarting over minor comments and wallowing in your sense of grievance, it's time to get re-acquainted with indeed.com.

Toddlers: STOP YELLING AT YOUR PARENTS!

We've all been there. You're at the store. You see a shiny, breakable thing and your parent insists on moving away from it, refusing to even let you pick it up or touch it. Her unreasonable attitude sparks a spiral of rage in your brain and you lose your mind. Completely. An out-and-out meltdown in the middle of Target. You scream, you throw yourself around, you bellow until your face turns an unflattering shade of purple. You have to be removed from the store kicking and screaming.

It's a tantrum. We all give in to them sometimes. God knows, we have all been told to count to three, take a deep breath and 'use your words' to express our needs. But it's hard. Emotions are overwhelming. Parents are challenging. Interesting things are always out of reach.

A new study just released, however, should give toddlers pause for thought. While research has shown that a majority of toddlers resort to tantrums to manage their parents' behavior, this most recent study from the University of Pittsburgh claims that tantrums may actually do more harm than good. Rather than minimizing problematic behavior in parents, tantrums may in fact aggravate it. 

Researchers found that parents who had experienced toddler tantrums and verbal aggression:

"[...]suffered from increased levels of depressive symptoms, and were more likely to demonstrate behavioral problems such as vandalism or antisocial and aggressive behavior."

This study is one of the first to indicate that tantrums may be damaging to parents' mental well-being. Significantly, the study also found that 'toddler warmth' such as clumsy hugs, lisped expressions of love and simpering smiles did not lessen the stressful effects of the tantrums. Parents in the study were mainly from middle-class homes, not the usual 'at-risk' profile for troubled behavior.

Based on the results of their study, researchers advised toddlers to avoid excessive verbal aggression and loud screaming when interacting with their parents. 'Letting loose at your parents might seem like the easiest option in the short run' said Professor Tang, who led the study, 'but in the long run, the deleterious effects on parents' well-being should not be underestimated.' Professor Tang suggested toddlers sit down with their parents and explain their needs and expectations openly in order to build a good communicative relationship early on. 

The toddler blogosphere has lit up in response to Professor Tang's glib advice, however. 'HOW CAN I USE MY WORDS???!?! I ONLY KNOW ABOUT 50!!!' screamed the anonymous author of Tantrums n' Tiaras blog. The most damning comment came from the Toddlerlode blog at the NY Times: 'Everybody has tantrums! It's just normal. It's not like I do it everyday, is it? I'm fed up of these STUPID studies that don't make ANY sense'.

What we have to remember here, however, is the well-being of parents. Modern-day parents suffer from higher rates of stress than any previous generation in history, forced to spend their days in child-free, bleak offices for meager pay-checks without any opportunity for physical recreation or fresh air. The 'maxed-out mom' is now a familiar figure, rushing from one appointment to the next, trying to fit everything in. Parents are under a lot of pressure.

So toddlers, next time you feel a wave of rage surging up inside you because your mother refuses to allow you to touch fire and play with knives, stop and count to three (if you can). Spare a thought for your frazzled parent and his or her worn-out nerves. Remember Professor Tang's helpful study conclusions: even one tantrum or meltdown in an otherwise good relationship can irreparably damage your parent's well-being. Toddlers: stop yelling at your parents!

Newsflash: 'Europe' Is Not a Working Mother's Paradise

This piece in the NY Times, 'Pregnant and Unemployed' about the employment discrimination faced by pregnant women elicited a lot of empathy from me. The writer, Erin Keane Scott, moved to Pittsburgh with her husband when he changed jobs, found herself unexpectedly pregnant and soon realized that pregnant women are not attractive hires for most employers. 

I can empathize because I have also been in the position - and still am - of relocating to support a spouse's career and having my own career suffer as a result. It's not pleasant when family and career get into a messy, head-on collision. 

One point raised by Erin Keane in this piece did give me pause, however. She writes: 

It’s worth noting that the United States is one of only four countries in the world that does not guarantee some form of paid maternity leave. Many countries in Europe and Canada offer at least 26 weeks of paid parental leave. 

I find it hard not to feel let down by our system. 

This theme of Europe as a working parents' paradise crops up regularly in the NY Times' parenting blog, Motherlode, too. Most recently, this post on 'maxed-out moms' ends with the comment: 

Mothers and fathers [...] should stop apologizing and start talking about the sorry cultural, societal and political choices that leave us, too often, with no chance of making it all work.

It brings me no joy to report that Europe is not the mothers' paradise Americans like to imagine. Although laws may be in place to protect women's maternity rights in most European countries, in practice many employers continue to discriminate. 

In countries like the UK, where the 'pro-business' culture (aka Americanization) is strong, you only get paid maternity leave if you have worked for the employer for at least six months and even then it is only paid (at 90% of your salary) for 6 weeks. After that, you receive a further 33 weeks at a standard stipend rate of about $200 per week. Obviously $200 per week is better than nothing but it would not cover the loss of most women's income considering that the average income in the UK is about $40,000 per year. 

In the case of this writer, if she had been job-hunting while pregnant in the UK, she would still not have been entitled to any paid time off if she had been hired while already more than four months'  pregnant  She would have been entitled to maternity leave of up to 39 weeks but only paid the maternity allowance rate of $200 per week. Again, this is better than nothing but would not meet expenses for most households.

In countries like Germany, where maternity leave is generous and employers are not allowed to make pregnant employees redundant, employers often just don't hire women of child-bearing age to avoid the issue completely.

When I worked in Germany, it was very rare to encounter women in senior management positions and when I did meet female high-fliers, they invariably had no children, as is the case with Germany's highest-flying female, Angela Merkel. It was prejudice against mothers that seemed to block the progress of German women in the workplace, not outright sexism.

Here in the US, I see women in senior management positions all the time, even those with large family commitments. It seems here that if a woman is willing to work and make the commitment required for a senior-level job, employers are happy to give her that opportunity. 

