11D

The Middle Class Crunch

Here's a fabulous Elizabeth Warren speech discussing the main concepts from the Two Income Trap. She compares a family in 1970 with a family today. In short, we have less disposable money, despite having two incomes. Health insurance and housing costs are killing us. We're spending more on houses not for the granite counter tops, but for the schools. Families would rather live next to toxic waste dump in order to have better schools for their kids. College is now a mandatory requirement for middle class status and college is expensive. If someone loses their job, there is no safety net, and the family ends up going bankrupt.

Families with kids are under enormous financial stress.  She thinks we're moving from a three class society to a two class society. (via Corrente and Wendy)

 

Mommyblogging As a Political Statement

Last week, Dooce defended mommybloggers.

But I guess there are some people who are very uncomfortable with the fact that I and many other women are writing about our children on our websites. How dare we violate your privacy like this, how dare we endanger you like this, we obviously care more about ad revenue than what this is going to do to your adolescence....

Am I violating your privacy? If keeping 95 percent of what goes on in your life off limits in terms of what I write on my website, then yes, I am totally invading your privacy. And what about that time I wrote about your poop, aren't you going to be mortified when your classmates read about that in sixth grade? Leta, I stopped writing about your poop many, many months ago, and chances are that all the kids you're going to know in sixth grade will have spent the first three years of their lives shitting their pants, too. Oh wait, THAT'S WHAT HUMANS DO. WHO KNEW.

Finally, I've seen it suggested in my inbox and by various critics online that what we do on our websites is egotistical and exploitative. Some even refer to it as child abuse. I know I am not alone when I say that when I sit down to update my website I do it to connect with other people, I do it to reflect on the absurdity of everyday life with the hope that the people who read it will find similarities in their own routine. I did not know that wanting to be a part of a community qualified as egotism.

... Leta, some people will one day try to convince you that what I've done here is some sort of sickening betrayal of your childhood, and what those people fail to recognize is that I am doing the exact opposite. This is the glorification of your childhood, and even more than that this is a community of women coming together to make each other feel less alone. You are a part of this movement, you and all of the other kids whose mothers are sitting at home right now writing tirelessly about their experiences as mothers, the love and frustration and madness of it all. And I think one day you will look at all of this and pump your fist in the air.

I mommyblog at least once a week here at 11D, but I'm too shallow to concentrate on any one issue on this blog. (Note to people who want to make cash and fame from blogging. Do not do what I do. Be consistent. Or else people will offer you opportunities to syndicate your blog and then take back the offer, because you're all over the place.)

I do the mommyblogging for a couple reasons. Those posts may be the only ones that I will print out and give to my kids some day. I loved our talk about Voter ID laws. It might inspire a longer post elsewhere or an academic paper, but I probably won't print it out and save it in a nice binder. The mommy stuff might be worth saving. The official family record. (Though I may end up deleting the posts about Ian's speech problems.)

I also get off on the politics of it. I think that parenting is undervalued as a profession. I think that mommyblogs tells the world, "I spent 4 hours getting a kid a haircut and 8 hours doing a stupid school project and I work damn hard. Damnit. When I need to leave work early to go to a school conference, I'm not going off to play. I'm doing more work". I think the mommyblogs also shows how we are better people because we have kids, and spawning is a worthwhile pursuit. Damnit.

The problem with my radical parenting blog scenario is that few non-parents read parenting blogs. And if they do, it's only to scoff and mock. They don't read enough to get it. Well, Dooce seems to be satisfied with the community of parents that come out of the mommyblogs. I would have preferred bigger social change.

Update: More from Geeky Mom.

Parental Rights and the State

The subject of child abuse has been in the news and on this blog quite often lately. Just today on the morning news I heard about a freak in Austria who imprisoned his daughter in his basement, that 31 of the teenage girls from FLDS were either pregnant or had already had a baby, and that Mylie Cyrus went topless in Vanity Fair with her parents watching (way to kill the golden goose, folks).

So, last week, I asked what grounds were sufficient to terminate a parent's rights over a kid.

