Actually, I know few parents who did accept reality. Not many take credit when their children did well (although they may well have a quiet pride), but as you allude to, the parents I’ve met where there’s been a truly tragic outcome (drugs, fatal illness, madness), were indeed haunted until the day they died with the knowledge (untrue thought it was) that they had failed the most important responsibility of their life.
Or as one parent put it, “it wasn’t until I had children that I realized that I’d armed the world with harpoon pointed straight at my heart.”
But you are, of course, correct. You can’t let fear rule. But it’s very easy to do so. An incident with my mother-in-law is still burned into memory. I let my son take some “risk” that were laughable when I was a child, and nearly considered delinquent parenting now-a-days. She let me know what she thought.
“If anything bad happens to him, you will have to live with the fact that you let it happen every minute of every day for the rest of your life.”
I should have been kinder in my response - after all the poor woman was simply paralyzed by fear for her grandchild, but I acknowledge the truth in her words.
“You are correct. If he comes to harm, it will destroy me. But if I am unwilling to take that risk, it will destroy him.”
The risky behaviour? Riding a bus/subway by himself in a busy city at age 11. I’d been doing so when I was 8. And sure enough, a few months later she’d forgotten that she’d ever been worried about my son taking transit to school.
Todd Kashdan, a psychology professor at George Mason University, reported a few years ago on studies that concluded that people who think being happy is important are more likely to become depressed
Does anyone happen to know which particular study this refers to? When I tell people happiness isn’t the be-all-and-end-all they look at me like I’m weird. Empirical evidence would be appreciated. I’m trying to find it in the list of Kashdan’s published articles but I haven’t found it yet.
You would expect that eventually a feedback mechanism would evolve which would cause women to experience diminished fertility if the population density got too high, to maximise the survival chances of other people’s children who are close genetic relatives.
True - which would also be natural. What I’m interested in is whether Ev Psych. (which is kind of de rigueur around here) allows for our moral indignation.
It doesn’t reflect a particularly noble reality; but it is hardly illogical: Men have kids; but the biologically-imposed downtime of doing so is close to zero; and it is much more culturally accepted(and often legally easier) to get dad back into the office more or less immediately(whether because he’s just delighted to skip that tedious baby-raising nonsense and doesn’t even try to stay home; because there aren’t any paternity leave requirements that allow him to take leave if you don’t want to give it to him; or some combination of the two).
The biological aspect probably isn’t fixable without heroic biomedical engineering; though it seems like a questionable ‘work/life balance’ if work precludes species-critical continuity measures; while the social-acceptance piece is theoretically fixable; but certainly not yet fixed.
Anyone who says this as though it is a good or ‘natural’ thing needs to be asked a few pointed questions; but as an empirical observation it is a bit tricky to argue with the idea that an employer is usually in a much better position to minimize the impact of employee fatherhood than employee motherhood; and it would be a surprise if this doesn’t factor into their decision making.
As best I can tell ‘evolutionary psychology’ is one of those troublesome notions that combines a terribly plausible premise(organisms evolved to be as they are under intense selective pressure, so we have good reason to suspect that what they do has or had some adaptive value) with compatibility with almost any just-so-story one wishes to tell.
The plausibility of the premise makes it hard to dismiss the idea as nonsense; but most of the ‘results’ are pretty dubious, especially when they conveniently slot into some social question about which people have strong opinions already.
The genre’s more cautious and empirically grounded work is good fun(I’ve always had a soft spot for the vole model whose promiscuity you can modify by tweaking a relatively small chunk of genome); but the more speculative stuff gets dodgy fast.
I think so, not that I know anything about ev psych. But evolution describes the “hawks and doves” dynamic, which can also apply to variations within a single population (e.g. the ‘stable’ 3-5% rate of sociopaths in normal society, cross dressing cuttlefish…). Evolution is basically just the sort of dickhead who would ensure that about 1 in 10 people are homosexual, say, without updating the other nines’ fear-of-other instincts. Evolution be like yeah, it’ll do.
@fuzzyfungus Yeah there’s a deeper argument, you’re right. But I’ve heard more or less that exact phrase a few times and, as a noted pedant, I can’t help but have a poke at it.
Still though, I’ve just signed on with a company that employs a couple of stay at home dads who work remotely. I can’t claim any personal experience but I gather that for a lot of modern occupations, the biological downtime imposed on a woman are pretty close to zero as well. Maybe they seem pretty high to people who live in countries that only mandate one week’s leave per year and where employers are too overbearing to consider telecommuting and people get all freaked out over public breastfeeding, but I’m tempted to call that perception a cultural factor. And the cultural element is what the original post is criticizing, after all.
