Pittsburgh Rocks

This is the funniest thing I have read this week. It was sent by my sister in Pittsburgh about her first-grade daughter.

[My niece's] reaction to the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team winning the Stanley Cup (with pauses):

"Pittsburgh rocks. My baby head. Off."

Racial "Weathering" and Family Stress

Arline Geronimus argues that African Americans age faster than white people in America due to racism and stress. This has many important consequences - one of which is that waiting until their 20s to have children may not actually be healthier for black women and children, as is normally true for the American population as a whole.

Geronimus blames the faster "weathering" of African Americans on stress. She blames racism as the main source of differential stress. I think this is a plausible way of accounting for the fact that African Americans as a group are much less healthy than other Americans at the same age.

I would add, though, that there is another source of stress that is distinctively high for African Americans: the stress of single parenthood. Black Americans are especially likely to engage in the most stressful kind of single parenthood, the kind that results from never having married in the first place.

Geronimus has taken much heat for her views on racial weathering from stress. If we are looking at sources of stress, though, some are more self-inflicted than others - and thus can be addressed more directly by those enduring the stress.

Family Values Hypocrites Should Resign

Rep. Barney Frank had an affair with a prostitute. He did not resign. I don't think he needed to because he did not try to justify what the other guy did, and because he had not made a big deal about sexual morality before that. His district has re-elected him many times since.

Sen. David Vitter had sex with a prostitute. He should have resigned. He had made a big deal about sexual morality before that - and still does, with no show of shame. He thinks the only thing he did wrong was getting caught.

The latest family values warrior caught with his pants down is Sen. John Ensign. He had an affair with a campaign staffer whose husband worked for him. He seems to have gotten their son a job, too. He only admitted the affair after he was blackmailed. Ensign was a particularly egregious hypocrite. In addition to being a family values culture warrior in general, he had specifically called on his Senate colleague Larry Craig to resign during his sex scandal. And Ensign called on Pres. Clinton to resign during his sex scandal.

It is getting to the point that if public officials makes a big deal about marriage, family, and sexual honor, it is easy to assume that they are sleazy.

Sandra Tsing Loh's Divorce

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer for The Atlantic Monthly who usually covers domestic life. In the current issue she brings us up to date on her marital history.

She hated her father and wished her parents would divorce. She married a decent guy, had two girls, and they made a busy and solvent upper-middle-class home. Then in her mid-40s she had an affair. After therapy she decided she just didn't want to work at saving her marriage. She used this month's column to announce her divorce.

She then drew what she thinks is the logical conclusion from her story and that of some of perpetually dissatisfied friends: we should abolish marriage. More: human beings were never really meant for marriage, anyway. She cites Andrew Cherlin's review of the high U.S. divorce rate, which I wrote about recently, as evidence. Yet what Cherlin shows is that Americans have a higher divorce rate than other countries because we have a higher marriage rate to begin with - because we believe in marriage the most.

Sandra Tsing Loh's divorce is sad for her and her husband, and tragic for her children. It is not evidence that human beings were not meant for marriage.

Classes are Honorable

Egalitarians don't like to acknowledge the reality of classes because they think that their middle class life is the good kind of life. They believe that noting the existence and different cultures of other social classes is necessarily to make invidious distinctions.

However, if we believe in the nobility of labor and of useful leisure we can talk about classes without assuming them to be moral hierarchies.

Education Rationalizes the Status Structure, Mostly

Wittgenstein has a wonderful metaphor of language as like an old city. The oldest parts are crooked, winding, organic. On top of and growing around old bits are the new, modern, rationalized parts.

I think the social structure is like that, too. There is an old, crooked organic structure based on an honor/shame culture. We see it especially at the top, with its residue in Old Money. And we see it at the bottom, where gangs and slums reproduce honor/shame warrior bands wherever bourgeois order is ineffective.

On top of this old organic structure, though, a modern, rationalized grid has been laid. The main mechanism of rationalizing the social structure is the educational system. And the main tool for creating social closure differentiating one stratum from another are educational credentials.

Undermining Elders

One of the problems I addresses in Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment is that the church has created structures to undermine the authority of pastoral leaders. I spent this week with the summer conference of the Synod of the Trinity in Pennsylvania. In our conversations on this subject, I realized that the church had also created structures to undermine the authority of elder leaders.

The session that governs a local congregation is composed of elders, and is moderated by the pastor. Prior to the reforms of "the Sixties," a small group of elders might serve for many years. Now elders normally serve for a three-year term, are off for a year, then serve another three-year term. And that is it. Though elders are ordained for life, just as ministers are, their formal service is normally limited to one stint. The same holds for deacons, who serve on a separate board. In most Presbyterian congregations, more than half of the members have been ordained as deacons or elders.

