Want it all? Try saying "thank you"

“Having it all” has been trending for two weeks, ever since Anne-Marie Slaughter’s blockbuster essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” went online at the website of The Atlantic magazine.

“It’s time to stop fooling ourselves,” says the Princeton professor and former State Department official. “The women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed.”

Feminist commentators on her essay have been quick to say that men as a group need to pick up the slack at home. “The problem isn’t that women are trying to do too much, it’s that men aren’t doing nearly enough,” writes author and activist Jessica Valenti in The Nation, citing a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report showing that working women still do the bulk of housework and childcare.

I don’t quarrel with their arguments or their facts. But what’s missing from critiques like that one is an acknowledgement of how much men have evolved in just three generations.

“Men are changing very rapidly,” feminist historian Stephanie Coontz once told me. “In fact, as a historian, I have to say that they are changing, in a period of thirty years, in ways that took most women 150 years of thinking and activism.” According to every single study, men today do more dishes and bring more kids to school than their fathers and grandfathers ever did.

Enter the awkward concept of gratitude. It’s awkward because many women frankly resent the idea that men should be thanked for doing the work they’ve always been expected to do. The resentment is personal and it’s political. It’s personal, because every woman who comments on these issues has had a man in her life that didn’t do his fair share. And it’s political, because the debate is fundamentally about the balance of power between men and women as groups. In fact, research shows that men will withhold gratitude as an expression of power over women.

“We should be grateful for anything that makes our lives easier,” says my friend Suzanne (not her real name), who is now divorced. “But at the same time, I’d grit my teeth because he was a big hero for doing a sink full of dishes.”

All partnerships have a division of labor, but Suzanne felt as though her specific labors had been imposed on her. Millions of women feel the way she did. This creates conflict, of course, but it also interferes with practicing fundamental relationship skills like gratitude. (Other skills like forgiveness and empathy are important, too, but here I'm just focusing on gratitude.)

Why should that be a problem? Because study after study shows that gratitude is essential to marital happiness. Suzanne didn’t just resent that her husband was a big hero for doing what she did every day. The bigger problem is that her daily work was thankless, and even denigrated by her husband: “If dinner wasn’t perfect,” she added, “he’d whine about it.”

The place of gratitude in marriage was explored by none other than UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who created a concept cited in Valenti’s article: “the second shift,” which suggests that working women go home to sinks full of dirty dishes to do. Hochschild came up with another catchy phrase, “economy of gratitude,” which turns up much less often in feminist commentary. Her theory says expressing gratitude for the labor of your spouse is more important to marital happiness than the precise division of labor. It’s not just who does the dishes; it’s also who gets thanked by whom for doing the dishes.

Researchers Jess Alberts and Angela Threthewey put Hochschild's “economy of gratitude” theory to the test in a series of focus groups, interviews, and surveys of heterosexual and same-sex couples. They “found evidence that gratitude isn’t just a way to mitigate the negative effects of an unequal division of labor. Rather, a lack of gratitude may be connected to why that division of labor is so unequal to begin with," as they write in "Love, Honor, and Thank."

So when a spouse expresses gratitude to an "under-performing" partner for picking up his socks off the floor, he's reminded that it's not fair that she's usually the one who does that. "And since people who receive gifts typically feel obligated to reciprocate, this insight can lead the under-performing partner to offer 'gifts' of his own by contributing more to household tasks. In addition, the over-performing partner is likely to experience less resentment and frustration once her efforts are recognized and appreciated."



Thus expressing gratitude does not necessarily perpetuate inequality, as some fear. Instead, it can help make relationships more equal. Unfortunately, the research suggests that men are worse than women when it comes to being grateful. This makes for an emotionally lethal combination: tradition imposes housework and childcare on women, and then individual men forget to be grateful for their wives’ contributions—a habit that might have a lot to do with maintaining their own social power. As psychologist Robert Emmons notes in his essay, "Pay it Forward":

It has been argued that males in particular may resist experiencing and expressing gratefulness insomuch as it implies dependency and indebtedness. One fascinating study in the 1980s found that American men were less likely to regard gratitude positively than were German men, and to view it as less constructive and useful than their German counterparts. Gratitude presupposes so many judgments about debt and dependency that it is easy to see why supposedly self-reliant Americans would feel queasy about even discussing it.

While the research evidence for this idea is scant, it personally resonates with me. Averages don't tell us much about individuals, and certainly there are men who are better at gratitude than women. But I have struggled to weave gratitude into my life, and so do many men I know. So if American marriages need more gratitude, that change should start with men. Guys, I’m begging you: Go home tonight and thank your wife for everything she does. Be specific; the "meta-thanks" won't work, because it doesn't show that you recognize the contribution as a unique and personal thing. Here, just watch this video:



So, should women be grateful to men for doing the dishes? My own answer is yes and no. Yes, individual women should express gratitude to the men in their lives for what they do, for the sake of positive reinforcement and marital sustainability. But no, I don't think women should be thankful to men as a group for changing so much in recent decades. They could have and should have evolved earlier than they did, when women started taking jobs in large numbers.

This brings us to questions of power and how it shapes gratitude, which has been the subject of recent lab experiments.

One 2011 study by Yeri Cho and Nathanael J. Fast paired two study participants and asked them to perform a task together—designating one the supervisor and the other the subordinate. The results were fascinating, and have useful implications for marriages. They found that gratitude from supervisors made subordinates happier, of course. But they also found that supervisors who had been challenged in any way by their subordinates were more likely to turn around and insult that person.

This is a dynamic that defines many marriages. If a wife challenges her husband’s competency at home—“Don’t you know how to sweep a floor?!”—the research suggests he’ll end up denigrating her own contributions, a vicious cycle that might be depressingly familiar to some readers.

To be fair, men aren’t the only ones who forget to be grateful. It’s commonplace for full-time caregivers—usually (but not always) women—to forget to thank breadwinning spouses—usually (but not always) men—for their efforts and sacrifices. Supporting a family is hard, especially in hard economic times, and can entail intense stress and deferred dreams. Even two-income couples, whose members are theoretically facing similar stresses, can fall into the ingratitude trap: They become too busy to see or appreciate what the other is doing.

Indeed, gratitude must go both ways to be effective. It’s the role of the spouse to serve as witness to their partner’s life. Gratitude tells the spouse that they are being seen, that their sacrifices and struggles are visible and honored.

But interpersonal power imbalances are pernicious in another way: They make us cynical about others’ motivations for expressing gratitude. In a study published in January of this year, M. Ena Inesi and colleagues ran five experiments testing how power shapes gratitude. They found that people with power tended to believe others thanked them mainly to curry favor down the line, not out of authentic feeling. This cynicism, the researchers found, made power-holders less likely to express gratitude to people with less power. In marriages, this gratitude corruption also led to lower levels of marital commitment in the more powerful spouse.

The bottom line from these and similar experiments is clear: Having power makes you less grateful, which just exacerbates power differences and all the resentments that go along with them. But expressing gratitude can help break that vicious cycle and change the balance of power. For me as a man, this amounts to a persuasive feminist argument. Power inequalities cut us off from genuine and necessary human feelings like gratitude—and that can push us a little further away from the possibility of happiness. It follows that it’s in our interest to act against power imbalances.

We can do that through our votes and political activism, I believe—it’s policies like flextime and paid parental leave that will best help women advance in their careers. But we can also make a small, positive contribution in our own homes by just saying “thanks.” It might not be equity that we as men are striving for, though that should be a goal and might be a glorious byproduct of this struggle. Instead, our greatest rewards will come in the form of meaning, authenticity, and, yes, happiness in our homes.

This originally appeared on the website of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center.

