Recently I was in Chicago, on the subway, and a big dude came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around, and the big dude held up his index finger, to show me that he, too, was wearing a Hello Kitty band-aid.
Recently I was in Chicago, on the subway, and a big dude came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around, and the big dude held up his index finger, to show me that he, too, was wearing a Hello Kitty band-aid.
“…she had to stay with him at nursery school every morning for four months, or else he went into a violent frenzy of tears and tantrums. In first grade, he often vomited in the morning when he had to leave her. His violence on the playground approached danger to himself and others. When a neighbor took away from him a baseball bat with which he was about to hit a child on the head, his mother objected violently to the “frustration” of her child. She found it extremely difficult to discipline him herself…”
“…In a Westchester community whose school system is world famous, it was recently discovered that graduates with excellent high-school records did very poorly in college and did not make much of themselves afterwards. An investigation revealed a simple psychological cause. All during high school, the mothers literally had been doing their children’s homework and term papers. They had been cheating their sons and daughters out of their own mental growth…”
“Whereas in earlier years it had been possible to count on the strong motivation and initiative of students to conduct their own affairs, to form new organizations, to invent new projects either in social welfare, or in intellectual fields, it now became clear that for many studnets the responsibility for self-government was often a burden to bear rather than a right to be maintained… Students who were given complete freedom to manage their own lives and to make their own decisions often did not wish to do so… Students in college seem to find it increasingly difficult to entertain themselves, having become accustomed to depend upon arranged entertainment in which their role is simply to participate in the arrangements already made…”
“…a new and frightening passivity, softness, and boredom in American children… incapable of the effort, the endurance of pain and frustration, the discipline needed to compete on the baseball field, or get into college.”
Today’s overinvolved helicopter parents are robbing kids of the character-building experiences of failure and frustration they need, and raising a generation of incompetent narcissists!
Except of course all this is from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. (The third passage is testimony from the president of Sarah Lawrence, the rest is Friedan herself.)
It’s amazing: you can open this book to just about any page and find material more relevant to contemporary life than 95% of “how we live now” articles published this month.
Andrew Gelman contemplates a blog post of L.A. Paul and Kieran Healy (based on a preprint of Paul) which asks: it is possible to make rational decisions about whether to have children?
Paul and Healy’s argument is that, given the widely accepted claim that childbearing is a transformational event whose nature it’s impossible to convey to those who haven’t done it, it may be impossible for people to use the usual “what would it be like to to X?” method of deciding whether to have a kid.
Gelman says:
…even though you can’t know how it will feel after you have the baby, you can generalize from others’ experiences. People are similar to each other in many ways, and you can learn a lot about future outcomes by observing older people (or by reading research such as that popularized by Kahneman, regarding predicted vs. actual future happiness). Thus, I think it’s perfectly rational to aim to have (or not have) a child, with the decision a more-or-less rational calculation based on extrapolation from the experiences of older people, similar to oneself, who’ve faced the same decision earlier in their lives.
Here’s how I’d defend Paul and Healy from this objection.
Suppose you had a lot of friends who’d been bitten by vampires and transformed into immortal soulless monsters. And when you meet up with these guys they’re always going on and on about how awesome it is being a vampire: ”I’m totally glad I became undead, I’d never go back to being human, are you kidding me? Now I’m superstrong, I’m immortal, I have this great group of vampires I run with, I feel like I really know what it’s all about now in a way I didn’t get before. Life has meaning, life has purpose. I can’t really explain it, you just gotta do it.” And you know, you sort of wish they’d be a little less rah-rah about it, like, do you have to post a picture on Facebook of every person you kill and eat? You’re a vampire, that’s what you do, I get it! But at the same time you can’t help starting to wonder whether they’re on to something.
