Each weekend, I'm treated to scores of feature articles in the major newspapers that highlight some new trend. In all these articles, there is a whiff of panic. Like the author is slightly worried about making a wrong turn and ending up in Gary, Indiana with elastic waist pants. For some reason, the people featured in these articles are universally loathsome. Is there some website where reporters find loathsome, trendy people?
OK, let's take a vote. Which trend article from this weekend features the most loathsome people?
1. Creating Hipstubia, The New York Times
2. Schools Ask: Gifted or Just Well-Prepared?, The New York Times
3. Run Your Family Like a Business, The Wall Street Journal
Apt. 11d 
What are waste pants? 🙂
LikeLike
Ack.
LikeLike
These people are all loathsome. It’s just too hard to pick!
LikeLike
I don’t know that the third article is that bad. The basic idea is to communicate, which is not a bad thing. We do that periodically.
The second article makes me so f-ing glad we moved out of Brooklyn in 1999.
LikeLike
I agree that lifestyle article people are usually loathsome, but I liked a lot of the ideas in the “Run your family like a business” article, although I think that the ideas they mention are mostly standard advice. We don’t do a weekly family meeting (my husband and I do have monthly budget meetings together to plan spending every month), but family meetings sound like a very good idea, especially for the larger family. Also, chore charts are normal.
The family in Cheaper by the Dozen was an early example of using business methods to simplify life for a large family (both parents were efficiency experts). They also had family meetings, run with parliamentary methods. It’s not at all incompatible with having a warm, affectionate family life. In fact, I suspect that family meetings are very important for making sure that nobody gets overlooked and that the parents aren’t just rushing around putting out fires all the time and neglecting their quiet, well-behaved children.
Here’s clip from the old 1950 Cheaper by the Dozen movie, showing the family council idea at work. If you watch, stick with it at least until 1:40, because that’s where mom starts using her doctorate in psychology.
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/552302/Cheaper-By-The-Dozen-Movie-Clip-Family-Council.html
LikeLike
That’s too much for me to read, so I’m going to assume the first one must be the worst based on this quote.
“Hastings-on-Hudson is a village, in a Wittgensteinian sort of way,”
LikeLike
I first read about the WSJ article on family meetings via a blog post by Historiann, and my reaction was “oh, family meetings are actually a good idea.” But when I went and read the article, I ended up thinking those people had just made a leap into a place I just can’t go. The whole family mission statement just seemed bizarre. We have actually done various pieces of what the article describes (we have tried to identify some core family principles–like kindness and empathy–which we use to have one or two core things to reinforce about behavior rather than a zillion different rules; we have, erratically, family meetings, which really do help make space for my daughter to help regulate her emotions). But the imposition of a business practice rather than the organic growth of parenting choices just seems odd to me.
I loved reading Cheaper by the Dozen as a kid–I suppose because it seemed so funny, not b/c it seemed like great advice for the rest of us.
The article about Hipsturbia struck me as odd for a different reason: surely there have been people moving from the city to Westchester for years? Why is this news?
And the gifted-in-kindergarten stuff just makes me want to cry.
LikeLike
“Hastings-on-Hudson is a village, in a Wittgensteinian sort of way.”
I’d love to corner the person who wrote that and get them to answer the question, “and what does a Wittgensteinian village mean, exactly?”
“I loved reading Cheaper by the Dozen as a kid–I suppose because it seemed so funny, not b/c it seemed like great advice for the rest of us.”
I think if you had 12 kids, it wouldn’t be a bad primer, actually, to ensure a happy, orderly, productive life.
LikeLike
“I think if you had 12 kids, it wouldn’t be a bad primer, actually, to ensure a happy, orderly, productive life. ”
Yes, but another alternative would be to not have 12 kids.
LikeLike
We have regular family meetings. It’s known as “dinner.”
The kindergarten piece made me sad. I don’t see the parents as loathsome. I consider the officials loathsome. So much energy devoted to limiting educational opportunity. I don’t care if a child is “gifted” or “hard-working.” Don’t limit access to education. Problem solved.
As for Brooklyn, well, it’s a logical consequence of the internet and efficient delivery services. I’m not certain why artists have to congregate in the most expensive city in the country.
LikeLike
Urbanbaby, right, that’s the website where the NY Times writers go to find loathsome lifestyle trends to report on.
I read the testing article as well another, similar article about private tutoring for specific courses in high school. I think the practices are imports.
China has had a long testing tradition; India, I think, developed it in order to circumvent the caste system (and it did work, for a few, but no, it doesn’t work, on the whole). Test prep, private tutoring, is the norm in those countries (for those who have the resources).
I see the bigger trend as being a breakdown of the honor system, including straight out honor codes, but also the expectation that if test-prepping undermines a tsst, you shouldn’t do it, of weakly enforceable rules in sports (like the rule against ruddering in small boat races), the non-inteference rule in Destination Imagination/Odyssey of the Mind, the request not to help with homework, . . . .
I think the issue is when the stakes seem to high (my kids goes to a great school or a terrible one, or areas are grey — playing with legos, tangrams, blocks is OK, but practicing the test items on IQ tests isn’t, using your rudder to steer is OK, but not to gain row, . . . .).
I don’t know where these changes will lead us, because I think a big effect of test prep is to select the people who are most highly loaded in executive function skills (i.e. suppression of immediate rewards, long attention spans, persistence, compliance) independent of other skills. I really don’t know what the effects will be, but don’t see obvious ways to for either individuals or society to hinder the trend.