Blogging, Privacy, Porn, and the Monetization of Intimacy

Today, the Good Men Project published an essay of mine about the lines of privacy in marriage, in which I argue that spouses have both the right to secrets and the obligation to be as honest with each other as possible, using porn as a case study. That sounds like a paradox to some, I’m sure, and here I want to offer up another paradox: That in the age of transparency, we as daddy bloggers have the obligation to speak out and tell our stories—but we also have the right to privacy.

That’s probably not a controversial point with most readers (striking the balance is what we call a public persona), but I have been challenged many times to “tell the whole truth” about my life—or, in my journalism, to dig beneath the surface of what moms and dads tell me about their family lives, to get at “the real truth.” This often has a lascivious undercurrent, as when people want to know how many stay-at-home dads and moms have had affairs. There is a certain, growing strain of thinking in our culture that worries that anything we reveal in public must be a lie of some kind, that surely we’re hiding something, and of course we are. There’s tremendous pressure to reveal more, more, more. This pressure is social—but, as I’ll discuss in a moment, it’s also financial.

As I write at Good Men, this mirrors a dynamic in contemporary American marriages. Today our ideal marriage tends to be totally consuming, in that we expect total transparency and involvement from our partners. But this is a pretty new, fairly unstable (as measured by the divorce rate) social experiment we’ve got going on here in college-educated twenty-first-century America. There are other ideas of marriage that allow both partners to have extensive, separate lives outside of marriage, in friendships and community involvement—and there are ideas of marriage that allow both partners to cultivate inner lives apart from their partners. In other words, they don’t expect total transparency and disclosure. Spouses are allowed to have some privacy. Many marriages are battlegrounds between these competing ideals, with spouses fighting over every intimate inch of private ground.

A battle between transparency and privacy also rages through the public sphere, online and off. As a culture, we’ve evolved into an exhibitionistic beast in which people reveal the most intimate details of their lives through memoirs, Reality TV, social media, and blogs—and in my view, it’s no accident that this exhibitionism has grown up alongside the rise of the Christian Right in American culture and politics. Moral absolutism goes hand in hand with the assault on privacy, feeding each other. From this perspective, Mark Zuckerberg and Mike Huckabee are allies. We’re at the point where people who cultivate private lives seem suspicious: “If you’re not doing anything wrong, why hide?”

In my Good Men essay, I write the following:

In marriage, disclosure and transparency are important—but we must also recognize the genuine doubts and anxieties that hold our spouses back from being completely honest with us. In fact, I’d go further and argue that to make our confessions compulsory robs them of their power. It’s the struggle to reach the point of confession that defines us, not the split-second catharsis of confession all by itself. To put it another way, truth is a road we build as we travel, not a destination. We don’t have to tell everybody everything all at once.

I’d like to suggest that the same principle applies to disclosure in public life, especially for those of us who write about marriage and family on blogs, in books and magazines, through social media. In both in marriage and in the culture at large, for individuals, honesty is important—but it should not be obligatory. In the essay I mention that I had a conversation with my wife about pornography, but I don’t feel the need to share the details of that conversation with you, dear reader, though doing so would doubtless drive traffic and catalyze outrageous comments that would feed the search machine that would drive even more traffic, and thus generate advertising dollars (if we took ads here, which we don't).

In a very real way, we now live in an economy of confession. Our intimate details can be monetized.

It’s up to each person how monetized they want to be. No one makes any money off this blog (and no one ever will). But I’m a writer and I’ve written about my life in blogs and magazines and books, and I’ve gotten paid for it. I have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and you’re welcome to friend or follow me. But I have rules and lines I’m not willing to cross, which have been set with my wife’s input. We’re selective. I defend our right to be selective. It’s our call, not yours, and people who wants to violate the boundaries we set can go fuck themselves.

So why talk about my private life, or write about other people’s private lives, at all? Why be a daddy blogger? Why write personal essays? Some people do indeed think I should just shut up—more than a few folks have implied that I do this for some combination of money or attention. These are often the same people who demand “the whole truth.” And let’s not pussyfoot around: money is nice, because we need it for food and shelter and books. Attention is important because in our economy attention, like intimacy, can be monetized. And vanity is also a factor in all writing.

However, “the real truth” is that there are better ways to make a living than to write about fatherhood and family. In fact, I suspect doing so has caused some serious damage to the rest of my career as a journalist. Many potential employers worry about hiring a guy who speaks out openly about prioritizing family. Many journalistic employers simply don’t take family issues seriously—I don’t seem “serious” to them since I write about “soft” things like male caregiving. I should be covering wars, business, technology. Man things.

So, again: Why do it? I do it because parents get a raw deal in our society and I want to do something to make it easier for us. I see my writing about fatherhood to be a form of political and cultural activism—among other things, through my work I’m campaigning for more people to recognize that today’s fathers have caregiving responsibilities that demand new public and workplace policies, stuff like paternity leave and flextime. I think a narrow, rigid definition of masculinity has caused an incredible amount of damage to our psyches, our bodies, our marriages. Redefining fatherhood and masculinity demands that we strive to be honest about our lives—to tell the truth, for example, about how we feel when we denied access to our children through divorce or workplace pressures. The more honest we can be, the more powerful our stories will be.

But that is not the same as arguing for verbal diarrhea. As Ernest Hemingway knew and practiced so well, power can also arise from what we choose not to say, from the silences that surround the words we speak. I’ve never been sold on the idea that men and women speak separate languages, but there is certainly a hardboiled male mode of communication (not shared by all men or all cultures) that seeks an artful modulation between silence and confession, secrets and disclosure, which can create a deep pressure that turns men’s inner lives into diamonds. I try to give that tradition—the one that defined our grandfathers—the respect it deserves, and I try to learn from it, build on it, use it to redefine who we are as guys.

I also believe that there are other priorities that can and should undermine public “honesty.” There’s the privacy of our spouses and children; there’s the pressure of our careers, which are the means of supporting our families. These things are important. There are also secrets, our own and others’, that we want or need to protect. That’s OK. Resisting the assault on privacy and the monetization of intimacy (of which porn is an example, incidentally) is a form of activism as well.

I’m not sure if what I’m saying will be useful to you, dear reader—this is a meditation, not a set of guidelines. And those lines, I’d like to suggest, are something that each of us much draw for ourselves, on our own.

Book Salon: Red Families v. Blue Families

This coming Sunday the 18th, starting at 2 pm PST / 5 pm EST, I'll be hosting a Firedoglake Book Salon for Naomi Cahn and June Carbone and their new book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture:

Red Families v. Blue Families identifies a new family model geared for the post-industrial economy. Rooted in the urban middle class, the coasts and the "blue states" in the last three presidential elections, the Blue Family Paradigm emphasizes the importance of women's as well as men's workforce participation, egalitarian gender roles, and the delay of family formation until both parents are emotionally and financially ready. By contrast, the Red Family Paradigm--associated with the Bible Belt, the mountain west, and rural America--rejects these new family norms, viewing the change in moral and sexual values as a crisis.

This political perspective on the family is a big part of my book, The Daddy Shift--a fact that puzzled, and perhaps alienated, some of my readers. Everything in the book points to the last chapter, which argues that the "daddy shift"--the expansion of good fathering from pure breadwinning to include caregiving as well--necessitates a shift in law and public policy. I end the book by asking dads who have made the private shift to help make that public shift happen, to allow their caregiving experience to drive their political participation and inform their votes.

Of course, some folks would have preferred that I stopped with the (genuinely moving and complex) stories about stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms. But since finishing The Daddy Shift, I've come to feel even more strongly that a specific political agenda flows from the emergence of what Cahn and Carbone call "the Blue Family Paradigm." We need policies, such as paternity leave and flextime, that will help us to be the fathers that we want to be.

