Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Unless or until Wood or someone else manages to "prove that an act of
parenting had an effect x years down the line", why should we fear the
results of parenting styles that differ from our own?
  

    <scribbled by dfowlkes Tue 3 Jul 12 10:14>
  

    
jennifer, i had many many hours of interviews with jeffrey wood, the
best of the material appearing in the book. you are just haggling over
journalese, the way researchers cover themselves in print, at the end
of an article. he wouldn't devote his career to studying the phenomenon
if he didn't think it had an effect. 
  

    
Hara, in <212> you said "no one can ever prove that an act of
parenting had an effect x years down the line."  You are a journalist
and therefore may be presumed to be speaking journalese, but Woods is a
professor of education.  His words came from a proposal for a clinical
trial, earlier this year.

Why should we fear parenting styles that differ from our own?
  

    
Also, why should journalists or researchers need to cover themselves,
provided they are not making false or unprovable allegations?
  

    
articles always end in a bunch of disclaimers. that's the convention.
one always leaves open the door to other possibilities, in words. 

yes, as i said, this is ongoing life. it is a river, a rushing river
with many influences. in the very strict sense of the term cause and
effect, no one can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that one act had an
effect. but people don't spend their lives studying these causes
unless they are gathering substantial evidence of effects. perhaps you
are unfamiliar with the research literature on how researchers word
their cautions at the end of articles. 
  

    
As a member of the educated classes, I am familiar with the
conventions you describe.  Those cautions are not, or at least should
not be, mere window dressing.  They exist precisely to keep the door
open to other possibilities, to prevent judgment from clouding
perception.
  

    
Words without meaning are salad or lies.
  

    

Perhaps you should go back and re-read some of your previous oversimplistic
blanket assertions here with some of this in mind.

Mote, beam, etc..
  

    
Which assertions did you have in mind?
  

    

Your responses #108 and #109 to Hara's #107, where you asserted that rural
kids, while retaining freedom from overprotection somehow lacked
opportunities that would prepare them to "fuel national culture."  (whatever
on Earth that phrase is supposed to mean - it appears rather broad and
undefined, let alone unsupportable).

You also ventured off on an assertion that "milking cows" somehow precluded
having the necessary time "to bury one's nose in books or computers for
fun."

Such overly broad, unsupportable, and unfalsifiable assertions bring to mind
the remark of physicist Wolfgang Pauli when he said, "That's not right. It's
not even wrong."
  

    
Thank you for directing me to the posts in question.  I did not,
however, say that milking cows "somehow precluded having the necessary
time" for leisure pursuits.  Here is what I said:

"Children get less exercise in school and less time to play at home in
part because there's so much work to be done, and it rarely involves
walking to the barn and milking cows.  The kids who are milking have
less time to run around loose or bury their noses in books or computers
for fun.  Even rural schools have to stick to the curriculum, which is
now structured around the need to produce ever-higher test scores."

I spoke of fueling national culture in reference to Hara's words in
<80>:

"It's not so much the numbers as that it afflicts the segment of
society that generally fuels the culture."

She explained her meaning in more detail in <89>:

"It's not college kids who are the driving force in the culture; it's
the educated classes. By and large, they are the ones who become our
leaders, run our companies, conduct our science, write our books, make
the laws, become our inventors."

Finally, in <194> I reconsidered my assertions regarding rural
opportunities in light of what you had to say.  I continued my
reconsideration in <197>.  It's how I got to my present point.  
  

    
One rarely-discussed effect of early drinking is the lowering of
inhibition such that kids engage in sexual activity they might not
have, otherwise. 

I guess that shouldn't surprise anyone who's seen the way adults act
when they mix alcohol and sexual possibility, but it is a significant
health concern- at least among advocates for teens.
  

    
Doesn't sound like there are too many wimps in this "discussion."  

What shall we attribute it to?  Parenting, the collective
pre-electronic cocooning enculturation process, or statistical anomaly?
  

    
I don't know about anyone else here, but I qualify as a "wimp" by
Hara's definition, on the basis of having been diagnosed and medicated
for depression, a well-known form of psychological fragility.
  

    
jennifer, i'm not sure why you are so hostile and so given to
misconstruing information and taking personal offense where no one is
even remotely discussing you. there are many paths to depression. the
path i specifically and exclusively discuss in the book is the one
where, thru lack of coping skills, because overprotective parenting has
kept them from various  kind of experience, kids are easily
overwhelmed by the slightest adversity and thus become depressed. or
anxious. 

your depression is your business. it's not under discussion
  

    
Hara, do you have insight into who buys your books?  Is "A Nation of
Wimps" being purchased by parents, primarily, or is the audience
turning out to be more mixed?

I ask because I'm not a parent, and I've found some of the comments in
this discussion to be quite interesting in terms of thinking about
different styles of coping among adults.

