"They said they were sending over an Asian woman"

Amy Chua's article about "Chinese" parenting - aka immigrant parenting, aka Jewish parenting, aka none of that wishy-washy multiple-intelligences, I-just-want-you-to-be-happy nonsense - is the buzz of the day. (Miss Self-Important, among others, beat me to it. But I had to go out for a sugar brioche before finishing this post. I'm a fourth-generation American, I have my priorities.) 

Mostly, the novelty of the piece is that we're accustomed to this cliché being torn apart - as MSI notes, we can anticipate a not-all-Chinese-are-the-same reaction. And here's a real Asian-American perpetuating the stereotype! To Chua's credit, she explains that by "Chinese" she means a certain parenting style by no means exclusive to Chinese or even Asian parents.

But even if we accept that there are different parenting styles in different cultures, there are a few confusing elements in the piece. One is that Chua speaks as though she raised her children the Chinese way, yet mentions a "Western" husband. Is part of Chinese parenting treating the non-Chinese parent like a child, thus ignoring his wishes in terms of how to raise the kids? Another, which Isabel Archer points out, is that "Chinese parents," according to Chua, do not permit their children to act in school plays. Why would this, of all endeavors, be deemed a waste of time? Jewish parents - or, really, "Jewish parents," - classically tell their kids not to be on sports teams. While this is counterproductive in a world of "holistic" college admissions, it's at least consistent with the notion of academic success before all else, whereas further exposure to literature and memorization couldn't hurt. I suspect, however, that the theater thing is particular to the author. Finally, there's this: "Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, 'Hey fatty—lose some weight.'" One might react to this in the Jezebel manner, in horror, but Chua's point is that Chinese parents don't care about self-esteem. Fair enough, but it's legitimate to ask why it matters if the A student - male or female - is overweight. The girl's not allowed to date anyway, and is not on her way to becoming an actress. Is it that heft is a sign of Westernness, of assimilation, of having cut class to go to McDonalds?  

My authoritah here comes from a) my own upbringing, which had elements of "Western" and "Chinese" traditions, and b) my having gone to a high school - the high school - where the successful children of "Chinese parents" end up. On the one hand, the fact that there were (and are, but I was class of 2001 and speak anecdotally) so many Asian and Asian-American students at Stuyvesant in the first place meant the parents were doing something right. On the other, at a school so heavily Asian and Jewish, the B-and-below students were Asian and Jewish. The potheads, or the kids whose smoking may not have extended beyond tobacco but who at any rate cut class to hang around outside: also the offspring of "Chinese parents." The slackers, as well as the just mediocre, were the product of families that would, if Chua is to be believed, accept nothing less than an A. It could be that even the "worst" of these kids ended up better off than the average NYC students. But the article left the impression that your child, too, can be permanently obedient, permanently valedictorian. As MSI puts it, "The real question is, how did Amy Chua get her children to obey?"

Point being, the "Chinese" method makes for a lot of good little 10-year-olds, but guarantees little once mainstream culture becomes readily accessible. Where Portnoy went nuts with the "shiksas," consider a "Chinese-parented" classmate of mine who apparently arrived at math camp only to discover that the dorm had a TV and to park herself in front of that long-forbidden fruit. This is, in other words, a parenting style that only works in a very particular situation. If everyone's "Chinese," someone has to be the B- student. Meanwhile, even if the obedient behavior sticks and the kid gets into a good college, a given family can only stay "Chinese" for so many generations. 

Meanwhile, in the towns and villages of America and beyond, just as some kids randomly turn out to be gay, others randomly turn out to be incredible students. Not children of neglect, but not children raised to excel at all costs, whose success isn't tied to obedience. In cities and suburbs, well-connected parents manage to pass their careers down to the next generation, keeping out the "Chinese." Parents can only do so much. 

This isn't to say they shouldn't try, and I do think that in America, too much emphasis is placed on the 'A' as the result of innate intelligence and thus not worth working for. Chua has a point here: "What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences." Some children do want to work - remember Saffy and Edina? - but this strikes me as true as a rule.

My question, then, is about what results Chua promises, and to what end. Non-bratty children? That much seems doable. Children capable of supporting themselves as adults? B-students, too, manage just fine. Superstar geniuses? Unlikely. But is the point social mobility? Probably not, because unless they're actually struggling immigrants (less likely to read articles like this one), or single mothers prior to women entering the professions (not likely to exist in the US in 2011), the parents who'd parent in this way would have already reached professional heights themselves. So is it just about not letting one's own children regress to the mean? If so, I see how there'd be an audience, but it hardly seems a cause we as a society should support - why not let the mediocre children of the high-achieving fall behind and leave spots for the high-achieving children of the mediocre? The only way it kind of makes sense is from an international-competition angle. American parents, man up! Because "Western" is really "American" - Western Europeans are not, to my knowledge, exposed to the culture of holistic self-esteem.

Judging a book by its coverage UPDATED

This afternoon, cheapness demanded that I return a 25-euro water-heater to Monoprix, then go a few blocks out of my way to Carrefour, where store-brand seltzer is cheaper than Badoit, the best option at Franprix. Accompanying me on this journey was none other than Amy Chua* - her interview on the Leonard Lopate show, that is. And, having heard her speak for herself, I must say I'm... a whole lot less sympathetic than I was after reading the WSJ excerpt. (Before proceeding, I should ask PG, does Chua claim this interview was also unfairly edited?)

Anyway. In the interview, Chua refers to her book - her own book - as both "complex" and "funny." These are not claims one is allowed to make about one's own writing. One can say a book was intended as humorous. Not that it is funny, but that some readers just don't get it. She also said it's about how her then-13-year-old daughter taught her "humility." Hmm.

Yes, the message comes across that didn't in the WSJ, that the book is a memoir and not a parenting guide, and that she learns at the end... not exactly that the "Chinese" method is wrong (and indeed, she quite vehemently defends the most outrageous WSJ-excerpted examples in the interview), but that it's not perfect. The nuance, lesson-learned angle feels artificial, externally or editorially imposed, and not consistent with what Chua really believes, which is perhaps (if the book in its entirety is what Chua said it is in this interview, and no I'm not having it shipped to me in France to find out) why the WSJ chose to ignore that bit. She seems to want it both ways - to admonish the parents of "Western" brats, while claiming to have written a book that does no such thing.

It gets more confusing. After she'd explained that "Chinese" means "immigrant," Lopate mentions that he lived for a long time in NY's Chinatown - a Chinese and immigrant neighborhood, if the name wasn't enough of a giveaway - and that the "Western" plagues of teen pregnancy and drug abuse were plenty common. At which point, more clarification: the "immigrants" she refers to are those who come to the US as graduate students or skilled workers. Well, in that case. Of course such individuals would be high-achieving themselves, and produce above-average achieving offspring. (I'm tempted to suggest to my boyfriend's mother that she write a parenting memoir about how to produce an astrophysicist, the Flemish way. With recipes, for sure, because good food is part of it, and because that would probably sell more books.)

