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More on the permutations of parenthood: I wonder what to make of this 2005 Census table about "self-care" among children of various ages, up to 15. It seems like some indicator, however rough, of the supervisory ethos in families (though I can't figure out how much variation is encompassed by self-care-regular long stretches, shorter interludes, or what). If I'm reading it correctly, it seems to confirm Liza's hunch that there may not be a class schism between hovering-haves and hands-off-have-nots. In fact, if anything, it suggests the trend may not tend the way we think. It looks as though the more education and the higher the income a mother has, the more likely it is her 11- 14-year-old kids spend some time fending for themselves. This isn't what I would have expected. And obviously, it doesn't tell us anything about the situations of kids older than 15, among whom birth rates are creeping up (while staying steady among 11- 14-year-olds). There, too, class differences can surprise you. As Margaret Talbot's great New Yorker article "Red Sex, Blue Sex" suggests, less-educated parents who run a tight ship don't necessarily inculcate sexual self-control in kids, just as more affluent liberal parents big on youthful autonomy can produce some pretty strait-laced teenagers.
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CBS News has discovered that both the Army and the Marines have given "moral waivers" to men who have been convicted of rape and sexual assault—related felonies—despite an initial denial from the principal undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, Michael Dominguez. In the clip below, Katie Couric talks to a former military medic named Wendy who was sexually assaulted twice while serving abroad. According to CBS:
Wendy’s experience is not unusual. Since 2002, the Miles Foundation, a private non-profit that tracks sexual assault within the armed forces, has received nearly 1,200 confidential reports of sexual assaults in the Central Command Area of Responsibility, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan. Those reports have increased as much as 30 percent a year.
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Nina, I didn't mean to leave your post on Disney's Princess and the Frog hanging out there. (For the record, I thought hard about Lilo--was going to disqualify her for youth, but the real Pocahontas was only 14!) I think you're right that avoiding a Manichean idea of race in America is desirable (today, essentializing brown people is harder, yet more prevalent than ever). And I definitely don't have the heart for a flame war about which ethnic group deserved which princess in which order. A former editor of mine often told me of this game he'd play with his sister as a child, which went:
Of the following minority groups, which is most likely to become president first?
a) gays,
b) blacks,
c) jews,
d) women.
Needless to say his prediction was wrong. But clearly the categories must be expanded! Politics have already bent the rules; hopefully the ever-growing horseshoe of Princesses will do the same.
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I ‘ve enjoyed every word of the helicopter parents versus adventure-parents conversation, and while I am probably just echoing Liza’s great post of this morning, I’ll say that there’s a microversion of the heli-debate that isn’t about class or income or education. It goes like this: Just about every time my kids have made some huge developmental leap, it’s happened around their cousins or grandparents. Like the time I left my then-baby with my dad for a few hours while I ran to a doctor's’appointment. After about 45 minutes I dutifully called home to see how it was all going.
Me: How’s Coby?
My Dad: Oh he’s climbing up and down the stairs.
Me [flipping out]: He doesn’t know how to climb up and down the stairs
My Dad: He does now.
Like Emily B, I’ve been hugely influenced by Blessings of a Skinned Knee. It doesn’t incline me toward sending my kids out to roam the local creeks unescorted. But I am constantly aware that my boys really do have better adventures when I am waaaay out of range. That said, this Coby-stairs story is funny only because he didn't fall on his head and injure himself. Which makes me wonder whether the over-/underparenting calculus just comes down to blind luck.
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Last night I was sitting at my computer when I got a Facebook message from Kimya Dawson, the singer who became an insta-indie folk-rock heroine when her music populated the Juno soundtrack. "Cool," I thought. "I really like Kimya Dawson." This is payback for all those times I defended her when my friends said her lyrics were corny, annoying, or inscrutable or that she was perpetually stuck in freshman year of college.
Then I quickly scanned the message and saw the words, contact my lawyers. Uh-oh. Turns out she was mad that her music was used in a video that accompanied my recent Atlantic story about breast-feeding. "I don't agree with your message and I don't want to be associated with it."
So you think this means she won't friend me?
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Yesterday, the Texas state Senate debated a bill that would require doctors to perform an ultrasound before performing an abortion, but that would give the woman the choice whether or not to see the findings. The underlying motive behind the bill is to give the pregnant woman as much information as possible to make her decision.
The ACLU is fighting back, claiming that the bill assumes that women aren't well-informed already, or that it opens the door for women to be pressured and intimidated into not having an abortion. But this seems like a shallow argument to me—and one that misses the point. For one thing, there may actually be women who aren't all that well-informed about how close a fetus is to human form. Juno captured that perfectly when our uninformed protagonist was swayed by the reality that "... your baby has fingernails!" After all, the women most likely to have abortions are young and less educated. Also, the pro-choice movement has been adopting a line of moral responsibility over the years, starting with Bill Clinton's safe, legal, and rare. Why not take this to its logical conclusion, and let women absorb the full knowledge of what they're doing when they're having an abortion?
