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. 

What I'm Listening to...Slate podcasts

... Slate Live at Politics and Prose podcast

Glenn Frankel on his new book 'The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend

Slate podcasts are my lifeline to the world of the mind these days. When you are banned from watching television by the American Association of Pediatrics and every book or magazine you want to read is knocked out of your hand and chewed on or torn, a podcast can be the closest thing you get to intelligent conversation with an adult. Slate podcasts are great because of the diversity of the material they cover and their brilliant way of unearthing random cultural artefacts that I would have no awareness of otherwise.

I'd never heard of Glenn Frankel. I'd only just about heard of 'The Searchers', the John Ford film starring John Wayne and Natalie Wood. I had heard the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, however, via another podcast I often listen to 'Stuff You Missed in History Class'. This podcast talks about the myths and lies surrounding Cynthia Ann Parker's story that Frankel has uncovered in his book about the movie, 'The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend'. One of most interesting aspects of the podcasts for me was the detail that Frankel goes into about Comanche / settler relations in the mid-1800s. The nature of the relationship was fraught of course because of the Texas-Indian Wars at the time but it struck me at the same time how much of a relationship of equals existed between the two populations. The settlers feared the Comanche people as much as the Comanche feared the settlers and raids happened on both sides of the divide. 

This surprised me because the usual story of the settlement of the US and the displacement of Native Americans is one of genocide, oppression and expulsion, starting out with the purchase of Manhattan island for a few beads and ending up with smallpox blankets and the Trail of Tears and reservations.  What has surprised me about the history I'm discovering since coming to the US is just how much the Native Americans fought back. There is not just victimization and sorrow but also fighting and uprisings. Native Americans provided resistance to European settlement where they could and fought hard for their rights and freedom. 

The Sioux Uprising of 1862 in Minnesota is a good example of Native Americans trying to fight back, rather than just pursue the path of deal-making with the settlers. After a number of deals with the Sioux were broken by settlers and they suffered from hunger and overcrowding as a result, a group of young men, fed up of trying to live alongside the settlers, raided a settler's house, killing the owners, triggering a war between the settlers and the Sioux, as years of resentment bubbled to the surface.  The Sioux won some of the battles in the war with the settlers but ultimately were outnumbered and pushed out of their lands. While the Sioux may have lost the war with the settlers, they did win some of the battles and were a force to be reckoned with. 

This is one area of American history I would love to learn more about, the history of Native American resistance. There are so many fascinating characters who emerge in these stories - Little Crow, the leader of the Sioux at the time of the uprising, Sitting Bull, the leader of the Sioux during the later Sioux wars, Quanah Parker, the son of Cynthia Ann Parker and a Comanche chief, who became leader of the Comanche. Dee Brown's 'Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee' was top of my list for American history books to read before I moved here but I was disappointed by the book once I started reading. It has interesting historical material but it is written in a very sentimental style, almost attempting to fake some kind of authentic Native American voice (e.g. 'White Man come, he bring suffering and sorrow' etc) , which got on my nerves after a while, especially since Dee Brown didn't have a drop of Native American blood in him, as far as I know. The book bemoans the fate of the Native Americans and portrays their history as tragedy but it didn't tell me much about Native American life at the time and how the different tribes used different strategies to survive and deal with European settler-colonialism. 

I am going to keep looking for the right kind of history book that covers stories like those of Quanah Parker and Little Crow in a way that does honor to their memory rather than just lamenting their fates as victims of colonialism.