I'm taking the day off from writing/blogging and am only reading stuff. Here are some goodies that I've found.
David Brooks is really chuffed that Obama and Duncan are putting pressure on the states to increase the number of charter schools and to find a way to identify and support good teachers.
More people are weighing in on the women/unhappiness research, including Barbara Ehrenreich and Judith Warner.
This post made me very sad.
Apt. 11d 
I’m a little confused on why people think it is a “paradox” that women have gotten less happy as woman receive more opportunities. Isn’t that the way things work everywhere all the time?
I mean, let’s say your oldest friend got engaged and you are going to be a bridesmaid and the bachelorette party is tonight. It sounds like it’ll be really fun. You are happy! Now let’s also say your child has plays softball and the season is supposed to be over, but they kept winning in the post-season and tonight is suddenly the regional semi-finals game. You are excited to go! It will be fun! Now, you’ve got a choice about what to do. You are now “twice as happy!” Right?
Of course not. Now you’ve got two really fun things to do and you are going to have to either disappoint your kid (“It’s the semi-finals. I went to all the other play-off games. I would NEVER miss the finals if your team wins tonight but . . .”) or disappoint your oldest friend (“I’ll definitely be there for the wedding, but this is an important play-off game and. . .”)
Whichever one you choose, you’ll be sitting there wondering if you made the wrong choice. BECAUSE more good things happened, you will be less “Happy.”
Women now have a broader set of expectations, both to family and to careers, and people will be disappointed either way. OF COURSE, women are — in the aggregate — less happy. I’d be shocked if the research showed anything else. I also don’t see it as a bad thing at all, and wouldn’t change it.
The problem — if there is one — is that men have too few societally-approved options and obligations. They are too “happy” because they have too few real options. (Some men choose to be house husbands, but it is not really on the Chinese Menu for most men to seriously consider and reject.)
So, the question I would ask isn’t “Why aren’t women more happy?” Rather, it is “How can we make the men equally unhappy?” More unhappiness would be good for the men, just as it has been good for the women.
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Katha Pollitt says what needs to be said about the happiness study, IMO: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091019/pollitt
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The Bitch PhD post is very sad. But I also totally relate. (Speaking of not being happy.)
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I didn’t find it that sad. I mean it sounded like a bad day and like she’s stressed. But men, do you feel like a failure if you only get to parent your kid for 2-3 hours on a school day? I don’t think that would ever cross my husband’s mind.
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But men, do you feel like a failure if you only get to parent your kid for 2-3 hours on a school day?
My son is actively trying to keep me out of the house. I think he’s taunting me for having never read Freud.
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To me this was not about whether or not another person (of any gender) would also feel like a failure. It was more just that she does not have any control over how she spends her days, to the detriment of her relationships.
I almost had a more Marxist response to the piece, raging against capitalism and the tyranny of full-time paid work.
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Her husband has a heavy duty job, where he’s out of town for most of the week. So, the kid only gets two hours a day of any parent. I could have applied for a job with similar hours to Steve’s. It would have meant a huge jump in income. But that would have meant that the kids would only see a parent for two hours a day. I couldn’t handle that. If Steve was home full time or my mom could watch the kids full time, then I could handle it. But that’s my personal guilt-o-meter.
My reaction was the same as jen’s.
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How old is the kid?
I guess I average 3-4 hours on weekdays (maybe 45 minutes in the morning and then 3 hours at night). But not all of that is quality time: I am showering, or cooking, or driving some of it. I’m not counting post-bedtime malingering, as I sit on my bed overruling requests for extra stories and glasses of water.
I wonder what the average is historically?
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I’m so torn with this hours-spent-with-the-kids stuff. On the one hand, they’re only young once and it seems reasonable to me to pare back on your work schedule for a while. OTOH there’s the whole Crittenden argument about lost pay and forward momentum in your career, not to mention the horrible Leslie Bennetts perspective (grounded in truth tho it may be).
Some friends of ours just shared with us that they’re getting divorced. Sad all around, even without considering economic impact. But I have been STUNNED to see the SAHM in that family reduced to scrubbing floors and taking in neighbor kids just to try and generate some paltry income. I have never seen a more direct example of the risks you run when you put all your eggs in your hubby’s basket. And note that she did it to spend time with her kids — except now she can’t do that either, because she’s too busy watching other kids and cleaning houses.