But if this story continues to fascinate me, it's not because of the parenting angle, but because of the questions it poses about the control an author should have over a book's reception, particularly if that book is a memoir. If this interview I just listened to made me less sympathetic, less sympathetic to what? The book? Chua-as-a-person? The phenomenon, I suppose...

With books generally, does an author have the right (right as in reasonable expectation, not First Amendment) to expect all who judge to have read the thing? As a rule, yes - thus the whole thing about not judging books by their covers - but does this change if the author has publicized it like crazy, published an excerpt as an article, taken high-profile interviews, and otherwise made sure that those who haven't read the book have plenty of material to work with? Hype may sell books, but taken to a certain level, it absolves would-be readers of the responsibility for having consumed any one particular text of the many claiming to represent the phenomenon.

And, more specifically, do memoirists have the right to ask that their fans take what they say as truth, but that their detractors not judge them as people for what is, after all, only a sliver - and an externally-edited one at that - of their true selves? Believing it's "real," the true account of a real human being, is fine and well when the response is favorable, but feels mean-spirited if unfavorable. How dare anyone - readers of the excerpt, the book, or any other installment of this multimedia extravaganza - judge Chua as a person? This phenomenon is especially true of the online overshare, but in an age when comments sections can overflow with what are ostensibly responses to a memoir, the line is blurry.

*I realize that everything anyone writes about Chua as of a week ago is "the last thing" they have to say on something that's already "so yesterday." But the discussion continues, who are we kidding? Not over till it's over.

UPDATE

I think there's a new First World Problem come out of this: Life is so tough, my Style-Section-ready upper-middle-class Ivy-league-seal-of-approval lifestyle book is so popular that people won't stop talking about it and buying copies.

In reluctant defense of (reading the book of) Amy Chua

PG and I have, like everyone else, been having a debate about Amy Chua's book. Since neither of us has read it (in its entirety, at least), I was beginning to think we'd discussed it from almost every possible other angle, and thus reached a dead end.

Not so! Yesterday I listened to the Slate Audio Book Club on Chua (which, incidentally, I recommend to even those considering reading the book - it's not as if there are "spoilers" at this point - but which made me more curious to read the book), and judging by the response of some intelligent people who apparently read it cover to cover... PG and I were both right. One of the participants said the coverage misses the third half (UPDATE not half, part - thanks for noticing this to my own mother, yes I catch the irony given the topic of this post) of the book, and they all agreed that the buzz =/= what's actually in the book. Points for PG. However, one (possibly the same) participant also pointed out that the way she can tell that the people holding forth on the book haven't read it is that they actually leave out some of the more outrageous things in it (the relationship with the permissive Jewish relatives, esp mother-in-law, apparently). Rather than making just them more sympathetic to Chua, reading the whole darn thing made the participants unsympathetic in new ways as well. And it doesn't appear that consuming the this-is-not-a-parenting-guide disclaimer, or the entire "narrative arc" culminating in an I-was-wrong, makes a reader not take away from the book that they should maybe question their own lax parenting style. (One participant mentions making her son practice the drums longer, and taking a more active role in her son's - another son's? - swimming lessons.) But at least someone at Slate thinks the book was a success as a memoir (they all agree it's a memoir), so PG, you win this round. If I were pre-enlightenment Amy Chua's daughter, I'd be punished accordingly for taking second place.

What I thought was most compelling in the podcast, that hasn't come up much in the discussion overall, was the question of what it means for someone who's essentially a mainstream, high-achieving, well-connected, elite American to adopt what is essentially an immigrant attitude to parenting. In other words, that this isn't a memoir about immigrant parenting or elite parenting, but about the unusual choice of elite parents (or one elite mother, if only for a time) to create an artificial sense for their children that the world will end if they don't get all A's. This interests me on a personal level both as someone raised in a family that's perpetuated some "immigrant" ways (though nothing as out-there as the WSJ excerpt) well beyond any actual immigrant generation, and as someone who for entirely particular reasons rarely experiences a moment of bourgeois everything-will-be-OK. (Yes, I opted for humanities grad school, but when I started, it was with plans B, C, and D in the back of my mind, never anything about how I could take some time off to find myself if it didn't work out.)

On a general level, though, what matters is the question of regression to the mean, something I alluded to in my first post on this, but that seemed more central after hearing the Slate folks discuss. One of the participants phrased it as, Chua didn't need to go the immigrant-parent route, because her children already had all the privileges that come with being the children of two Yale law profs/public intellectuals, in a milieu of immense intellectual and not insubstantial material advantage. But that's not how it works! Privilege of this nature does not guarantee one's children will be successful, only that if they're not, this is highly embarrassing for everyone involved - the parents who believe in meritocracy who must now confront that their children are not so great after all, and the children who've been schooled in how unjust of a society we're living in, who know they have it good, and who've still failed to make anything of themselves. If Chua hadn't cracked the metaphorical whip (or literal? why I do need to read the thing...) maybe her daughters would be trying to find creative ways not to let on how successful their parents were, so as not to attract unfavorable comparisons.

The draw of the book, then, is precisely the fact that even the most successful "Western" parents can't rely on good schools and their general educatedness if they want their children doing at least as well as they did. That it is the end of the world, in its way, if generation after generation slides in the US News and World Report ranking of its alma mater. Chua's originality is in finding a way to address this that isn't coming out and saying, damned if my kid doesn't go to Harvard. No, it's about having a work ethic, about things that are only fun when you've worked at them, about honoring immigrant forbearers or Asian traditions or who knows. Whatever it is, it's not crass, it's not about brand names. She's offering an alternative to the multiple-intelligences, well-roundedness excuses parents give (and provide themselves) for their kids' academic mediocrity, a respectable way to subtly make sure your children don't go to their safety schools. She's telling them not necessarily that it's possible to make every child an academic success, but that it's OK to care not only if one's child is happy, but if the family's place in a certain elite is secure for one more generation.

Moving on up, moving on down

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Amy Chua-fest was about regression to the mean, aka the fact that sometimes kids with all the privilege in the world still don't get into the Ivies. We-as-a-society are accustomed to discussions of how unfair it is that smart and hard-working kids without all the privilege in the world are held back, but we're not sure what to make of the reverse phenomenon.

This is a problem, of course, primarily for the kids in question and their parents, parents who believe in social mobility through education, who are themselves its beneficiaries, but who now have to contend with the fact that their children, however wonderful, are not certified wonderful by the relevant authorities.

