Paternity Leave Helps Kids

The British are ahead of us in taking paternity leave for newborns, so we look to them for studies of what difference paternity leave might make. Their Equal Opportunities Commission has just released reports based on a long-term study of the “millennial cohort,” those babies born in 2000 and 2001. This week’s study examined how the kids were doing at three years old. Most children did not have developmental problems. However, the kids were more likely to have developmental problems if their fathers were not involved in their care from the earliest ages. Specifically, child development problems were associated with:

Failing to use the employer’s flexible working options compared with using them;

Allowing the mother to do all the home based childcare instead of sharing;

Taking only annual or sick leave around the time of the birth compared with a mixture of paternity and annual leave; or

Taking no leave around the time of the birth.

The report is not specific on what the developmental problems are or how much father’s early involvement can reduce the risk.

Now is the first time since the beginning of the industrial era when we have enough men and women taking leave from work to care for newborns to really see the comparative effects – comparing both leave-takers and not, and comparing men and women. Britain now has mandatory paternity leave pay, though it was not in place at the time that these children were born. One of the major findings of the study was that professional and managerial class men were twice as likely to take paternity leave as blue-collar men. The paternity leave pay plan was created, in part, to close this gap.

In a sense, this is just one more thing for parents to worry about, one more weapon in the culture of fear. It is important to remember, therefore, that most kids do not have developmental problems. Still, I think it is encouraging to know that if fathers can be more involved in caring for their kids from Day One, the kids will truly benefit.

Is “Waiting on the World to Change” Centrist?

John Mayer is a very intelligent songwriter. I was disappointed when I first heard “Waiting on the World to Change.” The title seems to counsel fatalism, or at least passivity. The song argues

“It's not that we don't care,
We just know that the fight ain't fair
So we keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change”

I was very interested, therefore, in this morning’s interview with Mayer on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” Mayer contended that telling young people, his generation, what to do is ineffective. “Kids don't even like being talked to like kids anymore.” Therefore his task is to present an idea.

I can go with him halfway, but only halfway. The hectoring tone favored by baby boomer protest songs does seem annoying, if not presumptuous. Still, I think Mayer’s argument, and his song, would be stronger if he presented his idea of what ought to be done about the problem he names. Even couched in layers of “this is just my opinion, I am not telling you what to do,” it seems lame to me to declare that something “ain’t fair” but just leave it at that.

Still, Mayer is good. As he sees it, his job is to “get the ball to the ten yard line.” So I will say that I think, in my opinion (of course), that listeners who agree with him should pick up the ball.

500th post

Yesterday's post was #500 of The Gruntled Center. According to the Statcounter, the blog has had over 100,000 readings in that time.

Thank you all.

Marriage is Not Only for the Rich

Every year the Census Bureau reports that married couples with children at home make up a minority of households. Every year most of the press draws the wrong conclusion. They write articles with headlines like "Marriage disappears as married parent households fall below 25%." This is not the right inference at all. Married couples with children at home make up a minority of households because we are a rich country. Many single people can afford to maintain a separate household. My widowed mother maintains her own household, many of my colleagues have an empty-nest household, and each year Centre College sends out hundreds of students who will maintain households by themselves or with roommates. Yet all of them were, are, or are likely to be in married-couple-with-children households at some point. That is still the case for most people.

What is new in this year's version of the story is the claim that marriage is becoming something only rich and educated people can afford or even want. This is a false idea, and a dangerous one. Yes, there are more people having children without marriage, and there are more couples living together before they marry. But most people still aspire to marry and raise their own children together, in all classes. And most of them will.

Marriage is still normative – it is what most people want and think is good. Marriage is still normal – it is what most people will do, and most of them will have children.

Married-couple-with-children is still the normal household pattern, the pattern that most Americans will enjoy at the appropriate point in their lifecycle.

Obama as Joshua

Barak Obama just gave a great speech at the voting rights march commemoration in Selma, AL. It is 40 years since Dr. King gave his Moses speech, where he saw the promised land, but would not reach it. Obama, under the explicit direction of his pastor's father, himself a weighty church leader, said it was his duty as a member of the "Joshua generation" to go forward into the promised land. The greatest generation, Obama said – many of whom were in the room – had done 90% of the work of the civil rights revolution. It was up to his generation to do the last tenth.

Sen. Obama gave an excellent answer to the question "are you really black like us?" His grandfather was houseboy to the British colonial masters in Africa, but the American civil rights movement led him to dream dreams. His son, Barak Obama, Sr., came to America to study as a result. He married a Midwestern descendant of slave owners because of the civil rights dream. The fruit of that union is Barak Obama, Jr., U. S. Senator and presidential candidate.

