FATHERS WHO FAIL COSTLY FOR FAMILIES, ECONOMIES, BUT DADS CAN BOUNCE BACK: Deseret News

feature:

...The National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse tracks pertinent statistics. "When fathers are involved in the lives of their children," it notes, "especially their education, their children learn more, perform better in school and exhibit healthier behavior. Even when fathers do not share a home with their children, their active involvement can have a lasting and positive impact. There are countless ways to be involved in your child's education at all ages."

The organization says children with highly involved fathers have increased mental dexterity, more empathy, less stereotypical views of their gender roles and better self control. They are more curious and better able to solve problems. A father's active involvement with his young children helps language and literacy development. When non-custodial dads are very involved with their kids' learning, those kids are more likely to excel at all grade levels. And when dad doesn't live with his kids but sees them often and plays a big role in their education and lives, three things are more likely: "Fathers paying child support, custodial mothers being more educated and custodial homes not experiencing financial difficulties," says the U.S. Department of Education.

But what if the number of families without fathers keeps growing and if there are, as Slayton suggests, entire communities that lack male role models? ...

The A stands for "all-in marriage," he says. "You hear people say ridiculous things like 'we had some struggles, some fights, and thought it better to get a divorce.' Statistics are very clear that is not the case" except with physical abuse, he says. "All marriages go through difficult times. But for the kids and the mom and dad, when (they) stick together and get through the difficult times, kids' futures and success are dramatically strengthened.

"Being a good husband to your wife is the biggest gift you can give to the children themselves," Slayton says. ...

[Tom Watson] believes men need to do better in their friendships. They hang out and talk about sports, he says, but they often don't dig deeper, and they should. Lots of men before him faced challenges he went through, he says, and there are opportunities to share the wisdom gained. Too often, it doesn't happen. They should be able to ask for support, and to do it on a regular basis, "not just when they're having a meltdown. They will tell you what they think about the New England Patriots in great detail, he says, but most avoid communicating on a level where they'd have to "almost unzipper our hearts."

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Labels: childhood, children, culture, Fathers, friendship, gender, Marriage, parenting, unmarried parents

posted by Eve at 12:06 PM VOTE

DON'T ADOPT FROM ETHIOPIA: E.J. Graff

at the American Prospect:

Miriam Jordan at The Wall Street Journal has published an investigative article about adoption from Ethiopia, which has for several years been riddled with allegations of fraud and unethical practices. This article tells the deceptively simple story of Melesech Roth, whose Ethiopian birthmother died of malaria, and whose birthfather (who lives in stone-age poverty) gave her up for adoption when someone came through his village, offering to take children to America who would later help support their families. The writing is so straightforward that you may not realize how extraordinary it is unless you've tried to write a similar piece. Persuading an adoptive family to talk with you on the record, and also finding the biological family and getting them to talk on the record, is a significant feat. ...

Here's the rule of thumb: If you can get a healthy infant or toddler within a year, don't adopt from that country. Adopt, instead, from American foster care, or from countries that send abroad very few children, and when they do, the children who are available are older, or disabled, or come in sibling groups, or otherwise have had trouble finding new local homes. Or if you're adopting for humanitarian reasons, donate that money an organization that helps children stay with their families, or brings clean water and mosquito nets and medicines to their villages.

It's far more rewarding to love an individual child than to give to anonymous foreigners. I know; I'm parenting an adopted child. But no one wants to be complicit, even unknowingly, in defrauding a father out of his daughter.

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Labels: adoption, childhood, children, Ethiopia, Fathers, poverty

posted by Eve at 7:34 PM VOTE

AFRICA'S CHILD HEALTH MIRACLE: THE BIGGEST, BEST STORY IN DEVELOPMENT: Michael Clemens

at the Center for Global Development's blog:

If you’re sick of the sad, hopeless stories coming out of Africa, here’s one that made my year. New statistics show that the rate of child death across sub-Saharan Africa is not just in decline—but that decline has massively accelerated, just in the last few years. From the middle to the end of the last decade, rates of child mortality across the continent plummeted much faster than they ever had before.

These shocking new numbers are in a paper released today by Gabriel Demombynes and Karina Trommlerová in the Kenya office of the World Bank. Here are their figures for some of the recent changes in rates of child death across the continent. The numbers in the last column are the percent declines in child death rates every year over the past few years.

This is a stunningly rapid decline, and nothing like it was occurring even as recently as the first half of the decade.