Chua's contribution, "Chua" defined as an amalgam of the phenomenon as understood by those who did and did not read the whole thing, was to say a) that it's OK to want certified-wonderful offspring, and b) that amorphous, milieu-propelled, 'privilege' alone is not enough to get them there. Oh, and c) that, absent the kind of obstacles that the kids we generally think of as less privileged (more specifically, children of immigrant families) experience, young people have no drive to succeed, so if you want your privileged kids to stay that way, you have to create an artificial atmosphere of absence-of-privilege. Not just stuff like, no designer handbags in 8th grade, but more like, if you get a B, you will starve to death in the gutter. Basically, Chua's innovation was rethinking the concept of privilege, both in terms of declaring it acceptable to perpetuate hard-won high-status, and in terms of pointing out that we-as-a-society overestimate the extent to which simply having educated and well-off parents guarantees class maintenance across generations. To put it another way, aka to repeat myself, we're used to thinking of social mobility in terms of its inadequacy as a way of propelling people upward; she's reminding us that it functions decently well in propelling some downward.

The rest, as I see it, is secondary. The 'Asian vs. Western' bit; the question of whether one can, in fact, get a good education at a school that isn't Harvard (was this ever in doubt? was 'a good education' ever the issue?); whether 'success' means Harvard or Stanford and Berkeley too; how to foster a child's creativity or individuality or whatever... none of this is what made Chua's... phenomenon any different. Which is why Caitlin Flanagan has, I think, missed its significance. The "good mothers" she postulates hover in this on-the-one-hand, on-the-other sphere of wanting their children to Find Themselves, yet to end up at Ivies all the same. There is this paradox, fine, but the paradox that matters is the broader one: they want the Ivies to be meritocracies, but they want to make sure their own offspring get ahead.

Meanwhile, Flavia's suggestion, that parents encourage their kids along the way, but not in any definitive direction, "then see who your child is, and what she can do, and recalibrate," strikes me as altogether reasonable, but fails to address the anxieties that drove the wave of Chua-fixation. (Not that Flavia claims to be addressing Chua-fixation.) Chuaism is about making sure your children remain in the same class, about pushing them beyond what's needed to be in that class, just to be extra sure, and in order to make sure they do the same with their kids. It's not about producing children who are, god forbid, well-suited to the work they end up doing.

I, for one, think Flaviaism is more reasonable - why focus on class maintenance, when having wealthy offspring is no guarantee they'll be amazing let alone nearby when you're old? Unless you believe in an afterlife during which you'll be able to bask in the glory of your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren's i-banking careers, when it ends, it ends. But if you're losing sleep over the possibility that future beings with your DNA will worry about where the next meal is coming from, you're better off advocating for more socialism - or better yet, moving to a country where that's a done deal - than banking on your descendants being smarter, luckier, and more hard-working than most. Sort of like, as I've also said before, if your number one concern in life is that your offspring marry fellow Jews, you're better off moving to Israel than exerting pressure on them as individuals, when it could well be that they'll obey, but their kids won't.

But Chuaism isn't about reasonable. It isn't about looking at what it's supposed to matter if in 2150, people with your last name are lawyers or janitors. It's about taking whatever twinge of paternal angst compels parents to find it mildly tragic when their children, however happy, fail to be certified as wonderful, and rather than suppressing it, as is reasonable, making that the focal point of parenting.

Amy Chua Amy Chua Amy Chua UPDATED

The NYT is on the case. Judith Warner, Room for Debate, Motherlode, Fashion & Style. This woman, who will teach you how to raise show poodles, is everywhere. This is her moment! How kind of her to agree, "between what she called a '24/7' effort to 'clarify some misunderstandings,'" to give a phone interview to the Times. As though that wasn't a key part of said effort. Anyway.

I have not, I confess, combed through all of this. Doing so - comments included! - will be my reward for getting through a substantial to-do list after arriving in Paris. But I did appreciate this, from Warner: "simply by marrying a Jew, and not a Chinese man, she [Amy Chua, remember her?] worries that she is 'letting down 4,000 years of civilization.'"

Given how much emphasis many American Jews place on intermarriage as a Jewish issue, as though Jews are the only ones whose culture is worth honoring, and as though any non-Jewish partner is by definition a hearty Protestant Nebraskan or a New England WASP, or at any rate, an unhyphenated American, because really, isn't the world divided between Jews and the whites who inspire Ralph Lauren?, it's amusing to be presented with the other side of a scenario that we all know exists: minority-minority intermarriage.

UPDATE

How is an American Jewish mother that much more "Western" than an Asian-American one? I had more thoughts on this before a heck of a trip, and so will maybe muse on this later, but didn't intend to take the post down, just to update.

That's personal! UPDATED

As someone who writes in the first person on this here blog, and who often finds herself writing about other such writing, I've often thought and sometimes written about how one approaches this genre/this set of genres. By "genre(s)" I mean everything from "overshare" essays about love life, body image, etc., to articles or blog posts that mix a personal story with one of broader significance (think Amy Chua on parenting, Allison Benedikt on Zionism, or, indeed the Drezner's tenure tale, to give just three recent examples that have come up on WWPD). The authors/bloggers in question might be people somewhat in the public eye - that is, writers/academics/bloggers with readers outside their immediate families - but are not sufficiently famous/glamorous that strangers would be giving the slightest thought to their personal lives if they hadn't put it out there. So a Kissinger or Britney autobiography doesn't count, but a Park Slope parenting tell-all by someone well-known in sustainable-food circles does. (I.e. not people who would make it into this amazing/upsetting German celebrity magazine that's all about famous people whose bathing suits don't fit properly. Amy Winehouse's bikini top needed some serious adjusting, as did Kate Moss's bikini bottom. This is what's on the cover of the magazine, in the checkout area along with the tobacco and hard liquor selection. No Whole Foods, this Rewe.)

If you're writing one about yourself:

-Be clear with yourself (and, if relevant to what you're writing about, your loved ones) where you draw the line. Dan Savage, for example, talks about oh just about everything (note the "tail" query in a recent podcast), but not his sex life with his husband. First-person, personal-issues-topic, tone of openness, none of this requires actually spilling all. Where you draw the line is sometimes best not to spell out for readers, because this is information in and of itself that curious sorts will extrapolate from. But, as with Savage, sometimes common sense supports a decision, and there's no harm in stating it outright.

-Remember that the "you" your readers are getting is one based purely on the text provided, and others provided previously. If you hint at your husband being a tyrant (Benedikt), or a pushover (Chua), readers will round up. And you don't get to complain about this, because they didn't just randomly pick you out of a crowd and decide to discuss your marriage. You put it out there. Remember that however harsh the criticism, it's not you-you being criticized, so even if you end up learning valuable things about yourself, you don't have to take this personally. It's not your marriage in its entirety. Its the tiny glimpse offered by a couple of anecdotes.

