It's a Sunday night at the tail end of summer, and I've dragged two squawky kids out of the minivan and into a half-closed rest stop on the Garden State Parkway in search of non-dreadful dinner options. Leslie, their mother, is catching some precious zone-out time in the car. After we sit down with our unadorned burger and fries, I notice the woman at the next table, the one who's making eye contact and smiling.
"Are they twins?" she asks. "How wonderful!" Then she talks to Nini and Desmond: "Wow, you guys are 5. So big! Are you starting kindergarten soon?"
Here's where the fun starts.
My son and daughter regard me in grave silence, faces stuffed with processed meat and fried potato product. They field this question themselves fairly often, but they're going to let me take it this time. For an insane split second, I consider a full-on lie, just some total invention about where and when they're going to school this fall. Instead, I take a swig of fizzy fountain Pepsi and bite the bullet: "Actually, we're home schooling."
After various tense conversations with friends, family members and strangers, Leslie and I have concluded that earnest, heartfelt discussion of exactly how we're approaching our kids' education and why we're doing it is a bad idea. For reasons I can about halfway understand, other parents often seem to feel attacked by our eccentric choices. I guess this is what it's like to be a vegan, or a Mennonite convert. I can certainly remember having a weirdly defensive response ("You know, I hardly ever eat red meat"), one where I reacted to someone else's comment about themselves as if it were really all about me.
At the risk of gross generalization, there's a hierarchy of responses when you drop the home-school bomb in conversation. Childless men don't much care; the question is too remote from their consciousness. Childless women are often curious and even intrigued; the question is hypothetical but possesses a certain allure as a thought experiment. As for men with children, they may or may not be sympathetic, but they don't experience the subject as a personal affront. Let's be honest: It's almost always mothers who react defensively when the subject comes up, as if our personal decision not to send our kids to public school contained an implicit judgment of whatever different choices they may have made.
As I say, I understand this a little bit better than I did at first. For one thing, I'm not sure any man can really grasp the competing and largely incompatible demands faced these days by American women, who are expected to be providers, power brokers, nurturers and sex symbols, either all at the same time or in rapid succession. Whether they're working-class or middle-class, most working mothers feel fundamentally torn between home and the workplace. They get shunted into mommy-track careers if they seem insufficiently devoted to their corporate overlords while getting grief from mothers-in-law for not spending enough time with the kids. They're doing the best they can and it's not that much fun, and the last thing they want to hear is somebody telling them, in effect, that they must have missed the latest memo on hip 21st-century motherhood: You're supposed to quit your job and spend your days reading your kids "Oliver Twist"! Home schooling is the new black!
Other stuff is involved as well. Some people seem genuinely disturbed by our decision, on philosophical or political grounds, as if by keeping a couple of 5-year-olds out of kindergarten we have violated the social contract. Specifically, we have rejected the mainstream consensus that since education is a good thing, more of it -- more formal, more "academic," reaching ever deeper into early childhood and filling up more of the day and more of the year -- is better for society and better for all children. This is almost an article of faith in contemporary America, but it's also one that's debatable at best and remains largely unsupported by research data.
In a related vein, some people suspect we have a hidden ideological or religious agenda we're not telling them about. We may look like your standard-issue Brooklyn creative-class family -- two 40-something parents, two kids, two pet rabbits and a battered Chrysler minivan -- but who are we really? Home schooling has become a lot more mainstream and diverse in recent years, but familiar stereotypes endure. As Alicia Bayer, a Minnesota home-schooler and blogger who's one of Leslie's online mentors, puts it, "People think we're all conservative Christians who hate the government and wear denim jumpers."
In order to avoid one or more of these discomfort zones, we try to answer all well-meaning interlocutors with bland, diplomatic and totally unspecific generalities. Not quite lies, but well short of what you'd call the truth. This is a phenomenon known to almost all home-schoolers, from Mormon separatists to off-the-grid hippie anarchists, and a frequent discussion starter in online home-school groups. So it was in my conversation with the nice Garden State Parkway lady in that fluorescent cavern between Burger King and Sbarro.
Mrs. Garden State Parkway: Well, you guys live in the city, right? I guess the public schools are out of the question.
Me: No, that's really not true. There are some perfectly good schools in Brooklyn.
Real answer: There are, indeed, and in any other municipality you care to name. Now, it is true that the zoned public school in our multiracial, middle-class neighborhood has, let's say, a checkered reputation and is mainly attended by children bused in from other parts of Brooklyn. It's a uniform school run on a paramilitary model, ruthlessly devoted to driving up the test scores. Oh, and last semester the principal was arrested for assaulting a teacher. But, honestly, that stuff played only a marginal role in our decision making. There are numerous pretty good to very good schools in nearby neighborhoods that we could have applied to but never did.
Both Leslie and I went to public school and had the usual assortment of excellent, mediocre and bad teachers. We're not zealots with some animus against public education. We're glad it exists and relatively happy to pay taxes to sustain it. As I said earlier, though, we feel dubious about the ideology that seems dominant in public education these days, and especially about the idea that sending kids to school virtually all day for 10 months a year, beginning at age 3 or 4, is the healthiest mode of delivering it.
Home schooling sneaked up on us, or at least on me -- Leslie has been mulling it over far longer. About three years ago, she started to burn out on her low-paid, high-stress job as a political organizer for a lefty nonprofit that was working to end the war in Iraq. At the time, we were in the not-so-unusual New York position of spending her entire income, and then some, on paying a nanny to spend far more waking hours with our children than we did.
