Monday, March 02, 2009 - Posts
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As if the employment market isn't difficult enough, a human resources expert over at lemondrop.com on AOL argues that victims of sexual harassment in the workplace, should simply quit. "Trying to change the system from within has failed American women for decades. Don't be a sucker" writes blogger Laurie Ruettimann, "say ‘I quit' instead." I may be not quite post-feminist enough here, but isn't quitting one's job a luxury only the most financially secure dare indulge in? And don't HR reps ask why you left your prior engagement? Wouldn't answering "due to a hostile work environment" undermine your new job application? Besides, when a boss or co-worker invites you to a retrospective of Long Dong Silver, shouldn't the correct response be "Don't be an ass" instead of "I'm outa here"?
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Kerry just noted the problems with the "poverty-as-familial-bonding-mechanism narrative"; I've got issues with another recession story line, the Americans-want-to-be-comforted-by-crappy-entertainment-now-that-we're-poor meme. It's in full effect in Alessandra Stanley's piece about CBS's Rules of Engagement, a supremely middling sitcom that, after a long hiatus, begins airing on CBS tonight. In the piece, Stanley contrasts "new economy shows" like 30 Rock, which continue to bomb in the ratings, with successful "Old-economy hits" like Two and a Half Men. She says our preference for the latter "suggests that nowadays network viewers prefer comforting comedy to high-wire satire." (Successful satire The Office does not figure into her formulation.)
My problem with this assertion has to do with that nowadays. 30 Rock has been bombing in the ratings since 2006, when most Americans still thought the value of their house could only go up, up, up. Meanwhile, the admittedly execrable Two and Half Men has been the most popular sitcom in America since 2005. In other words, it's not just nowadays that Americans have preferred the "comforting comedy" of Two and a Half to the "high-wire satire" of 30 Rock—it's most days. So has the recession really pushed Americans to rediscover lame sitcoms? Or has it just given journalists a specious way to explain our bad taste?
Another Times piece, about the resurgent movie business (ticket sales are up 17.5 percent this year—it's not that we aren't consuming more entertainment in this recession, it's that what we're consuming is just as crappy, or just as quality, as always), argues, "Helping feed the surge [in box office] is the mix of movies. [They] have been more audience-friendly in recent months as the studios have tried to adjust after the lackluster sales of more somber and serious films."
In other words, more people are going to the movies because the films are not somber and serious. Well, it's January and February, historically the season for Hollywood's least promising projects—people willing to take in a thoughtful movie couldn't find one at the multiplex. If they could, can the Times really be sure they wouldn't go? Last year's biggest film, The Dark Knight, was hardly light and peppy. Next weekend's Watchmen is expected to do huge business, but given that it deals with an enormous weapon going off in New York City*, "somber and serious" sounds just about right. If it succeeds, I wonder how many articles will suggest we "embraced" it because it "speaks to our troubled times."
*Correction, March 3, 2009: The original version of this post incorrectly described the weapon that goes off in Watchmen as a nuclear bomb.
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I'm with Hanna on the annoyingness of this morning's NYT op-ed about British research into the effect of forward-facing strollers on children's language development. This "study" has more holes in it than a piece of openwork Irish lace. The lamest unsubstantiated conjecture (among the endless "mays" and "mights" and "anecdotal evidence suggests") is the claim that children "can easily spend a couple of hours a day" in the stroller. How many children, on how many days of the year? Are we talking waking or sleeping hours? (Most children I know conk out during long walks, thereby rendering them, by definition, nonverbal.) And even supposing this 2-hour mark is reached on a given day, are those two hours imagined to consist of unbroken silent trudging? Don't normal people wheel the stroller TO a place--school, a store, a friend's house--and "interact" with their child once they get there? Equally irritating is the author's casual leap from the statement that "social interaction fosters neurological development" (sounds incontrovertible enough) to the hand-wringing assumption that parents must therefore spend 24 hours a day up in our children's faces, yammering about every fire hydrant we pass. Couldn't they, and we, also get something out of taking a walk looking outward -- ie., at the world around us--and talking only when we have something to say?
Study upon study (backed by more solid data than the "observations" of "some" British teachers) has shown that parents of both sexes spend more time with their children now than they did a generation ago, and at least in the US, the current middle-class model of parenting is "interactive" to an eye-rolling degree. Thanks to this op-ed (which encourages parents not to feel worried, but "curious" about their newly discovered neglect), the crunchier-than-thou parents in my neighborhood are sure to start marching by in imported Swiss backward-facing strollers, "interacting" their way down the block as their children snack on pumped breastmilk and home-milled flaxseed crackers. Look, if my 3-year-old gets any smarter and more verbal than she is already, she's going to take my job. Can I please just plonk her in her beat-up forward-facing stroller and walk down the street in peace?
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I can not express how bogus and annoying I find this so-called stroller study mentioned by Emily. This is in fact a classic in the studies-designed-to-alarm-the-Bugaboo-set genre. Look at it closely. The researchers studied only whether caregivers who had inward-facing strollers talked to the kids more. Of course they did! The kids are facing them. I'm surprised the other parents talked to their kids at all. The rest of the "conclusions"—negative effect on language development, overall decline in linguistic abilities as "observed" by British teachers—is pure conjecture piled on conjecture. Of all the things that have happened since the collapsible stroller was invented in the '60s—mothers entering the workforce, extreme poverty in single-parent households, video games—we're supposed to believe the stroller is the culprit? All that will come out of this study is that Bugaboo gets to unveil an $1,100 model called the Bugaboo Laugh, because as the study authors helpfully point out, "the babies laughed more, too."
