The Call for Constant Parental Supervision

Ross Douthat tells us about the night he had to walk home from baseball practice,

When I was about 9 years old, I graduated to a Little League whose diamonds were a few miles from our house, in a neighborhood that got rougher after dark. After one practice finished early, I ended up as the last kid left with the coach, waiting in the gloaming while he grumbled, looked at his watch and finally left me — to wait or walk home, I’m not sure which.

I started walking. Halfway there, along a busy road, my father picked me up. He called my coach, as furious as you would expect a protective parent to be; the coach, who probably grew up having fistfights in that neighborhood, gave as good as he got; I finished the season in a different league.

Here are two things that didn’t happen. My (lawyer) father did not call the police and have the coach arrested for reckless endangerment of a minor. And nobody who saw me picking my way home alone thought to call the police on my parents, or to charge them with neglect for letting their child slip free of perfect safety for an hour.

Douthat should include the coach among those who didn't call the police on his parents. I'm tempted to be more than a bit uncharitable in my interpretation of what Douthat means by "rougher after dark", and I suspect he's dressing up a rather mundane story, but New Haven is a big place. Douthat should consider something more: What the police would have been likely to do if they were summoned. Odds are they would have tried to help young Ross find his way home. Also, as Douthat compares his own experience to those in the news of late, it seems worth noting that he doesn't accuse his furious father of overreacting.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the argument that our nation has become overprotective of children, but that's in no small part due to the fact that changes in our culture have led to a car culture, a culture in which you can drive down a street or even go to a park and find yourself quite alone. When I was a kid, I could walk from my home to the neighborhood park, and I would see other kids (and adults) on the sidewalk on the way there, and plenty of kids (and adults) at the park when I arrived. For much of the summer, one of my cities of residence would have staff at the park, organizing activities and supervising a splash pool. I don't think that human nature has changed, that fewer adults would help a kid in distress, but instead think that the problem is that fewer adults are around to provide that type of support to somebody else's unsupervised child. The biggest difference between a person driving by in a car, then and now, is that back then drivers didn't have cell phones.

Douthat lists a series of stories in which parents were arrested or had their children removed from their care after leaving them unsupervised, often for short periods of time, or even for matters outside of their control.

Some of these cases have been reported, but some are first-person accounts, and in some the conduct of neighbors and the police and social workers may be more defensible than the anecdote suggests.

But the pattern — a “criminalization of parenthood,” in the words of The Washington Post’s Radley Balko — still looks slightly nightmarish, and there are forces at work here that we should recognize, name and resist.

Douthat identifies what he believes to be the three primary causes of this pattern, upper class helicopter parenting producing a culture in which people expect children to be supervised at all times, media-driven anxiety from stories overstating dangers to children, and an erosion of community and social trust. I suspect that there is something to the first argument, as parents who have the privilege of always supervising their children, whether directly or through caregivers, can easily lose track of how difficult it is for other parents to accomplish a similar level of supervision. No doubt, the media's horror stories inflate public fears and make people wary of letting their children go out alone. An erosion of community and social trust, though? It fits with Douthat's preconceptions, but I don't see it. Instead I see a significant change in context, with our society shifting to indoor activities and its becoming alien to see an unsupervised child at play in a park. It's not particularly realistic to expect that a person, catching a glimpse of a child who may be lost, to park their car, approach the child and investigate before deciding what their next step should be, even if we assume the child won't be calling the police on her own cell phone due to "stranger danger" lessons.

Let's also not forget the angry parent. Just as Douthat's dad tore into his coach with a criticism that must have amounted to, "How dare you leave the child (who we forgot to pick up) alone to find his way home after practice?" How many passersby want to encounter the angry parent who, upon seeing them approach a child who seemed to be unattended, approaches with a belligerent, "How dare you!" How many store owners, finding children wandering unsupervised in their aisles, want to take the risk of having the children wait in their offices while they try to track down parents? Particularly with the exaggerated but accepted "stranger danger" threat, and with the disproportionate anger that can come from some parents even when it was their own negligence that necessitated stranger involvement, it's no small wonder that some people choose to notify the police.

The problem at that point, also, is less that the police were notified, and more that prosecutors are willing to authorize charges over parental mistakes that cause no harm, where a stern lecture might suffice. And in that context, once again, we have a significant media role -- "Protective services was called about this child on three separate occasions, but did nothing...." Nobody wants to be the subject of that sort of headline, so the reflex has switched from a friendly drop-off and perhaps a warning about providing proper supervision to the initiation of legal proceedings.

Moving back to the complexity, for a moment, sometimes at the root of these cases you will find either that the reason for court intervention is more complicated than a news media sound bite might suggest, or can find another case that suggests why the police or a prosecutor don't find an act to be as harmless as the media coverage suggests. Leaving a "4-year-old in a locked, windows-cracked car for five minutes on a 50 degree day" may not pose a danger that the child will die from exposure to heat, but cars are not safe playgrounds for children. You'll find plenty of stories about near-misses and injuries resulting from a child's shifting a parked car into neutral or releasing a hand brake and, although car cigarette lighters are now something of a rarity, of children injuring themselves with items left inside the car.

I'm also reminded of a time when one of my clients decided to bring his girlfriend's four-year-old child to court, on a date that he expected to be sentenced to jail. The judge drew the conclusion that the child was present as an insurance policy, inferring that the defendant thought he might not be sent to jail if that meant that somebody else would have to take care of the child. The judge sentenced the defendant to jail and was prepared to call protective services. I offered to try to find the child's mother and, after several hours and the leaving of countless messages, while ultimately delivering the child to his grandmother, was not particularly impressed that I had done the child any great favor by keeping protective services out of his situation. As my experience with that type of case has expanded, I would be surprised if the child had not already been the subject of a protective services investigation. I'll say this: He was a remarkably well-behaved child who handled the situation very well, and he deserved a better life than the one he has likely since experienced.

Douthat notes that work requirements for welfare recipients can result in contexts in which "a single mother [is] behind a fast-food counter while her kid is out of school". Douthat's childhood was apparently sufficiently sheltered that he is not aware that most single mothers are neither on welfare nor working fast food jobs, but that aside he raises a fair observation about the inherent tension within Republican views on the subject:

This last issue presents a distinctive challenge to conservatives like me, who believe such work requirements are essential. If we want women like Debra Harrell to take jobs instead of welfare, we have to also find a way to defend their liberty as parents, instead of expecting them to hover like helicopters and then literally arresting them if they don’t.

And the solution is.... to be continued? What an unfortunate moment for Douthat to have run out of space for his column.

If you want a culture in which children can play in public, walk to school, take urban public transportation and the like, without parental supervision and without raising any concerns or eyebrows, you need to focus less on nebulous notions of "community and social trust", and focus much more on getting a population of kids and parents back on the streets such that it's not unusual for a child (of appropriate age and maturity) to engage in public activities without supervision, and where there's a natural population of people on the streets and in the parks who will react to any danger the child might face. Scolding people for not putting their lives on hold to investigate a child's status before notifying the police is not an approach that is likely to solve anything. With the manner in which our society has evolved to one of indoor activities and empty public spaces, I'm not sure that any generation of kids in the foreseeable future is going to enjoy the sort of liberty I had as a child, to go to a park, walk to school, ride my bicycle around town, take public transportation and the like, without any thought of parental supervision.