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Labels: Africa, childhood, children, health care, poverty

posted by Eve at 11:29 PM VOTE

HOW TO TALK TO LITTLE BOYS: Lisa Bloom

at the Huffington Post:

My friend Oliver is 12 years old. I give his single mom a break every now and then, and he comes over to hang out. He's a whiz on a skateboard, has some killer dance moves, and radiates angelic sweetness. "You're a good person," he said to me once, apropos of nothing, getting me all choked up. He sees the best in everyone, though his own life has included years in a homeless shelter and an abusive dad. Recently, I saw Oliver on a sunny California day. We were outside at the pool, eating watermelon and relaxing. He loves to talk about his Xbox or Weird Al YouTube videos. Instead of going there, I asked Oliver, "Read any good books lately?" In response, he mumbled, "I guess." Books aren't Oliver's thing. I know he'd rather talk about basketball, or sneakers, but I wouldn't, and I was on a mission.

"What's your favorite book?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, staring off into the distance.

Oliver reads only when absolutely required to. You'd never find Oliver sneaking a book under the blankets with a flashlight, as I did growing up. (The midnight glow from his bed would be an iPhone app.)

When I had this moment with him, I was in the midst of writing, "Swagger: 10 Urgent Rules for Raising Boys in an Era of Failing Schools, Mass Joblessness and Thug Culture." I had been researching all the cultural forces that are dumbing down our boys. So I needed to drill down to the root of the issue.

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Labels: boys, childhood, children, culture, gender, girls

posted by Eve at 6:17 PM VOTE

IS OUTDOOR CHILDREN'S PLAY DOOMED TO EXTINCTION?: Emma McFarnon

in the Independent (UK):

Figures released by the National Trust earlier this month paint a picture of a generation of children disengaged with nature and outdoor play, largely ignorant of the joy of unbridled exploration. According to the charity, fewer than one in ten children regularly play in wild places compared to almost half a generation ago, a third have never climbed a tree, and one in ten can’t ride a bike. But has children’s play really changed in recent decades, and if so, how?

According to a body of commentators and parenting authors, numerous factors have altered the landscape of children’s play – from the increase in road traffic to parents’ longer working hours, from the rise of ‘stranger danger’ to the growth of new technologies. Of course, “children play in the same they always have done. It’s an innate biological thing, it’s part of who children are,” says Cath Prisk, Director of Play England. “But their freedom to play has changed over generations with being interfered with”.

According to Prisk, “what has changed is the barriers to children having their freedom to play”. Whereas previous generations might have been left to frolic outside for hours on end, returning home only to eat, nowadays for many children play is increasingly structured, and conducted under the watchful eye of parents and teachers. Nowadays “people do not think eight or nine-year-olds should be out in groups exploring and building dens,” says Prisk. ...

But no analysis of child’s play would be complete without reference to new technologies. For many children, the explosion of gadgets and TV channels has made staying indoors glued to a screen more appealing than venturing into the great outdoors. “It’s nicer in your bedroom than when we were growing up,” says Prisk. “Being sent to your bedroom used to be a punishment but now they have their computers, DVD players. They have less opportunity to go outside”. But, interestingly, the Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age report concludes new technologies have not overtaken more ‘traditional’ play. It maintains that while “children’s media cultures are richer and more diverse than at any time in the past”, physical playground activities “are alive and well, and… happily co‐exist with media‐based play”. The authors argue: “Modern children are, then, immersed in an enveloping mediascape, which is impossible for them to ignore. However, our research indicates that playground culture and children’s games are not overwhelmed, marginalised or threatened by the quantity and plurality of available media.”

Both Prisk and Watson stress the danger of making sweeping generalisations. “I would warn against assuming we are not able to let [children] play unsupervised,” said Watson. “Many parents are still letting their children out there, they’re being left unsupervised and have a great time.” Meanwhile Prisk stressed: “Some kids are being given the freedom to play”.

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Labels: childhood, children, parenting, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 12:50 AM VOTE

SWEDEN'S NEW GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN: Nathalie Rothschild

at Slate:

By most people’s standards, Sweden is a paradise for liberated women. It has the highest proportion of working women in the world, and women earn about two-thirds of all degrees. Standard parental leave runs at 480 days, and 60 of those days are reserved exclusively for dads, causing some to credit the country with forging the way for a new kind of nurturing masculinity. In 2010, the World Economic Forum designated Sweden as the most gender-equal country in the world.

But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don't identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels. ...