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“But I have been STUNNED to see the SAHM in that family reduced to scrubbing floors and taking in neighbor kids just to try and generate some paltry income. I have never seen a more direct example of the risks you run when you put all your eggs in your hubby’s basket.”
She’s trying to keep the house, isn’t she? Big mistake.
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“Rather, it is ‘How can we make the men equally unhappy?'”
Answering this could get me into soooooo much trouble…
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And the post over at B’s place is sad, but it also engages a bit of the fix-it mode. The writer seems overwhelmed, and I wonder if there aren’t ways to lessen the whelming going on.
Herewith: 1. Can the cat go to grandma’s or somebody’s? It not only has needs, it seems (guessing solely from this post) to take up a lot of mental and emotional space.
2. Consider going to bed shortly after the wee wun does, especially since (as noted by Laura above) the husband is often not around for adult-like activities. If eight more-or-less uninterrupted hours of sleep are a godsend, ten-plus could be a revelation, nay verily almost a visitation. More sleep will help with the waking-up-exhausted bit, and may help with other things as well. (If one might be getting sick, the to-heck-with-everything-else-and-hie-thee-to-a-supine-position-already advice goes double.)
3. Suck it up and go to the grocery store. It will be sorta fun. And should another wee wun appear someday, meeting one set of requests will seem a piece of cake compared with two (or indeed more) competing (often contradictory) sets of requests. Figuring out how to say yes also starts positive feedback loops.
4. The sister doesn’t need her on the phone until the kid’s asleep. Unless it’s a barely-sub-911 emergency. She’s got 90 minutes with the kid between arrival at home and sleepy time, including meals, baths, etc etc? The sister doesn’t get any of those minutes; there’s time to talk after the kids are in bed.
I mean, sure, bring on the structural remedies and all, but the story reads like someone who’s in a basically workable situation who had a subjectively rotten day, of the kind that even happen in Australia.
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When I was super overwhelmed with kids and work, I threw money at problems. I sent out for food and hired help in the house. Those horror times only lasted for a few months at a time, so I knew that the end was in sight.
My situation was a little different. The kids weren’t in daycare that much; I was home working and doing excessive multi-tasking/not sleeping. My advice to the BitchPhD person would be to make the time count. If you have only 2 hours, make them a great 2 hours. Don’t work on the weekends. Make the kid the priority. Don’t keep your house terribly clean or worry about being a super power in your field. Be an adequate worker. Don’t be cheap with the daycare; hire the absolute best.
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Good advice. The other thing is that in a year or two, her daughter will be in school all day and happy to spend more time with friends. And she’ll have more experience at her current job and know how to make the most of her time there.
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I was struck, too, by the phone call. Is this, more than the guilt about parenting, a gendered thing. If I am doing something with someone who I am actually sharing physical space with (especially if it is someone I care about, either personally or professionally) then if someone calls on the phone that person can wait (unless that person is my spouse or one of my children). I simply do not feel obliged to give my attention first to someone who is not actually there. I KNOW that my spouse feels differently.
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Yes, this is a gendered thing, Harry. There are more expectations on women to maintain relationships among the extended family than there are on men.
One of the best thing that Steve and I every did was that I never took on the responsibility for his family. He has to keep track of everyone’s birthday. He sends flowers for mother’s day for his mom. He does the x-mas cards for his family. When his folks call for a marathon phone session, I don’t get on the phone. This has been a problem, because his family takes birthday cards and phone call seriously. There have been hurt feelings. But I just can’t do everything.
There are still a ton of other extended family responsibilities that are totally on my side of column, even when I was completely stressed out. There’s a picture of me at Jonah’s first communion party looking completely bedraggled. I was teaching four classes that semester, and then I had to host a party for twenty and set up the guest room for the in-laws.
When you have two hours of time with your baby, your baby has to take priority against the demands of everyone else. It’s just hard to do that all the time.
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In my family, there’s a lot of flexibility about phone calls. When I call, my first question is almost always, “Are you busy?” However, I can readily imagine circumstances where one would feel compelled to take the call:
if the sister were getting a divorce, if she were struggling with mentally illness, post-partum depression, if she were living in a foreign country with limited access to long distance, if she were usually hard to reach, if she hadn’t called for a long time, etc. I suspect that the drop-everything-and-answer-the-phone attitude is a carryover from the days when communication was more limited and a phone call was a big deal.