The bigger problem I have encountered here has been lack of access to affordable, good quality childcare. In some states, there is no regulation on childcare at all so working parents have no peace of mind when it comes to the care of their children. In other states, like California, childcare costs are prohibitively high.

It is definitely hard to get hired if you're pregnant. That is an even bigger problem in a moribund economy, however, and currently Europe's economy looks a lot more moribund to me than the US.

What I'm Watching: The Great (Scottish) Hip-Hop Hoax

Making it as a musician is a pipe dream for many a young small-town kid. This documentary takes that well-worn story and pushes it up to a whole new level of baroque deceit and intrigue.

It starts out with an audition in London and a new hip-hop duo from a tiny town in Scotland, Arbroath, trying to get noticed as 'the next Eminem'. Instead of success, however, they meet with derision and are laughed out of the studio with the phrase 'the rapping Proclaimers' ringing in their ears. 

Determined to try again and make the music industry executives sit up and listen, they call around venues in London and put on fake American accents, pretending to be a hip-hop duo from California, 'Silibil 'n' Brains', looking to build up a presence in London. They were booked on the spot and signed to a record label within days of their first gig.

What I love about this story is the surreal hilarity of two young guys from a town that is know for not much more than a variety of smoked fish, taking on the music industry and duping seasoned A&R executives into thinking they were 'street' and 'real'. 

Listening to these guys, I'm amazed they ever took anyone in as their American accents are not that convincing and not very Californian either. At best, they sound Canadian. If they had ever encountered even one real American in their escapades, especially a Californian, I imagine their cover would have been blown very quickly.

They kept up the pretense for a matter of years, however, and were set to release an album and single until the pressure of the lie got to them and they broke up. 'Silibil' aka Billy Boyd went back to Arbroath to get married, have children and work on a oil rig. 'Brains McLoud' aka Gavin Bain, stayed in London and continued to try and make it big as a musician but went through many dark nights of the soul along the way.

The documentary itself isn't that great. It is a po-faced and deeply sincere about the entire saga, painting it as a tragic story of big ambitions gone awry. To me the real value of this story is the humor in it. It's absolutely hilarious that two kids from the middle of nowhere conned senior music industry types into thinking they were actual real live Americans from the 'hood. It is a classic American fable of self-made dreamers who turn fantasy into reality through nothing more than chutzpah and initiative. Their story is more American than Silibil 'n' Brains ever were. 

I'm not sure why the documentary-maker took such a serious angle on the story. Possibly it may be down to the suicide attempt of one of the duo, Gavin McBain, who struggled to adapt back to reality once the Silibil 'n' Brains fantasy was exposed. Perhaps she felt a duty to keep a serious tone to the story to recognize the hardships faced by Gavin. 

The music industry is built on fakery. Lady Gaga, Lana del Ray, Rihanna, even the Great White Rappers, Eminem and the Beastie Boys, have built their careers on fake personas. I had mistakenly always thought that The Beastie Boys were from some urban ghetto in Pittsburgh or somewhere  so I was very surprised to read this article in the NY Times and discover that the members were in fact nice middle-class Jewish boys from nice New York suburbs.

Nothing about the industry is authentic. There are musicians who have achieved mainstream success who live true to their values like Björk and Arcade Fire but the mainstream pop artists are just playing a role. Who really knows the truth about who they are and where they're from? At least these two guys managed to turn that superficiality of the industry to work in their favor. Good luck to them for that.

Peace Walls and Government Shutdowns

This documentary about the peace walls in Northern Ireland made me think of Ted Cruz and his banana republicans. It shows the lives of ordinary Belfast people living cheek-by-jowl with one another but divided by a high wall, the so-called 'peace walls' that were erected during the Troubles to limit sectarian violence. I had thought most of these walls had come down after the peace process but it seems many still stand to preserve an unsteady peace between divided communities.

It was sad to see people who should have common cultural and economic interests still divided by out-of-date sectarian ideas that have no place in a modern society, imagined political loyalties and old slights that should be long forgotten.

Whenever I see Tea Party Republicans arguing their case in the media, they always remind me of the hardened hatred I grew up seeing from sectarian people. There is something about the dead-eyed stare of intransigence and the malicious grins of these hardliners that are reminiscent of some of Northern Ireland's most objectionable politicians. 

This article in the NY Times notes that many moderate Republicans are getting frustrated with the hardliners and putting them under pressure to clarify their strategy in shutting down government. Understandably, they want to move the debate on from pure intransigence and obstructionism and start focusing on how to win elections.

To quote Jeb Bush (a sentence I never thought I'd write...):

“The fight here is important to have — this is an important part of political life,” said former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida at a recent news conference in the capital. “But I do think the emphasis of being against the president’s policies, no matter how principled they are, needs to be only half the story, if not less."

This is all recognizable territory to me. Intransigence for the sake of it and obstructionism against all compromise in order not to lose face has been the bedrock of Northern Irish politics for decades. That old Ian Paisley slogan of 'Ulster Says No!' always comes to mind when I see hardline Republicans. The answer is always 'No', regardless of what the question was.

One familiar thing I didn't expect to see in the Republican/Democrat fight, however, is gerrymandering. This manipulation of voting districts has a long history in the US but it was also used by the Unionist faction in Northern Ireland to maintain a majority in NI, ensuring that an intransigent group of Unionists always had a voice in Westminster.

On the other side, Sinn Fein represented polarized Nationalist districts by not attending Westminster at all - which didn't really help matters as it left their constituents unrepresented and therefore unprotected from sectarian prejudice. The result of this gerrymandering was polarization of both parties, entrenching hardliners and alienating moderates.

A similar result of gerrymandering seems to be happening in the Republican party today. While the party may have thought it was being clever to gerrymander districts and thus win the House, in fact all they have done is create entrenched extremists who have been voted into safe districts where the Republican majority will never be threatened. This gives these politicians no incentive to negotiate.