Indeed, Red Families v. Blue Families makes a very compelling, research-tested case for the idea that the kind of family you're in is tightly linked to where you live, how much education you have, what you do for work, how much money you make--and how you vote come election time.

Does that sound unlikely to you? Well, I hope you'll join us this Sunday the 18th--you'll be able to put your toughest questions directly to the authors of Red Families v. Blue Families, who will be on hand to answer. The book salon will be the top blog entry at Firedoglake from 2-3 pm PST / 5-7 pm EST, and you'll be able to participate by posting comments.

Does parenthood make men more conservative and women more liberal?

A new study says that parenthood pushes men and women in opposite political directions:

"Parenthood seems to heighten the political 'gender gap,' with women becoming more liberal and men more conservative when it comes to government spending on social welfare issues," says Dr. Steven Greene, an associate professor of political science at NC State and co-author of the study. Greene and Dr. Laurel Elder of Hartwick College used data on the 2008 presidential election from the American National Election Studies to evaluate the voting behavior of men and women who have children at home. Parents who have grown children were not part of the study.

"Basically, women with children in the home were more liberal on social welfare attitudes, and attitudes about the Iraq War, than women without children at home," Greene says, "which is a very different understanding of the politics of mothers than captured by the 'Security Mom' label popular in much media coverage. But men with kids are more conservative on social welfare issues than men without kids." Men with kids did not differ from men without kids in their attitudes towards Iraq.

You can read the press release here and the whole thing here.

This is a strong study; they have a good data set, and like all good social scientists they control for variables like age and education. The results are consistent with other studies, and also easy to understand.

Response scales varied, but all ranged from a number indicating very liberal to one indicating very conservative. So, the "social welfare index" (which measured support for issues like government-sponsored, universal health care), the scale ranged from -1.37 (very liberal) to 2.07 (very conservative), based on responses to specific questions.

This is the area where the contrast between men and women was starkest. Women zoomed from -.01 childless to -.11 after having children in the social welfare index--which is statistically very significant. Meanwhile, men went from .04 childless to .14 after children. A ten point difference for both, but in opposite directions.

To which I say: Wow.

Why the difference? The researchers argue that it's women's experience with nurturing kids that pushes them a more liberal direction when it comes to weaving the social safety net. From the paper:

We argue that this long-standing liberal motherhood effect is grounded in the gendered experience of parenthood. The societal expectation as well as the reality that women play the primary role in nurturing their children and take primary responsibility for their health care, day care, and educational needs fosters an appreciation for well-funded, domestic government programs.

Moreover, with the vast majority of mothers working outside the home, mothers are required to rely on people or programs outside the nuclear family for at least part of their children’s care, which may also foster their appreciation for a supportive and generous social welfare state. The fact that the liberal effect of motherhood remains highly significant even in the regression model (Table 2) when potentially confounding variables are controlled, means that it is not simply Democratic or unmarried or poor mothers that are driving the liberal motherhood effect. Consistent with some feminist theories, there seems to be something about the experience of being a mother that leads to more liberal social welfare attitudes (Ruddick 1980, 1989; Sapiro 1983). It may be that the act of nurturing children fosters empathy and caring, thereby generating more liberal attitudes concerning the role of government in helping others.

Whereas fathers, they write, tend to "view an active social welfare state as an intrusion on their ability to provide for their families."

That sounds somewhat plausible to me--although it must be pointed out that throughout American history, many men have looked to government to support their roles as breadwinners, as with, for example, minimum wage laws. It might be more accurate to suggest that men's relatively privileged social position makes them more receptive to contemporary conservative messages, and more invested in the status quo.

Some folks, I think, will tend to see this as an essentialist argument: Women are more liberal and pacifistic because they're women, and men are just warlike jerks. But actually this research suggests politics are shaped more by social roles and day-to-day tasks than by biology. An obvious way to test this theory is to look at stay-at-home dads: Does taking care of kids push men in a more liberal direction?

I don't know of any peer-reviewed studies that have examined this question, but I explored it quite a bit in researching my book The Daddy Shift through interviews with families.

The result: It's certainly the case that many stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms feel that taking care of kids does make dads more liberal--according to these couples, they're just more conscious of the importance of access to the commons, things like playgrounds and health care. "The world would be a better place if more fathers...took care of children," said one Kansas City mom. "I think a man becomes more aware of other social issues."

Many of these couples, it must be said, were at least somewhat liberal to begin with, which makes sense--liberal values allow for the possibility of a gender-role reversal. However, there are many conservative stay-at-home dads; do their attitudes evolve? To get a firm answer to this question, you'd need to track couples' political trajectory over many years, from pregnancy to the teenage years, and control for many variables.

If the answer turns out to be yes, this suggests that men as a group should become more liberal as they spend more time with kids. And if we want to push our society in a more liberal direction, policies that encourage male caregiving--starting with paid paternity leave--are a good place to begin. If the answer is no, we'll need to look elsewhere for an explanation about why men and fathers tend to be more conservative than women and mothers.

[Originally posted to my Mothering magazine blog.]

It's April 15: Do You Know Where Your Income Tax Dollars Are Going?

From the redoubtable Stephanie Coontz and the Council on Contemporary Families:

Americans tend to think we are better off than families in most other industrial countries because we pay lower income taxes. But when we factor in the higher amount Americans pay for health care, child care, and education, the comparison is not always in our favor. Where do American families' tax dollars go and what family "value" they get in return?

For every $100 in income tax:

* $32 goes to national defense

* $19 goes to interest on the national debt

* $15 goes to supplemental programs such as TANF, child tax credits, and farm subsidies

* $14 goes to health

* $6 goes to education, employment, and social services

* $4 goes to transportation

* $2 goes to administration of justice

* $2 goes to environment and natural resources

* $2 goes to international affairs

* $1 goes to community and regional development

* $1 goes to agriculture

* $1 goes to science, space, and technology

* $1 goes to the commerce and housing fund

FEDERAL PROGRAMS AND TAX INCENTIVES FOR FAMILIES:

* U.S. parents can reduce their tax burdens by claiming dependents, which results in a $3,100 reduction in taxable income. For a married couple filing jointly with a $50,000 income, this is worth a maximum of $510 per child per year, or $1020 for a family with two children. The child tax credit also gives families a maximum of $1,000 tax credit for each child, bringing the benefit up to $1,510 for a one-child family in that tax bracket. On the other hand, the average household pays more than $2300 a year for health insurance and medical care -- and risks being liable for much more should a family member face a catastrophic illness.

* The child and dependent care tax credit allows families to credit a percentage of their childcare expenses. The credit is a percentage of child care costs, up to a maximum of $3,000 for one child or $6,000 for two or more children. Taxpayers with earned incomes over $43,000 will receive 20% of that amount, and the percentage increases as earned income decreases. The maximum credit a couple making $50,000 can receive is $1,200. But for families who purchase child care, this makes only a small dent in the $7,300 average day care bill for one child each year.

* Tax credits are also available for higher education expenses. The Hope Credit is worth up to $1650 per tax year for up to two years per student. The Lifetime Learning Credit allows up to $2000 credit per return.

* In 2007, legislators voted to increase individual Pell Grant amounts to a new maximum is $4,310. This will be increased to $5,400 in 2012-13. This may sound like an impressive increase. But in 1980, the Pell Grant covered 99% of the average cost of tuition, fees, AND room and board at a four-year public college. Today, the Pell Grant does not even cover the full cost of tuition and fees at such a college.