Obama talked about jobs and health care, as any Democrat would. He also talked specifically about the scourge of absent fathers, the bane of the black community, which he knows well from his personal experience.

Forty years after Moses, the Joshua generation of African-Americans is poised to take their full place in the promised land. Barak Obama is the leading contender for the role of Joshua.

Herpes Dating

One in four women is infected with genital herpes, and nearly one in five men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is a staggering rate. Herpes is far from the worst sexually transmitted disease in its effects, but it is annoying. Worse, it is morally very embarrassing, a constant reminder that you did something foolish.

Most people who have genital herpes don't want to give it to anyone else, which is to their credit. But they still want to "date" and most still want to marry. With infection rates this high, a rational solution has emerged in large cities around the country: herpes-only dating sites. These herpes clubs are often as much support networks as they are matchmakers.

I feel for people with herpes. As a Calvinist, I know we all do foolish things all the time, myself included. None of us is in a position to look down on others. Moreover, I think that restricting your mate selection to people you cannot infect is a decent thing to do for society. Herpes dating and support groups are an ethical thing to do for the world, considering…

Still, it is hard enough to find the right mate without eliminating 75% or 80% of the potential pool. The fact that our country needs herpes dating sites is further proof that keeping sex only in marriage is the most realistic morality for individuals, and especially for society.

Cherokee Racism

The Cherokee Nation voted to eject descendents of slaves owned by Cherokees from membership in their nation. By a 3/4ths vote, only "blood" members of the tribe can be part of the nation.

Counting membership in Indian "nations" is one of the last remaining acts of blood racism recognized by U.S. law. They are the last remnant of the 19th century pseudo-science of race which worked so much havoc in every other area of American life. There are many irrationalities in the treatment of native American tribes in our law. I think it is time to put this one to rest.

The Craziest Website of Them All

This is a rich, rich category with many worthy nominees. There are Holocaust deniers, space alien abductees, Raelians, and Michael Jackson. No one has read all the crazy websites, and I could be convinced that there are even nuttier ones out there that I have not met yet. But my nominee can certainly hold its own on a level playing field. Especially since they only believe in level playing fields, since they think the earth is flat. That gem, though, is only the beginning of the elaborate theory propounded -- at great length, and in all sincerity -- by

The non-moving Earth

& anti-evolution web page of

The Fair Education Foundation, Inc.

I cannot reproduce the whole effect, since the webpage changes fonts, font sizes, and colors within almost every line.

The summary of their position is this:

"The Earth is not rotating...nor is it going around the sun.
The universe is not one ten trillionth the size we are told.
Today’s cosmology fulfills an anti-Bible religious plan disguised as "science".
The whole scheme from Copernicanism to Big Bangism is a factless lie.
Those lies have planted the Truth-killing virus of evolutionism
in every aspect of man’s "knowledge" about the Universe, the Earth, and Himself."

Let 'Em Sleep on the Floor

The New York Times has a story about couples being driven from their beds by their young children. Apparently there is a thriving business in the upper middle class for "sleep consultants" who come up with conditioning regimes to get the little darlings to stay in their own princess and airplane fantasy beds. None of which the tired couples in the article found very helpful. Mostly, the parents report giving up fighting their kids for the big bed – the parents get used to going off to the children's beds in the middle of the night and sleeping there. One of the predictable effects of this strategy is that the couples do not have sex very often.

Faced with the same problem, Mrs. G. and I hit upon a different solution when our offspring were little, which is cheaper and lazier than the sleep consultant approach. For most of the pre-school years, we did not have an "up bed," but instead slept on a mattress on the floor. When the kids came in for comfort in the middle of the night, they would be content to sleep on the floor next to us, with only a few inches of elevation separating us. The inches were few, but precious: they meant the difference between a good night's sleep for mom and dad, and wearing nightly interruptions.

When the youngest was a reliable sleeper, everyone got up beds.

I don't know if this will work for you; I give it to you as free advice, and would welcome comparative stories.

The Rich are Different – They are Sluttier

A new study by Hannah Shaw Grove and Russ Alan Prince cited in MarketWatch reports that rich people have more sex, of more kinds, with more people, in more expensive places, than other people. Rich people think having money means having better sex than other people. Moreover, rich women are especially likely to think this: 84% of the women in the survey agreed, versus 63% of the men.

This sex does not seem to be constrained by marriage, either. While they are as married as the average American (85% of the total rich group are now married), they have affairs at much higher rates: 53% of the rich men, and a whopping 73% of the rich women admit to (brag about?) extramarital affairs. This is compared to about a quarter of average men, and half that rate for average women.

