Review: Falling Apart

I decided to read more books I think I'll disagree with. In that spirit, I just finished Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

Murray lays out the evidence that while upper-class white Americans haven't changed much in terms of work, religiosity, and marriage, lower-class whites have. By upper-class he means college-educated people in the top 20% of earners, and by lower-class he means the bottom 30% of earners, which encompasses some working class and some non-working people. (He limits his discussion to whites to demonstrate that he's talking about class and not race differences. He states that the same patterns hold true among other races.)

While my sociology and social work background have emphasized economic and structural disparities in explaining why some groups have it worse than others, Murray points to cultural changes. For example, while the rate of physical accidents is much lower than it was in the 60s, the percentage of people on disability is much higher. To be fair, I'm not sure how much of this is due to the increase in laziness that Murray alleges, and how much is due to changes in definitions of disability such as the inclusion of mental illness.

Murray looks at four of what he considers cardinal values: marriage, industriousness, religiosity, and honesty (in the sense of not committing crimes). While some of these raised my ideology red flags, he does back them up with data about actual quality of life. Declining religiosity, he argues, is correlated with weaker social ties and lower self-reported happiness. Nations without a hardworking population will fail, he argues (taking some cheap shots at Europe along the way). And the decline of marriage, both in terms of higher divorce rates and more never-married adults, is bad for kids. He lays out the evidence that children not raised by their married, biological parents (controlled for income) do worse in terms of delinquency, childhood illness, school dropout rates, crime, early death, and emotional health.

I kept waiting to hear what practical policy changes Murray suggested, but his recommendations were vague. He accuses the upper class of being out of touch with mainstream America (there's a quiz including questions like: have you watched a full episode of Oprah? Have you eaten at a Waffle House this year?) I agree that there's a cultural divide, but it's not clear why exactly this is bad, or how improving my knowledge of NASCAR will help the country.

The piece of Murray's advice I found most interesting was that the upper class "preach what they practice." He says upper-class families still have a grip on industriousness, marriage, and honesty, and that these values are good for them and their families. Keeping these values to themselves and allowing the poor to destroy themselves, he says, will ultimately destroy the nation. And he argues that staying politely silent when you watch people choose foolishly is not actually an act of kindness.

I'm not too interested in Murray's project of preserving the America envisioned by its founders. I'm not interested in blaming the poor for being poor. I'm not interested in blaming single parents for the demise of their relationships. And it goes against every bit of my training to say that some family styles work better than others. But I found the facts on marriage and children especially hard to look away from: both rich and poor used to have kids largely within marriage. The rich still do, but poor people now do it less. Which indicates culture, not just economic forces. And the kids whose parents aren't married to each other suffer for it.

Murray doesn't directly say that he wants more stigma against bearing children outside of marriage. And stigma seems terribly unfair, because it also targets the children who didn't choose their parents' actions. But I wonder - would it actually be better for children overall if there were more stigma? If having married parents is so important, would it be better to exert a bit more social pressure on parents to make that happen?

Followup post: Why kids come out that way

Parent rights at what cost?

Recently, I've read two memoirs by adults who wished they had been taken away from their parents. One was Jeanette Wall's The Glass Castle, and I'm currently reading Daphne Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress.

Walls describes a childhood with two charming intellectual parents who just didn't prioritize things like groceries or heating fuel. At one point the child welfare people came to investigate, but Walls was able to head them off, terrified that she will be separated not from from her parents, but from her siblings.

Scholinski spent much of her adolescence in psychiatric hospitals for oppositional defiant disorder, which both she and the hospitals chalked up to her chaotic and affectionless family life. She describes her feelings upon being hospitalized:

"I didn't let on but part of me kind of wanted to go. Any place had to feel safer than home. Over the summer my father had sat on me, his knees on my shoulders, and poked me in the chest while I tried furiously to kick him, to get him off so I could breathe . . . I guess if I felt anything riding up the elevator to the third floor if Michael Reese, it was a stab of hope."

I realize these are extreme cases, but I wonder how many such cases are out there.

The social workers and judges who make these decision have two responsibilities. First, they must protect the health and safety of the child. Second, they must try to keep families intact. Those things don't always combine well.