The Swedish Bowling Association has announced plans to merge male and female bowling tournaments in order to make the sport gender-neutral. Social Democrat politicians have proposed installing gender-neutral restrooms so that members of the public will not be compelled to categorize themselves as either ladies or gents. Several preschools have banished references to pupils' genders, instead referring to children by their first names or as "buddies." So, a teacher would say "good morning, buddies" or "good morning, Lisa, Tom, and Jack" rather than, "good morning, boys and girls." They believe this fulfills the national curriculum's guideline that preschools should "counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles" and give girls and boys "the same opportunities to test and develop abilities and interests without being limited by stereotypical gender roles." ...

Claeson might have a point. The Swedish school system has wholeheartedly, and probably too quickly and eagerly, embraced this new agenda. Last fall, 200 teachers attended a major government-sponsored conference discussing how to avoid "traditional gender patterns" in schools. At Egalia, one model Stockholm preschool, everything from the decoration to the books and toys are carefully selected to promote a gender-equal perspective and to avoid traditional presentations of gender and parenting roles. The teachers try to expose the pupils to as few "gendered expressions" as possible. At Christmastime, the Egalia staff rewrote a traditional song as "hen bakes cakes all day long." When pupils play house, they are encouraged to include "mommy, daddy, child" in their imaginary families, as well as "daddy, daddy, child"; "mommy, mommy, child"; "daddy, daddy, sister, aunty, child"; or any other modern combination.

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Labels: childhood, children, gender, gender differences, Sweden, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 5:05 PM VOTE

ARE WE OVERESTIMATING THE BENEFITS OF MARRIAGE TO CHILD DEVELOPMENT? Washington Post blogger

interviews a researcher:

...In your view, will the trend of young parents forgoing marriage affect parental involvement?

Children born to unwed parents spend less time with their fathers on average than those born to married parents, and that difference gets larger as children age (unwed fathers are most involved in children’s lives at the very beginning). So, the rise in nonmarital childbirth is related, on average, to lower levels of fathers’ involvement. Overall, however, resident fathers are spending more time with children than ever before. So, it’s not fair to argue that unwed parenthood is associated with an overall decline in father involvement.

Also, unwed parenthood is not necessarily associated with lower levels of mothers’ involvement. Once you account for differences in education and income level between married and single mothers, there are no large differences in maternal involvement with children between these groups. So, the trend seems to impact fathers’ involvement but not mothers’, on average. It’s important to remember, though, that in some families, stepfathers (and stepmothers) are very involved in children’s lives.

Has your research shown a correlation between a marriage certificate and parental involvement? How about a father’s involvement?

I haven’t examined father involvement in married and unwed parent families, but others have. It’s important to distinguish between unwed parents who live together — called cohabiting families — and unwed parents who do not. Many unwed parents live together when their children are born, although the proportion decreases substantially as children age. Cohabiting fathers do spend less time interacting with their children than married fathers, but the largest differences are between married fathers and unwed dads who don’t live with their children, which is not surprising.

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[My take btw is that the causal arrow runs both ways, and while economic and personal circumstances obviously affect who gets married, marriage has a positive effect on child outcomes, in part by promoting greater stability and a stronger bond with the child's father. Both of which this researcher explicitly acknowledges even as she suggests that we overemphasize marriage. Also, the repetition of the phrase "a marriage certificate" where I think most people would just say "marriage" rings really oddly to me. --Eve]

Labels: childhood, children, class, cohabitation, culture, Fathers, Marriage, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting, unmarried parents

posted by Eve at 11:00 AM VOTE

PUBERTY BEFORE AGE 10--A NEW "NORMAL"?: NYTMagazine

feature:

One day last year when her daughter, Ainsley, was 9, Tracee Sioux pulled her out of her elementary school in Fort Collins, Colo., and drove her an hour south, to Longmont, in hopes of finding a satisfying reason that Ainsley began growing pubic hair at age 6. Ainsley was the tallest child in her third-grade class. She had a thick, enviable blond-streaked ponytail and big feet, like a puppy’s. The curves of her Levi’s matched her mother’s.

“How was your day?” Tracee asked Ainsley as she climbed in the car.

“Pretty good.”

“What did you do at a recess?”

“I played on the slide with my friends.”

In the back seat, Ainsley wiggled out of her pink parka and looked in her backpack for her Harry Potter book. Over the past three years, Tracee — pretty and well-put-together, wearing a burnt orange blouse that matched her necklace and her bag — had taken Ainsley to see several doctors. They ordered blood tests and bone-age X-rays and turned up nothing unusual. “The doctors always come back with these blank looks on their faces, and then they start redefining what normal is,” Tracee said as we drove down Interstate 25, a ribbon of asphalt that runs close to where the Great Plains bump up against the Rockies. “And I always just sit there thinking, What are you talking about, normal? Who gets pubic hair in first grade?” ...