It is this rump of 'safe-seat' House Republicans who are now providing the main resistance to the compromise that is necessary to get the government out of shutdown. They oppose Obama for the sake of it: 'Republicans Say No!' regardless of what the question was.

As it happens, many prominent US politicians from the red states have Scots-Irish ancestry. Both Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson had Scots-Irish ancestry. Ted Cruz's mother is Irish, along with his remaining Cuban-Canadian mix. Mitch McConnell looks like he could be a cousin of Ian Paisley. straight out of an Orange Order march in Belfast. John Boehner actually is orange but I'm not sure what that says about his ethnic origins.

Maybe Northern Ireland needs to take responsibility for having injected this intransigent DNA into the US political system. Here's a suggestion: Ulster can send over its own George Mitchell figure to heal the Republican-Democrat divide and get the government open and working again. It would probably be easier than letting the US descend into intra-necine violence and learning the hard way that mindless intransigence only leads to more suffering in the long run.

What I'm Watching: Claude Lanzemann's 'Shoah'

'Shoah': Part 1 of 4:

Keeping my wartime theme going, I also watched Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah recently, all nine hours of it... because it was too fascinating not to watch. It really brought home to me again the enormity of the Holocaust. The documentary is particularly interesting because, having filmed in the 1970s and 1980s, Lanzmann can use testimony from people who lived as adults through the Holocaust.

Such adult eye-witness testimony is much rarer these days of course because of the time span involved. Hearing the words of people who could understand events around them as adults, people who had co-ordinated resistance movements in Auschwitz and fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising was particularly revealing. 

Lanzmann also manage to 'catch' Europe, so to speak, before self-consciousness about the Holocaust set in. Prior to the late 1970s when he started filming his documentary, the Holocaust was something of a taboo. The war in general was not a topic that the generation who had fought it and survived it wanted to focus on. So it was only a generation after the war that people began to speak more freely about what had happened and admit to the scale of the horrors. By the 1990s and 2000s, of course, we had entered the era of Schindler's List and The Pianist and now there seems to be a movie or a book out nearly every month that tackles some new aspect of Holocaust history. 

This level of exposure is a good thing so that we 'never forget' but it also means that people are now highly aware of the Holocaust and, as a result, are self-conscious about it when they speak. In contrast, when interviewing Polish villagers local to the Auschwitz area, Lanzmann manages to capture some very plain speaking on what went on in the Polish death camps. At that point in time, the locals had little consciousness of their anti-Semitism because Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain. Anti-Semitism was never tackled by the Soviet / Eastern Bloc governments in the way that it was in Western democracies so these locals speak very freely to Lanzmann.  He also captures some raw emotion from witnesses and survivors who are often speaking for the first time about an event that left a deep scar on their psyches.

Strangely, Lanzmann gets very little testimony from perpetrators. It was presumably difficult to persuade the criminals to speak on camera because the few Nazi or SS men he does have in the film are only recorded on a secret camera. To get the one big fish on camera, Franz Suchomel who was a camp guard at the extermination camp Treblinka, Lanzemann apparently had to wine and dine him and promise him not to record the interview. Even then, he has little to reveal about his life as a mass murderer except details about the process. It seems to have been all about the process with Suchomel.  Great eye for detail. Pity his soul was nothing but a howling vacuum. 

Lanzmann's documentary is an exhaustive and exhausting slog but it is worth it. It certainly changed my understanding of some aspects of the Holocaust and was an intense recording of Europe's coming to terms with wartime horrors the previous generation wanted to forget.

What I'm Watching: 'The Flat'

Recently I signed up to Netflix, eight hundred years after everyone else as usual, to expand my treasure trove of foreign films. I'm glad I did because one of the first films I watched was this brilliant documentary from Israel "The Flat". The director, Arnon Goldfinger, uncovers the secrets of his grandmother's life as he and his family clear out her Tel Aviv flat after her death. 

As his grandmother was a Jewish woman who had lived in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s, her life inevitably turns out to be rather interesting. Goldfinger deftly traces back through his grandparents' early lives in Germany and in particular a trip they took around Palestine in the 1930s with the distinctly  Prussian-sounding Leopold von Mildenstein and his wife.

It turns out - spoiler alert - that his grandparents were in fact very good friends with the von Mildensteins and even remained in touch with them after the war. Even after his grandmother's own mother was murdered at Auschwitz. 

Their friendship seems impossible to fathom to our modern sensibilities. Goldfinger goes in search of the von Mildenstein family in Germany, near Wuppertal, and tracks down their daughter, now elderly, and her husband. She is well aware of the friendship between their two sets of parents and is very welcoming towards him. He is a little hesitant, however, given what he knows about his great-grandmother's fate and the uncertainty about von Mildenstein's activities during the war.

There follows an excruciatingly awkward scene where Arnon Goldfinger and his mother try to make small talk over some 'Sekt' in Frau von Mildenstein's back garden and at the same point bring up the inevitably dreaded question of 'what did your (grand)father do during the war?' Toe-curling prevarication ensued from the von Mildenstein side.

It was an amusing scene for me to watch because most Germans I know are refreshingly blunt, happy to be very frank when discussing any issue. They do not stand on ceremony. It was unusual to see Germans pussy-footing around an issue, speaking in platitudes and allusions. 

This spoke to the awkwardness of the topic of course. It turned out that no-one could give Goldfinger the straight answer he wanted and so he turned to the Bundesarchiv, the German national archive to dig deeper on von Mildenstein's background. There he found out that, contrary to what his daughter knew (or claimed to know?), von Mildenstein had in fact been employed with Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry throughout the war. To what extent he was a devoted Nazi remained unclear but the discovery was an emotional one for the director.