Leslie decided to untangle this conundrum by quitting her job, ditching the nanny -- who promptly got a job with a much richer family on Park Avenue, if you're wondering -- and handling the childcare herself, at least for a little while. She had read a lot about alternative approaches to education and was in touch with the "attachment parenting" online universe, which tends to overlap extensively with the home-school world. She started hosting a weekly playgroup in our Brooklyn backyard and writing a blog, and before our kids were even 4 years old she'd gotten hooked into the New York "home preschool" network, a bunch of smart, high-powered, Type A women who've taken on their kids' education as a challenge.
This struck a chord with Leslie in several different ways. She's a hardcore nonconformist -- yeah, she's a lifelong lefty, but one closer to anarchism than socialism -- and home schooling dovetailed perfectly with a bunch of other DIY interests she's developed in recent years. She tends a large vegetable and flower garden every summer at a family house in central New York state, where Desmond and Nini help her grow peas, beans, lettuce, carrots, pumpkins and enormous sunflowers. In the basement she has a workshop where she makes furniture out of recycled wood and fallen branches, and she hoards piles of sewing projects for the cold winter months. Her interest in unconventional education goes back to her beloved grandmother, a renegade schoolteacher in an Indiana small town who gave her a copy of A.S. Neill's legendary "Summerhill School" more than 30 years ago. Compared with all that, public school never had much chance.
Mrs. GSP: Do you use a curriculum?
Me: Oh, sure! Absolutely.
Real answer: Give me a break! These kids are 5 years old. What curriculum was involved when you were in kindergarten? As I recall, it was mainly scissors and paste. My wife will talk as long as you want her to about the fact that there's no real evidence to back up the recent move toward "academic," full-day kindergarten, and plenty of evidence that young children need more unstructured playtime than most of them get. The real purpose of all this formal schooling is to get the kids out of the house and train them to stand in line and follow instructions while mommy and daddy get back to their ultra-important lives as economic production units. If you break down the impressive-sounding, bureaucratically adumbrated federal list of kindergarten standards, a whole lot of it amounts to learning to count from 1 to 20, learning the alphabet and the months of the year, and learning to tell time.
All-day kindergarten is clearly a boon -- or more like a necessity -- for working families who have few other options, and where the alternative is likely to mean parking the kids on the sofa all day with Nintendo and Noggin. Nini and Desmond are fortunate human beings, and we have an unusually flexible home life. I get that. I'm not stressed about when or how they learn that March comes after February.
That said, you could argue that Leslie has developed a fairly demanding curriculum. But that word comes with certain expectations that don't fit here. It isn't written down, it doesn't run on a set schedule, and it isn't based on lesson plans, piles of worksheets or a fixed rotation from subject to subject. It's tough to make generalizations about home-schoolers, because there are so many different flavors, from the aforementioned denim-jumper Christians to back-to-the-land types who live in sod houses without electricity. But hardly any of them structure their time and space so it resembles conventional schooling. That's exactly what they're trying to avoid, after all.
"If you grew up in the school system, you can't imagine how totally different this looks," says Alicia Bayer, who home-schools her four kids in Westbrook, Minn., a small town about 160 miles southwest of Minneapolis. "I didn't go buy desks. We don't sit in rows. We don't spend an hour on one subject and then move on to another."
Bayer tells me she began her "grand adventure" by teaching her eldest daughter to read at age 4. When she first met another home-schooler online, she began to understand how different it was in practice from what she had envisioned. "She told me that one of her daughters was asleep at noon, because she'd been up all night studying the constellations," Bayer remembers. "Another one was across the street taking soil samples from a vacant lot that she was convinced was contaminated with toxic waste, and a third one was someplace in the house curled up with a book. It sounded like what I was doing, and what I wanted to do."
Leslie has loosely coordinated her grand adventure with her closest home schooling pal, the novelist Joanne Rendell, whose son Benny is a year older than Nini and Desmond. In practice, that means they read a lot of the same books and take a bunch of museum expeditions together. Given that one of the main reasons we're home schooling is to give the kids more unstructured time to play and explore, they also grab every opportunity they can to get outside in nice weather. (I'll have a lot more to say about Leslie and Jo's shared curriculum in a future installment.)
Jo found out the hard way how eager other people can be to judge one's parenting choices, having been virtually flogged in the public square after writing what I thought was a sparkling, funny home-school confessional for Babble last year. I suppose it was impolitic for Jo to admit, all at one gulp, that Benny sometimes accompanies her and her husband to bars and other adult social situations, that he goes to sleep much later and wakes up much later than most kids, and that she uses the freed-up morning hours as writing time.
Perhaps it was Jo's descriptions of Benny's dirty socks and unwashed hair. Perhaps her breezy, dry English wit was akin to sticking a fork in the haunches of the angry and puritanical razorback hog that is the American Internet-reading public. Be that as it may, her article provoked an explosion of outraged name calling and numerous suggestions that Benny's terrible predicament be reported to Child Protective Services. One commenter's post, in its entirety, read: "What an awful human being you are. You're creating a freak."
Mrs. GSP: What do you do about socialization?
Me: Oh, we've got a nice support network. They have a circle of friends. They do lots of classes and activities. They go to birthday parties and stuff.