So why are so many girls with no medical disorder growing breasts early? Doctors don’t know exactly why, but they have identified several contributing factors.

Girls who are overweight are more likely to enter puberty early than thinner girls, and the ties between obesity and puberty start at a very young age. As Emily Walvoord of the Indiana University School of Medicine points out in her paper “The Timing of Puberty: Is It Changing? Does It Matter?” body-mass index and pubertal timing are associated at age 5, age 3, even age 9 months. This fact has shifted pediatric endocrinologists away from what used to be known as the critical-weight theory of puberty — the idea that once a girl’s body reaches a certain mass, puberty inevitably starts — to a critical-fat theory of puberty. Researchers now believe that fat tissue, not poundage, sets off a feedback loop that can cause a body to mature. As Robert Lustig, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco’s Benioff Children’s Hospital, explains, fatter girls have higher levels of the hormone leptin, which can lead to early puberty, which leads to higher estrogen levels, which leads to greater insulin resistance, causing girls to have yet more fat tissue, more leptin and more estrogen, the cycle feeding on itself, until their bodies physically mature.

In addition, animal studies show that the exposure to some environmental chemicals can cause bodies to mature early. Of particular concern are endocrine-disrupters, like “xeno-estrogens” or estrogen mimics. These compounds behave like steroid hormones and can alter puberty timing. For obvious ethical reasons, scientists cannot perform controlled studies proving the direct impact of these chemicals on children, so researchers instead look for so-called “natural experiments,” one of which occurred in 1973 in Michigan, when cattle were accidentally fed grain contaminated with an estrogen-mimicking chemical, the flame retardant PBB. The daughters born to the pregnant women who ate the PBB-laced meat and drank the PBB-laced milk started menstruating significantly earlier than their peers.

One concern, among parents and researchers, is the effect of simultaneous exposures to many estrogen-mimics, including the compound BPA, which is ubiquitous. Ninety-three percent of Americans have traces of BPA in their bodies. BPA was first made in 1891 and used as a synthetic estrogen in the 1930s. In the 1950s commercial manufacturers started putting BPA in hard plastics. Since then BPA has been found in many common products, including dental sealants and cash-register receipts. More than a million pounds of the substance are released into the environment each year.

Family stress can disrupt puberty timing as well. Girls who from an early age grow up in homes without their biological fathers are twice as likely to go into puberty younger as girls who grow up with both parents. Some studies show that the presence of a stepfather in the house also correlates with early puberty. Evidence links maternal depression with developing early. Children adopted from poorer countries who have experienced significant early-childhood stress are also at greater risk for early puberty once they’re ensconced in Western families.

Bruce Ellis, a professor of Family Studies and Human Development at the University of Arizona, discovered along with his colleagues a pattern of early puberty in girls whose parents divorced when those girls were between 3 and 8 years old and whose fathers were considered socially deviant (meaning they abused drugs or alcohol, were violent, attempted suicide or did prison time). In another study, published in 2011, Ellis and his colleagues showed that first graders who are most reactive to stress — kids whose pulse, respiratory rate and cortisol levels fluctuate most in response to environmental challenges — entered puberty earliest when raised in difficult homes. Evolutionary psychology offers a theory: A stressful childhood inclines a body toward early reproduction; if life is hard, best to mature young. But such theories are tough to prove.

Social problems don’t just increase the risk for early puberty; early puberty increases the risk for social problems as well. We know that girls who develop ahead of their peers tend to have lower self-esteem, more depression and more eating disorders. They start drinking and lose their virginity sooner. They have more sexual partners and more sexually transmitted diseases. “You can almost predict it” — that early maturing teenagers will take part in more high-risk behaviors, says Tonya Chaffee, associate clinical professor of pediatrics at University of California, San Francisco, who oversees the Teen and Young Adult Health Center at San Francisco General Hospital. Half of the patients in her clinic are or have been in the foster system. She sees in the outlines of their early-developing bodies the stresses of their lives — single parent or no parent, little or no money, too much exposure to violence.

