I want to go to there

From "State of Play: How Tot Lots Became Places to Build Children's Brains" by Rebecca Mead, in the July 5th issue of The New Yorker:

Blocks are an essential element at the new Imagination Playground, which is [architect David] Rockwell's contribution to playground design. Five years in the making, it is schedule to open later this summer, at Burling Slip, at the South Street Seaport.... Rockwell's playground has no monkey bars, or swings, or jungle gyms. It has almost no fixed equipment at all, except for a dual-level, three-thousand-square-foot sandpit; a pool with running water; four masts, ranging from eleven to fourteen feet high, equipped with ropes and pulleys; and a sixteen-foot tower in the form of a crow's nest....

The imagination Playground will, however, have hundred of what play theorists call "loose parts": big lightweight blocks made from bright-blue molded foam.... In an influential essay entitled "How Not to Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts," [architect Simon] Nicholson wrote, "In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it."

Hmm. Could it be that I need more loose parts in my life?!

There is no "me" in "mommy"

This article on helicopter parenting, which was reprinted in our local paper from The Washington Post, has me pondering, yet again, this question:

How is it possible for there be a "me" in "mommy"?

The article, written by sociologist Margaret Nelson, reports on Nelson's research on the effects of hyper-involved parenting on the parents themselves. Nelson points out that a lot of the popular attention (like the Time magazine cover, above) has been focused on the effects on children: "Critics fret that the children of helicopter parents will lack maturity, self-reliance, self-esteem and good old-fashioned gumption."

As a college professor, I confess that I see this in too many students. Certainly not all - and those are the ones whose parents I want to meet at commencement - but still too many. As a parent, however, I feel that critics too often display little understanding about the pressures of parenting today. Esp. for women.

Nelson emphasizes that helicopter parenting is classed: "Compared with professional, middle-class parents, parents of lower educational and professional status are more likely to impose nonnegotiable limits on their children's behavior." In other words, strict rules and bans, including the use of blockers on their TV's and their computers, versus supervising and monitoring, which some parents might describe as exploring and discussing together.

A temptation might be to label middle-class parenting as misguided. However, I will counter that middle-class parents and children might likely see advantages and gains - for example, in school. Linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, in her 1982 article, "What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School," considered the classed differences in parent-child interactions around books and reading. Although in 1982, "helicopter parenting," at least as a term, had not been invented, Heath notes that middle-class parenting was oriented differently, with long-term consequences: "As school-oriented parents and their children interact in the preschool years, adults give their children, through modeling and specific instruction, ways of taking from books that seem natural in school and in numerous institutional settings such as banks, post offices, businesses, and government offices" (Brice 318). Working-class parents placed as much importance on books and reading and school as middle-class parents. However, middle-class parent-child interactions around books were not focused only on reading them, but also on talking about them. In fact, this might be the critical difference:

In doing the latter, they repeatedly practice routines that parallel those of classroom interaction. By the time they enter school, they have had continuous experience as information givers; they have learned how to perform in those interactions that surround literate sources throughout school....

They have learned how to listen, waiting for the appropriate cute that signals it is their turn to show off this knowledge (Brice 324).

The connection that I want to make here is that middle-class parenting appears, in fact, to "work": Brice found that middle-class children, overall, did better in school, which is seems a taken-for-granted truism today. On the children of working-class families, Brice found: "Their initial successes in reading, being good students, following orders, and adhering to school norms of participating in lessons begin to fall away rapidly about the time they enter the fourth grade" (Brice 331). Not being a specialist in education, I cannot say for certain, but if you believe what you read in the newspapers today, then this might be as true as ever in 2010.

So, we can decry helicopter parenting, but it seems hard to fix what apparently is not at all broken.

Is it not broken? Really?

The kind of involvement that exploring and discussing together is intense. Nelson observes: "Helicopter parenting is, to put it mildly, more time-consuming and more emotionally demanding than other parenting styles." She adds: "Mothers who try to live up to the new parenting standards of the professional middle class seem to have few options: They can overwork themselves, or they can leave the workforce."

Sister, you are singing my song.