Real answer: My public answer is OK, as far as it goes. But hang on a minute, lady: What do you mean by "socialization"? In a legendary Internet screed called "The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List," Deborah Markus answers this question by observing, "If you're talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet." Ordinary schools tend to socialize children by way of enclosed, age-homogeneous pods, while home schooling tends to socialize children through a wide range of interactions with older kids, younger kids and adults, as well as peers. It's not up to me to decide which is better, and I'm pretty sure both methods have their pros and cons. We like the sound of option B, at least for now.
Looking at the bigger picture, being a home schooling freak isn't what it used to be. We aren't Bible-thumping Christians or off-the-grid hippies, and we definitely don't feel isolated. You certainly encounter both of those groups in the home-school universe, a fascinating realm in which social dissidents from the left and right margins of society struggle to communicate and coexist. But home schooling has become a broad and diverse phenomenon found at all socioeconomic levels and in all regions of the country, and it can't be summarized with easy demographic labels.
At the time of the 1970 census, there were a reported 15,000 home-schoolers in the entire United States, nearly all of them presumed to be members of religious minorities who objected to the contents or method of public education. By 2007, the Department of Education estimated that there were 1.5 million home-schooled children in the country -- almost 3 percent of the school-age population -- but admitted that the real number was likely higher. Furthermore, in the same DOE survey, only 36 percent of home schooling parents picked a desire to provide "religious and moral instruction" as the No. 1 reason for their decision.
Now, I suspect that response fails to capture the full extent of faith-driven home schooling, but it does suggest that the phenomenon is more complicated than many people suppose. A rough but reasonable guess might be that one-quarter to one-third of home-schoolers -- say, 450,000 school-age kids -- come from more or less secular backgrounds, and that proportion is probably growing. Just as important, not every home-schooler who happens to be religious is home schooling solely or primarily for religious reasons. There's a vibrant African-American home schooling scene, for instance, and while a lot of the folks involved are Christians, many say their top concern is the destructive culture they see in public school.
Our support network in New York is diverse in many ways, but it definitely lacks the extraordinary racial, ethnic, religious and economic heterogeneity you find in the city's public schools. Our home-school cadre mostly consists of creative professionals with flexible work lives -- writers, actors, artists, musicians, academics -- both because those are people who can conceivably accommodate home schooling in their lives and because those are people who share a nonconformist attitude toward work, authority and institutions. Do we regret not exposing our kids to the intense cultural melting pot of New York's school system? Sometimes, sure. But we're also not exposing them to bullying, arbitrary systems of order and discipline, age-inappropriate standards of behavior, and the hegemony of corporatized kid culture. Desmond and Nini have never heard of "Transformers," and we're OK with that.
Mrs. GSP: God, I could never do that! Why in the world are you doing it?
Me: [Polite laugh] It works for us, for now. It's not some lifetime commitment. We're not sure about anything beyond this year.
Real answer: I'm not here to recruit you, and I'm not sure what the ritual pronouncement "I could never do that" -- which comes up in almost all these conversations -- really means. Does it mean you're not interested? Fine. Does it mean you feel envious, but you couldn't pull it off for financial, logistical or psychological reasons? (Leslie and Jo have had women tell them this explicitly.) Does it mean that at some level you don't feel too certain about the way you've lived your life and raised your children and what the point of it all was? Yeah, me too. That part doesn't have much to do with home schooling, I don't think.
As for the "why" question: We're not ready to surrender our kids, and ourselves, to a 10-month-a-year, all-day institution whose primary goal, at least at this age, seems to be teaching kids how to function within a 10-month-a-year, all-day institution. Our kids are learning plenty -- not exactly the same things other kindergarteners learn, I suppose, but plenty. They're making friends and having fun. They can go to the beach on gorgeous fall afternoons, or hit zoos and museums on crisp winter mornings, when other kids are sitting at desks doing worksheets about the letter B. Hell, I wish I could do it.
If I really felt like spilling my guts to Mrs. Rest Stop, I'd tell her that home schooling can be a difficult and draining way to live. Leslie gets overloaded and loses her temper sometimes. After a day as home-school mommy she can be so exhausted that she makes it halfway through a glass of wine and passes out at 9 o'clock. I get distracted and irritable, torn between my demanding work schedule and my desire to unplug the computer and spend time with my weird, adventurous family. I could also assure her that we wouldn't be doing this if it didn't come with a host of unexpected delights.
This is just the beginning of what could be an extended experiment, full of surprises and pitfalls. If I told you I knew how it was going to turn out, I'd be lying far worse than I lied to Mrs. GSP. Legally speaking, we're not even home-schoolers yet. In New York, as in most other states, kindergarten is not compulsory; we don't have to notify any bureaucrats or file any paperwork until next year. I think home schooling has brought Leslie and me closer together, after a difficult period in our marriage. (By definition, having twins from birth to age 4 constitutes a difficult time in one's marriage.) The four of us are a pretty tight unit -- it's not us against the world, but us in the world, trying to experience the days as they come.
We've planted seeds and watched them grow into sunflowers taller than Daddy; read books about Alexander Calder and Squanto and the warm-blooded, egg-laying Maiasaura; told stories about how our beloved bunny Picaro made his final voyage into the Egyptian Land of the Dead. We say goodbye to the setting sun (when we remember to) and greet each new day with tremendous enthusiasm, often much closer to dawn than the adults would prefer. I'm not saying that other families don't do that stuff too. I guess I'm saying what I said already: It works for us.