UPDATE (and expect more such updates):

-Your children are yours to raise. They're not yours to write about. I know I'm repeating myself, so I won't restate all the arguments here, but this really does belong in the official WWPD guide to writing and writing about personal essays, as PG's comment below inadvertently reminded me. Kids who are under your roof, especially, are not in a position to consent to being written about, so even if they were totally OK with it, what would that even mean? In this Facebook age, no one has much of a right to reinvention anymore, with all those friends from middle school virtually present at all times. But at least leave the potentially humiliating anecdotes of childhood to the children who've lived them, to retell years later if they so choose.

If you, the parent, believe what you need to say about parenting is really that important, find some way of doing so that in no way implicates your own, identifiable, real-life children, and sorry but yes, they're still identifiable even if you're a woman who kept her name, and their last name is that of their father. Write about Parenting, not your parenting, because your parenting is also their upbringing, and what if they, unlike you, never become big-deal writers/bloggers with an audience? Or better yet, write fiction, and even if some readers suspect resemblance to truth, you've probably mixed things up a bit, right?, and even if you've used their real names (which I wouldn't advise), it's not really about them.

Caveat: This doesn't carry over to if the personal writing is about having a child with severe mental retardation or severe autism, or worse (and yes, I'm thinking of this essay). In such cases, a) the chances that the child will read or write about his own childhood are slim to none, and b) this kind of writing could be immensely helpful to other parents going through the same thing, canceling out any remaining ickiness about discussing the private moments of a real-life person who can't give consent to being written about, or about the possible necessity of mentioning the siblings' childhoods as well. But if the issue is, your 12-year-old is begging for designer jeans, your 16-year-old keeps flubbing the PSAT, your charmingly articulate four-year-old's fixated on scat, this is not for you to report to all. If you need reassurance in these non-tragic matters, some combination of general-terms writing, fiction-writing, and private conversation with other parents about raising kids will have to suffice.

If you want to criticize one:

-Don't even begin if the person who wrote the thing is, say, your boss, your best friend's girlfriend, your neighbor with whom you share childcare duties. The recipient will take personally criticisms of personal writing, even if in an ideal world that would not be the case, so there will be real-life consequences. But even then, it's tough to criticize the personal writing of someone you know well or have strong feelings about, because that background is coloring everything you think about some measly 800 words.

-So, assuming the author is a relative stranger, or the kind of personal essay/opinion writer who actively invites criticism of his work, stick with the text(s) provided. If it's in there, it's fair game.

-Do not throw in personal details about the author beyond what's provided in the article/post or in other articles/posts by the same person. This goes both for if you're critiquing the writing of an acquaintance about whom you know details beyond what's provided, and for if you're improvising your own assumptions via speculation. Both are irritating, because there's no way to refute arguments that are based on personal details above and beyond what you're willing to provide publicly. As in: it's fair game to point out that someone hurling a YPIS ("your privilege is showing") is himself a graduate of Andover, if this is in some public bio of the individual. It's not fair game to be like, 'and at Andover, he always made a big deal about how his pink polos were Lacoste,' or, 'his parents so obviously could pay the full tuition, no way was he on scholarship.' It might be awfully tempting, but don't.

If you want to defend one:

-Don't say that all criticism of the piece is inherently unfair, because it's just one person's personal experience and don't judge, etc., etc. Writing for an audience, even writing in the first person, doesn't get a pass wrt being judged. Because, as noted above, it's not the writer-as-person who's being judged, but the persona as he comes across in the piece of writing.

-By all means include that disclaimer about being friends with the author, and defend your friends when you think they've been misunderstood, but don't then expect readers who know neither of you to find this persuasive.

There's probably a good bit more that could be added, so consider this a proto-guide at best.

The week, it ended

-Parchment-paper fish (cod fillet, in this case, with lemon, garlic, olive oil, dried thyme, salt, pepper) really is better. Whole fish is probably better still, but I cling to some shortcuts.

-Obedience class for dogs probably falls into the category of, humanity did just fine without it (if your dog isn't aggressive, and is affectionate with you, and knows the basic commands...), but it can't hurt. But a line must be drawn, and that will probably be at the extra $10 the trainer suggests we spend each week on some kind of "adolescent-dog" meet-up. The whole point of the class was to socialize our dog. That plus what occurs without special planning (today, she met a Westie, and might have met two supermodel Golden Retrievers, if their owner hadn't turned away; there are owners of a Yorkie who sometimes want it to meet Bisou, sometimes just need to go about their business) seems as though it ought to be enough, but if she doesn't get enough socialization, it seems, disaster might ensue. The slight problem is that she was super friendly to the trainer, and has taken to kissing the one friend of ours who'd initially, and for no real reason, frightened her. The techniques are quite useful, especially the tip about needing to "run" a dog, because walks are as good as useless as exercise to prevent naughtiness later. But I'm having trouble believing that our dog is as neurotic as all that.

"I'm like a mix of Alvy Singer and Alex Portnoy, with some George Costanza thrown in."

-But Bisou does still need walking, and that Irin Carmon - Caitlin Flanagan interview was pretty amazing. (Amber, if you haven't listened already...) It brings up so many questions. For one, why did Flanagan think "Irina" was there to represent The Youth, and not as a prolific, Harvard-educated journalist there to discuss Flanagan's recently-published book about today's young girls? Why should we care if Carmon - who does not seem to be at all of the demographic social conservatives claim was destroyed by the sexual revolution - had a high school sweetheart? "Creepy condescension" indeed.

But on a more practical level, how on earth could Carmon, 28, be expected to scour her own life story for meaningful information about Girls Today? Flanagan's idée fixe - well, aside from early-adolescent fellatio - is the great danger of Internet infiltrating the haven that is the adolescent girl's bedroom. If you're 28 now, if you had any Internet in your bedroom as a youth, it might have sounded something like this. Speaking on behalf of first-world 28-year-olds, I don't even remember if there was an Internet connection in my bedroom - a computer, yes, but if there had been Internet, I wouldn't have had any idea what to do with it.

I know that we're supposed to say, of Flanagan generally and this installment in particular, that she hits a nerve. I mean, maybe? If I'm going to rate controversial books about female adolescence that I've never read, I'm putting Amy "Tiger Mom" Chua's far, far above this, both because at least that was something new ("the hook-up culture," in 2012, really?), and because as someone who was too nerdy at 15 or whatever for either the sweethearts Flanagan advocates or the hook-up culture she denounces, with what Chua describes, I can on some level relate.

-Princeton has a Trader Joe's, but this is not something the shuttle route yet acknowledges, so it was only because we had a car for the obedience class that, after dropping of Bisou, we were able to investigate. This was not a store I'd been all that impressed by in NY. Everyone would always rave about it, and I saw the advantages, as a grad student, when it came to wine, but for the rest? If I wanted a store brand, why not 365, plus produce, at Whole Foods? Then we got the chips and salsa from "Trader José." The store now suddenly makes sense. It's everything you would want to buy at a normal supermarket, minus the excess. It takes a realist approach, doesn't fool around. Much smaller than Wegman's, so less selection, but also less time at the store. As 90% of this shuttle's ridership, I'm thinking of lobbying for an extra stop.