Why had his grandparents remained friends with an employee of Goebbels? Why had they continued to take trips to Germany and Austria from Israel even after the war? Goldfinger's grandparents had clearly been very well integrated into the German bourgeoisie. They also left Germany relatively early, around 1935, as voluntary emigrants to Palestine. Given that background, they would not have witnessed the extremes of anti-Semitism unleashed by the Nazis, only the earlier years of insidious prejudice and ill-feeling. Germany would have been their home as much as it was the home of Leopold von Mildenstein.

At the end of the film, I felt sorry for the director's grandparents. They cut a sad figure in their desperation to retain some link to Germany. It also was a reminder of the sad reality that many Jewish people in Germany before the Nazi era were as German as their Christian and secular neighbors, speaking only German and following German cultural practices. Kurt Tuchler, Goldfinger's grandfather, had served his country in World War One, like many Jewish men of his generation.

The director's family seemed to have entirely suppressed any personal experience of the Holocaust, never even mentioning that his great-grandmother had died in the gas chambers, for example. This seems to be a common experience with populations that suffer trauma. There is a complex psychology attached to suffering. It becomes a source of shame to have been a victim and so suffering is repressed and not talked about.

Typically only the third or fourth generations are ready to confront the suffering in the family's history   and find out the family secrets. Unfortunately, by then the generation that has the most secrets to tell has passed on. 

News From Across the Pond...

On my usual lunchtime read of the New York Times, I was confronted with the following front page:

The center headline announces the birth of the first child of the daughter of a party planner and the scion of an obscure German duchy. News of this baby's arrival has been much anticipated even here in the US, although with not quite the level of hysteria typical of the UK media. 

Call me a curmudgeon, but I find it a little disappointing that a country as large as the United States that is founded on republican (small 'r'!) principles takes such an interest in the 'Royal baby' story. They did kick out the baby's ancestor for very good reasons 250 years ago, after all. Celebrity baby stories are always good click-bait, however, so we can assume that the free market is more of a motivator here than any change in American political sentiments. 

What should be of greater interest to all Americans is the story to the left of the 'Royal baby' story on the New York Times front page, 'Location Seen As Barrier in Climbing the Income Ranks'. It details a new study that reveals how important location can be in determining economic outcomes for low-income Americans. In the poorest parts of the United States, such as Atlanta, social mobility is lower and being born into the lowest income percentiles more or less guarantees future poverty too.

The study provides further evidence confirming that the United States is one of the most unequal developed countries in the world. Other developed countries such as Denmark and Canada have better social mobility than the USA. It is interesting to note, however, that within the United States itself there are pockets of 'Danish' or 'Canadian' equality with the Midwest of the country and wealthier metropolitan areas providing more opportunities for upward mobility than poorer parts of the US. 

This makes sense because when jobs are scarce nepotism tends to come into play. Growing up in Ireland with a 25% unemployment rate at times, the only way to get a good job was to know someone. In an increasingly competitive economy, this phenomenon seems to be more widespread than ever. In the same edition of the New York Times, an opinion piece 'Who's Your Daddy?', points out that a more unequal society becomes a vicious circle eventually. As life becomes more and more competitive those who enjoy relative privilege in the top quarter of earners feel unwilling to make way for the less fortunate. It becomes more acceptable to engage in nepotism and shy away from hiring unknowns.

The writer gives the example of Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner appointing his son Gus to be head of Rolling Stone magazine's online presence. At the ripe old age of 22. News of this kind of aristocratic-style appointment based on little more than primogeniture are disappointing. At least we still live in a society where business magnates like Rupert Murdoch and Jann Wenner, who set their sons up to inherit, are still obliged to explain their decision-making to shareholders and the public. Also, there are still examples out there of fantastically talented young people, like Tavi Gevinson, who have achieved success on their own steam. 

Nonetheless, if the economy keeps going in this direction, maybe it won't be long until Americans find themselves reading about endless hype about the birth of a Zuckerberg or Parker baby, with the event hailed as securing the future of an hereditary business empire and the sale of Facebook-Birth memorabilia that gullible subjects citizens can spend their hard-earned dollars to collect.

Celebrities Playing House

Every so often, a wealthy, successful woman comes out with some clanger on 'traditional' gender roles, guaranteed to drive up page views and click throughs and traffic. Recently we had this gem of wisdom from the multi-millionaire model, Miranda Kerr:

"If you're really an alpha female, you don't allow [your partner] to have the space to feel like the man in the relationship. Maybe I am too traditional, but men feel important when you ask for their help, instead of thinking you can do it all on your own." 

To be charitable here, we have to recognize that models are not known for their intellectual credentials. They are paid to look good, after all, not for their brainpower.

Women like Miranda Kerr do have a high profile, however, and serve as a role model for some misguided souls. Other rich and successful women even trade off the idea that they play a traditional role in their home lives, despite their high profiles. Beyoncé has controversially pitched her most recent world tour under her married name, 'Mrs Carter', confounding feminist commentators. 

Gwyneth Paltrow is another example of someone who has enhanced her personal brand with appeals to 'traditional' values. She likes to portray herself as a homely wife and mother, having dinner ready for her husband when he is home, as in this quote from a profile in Harper's Bazaar in 2011:

"She... remain[s] positive about the relatively traditional role she plays as a wife and mother, with her husband's career commitments currently taking precedence over hers. "I have little kids in school. I want to maintain my marriage and my family, so I have to be here when he comes home.' "

Does anyone really believe that Gwyneth Paltrow lives the life of a 'traditional' wife and mother? Her filming schedule -  the three Iron Man movies and a number of independent films in the last few years alone - is not compatible with a 9-5 schedule and neither is her musician husband's touring schedule.

It begs the question why these women feel the need to be so vocal about the so-called 'traditional' values that they follow in their personal lives. These are successful women in their own right with high profiles and personal fortunes built on years of hard work.