Some of this may stem from the same social stresses that contribute to early puberty in the first place, and some of it may stem from other factors, including the common nightmare of adolescence: being different. As Julia Graber, associate chairwoman of psychology at the University of Florida, has shown, all “off-time” developers — early as well as late — have more depression during puberty than typically-developing girls. But for the late bloomers, the negative effect wears off once puberty ends. For early bloomers, the effect persists, causing higher levels of depression and anxiety through at least age 30, perhaps all through life. “Some early-maturing girls have very serious problems,” Graber told me. “More than I expected when I started looking for clinical significance. I was surprised that it was so severe.”

Researchers know there’s a relationship between pubertal timing and depression, but they don’t know exactly how that relationship works. One theory is that going through puberty early, relative to other kinds of cognitive development, causes changes in the brain that make it more susceptible to depression. As Elizabeth Sowell, director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, points out, girls in general tend to go through puberty earlier than boys, and starting around puberty, girls, as a group, also experience more anxiety and depression than boys do. Graber offers a broader hypothesis, perhaps the best understanding of the puberty-depression connection we have for now. “It may be that early maturers do not have as much time as other girls to accomplish the developmental tasks of childhood. They face new challenges while everybody else is still dealing with the usual development of childhood. This might be causing them to make less successful transitions into adolescence and beyond.”

Over the past year, I talked to mothers who tried to forestall their daughters’ puberty in many different ways.

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Labels: adolescence, childhood, children, culture, girls, parenting

posted by Eve at 2:00 PM VOTE

LI TIANBING: MY IMAGINARY SIBLINGS: The Guardian (UK)

feature:

The only memento Li Tianbing has of his childhood is five photographs. Tattered now, black and white, slightly out of focus. He's lucky, he says, to have even those: cameras weren't plentiful in Guilin, southern China, when he was a small boy in the 1970s, a three-day, four-night train journey from Beijing. He saw one only rarely, when his father – a soldier in the People's Army propaganda unit – managed to borrow one. As Li's dad could come home for only one or two days each month, and as he didn't often manage to borrow a camera, five photos is what there are.

But stacked against the walls in his studio, a cavernous former garage in a grimy Paris suburb, are some of the works those photographs inspired: huge, compelling canvases that have made Li one of the most critically acclaimed Chinese-born artists of his generation.

Rendered in the stark, monochrome detail of an old photograph, some splashed blue, red or green, others clutching unnaturally bright toys, books or bags, are children. Staring wide-eyed, deadpan they appear detached, waif-like. And above all – though each picture may contain several children – they seem alone.

These paintings are part of a semi-biographical series that has occupied Li for the best part of five years. They are an artist's attempt to recapture and reimagine what he can of his own childhood, and to explore the human consequences of perhaps the most controversial and far-reaching social policy China has decreed: the one-child rule. "My generation," says Li, serving green tea in a porcelain cup the size of a large thimble, "is unique, in China and in the world. We were the first not to fully know the meaning of the words 'brother' and 'sister'."

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Labels: childhood, China, one-child policy, population control, siblings

posted by Eve at 12:27 AM VOTE

STOP WORRYING ABOUT RAISING A MAMA'S BOY: KJ Dell'Antonia

at the NYT parenting blog:

What’s a “mama’s boy”? A wimp, of course, a child tied too tightly to his mother’s apron strings, overly sensitive, incapable of detaching, ready to “run to mama” at the slightest hint of adversity. Norman Bates. Oedipus. Robert, the awkward brother on “Everybody Loves Raymond.” The men are ineffectual, the “mamas” domineering — and if you’re looking for an analogous stereotype in the world of fathers and daughters (think father-daughter dances and “Daddy’s Girl”), you won’t find one.

It sounds like a myth of yesteryear, but Kate Stone Lombardi, frequent New York Times contributor and author of “The Mama’s Boy Myth,” says the hangover from generations of gender preconceptions affects us all, and that in many families and communities, mothers still find themselves urged to push their sons away at exactly the moments (like starting school and becoming a teenager) when our boys need us most — and that even when we don’t, we find it hard to talk about how close we are to our sons. ...

That soundtrack, she says, is part of why mothers are so often told to go against their instincts with their boys, to tell a crying child to “man up” or “shake it off,” or to let a hurting teenager suffer in silence and “work it out on his own.” Even the most attached of mothers can find herself wondering if she’s doing the right thing when she babies her little boy, or pushes her teen to talk. “But both science and research tell us it really is a good thing to offer boys our emotional support, and maintain that connection.”