Every possible advantage

The letter Flavia responds to here stuck out to me when I saw it in the NYT as well, although my own reaction to it was more fish, barrel. A more intelligent/successful/tuned-in child of that level of privilege (significant but not extreme, straightforwardly-UMC) would never write a letter like that, would be well aware that having parents who can and will pay in fact does make it easier to get into college, that 1300 on the SATs is not the achievement of the millenium, and that, if you've got three elite colleges and universities on your resume, the System hasn't exactly screwed you over. It is precisely the forms of privilege the letter-writer lacks - the ability to do well enough to get a spot regardless of affirmative action, the noblesse oblige or whatever we're calling manners it takes to not complain in this way, the self-awareness necessary to realize that if you've since been at UPenn and Oxford, maybe you don't want to draw attention to your high-school era mediocrity-despite-privilege (let alone to your continued preoccupation with this sort of ancient history) in a national publication - that makes her such an easy target. Nobody likes entitled.

After reading the interested thread at Flavia's, however, I'm moved to respond to a few aspects of this discussion.

Without delving into this too deeply, it seems possible that scores are higher among children of parents who were high scorers themselves for reasons other than that said parents pour money into tutoring, prep courses, etc. (Anecdata upon request.) What if this kid's parents had a college account for her from family money or a lucky investment or something, but were not super-meritocratic-high-achievers themselves? We don't know the nature of the letter-writer's privilege, other than that her parents footed the bill for college.

Society looks least favorably on kids who fail to parlay every conceivable advantage into results. Much is made at Flavia's of the fact that 1300 is not a fantastic score for a child of privilege. This, presumably, because SAT scores go up according to household income, and because common sense has it that if you're wiped out from supporting your family at 17, you arrive at the testing site at a disadvantage. As Flavia herself puts it, "a person with all her time, money, and alleged talent should do better than 1300 on the SAT [...]" Setting aside the "alleged talent," which we can interpret as a sign that the letter-writer's, uh, privileged with healthy self-esteem, let's focus on the time and money. What do these alone do for a kid's SAT score?

One way to look at it that would be less condemnatory is to compare the letter-writer not with the less-advantaged, as she herself does, to the detriment of her cause, but rather with those who are more so. What separates a given privileged 1300 kid from a 1500 one may be that the latter was more privileged in ways relevant to this kind of test - more tutoring, more Chuaing of the artificial or real-immigrant variety, more of a tendency via nature or nurture or both to have the focus and sort of thinking required to do well on these things.

In other words, we tend to look at 18-year-olds (and everyone, really) as falling into fairly set categories of privileged and not. Which is really the only way to assess advantage on a large scale, but which leaves us with, a kid from suburban PA whose parents paid for her college probably isn't privileged in the Chua's-daughters' sense. (This is leaving aside all the unknowables - whether there were non-financial obstacles this woman had to overcome - but the entitled tone of the letter, combined with the fact that the letter-writer doesn't mention that her parents paid her way but such-and-such happened, suggests this was not an issue here.)

So on the one hand, lack of disadvantage =/= every advantage in the world, yet the super-privileged end up getting judged in the same heap as the regular-privileged, putting the regular-privileged, who are still, of course, snottily privileged overall, at a relative disadvantage. If the letter-writer was that determined to be hung-up on long-ago rejection, this would have been a more productive angle for her to take.

On the other, the more interesting issue it brings up is the mediocrity question - that we as a society have no way of discussing the kids who, despite privilege, do poorly, but not so poorly as to suggest a particular disability is causing the poor performance. We somehow know what to make of kids like Chua's older daughter, of the children of successful parents who, in turn, excel. We don't admire their 1600s the way we do those of kids who had it tough, but we figure, given everything they'd gotten, this is the least they can do.

I've attempted, above, to come up with a less-insulting way to look at such trajectories, but am finding that, too, unsatisfactory. Sometimes those who have had every possible advantage still get Cs for no special reason, or those who've had many but not all advantages manage to do poorly, considering. In a sense, the NYT letter isn't really the best springboard for this discussion, because the mediocre-child-of-privilege doesn't by definition have a massive sense of entitlement. But is it (just) the entitlement we're responding to when we read this letter, or a genuine sense of disgust that someone could have so much and score so low with it?

"Bad news"

I went to what's probably the nation's best-known math-and-science high school, went to college "where fun comes to die," and am now living in a tiny, closed-off community primarily for mathematicians and scientists. I have been to numerous "apartment parties" where I was one of very few guests or the only guest. I have pained many an interlocutor by forcing them into ten seconds of small talk. So of course when Arts and Letters Daily linked, I read this Nature article about science-types and the autism spectrum (pull quote, from a scientist: "'I do think that when these geeks marry each other, that's bad news for the offspring.'") with interest.

Most of the time, when one thinks about the high-achieving couple's offspring, one thinks about regression to the mean. Or in layman's terms, the possibility that two former supernerds will produce a popular, well-adjusted B or C student. Amy Chua did her part to make it socially acceptable for parents to treat this outcome as one to be avoided at all costs, perhaps by trying to create a striving-immigrant atmosphere right there in your own UMC native-born household; the more typical writing on the subject is a thinly-veiled lament, a parent saying how wonderful it is to have a kid who's so athletic and outgoing, but who, alas, will never go Ivy.

But one does also think about another possibility, one that also may result in no-Ivy-for-junior, but that's a great deal more upsetting, namely that the kid will inherit an extra dose of awkward, minus whichever talents might lead to success as a computer-programmer or whatever. I'll confess that it does not take Borat's cousin to tell me that this possibility exists (see above), but it stands to reason that this of all issues is one that someone would be looking into quantitatively.

I have precisely one million thoughts on this (watch as I reveal my humanities-person-ness in my use of numbers), but the one I'll put in this post is that I wonder how much of the propagation of spectruminess (or whichever medically-recognized subset thereof) goes not through two-math-person couples, but through mothers who seem neurotypical and have no diagnosis otherwise but are... grown-up Darias, basically, who over the course of their lives have learned not to seem all that out-there. I have a zillion tons of anecdata, but nothing, alas, quantitative.

Do Jews hate pie?

I've just begun the second season of "Twin Peaks," which I'd somehow missed when it was new, apparently because it was on the same time as "Cheers," which either I or those who controlled the television when I was a young child preferred. After a touch of disorientation during the pilot (what are Mr. and Mrs. Ross, Susan's parents, doing in the woods?) I've really gotten into it.