* Thus, even at their height, the financial benefits of the last decade's tax cuts for middle-class families never equaled the financial benefits that citizens of many other countries receive in the form of monthly child allowances, universal health care, subsidized parental leaves and child care, and college assistance:

* Poor families get some extra help. The Earned Income Tax Credit is a refundable tax credit. If the family does not have enough income to benefit from the credit, they get the same amount as a cash return. The EITC maximum for a worker with one child is $2,853, and the maximum for more than one child is $4,176. The credit is probably the most effective anti-poverty program in America, lifting many poor working families above the poverty line.

* Impoverished families also receive modest monthly payments out of the TANF program, are eligible for Medicaid and food stamps, and may be able to participate in Head Start pre-school programs, which are funded under education.

* And wealthy families also get some extra help. All homeowner families benefit from the mortgage deduction for interest payments on home loans, but this disproportionately benefits upper-income families. Half of all tax subsidies for homeownership go to the wealthiest 3.2 percent of households.


SO HOW DO WE COMPARE TO OTHER COUNTRIES?

* In most of Western Europe, citizens enjoy the right to near-universal health care. They do not have to forego routine care for financial reasons, and are not financially wiped out by catastrophic health emergencies. In America, this occurs frequently enough that one-quarter of financial bankruptcies originate in medical problems not covered by insurance.

* Families in Europe generally pay far less in college expenses than do most American families. In Sweden, students are not charged for tuition. In the United Kingdom, tuition is £3145 ($6234). Thanks to subsidies, it is free for those households making less than £32,690 ($64,798). Meanwhile, students in households making between £32,690 ($64,798) and £60,004 ($118, 940) receive a stipend worth up to £1574 ($3120), based on income.

* Every other industrial nation in Western Europe, and most of the rest of the world as well, provides paid maternity leave, and in some cases paid paternity leave as well.

Canada offers Employment Insurance for both maternity and paternity leave, allowing a couple to take up to 50 weeks leave, which can be divided between mother and father, at 55 percent of pay, up to a maximum of $435 per week. In addition, Canada's Universal Child Care Benefit pays families $100 per month for each child under age six.

In Germany women get 6 weeks paid leave before the birth of a child and 8 weeks afterward. Either the mother or father is guaranteed up to three years unpaid but job-protected leave for child care.

In Norway, parental leave allowance is 54 weeks at 80% pay or 44 weeks at 100%. The mother must take three weeks before birth and six weeks immediately after if she intends to use any leave. The father must take five weeks off if he wants to participate in the share. Other than that, the parents can share the time off any way they wish. Adoptive parents are eligible for 51 weeks off at 80% pay or 41 weeks at 100%.

In Greece, either parent can use up to 17 months of leave time, and receive an additional hour off per day until the child is 30 months old, or two hours per day for 12 months and one hour per day for the next six months.

In Belgium, free early childhood education is available to all children starting at the age of 2 ½.

Health Care Horror

From Paul Krugman's column in today's New York Times:

Not long ago, a young Ohio woman named Trina Bachtel, who was having health problems while pregnant, tried to get help at a local clinic.

Unfortunately, she had previously sought care at the same clinic while uninsured and had a large unpaid balance. The clinic wouldn’t see her again unless she paid $100 per visit — which she didn’t have.

Eventually, she sought care at a hospital 30 miles away. By then, however, it was too late. Both she and the baby died.

You may think that this was an extreme case, but stories like this are common in America...

If being a progressive means anything, it means believing that we need universal health care, so that terrible stories like those of Monique White, Trina Bachtel and the thousands of other Americans who die each year from lack of insurance become a thing of the past.

More Sick of It!

Last week, a bill requiring paid sick leave for California workers was approved by a state Assembly committee, and is now going to the Assembly Judiciary Committee.

Assemblywoman Fiona Ma's bill would enable workers to qualify for up to nine days of paid sick leave a year. If you want to comment in support of the bill, AB2716, visit this page on the state Assembly's website.

This bill is not dissimilar to the federal Healthy Families Act, which stalled in committee in 2005. Recently, however, the National Partnership for Women & Families and the Healthy Families Act Coalition have tried to revive it.

Harvey Milk for President!

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician "in the history of the planet," to quote Time magazine. He represented my neighborhood on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and was killed in 1978 (along with Mayor George Moscone) by city supervisor Dan White, a seemingly nice guy, by some accounts, who turned out to be a raving lunatic.

But when White was sentenced to a mere seven years for the crime, there were riots at City Hall and in the Castro. Here's some (murky) footage:



Now director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Paranoid Park, etc.) is making a film of those events, staring Sean Penn as Milk, and much of the shoot occurred during the past several months on Castro Street, where I live on the border between the Castro and Noe Valley neighborhoods.

It's fascinating to watch a film put together: the facades of many Castro businesses were torn down and rebuilt to appear as they were in the 1970s; we saw famous people loitering around coffee shops; we watched staggering amounts of preparation for scenes that appeared to last for two minutes; and we residents were herded like cattle to avoid stumbling into scenes where our clothing would have made us anachronisms. Here's a little video someone did on the transformation:



But it was also interesting to hear gray-haired gay men reminisce about those days--and to hear the Castro's children ask about this Harvey Milk person. Liko wanted to know what all the fuss was about, of course, and I explained as best I could.

He gets that some of his friends have two mommies or two daddies, and it doesn't seem weird to him. I don't need to explain "gay" to him, though he doesn't know that word. He just knows that kids have different mixes of parents, and that boys can be affectionate with boys and girls with girls, just like his mom and I are affectionate. That's not so complicated, is it?

But it was painfully difficult to explain that there was once a time when the parents of his friends could not be parents--they couldn't be anything. They were invisible. And people like Harvey Milk helped create a place for them in playgrounds, schools, neighborhoods, and every area of life.

Love is easy to explain; hate is hard. It's not really suitable for children. One early morning I walked with Liko down Castro, and they had apparently just finished filming scenes of the "White Night Riots." The Castro was once again transformed, now with smashed windows, burned-out cars, and graffiti.

"What's going on, daddy?" Liko asked. I didn't say anything and I was just thankful that this was the reenactment of the riot, not the real thing. It was genuinely chilling to see the neighborhood in a state of ruin, however temporary and imaginary.

This history is often news to children of both queer and straight parents--both are learning about Harvey Milk and what he meant for the neighborhood. One afternoon during the shoot I heard this conversation between my friend Lisa (a lesbian mom) and her oldest son, about 9:

"Why was Harvey Milk so important?"

"He helped stand up for the rights of gay people."

"But what does that mean?"

"It means that we can take care of you and not be afraid of anyone taking you away."

Which is really cool, in every single way. I'm glad Van Sant is making this film, and I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I'm proud to live in a place with such great history.

By coincidence, the video of an updated version of Wyclef Jean's "If I Was President" was shot in the neighborhood at the same time as Milk. Liko and my wife Olli got roped into it one afternoon and they cheerfully participated, and now the video is out and they're in it, with many amusing San Francisco street scenes. They appear (for about a second in front of the Castro Theater) at the three minutes, eleven seconds point, near the end:



It's an accidental, personal juxtaposition, but it seems to me that "If I Was President" has a lot to say to Milk:

[chorus]
If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president...
If I was president

An old man told me, instead of spending billions on the war,
we can use some of that money, in the ghetto.
I know some so poor, they use the spring as the shower,
when screaming "fight the power."
That's when the vulture devoured

[chorus]
If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president...
If I was president...
If I was president...
If I was president

Tell the children the truth, the truth.

Sick of it!

Did you know that half of workers don't have a single paid sick day? There are no state or federal laws that require employers to provide paid sick days.

I don't know about you, but I use almost all my sick days to stay home with my son when he's sick. A lot of parents, especially moms, get fired because they have to stay home with a sick child.