To me, I think a lot of these pronouncements come from guilt. None of us feel like we are doing the best job we can do as parents. If you are a movie star or celebrity, it's inevitable that you will need to rely on childcare and tutors and service personnel to maintain your home life and raise your children.

These women, like many career women, for some reason feel like they have to apologize for this. And so they 'play house' for the public, pretending to maintain normal home lives just like the rest of us regular schmoes.

What they do not understand, however, is that regular schmoes are actually working and sacrificing time with their families because they have to. For most people, having dinner on the table for a husband or giving their partners space to 'be a man' is the least of their worries. Most people have no help at all and work long hours to just make ends meet.

It is ironic that when celebrities say these things about maintaining their marriages and what they think is a normal family life, they are only revealing how far removed they are from the concerns of their fan-base.

Instead of trying to espouse what they think are normal family values, these women should instead be thankful that they are wealthy in their own right, independent of their husbands, have successful careers and can afford all the help they need to make things run smoothly at home. In doing so, they are living feminist values that many other women cannot afford. Maybe that explains why they in turn are so cavalier about those very same values, taking their freedom and good fortune for granted.

Newsflash: Talking To Babies Makes Them Brainy

Parental talk is back in the media. This 'Lexicon Valley' podcast from Slate talks about a 1995 study by researchers at the University of Kansas that studied the home environments of 42 families, ranging from professional, upper-income families to families living on welfare. The findings of the study, carried out over ten years, demonstrated that the upper-income children developed a much wider vocabulary than the lower-income children and that this gap in cognitive skills was set before the age of three.

The researchers noted four key differences between the upper- and lower-income family environments:

1. The upper-class families used better vocabulary with more complex words and usage of those words than the lower-income families

2. Praise and positive reinforcement was common among upper-class parents

3. Upper-class parents were more likely to ask their children questions and give them choices to facilitate decision-making rather than simply ordering them to do something e.g. 'It's cold outside. Do you think you need your jacket?' rather than 'Put your jacket on'.

4. Professional / upper-class families were much more likely to respond to and continue a conversational thread initiated by the child, rather than only speaking to the child on their own terms.

Upper-class parenting talk 'suggested a culture concerned with names, relationships and recall, with symbols and analytic problem-solving' whereas lower-class parenting talk was full of imperatives, prohibitions and parent-initiated talk, 'suggesting a culture concerned with established customs, with obedience, politeness and conformity', according to the study's authors.

So much for that. When I looked into the details of the study (I can't actually read it as it's $70.00 to buy online...), it struck me that the sample size is pretty small and the data does not tell us anything earth-shattering. I'm not sure why the Lexicon Valley guys are surprised that the study didn't get wide coverage at the time. It's a pretty small study from a small university, hardly a nationwide cohort study with vast policy implications.

Of course it makes sense that talking to your baby will improve his / her mind and most of us try to make the effort to do that as much as possible. If you have a lot of children, however, and limited resources  due to your 'lower socio-economic status' aka being broke then you will simply have less energy to do this. Upper-class children will always have an advantage over lower-income children as their parents have far more resources and support. Vocabulary is only a small slice of that story.

Piecemeal projects, like this Providence, RI scheme that I have previously been skeptical of on this blog, will not make a huge difference. The real way to try to improve preschool children's cognitive skills outside of the home is to offer subsidized or government-run childcare that is affordable for lower-income households. Instead of paying lip-service to the stay-at-home mom as a social ideal, politicians should start to offer struggling parents, many of whom are low-income single mothers, the kind of support they and their children need: good-quality childcare. Why not make preschool something that all children can access, not just the children of the rich who probably need it the least?

Does Motherhood Make You Poor?

Stephanie Coontz raises the valid point in this op-ed from the New York Times that, while women have made significant gains in the workplace since the 1960s, there is still an earnings gap and that earnings gap largely falls on the shoulders of mothers. Women without children are almost at earnings parity with men by now. Motherhood imposes significant costs on women.

So what? you might say. Having children is a choice. If you choose to start a family, something has to give. You work more flexible hours. You can't travel as much. You become less committed to your career as children and their concerns take over. Isn't that just obvious?

It's obvious because of the way we understand motherhood. It's assumed in our society that when women become mothers they have to sacrifice something: their earning potential, their time, their bodies, their pelvic floors at the very least. It is not questioned that a man can become a father without much sacrifice on his part. Biology has programmed us to accept that women bear the brunt of the cost of reproduction because that is how Homo Sapiens happens to procreate. We're not plants or bees (more's the pity).

This has created a world where motherhood can mean the end of a woman's career while fatherhood has no effect on a man's career or can in some cases even increase his status and earning potential. We accept that as a fact of life, something 'obvious', caused by the woman's 'choice' to have a baby. 

Biology is destiny then, certainly according to certain male decision-makers like Paul Tudor Jones, who caused offense with his recent comments about women's inability to focus on their careers once they become mothers. There is a grain of truth in his words in that the biological aspects of being pregnant, giving birth and nurturing a highly dependent child for a year or more can be overwhelming. What's questionable is the way he assumes, as many people do, that these few years of intense biological investment somehow determine a woman's path for life. In this view of things, motherhood is a transformative, all-or-nothing state for women whereas fatherhood is just incidental for men.

This is the kind of prejudice that pushes women who become mothers into poverty while their non-parent peers maintain their career trajectories. Motherhood can be all-consuming but it doesn't have to be. It depends on the child, the child's age and the mother. The early intense years don't last forever (thank Christ). The expectation that motherhood will change a woman's priorities and limit her ambitions can in fact be more damaging than motherhood itself.

Gay Married Terrorists Are Saving America!

This clip of Fox News dinosaurs experiencing some kind of male hysteria (testeseria?) about female breadwinners is very amusing. What could these boys have their boxers in such a twist about? A Pew Research study showing that four out of ten US households now have a female breadwinner. Their comments reveal a deep rage at the idea that almost half of American households are no longer  economically dependent on men. 