When they go off the session, the governing experience that they learned mostly goes with them. Moreover, the elders who are sent by a local congregation as official representatives (commissioners) to the presbytery, the regional governing body, are chosen from the session. This means that the governing experience that the Presbyterian Church can bring to its central governing body, the presbytery, is also only short-term.

It would be bad to have only a small group serve on the session and presbytery for years and years. No one advocates that. But by requiring rotation of elders, and rarely recalling elders with past service, the Presbyterian Church (USA) undermines the other half of its possible Establishment.

The Coffee House: Where Strangers Become Acquaintances

Tonight I am giving a talk at The Phillips Emporium, an independent coffee house in the college town of Bloomsburg, PA. The subject of the talk at the coffee house is - the coffee house. This is a minor example of what sociologists mean by reflexivity. Modern institutions depend more and more on feedback about how they are working to do the next round of work and improvement. Coffee houses, as venues of critical thought, have always been self-critical. Pamphlets promoting, attacking, and analyzing coffee houses have been issued since the glory days of the coffee house in the 17th century.

It is probably not surprising that coffee house intellectuals get together in a coffee house to talk about coffee houses as a place to be intellectual. But coffee houses have also always served as places of business - and not just the business of selling coffee. Intellectuals do not usually focus on this element of coffee house life. Businesses that grew out of coffee houses, such as the stock exchange, have developed more exclusive places of conversation, most notably the private club. Still, new business ideas are born in coffee houses all the time, and low-level business, especially in the arts, is conducted in coffee houses to this day.

The coffee house is the best place to bring people together for clear-headed talk.

Du Bois Was More Prescient Than I Thought

I am re-reading W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk for my social theory class.

In that book, published at the dawn of the previous century, he famously argues that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." I had read this argument before as Du Bois correctly discerning the long hard civil rights struggle in the United States.

What I had not appreciated until this reading was that he clearly meant the entire global question of the interaction of the white and non-white races. He had in mind European colonialism just as much as American race relations.

In making my social theory class I am trying to pick pre-eminently transformative books. One good test is whether the book itself, and not just the author, has its own Wikipedia page.

The Souls of Black Folk was prescient not just about civil rights in America, but about colonialism and post-colonialism all over the world.

How Much Kids Cost at the Top and Bottom of the Income Scale

Marcia Carlson and Tim Smeeding reported at the Furstenberg Conference that parents in the top fifth of income spend about five times as much on their children as do parents in the bottom quintile of income.

At first glance this seems like common sense - parents with more money to spend will spend more on their kids. But the fact that children could be raised for less shows that richer parents are choosing to invest more in their children. The concerted cultivation that middle class parents normally engage in for their kids costs much more than the natural growth childrearing of the poor and working class families.

Women of All Classes Want the Same Number of Children, But Miss the Mark in Different Directions

At the Furstenberg Conference, Philip Morgan reported that women of all classes start out wanting about the same number of children - on average, a little over two. However, women with less than a high school education end up with more children than they wanted, while more educated women end up with slightly fewer than they intended. The least educated women end up with .25 kids too many, while the college graduates end up with .6 kids too few.

All Grown Up at 18

The Furstenberg Conference consisted mostly of demographers reporting on big numbers. One exception was Annette Lareau, who followed up on the children in her ethnographic study, Unequal Childhoods. She had found that working class and poor parents fed, clothed, sheltered their kids, made sure they went to school - then let them pick what they did with their time. She called this the "natural growth" approach. Middle class parents, by contrast, mobilized all the resources they could to develop the individual talents of each child, a method she called "concerted cultivation."

When she revisited the children as they got into their twenties, she found the next step of the two patterns of childrearing. At 18 the working class and poor kids were on their own. Even if they thought the kids were making mistakes, their parents did not think it was their place to step in. The middle class parents, on the other hand, continued to be deeply involved in helping their kids organize their lives, often in ways that were invisible to the children. These are the "helicopter parents," hovering over their children, who have become well known to college administrators.

Which contributed to a further difference. Both sets of parents knew that their children would be better off going to college. Most of the middle class kids got there, with parental help. Most of the working class and poor kids did not, even when they tried. The parents did not think they could, or should, push their kids to push through the inevitable roadblocks of college life. At 18, their kids were all grown up.

