Reunions

My sister shared this video of one of her second-grade students reuniting with her mother, who's been stationed in Afghanistan for the last year. It's a lovely moment: the moment of realization, then the silence, the rightness of being near each other after too long apart.

It makes me think of the mothers I work with in the jail. A World Apart, Christina Rathbone's excellent book about women in a Massachusetts prison, describes another reunion after two years of separation between mother and son:

“...she ran over and grabbed Patrick, sobbing, almost unable to breathe. Pat burst into tears too, and clung to her. Across the room, her father started to cry, the officer in charge of the visiting room that night started to cry, and one by one the inmates and even their visitors started to cry along with them.”

The male inmates sometimes talk about their children, but not with the same longing the women do.  Many of the mothers describe a physical craving to be near their children, a hunger for the sound of their voices and the smell of their hair.

They worry endlessly about their children's well-being. Have they eaten enough today? Is he doing all right in school?  Will she be mad at me when I come home? How can a toddler understand I didn't leave her on purpose?

They talk about how much they want to keep their children safe from all the terrors of their own childhoods: the sexual abuse, the neglect, the beatings. For some of these women, their relationship with their children is the only non-abusive relationship they've ever had.

The mothers' pain is one side of the coin.  The other side is the children's pain, which I can only imagine.

The United States has the highest imprisonment rate in the world.  That affects not only the people who are locked up, but their families.  Every time we imprison a person, we take away a part of a family.  We should think carefully about whether it's worth it.

Project: story stones

There are lots of kids' things I realize I won't have time to make when I'm actually a parent. So I'm making them now. The latest project: story stones. They're a starting point for kids to make up stories about the items pictured.

I chose a mix of fanciful items (hot air balloon) and ones that I expect my kids will see often (tree, Red Line train). Once I have actual kids I'll probably make more to suit their interests.

I made the pictures from cut-out bits of magazine paper attached with watered-down Elmer's glue. They're pleasant in the hand.

On eugenics

I was interested to read ethicist Julian Savulescu saying that parents should have the option of screening their embryos for potential problems like alcoholism and psychopathy, then selecting embryos with lower chances of those problems.

The comments on the article are predictably negative. "Start the process to revoke this clown's tenure." "Sounds like Nazi propaganda to me." "Hopefully, Christ raptures His church before all this genetics crap really gets put into play."

The practical implications of Savulescu's idea are sketchy. In a different article, he suggests that the testing would be for people who were already having in vitro fertilization for some other reason. Also, I trust he's aware that we don't have a medical test for propensity for alcoholism or any of the other problems he mentions. But we're more likely to develop tests if parents would be allowed to use them.

Here are the two reasons I consider eugenics a personal issue.

First, last year Jeff and I found out that there was a genetic disease in the family that might dispose our kids to cancer. While we were waiting to find out more, I thought a lot about whether I would use in vitro fertilization to select for a child without the disorder. Would we abort a child rather than watch her die of breast cancer in her forties like several of her relatives did? Would we gamble that cancer treatment would be better by then? Would we rather keep the money and hope for the best?

It turned out not to be an issue, because neither Jeff nor I have the gene. But if I had needed to choose, I think I would have done almost anything to have a healthy child.

Second, a couple recently asked me if I would consider being an egg donor for them. We talked a lot about the process and about my medical history. In the end, their fertility clinic screened me out because of my family history of depression. Part of me was devastated — who wants to be told your genes aren't good enough? But I agree with the decision: the child will probably be happier and healthier with a different egg donor. If that couple's child is going to have someone else's genes, they should get the best genes they can.

Some objections to my viewpoint:

It's eugenics. Yes, it is. I understand the history of horrible things that have been done in the name of eugenics. But if this particular idea has merit, we shouldn't reject it because some similar ideas have been abused in the past. It is possible to be in favor of healthier children and not to be in favor of sterilizing people against their will, etc.

It's discrimination. The disability rights platform on this is that gene selection is tantamount to saying people with disabilities shouldn't exist. But honestly, depression sucks. If I could choose to have been born without that tendency (even if it meant being a different person), I would.

