Scissors

I am not sure where this came from, but I like it.

Marriage-Go-Round 2: American Marriages vs. Euro Kids

Andrew Cherlin contrasts U.S. and European approaches to marriage. One strong finding is that the U.S. is much more concerned about marriage, while the Europeans have more regulations on reproduction.

The intense debates that we have about the nature of marriage, including homosexual marriage and polygamy, are just not repeated with the same intensity in Europe. Many European nations have adopted same-sex marriage or civil union laws. Indeed, their civil union laws have turned into a whole "marriage lite" category that is mostly used by heterosexuals. Polygamists have begun to use European civil union laws to validate their unions, as well.

On the other hand, European law is more oriented toward children. Many European countries provide money for child expenses, day care, and maternity and paternity leave - a fact often mentioned in U.S. family policy debates. What is less well known is that most European legal codes are much more restrictive than American law about "assisted reproductive technology" - sperm banks, in vitro fertilization, and the whole panoply of high-tech baby making. American states, by constrast, regulate the fertility industry very lightly. There is not likely to be a European "octomom."

I read this difference a little differently than Cherlin does. I think we emphasize marriage because it is the most reliable, most individualized, and most portable institution for raising children. The more parents raise kids, the less society has to. Europeans, on the other hand, rely on the state more for many functions, including quite a bit of child rearing. Thus, the state regulates who can make children more closely, since the state will do more of the raising. But the Europeans care less about who marries whom because they don't rely on married couples to do most of the raising of the next generation - if there is one.

Marriage-Go-Round 1

I am reading Andrew Cherlin's The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. Cherlin is a big name in family sociology, and this is the book he says he has been thinking of writing for a long time. His main concern is why and how American family patterns are different from European patterns.

Cherlin's opening claim is interesting: we are strongly committed to marriage, like the southern Europeans, and we are strongly committed to individualism, like the northern Europeans.

Hence, the marriage-go-round. We keep marrying and remarrying for the family, but also breaking up for ourselves.

Important Family News: Gruntled Child #1 is 21 Today

Megblum was born 21 years ago today. Mrs. G. and I were delighted with her then, and are delighted with her now.

Go conquer worlds, young lady!

Marry in Your Twenties

Everyone in the pro-marriage racket has been promoting Mark Regnerus' fine piece in the Washington Post, "Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For?" I agree entirely. I see my students putting off the thought of marriage right after college because they think they should get all their ducks in a row first. And they have lots of ducks.

The best line from Regnerus:
"Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed."

The Kentucky Derby - High Holy Day of our Civil Religion

Yesterday I began my quest to see the top 50 things that every Kentuckian should see before 50 with everyone's number one choice, the Kentucky Derby. I passed up the wild-youth infield and the horse-serious paddock to be in the land of fancy hats.

I got a real seat, albeit the Seat Farthest Out.

I get a good look at the final turn in an early race.

We were well situated for the start of the Derby.

Still, what I spent hours doing was walking through the crowds and lounging in the congregation points, watching all classes of Derby-goers go by.

Many people enjoyed $9 juleps. I was surrounded by cigar smoke, coming from women and men. And gambling all day long, in every level and corner of Churchill Downs. None of those things were my cup of tea, but I appreciate them as part of the ritual. And the gambling pays most of the bills.

What I liked were the hats. I started to take pictures, but there were literally thousands of great ones. I gave up and just appreciated. Derby hats seem to me to be a rare and innocent pleasure.

Derby Day

My quest to see the 50 things a Kentuckian should see before 50 begins at the top of everyone's list: the Kentucky Derby. I will send a report hereafter.

Mothers and Others Conclusion: Grandmothers as Allomothers

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has done some of her most interesting work promoting the "grandmother hypothesis." There is a puzzle why women have menopause long before life ends. Even in prehistoric societies, there would have been lots of grandmothers. The ingenious hypothesis is that women stop bearing kids early so that they can help raise their grandchildren. Since human babies take so much longer to mature than other animals, alloparenting (nurture by other than mothers and fathers) by grandparents would be a huge help in the survival and lives of children. And of all grandparents, the mother's mother is, other things equal, most likely to invest deeply in helping her daughter with the grandchildren.