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Amy Sullivan has a great piece in Time this week about the answer to the tired old abstinence debate we are about to launch into. Everyone fights over whether or not to mention condoms, she says, when the reality is that most students get no sex ed at all. Only one state requires schools to spend any specific amount of time talking about sex ed. When schools do, they might detail a gym teacher in his or her spare time to do the job. Sullivan says we already know from the research what is the most effective program: comprehensive sex ed, sometimes known as abstinence plus. She then profiles what she considers a model program in South Carolina, where a group of educators bypassed the culture war and constructed a program tailored to the realities of teen lives.
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Dayo, you pose a good question about why women don't watch women's hoops. Commenter Tradbert from the Fray had this to say on the matter:
You
might start by asking why anyone watches sports? It's more than a little
bit odd that some people (mostly men) will literally devote the
majority of their free time and mental energy to watching other men
throwing leather balls -- a game for which non-gambling fans have
absolutely no concrete stakes in the outcome. My guess is that this has
something to do with fantasy fulfillment (this is pretty obvious with
"fantasy" leagues, with children who emulate sports starts, and I would
think it applies to other fans as well). Maybe a lot of guys like to
see themselves as quarterback, b-ball star, etc.
Perhaps women don't fantasize as much about contact competition, and
so they don't see a point in watching other people indulge in this
activity. If this is true, there is no point in hand-wringing about
female fans and female sports. Would it really be so awful if women
didn't enjoy this bizarre pastime? By all logic, this would make women
more rational.
This certainly held true for me -- I used to watch the UConn Huskies and Rebecca Lobo as a tween, but once I realized that my full adult height was going to be 5'7'', I gave up my basketball fantasies. I'm not sure that women don't watch sports because they're "more rational," but I don't know many women who enjoy picturing themselves in Sheryl Swoopes' shoes.
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The talk of teacups and helicopters has me thinking about Taken, the fourth most popular movie in America and a film engineered to play on the worst, most irrational fears of American fathers—think Babel plus white slavery. A former CIA agent played by Liam Neeson is trying to spend more quality time with his 17-year-old daughter. She announces that she is going to spend the summer in Paris with a friend. "Paris!" he exclaims, "Paris is very dangerous." (Spoiler alert!) There is much talk of a seedy Gallic underworld. She persists, and he gives in despite his better, CIA-trained instincts. When she arrives in Paris she is immediately sex-trafficked by crafty Albanians. The Parisian police are in on it; Paris, it turns out, really is an amoral anarchic sexually perverse dystopia. Leaving U.S. jurisidiction sure was a mistake!
Liam Neeson tortures and kills some non-Americans and saves his daughter before anyone can touch her virginity, the loss of which is obviously the worst thing that could ever happen to an American 17-year-old female. Morals include: 1) Never let your virgin daughters leave the soft, warm womb of the United States and 2) The CIA is an omniscient, omnipresent organization whose competence and essential goodness should never, ever be in doubt.
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Not long ago, I was contacted by a representative from Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, who pointed me to Condition: Critical, an online project that seeks to give voice to victims of violence in Congo. I've written about the situation in Congo here previously; New York Times East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman has done an amazing job of chronicling the atrocities and their aftermath in a civil war-torn country where rape is used as a war tactic. "According to the United Nations," Gettleman reported, "27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province
alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the
country."
Condition: Critical looks to bridge the gap between Congo and the outside world with testimonies, videos, and photographs focusing on Congolese women who are victims of sexual violence, who emerge from the jungle after being kidnapped, raped, and enslaved by soldiers, who in some cases are unable to speak. Gettleman: "Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered
by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive
and digestive systems are beyond repair."
A 45-year-old widow called "L." was raped by two armed men, an attack that left her pregnant, suicidal, and an outcast.
L. gave birth to her child today. Her mother was at the hospital for
the delivery. But her father in-law refused to visit her. “The family
has rejected me,” explains L. “I cannot live with them anymore. A
neighbour has taken me in, and that’s where I stay now. I still need
support. I have been stigmatised and rejected by my family, by some of
my children and by my community. 'A widow who gives birth at her age,
it’s shameful,' that’s what they say about me."
"My two elder sons have been with the military service for a long
time. Another one lives in the street and when he heard that I was
pregnant, he sent death threats to the baby and me. He said that he
would kill both of us if I gave birth to a boy who could claim fields
for himself later on.”
Today, L. holds a little girl in her arms. She is breastfeeding her.
“This child has no problems. I must accept her, welcome her and take
care of her. My daughter is innocent and today I look at her as a
mother. We must stick together. I’ll go back to my village soon. I’ll
continue to stay with my neighbour. I’ll have to carry goods for people
to earn a bit of money because my family-in-law won’t let me work in
the fields any longer."