It will lead to abortion. Yes. Personally, I consider that a small harm to prevent a greater harm.

It will be used to make "designer babies." Let's consider how IVF works: you pay a fertility clinic about $12,000. For two weeks, you inject your own body with fertility drugs that make your ovaries hyperfertile, creating a sensation I've heard described as "like live goldfish." Then they knock you out and use a needle to withdraw the eggs, fertilize them, analyze them, and put the selected ones back in her uterus. 30% chance of medical complications. Oh, and it probably won't result in a live birth. You will probably need to shell out another $12,000 and try again. And again.

Now, how many parents do you know who would go through that to get a baby with their favorite eye color? And if they did, why would that even be so bad? A hundred years ago, IQs were lower and people were generally less healthy, probably because of poor nutrition. Nobody worries that we have "designer children" who are taller, smarter, and healthier than their grandparents.

If we allow the selection of personality traits, governments will want to breed a docile population. No, I would not want governments to control this process. (Despite allegations of fascism, Savulescu also said nothing about governments controlling how people's babies come out.) The only political rumblings I have heard about this is politicians who don't support screening because parents might choose abortion.

In the end, I think very few parents will screen for most disorders because it's so financially and emotionally costly. But I think the tests should be legal, and if parents decide they want to take extra steps to create healthy children, they should be free to do so.

Why kids come out that way

I just read something that cast new light on my previous question of whether stigma against single parenting would be good for kids. Scott's summary of a point from Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption:

"Studies do show that parents who adhere very meticulously to the standard parenting advice have children who, let's say, do better at school. But Harris points out - what personality trait is necessary to adhere meticulously to the latest parenting fads? Conscientiousness. What personality trait is necessary to do well at school? Conscientiousness. And what personality trait is about 50% heritable (recall that most things are about 50% heritable)? Conscientiousness. So the discovery that parents who adhere to parenting advice have children who adhere to school rules is absolutely worthless until you control for conscientiousness - after which the finding should disappear. . . .

Harris thinks that these sorts of problem explain the much-trumpeted findings that kids from single-parent homes and children of divorce tend to turn out worse. After all, what kind of fathers abandon their partners and young children? Low conscientiousness fathers who probably have a lot of personal issues. So what kind of children would we expect them to have, just by genetics alone? Low conscientiousness children who probably have a lot of personal issues. And surprise! Children of single parent homes are low conscientiousness and have lots of personal issues! But - and here's something I had never read before - this is true only of homes that are single parent because the father left. If the father died - in a car accident, of cancer, whatever - those children turn out exactly as well as children of double-parent homes! Exactly what one would expect if the problem were caused by what the split implied about genetics and social situation rather than by the parenting itself."

I'm always pleased to find evidence that I don't have to be a frantic parent.

We know better now . . . right?

The early twentieth century was an interesting time in birth and childcare.

Twilight Sleep
In 1899, German doctors began treating wealthy women with scopolamine and morphine to create labor in a state of delirium. The drugs created an amnesia that made women unable to remember the birth process. The practice was common in the US for decades afterwards. After my grandmother delivered her son in the 1940s, the nurse asked her if she wanted to see her baby. She asked, "What baby?"

"Twilight sleep" was discontinued after people realized that drugging mom (and thus baby) with morphine meant the baby came out weaker and with more breathing problems. In 1958, Ladies' Home Journal published nurses' stories of what the mothers themselves couldn't remember: women giving birth in a drug-induced psychosis, women clawing to get out of the wrist straps that were used to restrain them, women's cries stifled with masks. Husbands didn't know, because they weren't present for any part of the birth.

Childcare
While mothers spent days in a drugged state waiting for birth, someone had to care for their other children. It wasn't normal for fathers to take time off work to care for the kids while the mother was in the hospital, so if no grandmother was available, rich kids were farmed out to residential nurseries. It was assumed that children would be fine as long as someone was taking care of them, even if that person was a stranger. Because staff rotated shifts, no one person consistently cared for the same child. (Of course, we now put our children in daycares with strangers, but not 24/7.)