So I was struck by the arrival of forensics expert and "city slicker" named Albert Rosenfield, whose job is to help fellow "city slicker" FBI agent Dale Cooper (played by a youngish Kyle MacLachlan, sigh) solve a small-town Washington State murder. Brash, rude, and, if we're going to go by the Sheldon-of-"Big-Bang-Theory" school of mental diagnoses of television characters, somewhere on a spectrum, Albert's favorite thing in the world is telling the good folks of Twin Peaks that they're inept morons, at times comparing them to non-human animals. Dale, meanwhile, has fallen for the town, for its rustic, don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to charms. This, despite the fact that the town's a sordid place, far more violence per capita than a big city, I'd bet, but I suppose this is the whole Lynch/MacLachlan thing where the dark underside adds to the charm. Dale especially likes the town's coffee and pie, which seems reasonable, and no, I'm not being sarcastic.

Anyway, whereas both Dale and Albert are outsiders in Twin Peaks, Albert's the outsider. We certainly can't fault the locals for despising him, given that his attitude towards them is a bit like Benedikt's husband's towards Jews who have not sworn eternal anti-Zionism.* They don't hate him because his name is Rosenfield. They hate him because he's being an ass.

What we can look at critically is the choice to give a Jewish-sounding name to the urbanite who just doesn't get Real America, never has, never will. My question, then, is not whether the show is anti-Semitic, but whether this perhaps tells us something about the extent to which Jews are viewed, in contemporary America (the 1990s weren't that long ago), as the very epitome of Unwholesome America. (Last discussed in the comments here.) It's not that any number of other groups - yuppies, gays, etc. - don't exist in big cities and or not associated with big cities. It's that Jews are shorthand for "big cities" in a way that these other groups are not. Thus explaining why Jews might hear a dog-whistle operating when Palin, etc., hold forth on the Real America.

Granted, "Twin Peaks" is just one show, and a not-so-recent one at that. Nothing has been proven once and for all. Although I will say that my first thought re: the "Seinfeld" connection was that Susan's parents were cast from "Twin Peaks" precisely because they would, for 1990s viewers, have represented precisely the Wholesome America that George's parents, the Costanzas, did not. Oh, and the whole "log cabin" situation.

*See, I told you Benedikt's essay had a Chua-like staying power!

Faux-scarcity and is this stew I'm cooking ready yet???

Stop the presses: I think Jessica Grose has a point. But with the caveat that yes, her latest, about how frustrating it is to have to wait to get seated at trendy New York restaurants with her husband and their many cool friends who are constantly inviting them out for dinner, dinners they can presumably well afford but ugh the wait is sooo long, is yet another addition to this genre. It may even define the genre. But it's at least not about spending a lot for a shirt, or having, at around age 30, married a dude.

And I think there's a nugget within this latest piece that's applicable even to those with less fabulous existences, whose lives do not include jaunty jogs through DUMBO, namely: if you're someone who gets crabby when hungry, this is something you will live with your whole life. It's a blood-sugar thing, not related to whether one does appreciate food (like yours truly) or not (like Grose). People who don't experience this don't get it, and assume it's overgrown-spoiled-child behavior. When in fact, while the behavior can be controlled, the sensation cannot. Some of us experience hunger as cranky, as in we don't even know we're hungry, until all of a sudden we get kind of annoyed about something petty. We can, as functional, self-aware adults, not express this annoyance (at least around those outside our immediate families), but it's there. In any survival-of-the-fittest situation, we would not fare well, which is why it surprises me that Grose and I, presumably both of an ethnicity often historically required to be "fittest" to escape pogroms and such, ended up stuck with this trait.

Along with that nugget, another potential nugget, something that was barely alluded to in the article but would have added to it tremendously: the whole thing with the lines is marketing. Inaccessibility is basically how places in NY (and, as I will get to in a moment, beyond) sell themselves. This can be done via unmarked entrances (announcing themselves only, in the case of one place I remember walking by, with that letter grade the health department now puts in the window of every restaurant), by spreading the word that only the very glamorous will get a table, or by making sure there's a line. Other variants of this: hiring waitstaff whose main purpose is making all customers feel old, square and suburban. Putting up a list of "rules" patrons must follow, once mainly a fixture of independent coffee shops, now popular in restaurants as well. (And yes, I consider Dos Toros a restaurant.) Making sure the prices vastly exceed what one would expect given the decor, because if a burger costs $20 in this dump, it must taste amazing! All of this points to the phenomenon we at WWPD know to call hipsters-make-your-food.

And we, the food-lovers, buy into it, even if Grose, food-indifferent, does not. We think we're above it, but we're intrigued when a sushi place has its own version of the Ten Commandments at the entrance and, once seated, you get a menu with a somewhat different edit of the same list. (And no, this was not in NY.) We think that the pizza at Artichoke must be worth the wait, and even after waiting the wait and learning that no, it's not so wonderful, we still notice that a new branch opened near campus, and think that maybe we will use one of our precious few opportunities to dine in NY now that we don't live there anymore on a slice, because wasn't Artichoke supposed to be something? We wanted desperately to try Locanda Verde when we lived within walking (well, hiking) distance of it, and our desperation only increased when we were revealed time and again not to be cool (or forward-thinking) enough to get a table. It's faux-scarcity, kind of like how Amy Chua tried to raise her kids as if they were poor immigrants, even when they were neither poor nor immigrants. Powerful stuff.

If this trickery works, it's in part because so many of us are profoundly affected by our appetites, and remember as the best meal we've eaten recently the one we ate when we'd missed the previous meal and gone running that morning. Some of us are so set on the idea of preferring food quality to atmosphere that a hopeless atmosphere actually fools us into thinking food tastes better.*

Grose must really not care about food, to be immune to this manipulation. To accept it as manipulation and reject it would be something else, but to find it only comprehensible in this really abstract sense why restaurants have long waits - "if you’re a hot spot, you can serve more customers when you’re not reserving tables, and it always looks good to have a line" - suggests a genuine absence of interest in one of the five senses. Grose merely accepts at face value that her friends appreciate good food. While a real cynic would say that her friends are hipster foodies - "sheep," as commenters put it - and get on line for the sake of being on a line with others dressed ironically, I think it's more about this trickery.

But is it trickery, or rather, does that matter? Given that we're talking about a multifaceted sensory experience, what's the difference if we think we think the food is superlative, and if the food actually is?

*There are, however, limits. Today at the Whole Foods café area, the room adjacent to the tables was holding a staff training meeting. It was easy enough, what with the big glass doors, to see in. The lecture including things like, "True or false: [Disgusting pest the likes of which the mere thought of can induce nausea] manifests itself in [disgusting way you wouldn't have imagined]." I might have accepted the soft pretzel's weird aftertaste, but not after that.

