Risking Life and Limb to Birdwatch

The last thing the AAA guy said was, "I have no idea how you're going to get your car out of there." 

Let me back up. This past Saturday I attempted something very foolish for the sake of my child. I tried to drive my 2-wheel drive sedan up a quarter mile, curvy drive that was covered in a sheet of ice. Why did I do something so stupid? Because at the top of the drive was a local environmental center offering a free children's program about snow. 

The center had sent out an email that morning warning that the drive was icy, but that cars were making it up driving in low gear with a bit of speed. I figured if I didn't make it all the way up, I could always just back down in reverse. I made it most of the way up, but then slowed to a stop. In my attempt to go in reverse back down a sharp curve, I slipped and backed right into a giant rock and tree. 

Now the problem when my car is stuck nearly a quarter mile up a steep, icy drive was that no vehicle which could tow my car out could get up there and pull without the risk of sliding right into my car. Which is why two days and two AAA guys later my car was still stuck. 

Thankfully, Monday morning (after two more cars got stuck on the same drive) the city sent out a salt truck. A couple of city employees dug my car out, and I was able to get a tow to pull me out. The total cost was mostly a lot of worry, a day off work for my husband to watch the kids, and a backache and sore leg muscles from me shoveling and walking up and down an icy drive. Could have been much, much worse. 

Oh, the dumb things we do for our kids. 

After I first got stuck, while I was calling AAA and fretting about what to do about my car, my daughter was cutting out paper snowflakes, dropping salt and food coloring into blocks of ice for sun-catchers, and making maple icecream. Being only four years old, she had no concerns over the car or my anxiety. She was simply having a lovely time learning about snow. 

When she finished her suncatcher, we took it outside to hang up. An array of resident birds such as chickadees and cardinals congregated around bird feeders next to the environmental center. My daughter and I watched them flutter, hop, and peck with shared delight. I looked down at her wondrous expression, and said, "Even though the car got stuck, I'm glad we came." 

(Okay, I must admit, I wish we'd just parked at the bottom of the hill and walked up. Had things gone any worse, I'd really be kicking myself.) 

I'm glad for the mindset and habits I've developed as a parent regarding my kids' education and exposure to nature. With modern conveniences, and especially living in a city, it's easy to forget where we come from, and the environment that we're dependent on, ecologically speaking. 

Winter is the season that reminds us that nature is still in charge. It is the most inconvenient and violent of seasons. School is canceled. Colds and even life-threatening flu and pneumonia become more common. People break bones slipping on ice. Trees fall, weighted down by snow, damaging property. In these modern times it is still relatively easy to ignore the harshness of winter by staying indoors. But then the heating bill arrives. 

Garrison Keillor is known for the colorful stories about harsh winters in Minnesota he tells on his radio show A Prairie Home Companion. On one episode he remarked: 

Growing up in a place that has winter, you learn to avoid self-pity. Winter is not a personal experience, everybody else is as cold as you, so you shouldn't complain about it too much. You learn this as a kid, coming home crying from the cold, and Mother looks down and says, “It’s only a little frostbite. You’re okay.” And thus you learn to be okay. What’s done is done. Get over it. Drink your coffee. It’s not the best you’ll ever get but it’s good enough. 

I don't want to worship or idealize nature. The biosphere is neither good nor bad, but awe-inspiring in its complexity, and humbling in its enormity and power.

I hope to get my children interested in the scientific investigation and understanding of nature. I also hope to instill in them an appreciation for nature as it is experienced through both first-hand experience and artistic expression. This is no simple task, as I live in the developed world in the year 2014. My children could easily go their entire childhoods without ever seeing a forest or farm. 

This week we bought some bird seed, gathered a few pine-cones, and are making bird feeders in the hopes of attracting some resident birds to our own front yard. 

Nature education must be an educational priority, just like reading and math, history and science, art and movement. That's why I drove up a treacherous, ice-covered hill, so my kid could cut paper and play with ice, salt, and food dye.  

Addendum I: Here's a wonderfully informative website about snowflakes. 

Addendum II: Since I'm on the topic of nature education, Happy Darwin Day 2014! 

Calculating What SAHMs (and dads) Are Worth

Someone just posted this graphic to facebook - that the average stay-at-home-mom is doing labor that in the paying market would be worth over $113K.  (They compare it to a second graphic that shows "Working Mom" as earning only around $67K.)