Psychologist John Bowlby documented the reaction of young children to a stay in such nurseries: first a distressed searching for a familiar adult, then despair, then an emotional withdrawal. Social worker James Robertson documented similar effects of long hospital stays on young children in a time when parents were discouraged from visiting. As a result, hospitals and nurseries changed the policies that kept children away from their parents for weeks or months.

But not all institutions recognized the importance of any human contact at all. The invention of incubators resulted in babies who got food and heat but virtually no affection. They created a new diagnosis for the resulting failure to thrive: "hospitalism." Infants in poorer hospitals weren't susceptible to this new ailment because they were still held by staff rather than in incubators.

In the 1940s René Spitz and Catherine Wolf studied 91 babies in orphanages where they basically lay in cribs all day. Despite getting good food, 1/3 of the children died in their first year of life. They compared this group to babies who were with their mothers in prison - all the imprisoned children survived to age 5, despite worse food and sanitation. The orphanages were acting on scientific principles of the day - it was reasoned that isolating children would keep them safe from communicable diseases. Turns out that isolation is much worse than disease: babies can literally die from a lack of affection.

Breastfeeding
Starting in the 20th century, baby formula began to be marketed as the most "scientific" way to feed your baby. (To be fair, it was better than the cow's milk and sugar concoctions people had been using for formula before!) Hospitals used to proudly report their high rates of bottle-feeding.

Now every health authority is backpedaling and trying to get moms to return to breastfeeding. Now we know about the immune-system benefits of the first milk, even for moms who don't plan to breastfeed more than a day or two. And the evidence is clear that breastfed babies have less risk of ear infections, diarrhea, and pneumonia. For mom, the benefits include less cancer and less heart disease.

Birth interventions
Today, we've learned from much of the evidence. We don't handcuff birthing women. We place children in foster homes rather than orphanages (though, sadly, not everywhere). Currently, "kangaroo care" or skin-to-skin contact for premature infants is gaining popularity. Skin time with an adult gives the baby the heat it needs while also helping parent and child bond.

And yet our birth practices could stand to return to some of the methods of past centuries, before birth was medicalized. Medical interventions like c-sections and fetal heart monitoring can save lives when they are really needed, but in most cases a low-intervention birth is safest. The US has a rate of Cesarean section of over 30%, double what the World Health Organization used to recommend when it still gave recommendations. Maternal mortality is on the rise in the US, and some of that is probably due to an increase in unnecessary c-sections.

Evidence-based practices for birth include moving around (rather than lying on your back, which means gravity works against you) and having a doula or birth coach for support. One medical professor describes the evidence that a low-intervention birth is safest: "Our midwife could be trusted to be scientific, whereas our obstetrician could not."

As I approach parenthood, I don't want to be enslaved to the current attachment-parenting style that implies, as my housemate put it, "if you break eye contact with your baby, it will explode." But I do want to know what the evidence is when I make my choices. Hopefully we won't look back in 50 years and wonder why we made such terrible choices in the name of modernity.

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.

The three graces

Today I went to the Lowell Folk Festival.  At many of the performances, people got up to dance. A lot of little kids did the jumping-around thing that kids do, which was fun to watch. But in front at the stage with the Irish band, there were three girls who had something special.



None of them looked trained, but they were exceptionally graceful. They had that freedom of movement that comes when you have an impression of what trained dancers look like, but you've never had actual steps drilled into you.

My first instinct was to go over to their parents and say, "They've got talent!  Maybe they'll want to study Irish dance or ballet!"



But part of me quailed at the idea of formalizing their leaps and twirls.  I thought of long hours at the studio, auditions, stage fright, eating disorders, bleeding feet.

I watched, in love with their beauty.  They were so free, so confident in their own bodies.  Their grace was uninhibited by any fear of looking foolish.  How can we, as adults, recapture that?



I got up and joined them.  Some other women with bad tans and obvious Irish dance training appeared.  Soon there were lots of us, skidding on the dance floor that was slippery from rain.  We sprang and twirled, slipping, laughing, falling down.



As the band was packing up, I approached two of the girls.  "I had so much fun watching you dance," I told them. "Keep having fun."

Video of these dancers and more from the festival.