The puzzle that Hrdy addresses in Mothers and Others comes from the widely accepted finding by seminal anthropologist George Peter Murdock that most societies were patrilocal. Even if a child's mother's mother was alive and ready to help, if mother and father moved in with his family in another village, her willingness to help would be to no avail. However, Hrdy reports, when Helen Alvarez re-examined Murdock's data, she found that the situation was not so cut-and-dried. Even if a society was normally patrilocal, often the new parents would stay with her mother at first when the first grandchild was born, to learn the ropes. And in other societies, (including our own) it was common for an expectant mother to go back to her mother's house to have the baby, then come back to her husband's house some months later. Citing other studies, Hrdy also reported that in polygamous societies, if a man married sisters, their mother was likely to move near them.

It does take many helpers and many hands besides mother's and father's to raise a child. And the most useful other hands, the best alloparents, are grandmothers.

Mothers and Others Conclusion: Grandmothers as Allomothers

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has done some of her most interesting work promoting the "grandmother hypothesis." There is a puzzle why women have menopause long before life ends. Even in prehistoric societies, there would have been lots of grandmothers. The ingenious hypothesis is that women stop bearing kids early so that they can help raise their grandchildren. Since human babies take so much longer to mature than other animals, alloparenting (nurture by other than mothers and fathers) by grandparents would be a huge help in the survival and lives of children. And of all grandparents, the mother's mother is, other things equal, most likely to invest deeply in helping her daughter with the grandchildren.

The puzzle that Hrdy addresses in Mothers and Others comes from the widely accepted finding by seminal anthropologist George Peter Murdock that most societies were patrilocal. Even if a child's mother's mother was alive and ready to help, if mother and father moved in with his family in another village, her willingness to help would be to no avail. However, Hrdy reports, when Helen Alvarez re-examined Murdock's data, she found that the situation was not so cut-and-dried. Even if a society was normally patrilocal, often the new parents would stay with her mother at first when the first grandchild was born, to learn the ropes. And in other societies, (including our own) it was common for an expectant mother to go back to her mother's house to have the baby, then come back to her husband's house some months later. Citing other studies, Hrdy also reported that in polygamous societies, if a man married sisters, their mother was likely to move near them.

It does take many helpers and many hands besides mother's and father's to raise a child. And the most useful other hands, the best alloparents, are grandmothers.

Mothers and Others 4: Nuclear Families and Alloparenting

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes a strong case that humans needed to develop alloparenting – parenting by others besides mother and father. Therefore, she says, mothers can’t depend on any one family structure, but need to be flexible to get help wherever they need to. I agree with this conclusion. However, Hrdy goes on to say that the nuclear family is not an optimal structure because it can’t provide enough care and resources that demanding and slow-growing human babies need.

I think Hrdy’s criticism misses how nuclear families work. A married mother and father are the core of the unit that cares for children, but they are rarely all of it. Even in our highly mobile society, where couples in the middle class often live far from their extended families, nuclear families get lots of help from grandparents, aunts and uncles, and more distant kin.

A nuclear family is not a self-sufficient unit. Not in theory, and certainly not in practice. Instead, when a mother and father marry they bring together two lines of support for the benefit of their children. This is one of the great advantages that children in two-parent families have over single-parent kids: they have two sets of grandparents and two sets of aunts and uncles.

Mothers do need to be flexible. They do need to be ready to take help from many sources, especially if they are not married. But the nuclear family still remains the best structure for parenting, and for mobilizing the most reliable network of alloparenting. Mothers need to work hard to create some alternative network if they are unable to make a nuclear family.

Mothers and Others 3: Alloparenting Means Faster Babies

Humans beings are very slow to mature. We are the slowest of all primates, and probably the slowest of all animals. In other slow-maturing species, that means a long gap between babies. But not us. We can have new babies long before the earlier ones are mature because mothers get so much help from others.

In other apes, mothers rarely let go of their babies, not even to let their sisters or mothers hold or help, and certainly not the fathers of the babies. Human beings stand out for how much "alloparenting" - care by others - we do and accept. In foraging bands, fathers normally share in child care very extensively. This makes human mothers, especially in societies in which alloparenting is normal, confident that they can trust their babies to have extensive contact with other people.

Sarah Hrdy's main concern is to explain how intersubjectivity developed among humans. Alloparenting, she things, is the key difference. Mothers in many mammals, especially other primates, have reason to learn how to read the faces, noises, movements, and even minds of their babies, and babies need to develop similar skills in reading their mothers. But in humans, who are often in the care of "other mothers," it would be hugely valuable for babies to learn how to read other people, too, people with whom they did not share the whole range of smells and sounds that mothers and their babies do.