As the mother of two boys (and two girls), I was surprised by how often I recognized issues I’d run up against, even in our modern, feminist, equal-parenting household: the son who needs to talk after his team lost a game (it wasn’t the loss that was upsetting him); the need to staunchly squash the commentary people seem to feel the need to make about one son’s long hair, and the other’s pink hockey skate lace; and my own surprise (and extreme pleasure) that my 10-year-old son still seeks to hold my hand, even in public.

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Labels: boys, childhood, children, culture, gender, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 12:24 AM VOTE

BEING CHOSEN, NOT BEING CHOSEN: Amy Ziettlow

at Family Scholars:

...But the more that I listen to stepchildren and step-siblings reflect on their relationships with their stepparents and step-siblings, the Brady Bunch rarely happens, and any sense of obligation or loyalty tends to vaporize with age. Once a roof is no longer shared, any sense of connection emotional or physical is no longer shared either.

My thoughts are just forming here but I think it relates to choice. In Blue Nights, Joan Didion reflects on the undercurrent of fear that seemed to run through her adopted daughter’s existence. A fear of abandonment. Even though she and her husband affectionately called her “the chosen one.” The title seemed to exacerbate the underside of that term: in order to be chosen, someone else did NOT choose her. Didion cites as a mantra the anxiety that her daughter felt around the story of her adoption: What if you hadn’t picked up the phone when the hospital called? What if you had gotten into an accident on the way to get me? What if…?” At one point she reunites with her biological family which seems to unnerve her as the two worlds, or two stories, of her life collide. She decides to cut that story out, although Didion notes that one of her sisters sends flowers at her death.

Stepparents don’t choose their stepchildren, but they do choose how they will relate or not relate. In this week’s Dear Judy, a stepdaughter asks what choice she should make in attending or not attending her stepfather’s funeral. A hard choice to make.

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Labels: adoption, childhood, children, culture, divorce, parenting, stepparents

posted by Eve at 6:20 PM VOTE

FOUR OLD SAYINGS ABOUT FAMILY THAT ARE (SOMETIMES) B.S.: John Cheese

at Cracked, so usual language-and-imagery warnings apply:

Everything you know and have comes from your family. Even if you could somehow forget that fact, society continually hammers you with the idea that there are no limits to how much [s***] you should have to put up with when it comes to your blood relatives.

I disagree.

Growing up, you are in the most frightening, vulnerable position of your life, and I'm not just talking about relying on mom to throw some corndogs in the oven, or dad to show you which porn sites won't [****] up your computer. Because of my own abnormal upbringing, I believed for the longest time that my views on family were skewed -- influenced in a negative direction as a result of a lifetime of fear. It wasn't until I started writing for Cracked and collecting emails from readers expressing the same viewpoints that I realized I wasn't unique in disagreeing with statements like ...

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Labels: adolescence, child abuse, childhood, children, culture, mental health, parenting

posted by Eve at 9:39 PM VOTE

A FIELD GUIDE TO THE MIDDLE-CLASS U.S. FAMILY: Wall Street Journal

reports:

Anthropologist Elinor Ochs and her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles have studied family life as far away as Samoa and the Peruvian Amazon region, but for the last decade they have focused on a society closer to home: the American middle class.

Why do American children depend on their parents to do things for them that they are capable of doing for themselves? How do U.S. working parents' views of "family time" affect their stress levels? These are just two of the questions that researchers at UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families, or CELF, are trying to answer in their work. ...

Ten years ago, the UCLA team recorded video for a week of nearly every moment at home in the lives of 32 Southern California families. They have been picking apart the footage ever since, scrutinizing behavior, comments and even their refrigerators's contents for clues.

The families, recruited primarily through ads, owned their own homes and had two or three children, at least one of whom was between 7 and 12 years old. About a third of the families had at least one nonwhite member, and two were headed by same-sex couples. Each family was filmed by two cameras and watched all day by at least three observers.

Among the findings: The families had very a child-centered focus, which may help explain the "dependency dilemma" seen among American middle-class families, says Dr. Ochs. Parents intend to develop their children's independence, yet raise them to be relatively dependent, even when the kids have the skills to act on their own, she says.

In addition, these parents tended to have a very specific, idealized way of thinking about family time, says Tami Kremer-Sadlik, a former CELF research director who is now the director of programs for the division of social sciences at UCLA. These ideals appeared to generate guilt when work intruded on family life, and left parents feeling pressured to create perfect time together. The researchers noted that the presence of the observers may have altered some of the families' behavior.

How kids develop moral responsibility is an area of focus for the researchers. Dr. Ochs, who began her career in far-off regions of the world studying the concept of "baby talk," noticed that American children seemed relatively helpless compared with those in other cultures she and colleagues had observed. ...

