It occurred to me that we are caught on the horns of a dilemma, that we are thrust into a Catch-22.  I overheard some bit on television by Ayelet Waldman wherein she reiterated that she loved her husband more than her children.

No surprise that many people have taken her to task for this sentiment.  Our culture demands the most absurd levels of performance on behalf of our children; we’re made to feel incomplete as parents if we do not provide cable television, the most stylish clothing, the best schools and colleges, the best opportunities for our children.  We’re not supposed to question the sanity of sacrificing our own desires and our own relationships in order to make our children happy, keep them freakishly safe from harm, pave a golden highway to the future for them.

Never mind that many of us have difficulty parenting ourselves, let alone these small and precious gods we’ve been given.

It’s no wonder at all that so many of us are divorced, either.  How can a marriage compete with the demands our culture places on us about children?

We’re failures as parents if we can’t make marriage work, for the sake of the children.  We struggle to keep the flame alive, driven by other primal programming pushing us to procreate and stray to procreate further, while sacrificing nearly everything else we have in terms of time or resources for the benefit of our progeny.  We are torn by societal norms that say marriage is another must if we are to be successful at raising healthy children.

Men, once the “lord of the manor”, entitled to all the glories and attentions of the family, are now secondary to the children.  They are frustrated with a demotion they cannot point to without appearing anti-child; they continue in their long roles as “bread winner”, not having escaped the pressure that society places on them to perform, yet not receiving any external strokes from society for taking on this newer, subordinate-to-progeny role.  This shift has taken place in such a short period of time, too, making it easy to understand why some men resort to violence; they may not yet have been able to acquire other adaptive responses to this change in role.

Women in western culture have always been second-class citizens, quite used to the yoke of servitude to children and spouse.  It is this familiarity with an aged role that makes it more difficult to rise above the same role; women who choose not to have children or opt to place career achievement ahead of a traditional role are denigrated not only by society as a whole but by other women.  How dare we ever place ourselves and our desires above that of others – especially children?  Women are blamed, too, easy scapegoats for the frustrations of men; they are surely the reason why men are demoted in society, aren’t they the real reason why “lord of the manor” is no longer a politically correct aspiration?  Yet look at the response to Ayelet’s placement of her spouse and marriage ahead of her children; women are faulted no matter what choice they make.  It is easy enough to do so; those used to subordination rarely mount an effective retaliatory strike.

But there is little genuine dialogue about this quandary on balancing the demands of autonomy and marriage with the demands of children.  At least there is little that isn’t pop psychology, packaged with a bow to sell an ideology or simply sell a book.  Much pop psychology today is negative reinforcement of the existing, problematic dynamic, merely marketing for a meme that may be endangering.

There’s also little discussion about the pressure that children must surely feel about being raised in such a fashion, coddled and pampered, not allowed to feel the pangs of suffering that many before us were told would shape character.  Could children even articulate what the absence of failure in their lives does to them?  They have no words for failure, after all, unable to recognize it when it eventually does break through the bubble of societal cushioning and parental doting.  They have no words for the demands placed on them as the new leader of the family; they are unaware of their position, only knowing there are few boundaries that guide their growth and development.  The lack of boundaries manifests itself in increasingly outrageous behavior.  Who doesn’t think that children are far more rude and disrespectful now than in generations past?  Who can blame children, though; they cannot be responsible for themselves yet, let alone responsible for the direction of our culture and society…

This is where I left off on my train of thought.  What think you?

1:09:11 PM    

Jill’s recent post regarding gaming and narrative struck a chord for me.  She was reflecting on an article by Brenda Laurel wherein Laurel maintains that girls require narrative to sustain interest in games.

It’s bigger than that.  Way, way bigger.  HUGE.

Most females need narrative to engage and fully participate – whether it’s gaming or sports or science and math.  This is what Lawrence Summers doesn’t understand about women or even about his own daughters.