Rich Kids are Doing Fine... And its News?

A few days ago, Sean Reardon shared an observation which he suggested may not surprise you, "the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families."

So let me see... kids who on the whole have the most educated parents, the most affluent homes and best home environments, safe neighborhoods, good schools, and ready access to additional resources if they start to flounder, do better on the whole than the kids who do not have those advantages? Let me guess - the next thing that may not surprise me is that kids who have the least educated parents, the poorest homes and home environments, unsafe neighborhoods, schools that struggle to maintain order and perhaps even to maintain their basic facilities, and who have trouble accessing additional resources even if their parents attempt to find and utilize those resources, bring up the bottom?

The author notes that this is a phenomenon associated with wealth, not gaps in racial achievement or a decline in school performance. He argues that school quality is a small part of the difference.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich....

The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.

The author paints an idyllic picture of a typical wealthy family,

Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.

I doubt, however, that the phenomenon is explained by the small percentage of wealthy families who employ tutors to prepare their children for kindergarten admission tests. Also, let's note, being tutored for a test can make you perform better on that test, and that can be particularly true of aptitude tests, but what you end up with is not evidence that one group is outperforming another by any measure other than the test. Instead, you end up with an invalid measure. We can talk of, "support[ing] working families so that they can read to their children more often", but in some of those wealthy families the reading is done by the nanny, and I suspect that modeling remains a significant factor - if the only books (real or virtual) you have in your home are the ones you read to your kids, that may indicate both motivation and the possibility that your kids will engage with books in a way you do not; if you have a home full of books and spend a lot of time reading, the odds go way up that your kids will follow your lead.

That said, we already know that giving children an enriched preschool environment can significantly improve a child's performance as they enter school. Despite the anti-Head Start demagoguery (that after the child starts school and you end the enrichment, you see a reversion to the mean over the next few years), we know how to boost a child's academic performance. As various experiments have shown, both in public school and charter school settings, kids from impoverished community perform better in school when they spend more hours in the classroom and receive tutoring. Shocking, isn't it?

Rich people care about education, they can vote with their feet if they don't like the performance of their child's preschool or public school, and they can and largely will avail themselves of resources when their kids struggle. They are also positioned to help their kids pursue their interests, whether academic, artistic or athletic. Basically, if you're wealthy you're much more likely to care about education. "But middle class families value education," you protest? Sure, but our society largely cares about education in the abstract. Education matters, but teachers get paid too much, kids don't really need art or music, and a B is good enough - particularly if you're good at sports.

Although anybody's best laid plans can gang aft agley, there's a difference between hoping your child goes to college and gets a degree, and expecting that your child to attend a top university and proceed to graduate school. It's easy to find public schools that bring kids in several weeks in advance of the start of school for sports, and put significant resources into sports equipment, facilities and coaching. It's easy to find schools where past sports victories are trumpeted, and sports trophies and banners prominently displayed. You rarely find the same sort of priority being placed on academics. Its not an either or - you can push both sports and academics - but our society's choices reflect its actual values.

Let's remember also, the lowest performing children of the wealthy tend to earn more money than the highest performing children from poor families. Wealth has advantages, and those advantages affect motivation and outcome.

If You're Going to Fake Manual Labor... Fake it Right

Thinking back to Good Will Hunting, there's a scene in which Matt Damon is supposedly mopping a floor. He does so by sloshing a huge amount of water onto the floor them moving it around with the mop. You can't blame the actor. Who would have expected Matt Damon to have janitorial experience, after all. But you would think somebody associated with the shooting of that scene would know how to mop a floor, and I find it difficult to believe that a "technical adviser" would have been difficult to find.

Ah, but that was a long time ago. What brings the memory to mind? Paul Ryan's latest bad acting job:

Paul Ryan claims to have spent "a summer washing dishes", using a Hobart dishwasher. Apparently the dishwasher didn't even once break down, lucky for him, or the patrons of the restaurant would have been put at risk. Why do I say that? Because Paul Ryan doesn't know how to wash dishes - even clean ones.

Ryan is presumably referring us back to the summer he spent as a teenager working at a McDonalds Restaurant. That restaurant would have had a three-compartment sink, just like the one in Ryan's staged photo op, just in case the Hobart broke down. And if he was in fact the dishwasher, Ryan should have been trained how to use that sink.

The proper method of washing dishes is not: "Pretend to wash a clean dish, rinse thoroughly and pass it to a small child." Instead you use all three compartments of the sink - the first is for your hot soapy water, the second for clean water for rinsing, the third for your sanitizing solution. You wash, then rinse, then sanitize. Pretty simple, right?

It's a shame that Ryan didn't show up when there were people to feed or dishes to wash. He might have learned something. Instead, oh my, what a lesson he was giving to his children.

Update: Ryan's team is now claiming that the dishes Ryan washed were in fact dirty. Ryan's defenders contend that this means that the photo op was not "faked" - a claim that, under the facts, is unworthy of response. But here's the thing: If the dishes were dirty, it's all the more important that they be cleaned properly. The person who left the dirty dishes for Ryan should either have ensured that Ryan knew how to wash dishes, or should have stayed there to instruct him because what Ryan did on camera was and remains a health code violation.

Child Tax Credit Proposals Won't Fix Families (And Aren't Meant To)

Ross Douthat is concerned about pressures on families and, in what I hope he understands to be an oversimplification, contends that "domestic dissolution plays a role" in pretty much every problem our society faces - "stagnating blue-collar wages, weakening upward mobility, stalling high school graduation rates, even the increase in juvenile obesity and diabetes". His proposed solution of wealth redistribution may seem odd for a self-professed conservative Republican, but his actual goal seems to be on trying to convince people to make more babies:

Where mating and marrying are concerned, both our policies and our institutions are increasingly out of date: they’re built for a world in which two-parent, single-breadwinner families were a near-universal norm, and they don’t take enough account of the mass entrance of women into the work force, or the mounting economic pressures on the American family.

Not just "more babies", but more babies in non-traditional family arrangements? No, this one's not going to resonate with other conservatives. Douthat implies that a tax credit might allow parents of young children to spend more time at home during this "time when sustained parental attention can make the biggest difference to health, intelligence and life outcomes", but it is difficult to believe that a tax credit is going to be so large as to have a material impact on parents' career choices.

Douthat mentions that an alternative to a tax credit would be extended, paid parental leave, but complains that some governments that offer such leave offer a lower level of benefit to a parent "who is already at home full time", and that Europe supposedly has rigid rules that make it difficult to get part-time work "which is the kind of work that mothers, especially, tend to want". The first point objection could easily be addressed by not taking prior earnings into consideration. It would seem a bit odd to many Americans that people who chose not to work would be in effect given a stipend or salary if they chose to also have babies, but if the problem is overcoming popular resistance to giving a parental leave benefit to parents who have no employment history, Douthat should try to make a case for why such payments would in fact represent good public policy rather than ducking the issue.