I agree with having sympathy for employers who have to operate within all sorts of strict HR guidelines, can’t be easy and it must be tempting to skip the whole hassle when there are more “career minded” candidates for a position. It serves to perpetuate the culture, but your average small business owner probably didn’t get into business to smash the patriarchy.
Rural America problems. In media North London, that’s just being incredibly cool and envy-producing.
One of my own offspring is in this position, and they can both bask in the kudos of being more progressive than the neighbors.
I’m going to go a little off-topic here and point out that this is a complete misunderstanding of ISO9000. The idea of that standard is that you set up procedures that are so good, you achieve the standards you want with minimum effort.
Perhaps we need an ISO standard for parenting, a description of what is Good Enough without knocking yourself out too much. I’d begin, though, by getting all the authors of those appalling books like the Tiger Mom stuff - which doesn’t work, btw - and offer them the Chinese choice of public recantation or a bullet. Think how much unhappiness would be avoided.
(I excuse Spock - a lot of what he wrote was commonsense, the problem was people who then misinterpreted his work. Like Jesus. Or Marx.)
I haven’t read the whole book, but wasn’t the point that it didn’t work, and she had to change her standards for her second daughter? The excerpts people read seem to be speaking in the voice of the tiger mother who still thinks it’s all a matter of discipline.
It seems to me that there’s a gendered idea of life after kids at play here. Women have kids and need to recover while possibly breastfeeding at regular intervals during the day and night, so they won’t be able to give as much time and attention to work during that time. Men have kids and need to pay for them, so they will be even more motivated to give their lives to work. As they say: if you’re a man, make sure you have a picture of the kids on your desk. If you’re a woman, make sure you don’t.
While this makes some sense, it’s ultimately bad for everyone. Women have to do most of the work at home, men are more alienated from their families and women are less likely to be able to work (and will have much greater restrictions on their availability if they do find work). Having parental leave and family friendly hours for both parents probably significantly decreases stresses on the family and increases productivity in the long term.
Oh, I definitely don’t think that this is a good thing(even if we did subscribe to a fairly expansive view of how much baby-maintenance is ‘natural’ for mothers to engage in, a work/life balance that makes procreation and having a career mutually exclusive for half the population seems like a bad idea); my point was just that(especially in sectors where the standard is ‘well, you don’t have to work 100 hour weeks; but I hope you weren’t planning on making partner/getting tenure/etc. like that’ or ‘our “leave policy” is written on that pink slip; no GTFO’) a mixture of biology and cultural norms make it markedly easier to combine fatherhood with a desirable career trajectory than to combine motherhood(though, especially in the youth-crazed tech sector, employer preference is often for people without any family responsibilities, even ones they could more easily shirk without cultural condemnation.
I don’t think that this is a very healthy way to operate; just that anyone who wishes to squeeze as many hours out of the human resources as possible is almost certainly correct in believing that they can do that more easily with men.
It’s interesting how even in our quite progressive neighbourhood, things change slowly.
A few years ago, I overheard a conversation between three young mothers while taking my son to school. One mentioned a how nice it was that a classmate was taken to school by their father each day. The second mother was obviously pleased for the classmate’s mother, but pointed out in this day and age it shouldn’t that big a deal.
Then third mother chipped in.
“Actually, it’s not good news.”
“What do you mean?”
“He picks up Andrew after school as well…”
There was a moment of realization from the other two (and from me).
“Oh no… That’s so sad for her…”
I’ll admit I lost the rest of the conversation, as I froze in shock that I could be hearing this in the 2000’s in my neighbourhood. The idea that this could be a voluntary arrangement never even crossed their minds.
I was a bit disconsolate for a few minutes, but then my children needed to be eaten, so I changed into a werewolf and chased them the rest of the way to school.
I think people in my kids’ schools are pretty good, but I’ve noticed that a few parents or teachers seem to see fathers as the second best parent - it’s nice that we’re helping out, but you don’t want to give us too much responsibility. Most teachers interact with both of us very easily, but one or two will wait for a day when my wife picks the kids up if they want to talk about something important.
At 8 and under, it’s still fine. Most kids thrive at that age knowing that their parent(s) think the world of them. But if she’s still acting that way when they’re 14 and above, well, yeah, it’s time for a talk.
Actually, some research suggests that being gay may be part of that. Apparently there is a much greater likelihood for a second or third son to be born gay, rather than the first. Which means there’d be an extra uncle working for the family clan without being encumbered by having his own children to put first (evolutionarily speaking, obviously).