I had a scary moment this morning. I realized that conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and I sorta kinda almost publicly agreed on something: To wit, that it's premature to blame abstinence-only education for the recent rise in teen pregnancy rates. Of course, when I wrote that, my emphasis was on "premature"; although we can't prove a causal relationship at this point and should therefore be circumspect, I wrote,"I find it entirely believable that crappy sex ed is to blame for the spike in teen pregnancy, and I'll take any opportunity to remind anyone who will listen that abstinence-only education does not work."
Douthat, on the other hand, is all, "Well, yeah, ab-only ed doesn't work, but comprehensive sex ed doesn't either, so let's call the whole thing off." (I paraphrase.) He cites Berkeley sociologist Kristin Luker's "When Sex Goes to School" and a 2001 Guttmacher Institute survey that found "most studies of school-based and school-linked health centers revealed no effect on student sexual behavior or contraceptive use." In fact, says Douthat, family and community values seem to have the greatest impact on teens' sexual behavior, ergo, "This is the real problem with federal financing for abstinence-based education: It drags the national government into a debate that should remain intensely local."
"If the federal government wants to invest in the fight against teenage pregnancy," he continues, "the funds should be available to states and localities without any ideological strings attached. (And yes, this goes for the dollars that currently flow to Planned Parenthood as well as the money that supports abstinence programs.) Don’t try to encourage Berkeley values in Alabama, or vice versa." That's a nice thought (as Amanda Marcotte snarked on Twitter, "We'll let your kids be perverts, if you let our kids be tortured and shamed"), but there are a few glaring problems with it.
I'll start with what should be a fairly conservative-friendly argument: The consequences of teens' sexual behavior aren't borne only by their respective communities. According to a report by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, teen childbearing cost U.S. taxpayers (combining state, local and federal taxes) about $9.1 billion in 2004. In Mississippi, the state with the highest teen birth rate, the total cost was estimated at $135 million, 49 percent of which was federal money. (In New Hampshire, the state with the lowest teen birthrate, the total cost was $18 million, with 44 percent federal costs.) Teen pregnancy rates are among the "predictors and risk factors associated with welfare dependence," according to the Department of Health and Human Services, and there's substantial overlap between states with high teen birthrates and states that get a lot more out of the federal kitty, including for entitlement programs, than they put in. Mississippi, for instance, gets back $2.02 for every dollar it sends to Washington, while New Hampshire gets back only 71 cents.
So it's swell to say that this should be an "intensely local" issue, but it's just not. I mean, I'm a bleeding heart liberal who looks at the numbers and thinks poverty is the obvious common denominator, and I'd be happy to see even more money go to services that actually help people. But I also think reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies -- among teenagers and adults -- is a worthy goal for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it might free up some tax dollars. Conservatives are supposed to like things that save money, right?
Next, let's go back to that Guttmacher report Douthat mentions. While its overall message is indeed that social norms have a greater impact on behavior than any sex ed programs, we need to talk about which social norms are having what kind of impact. "If a group has clear norms for (or against) sex or contraceptive use, then adolescents associated with this group will be more (or less) likely to have sex and use contraceptives," writes author Douglas Kirby. "Innumerable studies demonstrated that the norms of individuals to whom teenagers are attached (e.g., family members, close friends and romantic partners) were strongly related to and consistent with the adolescents' own sexual and contraceptive behavior." Sexual and contraceptive behavior. Kids might be somewhat less likely to have sex if everyone around them is constantly talking about how sinful and dangerous it is, but that doesn't mean none of them will -- and if their parents, preachers and pals are also telling them that contraceptives are sinful, dangerous and/or ineffective, that's going to sink in, too. I haven't read Luker's book, but in her New York Times review of it, Judith Shulevitz wrote, "[I]f the notoriously inconclusive data on sex education show anything, it’s that teaching abstinence makes it more likely that young people will have unsafe sex once they start having it." Lo and behold, even with those strong anti-sex community values, teen birthrates are highest in the most religious states. (Mississippi's No. 1 for both; New Hampshire is the 48th most religious state.) Religious prohibitions against contraception aren't the only factor there, but they're one plausible explanation.
Also, back when teen pregnancy rates were still declining, the Guttmacher Institute found that although trends in contraceptive use were mixed, only about a quarter of the drop could be attributed to increased abstinence; the other 75 percent was the result of sexually experienced teens managing not to get pregnant. Furthermore, that report noted that "The greatest change is an increase in the proportion of sexually experienced teenagers who report having used a method at first sex." While that obviously doesn't tell us about long-term contraceptive use, a 2004 CDC report stated, "Teenagers who do not use a method of birth control at first intercourse are about twice as likely to become teen mothers as teens who do use a method at first intercourse." Twice as likely! So educating kids about contraception before they start having sex probably does matter, as it turns out! Oh, and about when they start having it? According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 55 percent of Mississippi teens have had sex by ninth grade -- versus 27 percent of New Hampshire high school freshmen. Just FYI.