Raising Johan and François

Miss Self-Important alerted me to something "combining amy chua with skinny frenchwomen," so I had to look, and before even knowing what it was, to kick myself for having not thought of it. What it is is another WSJ attack, by a Real Mom, on American parenting. (America being, let's be clear, defined as a caricatured version of Park Slope and Berkeley.) But this time, we're to emulate not Chinese moms, but French ones. There's even a video where the author, Pamela Druckerman, a woman who's been living in Frahnce for a decade, wears a beret, as if to announce that she knows this is a gimmick and has no intention of breaking character until the gimmick goes platinum.

(I defy anyone familiar with the RHONY not to look at the photo accompanying the article, with the three blond, baffled-looking kids in berets, and not immediately think of Alex and Simon, Johan and François, and the quest of one American woman and one Australian man to raise French children in New York. Druckerman's husband is British, close enough. Druckerman, however, has a background in comedy. She's in on the joke.)

This concept is of course all kinds of brilliant: a certain type of (book-buying) American women is preoccupied with parenting and with being more French. Why not combine the two?

Part of me knows, on some level, that my familiarity with France is one day going to have to be channeled into a book of this variety, one that takes the following for granted: Everything not America is Europe. All of Europe is France. France is Paris, and Paris is that bit of the city between the St. Germain Monoprix and the Bon Marché. That which wouldn't be readily observed by Americans on a five-day vacation can be assumed not to exist. My entry into this genre will be a parody take called "Why French Women Are Better Than You, You Vache: A Francophilic Guide to Self-Hatred," but this is but one parody manuscript of many in the works at WWPD Industries.

In all seriousness, some of what Druckerman says about French eating is true, in my experience, in France beyond Paris; in Belgium; possibly everywhere that isn't the U.S.. It's not true that picky eating is uniquely American and magically eliminated with "French" parenting, but the idea that there are specific times to eat, and beyond that, specific foods that can be eaten at specific times, is a place where Americans find ourselves the odd ones out. (It seems strange to The Europeans that if I happen to have baked something - brownies, lemon pound cake, whatever - I see this as a perfectly acceptable breakfast, and that if I'm hungry at 5pm, or 10, that's when I'll have dinner.)

While my Americanness in this area has never caused me any real problems,* I can see how, on a population level, limiting food in this way would have some tangible benefits (less obesity-related illness, more self-control, etc.). On the other hand, cultural rules like these strike me as being part of an exclusionary system more broadly, and if they happen to be useful in certain isolated ways, they serve to make newcomers and even not-so-newcomers feel unwelcome. And that's kind of the gist of the argument. Druckerman says that French parenting - not just eating - works better because everyone does things the same way - there aren't competing ideas of (or parenting books about) how to do things right. This is less stressful, she claims. Perhaps, but rigidly enforced homogeneity is plenty stressful for outsiders as well as dissenters.

And this is the flaw with the whole Be More French genre - Frenchwomen-as-in-rich-Parisians may look chic, but they're all dressed identically to one another. You can either bemoan the fact that everyone around you (in suburban NJ, to give a purely theoretical example) would be out-of-place at the organic market on Raspail, or you can be grateful for the diversity of options.

Oh, and are French children better-behaved? No. They are, however, more elegantly dressed. If there isn't "kid food" in France-as-in-posh-Paris, nor is there kid clothing. Tiny children are dressed like precious dolls from the nineteenth century, and then around early adolescence, boys and girls alike are dressed indistinguishably from their adult equivalents. For better or worse, they do not spend a decade or even so much as a week experimenting with hipster/goth/punk, etc. Thus the city's lack of neon hair dye. This parenting guide is going to be a bestseller in no time.

*I can't write about this without mentioning the "trough" incident - when I said to a group of European acquaintances from a bunch of different countries, who were discussing American versus European eating habits that me personally, I eat out of a trough... and met with knowing nods. Part of this was a language issue (sarcasm being a tough tone to convey, "trough" a bit agricultural), but I also think it struck those present that it was totally plausible that this was how I took my meals. I could provide so many more anecdotes along these lines, but I've long noticed that the idea that Americans are fat and lazy is so ingrained that they have essentially nothing to do with whether any particular American is either.

Zionist indoctrination assortment

-As someone who managed perfectly well to grow up Jewish, to go to my fair share of Hebrew school, and to miss the part where I was supposed to be indoctrinated in terms of what I was supposed to think about Israel, I never know what to make of the current proliferation of articles like this. I do know that the ridiculous all-caps comment that is at the time of my typing the only comment to the piece, whose author believes "JEWS SHOULD STAY UNITED BEHIND ISRAEL," before moving on to the topic of POGROMS, is not helping matters.

-Huh. (Via.) So maybe some Birthright trips are more about Zionist indoctrination, less about anti-intermarriage intervention. Clearly, as a Herzlophile who had just recently started dating the non-Jewish man who is now my husband, I picked the wrong trip.

-Thanks, David Schraub, for the shout-out in the comments at a Forward blog. As for the post itself, a defense of the Benedikt essay that I will try mightily not to mention any more after this post,* it unfortunately reinforces my impression of Benedikt as a kind of post-Zionist American-Jewish Sarah Palin crossed with Emily Gould-ian New Brooklyn overshare aesthetics. We're supposed to respect her decision to write "in an almost childlike voice," and to nod understandingly when she later explains that the point of the essay was "'definitely not to talk policy or really even politics.'" Why? On what basis are we giving the essay a second chance? Because "Allison is a friend" of the blogger. Well, in that case. Forget 'bad for the Jews.' This is bad for young women in or aspiring to be in opinion writing.

*But no promises, what with its Chua-esque way of sucking you in.

"That was way harsh, Tai": a response to a no-holds-barred manifesto I somewhat agree with

Flavia has a guest post from one of her readers, a claim that there is indeed an "opt-out revolution," as it's been put elsewhere. The guest-post is, in "Clueless" parlance, "way harsh, Tai," towards women with Ivy League degrees of not-such-distant vintage (spotted at the writer's husband's 25th reunion) who do not work for pay. It's also super compelling and getting a great discussion going. The letter-writer, who implicitly acknowledges the anecdotal nature of her evidence, finds that women with fancy degrees (Ivy college, graduate degrees) are staying home to raise large families. If it's their 25th college reunion, that makes them 47, give or take. So it's unlikely, though not impossible in that milieu, that they're staying home with very young children, let alone physically recovering from pregnancy. They're staying home with older children, it seems.

Which is interesting, sure. Do their husbands encourage this (as Flavia says in the comments, the status-symbol phenomenon, or for less sinister if still upsetting from a feminist perspective reasons) or merely tolerate it? How much of this is choice and how much is, as the author hints at one point, something more bleak - a kind of internalized misogyny holding back women with great potential? The danger of choice feminism is that we risk not considering that very real phenomenon as a possibility. Is there any positive to an arrangement where one parent stays home, if we make it more of a gender-neutral option? Could be, but as long as it's not gender-neutral, we must go on having this conversation.