In NY, admitting that their method of selecting the children is irretrievably broken and stopping their selection process *might* be an improvement. On the other hand, test prepping selects for able (i.e. those who don’t have learning disabilities) with involved parents. To the extent that parents are using the test prepping to stay in the NY system while selecting for those characteristics, removing the ability to join the select system by test prepping might just cause those families to leave (to private schools and the suburbs). Maybe that would be better, but I’m not certain.
LikeLike
“I’m not certain why artists have to congregate in the most expensive city in the country. ”
I think the artists might say that it is their coming there that made the city expensive (maybe not all of NY city, but the various parts of it). Artists come somewhere others aren’t willing to live, then others come, and then the place becomes too expensive for them.
New York, itself, well, artists come there because that’s where the buyers are, where the jobs are (i.e. you can have a day job as a waiter, or whatever job the artists rather than actors get), and because the artists are there.
LikeLike
Like cranberry, our family meeting is called “dinner.” However, in keeping with lean six sigma principles, we mostly try to avoid meetings (waste of time) in favor of division of labor: one person does the money, one does the vacations, one does the shopping, one deals with the building staff (this is all the parents), and one does the schoolwork. Of course, this requires skilled and knowledgeable individuals and a well-designed process, so that the result of all these individual efforts is the product the market wants.
LikeLike
Yes, dinner = family meeting time in our house, too. 30 minutes of eating and talking every single night. One day a week, dinner is 3 hours with lots of courses with friends and/or extended family.
Brooklyn hipsters are NOT artists. Real artists don’t live in NYC any more. It’s not like the 80s. Everybody is in upstate NY these days.
LikeLike
“Of course, this requires skilled and knowledgeable individuals and a well-designed process, so that the result of all these individual efforts is the product the market wants.”
How is your junior employee going to cope with her first apartment?
(My 10-year-old has yet to load the dishwasher, I confess.)
LikeLike
We lived in Brooklyn (Park Slope) from 1994 to 1999. My uncle said our building (we lived in the same brownstone) was near a dodgy area, 5th Ave. HAHAHAHAHA!!!! It’s so not dodgy now. But it was gentrifying enough that when we moved out in 1999, we could have bought a place for $200K, but that price was increasing every day. I didn’t want to live in Brooklyn with a family though (we moved literally 5 days before I gave birth, and in fact my daughter was born at Methodist).
My uncle lives in Kensington now.
“Real artists don’t live in NYC any more. It’s not like the 80s. Everybody is in upstate NY these days.”
Just as an aside, Lorraine Hansberry (1950s-era hipster) moved to Croton-on-Hudson in the late 50s when her husband made it big with a one-hit wonder (“Cindy Oh Cindy”). Everything that goes around, comes around.
LikeLike
“and what does a Wittgensteinian village mean, exactly?”
I’d guess that it’s like a Potemkin Village, but using a different 2 dimensions, so that if you look at it from the river, all the buildings just look like lines.
LikeLike
I’ve never understood how writers or artists are able to afford to live anywhere near New York City. How do artists spend $900K on a house? Are they commissioned by the Queen of England?
LikeLike
“and what does a Wittgensteinian village mean, exactly?”
Kieran Healey’s got you covered, including, for example, “4. The HOAs are unbelievably picky about exterior paintwork, door design, and appropriate methods of kite-flying.”
Though there’s nothing in that thread about whether, from a long way off, they look like flies.
LikeLike
Coming from a place where you can get a perfectly decent house for $100k and a huge one for $200k, I am also baffled as to why any creative person – or anyone in any profession that doesn’t make much money – would live anywhere near New York. So those people are not so much loathsome as batty.
LikeLike
I think our grandparents would read that third article and laugh (or cry?)
It takes a shiny business product lifecycle management tool to get today’s families to talk to each other and get the kids to do their fair share of chores?
My engineer husband has used agile. Hmmm…maybe we can use his experience to come up with some core values for our family. How about: “We may be mundane, but we aren’t loathsome?”
(the “we are travelers not tourists” core value made my skin crawl…just announcing that makes one a tourist, and a snobby one at that, me thinks.)
LikeLike
The Gothamist takedown of the hipsturbia article is almost magical. I do really like the coinage ‘hipsturbia’, though. It evokes that movie ‘Disturbia’. Although I didn’t see it, it’s a ‘thriller slasher’ film according to Wikipedia, which seems about right.
LikeLike
Speaking of hipsters-in-search-of-affordable-real-estate, do any of you guys watch Portlandia? That’s what my husband and I were watching while waiting at the hospital for Baby T’s appearance this past fall.
LikeLike
I don’t watch Portlandia because I grew up here, and the one time I watched the tv show it was not exaggerated enough to be parody. Plus I feel so sad, because I liked the Portland I lived in before it was hipsterized. You kids get off my lawn!
LikeLike
“I don’t watch Portlandia because I grew up here, and the one time I watched the tv show it was not exaggerated enough to be parody.”
I like the Women & Women First bookstore and the used clothing store that’s too cool for your clothes.
“Plus I feel so sad, because I liked the Portland I lived in before it was hipsterized.”
As kids, we had either Canadian or Portland TV (Bob the Weather Cat!)and I grew up thinking of Portland as being as comfy and an old pair of shoes, so the idea of Portland turning into hipsterville is still really bizarre.
By the way, did you notice the improbable number of sunny days shown on Portlandia?
LikeLike