Well, you can do something about it without leaving the ergonomic comfort of your keyboard. Join the Online Rally for Healthy Families! You can share your sick-day story and send a message to Congress to pass the Healthy Families Act, which would establish a new standard of seven paid sick days per year for workers to recover from their own illness, or to care for sick family members.

Remember the Future

Happy New Year!

Or is it?

For decades, the conventional wisdom has said that we're getting dumber, society is disintegrating, and the world is becoming more dangerous. Each new year, it seems, has carried us one step closer to the abyss. Why would anyone want to have children?

There's just one problem with this feeling: It's totally contradicted by the evidence.

Are we getting dumber? Not according to IQ tests, which show each new generation of Americans being smarter than the previous one. But isn't our culture dumbed down by TV? Not really. Have you ever sat down and looked at the pop culture of previous eras? I have. It's filled with racist and sexist stereotypes, cruel jokes, simplistic morality, and banal ideas. Even TV has improved dramatically. Compare shows like The Sopranos to the best TV dramas of the 50s, 60s, and 70s--The Sopranos beats them all in psychological, moral, and artistic sophistication. And The Sopranos isn't alone--the best TV these days is really, really good, and reflects a wiser, more self-aware culture.

Is society disintegrating? To be sure, there is less social capital in the United States today than there was fifty years ago. People are spending less time together; politics is polarized. But are things really worse than they were, say, in the decades leading up to the Civil War? Are people angrier now than they they were the 1930s or more polarized than in the 1960s? The answer is no. America today is more egalitarian, more tolerant, and more diverse than in any previous era.

Is the world more dangerous? Recently, crime in America has declined; so has domestic violence. Infant mortality is down; people are living longer. Scientists like Stephen Pinker, Douglas Fry, and Robert M. Sapolsky have argued that communal, political violence has gone down over the past few centuries--way down. Writes Pinker:

Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

Of course, there's plenty to feel anxious about in 2008. Expenses and debt are up; inequality is growing. The nightmare occupation of Iraq continues. The globe is warming. Those are things to struggle against, personally and politically--and we might lose. But you know what? People in the past fought to make life better for us today--and many of their efforts succeeded. We have an obligation to the do the same for future generations.

That's my New Year's resolution: Remember the future.

[Cross-posted with the Greater Good blog.]

No hitting: The play

Scene: Dinner at Savor in Noe Valley. I'm eating humus; Liko is eating pasta.

Me: Liko, do you want to go to the antiwar protest tomorrow?

Liko (mouth full): What's an antiwar?

Me: In an antiwar protest, people get together and they ask war to stop.

(Liko swallows.)

Liko: Why?

Me: Remember what we talked about yesterday? War is really terrible. Mommies and daddies and little kids like you get hurt really bad, sometimes they get killed.

Liko: Where is war?

Me: Tomorrow we are going to protest the war in Iraq.

Liko: Where is Iraq?

Me: I showed you yesterday on the globe. It's very far from here. The people there don't speak our language or dress like us, but they're people just like us and they don't like to get hurt.

Liko: Are we going to get dessert?

Me: I don't think so.

Liko: Why?

Me: Because you already had ice cream today. Do you want to go to the antiwar protest?

Liko: I want to be a war-guy and hurt people!

Me (flustered): What? We don't want to hurt people, Liko. We want to help them.

Liko (bashes table with his hand): I want a war-stick! [Meaning, a gun.]

Me: Liko, please don't hit the table.

Liko: Why?

Me: Because we're in a restaurant and we don't hit tables.

Liko: Why?

Me: Because it bothers the people around us.

Liko (looking around): Are those people going to antiwar protest?

Me (glancing around and feeling slightly defeated): Some of them might, sure.

Liko: What do people do at antiwar protest?

Me: We march and sing songs and hold signs.

Liko: What do signs say?

Me: They say things like "Stop the war" or "War is bad for children."

Liko: I want to make a sign.

Me: OK. What should it say?

Liko: No hitting!



Photos courtesy of our neighbor Woody Hastings.

Family vs. Political Involvement

Naazneen Barma reports:

Julianna Sandell Pacheco and Eric Plutzer analyzed the effects of three important teen life transitions—adolescent parenthood, early marriage, and dropping out of high school—on later political engagement. In a paper published in American Politics Research, Pacheco and Plutzer report that the three transitions “can contribute to a pattern of cumulative disadvantage because experiencing one teen transition often leads to another.” Teen parents are much more likely to drop out of school, which in turn sets of other chains of events that dampen political participation, making it unlikely they’ll be able to advocate effectively for their needs and opinions.

Interestingly, the scholars find that the effects of these life transitions on voter turnout differ across racial and ethnic lines, with the impact of teen parenthood applying more to Whites than to Blacks or Hispanics. They suggest that the differences across racial groups may reflect divergent norms about educational achievement and early parenthood and marriage. This hints that providing the right kinds of social support to teens could offset the negative impacts of their life transitions...

The authors demonstrate that supposedly “nonpolitical” life events can have an influence on political behavior. From a harm reduction viewpoint, it may be possible to cut into the causal chain to prevent one bad choice from leading to another. Their results suggest that efforts to help teen parents in a way that makes it easier for them to stay in school could carry great benefits—both for their immediate educational success and their lifelong political engagement.

I have been thinking recently about how tough it is, period, to be a parent and stay politically active. This past weekend I attended a board meeting for an organization that I've been involved with for about a year, and as I sat there looking at spreadsheets I had a revelation: it's not just me volunteering my time, it's my entire family. I normally take responsibility for Liko over the weekend, which allows my wife to do whatever she wants (hanging out with us is one option, but it's her choice; she spends a lot of time cleaning the house and doing laundry, I'm afraid). When I go to a weekend-long meeting, my wife loses the break from caregiving, and of course my son loses my company. I've started to recently think that maybe it's just not the right time in my life to be politically active, but I fear that if I drop out completely I'll never go back. (I also just had a short story published, "What Do We Want? When Do We Want It?" that touches on this topic--one of my few stories to be available online!)

The U.S. vs. the Rest of the Post-Industrial World

The Council on Contemporary Families released a new study of how the U.S. ranks in family-friendly work policies. The study found that the U.S. ranked high in protecting the right of all people to work, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age or disability. The study also found "marked success in lowering the poverty rates of the elderly, although they have been less successful than other affluent nations in protecting children from poverty...In addition, the U.S. is also one of 117 countries guaranteeing a pay premium for overtime work."

All to the good, and thank your lucky stars for the labor, feminist, and Civil Rights movements. Beyond that, however, the U.S. left much to be desired:

Out of 173 countries studied, 168 countries offer guaranteed leave with income to women in connection with childbirth; 98 of these countries offer 14 or more weeks paid leave. Although in a number of countries, many women work in the informal sector, where these government guarantees do not always apply, the fact remains that the U.S. guarantees no paid leave for mothers in any segment of the work force, leaving it in the company of only 4 other nations: Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.

65 countries ensure that fathers either receive paid paternity leave or have a right to paid parental leave; 31 of these countries offer 14 or more weeks of paid leave. The U.S. guarantees fathers neither paid paternity nor paid parental leave.

107 countries protect working women’s right to breastfeed; in at least 73 of these the breaks are paid. The U.S. does not guarantee the right to breastfeed, even though breastfeeding is proven to reduce infant mortality.

137 countries mandate paid annual leave, with 121 of these countries guaranteeing 2 weeks or more each year. The U.S. does not require employers to provide any paid annual leave...