All Classes Want the Same Number of Kids

Paula England reported at the Furstenberg Conference on her new study of class differences in having children. She found that girls from all classes want the same number of children - on average, a little over two. However, by 16 there is already a negative correlation between sexual activity and income/GPA. That is, the poorer girls, who are also likely to be the girls doing worse in school, have sex more often than the richer girls, who are also doing better in school and are on the college track.

Eventually, the dropout girls have four times the unintended pregnancies that the college-track girls do. It is not that unintended pregnancies derail some girls from the college track - the causation runs the other way. Girls who start out poorer are likely to be "sloppy and inconsistent" in using birth control, whereas the middle class, college-track girls are not. Moreover, England reported, this class gradient in birth control goes back at least to the 1920s.

Legislation Not Court Decisions: Religious Protections

Religious opponents of same-sex marriage worry that if (probably when) same-sex marriage or civil unions become legal, people like them will be prosecuted. This is not far-fetched. "Hate speech" laws could easily be used to prosecute speech, even sermons against gay unions, as they have already been abroad. Religious charities have already stopped placing all adoptions because the state threatened them for not placing children with homosexual couples.

The first few states to legalize same-sex marriage did so by court decisions. These are blunt instruments. They invalidated existing laws without doing the necessary political work to deal with the unintended consequences of the court decision. Now, though, several states are taking the better path, making this major political change through the proper political means, the legislature. When states debate laws, they hear from all kinds of people who would be affected. The states that have passed same-sex marriage laws were able to put in protections for religious groups. Legislative debate, and laws that actually make it through the political process, are better protection for everyone.

Alternative Baby Faces

A wonderful image from "Texts from Last Night":

Whenever I'm sad I just imagine if babies were born with mustaches...

Modern Hunting and Gathering

A side thought from the Furstenberg conference.

Kevin Roy reported that among the working poor, men make more per hour, but are less stably employed than are women.

This sounds just like the relationship between hunters and gatherers.

Welfare Dads

At the Furstenberg conference, Kathryn Edin reported on a new study of poor, unmarried fathers. This is the counterpart to her work in Promises I Can Keep on poor teen mothers.

In the teen welfare mom and dad "courtship story," there is barely any courtship - and what there is begins after the baby is born. The couple meets, "get's together," has a baby, and then, if he is still around, begins to know one another. The men describe their relations with the mothers of their children, as well as their child's birth, passively. The emotional high point of the relationship is the birth of the child. The mothers are usually excited about the baby, and normally become emotionally attached right away. The fathers often also fall in love - with the baby.

Poor men and women are usually mistrustful of one another, even if they theoretically are a couple and have a child together. The women don't expect the men to provide for the child, and the men fear that they will be dumped if they don't provide. Edin found that the men would often do things to accelerate the breakup - fooling with other women or getting arrested - so she would no longer expect anything of him.

The most interesting, but sad, thing that Edin found was that these poor fathers never expected to be able to keep the love or respect of the mothers of their children. “They are confident," Edin said, that "they can be good dads because all that good fathering takes is love, not money.”

The Losing Game of Multiple Partner Fertility

One of the major issues at the Furstenberg conference was "multiple partner fertility" - that is, women who have children by different men.

Sarah McLanahan reported that when poor single mothers move from man to man, they are usually trading up, if only marginally. They have a child with the new man to give them a stronger reason to stay together.

However, McLanahan also reported, the more children women have with different men, the less help they get from the extended kin network of any of the fathers of their children.

Family Instability Hurts Boys in School

Sarah McLanahan reported from her continuing study of "fragile families" at the Furstenberg conference. She had some interesting new things to say about the effects of family instability - especially boyfriends passing in and out of the household.

One major effect is that instability increases the mother's mental health problems, especially depression and anxiety.

Another major finding is that instability hurts boys more than girls.

This led me to a thought about why girls out-perform boys in school, when the reverse used to be true: girls may be passing boys because instability hurts boys more, and family instability is increasing.

Working Class Women Are the Most Likely to Live with Multiple Partners

At the Furstenberg conference Andrew Cherlin made a case for studying working class family patterns separately from the middle class and the poor. He doesn't want to use class terms, so instead he treated high school graduates, GED holders, and two-year Associates degree holders as collectively the middle group of his analysis.

Cherlin found that women who live with multiple partners -- whether married or cohabiting -- are more likely to come from this working class/middle education group. College educated women are more likely to marry, and more likely to stay married. Poor women are less likely to live with, and especially unlikely to marry, the men they are connected with, even if they have children with them.

Bad things happen to kids each time someone significant comes or goes from their household. Working class kids are even more likely to suffer these disruptions than poor kids are. This is interesting and not obvious.