The second objection is silly. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that many people in Europe do work part-time, there's a huge difference between wishing and having. The fact that many mothers would prefer part-time work tells us nothing about the relevant statistic - how many mothers actually work part-time. Douthat has made pretty clear that his tax credit, based upon the family unit, would not change if one parent worked only part-time or stayed home full-time, but it's difficult to believe that the tax credit will be so generous as to overcome a middle class family's need for two full-time incomes.

Douthat refers to a proposal that the tax credit be worth $4,000 which, when combined with other "reforms", would allow "a married couple with two children, earning $70,000 a year", to "enjoy a tax cut of more than $7,000 per year". But if mom goes half-time, their income drops by $17,500 or so, resulting in a net loss approaching $900 per month - not something that they're apt to be able to afford.

Douthat makes no reference to the rest of that proposal, perhaps out of recognition of its incoherence. The authors' thesis is, in essence, that with Social Security and Medicare to support them in their old age, people aren't making enough babies:

Our nation's long-term economic prospects are threatened by a declining fertility rate that, if it remains constant, will only barely manage to replace our current population. And even as Social Security and Medicare depend on large numbers of future workers, they have created an enormous fiscal bias against procreation, undermining an important motive for raising children: to safeguard against poverty in old age.

So the solution is to slash business taxes, estate taxes, capital gains taxes, taxes on unearned income, and... all of those things that have nothing to do with procreation, but to also offer the aforementioned tax credit for having babies. The author, unlike Douthat, see the tax credits as "enhanc[ing a] family's work incentives", not an opportunity to work less. The author assures his readers that the tax credit won't give a significant benefit to the working poor ("once a household has no more income or payroll tax to offset, having more children gets the family nothing") or those who aren't working ("If one has no labor income, one simply does not receive the credit"). And it won't encourage middle class workers to have more babies: "Anyone who has children knows that $4,000 per year is only a fraction of the actual cost of raising them." That is to say, the "tax credit" side of this proposal seems like a fig leaf, meant to cover up the fact that this is a run-of-the-mill Republican proposal to slash taxes on the rich - although they attempt to imply otherwise ("the tax proposal outlined here would increase the share of annual taxes paid by the highest ­earners") they are definitely talking about earners - wealthy people who derive their massive incomes through unearned income will receive massive tax cuts.

So who pays more? Primarily high-income workers, but also upper-middle-class taxpayers who do not have children in the home (either because they have decided not to raise children at all, or because their children have already turned 18).

That is to say, people who act responsibly by not having children they cannot afford or by attempting to establish themselves in a career before having children, and people who have decent incomes but apparently not yet enough in the way of income or assets that the Republican Party cares about their votes. No surprise here, even after (or perhaps because of) Bush's massive tax cuts for the rich, they're already the population hit hardest by federal taxes. But nobody feels sorry for them, so oddly enough they're easy marks.

If Douthat recognizes that the child tax credit was the best idea (or perhaps the only thing approaching a good idea) in that tax proposal, I'll give him credit. And it's easy to see why he looks past the superficial self-contradiction of its authors ("We need more babies, not that this proposal will result in people having more babies") to argue that we need to make it easier for families to procreate. But the idea that this tax credit, or a burgeoning population, will cause parents to be able to be supported by their children in their old age rather than being supported by Social Security and Medicare is no more based in fact or logic than tacking the standard bill of Republican tax cuts on to a proposal supposedly meant to help working parents.

Actually, It's An Old Story About Parenting

I suggested recently that perhaps David Brooks was better served by sharing the thoughts of others - a paper or book he's read - penning columns that are really 800 word book reports, due to his propensity to go terribly wrong when sharing a personal analysis. Brooks took enough issue with my suggestion to write a column that demonstrates that he can go terribly wrong, even when penning one of his book reports, or in this case his reaction to a magazine article about a thirteen-year-old whose age-inappropriate online life led to a lot of problems.

People talk about the online “community,” but it’s more accurate to see the response as a guerrilla war. Ostrenga made an aggressive bid for attention. Other people made a bid for attention by savaging her. Most of the viciousness hurled her way can’t be quoted here, but the article in Rolling Stone accurately described the mob-like behavior: death threats, savage sexual appraisals. “I know where you live, and I’m gonna kill” your cat, one person flamed. “Kiki go die you ugly [expletive],” another wrote.

Call it a Scarlet Letter phenomenon, something that could not possibly have occurred in any other era... except, that is, for every other era. There's nothing new in the story except for the role of the Internet, and even in that respect you can find similar stories. Parents have been warned about predators on the Internet pretty much as long as it has existed.

What we really seem to be looking at, though, is a story about parents who did not provide proper supervision for their child, who did not take appropriate corrective action when it was obvious that serious problems were brewing, and who... well, judge for yourself:

She [at age 13] was contacted by an 18-year-old man named Danny Cespedes, who charmed Kiki and her parents and became intertwined with their household. Unbeknownst to them, Danny had tried to seduce a string of young girls, some as young as 12. After her mother discovered that he had forced himself on Kiki one night, the Ostrengas pressed charges. As he was being arrested, he jumped off the second floor of a parking garage and ended up in a coma. He died two months later.

How many parents would allow themselves to be "charmed" by a grown man who was interested in dating their thirteen or fourteen-year-old daughter? One who supposedly gained access to their home the first time he molested their daughter by claiming to be too drunk (or possibly stoned) to go home... what a charmer. Does Brooks sincerely believe that alarm bells should only start going off if they know he has a prior history of predatory behavior? Even if we assume extraordinary naivete, how was it that the man was even in a position to force himself on the child "one night"? I recognize that the PSA's, "It's ten o'clock, do you know where your child is," haven't run since Brooks and I were about the same age as the girl in the story, but again this seems to be "the same old story". It appears that the parents did know where their daughter was, which raises the question of why they allowed a context in which a grown man would have access to her bedroom at night, even if they found him to be charming.

From the original article,

Cathy and Scott suggested to Kiki that it was time to leave MySpace, but Kiki protested: "If you take me off the Internet, the bullies will win."

To which I think an appropriate parental response would be, "Nice try, young lady."

Kiki didn't tell them the other reason she didn't want to leave MySpace. She had finally made a connection that she hoped would last....

As you've guessed, the connection is the aforementioned adult "boyfriend".

Back to Brooks:

Next, she was victimized by the owner of a for-profit, teen-exploitation site called Stickydrama. The site’s owner both organized mass hate sessions against Kiki and invited her to live with him and become one of the site’s exhibitionist playthings. “If I can’t have you, I will destroy you,” he wrote in a Twitter message, according to Rolling Stone.

And her parents were where?

Her parents couldn’t seem to take the reins, even after they saw her online presence was not just a way of being creative.

Is that "couldn't seem to" or "didn't try to"?

She is an extreme case of an enormous uncontrolled experiment that is playing out across the world. Young people’s brains are developing while they are immersed in fast, multitasking technology. No one quite knows what effect this is having.

Even that isn't a new story - just an update. People said pretty much the same thing about radio and television.

The culture of childhood is being compressed. Those things that young people once knew at 18, they now know at 10 or 12. No one quite knows the effect of that either.