145 countries provide paid leave for short- or long-term illnesses, with 127 providing a week or more annually. More than 79 countries provide sickness benefits for at least 26 weeks or until recovery. The U.S. provides only unpaid leave for serious illnesses through the FMLA, which does not cover all workers. Moreover, the U.S. does not guarantee any paid sick days for common illnesses.

And so on. I suspect that very few Daddy Dialectic readers will be surprised by these findings. The press release concludes:

There is an enormous payoff to improving working conditions -— from lowering long-term family poverty to improving population health and education and increasing their associated economic and social benefits. The comparative data do not support the common notion that establishing good working conditions leads to job loss. Our studies found that none of these protections is associated with higher unemployment rates on a national level. In fact, on a global scale, countries that provide longer parental leave, as well as more leave to care for children, are among the most economically competitive.

At the top of this post you'll see my son Liko, fighting for everyone's right to work...

Mary Cheney vs. Borat

Newsflash:

“Every piece of remotely responsible research that has been done in the last 20 years on this issue has shown there is no difference between children who are raised by same-sex parents and children who are raised by opposite-sex parents,” said [Mary Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney]. “What matters is that children are being raised in a stable, loving environment.”

I also read in this article that Ms. Cheney "came 'pretty close' to quitting when President Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage." Way to stand up against evil, Mary! I'm sure the President was quaking in his boots.

Meanwhile, Borat does the right thing.

Yes, I'm in a snarky mood.

Assumption vs. Assumption

Recently I was swapping emails with a group of feminist activists I've known for 15 years. We were talking about progressive family policy.

At some point in the dialogue, I realized that we were starting from two very different assumptions. Theirs was that progressives should fight first and foremost for daycare and preschool, so that mothers could go to work and pursue worldly ambitions.

I couldn't help but feel that my friends saw kids as a burden that public policy should strive to alleviate, shades of Linda Hirshman. And until, oh, about 29 months ago, I pretty much shared their assumption and priorities.

Before Liko was born, we figured that after six months my wife would go back to work and we'd engage some form of childcare. Wrong. Liko didn't want his parents to go to work. This might have been a problem, except that we agreed with him. We didn't want strangers to take care of our son. We didn't think it was best for him or for us.

And so we changed our lives, in various ways I have documented here at Daddy Dialectic. Since then I have thought a great deal about our caregiving impulse and its relationship to our values, and what it might mean for the family policies I'd support as a parent.

Just to be clear: Childcare and preschool are good. High-quality childcare should, like health care, be available to anyone who wants and needs it. Moreover, I believe that daycare and preschool should be guaranteed and heavily regulated by government. It's a matter of equity as well as economic development. More women (and men) in the workforce is good for the economy.

Good for the economy, but is it good for children? Is it necessarily a good thing for all mothers and all fathers to march off to work every morning? There are literally hundreds of empirical studies that answer no to these questions; taken together, they suggest that parents working outside the home too much, too early in a child's life is bad for the kid as well as the parents.

Numerous studies, writes Jane Waldfogel in her new book What Children Need, indicate that "Children whose mothers work long hours in the first year of life or children who spend long hours in child care in the first several years of life have more behavioral problems...Children do tend to do worse [in health, cognitive development and emotional well-being] if their mothers work full-time." The effects of paternal employment have hardly been studied; social science firmly places the burdens and joys of caregiving on moms.

Does this mean that conservatives are right? Are working moms guilty of neglect and responsible for America's social ills? Emphatically: no. First of all, we need more men to contribute more to taking care of kids: there's no evidence at all that dad can't do it just as well as mom.

We need to be careful in interpreting these results [writes Waldfogel], given that in nearly all cases studied the fathers were either working full-time themselves or were not in the household at all. These results tell us the effect of having two parents working full-time or a lone mother working full-time. And so their clearest message is that children would tend to do better if they had a parent home at least part-time in the first year of life. They do not tell us that the parent has to be the mother.

Second, the studies also show that parental sensitivity and responsiveness "is the most important predictor of child social and emotional development--more important than parental employment."

Third, we need genuinely family-friendly policies that respect parents' choices and will allow parents of any gender to stay at home as much as possible with their kids for at least the first year. To my mind, this needs to be the progressive policy priority. The shape of such policies is well-known and widely implemented outside of the US, consisting of paid parental leave and wage replacement, job and legal protections, guaranteed health care, requiring employers to consider requests for part-time work, etc. As usual, the social democracies of Scandinavia set the standard. As usual, the United States looks like it watches too much Fox News.

It should be acknowledged that support for parents to stay home can help keep parents out of the workforce or inhibit career growth. There are solutions to this problem. Sweden combines support for parents to stay home with comprehensive daycare and preschool programs for when they go back to work, with good results. But I don't want to move to Sweden. It's too damn cold.

Odds vs. Ends, Once Again, with Focus on TV

Daddy Dialectic readers have been sending me tips right and left. Here are some hot spots:

1) Alex (in Boston, MA) pointed me to this blueprint for a policy program that values families, "including legislation, articles, research reports and other resources, to help legislators and advocates bring these policies to your states." It's an amazing resource.

2) Lara (in Colorado) sent me an incredibly disturbing expose of women who were fired from their jobs for getting pregnant. "I've seen more (pregnancy discrimination) clients ... in the last couple of years than I've seen in the past 10," says an attorney. Meanwhile, Cooper Munroe (in Pittsburgh, PA) shared this piece on a PSA campaign urging women to vote. The link between these two items goes without saying, yes?

3) Today The New York Times covers a new confirmation of long-term trends in work/family balance:

Despite the surge of women into the work force, mothers are spending at least as much time with their children today as they did 40 years ago, and the amount of child care and housework performed by fathers has sharply increased, researchers say in a new study, based on analysis of thousands of personal diaries.

“We might have expected mothers to curtail the time spent caring for their children, but they do not seem to have done so,” said one of the researchers, Suzanne M. Bianchi, chairwoman of the department of sociology at the University of Maryland. “They certainly did curtail the time they spent on housework.”

The researchers found that “women still do twice as much housework and child care as men” in two-parent families. But they said that total hours of work by mothers and fathers were roughly equal, when they counted paid and unpaid work.

Using this measure, the researchers found “remarkable gender equality in total workloads,” averaging nearly 65 hours a week.

Guys, we still need to do better. In ten years, I'd like to hear that men do just as much housework and child care as women in two-parent families.

In "To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered," The Times tracks the rise of non-traditional families. "The numbers by no means suggests marriage is dead or necessarily that a tipping point has been reached. The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans eventually marry. But marriage has been facing more competition. A growing number of adults are spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners, and the potential social and economic implications are profound."

4) Finally, Chris at the Institute for Southern Studies (in Durham, NC), shared a brief story in Slate about a possible link between TV-watching and autism. "Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders."

We don't own a TV. We dumped it shortly after 9/11 and haven't looked back. But we do watch DVDs on our computers and once a month we watch kids' movies with Liko. While obviously we're against excessive TV-watching, I must admit that Liko seems to get a lot out of the occasional Baby Einstein. Instead of staring slack-jawed at the screen, he really interacts, verbally and physically, with what he sees and hears, dancing, repeating words, and pointing to things around the house that he sees in the movie. (He calls movies "moo-moos" and calls my laptop the "moo-moo machine," as in, "Daddy took the moo-moo machine to work.") I guess my position, which seems common-sensical, is that a little bit of TV is fine and even beneficial. But I don't think we'll ever actually own a TV. The temptations, and the potential harm, are just too great.

In today's photo, you can see Liko and me at a game of the Reno Silver Sox, who took the championship trophy of the new Golden Baseball League in their inaugural season. Who wants to see a bunch of preening, bloated millionaires lumbering around a diamond? Minor league baseball is the way to go! Go Silver Sox!