So, one really big problem with not encouraging Berkeley values in Alabama is that kids who grow up with Alabama values have babies at much higher rates. (Alabama has the No. 12 teen birthrate; California's No. 28.) Even if communities and families have more of an effect on teens' behavior than schools do, it is abundantly clear that kids growing up in environments where they learn something about sex and contraception beyond "Don't do it, and then you won't need it" are less likely to get pregnant. So, not for the first -- or 50th -- time, I have to ask: Do the folks who insist on keeping their children ignorant actually want to prevent teen pregnancies?
While it should go without saying that not every teen pregnancy is a sad story in the long run -- our president seems to have turned out all right, and Salon contributor Amy Benfer has written numerous times about the daughter she had at 16, whose awesomeness I can vouch for -- there's no question that it's in society's best interest (not to mention most teenagers') to reduce the number of them. There is no question that abstinence-only education doesn't help with that. And there is no question that in a nation where church and state are meant to be separate, public schools should favor curricula that offer comprehensive, scientifically accurate information over those that offer limited and sometimes false information based on a narrow, usually religious worldview. Deciding whether to tell schoolchildren the truth is not something that should be up to the discretion of local communities. As Bitch Ph.D.'s M. Leblanc put it, "As it turns out, kids have a right to a meaningful education ... What non-abstinence only education does is not lie to kids." So the thing is, determining the best way to educate children about sexuality and reproduction is not merely a matter of Alabama values vs. Berkeley values. It's a matter of good old-fashioned American values -- like preserving freedom of religion, helping all of our children get the best possible start in life, and above all, believing the truth is better than a lie.
Those kid these days! With their sexting and their pregnancy pacts and their dirty book reading. I mean, Jesus, have you taken a look at this thing called Merriam-Webster's 10th edition? It's like an R. Kelly album.
Fortunately, the folks at Southern California's Menifee Union school district have taken steps to protect their children's innocent eyes from sexually explicit materials. Acting on a complaint from one parent after she noticed that the dictionary in her son's Oak Meadows Elementary School contained the phrase "oral sex," swift-acting school officials pulled the salacious work from fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms throughout the district.
District spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told Southwest Riverside News that after the mother complained to the school principal, the district decided to temporary remove the books. "We are grateful that the parent who saw something sexually graphic brought it to our attention," she explained. The district will now form a committee to "determine the extent to which the challenged material supports the curriculum, the educational appropriateness of the material, and its suitability for the age level of the student." That's right -- in certain places, one cranky parent can get the dictionary removed from an entire district's schools, even when the kids themselves haven't been running around blurting about ORAL SEX to their elders.
Coincidentally, I happen to have the 1995 edition of Merriam's 10th right on my own bookshelf, just waiting to poison the minds of my young daughters. But "oral sex" isn't even in it. ("Oral history" is, but try getting off to that.) There are however several other scandalous words and phrases. "Blow job" is there ("n. 1956: an act of fellatio – usu consider vulgar"). Oh yeah, there's "fellatio" too. "Cunnilingus" is there, just three entries above "cunt." There's "bugger" ("vt. 1598: to commit sodomy with"), which would surely lead the curious to "sodomy," not to mention "sodomist," "sodomite," "sodomize," "sodomitic" and "sodomitical." There's "pussy," ("perh. of LG or Scand origin: n. vulva – usu. considered vulgar"), as well as "cock" (meaning #5: "penis") and "ball" – both as the n. for "testis" and the vt. "to engage in sexual intercourse." "Cocksucker" is there, though "carpet muncher" is not. There's "gang bang" (two words as a noun, hyphenated as a verb ) and "ménage a trois (F. 1891, meaning "household of three"). There's "pimpmobile" ("n. 1971: an ostentatious luxury car of a kind characteristically used by a pimp"). See "pimp." And of course "fuck" is there, both noun and verb, as well as "fucked up," "fucker," "motherfucker" and"fuck off."
Speaking to the Press-Enterprise about the dictionary ban, Betti Cadmus explained, "It's just not age-appropriate. It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature." For a tome that runs from "a" to "zymosan," that might take a while.
Sure, there are other, less salacious dictionaries than that freaky Merriam Webster's 10th. There are even newer ones, which benefit from boasting fresher terms like "frenemy" and "smackdown." But it only takes a quick leafing through a book that has 1,560 pages full of words to give one a deep appreciation for how powerful, beautiful and special the English language is, how varied in its orgins, how rich and colorful in its history. And though that language also contains terms that have cruder and more sexually explicit meanings, I can't think of too many places I'd prefer my own fourth grader to learn their correct meaning and origin than a good dictionary. In fact, the more words in that book my kid knows -- even the vulgar ones -- the happier I am, because every one of them makes her better equipped to articulate her own thoughts. Nobody ever gained anything from knowing less. And when she needs a word for "Menifee Union school district," she can find it right on page 345: doofuses.
The going rate for a kid in the United States is $4,600 and change to families making $110,000 or less in 2009 . At least that's what my tax prep computer program is telling me. (A $3,650 dependent deduction plus a $1,000 child tax credit.) So the mightier your uterus, the bigger your tax break. My uterus is weak and puny and has produced only one child. But my husband and I foster-parent in our hometown of Lubbock, Texas, and one of the ways the government compensates foster parents is by allowing us to claim tax deductions and credits for our charges as though they had popped out of our own baby-makers. Or so we thought.
So, I set about doing our taxes to include the little boy who spent a little more than half the year with us in 2009. No big deal, right? Wrong.