AND YET:
I don’t think it’s actually good decision-making to say: people similar to me became vampires and prefer that to their former lives as humans, so I should become a vampire too. Because the vampire is not the same being as the human who used to occupy that body. Who cares whether vampires like being vampires better than they like being human? What matters is what I prefer, not what the vampiric version of me would prefer. And I, a human, prefer not to be a vampire.
As for me, I’m a parent, and I don’t think that my identity underwent a radical transformation. I’m the same person I was, but with two kids. So when I tell friends it’s my experience that having kids is pretty worthwhile, I’m not saying that from across an unbridgable perceptual divide — I’m saying that I am still similar to you, and I like having kids, so you might too. Paul and Healy’s argument doesn’t refer to my case at all: they’re just saying that if parents are about as different from non-parents as vampires are from humans, then there’s a real difficulty in deciding whether to have children based on parents’ testimonies, however sincere.
(Remark: Invasion of the Body Snatchers is sort of about the question Paul and Healy raise. Many have understood the original movie as referring to Communism, but it might be interesting to go back and watch it as a movie about childbearing. It is, after all, about gross slimy little creatures that grow in the dark and sustain themselves on your body. And then the new being known as “you” goes around trying to convince others that the experience is really worth it!)
Update: Kieran points out that the reference to “body-snatching” is already present in their original post — I must have read this, forgotten it, then thought I’d come up with it as an apposite example myself….
Someone shared this HuffPo piece on my Facebook feed:
The newly-combined global HR leadership team were coming together for the first time at the Zurich headquarters and the CEO was going to be opening the meeting and addressing the HR team. I was really looking forward to the meeting and the opportunity to focus on the growth and performance strategy and to hear what the CEO had to say about the role HR would play.
I then realized that my 5-year-old daughter’s birthday assembly at school would be taking place on the first day of the HR conference, at exactly the same time that the CEO would be addressing us. I had always had a full-time job and had remembered one piece of advice from another Mom: “Don’t ever miss the birthday assembly.” I went back and forth in my mind. I was concerned about getting off on the wrong foot with my new boss by not attending the start of the meeting, and wondered if would I be making a career-killing decision if I explained that I would be attending the birthday assembly and would fly to Zurich in the afternoon but would miss the CEO’s address.
Did you notice that somebody’s missing from this story? Somebody else who could have gone to the birthday assembly? Somebody with a penis?
You read articles like this all the time, usually under some heading that says, in many words or few, “Women can’t have it all.” But what these articles call “having it all” and treat as an impossible fantasy – being a good, loving parent without sacrificing work ambition — is what men call “daily life.”
And that’s part of the problem. If you start from the position that raising children is a colossal amount of work, and that fathers are not going to participate in that work, then, yeah, women have some very tough choices to make. But only one of those assumptions is a fact of nature.
Dating is dead now, at the hand of Facebook, texting, “hanging out,” and “hooking up,” per the New York Times:
Blame the much-documented rise of the “hookup culture” among young people, characterized by spontaneous, commitment-free (and often, alcohol-fueled) romantic flings. Many students today have never been on a traditional date, said Donna Freitas, who has taught religion and gender studies at Boston University and Hofstra and is the author of the forthcoming book, “The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.”
Hookups may be fine for college students, but what about after, when they start to build an adult life? The problem is that “young people today don’t know how to get out of hookup culture,” Ms. Freitas said.
This generation is not very good at face-to-face relationships. The image that comes to mind is two students, sitting in the room they share, angrily texting each other, but not talking. They all want to have intimate relationships, they want to get married and have kids, but that’s hard to do if you don’t know how to talk with another person. Just under half of freshmen said they’d been on a date. Relationships often begin with two people meeting at a party and hooking up. Then the next day they check each other out on Facebook, and if they like what they see they might send a message saying they’re going to a party the next night — but not inviting the other person. And if they both show up, and hook up again, that might go on for a while, and then they’d consider posting on Facebook that they were in a relationship.