Hrdy reports that kids attached to their moms are better fed, but kids also attached to others were more empathetic, dominant, independent, and achievement oriented. This is an immediate fruit of a society, and species, trusting enough for alloparenting.

Mothers and Others 2: Gendered Mind Reading

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others, needs to figure out how humans developed intersubjectivity or a "theory of mind" - that is, the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling. She says that there are two main theories. One, that mothers needed to develop a capacity to read the minds of their pre-verbal babies. Two, that people needed to develop a "Machiavellian mind" to understand and anticipte the plans of their rivals. To these she adds a third strong motivation: babies need to understand what their caregivers are thinking and feeling. As Hrdy puts it, a baby's first job is to get mom addicted to nurturing, and that requires that babies need to know how to read mom.

I was surprised that Hrdy did not emphasize how gendered these theories are. When she names the chief proponents of the mother's mind-reading theory and the Machiavellian mind theory it is easy to see that the former are women and the latter are men. Hrdy notes regularly that as a mother she is very attentive to how babies interact with mothers.

I think these gender differences in theories of mind reading strengthen the case that they are true. If men, women, and children all have strong and distinct reasons to do something, that makes me more convinced that it is really true. Moreover, the different kinds of mind reading complement one another. My focus is on mate selection and marriage. Women select men who can provide resources; men who can anticipate rivals and cooperate with allies should be better at getting resources. Men select women who will be good nurturers; women who can understand what their families need even when the need has not been said in words would be better at nurturing.

I would add one more reason that humans need intersubjectivity. Women need to read whether men are really committed before they take the great risk of having children with them. And men, to a lesser extent, need to be confident that the women they marry will stay faithful to them. Women rely on mind reading more than men do, and often expect men to do the same. This leads to many miscommunications in courtship and marriage.

Nonetheless, human beings - women, men, children - have a strong need to be able to understand what other people are thinking and feeling, even without words. Whether, as Hrdy thinks, this capacity evolved or if we acquired it some other way, it is still a skill useful enough to keep. Which is reason enough for human beings to do it more, and more effectively, than any other creatures.

Mothers and Others 1

This week I will be blogging on Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Her concern is figuring out how human beings evolved the capacity to share childrearing - what she calls alloparenting - with others who are not mother or father to the baby. The "it takes a village to raise a child" strategy is very helpful for humans, and very different from what is normal to the Great Apes.

Hrdy argues that empathy and giving are hard-wired in us. We can see from brain scans that people find helping others inherently rewarding. One of the most striking findings that she reports is that people are more cooperative than economists assume: in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game, 42% cooperate anyway. In multiple iterations of the game, when we can see who is generous and who is not, the cooperative people tend to get even more trusting and cooperative.

A crucial point that I take from these experiments is that we want to be cooperative. We are very sensitive to who else is cooperative, and whether the social environment makes cooperation normal. If the people we most depend on are reliable, and most people we deal with are, too, then we tend to be cooperative and trusting in new situations because that is the kind of person we want to be - even though we might get suckered.

On the other hand, children who are betrayed by adults have a much harder time trusting and cooperating.

Presbyterian Gay Ordination Fails Again

The vote was closer this time, but outcome was the same as it has been the last three times. Will that settle the issue? Of course not. Look for a wave of overtures to the next General Assembly to try exactly the same thing again.

If we adopted the new Form of Government, we would not have to tear up the whole church every two years over this issue.

Monkey Fighting

How do you edit a famous vulgarity to make is safe for work (or TV)?

Probably not this way.

Race Differences in Men's Nurturing Hormones?

Another interesting possibility that comes from juxtaposed reading.

Edin and Kefalas, in Promises I Can Keep, report that black welfare moms are less likely to be beaten by their boyfriends than their white and Hispanic counterparts because the black women are less likely to live with the fathers of their children.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others, reports that men become better fathers by sharing the hormones of pregnant women and newborns. The sustained physical contact makes men's prolactin levels rise (a nurturing hormone) and their testosterone levels to fall.

Perhaps one of the reasons that poor black men are so much less likely to be daily providers for their children is that they don't live with mothers and babies enough to get the nurturing hormonal changes that help make other men into providing fathers.