Not only that, but having been brought up with a certain degree of benign neglect, I want to be less hovering as a parent, but I find it challenging to put into practice - and it is not just my own "psychology," a concept about which I will save my harange for another day... To start examining the structural reasons why, like the kinds of literal policing that surrounds parenting today, you might visit my friend Lenore Skenazy's blog, free range kids.

For me and for too many other parents, Nelson notes, the overwork means not less time with / for the children or at work - in fact, time studies show that working parents today spend more time both with their children and at work than in the past. Instead, it means less time with spouses and partners (not so good for marriages), other family members and relatives, and friends:

The time married parents spend visiting with friends and relatives outside the nuclear family has declined dramatically: Married fathers spent almost 40 percent less time and married mother spent almost a third less time socializing in 2000 than they did in 1965.... Parents seem to have few opportunities to pursue friendships unless they are friendships that take little extra time (as with co-workers or other parents on the sideline of a child's sporting event).

I found myself nodding as I read this last bit. For me, being able to maintain friendships with little extra time is part of the appeal of Facebook, and why I finally gave up my resistance to joining. Now, I can read the "walls" of friends from college and graduate school and past work lives, and they can read mine, and we occasionally can offer a "like" or a "comment" on each other.

Even in a relatively small community, like where I live now, too many conversations start with apologies for not being in better touch. However, as I walk Beanie to school or pick up Bubbie from day care or escort them to their various and sundry activities or just browse around, along with StraightMan, at the local farmers market, there is also the smile, the nod, the wave, and the brief exchange that I can share with the broad category of people whom I kind of know: Some friends and some friends-like. (Which the likes and comments on Facebook simulate...) All of us seem to be digging in, at least for the foreseeable future. Paradoxically, I might not have extra time for the active pursuit of friendships, but it seems that over time, people can become friends, too. Or at least I am beginning to appreciate and imagine the possibility.

Hello, Ephs

From That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo:

She thought Laura should go to Yale, of course, and turned up her nose at the small liberal arts colleges where she and Griffin's father had once hoped to secure jobs. "Safety schools" was how she now regarded them. "Dear God, not Williams," she told Laura. "Do you know the kind of people who sent their progeny to Williams? Rich. Privileged. White. Republican. Or, even worse, people who aspire to all that." Not so unlike your other grandparents, she meant. "Their kids aren't smart enough to get into an Ivy but have to go somewhere, so God created Williams."

What you can learn from books * and * reviews

David Brooks: How I love to dislike him. He will start with an observation that makes sense to me - then blow it. Like in today's column, "The Medium Is the Medium."

Brooks begins the column by reporting on a study that found that disadvantaged kids who received books at the end of the school year - in other words, the kids typically affected by "summer slide" as measured in tests and grades - maintained higher reading scores than the kids who received no books. The results held even when they did not read the books. How and why? Here is the bit of sense:

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

After this point is when Brooks blew it, at least for me.

I do not disagree entirely with the observations underlying a statement like this: "The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students." I teach college students, and I lament the fact every single day that too many of them are not better readers. I believe that were they better readers of books, they also might be better citizens and - gasp - better users of the Internet.

However. Brooks' exposition on the "culture" of the book versus the "culture" of the Internet makes me cranky as an anthropologist. Here again, "culture" or rather "cultures" become talked about as bounded and singular and consistent. Books and the Internet emerge from and coexist (and might or might not compete) in what we might call the one and the same "culture." In a book that I currently am perusing, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, linguist Dennis Baron reminds us:

The World Wide Web wasn't the first innovation in communication to draw some initial skepticism. Writing itself was the target of one early critic. Plato warned that writing would weaken memory, but he was more concerned that written words - mere shadows of speech - couldn't adequately represent meaning. His objections paled as more and more people began to structure their lives around handwritten documents (Baron 2009:x).

"Culture," and history, aside, Brooks' description of books as representing "a hierarchical universe" with "classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom" is exactly not the buzz that reading deserves or requires, esp. for the disadvantaged kids who likely already understand themselves as the beach reading of society.

His primary objection to the Internet is this:

Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

I have to wonder whether or not Brooks has any self-awareness of his own position in the old media - on the "important" and "prestigious" editorial page of the Gray Lady - because this sounds like his own crankiness as a columnist in a snit about the respect that he believe he should be shown?

However. Now I have placed my own snittiness on display.