According to our case worker, the only time you get to claim a foster child as a dependent is when the state has forcibly wrenched the child away from his or her natural family. Voluntary placement kids are still deductible by their natural parent(s). (Those who want to read the specifics of the law can at IRS.gov.)
Many kids are in foster care because their parents voluntarily gave them up -- either because they could not afford to feed and house them or because they are in prison, or because they just don't want to be bothered. One of our friends fosters two little boys who were voluntarily placed at birth. They are both 6 years old now. For six years, our friend has fed, clothed, loved, band-aided, taught and honored these children, apparently all without being able to deduct them as dependents. To a single mom on a high school teacher's salary, that's a huge disadvantage, financially.
A couple of years ago, when our finances weren't as tight and we had not even dreamed of a child, I would have thought, "how crass -- griping about a tax deduction instead of thinking about helping a child." I still feel somewhat like that -- we won't stop fostering if we can't claim tax deductions; in fact, if the government revoked all tax deductions and charged people for kids instead, we'd still have had our own son, and been just as grateful for it. I just have to wonder what we are trying to achieve as a society with the policies we have set around children and taxes.
On the one hand, we have a problem with more demand for social services than we have the will or the heart to budget for. The more impoverished kids, the more demand. Worldwide population growth is an environmental concern on many levels, from food scarcity to global warming. But instead of teaching family planning in our schools and encouraging young people to have fewer rather than more children, we offer the single biggest tax incentive available to average people (outside of the mortgage interest deduction) to those who procreate the most. And we discourage families from taking care of kids whose own parents can't care for them by denying that tax deduction to at least some of those caretaker families.
The little boy we had in our home was moved to another foster family because he was behaving threateningly toward our son. He's a great little boy and is now in a home with his natural sister, where his behavior is exemplary. He and our son still play together. We would have cared for him even had we known from the start that we would not be able to claim him as a dependent.
His mom has five children. She was broke and homeless and living in her Escalade when she placed the kids in care. Now she's broke and living with some guy with whom she reportedly smokes dope and goes to bars when she's not in hairdresser classes.
She sold the Escalade and bought a little BMW 5 series with the proceeds. My heart broke thinking of the eldest child seeing her mom's new car. She's a precocious 7 years old and can count well enough to see that three car seats, two booster seats and Mom will not fit in that car. Since the mom can claim all five children despite their being in other homes more than two-thirds of the year, she should get a handsome sum back from the government after she does her taxes. Hopefully, she will use the money to get a more suitable car and put a deposit on an apartment. That's our case worker's hope anyway. I'm not holding my breath.
Foster parenting is wonderful and terrible. Amazing children, amazing love. Monotonous paperwork that goes on forever, home inspections, CPR classes, licenses, continuing education. Getting attached and having to step aside for a natural family member. Getting attached and having to admit that there are some behavior issues that you just can't handle.
Voluntary placements get turned away by our agency regularly because there is no home to place the child in. I wonder how many families won't take voluntary placement children because of the tax rule giving the deductions/credits for voluntarily placed children to their natural parent if they choose to claim them. Personally, I think that we foster parents who've actually cared for a child during the greater part of the year have earned the $4,600.
My mom had a handy phrase for those moments when she realized she sounded exactly like Grandma: "My mother's in my mouth." As a kid who took everything too literally, I found that image downright frightening, and even now, I still wrinkle my nose involuntarily when I think about it. But I do think about it all too frequently, because every time I catch myself sounding mom-like, that's the inevitable next thought. "Nearly every parent has had that moment at which they open their mouths and sound just like their mother," writes Lisa Belkin at the New York Times' Motherlode blog today -- and my childless self is here to tell you, it's not just parents. But a recent survey commissioned by The Baby Website found that having kids only exacerbates the problem: "Eight out of ten of today's mothers admit they use the very same cliches to discipline their children that they had to endure from their own parents."
At the risk of reading too much into a marketing survey, what I find interesting about the results is that many of the top recycled parental admonishments listed by respondents (which, despite the British inflections, will mostly be familiar to Americans) seem to fly in the face of today's parenting standards -- at least as those are conveyed to the public by today's trend pieces. "Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about" (No. 17) seems an awfully harsh (and, one does hope, hollow) threat at a time when "shouting is the new spanking." "Do as I say, not as I do" (No. 20) seems a dangerous tactic to use in an era when mothers, especially, are judged narcissistic and unfit for such poor role-model behavior as drinking, dating, swearing or thinking about themselves for five minutes. And the number one classic, "Because I said so," contradicts everything the media has taught me about the perils of issuing commands rather than reasoning with small children. If people are really still saying these things to their kids, then I just don't know what to believe about the current generation of parents, which the New York Times has assured me is a "pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering" one, with mothers who "warn, 'You're making bad choices' when, say, someone doesn't want to brush his teeth." Now you're telling me they actually sound just like the last generation of parents? That means I'll have to formulate a whole new set of smug judgments.