Babywearing in Ecuador

In much of Asia and Africa, people carry heavy things on their heads. In Latin America women use a rebozo instead. It's a rectangle of cloth that can serve as a garment, sunshade, or carrier:



And of course, it's the classic method for carrying kids. You see a lot of kids with their parents in Quito. A lot of people can't afford daycare or stay-at-home parents, so they take their kids to work with them. You see people, especially indigenous women, selling things in the street with kids tied on their backs.



While the rebozo is traditionally hand-woven wool, modern Ecuadorian mothers favor other materials. The one above has Strawberry Shortcake characters printed on it. A lot of women just use polarfleece blankets.

Unlike US parents, who have heard about SIDS a million times and are always checking that their child is still breathing, Ecuadorian parents often cover their children entirely with a polarfleece blanket. You'll see a woman walking along with a large bundle in her rebozo, with perhaps a little foot dangling out the bottom. Ultraviolet radiation is very strong at this altitude, so the blanket is probably keeping the kid from getting burnt.


I'm pretty sure there's a kid in there

While Americans tend to buy special baby carriers, even if they're going with a simple rectangle, Ecuadoran women seem to use any convenient piece of cloth. The babies are all very chill about it.



One does see the occasional child in a stroller or a storebought baby carrier. Most young children are carried in arms, which seems inconvenient but maybe doesn't have the negative connotation of being an "indio". And while I see plenty of men carrying children, I've never seen one use a rebozo.

Adult life, seen from age 5

My five-year-old Ecuadoran host sister has some new paper dolls. She has just heard that Jeff and I met through dancing, and she wants to reenact this. Her interpretation of how people meet and shack up is fascinating.

She dresses her paper doll and commands me: "You be a boy who wants to dance with her."

I hold up some paper clothes to be a boy. They dance with her paper girl. After several dances: "Now she wants to go home, but you ask her to wait."

"Don't go home. Wait!"

"Okay. Now you have to say, 'I want to live in your house.'"

"I want to live in your house."

"Okay, let's go to my house. But there's a crocodile."

"Ahh! A crocodile! We have to jump over it."

"Okay." (The dolls jump over the crocodile.)

"Now we go home." (They go to a sofa cushion.) "Now you say, 'I want to sleep with you.'"

"What?"

"You have to say, 'I want to sleep with you.'"

"....I want to sleep with you."

"Okay. They sleep in the bed." She lays the dolls side by side and covers them with her hand. She waits silently a few seconds, then crows: "Kukuriku! It's morning."

"Good morning."

"Now you make me breakfast while I put on new clothes."

"Okay. Do you want eggs? Toast?"

"Eggs. I'm going to wear this short dress so you can see my pretty legs."

This repeated for a few sleep-and-breakfast cycles, then she staged a wedding. I don't remember it happening quite like that, especially not the crocodile.

What's not working here

In college I spent a semester in Denmark partly because I wanted to see what a really well-run society looks like. And it was extremely civilized: people had good free health care, good free education, pleasant public spaces. Studies consistently rank Danes the happiest people in the world. There were few rich people and few poor people. Other than the xenophobia, it was almost an ideal nation.

And Ecaudor, too, has a lot going for it. People here are mostly polite, friendly, and involved with their families. The weather and natural environment are beautiful - it possibly has the most biodiversity per square mile of any nation. It has the potential to be a really delightful tourist destination.

And yet things aren't going so well here. 10% of the country lives on less than $2 a day (adjusted - that's what $2 would buy in the US, not what it would buy here). There are thousands of street children whose parents are dead, imprisoned, deported, or who abandoned their kids. Picketing, purse-cutting, and muggings are rampant in the cities, making them unattractive to tourists. Every house has a wall around it with barbed wire or broken glass cemented at the top to stop housebreakers. Even the grocery stores have security guards. People don't trust the police much anymore since they went on strike and held the president hostage in 2010. People were looting stores and the police did nothing. Freedom of speech is not a right here - people have gone to prison for criticizing the president. Bus accidents are more common here partly because mechanics will rent functioning parts to bus companies so they can pass inspection - then they take them back and reinstall the faulty parts. Firefighters don't always have functioning equipment, and recently there was a case when firefighters refused to show up to a fire. If you go to a lawyer, many will ask "how much help" you want - i.e. if you just want their legal services, or if you will also pay them enough to pay off the judge. Bribing the police is also common.