Paddling vs. Waterboarding

Yesterday's New York Times contained an interesting piece on paddling in public schools:

As views of child-rearing have changed, groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of School Psychologists and the American Medical and Bar Associations have come out against corporal punishment.

“I believe we have reached the point in our social evolution where this is no longer acceptable, just as we reached a point in the last half of the 19th century where husbands using corporal punishment on their wives was no longer acceptable,” said Murray Straus, a director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire.

Among adherents of the practice is James C. Dobson, the child psychologist who founded Focus on the Family and is widely regarded as one of the nation’s most influential evangelical leaders.

DuBose Ravenel, a North Carolina pediatrician who is the in-house expert on the subject for Mr. Dobson’s group, said, “I believe the whole country would be better off if corporal punishment was allowed in schools by parents who wish it.”

I also just stumbled across this essay by Randall Balmer, an evangelical Christian and professor of religious history at Barnard College, which I share as a follow-up to the previous two posts on conservative childrearing practices:

The torture of human beings, God's creatures — some guilty of crimes, others not — has been justified by the Bush administration, which also believes that it is perfectly acceptable to conduct surveillance on American citizens without putting itself to the trouble of obtaining a court order. Indeed, the chicanery, the bullying, and the flouting of the rule of law that emanates from the nation's capital these days make Richard Nixon look like a fraternity prankster.

Where does the religious right stand in all this? Following the revelations that the U.S. government exported prisoners to nations that have no scruples about the use of torture, I wrote to several prominent religious-right organizations. Please send me, I asked, a copy of your organization's position on the administration's use of torture. Surely, I thought, this is one issue that would allow the religious right to demonstrate its independence from the administration, for surely no one who calls himself a child of God or who professes to hear "fetal screams" could possibly countenance the use of torture. Although I didn't really expect that the religious right would climb out of the Republican Party's cozy bed over the torture of human beings, I thought perhaps they might poke out a foot and maybe wiggle a toe or two.

I was wrong. Of the eight religious-right organizations I contacted, only two, the Family Research Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, answered my query. Both were eager to defend administration policies. "It is our understanding, from statements released by the Bush administration," the reply from the Family Research Council read, "that torture is already prohibited as a means of collecting intelligence data." The Institute on Religion and Democracy stated that "torture is a violation of human dignity, contrary to biblical teachings," but conceded that it had "not yet produced a more comprehensive statement on the subject," even months after the revelations. Its president worried that the "anti-torture campaign seems to be aimed exclusively at the Bush administration," thereby creating a public-relations challenge.

I'm sorry, but the use of torture under any circumstances is a moral issue, not a public-relations dilemma.

Amen to that!

Lastly, I'd like to point readers - especially any readers who doubt the link between conservative childrearing practices and right-wing policy - to this dialogue between Focus on the Family and combat veteran Michael Gaddy about the Iraq War.

Raising kids and social change

By Chip -- A few posts back in a comment Justin questioned whether being home full time with our kids is actually "social change work"; he argued that it was not, and that raising our kids is not the most important job in the world. In his words it is "important but not revolutionary."

I have to say I disagree.

By revolution, I am assuming Jason means bringing about social change "from below," that is, building consciousness and support among real people. I think anyone talking about "revolution" in the US these days is probably actually referring to this form of change rather than the traditional meaning of the word, which involves actual violence.

And it is exactly in this goal of bringing about social change "from below" where we as parents play a crucial role. There are two ways we do so, one direct, one indirect.

The direct way involves a number of discrete elements. The first is that by spending time with our kids we show them through our actions that we are commited to them, that they are important to us. This gives them the confidence and psychological health to act on their principles in the face of a society that is hostile to those principles and values.

If we let our kids be raised by societal norms, we are doing the opposite of progressive, positive activism. Raising progressive kids requires being very proactive, being very involved in our kids' lives, talking to them from the earliest days about the values that we believe are important, about the changes that need to happen in our society, and living those values.

For me, the foundation or prerequisite to doing that was to be an involved father. First and maybe most directly, in the area of gender relations: if we want to bring about change in that area, we have to not only talk the talk, but walk the walk.

As a guy, I can thinking of nothing more subversive of "traditional" conservative values than the fact that I chose to stay home full-time with my daughter for the first two years of her life; that I chose to downsize career ambitions to spend time with my kids and to be more involved in their lives than I could have if I had followed my earlier ambitions. I understand that in many ways my ability to do this is related to my class privilege and educational background. Nevertheless, I think that exactly because of those factors, and the resultant fact that I had many other options, it is important for me to take steps to undermine gender hierarchies in the eyes of my kids as well as in my wider community.

Apart from gender, it takes a lot of work to deconstruct or innoculate our kids against the insidious right-wing values that suffuse our culture and society. I'm proud that, for example, my kids actively question US nationalism, that they understand that poverty and injustices are not the fault of the victims but rather of the structure of our society and economy. Getting them to that point is important work. Without this kind of work, social change is much less likely to occur.

So while Justin feared that spending time in the nuclear family is a conservative value, in fact I'd argue that it's a key way to spread progressive values. One reason conservatives cocoon is to be sure that their children absorb their values. In that sense, by not seeing family as vitally important, progressives abandon a major area of work. But unlike for conservatives, whose focus is on a competitive, disempowering individualism, for progressives the family is just the start, it's the foundation of building a conception of solidarity, the only way that social change will come about.

Indirectly, family time is crucial because activists and others committed to progressive social change need a private life. Like all humans, we need love and affection, joy and enjoyment, in order to maintain energy, motivation, and perspective. Nothing energized me more to work for social change than the time I spent with my children: directly, because I realized they are going to be living in the world we create; and indirectly, because of the energy and strength I get from those relationships.

Raising our kids as progressives is a revolutionary act. Dads staying home full time, dads being very involved in their kids' lives, is a revolutionary act. It is the most important job, it is social change work. Unless we model our commitment to a better world, including in the very concrete context of our immediate families, our kids will be much less likely to internalize the kinds of values that will lead them, in turn, to push for progressive social change when they grow up.

As Steve Earl says, the revolution starts ... Now.

Cross-posted at daddychip2

a mythology of contradiction

Lately, I have been obsessed with myths. Stories. The mythology of living. The tales we tell to define ourselves, explain our existence, create communities, clarify enemies. I read an essay by Frank Chin who chastised Maxine Hong Kingston and other Asian American writers for bastardizing the myths of China, creating hapa myths devoid of their “true” cultural relevance. And at first I aligned myself with him thinking of Disney’s Mulan, of Aladdin, thinking of history classes my children come home from and try to explain why they build model California Missions. My daughter acknowledge though that she is also building a cemetery for the dead Indians used to build those Missions. What bastardized and commercialized mythology is being told there? And why does it get retold over and over? What purposes does it serve?

So I see his point, but then I remembered how often I have written about the ways storytelling and talkstory can change you, change minds, change directions; how it can also replenish, can restore, bring peace, solidify, fortify. I believe storytelling is less about the events and more about the narration, the connections; you tell what needs to be told; you create what your people might need to hear. I remembered how when I think back on the most memorable moments of my life, I smile and recall the way they are told, narrated, shared with others over dinner or at bed time or accompanied by beers on Thursday night. It’s the retelling that is so powerful, is what makes us laugh and smile, or cry and feel empathy. It’s how we live on.

So my kids and I talk about the Missions and how there are so many stories; we talk about how I won’t go in them, how I waited outside the numerous catholic churches in Mexico as their mother went in to connect with the stories of her religious upbringing. We then talked about how her and I both learned from our individual choices and the exchanges or explanations we had around them. My children and I talk about how beautiful those Missions are and what it means to have something so beautiful, so spiritual, have such a dark origin. We talk about both sides; we create a mythology of contradiction.