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Forget about feeling mommy guilt over which way your child faces as you wheel him along, Emily. Children need to feel separate from parents once in a while, even if you miss them a bit when they are facing away. Forward-facing strollers may or may not deprive your children of verbal-development benefits gained from eye-to-eye conversation, but I think parents of youngsters could make a big difference in that respect just by turning off their wireless handsets. Cell phones are the magic wand of parental helpers, but the attention-drawing mobile miracles must have a far more insidious impact on a child's communication skills than the seat on his pram. I'm not judging. There were no cell phones when I was raising my children. In 1972, when my daughter was born, I used cloth diapers and car seats hadn't been invented yet. When my son came 16 years later, snugglies and umbrella strollers (genius!) had made child transport mechanics much more manageable. If I'd had such a life-changing timesaver, I'm sure I would have neglected my children all day long, but fortunately for them, wireless communication was at least a decade off. Nevertheless, I'm struck by how often I notice parents and caregivers with small children in the park and at the grocery deeply engrossed in conversation on their cell phones. I'd like to see a preliminary study on the developmental effect of that.
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Jessica nails the millionaires-playing-at-poverty trope so beloved by the New York Times Style section of late. But for sheer editorial laziness nothing beats the recession-as-moral-uplift story. Here is Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson explaining that recessions might free us from the shackles of consumerism and "expand our horizons—like an escape from the dungeon of our own desires." Here is the New York Times' Shaila Dewan explaining that forced time off might "work as a kind of recalibration" for Americans who too often choose "money over time." Here is Main Street explaining that "recessions can often bring families together."
I suppose that some downwardly mobile families really will rally around the campfire for a recession-fueled round of "Kumbaya." But the poverty-as-familial-bonding-mechanism narrative has some serious problems, the most obvious being that divorce rates tend to jump and birth rates tend to fall during economic downturns. (Gerson's column makes a very big deal about the fact that the divorce rate fell during the Great Depression, but this is atypical.) Self-reported measures of subjective well-being have plummeted since the start of the financial decline, suggesting that partners and parents are more anxious than they were in times of plenty. And, of course, less disposable income also means less spending on family vacations, day trips, and romantic evenings out. There seems to be some idea, lodged deep in the American psyche, that moneyed people spend all of their time alone in bathtubs full of cash. As it happens, Americans spend quite a bit on consumption experiences enjoyed as families. "Cutting back" surely means cutting back on these expenditures as well. I would not pin my hopes on an upsurge in family whittling.
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Is the recession causing gendered consumer patterns to shift? That's what a marketer from ESPN thinks. While household goods have traditionally been advertised to women, according to MediaDailyNews, "Men are becoming more involved in making household spending choices—perhaps because of the economy—and that could increasingly open doors for ESPN with its male audience." Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, and other major advertisers are shifting funds to reach those new purchasers. For "Ad Report Card" enthusiasts, it will be interesting to see how advertisers attempt to sell these products to men. I predict a Swiffer commercial starring a Victoria's Secret model seductively sweeping in our future. For the married "XX Factor" ladies—who makes decisions about household products in your union?
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Reading about dangerous strollers this morning on the New York Times op-ed page, I thought about a hilariously dismaying chapter in Mary McCarthy's The Group. It's 1935 or thereabouts, and conscientious Priss Crockett takes her toddler, Stephen, to Central Park, where she bumps into a fellow Vassar alum, Norine Schmittlapp, whose is sitting on a bench with her baby. The women proceed to regale each other with polar opposite and equally crazy theories of child-rearing. Example: Norine gives her 3-month-old a pacifier; Priss is horrified. She tells Norine that the pacifier is unsanitary and can change the shape of a baby's mouth. Norine tells her a child sucks "because he's been deprived of oral gratification." Priss is unpersuaded. "For a child to find heaven in a dummy breast was the worst thing she could think of—worse than self-abuse. She felt there ought to be a law against the manufacture of such devices."
And now we learn, via a preliminary study in Britain, about the latest suspect device: the forward-facing stroller. According to the researchers, mothers (yes, it's ever mothers) talk less to babies who ride facing away from the person who is pushing them. This is not a good thing because babies' vocabulary build mostly from listening and laughing with their caregivers. (Quiet time, overrated.) This makes sense to me, to a point. I always felt a bit separated from my kids when they rode forward. The researchers appropriately include a short caveat about the significance of all of this: They say that babies spend a couple of hours a day in strollers, not all their waking hours. (Even that sounds high to me.) Still, the upshot is a general frowning upon the forward-facing stroller. Which, of course, most American and apparently British households with babies have. Suddenly, a seemingly innocent piece of baby equipment seems treacherous. It's blocking babies from learning to talk! The researchers don't call for a law banning the strollers. They've updated to the idea of an award, for an affordable collapsible stroller that faces both ways. Sounds great. But in the meantime, can we hold off on the mommy guilt for the strollers we already have?
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