It makes me realize what difference a well-functioning government makes. It makes me think charter cities are a pretty good idea. Not that Ecuador is a failed state - it does have a decent level of functioning, just not as good as I was hoping for.

The other night we walked in a charming colonial street where families stroll, eating pastries and listening to traditional musicians. A girl with a dirty face, about seven years old, walked up and down begging for money to buy bread. (To be fair, at one point she was doing this with her mouth full of chicken kebab, which made it less convincing.) Eventually she tired of the routine and began playing with pieces of a broken bottle.

I left the street sobbing, furious with the adults and the systems that had abandoned her. The US foster care system is flawed, but at least we have an option other than the street. At 10 pm that girl should be in bed. She should be going to school in the morning. She should have parents who don't let her play with broken glass.

I kind of knew this is what I would see. I wanted to see a developing country to know how most of the world lives. And a lot of it is horrible. Which is why I want to change it.

One more reason

Today our Spanish teacher told us that one problem in Ecuador is that people steal babies from hospitals.

"Steal?" we repeated.

"It happened to my uncle," she said. "His wife gave birth in the hospital, and she fed the baby for the first time. Then a nurse took the baby away and it disappeared. They looked for it, but it was a newborn and she didn't remember if it had a birthmark or something. They never found it."

"Why do people steal babies?"

"There are women who can't have their own babies who steal other people's. Also, there are North Americans who will pay a lot of money for a baby. So people steal babies for them."

"I knew that happened in Guatemala, but..."

"It happens more in Guatemala, but it happens here too."

I think adoption can be a very good thing in some situations. But this is one more reason why we need reforms.

Thoughts on children and population

So you know I've been thinking about kids. As usual, I'm also thinking about ethics. Some considerations:

- All morality aside, I would prefer to have about two children.

- I used to be unsure about whether most people's lives were worth living. I now think it's pretty likely that they are. Reading the recent World Happiness Report reinforced this belief. Americans are doing pretty well in terms of happiness (though not as well as Danes or Canadians.)

- I expect being born would be better for my potential children than not being born.

- Creating new humans is the worst thing I personally could do for the global environment. All our concerns about paper vs. plastic just vanish in comparison to making a new person. Especially if we live in countries with high consumption/pollution rates.

- The US birth rate is right around replacement rate. But I expect US population to grow due to immigration and a higher birthrate among Latinos. So I'm not worried about a population crash here.

- I realize that parenting ≠ making a baby. After years of considering adopting from foster care, Jeff and I don't think it's for us (at least not with our first child). Those kids have been through the wringer, and I'm not prepared to deal with that 24/7. We haven't seriously looked at international adoption because of the high cost.

- Having kids will not impact the amount of money Jeff and I give away, because Jeff has set aside a portion of his income that can't be given away. On that budget, we can either have a quite comfortable life for two of us or a financially tighter life with kids. There's nothing I would rather spend that money on than kids.

- It kind of boils down to the tragedy of the commons. Adding another person is good for that person, but a little bit bad for everyone else. (With most of the ill effect going to people who already drew the short straw and live near a mud-slide zone in Bangladesh.) The question is, will my kids get more enjoyment out of life than they will take away from other people?

So, some thoughts on what Jeff and I are like and what our kids might be like:

- I estimate our environmental impact to be substantially lower than most Americans' because we live in small spaces, use cars and planes rarely, buy most things used, and don't eat much meat.

- Jeff and I give a good fraction of our income to high-impact charities. I think our contributions in this way (and through being nice people to have around) definitely outweighs our negative impacts.

- Jeff and I are outliers in terms of giving and environmental impact. Our kids will probably regress toward the mean, but I'd be surprised if they make it all the way there. Through a combination of genetics and upbringing, I expect our kids to be somewhere between average and us.