"I would like to have my own house one day, from where no one can drive my daughter and I.”
[Condition: Critical]
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June recently pointed out that Friday night has become TV's "butt-kicking women" night thanks to Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and, if you don't use the term butt-kicking quite so literally, Friday Night Lights, as well. With Battlestar set to go out in a blaze of glory this evening, I'd like to nominate another Friday show to take its slot on your DVR—BBC America's Mistresses, an overwrought, gripping little soap opera that's not exactly about butt-kicking women so much as bed-hopping ones.
Mistresses, like Sex and the City, is about four friends who shag and chat about it, though not while wearing designer duds and hardly ever over brunch. None of the women (a married lawyer, a single doctor, a playgirl party planner, and a 9/11 widow) are mistresses in the classic sense, though they do have more experience with adultery than good girls should. If Sex and the City is the Jane Austen take on the four-friend relationship—comedic, funny, money-minded—Mistresses is the Brontë sisters one—overly dramatic and full of secret plot twists and distraught heroines who would almost certainly be running around on the moors but for the fact that they live in London. It's also a good short-term substitute for The L Word, since it shares that Sapphic soap's overall mood and has an experimental lesbian story line to boot. Best of all, since it's British (the second season is airing there right now), all the high drama has to resolve itself in just six plot-packed episodes.
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While I enjoy March Madness for the entertainment of watching the earnest, last-gasp efforts of talented young athletes, I didn’t fill out a bracket for the men’s tournament this year. And even though I consistently watched one of my best girlfriends play hoops throughout college, I didn’t even consider filling out the women’s bracket. Martin Johnson has an interesting piece in the Root telling me why. I pretty much exhausted my knowledge of college basketball while recording our weekly podcast (give it a listen; you can tell). But I buy his analysis—that there is some weird stigma still attached to women’s basketball in particular that is not present for say, women’s tennis, or women’s swimming, or even women’s golf.
Here’s my armchair psychologist’s take: The female players are not overexposed. Call it the Imus effect? Basketball is all long shorts and sweatbands—even male athletes have only their arms (sexy!) to rope with elaborate, distinguishing tattoos. During last year’s Olympics in Beijing, there was much to-do about half-naked women athletes winning press coverage not for their high level of achievement but for their (obviously) slammin’ bodies. And anecdotal experience suggests that hot, female “on-the-court” television anchors are as much of a draw for men’s sports-watching as the games themselves. Perhaps dudes, subliminally accustomed to a little tittilation with their sports fix, take a pass on lady hoopsters, and speculation—and general spectatorship—for the female Final Four falls.
That’s not terribly well-reasoned as much as it's provocative. (Though, searching around to try to pin down how many more men watch sports than women, I found that “Since the 1999 regular season, nearly every NFL team has implemented a series of classes meant to educate female fans. NFL 101 Workshops for Women invites women to increase their understanding of football's history, offensive and defensive strategies and how to decipher game officials' signals.” Nice.) Any other theories?
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Emily Y, you're right about the large number of women who are having babies outside of marriage. In 1960, 5 percent of kids were born to unmarried mothers. Now the rate is about 40 percent. That is certainly a broad cultural shift, over a couple of generations. But unmarried doesn't necessarily mean single as in all by yourself. University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock has shown that as many as half of unmarried mothers live with the fathers of their children when those kids are born. That doesn't mean those relationships are long-term and stable—compared with marriage, they are less so. But the data paint a different picture, I think, than the one we usually see when we think single mom.
As for whether to recommend single motherhood by choice, Bonnie, this one to me is part of what I was puzzling over the other day, about audience. Most unmarried mothers are low-income and young and haven't gone to college. They're the people for whom unwed motherhood is an engine of social inequality, as Emily aptly put it. That's the main story, in terms of the numbers, and so we should have our eye on it. But then there is the much smaller—but growing much more rapidly—group of Murphy Browns: single mother by choice who have gone to college, make good money, and for one reason or another don't find husbands but in their 30s decide to have kids anyway. When I hung out with some of those moms for a magazine piece earlier this year, I was struck by their autonomy. (Their kids were adopted or sperm babies, so no dads in the picture.) I'm not suggesting we design policy around this much smaller group. But the framework for their choices is simply different from the framework of a 20-year-old who has no clear way to support herself and her kid. Whether growing up without a father, to get back to that point you raised Emily, is just as difficult no matter what other resources your family has—that's a hard and big question.
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Emily's post about whom we write for when we write about parenting raises always-worth-asking questions. But I'm not convinced that poorer parents and more affluent ones always have different concerns (I know she wasn't implying this) or even different styles of parenting.