I think the most disturbing finding in this report is that 93% of the rich women think that higher-quality sex is the biggest benefit overall to being rich.

Wealth does not corrupt necessarily or absolutely, but it doesn't seem to be a big aid to one's morals.

Breastfeeding Helps You Rise in Social Class

This is an amazing result. I am almost reluctant to report it, though, because no one has a very good idea why it is true.

British researchers have been following a large group of babies born in the late 1930s into their 70s. There was not a big difference in class among breastfeeders in those days (as there is now, when breastfeeding is skewed toward the middle class). Yet breastfed babies were 41% more likely than other kids to move up a class, net of their initial class and family income. Breastfed kids were even 16% more likely to move up a class than their own bottlefed siblings.

One thing not reported in the press account: whether birth order and family size mattered. My best guess is that first-borns were more likely to be breastfed. This might explain the intra-sibling difference. First-borns would then be more likely to move up in class for a variety of reasons, not least because their parents wanted them to. It may also be that all the kids were more likely to be breastfed in smaller families. We know that later-born children in large families are more likely to have lower IQs and lower rates of upward mobility. If smaller families were more likely to breastfeed all the kids, and less likely to have low-achieving later-borns, this might account for the main finding.

Just a guess, though. Maybe La Leche League might want to invest in some research grants.

Old Guys Have Fertility Problems, Too

Old women can't have kids. Older mothers risk more birth defects in kids. These facts are well known. Now research is accumulating that older men are less likely to have kids at all, and older fathers are more likely to have kids with birth defects. The numbers are not as dramatic as for women, and the risks are not as great. Eggs, after all, are not made new, but keep aging from the mother's birth. New sperm are created all the time. But the organs for making sperm keep aging, and they wear down and make mistakes more often in later years.

To put some numbers to these risks, the children of younger fathers run a 3% risk of birth defects. With fathers over 45, the risk rises to about 4%. This is still not a large risk, but a huge percentage increase. Likewise, autism is rare, but there seems to be more of it than there used to be. One reason might be that older fathers are more than 5 times as likely to produce autistic children compared to younger (under 30) fathers. One of the most specific results reported comes from a large-scale Israeli study of schizophrenia, which found a risk of 1 in 141 in children of fathers under 25, 1 in 99 for fathers 30 to 35, and 1 in 47 for fathers 50 and older.

The research on the fertility of older fathers is just beginning, compared to studies of older mothers. There is not even the same level of speculative theory about why male fertility declines in number and quality. Still, I think it is already clear that both men and women – and their children – are better off if a couple can have their kids in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties.

DePauw Sorority Shows It Has Class When Its National Office Does Not

The Delta Zeta sorority at DePauw University was having some recruiting problems – the normal ups and downs of Greek life. With falling numbers, the national office was a little concerned. With the 100th anniversary of the chapter's founding coming up, the nationals wanted to more than fix the problem – they wanted to reinvigorate the chapter. So some officers from the national office came to interview every member of the DePauw chapter. They suggested that the women dress up. They wanted to see who was really committed to recruitment.

When the national officers left, the sent form letters to 23 of the 35 women living in the sorority house notifying them that they had been moved to alumna status, and should vacate the house. The women who were evicted included all the fat and non-white women. The ones they kept were white and pretty. The chapter president was one of those tossed out. According to the women who were sent off, some of the ones kept by the nationals were not very active in the life of the chapter to begin with.

To their credit, six of the 12 women who were asked to stay also resigned in solidarity with their ejected sisters. Alumni, parents, other students, and many faculty members protested. The Delta Zeta national officers who conducted the purge would not comment, while the official responses from the sorority have been mealy-mouthed.

I agree that it is time for a big shake-up at Delta Zeta – not at the DePauw chapter, but at national headquarters.

Are Episcopalians Anglicans?

The leaders of the worldwide Anglican communion just released a document chastising the Episcopal Church of the USA for ordaining a practicing gay bishop. Even the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who supports gay ordination, signed the document, calling for a season of restraint before either side issued further provocations. She is getting grief from some American Episcopal leaders for not fighting this censure. In an even more extraordinary concession, Bishop Jefferts Schori agreed to the creation of a non-geographic diocese for traditionalist Episcopal churches, to be overseen by a commission of foreign bishops.