'We're watching society dissolve around us!!!'

'Something is going terribly wrong in American society - and it's hurting our children!'

'The male typically is the dominant role... the female is a complementary role. It's bad for kids and bad for marriages. It's tearing us apart!!'

'Bottom line: it could undermine our social order!!'

(Exclamation points added to convey testeserical tones in which these statements were delivered.)

Erick Erickson's reaction is the most revealing, with his weird belief that nature has ordained a certain order to male/female relations that this trend of female breadwinners is turning on its head. That one is as old as the hills. It must be wonderful to have such certainty that you belong at the head of a structure, playing a dominant role and that 'science' has ordained it to be so. 

Nobody go telling this guy about bees now! Or birds or bears! Or even large primates, for that matter, who live in groups where, yes, there is a dominant male but where the rearing of the young takes place in the group and the group as a whole forage for food and resources.

What is possibly ordained by nature for humans is a hunter-gatherer scenario where men and women live in a tribal group of closely related people. The children are cared for in a group setting and resources are sought and shared within the group. The modern equivalent of this 'traditional' way of life would be homeless people who move from place to place to find food, dumpster diving and 'grazing' at food banks. I hope this Erickson guy is prepared to give up his home and cooked meals and don a pair of fingerless gloves and a dumpster diver's satchel so he can stop destroying America and start living a traditional way of life that is ordained by science. It would certainly help him to lose a few pounds anyway.

I have some good news for the Fox talking heads, however. A recent article in The Atlantic magazine shows that one group in American society is fighting to save traditional values: gay married couples. 

In debating this issue, Slate podcast commentators note that Mundy's research showed that there are more stay-at-home parents among gay couples than among straight couples. Whether it's because gay men tend to be higher earners and so can afford a single-income household or whether it's just because gay couples feel less oppressed by the housewife stereotype than straight couples do, this is a growing trend among gay married couples. My guess is that it might be due to the fact that many gay couples adopt their children and having a stay-at-home parent helps their chances in being considered as adoptive parents.

As Hanna Rosin comments: 'We're choosing the conservative, traditional path and gay people are finding a way to make it cool for the rest of us'. 

So men of Fox news: take heart! There are still 'traditional' marriages in America. They just might not seem that way to you at first glance.

What I'm Listening To: 'Walking Across America'

This American Life is one of my favorite podcasts. Every Monday morning, I look forward to loading it up on our Apple TV and finding out what new stories Ira Glass and his team will have for me. 

I discovered This American Life completely by accident before I ever moved here. It was one of the top podcasts on iTunes so one time I downloaded a few episodes out of curiosity. When we had just moved into our new house and had no internet connection yet, I listened to an episode while setting our new kitchen to rights and was instantly hooked. It was the slow storytelling that drew me in and the sheer quirkiness of some of the stories featured. Most of all, however, it was the slow pace of the show, the fact that every story was given its chance to unfold as it needed to without the pressure of advertising and soundbites and zingers and driving web traffic. 

Now that I actually live in America, my appreciation of 'This American Life' has changed as I can set it into its cultural context. It turns out that Ira Glass is not a twenty-something guy doing a low-key public radio gig, as I thought when I first heard the show, but is something of a left-wing cultural icon. It turns out that NPR is a national cliche for being right-on and wholesome, although you could kind of tell that from the content of the show already.

I have noticed recently that TAL has been running more repeats or re-hashing old episodes and splicing them together with newer material so that does make me wonder if the show is being affected by budget cuts or if this was always the case and I'm just noticing now because I've been listening to the podcast regularly for a couple of years.

This week's episode, Hit the Road, was a great example of how good This American Life can be when it airs fresh material from new writers, however.

The first part was dedicated to a project by a new writer, Andrew Forsthoefel, who decided that, at 23, he would walk across America instead of continuing in his graduate job. What's interesting about his journey is that he spends his time listening to people's stories along the way and gathering their memories of their own lives. He wore a sign 'Walking to Listen' on his back throughout his journey. Something about this story really appealed to me. It had a very Studs Terkel feel to it, focusing on individual experiences to build a picture of local history. 

The whole project is available here with videos and photos of his trip. Forsthoefel is also planning a book about this journey and, I say, more power to him. 

Weekend Reading - 04/28/2013

'The Growing Pains of Jonathan Krohn'

This piece in the New York Times, about the erstwhile pint-sized pundit, Jonathan Krohn, darling of Fox News, was a real feel-good story. A few years ago, I saw a youtube clip of him talking at CPAC, so self-assured and yet so young, and I remember thinking how desperate conservatives must be if they are turning to brain-washed home-schooled children as their Next Big Thing.

Krohn is now 18 and has just dropped out of NYU to take up a job with a Kurdish news agency. He sounds like he has broken free of his conservative upbringing and started to think for himself. It takes courage to admit your mistakes, even adolescent ones, and even greater courage to move to a foreign country at 18 and start a career with no college education. Fair play to him.

The Atlantic magazine provided much of my weekend reading as my print edition showed up in the mail this week. I am experimenting with some old-school print media options to see if it forces me to read more rather than pissing around on using the internet. There was something calming about sitting down, free of any devices and intrusions, to just read my magazine and focus on it. There was something refreshing about not hopping from one tab in Safari to the next to look up things on Wikipedia and Google and so on. Instead it was just me, The Atlantic magazine and quiet, which makes a change.

The Slacker Culture Among Young Japanese People

This article stood out for me in particular, showing the dangers of allowing unemployment and job insecurity to become embedded in your economy. A whole generation of young Japanese who have never had a proper job and just drift from one non-regular job to the next. This is rapidly becoming reality in much of Europe as well. 