And as my family marched with hundreds of thousand of other protesters during the May first general strike, we heard talk of what an American is (can you wave both an American and Mexican flag, someone scoffs at us). Well, what’s the mythology of immigration? What are the ways to explain boarder crossing, exile, diaspora? We, of course, know thanksgiving, but do we know the Florida Seminoles’ story, do we retell the stories of the southwest as it went from Indian, to Mexican, to American nations. And as Gloria Anzaldua fortells, “will become Indian once again.” Some day. My New Mexican family claims they have been here before anyone, and they survived by growing and welcoming others into their lives, into their stories and histories like the Mexicans, the gringos, your mother, they tell me. My father says I’m a new breed a chiconky. That’s how he tells it.

In Kingston’s book The Tripmaster Monkey Wittman says that language contains the key to the past and to our future; that in the Chinese character for I was imbedded in it the word warrior or fight or even weapon. To say I was to say I-fight. How powerful is that? But it has been lost to us now. But do I believe? This mythology isn’t mine. Do you believe me about my family? I’m sure I’m not they only half-bred boy from some idealistic white mother and some reckless father from the rez, or ghetto, or barrio. There’s probably a whole underground army of chiconkistas roaming the United States waiting for our story, our time. I think it’s time we start spreading the word, finding that language that says I and means Fight.

I don’t know how to read Cantonese or Mandarin; but I know what Wittman means when he says we have lost the fight and to regain it, we need to relearn our language. Or better yet create our own. Chin, if you wanna wage war against the storytellers, cut out your own tongue.

Because all language starts with stories. When my son asks me about why my mom ran like the prodigal daughter home to her parents after giving two years of her life to the New Mexican desert, what can I say? The myth that was told me from my abuela goes: it was a snowy night when your mom came, mijo, to say good-bye. She looked at all of us and hugged each one of us. But she did not say a word. And neither did we. We all stood in silence. What could we say, mijo, what could we say? Then, she just turned and left.

She never said a word about them again till I was 18. How strong must you be to hold your tongue for so long? The truth is something a little different: my mom, lonely, a single mother because my father left her and then went to jail, trying to survive, knowing she needed family, decide to return home. Who can blame her? What else needs to be said? But the problem was the silence. That is what caused the pain, what divided families years after the events happened. What people remember is the silence that followed my mother’s departure.

Wittman says Repetition makes a custom. Doing things over and over establishes reality. Hearing the words more than once, the people will get it. I want to get it. I want my kids to get it. I want everyone one to once and for all get it. But in order to do so, we must all start talking and start listening. Don’t worry if it is slightly different each time you tell it; don’t worry if someone else tells it differently. Just tell it like it might save your life. Tell it like you're fighting for your kids. For indeed, in these times, in this day and age, it just might and you certainly are.

Pissing into the wind vs. Going with the flow: The Play

Based on a more or less true story!

Characters:
Dad#1 is a writer.
Dad#2 runs a nonprofit law firm that sues prescription drug companies.

Act II, Scene 2:

Scene: Irish bar in Boston.


Dad#1: How’s work going?

Dad#2: Win some, lose some. Lately I’ve been trying to stay enthusiastic. Sometimes I feel like we’re just part of the cost of doing business for these big pharmaceutical companies.

Dad# 1: The cost of doing business matters. It can change behavior.

Dad#2: Don’t you ever feel like you’re just pissing into the wind?

Dad#1: Sure, all the time. When I left my job a year ago, I absolutely felt that way.

Dad#2: Still feel that way?

Dad#1: All the time. But I realized something kind of important, which is that I didn’t have any choice but to do the kind of work I do. I may be pissing in the wind but I have to do what I think is right and hope it works out. I mean, look, we don’t know what effect our actions will have. What seems ineffectual today can turn out to have a huge impact later on – Rosa Parks and King were inspired by people we’ve never heard of, blah, blah, blah.

Dad#2: Like the butterfly that flaps his little wings in China and causes a hurricane off the coast of Louisiana.

Dad#1: Sure, exactly. Except the butterfly doesn’t have any choice but to flap his little wings. That’s just what he does. We on the other hand have to make annoying choices. See, the problem with my old job is that the organization had, you know, strayed from its founding values. I joined a social justice organization but it turned into this business while I was there. At the end I wasn’t doing work that made sense to me, and so I was unhappy. Right after I left I just felt disillusioned, like no good intention goes unpunished. But then I realized I couldn’t live that way, thinking that whatever I started would turn to shit.

Dad#2: You can’t think that way if you’re dad.

Dad#1: That was a big part of it, yeah. Exactly. We don’t know how our kids are going to turn out, but we just have to raise them in a way that seems right to us. It’s like how E.L. Doctorow described the experience of writing a novel: you’re driving a car through the desert at night and you can only see as far as the headlights shine. You have to just keep driving in the right direction and have faith that you’ll get to your destination.

Dad#2: That’s the problem. What if you start to think that you’re not actually going anywhere?

Dad#1: What else are you going to do?

Dad#2: Stop the car. Get a job with one of the pharmaceutical companies you’ve been suing, buy a big house, send your kid to private school, retire in luxury.

Dad#1: I got a glimpse of that life at my old job. After I became a dad, I thought lots, more than I’d like to admit, about whether or not I should focus on making money. It seemed like the right thing to do, provide for my family and so on. That whole manly dad thing. But I was so unhappy. I’d be holding the baby and thinking about arguments at work. I wasn’t focused on the baby; I was always somewhere else.

Dad#2: That can be true at any job.

Dad#1: Sure, lots of nonprofit jobs suck. But some are great. This is about values and what you want out of life. After I quit I realized that I couldn’t organize my life around private accumulation. Why should that be the point of being a man? That’s somebody else’s idea of daddyhood. It’s a trap. For lots of guys, maybe it’s OK. I’m not judging them anymore. I just know that I have to live a certain way or I won’t be happy. And what kind of father will I be if I’m not a happy person?

Dad#2: So it’s destiny.

Dad#1: Maybe that’s one way of putting it, like you have a purpose and the secret to happiness is discovering that purpose, though I have no idea how that purpose would get assigned. It’s probably just accident, like everything else in our lives. Anyway, I just felt like, I had to live my life come what may. Maybe I wouldn’t make as much money, but maybe there are other things I could give my son by living my life the way I do. I’m not sure what. I’m still figuring that out.

Dad#2: But what if you’re no good at fulfilling your destiny? Like, you sue drug companies but you suck at it? Or maybe you just think it’s boring?

Dad#1: First of all, you probably don’t suck at it as much as you think you do. You can’t win every battle and if you lose a couple in a row, you can start to have negative bullshit ideas about yourself. Second, you don’t have to do this particular job forever. You can move on. Third, you know, a lot of work is boring. Especially legal work. If you worked for a big company, would it be any less boring? It’d probably be even more boring.

Dad#2: At least you’d make a lot of cash. (Finishes beer and slams it down on the bar.)

Dad#1: If that’s what you want to do, that’s fine with me. The only problem is, would you be making the world better or worse in that job?

Dad#2: Yeah. I think I know the answer to that one.

Dad#1: I dunno. Drugs help people live longer, right? You could tell yourself lots of stories that would make it easier to go to work.

Dad#2: Ugh.

Dad#1: See? (Laughs.) You can’t do it, can you?

Dad#2: I think I’m drunk. And I have to piss. Do you want another beer?

Dad#1: Sure. Does beer help people live longer?

Dad#2: I dunno but it sure makes me piss.

Dad#1: Just don’t do it into the wind.