Leaving the White House - for the Kids

Ellen Moran, the White House Communications Director, is leaving to become chief of staff to the Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. The Commerce job is no easy sinecure, but is not the life-eating total institution that the White House is.

Why is she leaving this dream job?

"She met with Locke twice in recent weeks, and said she decided that the role was a better fit for her professionally and personally in the long run. She and her husband have a daughter and a son both under age 4."

I think it speaks well of her priorities that she can make this decision. Not everyone would make the same call, nor should they. But if everyone, even those at the very top, can keep their family's needs in an appropriately high place on their priority list, the world would be a better place.

Ellen Moran is still having it all. Just a little bit less of it right now.

Working Class Family Patterns vs. Middle Class and Poor

This is a thought inspired by putting together Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods with Edin and Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep. Lareau found that the middle class tend to raise their kids one way, while the working class and poor raise theirs another way. She thought there might be a child rearing difference between the working class and the poor, but it didn't turn out that way.

Edin and Kefalas found that poor women see children as a stage on the way to marriage, which the authors implicitly contrast with the middle class norm of marriage as a step toward children. They did not study working class families in this ethnography.

So if the working class does not differ from the poor in how they raise their children, how do they differ from the poor in family life? My guess: the working class are more likely to marry before the kids are born, even if not before they are conceived. The working class is like the poor in child rearing, but like the middle class in marriage.

Long-Term Divorce Effects: A Testimony

The blog Confessions of a Community College Dean has an affecting personal appreciation and eulogy for the blogger's divorced father. This is not science, but powerful testimony. Some excerpts:

I remember vividly the day they told us they were divorcing. I can describe where everybody sat. It was the summer before I turned 11.

The years after that were harder. I was the latchkey older kid, so I had to watch my brother until Mom got home. ... We did the 'joint custody' thing, which is tough in the teen years when you'd really rather be with your friends. To this day, I get a little weird sometimes around packing.

Now he's gone, and I'm a father. ... Much of what I try to do as a father is defined, in part, by awareness of what he did. Having seen the 'divorced dad' thing up close, I want no part of it. And while God knows I've got my flaws and my blind spots, defeatism is not one of them. I will not teach my kids to settle. To deal, yes. To settle, no. There's a difference.

College Drinking and Poor Teen Sex: An Analogy

We are talking about teen welfare mothers in the family class, using Edin and Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep. The authors quickly dispose of the first two myths about teen pregnancy - that poor teens would not get pregnant so often if they had more sex education or if they had more access to birth control technology. That is not the problem. The teen moms in this study know perfectly well that sex can lead to babies, and they have birth control technology, which they use when they don't want to get pregnant.

The real difference between the teen welfare moms and my middle class students, or the middle class do-gooders (like me) who want to prevent poor teen pregnancy is that the poor teens don't really care if they get pregnant or not, while the middle class people who plan their lives, do. The Promises I Can Keep moms said that half of their children were "neither planned nor unplanned." Having a baby was not something they were trying to do, but it would not derail any life plan they had.

To students on the elite college track, this attitude is dumbfounding. I was trying to think of an analogy that might make this calculation seems more intelligible. This is what came to me.

On any given weekend, a sizable minority of college students will not drink at all, a small minority will get drunk on purpose, and another group will drink and may end up drunk. This last group might be as many as half. On this campus, nearly all of these students will have received extensive education on the effects of alcohol. Some take this information and choose to be abstinent. Some take this information and choose to be moderate drinkers. A few ignore it utterly and aim to get drunk. All students, likewise, have several kinds of "drunkness prevention technology" available to them. Some use it religiously, some ignore it.

I am most interested here in the middle group. They know drinking can lead to drunkenness. They know several ways that drunkenness can be avoided, some of them foolproof. They go to a weekend party and they don't really care if they get drunk or not. Their drunkness was "neither planned nor unplanned." They did not make a plan one way or the other because getting drunk or not would not derail any life plan they had.

For poor teen moms, having a baby is not in itself a bad thing; that is not the way they measure their character. Being a bad mom would be a bad thing, but they don't plan to be bad moms. For college drinkers, getting drunk is not in itself a bad thing; that is not the way they measure their character. Being an alcoholic would be a bad thing, but they don't plan to be alcoholics.