Again, this is supposed to be a new phenomenon? I guess Brooks has never heard, for example, of the 70's?

Most important, some young people seem to be growing up without learning the distinction between respectability and attention. I doubt adults can really shelter young people from the things they will find online, but adults can provide the norms and values that will help them put that world in perspective, so it seems like trashy or amusing make-believe and not anything any decent person would want to be part of themselves.

That's the most important lesson from this supposedly new phenomenon - that people, and quite notably young people, can't always differentiate between respectability and attention? And that grown-ups can help kids develop good values?

So it's the age-old story that parenting is hard, setting appropriate boundaries for your kids is hard, adolescents will push their limits, and if appropriate boundaries are not enforced bad things can happen.

Brooks offers the softest of conclusions to his editorial, that the story "is not only about what can happen online, but what doesn’t happen off of it". But in that sense, he's offering the story as a parable. Although Brooks minimizes the role of parenting and speaks of adults, generally, either way this is an extreme case. No meaningful lesson can be drawn from the specifics - if another teen tried to imitate the young girl in Brooks' story, even in the most slavish of fashions, odds are she would remain obscure. Perhaps his conclusion is, in a sense, like the "do you know where your children are" PSA's - both oversimplifying what it means to be a good parent and implying dire consequences if you don't meet a relatively arbitrary test. But no matter how I look at it, Brooks seems to be attempting to present as somehow new an age-old story about which he has no particular insight.

Handing the Virtual Credit Card To Your Kid

A parent has sued Apple (or, more correctly, is the named plaintiff in a class action lawsuit directed at Apple) after his daughter acquired "game currency" through an in-App purchase using his Apple account.

Despite the fact that Apple now requires users to enter passwords before making in-app purchases, Garen Meguerian says that minors can still easily make purchases on their parents' accounts....

Since the passwords for in-app purchases are the same as the main Apple passwords, kids who are "aware of such password may purchase Game Currency without authorization from their parents for that purchase," Meguerian argued.

In other words, if parents choose not to implement a PIN to protect their accounts from being used by their children or choose to let their children know their account passwords, their kids will be able to make purchases through their accounts? No kidding.

From a legal standpoint, I'm wondering what's the distinction between this and the controversy from a few decades ago in which kids were calling 976 numbers without parental permission, resulting in significant charges to their parents' phone bills. I don't recall any phone companies being held liable for billing the parents, threatening to cut off phone service if the bills weren't paid, or in fact cutting off phone service over unpaid bills. The issue then, as now, would appear to be one of parental supervision and control over their kids - except it's actually much easier to exercise control over your passwords than it is over general use of your phone and, as previously suggested, it appears that at least since 2009 a concerned parent could have learned how to implement an additional layer of protection by implementing a PIN.

Ever since Apple enabled in-app purchases in 2009, parents have been able to restrict this feature with parental controls, behind a separate PIN.

I am also left wondering whether the children were old enough to read and, if so and even assuming that they didn't have to enter their parent's password to do so, why it's more Apple's fault than the parent's that they chose to make purchases on the parent's account. No, I don't think parents can prevent all forms of misbehavior, but I do think that parents bear more responsibility for a child's deliberate misbehavior than is a remote third party who supposedly failed to prevent that misbehavior.

"Have You Drugged Your Kid Today?"

I guess this is what happens when a teacher comes down on the wrong side of the war on... no, make that for drugs. The admonition, "Don't use Adderall or Ritalin" is for DARE officers to give, not teachers.

I have sympathy for parents and teachers dealing with ADHD, but it does seem that the "diagnostic criteria" have devolved in many parts of the country to a school official saying to a parent, "You should consider an ADHD medication," followed by a general practitioner saying, "Let's try this one".

The teacher fired over her bumper sticker worked at a high school. You'll please forgive me, but I think high school students should be regarded as sufficiently capable to participate in a debate over ADHD drugs. But I suspect that the real issue wasn't so much a fear of a loss of order within the school or students refusing to take medication at the nurse's office, so much as it was their parents taking umbrage or fearing having to justify to their kids why the teacher is wrong.

When to Push....

Following test scores suggesting strong academic performance by Chinese students in Shanghai, I've read any number of protests, "Our nation would do just fine in comparison to other developed nations if we don't include the poor kids." And I read at least one study that suggested otherwise - that between our nation's relatively cavalier attitude toward academic achievement and our assumption that smart kids can take care of themselves, we are lagging at the high end of the curve. Having seen with my own eyes how easy it is for kids to get through high school with next to no math or science, and get through an undergraduate program with even less, how can we pretend otherwise?

I have followed some of the recent furor over a Wall Street Journal article on "Tiger parenting", published under the inflammatory headline, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior", along with the responses of various Chinese parents and children who took issue with the depiction of Chinese parenting and the explanation that the WSJ pulled out some sensational portions of the book without presenting the evolution of it's author's views and parenting style. In short, the WSJ article suggested that if you chain your child to a desk to do homework, freeze out pretty much anything that could distract your child from homework, demand top performance in everything the child attempts, and don't hesitate to use brutal derision if your child is less than perfect, "you're doing it wrong".

Ruth Marcus wrote a column attempting to give some balance to the issue, acknowledging that the WSJ article omitted some important context, but also describing a counter-voice, a recent book suggesting that parents not push their kids and be accepting of imperfect grades. We compare this:

"I would do it all again with some adjustments," Chua told Diane Rehm. She's still proud of having rejected the birthday cards. She relates what I think is the saddest story in the book - about how her late mother-in-law begged in vain for a single day with each granddaughter - with no apparent regret: "I never had a full day for them to spare. The girls barely had time as it was to do their homework, speak Chinese with their tutor, and practice their instruments."

with this:

"One of the ways teens learn about the importance of hard work is by suffering the consequences of their procrastination and laziness," Mogel writes. "A wise parent will resist interfering with those natural consequences, even if it means allowing a child to take a lower-than-wished-for grade."

Parental pushiness is a Mogel no-no. "Let affirmation - 'Yes, a B-plus!' - stand happily alone," she advises. Mogel cautions against the "What about varsity?" school of parenting, constantly prodding children to achieve the next level.

That suggests an inconsistency in Mogel's views - you don't cheer a B-plus that results from "procrastination and laziness". You would cheer a B-plus that results from a reasonable effort by the child. I haven't read Mogel's book, but I expect that she draws a distinction.

Marcus suggests that it is an exercise in caution to intervene too much in a child's life - that doing so carries less risk than intervening too little. On the whole, that seems correct, although it's not something we can measure objectively. If you ask two parents of very similar teens to draw a set of lines the child is not to cross, you might find some very different ideas. Given that odds are both teens "will turn out okay". Parenting isn't a scientific process, despite what your kid tells you there's unlikely to be a moment of parenting when you actually ruin her life, and we give ourselves credit than we deserve for how well our kids turn out. (Faults? Those are the kid's fault, or that "bad influence" friend, or maybe the other parent's....)