Harry B. at Crooked Timber fleshes out an argument he made in my comment section about parental rights.  He says that parents should have a great deal of latitude to raise a kid as they see fit, however those rights end when a child is abused or neglected. He says that a child's interest is probably more involved that just getting a decent breakfast and avoiding a beating, but he doesn't elaborate in this blog post.

The problem, according to Harry B., is that the remedy for the situation may be worse than status quo. The disruption of families, even bad ones, can lead to other serious problems for the kids. The foster care system in our country has an uneven track record.

Harry throws out a final, and excellent question.

What kinds of public policy will make it more likely that more parents will meet the (in my view quite stringent) conditions on retaining a fundamental right to raise their child. How, in other words, can we arrange policies so that events like this one with the FLDS don’t arise in the first place?

In the interest of not confusing the conversation, respond to Harry at CT. All other random and less serious comments can be left here, as always.

The Termination of Parental Rights

I shut down comments last week on a discussion on polygamy and child abuse, because I was having trouble keeping my cool. But if you all want to keep chatting, I'm offering an open thread on the topic. The question: what grounds are sufficient for terminating parental rights of a child?

Polygamy and Child Abuse

The details of the raid on the Polygamist cult in Texas are coming out. It's horrifying. Girls married off to men when they hit puberty. Boys taught to be sexual predators. There's the strange clothing requirements. The cult got rich out of gangs of unmarried mothers getting welfare. Some 400 kids may have to go into foster care, and the system is overwhelmed. The kids are going to require serious counseling. The Texas courts may rule that polygamy is inherently abusive to children, which the AZ and UT courts have never ruled. Some links here, here, here, and here. 

Weird State Laws

I'm on a state politics kick today, so I was delighted to read about Montana's marriage by proxy law. (Thanks to Harry B).

Does Space Equal Babies?

Jeremy sends me an article from the Times that suggests that the world-wide dropoff in fertility rates has more to do with a lack of housing, rather than other variables such as women's employment or lifestyle issues.

But at a time when no cocktail conversation is complete without a discussion of real estate, the boomlet raises a question that has long interested social scientists: What is the relationship between fertility and real estate?

In the wide-open mortgage climate early this decade, creative loan products allowed more people than ever to buy homes, often a precursor to having children. In 2006, the babies arrived — a reminder, perhaps, that if you build it, they will toddle.

I would describe this as the Goldfish argument. The bigger the tank, the bigger the fish.

I have to admit that when we moved to the suburbs, we did toss around the idea of making another. When we lived in a cramped apartment with the four floor walk up, it was physically impossible to lug another kid up the stairs. Also, there was no place to store the kid in the apartment. Maybe if the third kid slept in the bathtub, we could have managed. The lack of kid storage space and the stairs hike capped our kid quotient to two, and there was really no discussion about it. 

We moved to the suburbs with a novelties like a driveway and a dishwasher. Suddenly, spawning again was an option. Steve and I tossed the idea around for a while. But the negatives outweighed the positives. I started calculating how old I would be at my kid's high school graduation and at the kid's wedding. I hadn't had a teaching job in a couple of years and was antsy to get out of the house. Ian was also going through a really tough time. He was two and he screamed all day in frustration, because he couldn't talk. I was afraid. I'm not sure if we made the right decision or not, but that ship has sailed.

So, I'm not sure I buy the goldfish argument. In our case, making more babies involved a series of variables -- space being one.

Jeremy asks what I tell people who ask if we're going to have more kids.

I haven't gotten that question in a while. I choose to believe that it is because my youngest is now five, and people assume that we're done. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I look old, old, old. My usual answer, a few years back, was to simulate self-embowelment with a sword.

The "Mom" Name Tag

Geeky Mom comments on a letter to Salon. The woman writes that she's thinking about having kids, but is really grossed out by women who self-identify as moms.

As my friends have gotten married and started having children, I've heard this kind of thing coming out of their mouths. I realize that being a mother is fun and rewarding, and all-consuming at times, but why does it have to be the primary identifying factor in some women's lives? I would think being a mother is sort of a family affair, and making it your calling card, so to speak, is no more appropriate than saying, "I'm a wife."