Summers, you’ll recall, made some truly ignorant comments about the dearth of women in science and math.  It was women’s inherent inability, he speculated.  He used the example of his own daughters in the course of his remarks, noting that given a truck to play with, his daughters treated it like a doll.

Exactly!  It’s not just his daughter’s innate need to learn and develop nurturing skills that are vital to the survival of the human species, but her need for context and narrative.

What the hell is a truck, by itself?  It’s a tool, an object, a thing.  It has no narrative, no construct into which it can be inserted.  Or at least that’s how a girl might look at a truck (this particular girl definitely would view a truck that way).  But a truck that can interact, has a relationship with the owner?  It has a narrative – and that’s fun.  Hence Summers’ daughter treating the proffered truck like a baby.

We lose girls’ interest in grade school because science and math are presented in a vacuum, a silo, presented in such a way that there is no narrative.  Girls quickly decide that this isn’t for them; solving for X in the absence of a compelling human reason to do so is simply not fun.  Were math and science presented differently across the course of the grade school curriculum so that a narrative was presented or creation of a narrative was encouraged and rewarded, we might see more girls involved in math and science.

Go ahead, pshaw all you want.  Here’s another example for you: chick flicks.

What is it that makes a chick flick?  It’s narrative.  A chick flick might even have action and adventure in it – the best date movies are those that have both narrative and action/adventure.  But it’s the narrative that engages most women.

Think about it if you’re a guy; the very thing that makes your eyes roll back in your head out of sheer annoyance and boredom during a chick flick is the thing that works for women.  It’s not that you don’t get it; it’s not that you don’t appreciate a good story.  It’s just that it doesn’t move you persistently, consistently.  You’d rather watch head-to-head competition or a big shoot-‘em-up with lots of pyrotechnics.

What if young girls felt the same way about math and science?  What if, in spite of the fact that they get it, might even be able to do it with ease, remain unmoved by math and science?  What if for the duration of their school years these subjects were presented in such a way that they were completely unengaged?

If you’re a man, imagine being forced to dedicate a couple hours a day for your entire school career to something as unmoving as a chick flick.   What would that do to you, year after year?  Do you think you’d choose creating chick flicks as a career path – even if you had the talent to do so?

(And what if the entire system actively worked against encouraging you, throughout your education?  What if it still actively discouraged you if you chose this career path anyhow?)

Still don’t buy this premise, that the method by which math and science are taught encourages girls and women to flee from these fields?

Read this speech (PDF file).  It was presented to the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space in July 2002.  The speaker uses the example of girls being interested not in building an earthquake-proof building, but instead in building an earthquake-proof room.

For which would it be easier to build a personal narrative: a room in which one can imagine becoming intimately involved with individual humans, or a building?

10:15:05 AM    

Julie experienced some mother's anxiety this past week, worried she'd flunked mothering, exemplified by a recent experience wherein a child nearly ate some bread with mold on it.  She'd been mulling over my recent post about mothers' angst, how much more worried we are about so many things our matriarchs never faced.  We're all up against that fear of maternal failure.

No flunking, by a long chalk.  No harm, no foul.

I told her,

..."We are all human first, prone to errors and omissions.  And highly prone to guilt trips, too.  I think about the dramatic change in infant-child mortality rates over the last couple of centuries here in the U.S. and I have to wonder whether we skipped that part in school; we're all so terrified of the consequences of our actions as parents, and yet our children will survive in spite of anything and everything we do.  The real threats have been removed from their world, like diphtheria and typhoid and polio...

 

Which makes me wonder if after 50,000+ years we're still programmed to worry about these illnesses (ones that still threaten the third world) and now project that worry elsewhere since the core programming hasn't changed. Hmm.

 

Think about it; a mother in 17th century America might have given her child beer and moldy bread for breakfast, praying he wouldn't get influenza or mumps or yellow fever.  Now we're worrying about the bread that didn't kill them hundreds of years ago.  How do we shut it off, all the worry?"