Do you ever get other than anecdotal feedback on who reads a book?
  

    
well, i hope that styles of coping have universal applicability. one
is lucky to get feedback about who is buying any book, and yes, i've
been getting some (emphasis on some) feedback. it's strictly anecdotal
and nowhere near a complete picture of who reads the book. so who's
buying it? i hope mainly parents. but i know many educators, teachers
and school administrators (again, at every level) are reading it and
talking about it. another constituency is athletic coaches and people
who deal with kids and interfering parents on a daily basis, from the
college level on down. i know this because many of each group have
contact me directly to thank me or ask me to come speak in their
community. i've gotten letters from doctors who are themselves parents
but who bought it because they saw a patient reading it and were
intrigued. 

writers really are lucky to get any direct feedback from readers, and
we treasure it. but it's the best way we have of knowing who is
interested enough to buy and why. 

my previous book was on kids' social development. it was published ten
years ago. over the  years i've gotten a number of letters and emails
from adults who told me how the book changed their life and gave them
social skills and the ability to handle themselves that they never got
anywhere else. go figure. someone even sent me a picture of him
much-underlined, dog-eared copy of the book. 
  

    
Hara, about a year ago, we hosted Jonathon Simon, author of "Governing
Through Crime".  He discussed how the *idea* of potential crime has been
directing our governance for over 2 decades.  While involved in that
conversation, I thought that crime was also directing many parenting styles.
 There is no real question here, but you might be interested in his book (or
the topic here in Inkwell.vue).  The general idea being, since crime may
happen, we have to legislate against it before it does.  Very simplified,
but that's the general idea. Again, it's the fear that's directing rather
than anything else.
  

    
well, on the face of, there is a big fallacy in legislating against
crime before it happens. like life itself, crime evolves. the kinds of
crimes possible evolve. otherwise we would have disbanded legislatures
eons ago. you'd be pretty damn prescient if you legislated against all
possible crime now and forever. it's a mistaken approach to human
behavior. humans are clever and sometimes devious, and someone will
always want to get away with something. to live in perpetual fear of
that happening is just a vast waste of human energy.
  

    
I thought you'd all appreciate this tidbit of news. A study conducted
by USC's Marshall School of Business has just reported low and
increasingly low levels of job satisfaction among those professionals
25 and under...that is, the the kids i'm writing about. It seems their
expectations are out of line. Their productivity, their commitment, and
retention rates are tanking. They're disengaged. Until now, they were
a problem for the educational system. Now they're beginning to be a
problem for the whole economy.
  

    
Here's another "protective mom" story for your collection: In the fall, I
take my apple cider press with a couple of dozen others to a community
festival. They used to encourage people to bring their backyard apples, but
now it's limited to apples for sale (due to insurance concerns about e
coli).

So people get their apples, and come to a press where they get to throw the
fruit in the hopper and turn the crank until juice comes flowing out. Part
of the tradition is that the youngest person at the party gets the first
taste of juice, so I would always fill a cup from the press and giveit to
the youngest child. This is often the first time they ever associated apples
with "apple juice." The parents and grndparents are generally pleased that
the little kid is recognized by the Apple Press Guy.

So here's the next group, a mom and two kids under six. Throw in the fruit,
turn the crank, here comes the juice. I start to hand it to the younger
child, but mom says no. "I have to take it home and boil it before I would
let them have any of that juice."

Ho-KAAY... we've pressed hundreds of gallons of juice today, and fed it to
dozens of children and adults, right off the press. You saw that we washed
thee apples before we used them. But your kid is so fragile that you have to
boil the juice first. Thanks for coming. Who's next?
  

    
john, it makes you wonder how anyone ever survived to this highly
enlightened age of uber-sanitization. the distrust at every turn is
amazing. distrust of nature. distrust of the child's ability to cope
with the world straight on. gawd, i hope next year you won't have be
certified and indemnified to run the apple press.

and imagine...if there are dangers lurking in fresh-pressed apple
juice...IMAGINE the dangers lurking Out There.
  

    

Just Another Data Point:  I recently got a juicer and went to town 
concocting delicious juice drinks.  The only problem was that the juice, 
no matter what kind, gave me terrible gas.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine who said that the solution is to boil
the juice.  Which seems to defeat the whole purpose, but that could be
another explanation for the woman's reaction.  Unless, of course, she
specifically said it was fear of germs.
  

    
Hara, I have questioned the quality of your research and reasoning.  I
have challenged the ethics of your methods: name-calling, blaming, and
shaming those who differ from you.  Is that what you mean by hostile?

What information have I misconstrued?

I am being discussed.  I'm a homeschooling SAHM of diagnosed and
medicated children, who appear normal and healthy but suffer from
anxiety and difficulties with gestalt thinking, necessitating IEPs with
extensive accommodations, including extra time on tests.  Along with
every other mother of special needs kids I know, I have been deemed
overprotective, intrusive, and invasive by some.

My comment about my own depression was flippant, however, meant to be
a playful response to Scott's previous post.  I'm not actually troubled
by it, as I'm lucky enough to respond well to medication and don't
feel there's anything shameful about it.  And I'm the daughter of a man
who used to proclaim it was his mission to restore the cult of the
effete intellectual ass, so I'm happy enough to use the shorthand
"wimp" in reference to myself.

For some reason, though, it gets my back up when folks call my kids by
that name.  Also, I am sick nigh unto everlasting death of being
judged every time I go out with one of them.  It makes me want to
invest all my money in Botox, acquire a mirrored shield like Perseus
carried when he went to pay a call on Medusa, and take my cherubs on a
tour of urban and suburban, middle and upper class neighborhoods, so I
can ensure a future of material independence for them, in a society
that appears to value material independence over every other virtue.

The ghost of Bettelheim lives on, flipped on its head: you might just
as well call it Oven Mother Syndrome.