How Not to Die
This was a story about a doctor near Boston who is determined to change end-of-life care in America by re-educating doctors and patients about 'The Conversation', how end-of-life care is discussed with families. Fascinating story of a workaholic with a mission to improve patient care.

'Diagnosing the Wrong Deficit'
A psychiatrist's novel theory on the causes of ADHD - sleep deprivation. He shows how many ADHD sufferers are found to have sleep disorders of some kind and lack delta sleep. As the parent of a toddler, you get to know the hyperactive grouchiness that toddlers exhibit when they don't nap properly, those hellish days when they wake you up in the night and then spend the following day being impossible because they're overtired. It's interesting to think that poor sleep patterns could be something that persists beyond toddler years, into adolescence and even adulthood.

Finally, this random find from pissing about on the internet inspired some debate in our house: a photo essay in TIME magazine from a few years ago, showing families in 16+ different countries, posing with their weekly food intake. The level of food inequality worldwide is disturbing (but not half as disturbing as the fluorescent glow of the some of the packaged food displayed by one American family) with a family of six in Chad surviving on just over a dollar's worth of food while a German family of four spent $500 on their weekly food. A sad story given its implications...

Talking About the Weather

I have a guest post at Write On, Mamas! today as part of their A-Z blogging challenge, talking about how I've adapted to the Californian climate (answer: by running away to the sea to enjoy the fog...).

W is for Weather

The Terrifying Reality of the Mommy Trap

Maternity leave here in the US is limited to the FMLA, three months of unpaid or partially paid leave for any employee with caring responsibilities. Women who give birth are given no quarter in the US: you just have to shoulder your unique biological burden and get back to work asap if you want to keep your job. Usually that involves a mix of family help and daycare. For lower income women, daycare, often a cheaper home daycare, is the default option. 

In this interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Jonathan Cohn, author of the recent article 'The Hell of American Daycare', gives a good rundown of the history of family leave regulation in the US. The upshot of it is that, due to moral squeamishness about endorsing mothers of young children working outside the home, Americans are left to fend for themselves when it comes to childcare. 

As usual, it's the poor who suffer most. If your mother lives nearby and can take care of your baby: great, you can go back to work with peace of mind. If you're rich enough to afford a nanny, as many are where I live, then you can go back to work with peace of mind (kind of...). If you're lower-income and have no family nearby, however, you're on your own.

As Jonathan Cohn describes with heart-rending detail in his story for the New Republic, it's the children who ultimately suffer. And yet, still, women go back to work and put their children at risk in poorly regulated daycare places because they have no choice. In fact, 68% of women with children under 6 years of age are in the US labor force. Why would so many women still choose to work when daycare provision is so bad and so expensive? 

I would guess that, apart from financial necessity, it has something to do with this article in Atlantic magazine 'The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment'. It shows pretty conclusively that if you have been out of work for more than six months, even if you have relevant professional experience, you have almost no chance of being hired. In that context, a short career break to raise your preschool aged children can turn out to be the end of your career. 

It's an understandable prejudice on behalf of employers: why hire someone whose contacts and skills are five years out of date, when there is someone else on your list who is moving from an identical job or has just been 'in-between jobs' for a few months? Taking on a long-term unemployed person is a higher risk option. Taking on someone who has spent five years taking care of their children is slightly less risky as they have a legitimate reason for the break but it's nonetheless a risk. The only way to lessen the risk is to regulate. Somewhere along the line in this unregulated mess, the government is the only one who can step in to create either supply or demand. Either improve the supply of daycare through tax incentives and improved regulation or improve the demand for hiring the long-term unemployed, including parents returning to work, through incentives and specialized back-to-work schemes. That would go a long way to reducing the terrifying reality of the mommy trap.

What I'm Reading... Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion's California is the kind of place I had in my mind's eye before I moved here. Brash, sunny, arid and plastic, full of new things, fresh starts and a to-hell-with-the-past attitude. (As it has turned out, I'm in leafy Northern California, a remarkably lush place despite the low rainfall. San Francisco is worlds away from the California I had in my mind. Although it is sacrilege to say so, San Francisco nearly belongs out of California altogether. It should be towed northwards to join up with the Pacific Northwest, the cool, foggy Portlandia where it belongs.)

If I had read 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' before moving here, I probably would have hesitated more in taking Global Giant up on their relocation offer. The essays paint a portrait of a part of America that is wild and new but also tough and heart-breaking, not a place for the faint-hearted. The very first essay about the Seventh Day Adventist murderess, Lucille Miller, has a chilling modernity to it. 'Of course she came from somewhere else' Didion writes about the Canadian-born Miller, who staged a car crash while out driving with her lethally drugged husband in order to destroy the evidence of his murder and collect the insurance payments. I found this sad account of the real nightmare the family was living behind their California dream, written by their daughter in the LA Times.

Didion herself was from Sacramento, not Death Valley, but a hot enough place with no coastal breeze to cool it. The book of essays has the feel of aching heat about it, waiting for a drizzle of rain to slake your parched throat. There is a sense that Didion conveys of California being the place where America finds its end. Even the greatest heroes created by Hollywood are nothing behind the facade.

Most fascinating for me is her account of the people at the heart of the 'flower power' movement in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. This gave me a new perspective on the Sixties peace movement. From Didion's perspective, half a generation older than these 'kids' and 'little girls' as she says, the hippies are products of a society in decline where no-one belongs anywhere anymore. The only answer they have to the atomization of modern American life is drugs, self-destruction and dissipation. It's a negative take on a movement we tend to idealize today.

She zeroes in the the children living in the hippy communes, a little boy called Michael whose drugged-out parents are oblivious while he plays with electrical cables and matches and a five-year-old girl who is given speed by her mother. It reminded me of Ralph Arlyck's documentary 'Sean', about a grass-smoking four-year-old boy growing up with hippie parents in the Haight in 1969.