Really, it's a miracle we are what we are today.  The human genotype is miraculously resilient.  Many of our mothers smoked like chimneys and drank like fish throughout their pregnancies; I know my own indulged at a few parties and drank entirely much coffee while she carried me.  (Which might explain my shorter-than-average stature and my addiction to coffee...)

Yet here we are, with most of our limbs and digits and rational capacity, in spite of fetal and childhood exposures to toxins like DDT and whatever that super-cleaning chemical was in the original formulation of PhisoHex soap. 

It's a wonder our grandparents were so functional, for that matter.  I wasn't kidding when I told Julie that mothers in earlier times would have given beer to their children:

 "While precise consumption figures are lacking, informed estimates suggest that by the 1790s an average American over fifteen years old drank just under six gallons of absolute alcohol each year. That represented some thirty-four gallons of beer and cider (about 3.4 gallons of absolute alcohol), slightly over five gallons of distilled liquors (2.3 gallons of absolute alcohol), and under a gallon of wine (possibly .10 gallons absolute). Because this is an average figure..., the level of consumption probably was much higher for actual drinkers. But even six gallons is a formidable amount. The comparable modern average is less than 2.9 gallons per capita." (p. 14)

 

"The period from the 1790s to the early 1830s was probably the heaviest drinking era in the nation's history." Mean absolute alcohol intake rose from 5.8 gallons in 1790 (people aged 15 or older) to 7.1 gallons per year in 1810; it held at that level, "with minor fluctuations", until "at least 1830."  (p. 46)

 

Why? "The old notion that alcohol was necessary for health remained firmly fixed. It was common to down a glass of whiskey or other spirits before breakfast, "and so conducive to health was this nostrum esteemed," noted a journalist in 1830, "that no sex, and scarcely any age, were deemed exempt from its application." Instead of taking coffee or tea breaks, Americans customarily stopped every morning and afternoon for eleven o'clock ("eleveners") and four o'clock drams. At the appointed hours, laborers in fields, offices, and shops halted and picked up the jug. Even school children took their sip of whiskey, the morning and afternoon glasses being considered "absolutely indispensable to man and boy." (p. 47) - Drinking in America

Can you imagine being allowed to have a nip in the middle of your grade school classes?  Or being a might bit buzzed as you walked to school in the morning?

Come to think of it, after touring some preserved homesteads in the Smokey Mountain National Park, I wondered how children would manage daily to trek to school five to nine miles on foot each way.

They must have been bombed out of their gourds.

Yet they managed to get to school and for the most part, became educated American citizens.

I resolve to stew somewhat less about my children's nutrition, and try to fret less about more of the small stuff of parenthood.  If we built a nation such as this upon generations of tipsy children before us, imagine what our children will do sober.

Psst...pass some of those Cheetohs to Mom, sweetie.

11:31:36 PM    

Sorry for the lack of content.  This is merely a test to see if my new category will post and register on the Recently Updated list.

More later.

Thanks,

~Rayne Today

7:14:21 PM    

It occurred to me while responding to an offline discussion during the wee hours of the morning that there was a connection between several related topics and antiquity.  Maybe it was just sleep deprivation talking, but I thought of Rhea and her daughters.

In case your mythology is rusty, Rhea was the mother of the Olympic gods, including:

Hera -- wife and sister of Zeus...goddess of marriage, the patriarchal bond of her own subordination;

Demeter -- Greek goddess of agriculture, the pure nourisher of youth and the green earth, the health-giving cycle of life and death, and preserver of marriage and the sacred law;

Hestia --  goddess of the hearth, of the right ordering of domesticity and the family

Over the last couple of years, I've been engaged in meta-dialogue with a number of women and men about the nature of home, family, womanhood and sundry related topics. 

In general, we've conducted a discourse in the domain of the goddesses themselves.

Here's to the demi-goddesses and demi-gods that we are, and to continuing our discussion here in this new category.

[Definitions per Wikipedia.org]

7:42:46 PM