I agree with Marcus that some parental pushing is appropriate. I'll take her at her word that Mogel suggests not pushing at all. But... if you have high expectations for yourself, odds are you'll end up pushing your child without saying a word. I agree on the whole with Marcus on praise - it should not be lavished on underachievement. You don't lavish praise on a B+ from a child who could easily have scored an A. But you also shouldn't withhold praise "absent exceptional performance". At various times I've heard "experts" describe how and when to give praise to young children, elevating it to something of a pseudo-science. "Don't tell the child that she's 'good' or 'bad'. Praise or criticize the action, not the child." "Don't simply say, 'I like that painting you made,' identify what it is in the painting that you like."

But here's something interesting - self-esteem is negatively correlated to academic performance. You want your child to do well in school? Make sure she knows she's only as good as her grades. Make her terrified of coming home with a B+. Those kids pulling B's and C's or worse? Some of them are the happiest, most self-assured kids on the block. So yes, I can see how a certain style "Tiger Parenting" can help contribute to academic success, even as it's not a model I would personally follow and I'm skeptical of its long-term academic benefits. If the child wants an "A" because it makes him happy? Great. If the child wants an "A" to make you happy? Not as great. If the child wants an "A" because he's terrified of your reaction to anything less? Not a parenting style to which I aspire.

Our society has some difficult choices to make as we prepare for a future in which it appears that much of the so-called "working class", the nation's blue collar workers, can expect to earn at the lower middle class level, if that. We have to face the issue that not every person has the aptitude for or interest in college, and that we're doing our nation's colleges no favors by filling them up with kids who neither want to be there or lack interest in anything resembling academic rigor. We do even worse by ignoring the privilege that has helped people like Bill Gates (Lakeside School) or Mark Zuckerberg (Phillips Exeter Academy) succeed "despite being college drop-outs" - parental support for their interests, parents willing to pay for private tutors and elite schools to help their children achieve remarkable things within their areas of interest, and by the time they dropped out quite possibly a more complete education than is achieved by many graduates of lower and middle tier colleges. Sure, give everybody the opportunity for an education such that they can maximize their potential, but make sure that you're not doing so at the expense of identifying and fostering next generation of business and scientific innovators.

Push your child to do her best, and whatever your expectations or aspirations try to recognize that her best is good enough.

Ah, Kids....

It's a fair observation,

Having kids does not make you happy. That’s the newsflash from All Joy And No Fun, an article in New York magazine that is creating a buzz. Author Jennifer Senior, interweaving anecdotes from harried and disappointed parents with multiple studies that conclude that raising a family, if anything, will make you less happy than your childless peers, has written a damning but thoughtful portrait of modern middle-class parenting. . . .

Despite its occasional whiff of baffled entitlement (wondering why, say, that parenting isn’t as much fun as going out to dinner with friends), that New York piece eventually comes to the same conclusion that most of us have: raising kids is always hard work and yet at times it’s tremendously rewarding.

But don’t look to it to make you happy. There are only, Ms. Senior writes, “moments of transcendence, not an overall improvement in well-being.”

But here's the thing: Nothing actually makes you happy, not even the geegaws and doodads that our consumer-oriented society says are supposed to make you happy, except the thoughts that are passing through your own head. The happiness you feel over a new car, new house, whatever? Fleeting. Your brain will adjust back to the status quo. (That's not altogether a bad thing as your brain also adjusts back to the status quo from losses and setbacks.)

You want to be happier at work? As a spouse? As a parent? Change the way you think about your situation. Sure, that can be hard to do, but the alternative is to have human nature, perhaps the entire world, change to accommodate you - and that's not going to happen.

(Note, there are things that can make you miserable - toxic people and situations - and it can be very healthy and appropriate to extricate yourself. Yes, you can grow accustomed to being mistreated but that's anything but a path to a healthy mental state, let alone happiness.)

The Limited Virtues of Teen Parenting

A couple of months ago, I read an argument in favor of teen parenting - not just the parenting part, but with the notion that society should unblinkingly subsidize teen mothers. The author starts out with a description of her own pregnancy, and how much she looked forward to being a mother - because, as you know, assuming that everybody else's experience is exactly the same as yours is the next-best thing to following the scientific method. She next conflates the disinterest of teen mothers she has encountered with learning how to parent with there being "something enviably instinctive about the mothering skills of those I met":

Their kids meant everything to them: at six months they were having their ears pierced, by one they had their own TV. There was no angst about, "Am I doing this right?". No textbook consulted, and on the whole, apart from what their mums advised them, no authority revered. A new pregnancy, however many children already lived in the house and whether there was a man around or not, was almost always a cause for celebration. And in the end, these mothers ended up teaching me. Like how to share your bedroom with five kids and not get wound up. Like how to rely on no one but yourself. No bloke was ever worth trusting, I was told; they were just useful for one thing, sex. These young women had an important job to do. They were bringing up the next generation. They were mums.

It gets better - why do a difficult job to make money and support yourself, maybe even getting an education, when you can simply have a baby and get a government check? As if having a family and supporting your family are incompatible concepts.

I couldn't agree more. Motherhood engendered responsibility. When we talk about teenage mothers not having aspirations, what are we talking about? Working in a chip shop? A cleaning job? Are we saying those are more noble, more "aspirational" pursuits than motherhood

As you can see, it's the people who disagree with the author who are the ones being judgmental, by thinking that it's not beneath somebody to work in fast food or housecleaning during their teen years while they lay a foundation, even get the education necessary, for a better life. It's not at all judgmental to sneer at entry level jobs as being beneath people who have not yet developed the skills or gained the education that will lead to better jobs.

But it gets even better....

When I was pregnant I decided to give a dinner for all the pregnant girls of Corby who were under 16. It was fun. We compared our bumps, ridiculed our partners, told each other anecdotes about bad sex. All had got pregnant "accidentally on purpose", and not because they had no aspirations but because they had: being a mother, living in their own flat, and being paid pocket money by the state to do so. None felt that real life was passing them by: they had each other for company. It would be a laugh. They'd have pushchair races. They'd take sandwiches and eat them in the park together. They all loved kids. Kids were the best company of all, they said. I was impressed.

Teenagers getting pregnant "accidentally on purpose", with a life plan of going on the dole, and with no deeper thoughts about parenting than "I love kids" or "It will be a laugh"? This impressed the author?

The author then describes how having three children in relatively rapid succession wore her down - how parenting was hard work. How she was competitive with other parents, particularly with her first child. How whatever control she had over her life after she had her first child was gone by the time she had her third. How resentful she became (and still appears to be) over friends who, without children, traveled, "were being artists or training for the professions", "were in restaurants with potential lovers", and didn't have any interest in her parenting stories. How her husband had to travel a lot, leaving her alone, without a similar "cool" peer group to the group of teen mothers she met on council estates (public housing). So in her twenties she was completely ill-equipped to be a parent, and yet she wants us to believe that impoverished teenagers can naturally parent in a way that she, with money and education, and resources she chooses to elide from her self-pitying summary, could not.

She closes with an example of the "natural" parenting she is talking about:

A few years later, I became, for a brief while, a truant officer. I was persuaded by every single family I interviewed that school was a waste of time. The mum would argue, 'My lad's just not happy at school. He's bullied. He finds lessons boring. He doesn't concentrate and then the teacher shouts at him. I just don't see the point of school, when you can be at home."