Well, I can identify. To a point.

After Birth

Ingrid at Crooked Timber has written an excellent post on why men in the Netherlands should receive paid paternity leave. Excellent post and very much worth reading. Totally applicable to our needs here, as well. But what caught my eye (and stirred up old resentments) was her description of health care for women in the Netherlands after they give birth.

... since women are not allowed to stay in hospital after delivering their babies (except, of course, if there is some medical reason, such as excessive blood loss or a c-section with complications). Instead, a professional carer comes to the mother’s home to take care of mother and child there, paid for (largely) by the national health insurance. Yet this kind of care has been scaled down considerably – since 2006 the task of these careworkers is limited to checking the health of mother and child, cleaning the bedroom and the bathroom, doing the laundry, advising on breastfeeding, and preparing lunch. Until 2005 these care workers would also take care of older children, do grocery shopping, prepare the evening meals, clean the house, make coffee for visitors, and do anything else that needed to be done so that the mother could stay in bed. But how can mothers who just gave birth do what is medically necessary (that is, try to rest and minimise walking around for about a week), if they only receive care for 4 to 5 hours a day, and their partners have no legal right to stay away from work?

How civilized. After my second C-section, I left the hospital after four days, walked up four flights of stairs, and vacuumed the apartment, because my in-laws were already there to inspect the new baby. I had to clean like crazy, because I had sciatica during my last month of pregnancy and couldn't pick up anything that fell on the floor. Then I made dinner. My husband returned to work three days later, because he had already used up his one week of vacation of time.

Not bitter much.

Taking Marriage Backwards

In yesterday's Times, Stephanie Coontz writes another anti-marriage opinion piece. Coontz always goes for the cool and hip, but leaves the logic behind. Someone at the Times must have said, "hey, let's distract people from our snoring columnists. Someone call up that kook, Coontz."

Coontz starts off with a history of how the state got into the business of legitimizing marriage. Actually, I found the history quite interesting.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

In 1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and obligations as a couple married in church: their children were legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights; the couple was subject to the same prohibitions against divorce.

Not until the 16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be performed under legal auspices. In part, this was an attempt to prevent unions between young adults whose parents opposed their match.

Government began relying on the marriage license in the 1950s, as a way of distributing social security benefits and health insurance. But Coonz says the marriage license no longer makes sense, because people aren't getting married anymore.

Possession of a marriage license is no longer the chief determinant of which obligations a couple must keep, either to their children or to each other. But it still determines which obligations a couple can keep — who gets hospital visitation rights, family leave, health care and survivor’s benefits. This may serve the purpose of some moralists. But it doesn’t serve the public interest of helping individuals meet their care-giving commitments.

So, Coontz wants us to do away with this marriage license nonsense. There are so many reasons to have problems with this argument that I don't even know where to begin.

I'll let the social conservatives talk about why state sanctioned marriages force feet draggers to get married and that this is good for children and society. Instead, I'll talk about why the marriage license is good for women.

So, Steve and I get married  on a mountain top, by a hippie who got his ministerial license from an ad in Rolling Stone magazine. We have no state license, just a batik print paper from the hippie saying that we're married. We hang out for few years and have a couple of kids. Then he decides that he wants the corporate life and a wife who shaves her legs. He leaves me in the trailer park with the dirty kids. I need to sue him for child support, but now he says that the marriage wasn't binding, because the hippie officiant was stoned at the time. I think he'll have the edge in court.

That marriage license provides women with guarantees for social security, alimony, and child support. Women need these protections, because they are more likely then their spouses to stop work or to take less demanding jobs after the children are born. Women are the most vulnerable to poverty in their older years. A marriage license provides them with certain guarantees that private unions cannot.

It might even be better for women if marriage licenses were written with the details of pre-nup contract. It could provide detailed information about property divisions and proportions of future salaries, if the marriage should dissolve.

Coontz's proposal to get government out of the marriage business might distract us from the latest Dowd column, but it is still a lousy idea.

UPDATE: A different take on this issue from bean. More from Family Scholars. See blogrunner for everything.