Six years ago, when my children were younger and I wrote about them with some regularity—I still do, but not as often, since they are, in theory, old enough to write letters to the editor denying my assertions and correcting my anecdotes—I did a piece about what I realize, now, was helicopter parenting. I was looking at the way in which mothers are absent from so much children's literature and wondering whether that's because children can never have interesting adventures unless mom is out of the way.
In reporting out the heli-parenting phenomenon a bit, I talked to Kristin Moore, a researcher with the organization Child Trends. I had the notion that maybe affluent kids were the ones bottled up in houses, now, and sent to classes and constantly watched, and that poorer kids were the ones with the freedom to wander. That seems to be pretty much what Annette Lareau found, as summarized in that NYT piece by Paul Tough—that kids from poor and working-class families experience "natural growth" childhoods in which they still get to ride bikes with friends and invent games in the neighborhood. But Moore's research suggested that all parents, now, share some of the same anxieties and that all children share some of the same restrictions; she found that poor children are actually more likely to be supervised and contained. "Low-income parents are very concerned about safety, and place a lot of restrictions on their children," she said.
At that time, her research showed that 17 percent of kids aged 6-12 from families with incomes over $35,000 are latchkey kids—nobody there when they get home from school—compared with just 12 percent of kids from families whose incomes are lower. I have to say that Moore's comments rang true to me, based on anecdotal reporting experience. I'm not convinced there are many kids of any socioeconomic level out riding bikes and building forts and walking to school anymore. One of my colleagues has a relative who, when her 12-year-old was riding her bike, actually followed behind in her car.
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Hanna, your great post on the science of prostate cancer treatment reminded me of this interesting op-ed that ran in the Post a week back but that—amid the beginning simmerings of the AIG furor—didn't get much attention. The writer, an endocrinologist named David Shaywitz, suggested that we tend to treat scientific research with far too much reverence:
A lot of science, it turns out, can't withstand serious scrutiny. Thoughtful analysis by John Ioannidis suggests that more than half of published scientific research findings can't be replicated by other researchers. Part of the problem is that we've been conditioned to trust university research. It is based, after all, on the presumably lofty motives of its practitioners. What's not to like about science carried out by academics who have nobly dedicated their lives to understanding the unknown, furthering knowledge and serving humanity? ...
[But] the university is not a peaceable kingdom, and life is far more Hobbesian. ... University researchers are in a constant battle for recognition and the rewards associated with success: research space, speaking engagements, funding and autonomy. Consequently, while academic research is often described as "curiosity-driven," the reality is messier, as (curiously) many researchers tend to pursue the trendiest technologies and explore topics that happen to be associated with the most generous levels of research support.
It's a twist on the expert problem—most of us aren't scientists or doctors, and our ignorance weighs heavily on us. We feel we've just got to trust scientific or medical analysis, because we wouldn't have a clue where to begin questioning it. But we also operate from the assumption that scientific or medical researchers are an especially holy kind of expert, the intellectual ascetics sweating their lives away over petri dishes in pursuit of Truth. But maybe we should be just a little more open to treating scientific studies like we treat the bid of the mechanic who wants to fix our car.
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While we're on the subject of teen sex, I thought I'd raise this post from Constantino Diaz-Duran at the Daily Beast. He describes the case of two 17-year-olds from Sheboygan, Wisc., who were arrested for having sex with their 14-year-old significant others. Same town, same age difference, same assistant district attorney. But one of the 17-year-olds was charged with a class C felony (maximum sentence: 40 years in prison), and the other was charged with a misdemeanor (maximum sentence: nine months in jail).
Why the disparity? In one case, it was a 17-year-old guy sleeping with his 14-year-old girlfriend; in the other, the sexes were reversed.
Diaz-Duran asks if the "boy was a victim of gender bias." Certainly it seems that his gender influenced the charge. But maybe that's as it should be. Yes, a 17-year-old female is capable of causing harm to an innocent 14-year-old with her sexuality, just as is her male counterpart. But men tend to be bigger, stronger, and have more parts that they can force into you. That's a crucial difference, and one that explains to some extent why rape laws would (and should) treat the sexes differently.
Gender discrimination aside, statutory rape laws do seem problematic. Obviously we should protect youngsters from the Humbert Humberts of the world. But what about teens whose sexual relations are totally consentual, like the case of Genarlow Wilson? (And yes, I do think teenagers are emotionally capable of coming to such mutual decisions.) In those situations, it seems like the statutory rape card is just a way for angry parents to convince themselves that their own child is pure by pinning the dirty sex act on someone else. And too often, those angry parents may be reacting to something other than actual predatory behavior, such as a boyfriend they don't approve of.
I'm curious, especially in the context of yesterday's discussion about the balance of raising kids who are safe but independent, how others—especially Emily B. and Dahlia—feel about statutory rape laws. Can't there be a better way of protecting against genuine predators without ensnaring teens engaged in consentual sex?