And I would say: "But don't you have aspirations for your child? Don't you want him to grow up and be a brain surgeon?"

And the mum would say: "What I want is for my child to be happy. And being happy with a little is better than being unhappy, isn't it?..."

And a few years after that (or maybe not) the little truant would knock up one of the "cool" teenage girls, "accidentally on purpose", who would simultaneously describe him as unreliable, untrustworthy, and useful only for sex. And those who had sons would persuade her that all that matters is being happy... with no education, no prospects, and a scattering of children being raised by mothers who want nothing more than their children to be "happy" even as their daughters come to view their sons as human detritus? Meanwhile, their fourteen year old daughters are so gratful for being raised by such a "cool" mother that they can't wait to get pregnant "accidentally on purpose" so they can get out of the home? Boy, this does sound enviable.

She never takes a step back to ask herself if the principal goal in getting pregnant "accidentally on purposes" is "living in their own flat, and being paid pocket money by the state to do so", perhaps it might be better for everybody involved to set aside her own fantasies of how "cool" these teenagers are, their fantasies of how fun and easy parenting would be, and simply directly subsidize their move to independence. Heaven forbid we present a choice that's more stark, such as, "Get pregnant, and your choices are to continue to live at home until the age of 18, or if that's not possible to live in a group home setting where you will continue your education, learn how to parent, and be supervised in your activities until you're 18." (The problem with that last idea, of course, is that in the short-term it's more expensive than saying, "Okay, here's an apartment of your own and a government check.")

I know that there are teen parents who step up to the plate, who effectively give up their childhood to do right for their own children. But sorry, a young teen who gets pregnant on purpose with the idea that she'll cast off the father and raise her child on welfare is unlikely to fall into that category - and a father who's passive about being cast aside doesn't even come close.

A much more conservative, albeit at times misguided, take on things from another author:

I visit many schools and Sure Start centres. I meet women of my age (47) who are now great-grandmothers. These women have never had jobs; have multiple children by multiple men – none of whom have ever contributed to their children's upkeep, welfare or moral guidance. They have lived on benefits because grandma did and mother did. These young girls see nothing wrong in this lifestyle and that it is their right to live like this. No one else is telling them that they shouldn't.

I visited a Sure Start centre¹ a couple of weeks ago where there were six 16-year-old girls with one-year-old babies. Three were pregnant again, none by the same boy, and they saw nothing wrong in this "lifestyle choice". They did not see anything wrong in claiming benefits and were adamant that they did not want the boys who impregnated them having anything to do with their first-born as they were now with the latest partner. It is so sad to see this and their attitudes are astounding.

I largely concur. The previous editorial's perspectives having been duly considered, there's nothing "cool" about any of that. I think, though, that it's a misperception that these teen pregnancies are principally based upon the past choices of parents and grandparents - the modeling plays a role, but I think the previous editorial made a valid point that these are in many ways economic decisions. The author also shares an implausible statistic:

I then went to a Catholic primary school that, five years ago, said around 90% of its children were living with two parents; that had now changed to 60% who were living with single parents.

Sorry, even if I thought the anecdote were relevant to the topic, I simply don't believe that such a transformation occurred over the past five years.

Now we enter the realm of hard choices:

We have to tell these girls that it is unacceptable to get pregnant outside of a stable relationship unless they can support themselves, that the taxpayer cannot afford to keep them and that they have to train to work when they leave school.

Okay, let's assume we tell them all of that, and they get pregnant anyway? I've previously described a tougher response than "give them their own apartment", but I am skeptical that the government is going to invest in supervised, structured communal housing for teen mothers. Those who stay home will see more money come into the home, and those who are kicked out have to live somewhere.

Wait, did I say "Those who stay home will see more money come into the home"? Why is that? Why not simply maintain support at the prior level, as if no new child came into the home? After all, if these families had jobs, they wouldn't get an increase in their wages merely for having another baby. Alas, there's no easy answer to this one. If you don't give additional benefits when another child enters the household of a welfare recipient, you "punish the children". And if you do, you subsidize the expansion of a family that cannot support itself, and arguably create a context where the mothers at issue benefit from either choosing to again become pregnant, or being indifferent to that outcome.

Sorry, telling these mothers, "We can't afford to keep doing this," or "You need to get a job so you can support yourself before you have children" will only work if it's true. You can say whatever you want, but nothing will change as long as the government checks keep coming. Further, in those countries where there are no government subsidies, where each new child literally does take food off of the table for everybody else in the family, it's hardly the case that impoverished people defer or opt against having children - in fact, their birth rates may be substantially higher. I wish there were easy answers to this, but there are not.

They have to be given more sex education (it is not compulsory, despite the myth, and this should start at puberty, not five years old) and offered more contraception.

That argument qualifies as silly. Sex education at age five is "good touch, bad touch" - anybody who gets upset at children being taught such concepts really should defer discussion of sex education to people who are either more informed or more comfortable with sex. Sex education preceding puberty often includes valuable information about puberty that a lot of children do not otherwise get from their parents. It may be better that a young girl learn about menarche from her mother, but I think most will agree that it shouldn't be a surprise - in retrospect, even Carrie's mom probably agrees. Also, what... we're going to assume that all kids mature at exactly the same rate? Or is it that we're going to single out kids who mature faster or slower, so that nobody learns about sex before puberty. That won't stigmatize anybody....

It is only by talking openly about marriage, sex, relationships and responsibility that we can change this. It will take a generation, but we have no choice.

By all means, let's start the dialog... but please, not with the illusion that it will transform society, let alone do so inside of a generation.

The second editorial was inspired by an essay by J.K. Rowling in which she describes how, thrust into single parenthood, she was able to make ends meet with the help of some not particularly generous government benefits, while she struggled to better herself, qualified as a teacher, and wrote 1-1/2 novels. Quite reasonably, she describes how the benefits helped her get past a difficult post-divorce period, how she resented being demonized by politicians for being a "single mother" during that time of struggle, and the silliness of the British Conservative Party's notion of a tiny tax credit that is supposed to encourage marriage.

Rowling explains how Britain's social safety net has factored in, as she's become wealthy beyond her wildest dreams:

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens,² with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

Save for becoming a billionaire author, my mother had a post-divorce period not too different from Rowling's. That's actually the historic story of most "welfare recipients" - about three years of benefits following a divorce or crisis, then they're back on their feet, having theme parks built based upon... again reaching a point where they can support themselves and their families. I'm with Rowling - that's a good thing. The hard part is to translate welfare as a short-term solution into communities where it is an acceptable lifestyle choice.

--------

1. Quoting Rowling, Sure Start centres are "service centres where families with children under 5 can receive integrated service and information." She adds, "Unless you have previously grappled with the separate agencies involved in housing, education and childcare, you might not be able to appreciate what a great innovation these centres are."

