Bitch writes, “Blah blah single women, blah blah soccer moms, blah blah security moms, blah blah NASCAR dads? Wanna know how to motivate those folks and get them to the polls? Talk about issues that matter to women and mothers. Talk about issues that matter to families. ” And she has great links to politicized moms. The Democrats have to take back the family.
Harry writes, “restrictions on women’s participation in the labour market constituted a massive subsidy to public education.” The smartest women became teachers, because there were few other career options for them. Harry isn’t bemoaning women have more options today, just celebrating the smart teachers of the past. I would add that the schools still free ride off women’s volunteer labor and assume that moms are there to pick up their child at 3:00 and are home full time over the summer. What job conforms to the school year?
Putin’s efforts to subsidize baby-making have put the cost of motherhood and dropping populations back on the radar. Glenn Reynolds says that the safety nuts have made parenting too hard. No more five kids in the backseat. Sam Crane writes that Americans are making more babies than Europeans, because we aren’t that concerned about the safety of the kids. “Americans have more children because they are irresponsible and do not understand or carry through their child rearing duties.”
One of my rules about blogging is to never diss family, friends, or work. But maybe I should reverse this policy. Look at all these people who’ve made a ton of money dishing the dirt on their blogs.
Apt. 11d 
Sam Crane’s thesis (that Americans have more kids than Europeans and the Japanese because Americans are careless parents) is foolish, especially since he attempts to paint it as a society-wide issue. What of the soccer moms, the helicopter parents, the 24/7 surveillance that middle class American parents get mocked for? Not to mention our habit of arresting Europeans who park a baby in a stroller outside a shop or restaurant, or our frequently absurd guidelines for how old a child has to be to be left home alone.
To Eberstadt’s quite defensible list of reasons for America’s greater fecundity, I would add two things: better housing for families (Lileks mentions this somewhere) and our more helpful husbands. McMansions and SUVs may be absurd, but they take a lot of the pain out of having a largish family. Likewise, while American women often complain that their husband is like a second or third child, in developed countries where this is really the case, women will pass on having that extra child.
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My mother has been a high school teacher for 37 years, and comes to the same conclusions– the most intelligent, educated women don’t “have” to be teachers anymore. They can be chemists instead of teaching chemistry, but education suffers. Of course, one solution would be to increase pay and benefits to teachers, but I know that’s just crazy liberal talk. Also tho, it makes it harder for women too– the only job that conforms to the school year completely is teaching.
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Re: the Times and profitable blogs. Didn’t they just do an article last year about being Dooce’d from one’s job because of blogs? I don’t mind the two contradictory stories, but at least pretend you remember them, because in the age of lexus-nexus, or even a good Google search, insitutions should be able to remember their own pasts.
The Times falls prey to this sort of contradictory idiocy in every lifestyle piece they write.
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Snort, Jody. Totally true. Either they write contradictory articles or they keep recycling the same ones over and over. Every year brings another article on mothers and their big fat strollers and how the nonparents hate them.
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Laura, the Sam Crane link isn’t working for me (no closed-end quotation marks in the title tag?).
But I’ve hied my way back here because all day, that article about how children no longer provide economic security for their parents has nagged at me. Unless I missed something, and the trend reporters have reversed themselves, aren’t women in their forties and fifties now known as “the sandwich generation,” precisely because they DO take care of their parents, along with their kids? Aren’t we trying to reframe debates about family leave and family-friendly workplaces with that reality in mind? To argue that children don’t provide support for their parents in old age seems like another way of devaluing women’s work in particular.
While it’s become easier to live child-free into a comfortable old age, not dependent on immediate family for certain basic services, it’s certainly not the norm for people to live entirely without the assistance of their families. Children or nieces/nephews are often responsible for negotiating finances, health care provision, and housing as people age — and that only becomes more true as people live longer, are more likely to suffer some form of senile dementia, and need family members at least to hire their home-health workers, not to mention ensure that the home health workers perform adequately.
Some of the confusion about families and economics, it seems to me, arises from the relatively brief period of time in which we have been a whole-heartedly industrial/post-industrial society. While it’s true that factory work was becoming the dominant urban work environment by the 1880s, the simple majority of the US population still lived in farms and in rural places until the 1920s — and until the “green revolution” of the 1970s (not what you think it means, since it refers to the exposive growth of yields-per-acre after the development of a new generation of fertilizers and pesticides/herbicides), a significant minority still lived on farms, supporting a broadbased rural farm economy.
I could write forever about the ramifications of our agricultural legacy, but suffice to say: the way we think about household wealth, and the distribution of income, and the division of labor according to sex, and even things like the norm for a clean house or a family meal, still owes a great deal (too much?) to concepts rooted in family farms.
In this particular case, I challenge the notion that, because old-age care doesn’t look now the way it did fifty years ago, we can safely assume that people no longer derive significant support, economic or indirect, from their children. Even in the age of Social Security, people have still depended on family to help them negotiate old age.
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Amy: I was reading that fertility has fallen below replacement level in Italy, Spain, and Japan. All of which countries cling to that separate-spheres ideology. Husbands don’t help out around the house, and women can’t combine work and family easily. The result is that women are foregoing marriage and family because work + the single life is so much more appealing, and who can blame them?
Re teaching: I agree that women now have so many more options than back in the day when teaching was one of the very few careers open to bright, educated young women. Claudia Goldin has a new paper out called “The Homecoming Of America’s College Women” (or something like that). In earlier cohorts, over half of employed women college graduates were teachers. Now it’s like one-fifth.
I would add that the increasing cost of education may be a factor in why fewer women (and men) are becoming teachers. Time was that teaching was the “first step” career for men as well as women from working-class families, who were the first in their families to go to college. This was when education was cheap to obtain and teaching salaries were comparable to other professionals’. Nowadays, working-class kids in particular often come out of college owing quite a bit, and a teachers’ salary won’t pay the loans.
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fixed the link, jody. sorry about that. running around with kids today. more comments later.
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Jody, what she said. We’ve moved my wife’s parents in next door and are the difference between living on their own and going to geezerville. My father didn’t like my mother’s family, and wouldn’t contribute, but the rest of her kids paid for her (long) stay in a convalescent hospital (still some blad blood over that, and deserved, I think). My sister is doing much of the same for my mother, out in Calif. We hope that our kids will remember what we did for their grandparents, when our time comes. Our age peers are pretty frequently flying to distant locales to keep things going for their parents, even when not sharing housing.
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