Kidding aside, while I relate to the surprise of realizing you just said something that annoyed the hell out of you when your mother said it twenty years ago (even if I haven't had the experience of annoying my own child that way) it bums me out a bit that it's so often presented as not just shocking, but horrifying. It's always, "Oh my god, I sound exactly like my mother!" not, "Huh, I guess one of Mom's lessons actually sunk in." Sure, some of the sayings could stand to be retired (do kids really find the promise of improved night vision a compelling reason to eat carrots?), but a lot of them have lasted because they're genuine bits of wisdom scaled to a kid's comprehension level. (I mean, would you jump off a cliff if all your friends did?) And moms don't say them because giving birth automatically turns women into short-tempered killjoys, but because they have the thankless job of teaching tiny human beings with "high mobility and no brains" (that's a direct quote from my mother) right from wrong, safe from unsafe, and appropriate from inappropriate. No matter what the current parenting wisdom is when you have kids -- and no matter how much technology and the cultural landscape have changed -- that task poses the same basic challenges generation after generation.
I may never say, "My mother's in my mouth" -- because, ew -- but nine years after my mom's death, I find it far more comforting than irritating to realize how much she's still there in my mind. Acknowledging that you're just like your mother is always presented as a depressing moment in a woman's life, but couldn't it be that some of us turn out like our moms because deep down, we think they did a pretty good job? Deep down, we might even think they're good people to emulate? If I ever have kids, I'm sure I'll do a lot of things differently than my parents did, but I'll tell you this much: If one of them wants an air rifle for Christmas, I already know what my response will be (No. 4).
While Mary Martinez was shopping in a Target store in Harper Woods, Mich., recently, her 4-week-old baby got hungry. And because some people still haven't gotten it through their heads that women often use their own breasts to feed hungry babies, a security guard who saw her doing just that told her she had to leave because she was breaking the law. Which she was not. Target mistake No. 1.
When Martinez and her husband, Jose -- a police officer who knew full well his wife wasn't doing anything illegal -- refused to leave, the security guard called the cops. Target mistake No. 2. Although the local officers who arrived confirmed that it is not against the law to breast-feed in public in Harper Woods, Mary Martinez says she felt humiliated and forced out of the store anyway. "Two security guards, the manager or team leader, two officers, they just made a spectacle and a scene. I feel like I can't go to that specific Target anymore."
Now, Target mistakes 1 and 2 can be written off as the poor judgment of individual employees, but 3 is the real eye-popper: When contacted by Detroit's Fox affiliate, Target's corporate headquarters said that breast-feeding is allowed in their stores, but "This specific situation escalated to a point where we were concerned for the safety of our guests, so law enforcement was called." Are you kidding me? How on earth does feeding a baby "escalate" to a safety issue for other customers? Target's corporate spokesperson does understand that when you give a quote to a media outlet, other people will end up hearing it, right? And also that words mean things?
Perhaps not, because the rest of the statement was: "We regret the incident in our store and will continue to provide a shopping environment that respects the needs of all guests, including nursing mothers." Yeah, see, the verb "continue" implies that you have already been doing a thing you plan to keep doing, yet calling police on a breast-feeding woman is not providing a shopping environment that respects the needs of nursing mothers. See how that works? So at this point, you could maybe start respecting nursing mothers, or change things so that all Target security guards are aware that breast-feeding is neither illegal nor against store policy, or create a new rule like, "Hey, don't call the cops on moms feeding their babies," but you can't really "continue" doing something you weren't doing before.
I mean, sure, maybe every other Target in America is wonderfully welcoming to nursing mothers, but even if that were the case, this one screwed up. Badly. And the savvy P.R. move in response to such a screw-up is not, "we were concerned for the safety of our guests" -- I'm sorry, did Mary Martinez whip out a gun and demand that everyone back off while she finished feeding her kid? Take hostages? Tell someone she'd planted a bomb? -- but, "Our security guard overreacted and misrepresented both store policy and local law, and we are ashamed that a Target employee caused the Martinez family so much trouble and embarrassment. We want to reassure our guests that nursing mothers are always welcome in our stores." Because you know what? Even if you alienate the kind of customers who might find an accidental boob sighting offensive, I'm guessing that's better for business than alienating parents of young children; women who are, have been or might someday be nursing mothers; and any other human beings who understand that babies need to eat.
The manager of the Harper Woods store told the TV station that (despite evidence to the contrary) "breast-feeding is certainly not discouraged inside of her store." Good thing, since I'm betting that store now has a nurse-in to look forward to.
I don't know if parenting makes you chronically stupid or just temporarily slow, but after nearly four years of child rearing, most of them spent as a stay-at-home dad, my intellect has been dulled to a nub. Women have known this for generations. Maybe that's why the "stay at home vs. get out and work" debate is so contentious. Of course, I've never heard anyone talk about it. But maybe I just wasn't paying attention until now. All I know is, while my wit may never have cut with the precision of a Ginsu blade, my mind was a bit sharper than the rusty pair of kindergarten safety scissors I'm working with these days.
How often have you been at a fancy dinner party, or a rocking kegger, and overheard someone lamenting the fact that their friends with children have suddenly been rendered incapable of discussing anything except the contents of the baby's diapers or the adorable thing little Cullen did to the dog? There are Facebook groups for venting frustration with parents who constantly yammer about their offspring and the business of raising them. I understand where these people are coming from. But it is hard for me to understand why they are so annoyed — after all, those people are free.
The common misconception of childless, alcohol-imbibing party guests and cyber-ether baby-haters alike is that parents blabber constantly out of some arrogance or indulgent desire to show off their great kids and their perfect parenthood. Nothing could be further from the truth. We parents have so little now; the children have taken so much. We just have nothing left to say. We sometimes hear ourselves and know how we must sound to others, and we feel great shame. Our children have broken us and turned us into single-subject simpletons. They've accomplished this feat in what is supposed to be the prime of our intellectual life.