I've heard parents say their children were taken away for no good reason. (Of course, they're free to say they weren't abusing or neglecting their kids, and if the Department of Children and Families has evidence to the contrary, they're not allowed to release it to the public.) And yes, I know there have been abuses of the system, especially against Native American families. Probably there still are incompetent or biased social workers taking kids away from families who could have cared for them if they had been properly referred for housing assistance, food stamps, etc. And yes, there is a shortage of those resources that may make the difference between being able to care for your kids and not.

But I've also heard social workers say they think the system is too permissive, that birth families are sometimes given too many chances, that children are moved from foster care back to the home too many times before parental rights are terminated. By the time the kids have spent a few years bouncing between homes, they're too old to be easily adoptable and have endured too many disrupted attachments.

Parents have a legal right to their children, unless they really screw up. Children need families, and in most cases their original parents are the best people to raise them. But in the cases where that's not true, I'm not so keen on protecting parental rights at the expense of the children.

I wonder what an outcome-based rather than rights-based approach to this would look like.

Children seldom say they want to be separated from their parents at the time, because children cling to the only supports they know. But once they're grown? I'd love to see a study that asks adults:

Did your parents lose custody of you?
1) No, and it was the right decision
2) No, but I wish they had
3) Yes, and it was the right decision
4) Yes, but I wish they hadn't

I don't know what results we would get, but it would be a good tool for knowing if our policy is tipping too much in one direction or another.

Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

I just read Bryan Caplan's book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.

His argument is that parents drive themselves crazy doing things - activities, fancy schools, safety precautions — that don't actually improve kids' outcomes.  The bulk of the book comes from twin and adoption studies showing that kids are mostly preprogrammed, and nurture doesn't play much of a role in how they come out as adults.

This is counterintuitive because we see how children resemble their parents.  Even adopted kids resemble their parents and siblings in terms of behavior and opinions.  But most of that is probably temporary — by adulthood, we mostly turn into the people we were always going to.  Looking at twins separated at birth, or comparing adopted children to their non-adopted siblings, it turns out that parenting has little long-term effect on educational achievement, personality, income, criminality, drug use, health, or intelligence.  Those things come mostly from genes, non-parental environment, and free will (whatever that means).

Some of our modern parenting practices do seem pretty nutty.  In 1965, a typical mother spent 10 hours a week directly caring for her children.  In 2000 (when women had fewer children and were more likely to work outside the home), the number had risen to 13 hours a week.  Dads have increased their childcare time, too.  So we could probably do as our grandparents did, and let our kids run loose more.

Kids are safer now than they've ever been.  They're more likely to get hurt driving with you in a car than they are to get kidnapped playing outside.  Our parents ran around the neighborhood, chewed on lead paint, breathed secondhand smoke, etc.  So we should expect our kids to turn out at least as well as we and our parents did - probably better.

Caplan's advice is to chill out and enjoy the ride. Instead of treating kids like a project to perfect, he advises treating them like we treat our partners: as people to try to get along with and enjoy, but not ones whose future we determine.  So spend your time and money where it will make you and your family happier.  E.g. firm discipline that discourages tantrums is worthwhile because it makes your kid bearable to be around in the present, but not because it will make her a better adult.  And if your kid doesn't want to go to violin lessons, it's probably not worth dragging him there.

All this is within a middle-class first-world environment with reasonable parents.  Obviously if a kid is malnourished, neglected, or abused, they'll have worse outcomes.  If you want to improve the life of a child, Caplan says, adopt from the third world.  That shift of environment will make a big difference in whether the child is able to live his potential.  (I'd add that adopting an older child from foster care costs much less and also greatly improves the child's prospects, though I don't know how the improvement compares to international adoption.)

Where does the "selfish" come in? Caplan says you should take a long view and count how many children you might like in each decade of your life. In your thirties you might want one or none, since little kids are a lot of work.  In your forties you might want two school-aged kids.  And by the time you're retired, you probably want several adult children to take care of you and make grandchildren.  Caplan advises averaging your ideal number of children over time, so as not to deprive your future self of family members just because the most difficult period is first.

Verdict: the book is worth reading, but there's not enough material in it to really fill out the 184 pages.  Claims are well cited, which is a plus. 

Caplan makes a strong argument that parenting doesn't have to be as hard as we're making it, but he doesn't do justice to arguments against making more people.  He says that adding to the population will probably help us, since any new child could turn out to improve the world in some grand way (and at worst, will probably just quietly enjoy themselves).  He admits that adding first-worlders worsens our environmental problems, but says it would be better to deal with this by carbon taxes or other meta methods rather than antinatalism.