I do not think there is anything inherently anarchical about the Internet. (In its own ways, it is also hierarchical.) It is a technology, like books are a technology, and it is what we make it to be.

***

While there might be nothing like reading Brooks to raise your (my) ire in the am, but I esp. learned much from reading this recent essay on "The Death and Life of the Book Review" in the June 21 issue of The Nation.

In it, John Palattella considers the past and present state of newspaper journalism and of the book review in particular:

Claims that books sections are eliminated or downsized because they can't earn their keep are bogus. It is indisputable that newspapers have been weakened by hard times and a major technological shift in the dissemination of news; it is not indisputable that newspaper books coverage has suffered for the same reasons. The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves.

.... In a news context, "anti-intellectual" does not necessarily mean an antipathy to ideas, though it can mean that too. I use the word "anti-intellectual" to describe a suspicion of ideas not gleaned from reporting and a lack of interest in ideas that are not utterly topical.

So, in Palattella's perspective, there is more at stake in book reviews than a particular book or even books and reading at large. As, dare I even suggest, Brooks also contends, it is "culture" and history.

Learn from book reviews, Part Tres

Pain in childbirth had been considered inevitable until the 19th century, when chloroform came into more common use during labor. Donald Caton, an anesthesiologist, wrote a history on the use of anesthesia and analgesia titled, What a Blessing She Had Chloroform, itself a declaration attributed to Queen Victoria.

Interestingly, the idea that childbirth need not be painful also spurred others to consider alternatives to medication, which itself presented problems, not the least of which included serious side effects and consequences for women's own experiences of childbirth. An early proponent of "natural" childbirth in the mid 20th century was Grantly Dick-Read, an obstetrician who cited examples of painless "primitive" birth from late 19th century anthropology in his book, Childbirth without Fear.

This story has been told before, but a book review in the May 31 issue of The Nation suggests another dimension that seems well worth exploring. The review, by Paula Findlen, discusses Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. As Findlen explains:

The objective developments in science of the preceding century gave way to subjective reflection about the meaning of understanding nature. Poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats marveled at the new vision of the world wrought by science. At the same time, the British astronomers, naturalists, chemists and experimenters of their generation developed a conception of the world that was, in its own way, profoundly poetic.

One of the developments of Romantic science was nitrous oxide:

In spring 1799, Humphrey Davy invited a circle of friends to experience the giddy effects of laughing gas. He was inspired enough to write a poem about it. Davy's celebrated self-experiment, in which he inhaled six quarts of N2O on May 5, 1799, led to a loss of consciousness, feeling and memory.... The psychosomatic effects (to borrow Coleridge's term) of Davy's discovery fascinated his contemporaries. He invented a new pleasure for which they had no name.

If Romanticism began as an exploration of the enhancement of the senses, at the height of its success it grappled with the novel sensation of feeling nothing at all.

It makes me wonder what we want today - to feel more or to feel less or both at the same time - and what that means.

Learn from book reviews, Part Deux

A book that I admire and that I have taught in Medical Anthropology is Emily Martin's Bipolar Expeditions. Encountering Martin at the annual meetings, I told - nay, gushed to - her that a number of my students had been quite moved, lending and even buying copies for friends. I think they appreciated both her questioning of what "makes" a mental illness and her understanding that bipolar really means something. Constructed, but not fiction.

So, I read with interest this review of Gary Greenberg's Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease, by Adam Phillips in the May 24 issue of The Nation. Is it the author or the reviewer that takes the next step in grounding the making of mental illness in the politics of the times?

In this sense, whatever else it is - and it is an interesting book about many things - Manufacturing Depression is a book about liberal democracy, which allows people the freedom to tell competing stories, and the scientific rather than religious forces that threaten to undermine it. It is also a book that shows how deeply wedded all the talking cures - the nonmedical mental health treatments - are to the defense of liberal democracy rather than, as they once were, to a more radical politics. (Fantasies of liberation are not what they were.) "You can tell your own story about your discontents," Greenberg writes, "and my guess is that it will be better than the one that the depression doctors have manufactured." It's when therapies don't err on the side of guessing games, and don't acknowledge that this is what they are, that they become dangerous. The only therapies we should trust are the enemies of militant competence.