- Average US giving is about 2% of gross income. We do about 30%. I bet we can bump our kids up to maybe 6%. Based on our income, our kids are likely to make somewhere around $70K. That comes out to giving about $4K a year, which would save two lives a year at current rates. I'm hoping current cheap problems like malaria will be solved by the time my kids are grown, but there may be new ones.

- Our kids will probably not come out exactly like my estimate, but I can act in good faith based on what I think is most likely.

What do you think? Are there things I forgot?

Child things

I'm not entirely sure if Jeff and I should have kids. I've seen the evidence that parents are less happy than non-parents. I understand that I'm the product of many, many generations of mammals that successfully reproduced, and that we are all selected to be good at parenting. And I understand that evolution does not have my personal interests at heart, and that it may have bred me to want something that will not actually make me happy.

But boy, do I want it.

Any actual babies need to wait until I've finished school and have had a job long enough to get medical leave. So in the mean time, I'm sewing stuff.

A mouse in an Altoid tin bed, from this idea.


A marble maze, from this idea.


And a Waldorf-style weighted doll.


(Watching a woman and her 10-year-old grandson at the bus stop the other day gave me food for thought. They were cursing at each other, threatening to knock each other into traffic. At one point she rounded on me and said, "You have kids? Don't have none!" I gave her a half-smile and thought, "I bet the findings on parental happiness are dragged down by people with terrible parenting skills. I'm sure I can do better than this.")

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...

What keeps us safe

My housemates' baby is four months old now. As I watch them bounce, cuddle, and sing their son to sleep, I wonder about how lullabies worked before recording. If you're actually only singing them when your child is so young they can't fall asleep unaided, the child is too young to remember songs. Maybe older siblings hear what their parents sing to new babies, or what neighbors or relatives sing?

There are modern lullabies that obviously never went through the folk process. Take the beautiful "John O' Dreams":

When midnight comes good people homeward tread
Seek now your blanket and your feather bed
Home is the rover, his journey's over
Yield up the night time to old John O' Dreams.

It's lovely, but it's not exactly for kids. It's got four wordy verses which I've sung dozens of times but can't remember. This is clearly not the kind of thing that sleep-deprived parents pass down orally. But why write a lullaby for adults?

The other shoe dropped for me recently in a lecture on self psychology. Self psychology is cursed with terrible nomenclature - almost none of its terms accurately describe what they mean. So the "idealized parental imago pole" of the textbook sounded like mumbo-jumbo until the professor explained: "Our lifelong task is to find what feeds us and keeps us safe." We never outgrow the need to feel that we are protected by someone wise and strong. People may get this from religion, from idealizing a romantic partner, from hero-worship. And it's okay, because it gives us ideals to strive towards as well as a sense of wellbeing.

Children are born without much ability to self-soothe. Parents do it for them with sounds and touch. Later children carry around objects (blankets, dolls) to comfort themselves with when the parent isn't there. Still later, we repeat verbal assurances we have heard from others. (The first time I took a city bus alone at age fourteen, I repeated the phrase "It's going to be okay" under my breath for the duration of the trip.) The need to be comforted doesn't go away, but we learn to parent ourselves.

One of my favorite experiences is falling asleep while other people are awake and making music. It feels comforting in the same way that reliving childhood pleasures is comforting, except that this wasn't actually something that happened in my childhood. I think it's the sense that I can relax because all's well in the world. I've heard other people describe this feeling while falling asleep in a car with someone else driving.

This is why we have wordy lullabies for adults. This is why 25% of businessmen take their teddy bears with them on business trips. This is why Guns N' Roses wrote "Sweet Child O' Mine" as a joke and it topped the charts. Even if our parents will never literally hold us and comfort us again, we have to get that feeling somewhere.

Hostile lullabies

Jeff and I share an apartment with another couple and their two-month-old baby. I'm getting lots of babysitting practice, and with that comes lots of singing. After a day with a person who can't speak or understand your language, what you really want is to be verbal. Reading is difficult because babies have a way of occupying your hands. The kid likes hearing a human voice, but you quickly run out of things to say to someone who can't talk back. Thus, singing.