I'm not sure about this.  While I think carbon taxes would be a good step, I can't personally do much to help them along.  But I can choose whether to add to the population.  I think it's possible that average first-worlder creates more harm than good, but we don't have a good way to tell.

Caplan cites studies saying parenting doesn't matter much in how many years of education a child ends up getting, but nothing in the book addresses quality of education.  Does sending your kids to private school or moving to a better school district improve their outcomes?  Or their happiness over the 13 years they spend there?  No answers from this book.

And while I agree that it's good for older people and younger people to be in each other's lives, traditional family is not the only way to do that.  I enjoyed my time in an intergenerational community, and our current household (two parents, two non-parents, one baby) has worked well this year.  When I'm old I hope to live with younger people, even if we're not family.

I go through periods of thinking "we should adopt" or "we should make our own" or "argh argh we shouldn't even have kids."  Jeff is consistently in a "we'll decide this later" period.  Right now I'm leaning towards homemade.  We'll see if I'm still in this zone in a year when I'm done with school and have a real job...

Shine like the moon

Over Christmas I read Dreams of Trespass, a memoir by Islamic feminist Fatima Mernissi. It's about her childhood in a harem in 1940s Morocco. This was a family harem, as opposed to the imperial harems that caught the Western imagination. Mernissi grew up in a big family compound full of cousins and aunts, which the women were rarely allowed to leave.

One scene that especially interested me was the women's elaborate preparations for the weekly trip to the bathhouse. Mernissi describes the drying of herbs and clay, the steeping of leaves in oil, the application of face masks and henna paste, and then soaking it all off in the baths and emerging clean and new.

Mernissi's father dislikes the smell of henna and pleads with his wife not to participate:

“I love you as natural as God made you,” he would say. “You needn't go through all this trouble to please me. I am happy with you as you are, in spite of your quick temper. I swear, with God as my witness, that I am a happy man. So, please, why don't you forget about the henna tomorrow.” But Mother's answer was always the same. “Sidi (my lord), the woman you love is not natural at all! I have been using henna since I was three. And I need to go through this process for psychological reasons too – it makes me feel reborn.”

Mernissi's beloved cousin and playmate Samir also tires of her participation in these female rituals:

He explained to me that if I kept dropping out for two days in a row to take part in the grownups' beauty treatments, and attended our terrace sessions with smelly, oily masks all over my face and hair, he was going to look for another games partner. Things could not go on as they were, he said; I had to choose between play and beauty, because I surely could not do both.

Her response surprised me:

“Skin first! Samir,” I said, “a woman's fate is to be beautiful, and I am going to shine like the moon.”

This strikes me as braver than anything I said on the topic in adolescence. I understood that while being pretty would attract boys, appearing to care about beauty would not. I was looking for a geeky boy, and such boys did not like fussy girls, hobbled in high heels and always disappearing to the bathroom to fix their makeup. The praise I most remember from my first boyfriend was when we went sledding, clad in long underwear and old clothes. He said he liked when I looked “simple.”

Meanwhile, most girls love to preen. At twelve, my sister used so many fruity bath gels and sprays that she attracted wasps when she went outside. I grew my hair long and braided it in elaborate Princess Leia updos, though I never wore them outside the house. In college, one of the pleasures of a women's dorm was helping each other pick out clothes for dances or shabbats. There were no men to know we cared about clothes or complain that we took too long to get ready. Preparation was a pleasure in itself, sometimes more fun than the actual event.

I'm sad Mernissi couldn't keep her friend and her henna, and that women's beauty was used as an excuse to lock them up. But I admire her bravery in siding with her mother and aunts instead of capitulating to Samir's demand.

Good things

Today in church the topic was the Magnificat, also known as the Canticle of Mary. I was thinking about one part, which we used to sing in children's choir:

He hath filled the hungry with good things
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Today I realized that my mental image of the "good things" is the food page from The Little Engine that Could.

"Some of the cars were filled with all sorts of good things for boys and girls to eat — big golden oranges, red-cheeked apples, bottles of creamy milk for their breakfasts, fresh spinach for their dinners, peppermint drops, and lollypops for after-meal treats."

To me, the combination of words and images invoke all that is wholesome and tasty. Fill me up!