My immediately thought is that is bullshit. I know what day care workers, housekeepers, and drivers (which is most of what stay-at-home-parents do) get paid, and they sure as hell don't make six figures!

After looking closer at the details, I see how they get at such an inflated number. Basically they consider a bunch of stuff that typical stay-at-home-parents do as highly skilled (and thus highly paid) labor such as Facilities Manager and Psychologist.

I don't know if the people who created this are trying to be funny, but obviously it's bullshit to just state that stay-at-home parents do that sort of work when they have no professional training or experience in those fields and certainly couldn't just go out and get a job doing that sort of work.

Also, that's just an inaccurate description of what stay-at-home parents are doing. For instance, just because I have heart to heart chats with my close friends about relationships, hopes, and fears, and my friends' mental health might improve because of those chats, doesn't mean that I qualify as a mental health professional and that hanging out with me is worth an hourly rate of $38.02.

So I can't take it seriously. But if this is meant to be funny, I don't get why this is a subject to treat so lightly.

Divorce rates are still high, and it is well documented fact that single women with kids are disproportionately represented under the poverty line and while fathers tend to do better financially after a divorce, mothers tend to do worse. Of course the explanation behind these trends are that mothers tend to be the ones to put more time into childcare and domestic chores in a marriage, which means that they are sacrificing their long-term and future career while their spouse is benefiting from their labor. It works out fine if they stay married because as a family they can regard the working parent's paycheck as something they earned (and will spend) together. But if they divorce, the one who stayed home is screwed.

Salary.com provies a calculator where you can work out what your additional labor as a parent is supposedly worth. I tried to be more realistic about what I do as a SAHM, and came up with this list of duties:

Housekeeper 624 hours at a rate of $10.49
Cook 416 hours at a rate of $13.97
Day Care Center Teacher 2,184 hours at a rate of $13.47
Van Driver 364 hours at a rate of $14.02
Laundry Machine Operator 156 hours at a rate of $10.25

Total salary for the year of $59,188.

Are you fucking kidding me? More feel-good bullshit. After all, the average nanny makes less than half that.

My calculation is so high partially because it takes overtime pay into account, despite the fact that no day care workers, cooks, van drivers, or laundry machine operators are raking in mad overtime hours with time and a half. Hell, these days they are lucky if they can score a job that's full time.

It is the norm - in this shitty economy with growing wealth disparity - for every working class stiff to do all kinds of extra labor for no extra pay. Commuting. Balancing schedules for multiple jobs. Coordinating work schedules with those of our spouses and kids. So how can we say all this extra work is worth any money when nobody is actually getting paid for it?

My own modest calculation is really even less than $59K because you have to figure that about half of that housework, cooking, and laundry I'd be doing even if I didn't have children. So let's knock off about ten grand and then we say that as a SAHM I'm, in theory, worth about $50,000. Yeah right.

That is more than I could make if I didn't have kids and was just working full time in my profession (artist/teacher). Of course in reality I'm not making jack shit because being a stay-at-home-parent pays nothing.

So gee, thanks salary.com for reminding me of how much work I do for zero pay, and how much I'm financially falling behind every year, despite all the work I do. Checks for imaginary money always makes people feel great!

How about instead of living in lala land we acknowledge that this is a shitty situation. That too many people in America either work way too hard for barely enough pay, or live in poverty or totally dependent on the generosity of relatives because they can't find work that pays a living wage. That we don't as a society put a real value on the work of parents who are rearing the next generation.

This isn't a topic that calls for cutesy graphics and fake checks. We need to decide what sort of society we want to be part of, and take steps to achieve that vision. A good start would be increases instead of cuts for food stamps, subsidized day care and preschool for all Americans. And next would be truly universal health care that is simple and easy to use. We've got a long way to go before I actually feel like I live in a society where what I do is "worth" $59,000.

Two Good "Nurture" Books for Skeptical Parents (Or Any Parents, Really)

Like many American parents of my generation, since having kids, one of my main pastimes is reading about the latest in understanding childhood development. This isn't a casual interest. It is a serious undertaking with the goal of developing optimum parenting strategies. Or at least it was.

 The American middle class is shrinking. Good jobs for people without college degrees have largely been shipped overseas, but the rising cost of higher education has way outpaced wage increases. Rising health care expenses have cost many people their homes and retirement savings. Many of my peers are choosing to have less kids or no kids because they don't want to be forced to choose between saving for their children's education and saving for their own retirement.