I'm realizing lots of the standard lullabies are strangely slow in tempo and sappy in lyric. At least at this age, the baby seems to want a lot of upbeat jiggling, not slow rocking. And since the baby only hears sounds, you can say anything. Which explains all the less-than-kind older lullabies. Think "When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall."

From Scotland, with too many children:
Hee O, wee O, what wou'd I do wi' you?
Black's the life that I lead wi' you;
Many o' you, little for to gie you.

A sleep aid from Appalachia:
What'll we do with the baby-o?
If he don't go to sleepy-o?
Dance him north, dance him south,
Pour a little moonshine in his mouth.

From the Blackfoot:
Come wolf, bite this baby:
He won't sleep.

Then there are the homemade kind, made up on the spot. Our housemate Hassan's go something like this:
Baby baby, you're the one
You make bathtime . . . you actually hate bathtime.

Bottom line: If you don't keep your sense of humor, you're done for.

Control

Jeff and I live with another couple who are expecting their first child in a few weeks. “Attachment parenting” is the current paradigm, and they’re knee deep in books about how to bond with your baby. Last night they were discussing how to get the proper skin-to-skin contact to encourage the production of prolactin and oxytocin while still allowing them to put the baby down occasionally. Some of these books imply that, as the dad-to-be put it, “If you break eye contact, your baby will explode.”

It’s sweet to see their preparations and their happiness, but at times I feel a little bitter. Jeff and I are planning to adopt children from foster care in a few years, and it’s a very different story. Kids in state custody have been removed from their birth families because of abuse or neglect. I can’t control whether their mothers took meth instead of folic acid. I can’t control whether they were breastfed. The ultra-cozy, ultra-responsive atmosphere that is in vogue right now is probably not what these kids got. And so, if you believe the books, they are probably hopelessly screwed up.

I have my fears, but I don’t really believe it. Every child who’s been removed from its family has trauma that will never fully go away. I work with kids who have been homeless, seen parents deported or jailed, who have gone hungry and underdressed because their parents were incapacitated by their own problems. That leaves a mark on anyone. But I’ve seen these kids grow and thrive once their circumstances change. I hear adoptive parents say, “At age three he was barely speaking, and they told us he was mentally retarded. Now he’s at grade level. He’s so excited about everything.”

It’s tempting to believe that if I could just control all the variables, I could make sure my children were perfectly healthy and happy. But no parent controls all the variables. You can take all the folic acid in the world and still get a child with autism or Down syndrome or anything. For me, part of getting ready to be a parent is letting go of the illusion of control.

(Also, coveting the tiny clothes and blankets that are scattered around the house. That’s another part.)

The way things should be

I used to think that social work was mostly about fixing people's problems. Or if I couldn't fix things, at least I could listen.

Working with children, I'm realizing that it's not just that. It's also teaching them how things should be. Children don't have a lot of information about the world yet, so each time they have an experience, it shapes their view of what is normal. A lot of my job is telling them when things are wrong.

They should not have called you that name.
Your father should not choke you. I know you're used to it, but you should not be used to it.
Your mother should not have told you she wanted to give you away.
Friends do not spit on each other.
Those boys should not write things about you on the bathroom wall.
I'm sorry that happened to you. You deserve better than that. You deserve to be safe. You deserve to be loved. It will not always be like this. Right now you are eleven, but someday things will be better.

Fables

The division between religion and mythology seems fairly clear to adults - one is believed by people currently alive, and the other was believed by people not currently alive. To children it's less clear.

I'm sitting with two eight-year-olds, one Irish Catholic, one Haitian Catholic. They are discussing bee-stings.
"It's like that fable," says Ryan.
"Yeah", says Paul. "That we read in class." I ask them about it.
"Zeus didn't want the bees to sting people over and over, so he made the bees die after one sting."
"But it's not all true," Paul adds. I ask which part isn't true. "The part about the bees."
"But the part about Zeus is true," Ryan asserts.
Paul agrees. "Zeus is watching us right now." He looks upwards and waves. "Hi, Zeus."
"But Zeus doesn't have a stinger," Ryan says.
"No. He's really busy. I bet he has a lot of papers on his table."
"But they didn't have papers then, they had scrolls."