Didion was around my age, and had one child also, when she wrote the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 'On Going Home' struck a particular chord with me, exploring as she does her mixed feelings about the familiarity of home to her as she takes her daughter from LA to Sacramento to visit her parents for her first birthday and the fact that she can't offer her daughter a feeling of home in the way that she herself had growing up. This idea of lacking a home, rootlessness and drifting pervades the whole book.

That's who California is for, after all: drifters, dreamers and prospectors hoping to find gold, to find their better selves in the sun-soaked California landscape. 

A Five Million Dollar Question

Should it take five million dollars to encourage parents in Providence, RI, to talk to their babies? According to this article in the NY Times, the city won a Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge competition prize to spend $5m on investing in the development of parenting skills among its most marginalized populations. At first read, I thought it sounded like an interesting program. It's widely agreed that the child-rearing from the age of birth to three years old is critical to child development and it's good to see money going towards a good cause.

The more I read, however, the more hare-brained the scheme in question seemed. Providence already does invest in services for poor families such as nurses and social workers and free parenting classes, but the goal of this program is to encourage parents to talk to their babies. The scheme is called Providence Talks and as part of it, babies in eligible homes will be equipped with recording devices that monitor the auditory environment around them, counting new words they are exposed to, excluding background input such TV or music. As the NY Times puts it:

"Now Providence will train [city] home visitors to add a new service: creating family conversation. [...] The visitors will show poor families with very young children how to use the recorders, and ask them to record one 16-hour day each month. Every month they will return to share information about the results and specific strategies for talking more: how do you tell your baby about your day? What’s the best way to read to your toddler? They will also talk about community resources, like read-aloud day at the library. And they will work with the family to set goals for next month."

Something about this scheme is unsettling to me. Partly it's the 1984 feel that it has. Recording devices in homes? Recording family conversations and 'setting goals? Fox News would have a field day with this. I can see the headline now: 'ObamaTalk: using recording devices to control how you talk to your kids - in the privacy of your own home!!!!' I'm surprised it hasn't been picked up by Republicans already as an example of public-spending-gone-mad. 

As a parent, however, there is something more unsettling about the idea that poor parents need to be told how to speak to their children and that they need to be recorded doing so. I can see how such a scheme would be a social scientist's dream come true. You get to collect hours and hours of recorded data on your subjects for free and then follow up on the development of those subjects over years. It's the stuff of PhD dreams. It is a volunteer program, of course, so anyone participating will be doing so willingly. Nonetheless, there is something faintly patronizing about it all.

Do poor parents need to literally have words put in their mouths by social scientists from the city authorities? If they want to encourage talk between parents and babies, then surely it can happen organically in the subjects' own homes, structured in a way that suits them and that reflects the cultures and languages that the families value, not the social scientist's idea of what constitutes valuable culture or language. By all means, include current research on the importance of talking to babies in parenting classes and offer peer support but it is surely overbearing to intrude on parents' time with their children in such a paternalistic way. It's also assuming that the parents need to have goals set for them and to be managed, like helpless objects of a study, instead of responsible adults trying to do what's best for their baby. Already by labeling a home as poor or ignorant enough to warrant intervention on this level - you're so poor and ignorant, you can't even figure out how to talk to your baby properly so let the nice lady from Social Services help you with that! - the scheme is categorizing children from an early age. That might work for a social study but it can't be good for the participants. 

Talking to your baby may be powerful in building cognitive skills but it's hard to see how this scheme will benefit the parents and babies involved any more than some simple parenting classes (that probably cost less than $5m).

Oul' Maggie

Catching up with news after a couple of busy days, I read that Margaret Thatcher died. She reached a fair age, as they say where I'm from, and I'm sure I'm not the only one to have mixed feelings about her passing and yet hesitating to speak ill of the dead.

As a child of the '80s, Margaret Thatcher was an influential figure in my life. She was the enemy but she was also a woman who drove a tank past assembled troops standing to attention, while dressed immaculately. She was described by a leading IRA man, no less, as 'the biggest bastard we have ever known'. As an eight-year old feminist-in-training, I had to have a grudging respect for her. She and Ronald Reagan were the dynamic duo of world affairs, ubiquitous on the nightly news, it seemed.  I always remember their hair. He had jet-black, plastic Lego-man hair that never moved. She had russet bouffant hair, perfectly set, that never moved. Maybe their hair reflected their intransigent, conservative Weltanschauung.

In Irish nationalist households, Thatcher was hated for her hardline policy on Northern Ireland, her refusal to negotiate or even attempt to understand her opponents' point of view. When it came to relations with Ireland, Thatcher didn't want to know the background, the history, the reality of the situation. Her policies in Northern Ireland reflected her view that the IRA were just criminals, their political motivation irrelevant to their actions, and she pursued internment of any suspected terrorists without trial, a blueprint of George W. Bush's later War on Terror, and denied interned prisoners the status of political prisoners, even in the face of hunger strikes. Thatcher was British tyranny personified.

And yet, just as her profile was on the wane, that famous photo of her driving a tank past troops in Germany was all over the press. At the time, I was reading a book, possibly this one, called 'A Children's History of Britain and Ireland'. The 'and Ireland' was printed in smaller letters, which irked me immensely of course but after that initial upset, it turned out to be a good book. One of the stories I liked best was the story of Boadicea and her 100,000-strong army of men, waging war against the Romans to defend her territory. I loved the idea that there had been a military leader who was a woman so far back in ancient times and that her military success, such as it was, became noted in the historical works of classical scholars. It proved to my eight-year old self's satisfaction that women had been prominent in public life for centuries and had even led armies into battle. In my mind, Thatcher and Boadicea provided a counterpoint to the patriarchal Catholic culture around me, proving that, yes, women can be strong and can fight and be leaders, just like men. For me, Thatcher and Boadicea were both symbols of female strength and heroism, even if, in the case of Thatcher, the guns were probably pointed in my direction.