What you can learn from book reviews

During both the six-hour flight there and back, StraightMan sat across the aisle from me, with the two kiddos and a portable DVD player. (Mind you, he owed me, after three weeks away at his NEH seminar...) This allowed me the luxury of catching up on back issues of two of my weekly reads, plus reading half of a novel on my kindle. I just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last night, and this afternoon downloaded The Girl who Played with Fire, which by all accounts is even better. Both Dragon Tattoo and Played with Fire are page-turners, with commentaries on financial journalism, Swedish society and politics, and gender, which become issued as blocks of discourse from the mouths of the characters. Rather awkward, but the commentaries themselves can be interesting. As a lapsed fictionista who has worked in journalism, I admit that I am hooked. The books are a bit of change, too, from my usual fare in non-fiction.

I admit that sometimes I never bother reading the books themselves, but I enjoy reading the reviews of them: Not just thumbs up or thumbs down, but essays that contextualize the book and its subject matter and the author's approach, or read them alongside other books. I sometimes feel that academic journals ought to look more to The New Yorker and The Nation for models on the kinds of book reviews that they themselves might publish.

In fact, The Nation published a cover story, "The Death and Life of the Book Review," in its June 21 issue (which I have not finished reading), which suggests that the state of the book review today is linked not only to the Internet and the book publishing industry, but also the future of newspaper journalism. It seems also to me that the significance of the book review today is that it is arguably one of the few remaining public outlets of ideas - not as punditry or man-on-the-street opining, but to paraphrase The Nation, with "scrutiny, the deliberate, measured analysis of literary and intellectual questions without obvious or easy answers."

Which brings me to something I learned from a book review in the May 10 issue of The Nation: A review of two books about the conservation movement, its origins and its present, one being Mark Barrow's Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology, and the other being Caroline Fraser's Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution.

I confess that I am considerably less interested in the latter than the former, being skeptical, even cynical, about naive do-goodism, of which the title smacks. Indeed, the review confirms that I am not wrong: Do-gooders especially ought not to be naive, especially about their history.

The review begins with a vignette, borrowed from Barrow, about Thomas Jefferson's scientific and philosophical interest in the woolly mammoth, which he believed had not become extinct, but survived somewhere beyond, possibly in the American West: "For Jefferson the patriot, America's natural advantages counterbalanced Europe's prodigious cultural patrimony. So in picking a fight with the Old World, he no doubt found it prudent to recruit a massive beast like the mammoth to his side." So, the reviewer, Ari Kelman, introduces us to the political history of American conservation efforts, in particular endangered species protection, which Barrow traces in his book through the 1970's. "This high-water mark lingered until the mid 1990's, when Congress, under Newt Gingrich, began rolling back environmental regulations."

Part of the history is the embrace of animals (albeit endangered) simultaneous with the rejection of other people. Kelman notes Barrow's examination of naturalists at the turn of the 20th century, a number of whom were interested in "positive eugenics" and drew parallels between the fate of animals and of people:

For many concerned onlookers, steeped in Jeffersonian and Turnerian intellectual currents, the West served as a synecdoche for the United States, and the imperiled bison served as a synecdoche for the West. If the rugged bison died out, then so too, they worried, might America, a nation they felt was being feminized by an economy that alienated workers from the land; radicalized by labor activists preaching class warfare in exploding cities; and mongrelized by ostensibly unassimilable immigrants (Catholics, Asians and Jews).

In 1886, the response, as Kelman describes, was to "embark on a scientific expedition to shoot or capture some of the remaining beasts." The bison were treated not much differently than the human population of the Great Plains - hunted first, then "saved" and collected. It is worth remembering that salvage anthropology, as well as salvage zoology, was practiced at this time in history.

Others better versed than I might be familiar already with this history. As a novice, I think as often as not, such causes as endangered species protection become presented as self-evident: Ethical and moral values that are irrefutable in any time and place. So, I think it is significant to be reminded that the sentiments now rallied around extinction and conservation themselves have histories. Knowing these histories, and making them known, will not undermine the impulse - to create the kind of nature that we think we ought to have - but hopefully lead to asking the questions that ought to be asked and producing better-informed answers.

If, indeed, the continuance of species is at stake, then it seems to me that we need to take the long view, both into the future and the past.