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Isn’t part of the problem one we’ve discussed before in other contexts, when there are actually more “priority” items than fit in a particular time? The same thing happens with money. It’s easy to say one has to prioritize what we spend money on (we can give up the malano blahniks without much distress). But, when you’re choosing between shoes or a winter coat, or a an effective education for your children or a 1 hour commute, or talking with your sister or spending time with your 4 your old, or finishing your lesson plan you have difficult prioritizing to do.
I do think there’s something else going on though, with interactions with small children. It can often be stressful. In theory (some of us) want to spend time with our four year olds, but not when they act like four year olds. And that becomes a bigger problem when you don’t spend your whole day with the four year old or with four year olds in general. The person who has a temper tantrum when they can’t get the ice cream, or who doesn’t understand that you couldn’t pick up ice cream on the way home because there was a huge accident that backed up traffic for hours (the four year old) is difficult to deal with.
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Right. But (and I speak as someone who has had two delightfully easy 4 year olds and now has comparatively immensely difficult 3 year old) there is an investment issue here. The truth is that my 3 year old, though difficult with me, is far easier with me than with his mother (with whom he spends less time, and much much less time alone). The more time you invest in a kid (up to a point) the easier he or she is for you to handle and the more enjoyable he or she is (other things being equal). People (oops, I guess children are people — I mean adults) are not, in fact, that different (spouses need to invest time in each other in order to really enjoy each other, too; friends too).
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“The truth is that my 3 year old, though difficult with me, is far easier with me than with his mother (with whom he spends less time, and much much less time alone).”
That’s one model of child behavior. The other model is giving the custodial parent heck and being angelic with the parent who is less available or (very similarly) being cooperative with a teacher and saving misbehavior for home. I think you’re right about the importance of investing time in a difficult child in order to disarm the behavioral grenade, but a complicating factor is that a difficult child will come home and punish you for all the aggravations of the day.
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Totally agree. In general (there are exceptions), the more time that you spend with your kid, the easier they are. (Your son sounds like a hoot, harry. I have a weakness for crazy boys.)
The reality is that there are a lot of parents who don’t have the opportunity to spend more than two hours with their kids. They have to do the quality parenting thing. They have to ignore exhaustion and competing demands. They have to bond with their kid and learn how he/she tick in two hours, rather than all day. So, that has to mean putting everything else on the back burner. The sister has to deal. If you spent all day at your job, then your job has sucked enough life out of you. No lesson planning.
Has there been a book on quality parenting yet? Must be, right?
Amy, be tougher. No kid should be punishing the grown up.
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I get what Amy is saying. It’s not a matter of the child deliberately punishing the grown-up; the kid just is under so much stress during the day that the worst behaviors come out at home, where it’s safer. It’s just hard to manage.
E “forgot” his Monday spelling homework for the 3rd week in a row. (He never forgets any other homework any other day.) I don’t know what’s going to happen the next Monday I have a meeting and have to send him to after-school care. I’ll have to send the teacher a note insisting that she not let him leave the classroom without gluing the homework to him.
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I have to say that when my three-year-old boy wants to hug somebody, that’s when you need to be afraid. And it’s very hard to punish somebody after the adorable little “You’re the best.”
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“It’s not a matter of the child deliberately punishing the grown-up; the kid just is under so much stress during the day that the worst behaviors come out at home, where it’s safer. It’s just hard to manage.”
I think this is a classic scenario–a kid keeping it together all day at school, and then falling apart 4ish. This may be somewhat blood-sugar related–the behavior clock seems to reset after dinner. (Somehow, the afterschool snack doesn’t have the same miraculous restorative effect.)
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Of course, the child isn’t deliberately punishing the parents. If the child has special circuitry and a typical school day is overwhelming, he/she often fall apart when they get home. Still, the child isn’t allowed to terrorize the rest of the family. Maybe the child needs some quiet time in their room alone with a book for an hour to reboot their system. That’s fine. But no temper tantrums or public yelling allowed. After three strikes, someone loses computer privileges. It’s remarkably effective.
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