2. Subjects, actually. But there's little practical difference, I suppose.

The Horrors of High Self-Esteem

Getting back to the post from a couple of days ago on self-esteem, it should first be recognized that a "rule" of psychology is typically going to apply in about 80% of cases. With regard to praising kids, that "80%" rule takes two forms:

First, some kids who are praised unduly, even to the point of developing completely unrealistic images of themselves and Axis II disorders such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder are successful. If you define being elected to a national political office or the Presidency as success, for example, you'll find that a huge number of those successful individuals could be diagnosed with Axis II disorders. Some of these people are bright and capable in addition to being self-absorbed and narcissistic; others personify the Peter Principle and (ht: a comment at The Nonsequitur) the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Second, sometimes kids need praise. Sometimes they need an "I'm proud of you," or "You're an amazing kid", even when it's divorced from a specific effort or achievement. It's not bad parenting to recognize and respond to that need.

I was reading an article today about a kid who, by the measure described in Will's editorial, should have been completely ruined. Let's start with his name - his parents named him after a god. Not a god from ancient mythology - a god from an actively practiced religion. And he learned at a very young age to love adulation and being the center of attention, even when it had nothing to do with achievement. At the age of five, coincidentally looking like a child featured in a movie his family had gone to see, the manager "held him up in the air, to the applause of the foyer crowd," inspiring "a love of adulation". By the time he was in elementary school, in his own words, "I was blessed by being a very popular child. I was often the life and soul of the classroom". Surely a recipe for disaster?

Well, not so much. Pursuing a career in entertainment, despite being encouraged by a couple of the Beatles to instead pursue music, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. At the age of 38 he appeared in his first feature film role... and won an Oscar for Best Actor (Sir Ben Kingsley, born Krishna Bhanji.) No doubt, he still has robust self-esteem.

The point here, obviously, is not to defend school efforts to bolster self-esteem, nor is it to paint self-esteem as a sure path to success. There are notable actors of similar or greater accomplishment who were introverts, unsure of themselves, gripped by stage fright even at the peak of their careers. You can't point to what a particular pair of parents do with a specific child and say, "That's going to make the kid great," or "That kid's going to be a wreck." Yes, you can speak to odds, but sometimes (albeit rarely) the kid who you least expect to succeed grows up to be Chris Rock, and the kid with seemingly insurmountable obstacles against future fame and fortune grows up to be Oprah Winfrey. Similarly, there are kids who have good parents who "do everything right" and who are offered many opportunities, yet live invisible lives of mediocrity.

It's hard to make statements about self-esteem that aren't meaningless. "People should have good self-esteem", or "health senses of self", whatever that means. Some people are self-confident, and that helps them throughout their careers. Other people seem to be driven by angst, insecurity, and a need to prove themselves. It's safe to say that building self-esteem to boost school performance will largely be counter-productive, but the more important question is whether our schools are preparing kids for a future in which the best jobs are unlikely to involve rote memorization, rule-following, punctuality, and sitting obediently behind a desk.

"Kids These Days Have it So Easy"

You would think by now that, after centuries of repetition, the "Kids these days..." articles would have pretty much run their course. But no, it seems that there's always a curmudgeonly old man ready to grumble about how he used to have to walk ten miles to school through snow up to his chin, uphill... both ways. No exception here.

George Will is upset because in a school, somewhere in Massachusetts, grade level undisclosed, kids are "jumping rope without ropes because of a self-esteem obsession". And he similarly complains that "some children's soccer teams stopped counting goals", their locations and the ages of the kids again undisclosed. Every watch five-year-old kids play soccer? A swarm of little bodies following the ball, wherever it goes on the field. If that's the context for Will's complaint, I have to say, I'm not sure that there's a benefit to the kids in keeping score, because they haven't even learned the basics of the game. I can see how a school might feel the same way about jumping rope - have the kids learn to jump in rhythmic patterns first, and introduce the ropes later. I'm not sure what life lesson George Will thinks that clumsy kids will get out of "tripping on the jump rope" - most of them already know that they're clumsy, and many will eventually learn to jump rope at recess.

Will's essay evokes the whining of recent years from people upset that schools were eliminating dodgeball from gym class. Dodgeball, it seems, is full of life lessons, warmly remembered by those who used to plaster the smaller and slower kids in gym class. There's an easy solution, after all, to being picked on in dodgeball - have a growth spurt, because if you're six inches taller with thirty pounds more muscle, the... kids who in any other context would be called "bullies"... will find somebody else to target. But you know, in a nation that's as slim and fit as our own, why would we need to question an approach to childhood sport and exercise that could turn kids off of physical fitness and competition.

Part of the problem here is that Will is confusing three different things: steps that make kids enjoy sport more, particularly at an age when many lack the cognitive skills and coordination to perform competently, praising kids for actions that don't deserve praise, and working to raise self-esteem. It is quite possible, and quite sensible, to structure a gym class that is focused on developing good fitness habits. It's reasonable within that context to recognize that although some young kids are coordinated beyond their years, most are not and some inevitably lag. You can create a context that emphasizes exercise and fitness without either lavishing kids with unearned praise or giving two figs about "self-esteem", even if it's possible for somebody like Will to caricature your effort.

Will announces that "the theory that praise, self-esteem and accomplishment increase in tandem is false", as if it's a great wisdom he's sharing with an unsuspecting world. "Wow," we're supposed to gasp, "And here we were confused by the popular stereotypes of the reticent nerd and the popular and confident, but academically challenged jock." Seriously, I'm not sure what middle school or high school people like Will attended where that wasn't self-evident; or is it that their life experience is now too remote and they shun popular culture. But I do agree with the larger point that unearned praise, and more significantly a pattern of unearned praise, can be counter-productive. With that in mind:

"We put our children in high-pressure environments," Bronson and Merryman write, "seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments." But children excessively praised for their intelligence become risk-adverse in order to preserve their reputations. Instead, Bronson and Merryman say, praise effort ("I like how you keep trying"): It is a variable children can control.

George, I recognize that you are under significant pressure to turn out your columns on a regular basis, with word counts and deadlines to meet. But that's no excuse for slipshod thinking, or for the abject ignorance you display on subjects such as global warming. Given the magnitude of your errors while writing on that subject, it seems fair to say that it would have been responsible for you to retract some of your past claims and, further, to apologize. It is good that you're not so risk-averse that you won't take on new subjects, but when you misspell basic terms like "averse" you quickly reveal yourself as paraphrasing somebody else's work to meet a deadline, as that's a term people who follow these subjects pick up no later than their intro psych class. Do I sense... overconfidence?

The school day starts too early because that is convenient for parents and teachers.

Really? Or is it because school districts only want to invest in a single fleet of buses and drivers, and thus stagger start times for elementary, middle and high schools - with later start times for high schoolers meaning earlier start times for younger kids? You don't have an editor who is going to fact-check for you, George. You need to be accountable here. You also need to be consistent, if you truly believe that less sleep translates into more obesity, as earlier start times in the lower grades will take sleep away from younger kids.

What's the point of a "kids these days" essay, or a harangue against parents as giving their kids too much praise? Or perhaps it's not "too much", but is "the wrong kind" - praise directed at inherent attributes (that may not be particularly manifest) instead of effort. Will's piece is under the sensational headline, "How to Ruin a Child", but his conclusion is, "Twigs are not limitlessly bendable; trees will be what they will be." So was he just venting?