To rewind a couple of steps, when the Church of England was considering naming a celibate gay man as bishop, the Archbishop of Canterbury eventually asked him to withdraw his name, rather than create controversy in the Anglican communion. When non-celibate gay priest V. Gene Robinson was being considered as Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, the Archbishop of Canterbury asked him to withdraw his name, as well, for the good of the worldwide Anglican communion. The American, however, refused, on the grounds that it was inevitable that his side would win the struggle, so the conflict might as well come now.

The Archbishop of Nairobi, Peter Akinola, presides over a church that is about ten times larger than the Episcopal Church, and has more active members on any given Sunday than the mother church in England does. He has emerged as the de facto leader of the third world Anglican church – where most of the world's Anglicans are. The worldwide Anglican communion has disapproved of the American church for decades, but has put up with them because Anglicans are polite, and because the Americans provide quite a bit of money.

The limits of Anglican patience seem to have been reached, however, The showdown is upon us. The Episcopal Church must decide whether to follow the rules of the Anglican Communion, or get booted out.

Unitarians Build a Church for Dragons

In the virtual world Second Life, Unitarian-Universalists have built a real church. Some of the regular congregants are human, and some are not. Bizarre Berry, the creator of First U-U Church of Second Life, wanted to create a real congregation, not just a show building. Catherine Cleanslate, a U-U minister in the real world, sees participation in the Second Life church part of her ministry of "radical welcome."

Other religious groups are colonizing Second Life, but FUUCSL seems to be the only regular congregation so far. Second Life seems made for U-Us, as both have a strong "do your own thing" ideology.

I was trying to imagine what First Presbyterian Church of SL would be like. I don't think it would fly. The world of permanent self-invention – the world of Catherine Cleanslate and those like her – is not really suited for the understanding of the world as fallen and in need of redemption.

And, of course, theological disagreement and moral uplift would not really be in the Second Life spirit. One of big draws of SL, I gather, are the sex clubs. I expect that a crusade to clean up the virtual red light district would seem to strike at the very soul of Second Life.

Second Life jihad, anyone?

A Market Solution to the Asian Bride Shortage

In many Asian countries there is a growing shortage of women. Years of favoring boys and disposing of girls are catching up with them. In South Korea, a market has sprung up in the past few years to find foreign brides for South Korean bachelors (my thanks to regular reader D-rew for this New York Times story). At first the marriage brokers went to ethnic Korean communities in China. Now, though, the brokers are arranging quick marriages further afield. This year's favored source for brides is Vietnam. South Korea is more prosperous than Vietnam, at least temporarily, and the "Korean Wave" of pop culture has made South Korea seem a good place to live.

Until recently this marriage market was unregulated. After a series of scandals involving lies and abuse by brokers and husbands, the Korea government has begun to set some rules, and the etiquette of the market has weeded out some of the bad actors. This market evolves very quickly – Vietnam is getting richer, and may dry up as a source of brides a few years hence. What first struck me about this development is that it is a market solution to a market problem. It was the cumulative effect of many individual actions that created the women shortage in the first place, creating a market that entrepreneurial brokers can fill. To be sure, some rural governments in Korea are sponsoring marriage tours to Vietnam, but they did not make the arrangements in the first place.

I can also see a few unintended positive consequences that might come from this international marriage market. Many Asian nations have exaggerated ideas of their own "racial purity," which they make central to their national identity. South Korea is no exception to this self image. Yet in 2005, 14% of South Korean marriages involved foreigners, up from 4% just five years earlier. Over time, mixing populations that way would undermine the idea that racial purity is essential to national identity – or even that it is ever was very prevalent. A second possible silver lining of Vietnamese women living and prospering in South Korea is that their frequent communications home might spur the Vietnamese people to press for democracy to go along with their increasing capitalist prosperity.

The Asian women shortage is due to the worst kind of sexist discrimination, devaluing of girls, and even deliberate killing. I find it encouraging to think, therefore, that there might be an unexpected silver lining or two to this dark cloud.

The North Carolina YouTube Breakup

The phenomenon of the moment on YouTube is the breakup of Ryan Burke and Mindy Moorman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Burke found out Moorman was cheating, and set up a public humiliation for her. The innovation is that he advertised it ahead of time on Facebook, and hundreds of people showed up. She came to the Pit, a public square at the university, for a "surprise." An a capella group serenaded her with a somewhat odd choice of song (the Dixie Chick's "I'm Not Ready to Make Nice"). Then he dumped her. She, taken aback, responds with a torrent of condescension. The crowd eggs them on for nearly ten minutes. He walks away first.

There has been some suspicion that the whole thing was staged by both of them. It doesn't look that way to me. I think he is surprised at how much publicity there has been.