Oh, for the old days, before Facebook and the ubiquitous Internet, back in 1998, when everything was different, and when Arthur Levine — yep, the same guy — wrote:
One of the things traditional-age undergraduates have been most eager to escape from is intimate relationships. Traditional dating is largely dead on college campuses, replaced by group dating, in which men and women travel in unpartnered packs. Group dating is a practice that provides protection from deeper involvement and intimacy. One student at Southern Methodist University summed up the dating scene this way: ”I don’t think there is much serious dating until people are seniors. I mean, people go out a lot but do not want serious relationsips. There is a lot of sex. College is about casual sex.”
Students talked a lot about sex. On a given night the typical pattern is to go to a bar or party off campus, get drunk, and end up back in someone’s room. One student explained, “People will stand in the bar just waiting to be chosen at the end of the night.” Developing a sexual relationship that is not intended to be emotional is just another alternative to traditional dating. It is a pattern repeated all across the country and rationalized by students, who told us repeatedly that they have never seen a successful adult romantic relationship.”
Young people who read my blog, I have an important message for you. I went to college in the early 1990s. There was not much “traditional dating.” Lots of people complained about this, especially in newspaper editorials, and worried about our ability to forge meaningful relationships. You know what happened to us? We all figured out how to get married and have kids. Just so you know.
Listening to AB talk you learn a lot about the development of syntax. The other day CJ found her mitten strap, which had gotten wedged into a crevasse in her carseat. ”CJ saved the day!” I said. AB, who likes to repeat things, said
“CJ saved a lot of day!”
So she knows that “a lot of” is a sort of intensifier but is still learning when and where it can be inserted.
AB tonight:
“I’m gonna be a mommy. And I will have a bed. And I’ll be so funny. And I’m gonna be so big. And I’m gonna have long hair! And long hands and a long face. I will have funny shoes and I will walk in them. I’ll be so funny!”
I was pleased to see that this year’s Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego offers subsidized on-site childcare for participants in the meeting. But even after the subsidy, it isn’t exactly cheap; at $14/hour, a mathematician who wanted to attend the conference full-time would easily spend over $300 on childcare.
Can you use your NSF grant to cover this $300? Nope:
Can NSF award funds be used for travel and associated dependent-care expenses for dependents of individuals funded on an NSF award?
NSF award funds may not be used for domestic travel costs or associated dependent-care expenses for individuals traveling on NSF award funds. Travel costs associated with dependents may be allowable for International travel in accordance with Award and Administration Guide Chapter V.B.4, which contains several stipulations, including that travel must be continuous for a period of six months or more.
What about organizers of NSF-funded conferences? Can we offer to use NSF money to cover childcare costs for attending mathematicians? That’s another nope:
Can conference/workshop awards or travel funds from research awards be used to support child care at conferences and workshops?
NSF award funds may not be used to pay for travel costs or expenses related to onsite care (e.g., daycare) for dependents of participants at NSF-sponsored conferences and workshops. NSF-sponsored conferences and workshops are encouraged to consider child-care services to ease the burden on attendees, but the costs of such services are the responsibility of those that choose to utilize the accommodations.
For me to go to a conference requires me to buy a plane ticket and book a hotel room. NSF wants me to go to conferences, so they allow me to charge these unavoidable expenses to my grant. If I’m a single parent of a 1-year-old child, going to a conference requires me to have childcare available at the conference location. No childcare means I don’t go to the conference. If NSF is willing to pay two hundred bucks a night for my hotel room, why not a hundred bucks a day for childcare?
One good feature of meeting Adam Phillips was that I got to ask him about Grothendieck’s use of the phrase “the capacity to be alone,” generally associated with the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. Winnicott was Phillips’s analyst’s analyst, and Phillips has written extensively on him, so I thought I’d run the quote by him. Phillips told me:
From Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography:
In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.
Update: I should have Googled this — Howard Markel gives a much more detailed account in the New York Times, including the relevant fact that one of the chief anti-inoculators was Franklin’s older brother, James.