In 22 of 30 families, children frequently ignored or resisted appeals to help, according to a study published in the journal Ethos in 2009. In the remaining eight families, the children weren't asked to do much. In some cases, the children routinely asked the parents to do tasks, like getting them silverware. "How am I supposed to cut my food?" Dr. Ochs recalls one girl asking her parents.

Asking children to do a task led to much negotiation, and when parents asked, it sounded often like they were asking a favor, not making a demand, researchers said. Parents interviewed about their behavior said it was often too much trouble to ask.

For instance, one exchange caught on video shows an 8-year-old named Ben sprawled out on a couch near the front door, lifting his white, high-top sneaker to his father, the shoe laced. "Dad, untie my shoe," he pleads. His father says Ben needs to say "please."

more (and more: "This kind of thing pushes my buttons, because we have refocused ourselves, just recently, on this exact question in my household.")

Labels: California, childhood, children, class, culture, parenting

posted by Eve at 8:47 PM VOTE

TWO DOCUMENTARIES ON BULLYING TAKE DIFFERENT APPROACHES: KJ Dell'Antonia

at the NYT parenting blog:

I was bullied. From the third-grade boys who twisted my name up until I hated the sound of it, to the sixth-grade girls who wrote the mean notes about my glasses and braces and left them, quite purposely, for me to find, every time we moved when I was young, I found myself marooned in a new school where I felt neither safe nor happy. If I’m honest, I’d still prefer not to talk about it. What kind of kid was I, after all, that so many other children saw me as a target? How uncool can I possibly have been that I took it all so very seriously, when I should have just brushed away what was obviously unimportant?

Over a quarter of a century later, I’m still blaming myself.

That’s one of many things the current movement against bullying intends to change, but in spite of what may seem like an overwhelming onslaught of anti-bullying messages, it’s an uphill battle. How can we reach children who bully because they feel bullied at home (or for a hundred other reasons), their victims and the children around them? What about adults who believe, overtly or secretly, that bullying is either inevitable, or survivable, or not that big a deal?

Two different approaches are on view this week, as the Cartoon Network premieres its first original documentary, “Speak Up,” at the Stuart-Hobson Middle School in Washington with Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, while Harvey Weinstein and the makers and fans of the documentary “Bully” fight to change its R rating.

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Labels: childhood, children, culture, parenting, schools

posted by Eve at 12:07 AM VOTE

THE POLITICS OF PLAYGROUNDS: A HISTORY: Amanda Erickson

at The Atlantic--Cities:

Unless you're a frequent reader of parenting blogs, you might not know there's a major divide in the world of children's playgrounds.

On the one side, you have the safety advocates who want lower structures, softer ground, and less opportunities for falling off or over, well, anything. On the other, those who worry that a safe playground is a boring playground that will do little to stimulate a child's imagination.

The debate can seem quite technical – should playgrounds have foam floors, or wood chips? What would be better for the 5-year-olds who tumble off the monkey bars? Should there even be monkey bars, or is that just asking for trouble? One mom was even banned from McDonald's after she was caught swabbing their play places in search of bacteria.

The debate has a very 21st century feel to it but it’s actually nothing new – these types of questions have been asked for at least a century. Below, a look at the history of playgrounds....

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Labels: childhood, children, class, culture, parenting, poverty

posted by Eve at 9:24 PM VOTE

FROM THE DEFENSE SPEECH IN "THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV"

"...But, gentlemen of the jury, one must treat words honestly, and I shall allow myself to name a thing by the proper word, the proper appellation: such a father as the murdered old Karamazov cannot and does not deserve to be called a father. Love for a father that is not justified by the father is an absurdity, an impossibility. Love cannot be created out of nothing: only God creates out of nothing. ...No, let us prove, on the contrary, that the progress of the past few years has touched our development as well, and let us say straight out: he who begets is not yet a father; a father is he who begets and proves worthy of it. Oh, of course, there is another meaning, another interpretation of the word 'father,' which insists that my father, though a monster, though a villain to his children, is still my father simply because he begot me. But this meaning is, so to speak, a mystical one, which I do not understand with my reason, but can only accept by faith, or, more precisely, on faith, like many other things that I do not understand, but that religion nonetheless tells me to believe. But in that case let it remain outside the sphere of real life."