In short, American parents of my generation are all too aware that we do not live in the economy of our parents. We fear that if current economic trends continue, things will be even worse for our kids. So we're desperately searching for anything that might give our kids an edge.

Like most parents in my demographic, I was reading to my first child before she was even a year old. When she turned three I started her on Suzuki Piano, a pre-ballet class, a phonics program, a Spanish language program, and began doing age-appropriate math exercises on an almost daily basis. One might think I felt like a super-parent, but that was not the case. As a former teacher at a small, independent school, I was aware of progressive theories in early childhood education that insist that workbooks and flashcards are no-nos. I had also been reading about current theories in early childhood education for a college course I was teaching, and these supported the idea that "play is the work of children". As a result I became increasingly anxious that all the piano, ballet, language, and math might eat up too much of the much more valuable play time. I sought a middle ground out of uncertainty.

In January my local secular humanist group's book club read the book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris. Just recently I finished reading NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. These books are similar to each other in that they both challenge common assumptions about how to best raise children to be intelligent, moral, confident and capable individuals. Both books are written for the layman, specifically targeted at parents. Both rely on scientific research to support their claims, though they are written by outsiders; Bronson and Merryman are journalists, and Judith Rich Harris had dropped out of graduate school and was writing college textbooks on developmental psychology when she began to form unique conclusions based on comparing the research of others.

What I like best about both of these books is that even though they assert their own conclusions about several aspects of childhood development and the ability of parents to influence children's development, parents would have a difficult time developing any formulaic strategies in response. This is partially because the analysis presented is complex and nuanced. It is also because both books, especially The Nurture Assumption, emphasize the important influence of factors other than parenting.

Scientific studies require narrowing a focus down tight and conducting experiments in very specific context. Therefore it is usually only after many related studies are compared and analyzed over a significant period of time that we can start to see a complete enough picture that allows us to develop effective strategies for achieving specific goals in the real world.

Unfortunately, too often the results of specific studies are reported and people immediately react based on assumptions that go beyond the scope of those studies. For instance, parents read reports about how babies who hear more words develop more extensive vocabularies more quickly, so then those parents begin babbling on in a contrived manner endlessly to their infants and toddlers before they (or the researchers who did the studies) understand the more complex mechanisms behind those results. In NutureShock, the authors explain how the popular series of Baby Einstein videos were developed based on research in childhood development. But because the maker of the videos made false assumptions about what the research meant, the result was a product which achieved the opposite of its intended results. (Babies who watch the videos end up having smaller vocabularies.)

As a parent seeking optimum strategies for giving my kids an edge in an uncertain economy, these books have left me feeling a bit dis-empowered. NurtureShock convinced me that I couldn't trust common wisdom or even my own intuition. And The Nurture Assumption left me thinking that I have basically no control over the values and personalities that my children develop. Yet I feel I'm better for having read them.

Being a skeptic who was raised religious, I've been down a similar path before. I'm at peace with the idea of no cosmic justice or afterlife. In fact, I've now come to a point where I find my secular worldview preferable, not only because I think it is true, but because I find honor in having the courage to face an imperfect universe, and humble awe in viewing life as a precious, fleeting, gratitude-inspiring anomaly. I can, too, come to peace with the idea that my parenting style is but one (perhaps even minuscule) factor, in a complex wave of elements that will influence who my kids become. More than just come to peace with it, I can see how much that takes the pressure off and allows me to more fully enjoy parenting.

My oldest child is now four. She still does Spanish, math, ballet, phonics, and Suzuki piano on a regulated basis (although combined these all take up a relatively small percentage of her time, and stimulating free play time does dominate her waking hours.) I no longer feel so torn and anxious over whether I'm doing the best job I can or not. After a year, these supplemental activities have become an integrated part of her and my lives. They have become simply what we do in our home. It feels right because we both often take pleasure in them, and there is a ordinary give and take going on between mother and daughter.

Once upon a time I made a plan. I had developed a formula because I felt that was necessary. But it's not a formula anymore. Now I'm just being the parent that I am. I see that the approaches I take and choices I make for this child will be somewhat different for her younger sister, because they are different people. If there is an optimum parenting style for raising them, I can't know what it is, so why worry about it?

Life is uncertain. Making choices is complicated. Of course I'm going to keep trying to give my kids an edge in the world in the best ways I know. But most of the time I'll simply enjoy watching them grow up.