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).