Labels: biological parenthood, childhood, children, Christianity, culture, Fathers, parenting, religion, satire

posted by Eve at 1:13 PM VOTE

I WANT TO BE MY KID'S ONLY PARENT: Jessica Olien

in Slate:

I grew up with one parent. My mother raised me with help from her mother. It was not her choice to be alone, but she did make a conscious decision not to remarry while I was still a kid. I am grateful for that and glad that she and my father were not together while I grew up. I believe it was because she made the decision not to commit to anyone else that I had such a well-supported and peaceful childhood.

We lived in a medium-size town in northern Wisconsin, in a small lime-green house with a yard. My grandma, a college professor (herself twice divorced), lived no more than a few miles away throughout my childhood and for a while even lived on the same block as we did. My mom worked as a public-school teacher. During summer vacation I played outside while she tended to a vegetable garden. In winter we baked cookies and made snow sculptures we’d paint with food coloring. We always ate well. We took vacations. It was hardly a conventional childhood in the traditional sense, but in its own way it was quite idyllic.

I’ve realized recently that when I picture myself with my own child, there’s no father in the frame. I imagine it being just the two of us—a team, like my mom and me. Perhaps because of how I was raised and how happy my childhood was, I often wonder whether I wouldn't rather just have a kid alone. ...

Rather than being a force of stability, the times my own father did show up served only to temporarily disrupt the pleasant routines my mother and I had established. He arrived unannounced at our back door one day when I was 8, and I thought he was an escaped convict who’d come to bludgeon us to death. I’d screamed, and my mom came running, pausing for a moment to laugh, “No, honey, that’s just your dad.” My father came to see us several times over the course of my growing up. I remember these visits as short and uncomfortable. (His large beard embarrassed me to no end.) ...

Perhaps all of this sounds selfish to some people, but there is no conclusive evidence that I would be giving a child any less possibility for success than a kid with two parents, as long as I am mature and have the financial means. Much of the research that supports having children within marriage is about opportunity, not the physical presence of two parents.

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Labels: childhood, children, culture, divorce, Fathers, motherhood, single parenting

posted by Eve at 1:49 AM VOTE

FREE-RANGE PARENTING: YOU'RE GOING TO JAIL. MAYBE.: Katherine Mangu-Ward

at Reason's blog:

Hey look, here's a big omnibus article by David Pimentel of the Florida Costal School of Law on all the ways you are potentially legally screwed if you let your kid do stuff that was considered normal at some point in the less intensively parented past.

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Labels: childhood, children, culture, law, parenting

posted by Eve at 8:52 PM VOTE

SHOULD OUR KIDS BE HAPPY?: Carolyn Moynihan

in Crisis:

A British media personality has pricked the country’s happiness bubble by declaring that she does not want her kids to be “happy”. Kirsty Young, a Scot with two young daughters and two teenage step-children (and a husband who is a millionaire), said in an interview that it was impossible to be happy all the time because “Life is complicated … mostly never as it seems”.

“I don’t want my children to be ‘happy’,” she said. “They’ll be bloody lucky if they glimpse it now and again. I want them to be content and to have self-worth.” ...

On the other hand everyone wants that extra something that is not captured by “contentment” and a sense of “self-worth”, important as those things are. We want joy, a sense of transcending ourselves, of growing and … flourishing.

That’s the word that Martin Seligman, founding father of happiness research, came up with last year to replace happiness — a word he now considers too subjective to be a guide either for individuals or nations. And the key to flourishing, he says, is meaning; we thrive when we pursue what is meaningful for us, and a large part of what is meaningful for a human being consists of relationships and accomplishments.

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Labels: childhood, children, culture, parenting, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 2:06 AM VOTE

WHY FRENCH PARENTS ARE SUPERIOR: Pamela Druckerman

in the Wall Street Journal:

...But for all its problems, France is the perfect foil for the current problems in American parenting. Middle-class French parents (I didn't follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.

Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.

I'm hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. This problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves.

Of course, the French have all kinds of public services that help to make having kids more appealing and less stressful. Parents don't have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.

But these public services don't explain all of the differences. The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. "Ah, you mean how do we educate them?" they asked. "Discipline," I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas "educating" (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.

One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don't pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.) ...

When Pauline tried to interrupt our conversation, Delphine said, "Just wait two minutes, my little one. I'm in the middle of talking." It was both very polite and very firm. I was struck both by how sweetly Delphine said it and by how certain she seemed that Pauline would obey her. Delphine was also teaching her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. "The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself," she said of her son, Aubane.

It's a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In a 2004 study on the parenting beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one's child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.

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Labels: childhood, children, culture, France, parenting

posted by Eve at 4:23 PM VOTE