I was struck by how they attacked one another. In that sense (and only in that sense) it does not much matter whether her response was spontaneous or scripted. The particular insults they, and the audience, chose were revealing. It is very hard to hear what they are saying, but he appears to call her a slut. At one point the crowd chants "Slut! Slut! Slut!" She responds by asking him if he is gay, asserting that "I am a woman and I have needs," and suggesting that he has a small penis. The crowd then chants "Small penis! Small penis!"

His position is that if she had sexual relations with another man, she deserved whatever humiliation he could think of. He appears to have no self-knowledge or critical reflection. Her response is also entirely in sexual terms. Neither of them makes reference to any deeper aspect of their relationship – no emotional connection, no intellectual engagement, not even the material gifts they gave one another. And no love.

Ryan Burke is clearly an ass. She is no prize, either. What is most striking to me about the whole spectacle, though, is that their entire relationship seems to be sexual, and they have no qualms about parading that in public.

May the Wilberforce Be With You

The film "Amazing Grace" opens in two days. I was favored to see a preview last week. I commend the film highly. The ads suggest that the movie is about the song, but it isn't. The film is about the long struggle of William Wilberforce to end the slave trade in Britain. Friday, the day the film opens, is the 200th anniversary of the crucial vote in Parliament.

Let me say a bit about the movie first. Ioan Gruffudd does a pretty good job as Wilberforce. There is also a courtship story in the middle with a gorgeous Romala Garai as the eventual Mrs. Wilberforce. I thought the best performance came from Benedict Cumerbatch as Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, friend and close ally of Wilberforce's. Bristol Bay Productions made the film, following "Ray" and "The Chronicles of Narnia." Bristol Bay is not a Christian company, but, as we were told at the preview, it is full of Christians, and they have a mission to make decent films about moral triumph. "Amazing Grace" was one of the stories that Bristol Bay was created to make.

William Wilberforce is a hero of evangelical politics. I think he is all but unknown in this country due to his "right" religion and his "left" politics. He falls between the stools of American ideological polarization, which is a double pity – he should be a hero to both sides, and the sides shouldn't be divided into these camps, anyway. I think Wilberforce exemplifies the kind of "God's Politics" that Jim Wallis has in mind in the book of that title.

I had long wondered why it took more than twenty years for Wilberforce and the other abolitionists to succeed. What derailed the movement toward abolition for years was the French Revolution, and the subsequent war with France. Though there was no logical connection between the two, the slave powers succeeded in painting abolition as sedition, because abolitionists were critical of existing government policy in wartime.

"Amazing Grace" is not a great movie, but it is quite good. It is, though, the best movie about a great story, and a great model for religious politics today. I will be going with a colleague to opening night, taking vanloads of family and students. I urge you all to see it, too.

Natural Selection Speed Dating

This one writes itself. CNN.com had a story about a special speed dating event in New York. The rules were not clearly specified on camera, but it appears that the women had to be young and beautiful, based on a judging panel's estimate of their photographs. The men had to have a net worth of a million dollars and (or?) income of at least $200,000 per year, with a higher minimum for older men.

Yes, it really was called Natural Selection Speed Dating. Paula Zahn's summary: "Deep cleavage meets deep pockets."

The organizer said they are planning a follow-up speed dating event, Sugar Mamas and Boy Toys.

The Curriculum is the Untapped "Identity" Resource

I missed you all yesterday, as I was on a retreat with college students and colleagues. The topic was that current college favorite, "identity." We talked about our personal identities, our group identities, the identity of the stereotypical Centre student, and how these all connected. Students talked quite a bit about how their various identities shaped who ate together, who played together, who joined which social groups together.

Near the end of the retreat I as struck by the fact that almost nothing had been said about the curriculum. Yet as I reflected on my own college experience, what I learned in class actually had as deep an effect on me as any social experience I had in college. In fact, the best social experiences were based on talking about ideas that we had studied in class. In the last class I taught before the retreat, two newlywed alumni came back to talk about marriage. Again and again they came back to how things they had learned in their classes applied to their new life and work.

One of my projects over the past few years has been to write a history of the college. I was impressed with how long Centre has had a distinctive identity, and shaped students in a distinctive way. Many factors go into that identity, but the curriculum always holds its own as a shaping force.

When we think about how our teaching shapes lives, the faculty are comfortable with the idea that we are making "critical thinkers." When we start talking about our teaching making good citizens, we get more nervous. To think that the curriculum should help make students into more virtuous people is to invite resistance. Yet the alumni attest it all the time.

The curriculum does shape student identity, whether we intend it or not. I think we should intend it, and choose our curriculum accordingly.