Parenthood be not proud.
After 14 uninterrupted hours of childcare, making the transition from Diego and diaper cream to Jim Lehrer and Paul Krugman is an exhausting prospect. If I ever muster the energy to investigate what is going on in the world outside the baby bunker, I find it impossible not to see that world through the deceptively warped lens of how my children fit into it.
I would love nothing more than to write an insightful article about healthcare reform, but I'm dumb now. Anything I write relating to healthcare would end up as a screed about why my children have to take a back seat on getting their flu shots to a bunch of kids with “respiratory disorders.” Why are kids who can't breathe right so much more important than my own kids? My kids love to breathe, and they're good at it, and they should be rewarded for their aptitude in breathing. But I digress.
Aside from totally skewing my worldview and politics, my kids also obstruct my ability to feed my mind in the way I used to. I can't tell you the last time I read something that wasn't about hippos going berserk. That being said, I'd still jump at the opportunity to discuss the subtext of the book "Hippos Go Berserk" with another adult, because you take what you can get when you're a parent. But even that discussion would not be very long since Sandra Boynton, the author of "Hippos Go Berserk," doesn't shroud the meaning of her tome in layers of literary subterfuge: “One hippo alone once more ... misses the other forty-four.” The point is, of course, that the hippo doesn't know what he's got till it's gone, like Joni Mitchell with her parking lot (wait, am I remembering that song right?) or like me with my smartness. So you see -- I'm the hippo.
My view of parenting and its effect on the adult mind is particularly sour right now since my daughter has just entered into the most difficult stage of development. She is 10 months old, and while most people would point to the fabled “terrible twos” as the most challenging and exhausting time with their young ones, the interval between 8 and 15 months is almost indescribably difficult for me, especially because it is making me not good at words plus how to use them.
At least the terrible twos come with a certain destructive streak fueled by imagination and creativity. The current state my daughter finds herself in is one of complete and abject dependence, combined with a totally unhealthy understanding of self-preservation, combined with newfound mobility, combined with an almost complete lack of comprehension. If I put my daughter down to attend to the needs off my son (or my bladder) within seconds she will be yards from her drop point and will have discovered the most harmful object in a three-room radius. If it can be pulled onto her head, choked on, ignited, shattered or used to gouge herself (or the dog), my daughter will be magnetically drawn to it. There is no reasoning with her. There is no stopping her. Anything short of constant vigilance will end in a trip to the emergency room or a panicked call to the fire department (or the vet).
There must be a biological imperative that babies be at their cutest during these months. At 8 to 15 months they shed the anonymous blobbiness of infancy but have not yet achieved the sticky-fingered, snot-caked grossness of toddlerdom. That they are at their most adorable means that parents are less likely to abandon them to their own devices for more than five minutes (or altogether), because going longer than five minutes at this age is akin to a death sentence. It also means that your children become the equivalent of the Overlook Hotel from "The Shining": You can never escape their icy grip.
Even the once relaxing pastime of following my favorite sports teams has become an exercise in futility. I was so exhausted from my days of hauling around 30 pounds of baby girl and 40 pounds of toddler boy that trying to watch the World Series was like trying to listen to my wife explain how my new phone works while being waterboarded. I'm still not entirely sure that the Phillies aren't world champions. Chase Utley won it all by tying Jesse Jackson's World Series home run record, right?
Don't get me wrong: Even with the physical strain, the job of stay-at-home parent is better than any other job I've had, because it's not really A Job. But the trade-off for this freedom is severe. For the moment, the children have transformed me into a one-dimensional dullard. My son's recent question, “Do we hammer on cats?” not only seems perfectly reasonable to me at this stage in my life, but now also warrants some serious consideration.
I am not proud that much of my daily brain power is dedicated to figuring out whether the mysterious object in my daughter's mouth can be swallowed and digested or whether it will become lodged in her throat. But this is the life I've made for myself, and it is either talk about that or take a vow of silence. As I tell my uncomprehending daughter, “You can't put something mysterious in your mouth and then cry about it when it doesn't taste good or blocks your airway.”
I have to believe that as my children become less dependent on me, my higher brain functions will return to some semblance of normalcy. It is my sincere hope that four years from now I'll be writing about "opting back in."
I can just imagine it: “Mr. Traister, you haven't held a job in seven years. What makes you think you're Ground Round fry-cook material?”
“Well Pete, I know it's a school night, and you have homework to get to, but I'd like to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question: Do we hammer on cats?”
So next time you find yourself tearing into a friend or acquaintance who can't shut up about their kids, the next time you find yourself ready to fire off an angry missive about the unrelenting surging tide of mommy blogs, remember that you're hammering a dead cat. We know it's sort of sad, but it's all we have until the kids become a little older. Allow me and my kin to engage in our one conversation, even if it's just to stay in practice for when we emerge from the bunker. Maybe you can even find it in yourselves to muster a little understanding for us next time you're out past 10 p.m. at one of your fancy childless keg parties where you discuss the new Philip Roth and the Phillies' amazing World Series defense. Because, who knows? You may find yourself dumb like me someday.
R.I.P. Social Activist Howard Zinn
Book Banning is Alive and Well in the State of Oklahoma
A Hello to Arms