If you have children, as Will does, and you're at all present in their lives, you know that they're not created equal. Identical parenting techniques can have different results on different kids. Will's final sentence seems to acknowledge that. Every parent makes mistakes. If Will reflects on his own parenting I'm sure he'll find plenty of examples of times he praised his kids "the wrong way", or taught his children incrementally. The first time he played catch with his son, was he throwing fastballs? Or was he doing something analogous to the "jumping without a rope" thing - making slow, underhand lobs... perhaps even with a tennis ball or softball... while his child learned the basics of how to catch? Is that something he now regrets as being too focused on his child's self-esteem?

And seriously, for all of his concern about how kids these days are being "ruined", Will never got around to relating his headline to any deficiencies or character flaws of the upcoming generation of kids. Strangely, like so many ruined generations before them, I suspect they'll turn out okay.

Um... Do I Smell Bad?

By now, you've all seen this cleverly produced Old Spice commercial:

After seeing the commercial my daughter turned to me and asked, "Daddy, can you get that?"

Google Land

Last night, as we tucked her into bed, our four-year-old daughter started to tell us about "Google Land".

Google land is full of smart people.

There are no lines in Google Land.

Everything is free in Google land. They have free food, and free pop and free chocolate.

There are dumb people in Google Land, but they have to pay.

Pretty close.¹
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1. I suspect that if I ask her teacher, I'll find out that either one of her classmates' parents works for Google, or they had a visitor come in from Google's local office. I would ask at Google's local office, but now I'm afraid they would charge me for the information. ;-)

When A Child Is A Parent's Meal Ticket

A couple of months ago my four-year-old became very interested in Michael Jackson. His "moves". She doesn't have much interest in his childhood work, but is absolutely fascinated by his dance sequences and choreography. She wanted to see him perform live. As I reflect on that, it didn't even cross my mind that Jackson was 50 years old. His changes of appearance were disturbing, saddening, but they had one of the effects he (owner of "Neverland") apparently intended. He did grow up but he became, in a sense, a man without age. Had he kept his original appearance, and become wrinkled and gray, I doubt that the public surprise at his early death would be quite the same.

The span of his career led to my daughter asking questions about his age in various videos, as well as his evolving appearance. The best explanation I had to offer for his surgeries was that I suspected that he didn't like himself. My daughter couldn't understand why somebody wouldn't like himself, and I'm grateful for that. But then, she didn't have Joseph Jackson raising her in an atmosphere of isolation and abuse. What a lovely guy.

Something that's apparent from Jackson's childhood is how readily people will ignore the abuse and mistreatment of children if it jeopardizes the gravy train. Tell me nobody saw Joseph make threats or administer beatings to his children, when they missed a step or a note during their childhood practices and performances.

He touchingly describes his humiliation at having severe acne as a child, and the relentless teasing by his brothers and father, who called him "Big Nose." "You didn't get that ugly nose from my side of the family," says father Joe Jackson, according to Michael. He also describes throwing up at the mere sight of his father who "threw him against a wall" and beat them with "anything that was handy."

Lisa Marie Presley comments on her relationship with Michael:

"I became very ill and emotionally/ spiritually exhausted in my quest to save him from certain self-destructive behavior and from the awful vampires and leeches he would always manage to magnetize around him," she wrote.

It's one of the strange thing people do... we develop coping skills to get us through our childhood, and have a hard time breaking out of those same patterns as adults, even when we have a "choice" and following the childhood pattern is self-destructive. It seems that Jackson was surrounding himself with versions of his father - people who would bleed him dry for their own devices. But as an adult, he could also choose people (or choose to end relationships with people) who wouldn't challenge him to break with the past and enabled his eccentric and self-destructive behaviors. I suspect that his pattern of conduct, relationships and surgeries was supposed to help him be happy, but instead provided at best brief moments of relief from the unhappiness they otherwise perpetuated. And I will not be surprise if, having expressed to Lisa Marie Presley the fear that he would "end up like" Elvis, his death involved a similar soup of pharmaceuticals - a maladaptive tool to escape from (and avoid) pain, physical and psychic, that probably ended up magnifying both.

A childhood only counts for so much. Jackson is responsible for the mistakes he made as an adult that led to his isolation in his final years. But if he's capable, I hope Joseph Jackson spends some time thinking about what he did to his children. That he's somehow able to feel shame, remorse, embarrassment for his role in the unhappiness of, dare I say, more than one of his children?
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Update: More on this theme from Eugene Robinson:

Jackson once said his father used to beat him, perhaps because he was the "golden child." Joe Jackson has always denied being physically abusive, but in a sense it doesn't matter. It seems to me that attaching oneself to one's young son like a leech and denying that boy any semblance of a childhood qualifies as abuse.

* * *

The worst choice, of course, was the way he frolicked with children at his Neverland ranch. Jackson was acquitted of child molestation charges, but he also paid a reported eight-figure settlement to the family of one alleged victim. Let me be clear that no childhood trauma would excuse molestation. My question, though, is where were the staff members and the agents and the hangers-on - and the loving family members - who had an inkling that all might not be right at Neverland? Did they choose to look the other way?

I believe Jackson's story that he suffered from the skin disease vitiligo -- though I don't believe that vitiligo or any other infirmity was the reason for the disfiguring plastic surgery that turned his face into a pale, taut mask. It had to be self-hatred - not necessarily an attempt to make himself "white" but to make himself hideous.

I don't think Jackson was trying to make himself hideous - that seems to be the inevitable result of having too many significant cosmetic surgeries. I'm more inclined toward thinking, body dysmorphic disorder.

"Help Me Lie To My Ill-Behaved Children"

(Appropriately) via lies.com, somebody who's not up for the parent of the year award.

Premise: You will be the dog walker hired by daddy (me) to walk Skittles. I will introduce you to the kids, and you will tell them you are going to help Skittles get her exercise when Daddy is too busy to walk her. At that point you will walk Skittles to your car and take her to her new family 20 minutes from my place. Then return holding just a leash. The story will be that Skittles broke free of the leash and took off. At this point prepare for crying, things being thrown at you, and possibly cursing. My kids are young and dramatic, their girls.

Are you qualified?

This job is ideal for an actor looking to diversify their role base, or someone who genuinely likes to make children cry. Acting experience is a plus, but not necessary. Please inform me of any prior experience in this kind of situation.

No mention of whether you can get SAG credit....

Parenting a Toddler

If you've done it, this is worth your 1:44. If not, well, you still might think it's cute.

"And What's Your Daughter's Name?"

We were at a local restaurant where my wife is a regular. I occasionally join her for lunch there. But today, our daughter Emma (now four) came along. One of the waitresses greeted my wife, exchanged pleasantries, then looked at Emma and asked, "What's your beautiful daughter's name?"

Emma replied, "I don't have a daughter yet."

What a Long, Strange Tri....

How does that family come up with these names?

Trying to Pull Rank

A "Rodney Dangerfield" parenting moment while kidding around with my (almost four-year-old) daughter....

Emma: Why do you want me to do that?

Me: Because I'm the boss of you.

Emma: You're not the boss.

Me: Okay, then who's the boss of you?

Emma: Mommy's the boss.