Posts with the tag family

David Brooks Hearts White Fertility

Josh Eidelson — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 14:27:00 EDT

Why isn't John McCain on the stump telling Americans to have more babies?

Kate Sheppard notes the passage of Russia's "Day of Conception:"

Today falls exactly nine months before Russia Day, and as one of Putin's policies to encourage more breeding in his country, he's offered SUVs, refrigerators, and monetary rewards to anyone who gives birth on June 12. So the mayor of Ulyanovsk, a region in central Russia, has given workers there the afternoon off to make with the baby making. Everyone who gives birth is a winner in the "Give Birth to a Patriot on Russia's Independence Day" contest, but the grand prize winner -- judged on qualities like "respectability" and "commendable parenting" -- gets to take home a UAZ-Patriot, a Russian-made SUV.

This seems like a good opportunity to ask why the kinds of natalist appeals and policy justifications that are so widespread in Europe are all but non-existent in the United States. Sure, American politicians seem to be expected to have gobs of kids to demonstrate their family values. But why is it much more common for politicians in Europe to push policies explicitly designed to make people have more kids?

Discouraging though it may be, I think the best answer is race. Politicians in Sweden or in Russia or in France get further with calls for the nation to have more babies for the sake of national greatness or national survival because that nation and those babies are imagined to look more the same.

Who You Gonna Call?

Dana Goldstein — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 11:25:03 EDT

According to the New York Times, if you're a young professional woman, you spend a lot of time on the phone with your mom. Hours. Like six hours. Four times a day.

Dr. Gadsden, of the University of Pennsylvania, said that if mothers are orchestrating their daughters’ lives and regularly attempting to take away the hurt, they could be turning them into overly needy adults.

“Parents over the last 25, 30 years have been far more indulgent than they necessarily needed to be with their children,” Dr. Gadsden said. “Some problems have to be solved by yourself.”

I talk to my mom several times a week, but not everyday. And when we do talk, it's usually for at least 15 minutes or half an hour, and often much longer. My male friends have remarked that I seem particularly close to my mom. Well, yes. I'm an only child and my parents are divorced, so we have been each other's main supports for years. But I see similar relationships between many of my female friends and their mothers, regardless of family dynamics. I think our cultural assumptions about young adult's relationships to their parents have certainly shifted, so much so that one friend of mine recently said she feels uncomfortable when she tells people she doesn't feel that close to her mother.

This Times article is gender-specific, but we've seen plenty of coverage of parental "hovering" over both male and female college students via cell phones and email. Do you think it's really about delayed marriage and increased technology? Or does our generation, many of us raised by children of the sixties, really have better, closer relationships with more "with it" parents? How often do you talk to your parents?

Garrison Keilor: Misogynistic, Heterosexist Adulterer

Dana Goldstein — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:45:01 EDT

Ouch, I know it's harsh. And I must admit, I sometimes take a bit of campy, guilty pleasure in Prairie Home Companion. But friend and Campus Progress contributor Ann Friedman is right: Keilor's little Salon peon to the traditional family is puke-worthy. He writes:

Back in the day, that was the standard arrangement. Everyone had a yard, a garage, a female mom, a male dad, and a refrigerator with leftover boiled potatoes in plastic dishes with snap-on lids. ... Under the old monogamous system, we didn't have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point.

The always excellent Dan Savage (a gay dad) rips Keilor to tiny, quivering shreds, reminding us that this old white dude has been married three times with kids sprinkled throughout. He cheated on one of his wives with his Danish language tutor. Sweet, right? As a child of divorced parents, I really resent Keilor's larger point, which is that parents should grin and bear it, since what's best for children is adults trapped in unhappy marriages who devote every second of their lives to kids' well-being. Good parents are good parents. Period.