And a useful conversation it is. But it's a message that would have come across more strongly had the author not held herself up as a shining example of adherence to feminist ideals, of general together-ness. She writes, as an example of why two-working-parent families are better, "When our child was small, we could afford excellent in-home care and also save for hir education. We don't have to debate whether or not we can afford camp, music lessons, or orthodontia. We can!"

Eh, not everybody can. Another family - even Ivy-educated - may have calculated that if the lower-paid partner (often the woman) worked outside the home, this wouldn't pay for childcare for multiple children. Now, maybe that's short-sighted - maybe the woman should keep working as an investment in her future career-and-salary - but it's still a different situation.

Also this: "Maybe it's my background as a scholarship kid who always assumed she'd work her whole life, but I've never seen the world of work as a faceless enemy," and "[...] I've managed to work my way into a decent position, and I have hopes that new opportunities might open up for me in the future."

Is that a frank assessment of good life choices, good character, or a kind of boasting that fails to take into account the role that luck plays in all of our lives? Maybe a bit of both, and I say this as someone who's probably also done my share of good-life-choices humblebrag without intending to. I mean, it's good to think your own choices are consistent with your own values. And there's also some genuine humility in there, so perhaps I'm being unfair. But it just seems like, if you're talking individual cases, maybe there were not-so-cheery reasons these women stopped working, and it wasn't all about being bad feminists. Like the anonymous commenter at Flavia's says, certain things can go wrong in the reproductive process that disproportionately impact the one with the uterus.

Anyway, it seems clear enough that children of the middle-class-broadly-defined who weren't Chua-parented aren't done any favors if told that they won't always have to work no matter what. Because they will. Children of the super-ridiculously-rich, no, and by all means let them pursue careers as unpaid fashion assistants. But if you're of the set risking impoverishment if a husband leaves, someone's done a number on you if they gave you the impression you don't really need to work.

-Like Withywindle, who linked to some data about this there, I do think a j'accuse on the topic of elite women opting out kind of does call for numbers, if it's making sweeping claims, and not just questioning the choice on an individual level. Unless the reunion published a book with what everyone's up to (which can happen) and is basing this on something larger, it could be that the author simply ran into an unrepresentative group. I wonder if the women the author met really don't work for pay at all, or if the author's rounding down their less-ambitious or from-home jobs to 'housewife'. Or even if - if these were just women met briefly at a social function - some of these women do have powerful careers, but in a social/reunion setting for whatever reason choose to identify first and foremost as "moms." Which would also be interesting, but which would be quite different.

-We really do need to be sure these are women who might have had illustrious careers, but then decided against. "Elite" isn't a monolith. Nor does 'graduate-educated' mean 'employable in the professions.' See Emily Matchar. See my Second-After-Sartre theory. While women who become high-powered executives tend to come from a certain part of society, it's not accurate to look at everyone with an MA in Medieval Tapestry as a potential Sandberg or Slaughter who opted out. This doesn't mean women don't self-sabotage along the way, closing off various opportunities open to those at their universities, of their social class. It only means that said self-sabotage has often happened long before any husband-and-babies entered the picture.

-In response to: "Is it just me, or is the unemployed spouse and large (3-5 children) family back with a vengeance among the economic elite?": These women are/were home with a million kids, presumably over the span of many years, unless quadruplets. They weren't idle. They weren't "unemployed" really. They didn't opt out of doing things with the day.

-Re: "Why aren't women who drop out of the paid workforce being treated for depression, or at least urged to get counseling before they go?": Unemployment has been known to relate to depression, as, they say, has stay-at-home parenting. I suppose I don't love the way "depression" here is used almost interchangeably with making the wrong life choices. (OK, so there's this: "If you are educated for and capable of a decent job, the disinclination to work should be seen as a symptom of an underlying problem, not a lifestyle 'choice.'" But in context, it reads as if the letter-writer doesn't think these women are depressed, just foolish.) If these women really are depressed - and perhaps so - then this is upsetting, not a reason to chastise them for their failure to adhere to feminist principles. We may then want to look at what it is in the culture - the "beauty myth"? something in the water? - that's led them to that state. We'd want to investigate correlation and causation. We'd sooner view these women as victims of social norms than as bad feminists or spoiled housewives.

-If you're going to have a post that asks what message it sends to daughters if mom doesn't work, you also need to address the argument that kids are better off if one parent stays home. Once the think-of-the-children angle enters into it, once you're arguing that other people are bad parents, you do open yourself up to the same accusation. And as much as I personally think working-for-pay is important, I'd have to say, there are far worse things a parent can do to a kid than stay home and look after him/her.

-Having an egalitarian, 50-50 marriage, but basing this entirely on work-for-pay, seems like a dangerous road to go down, even if both partners work. Two spouses rarely have the exact same salary or work-hours at all times. It matters, in terms of power balance, if one spouse isn't and could virtually never be economically self-sufficient, i.e. if that person could never, if need be, leave. But do we really think the hedge-fund-manager plus nursery-school-teacher marriages a) are typically 50-50 household-chore-wise, or b) need to be in order to be egalitarian in the internal-power-balance sense? 

-Refreshing anecdotal evidence time! I know of quite a few women who divorced at a certain age and promptly went back to (a more practical version of) school and, in at least one case, went on to out-earn the ex-husband. This is going to be easier for women who already have a college degree, and who are relatively young (40-ish, say) when all this happens, but it's been done. I mean, there's always air-conditioner-repair school, even for the happily-married. It never hurts.

A jet- and poodle-lagged pedagogy post

In Heidelberg with husband and poodle. So I have not kept up with the thread following this post, and I'm way behind on Sunday Styles and the like. I have, however, seen the cargo areas of the Frankfurt airport - evidently two weeks before our arrival, they'd changed how one goes about picking up a pet, but hadn't told us, so that was a completely unnecessary - if not entirely uninteresting - trip to the parallel universe known as Cargo City Süd. (Even small dogs can't always come in-cabin. Inconsequential dog-welfare-wise, assuming the right breed and other factors, but unanticipated-cost-wise, bureaucratic-hassle-wise, something to consider.)

I have, however, read Flavia's latest post, about socioeconomic differences in students' classroom behavior. As usual, lots to think about. To highlight just one angle: student self-advocacy: "Most of us have probably noticed that while some students have no hesitation asking for extensions or extra help or other special treatment (sometimes justified, sometimes not) others are diffident and won't advocate for themselves even when they have a compelling reason." Indeed, although at this stage - having taught for three years and been in school for 300 - I've seen it more as a student than as an instructor.


But yes. There are certain students who come to a teacher to explain that they're really stressed and thus need an extension, and other who won't tell the teacher that, say, a parent just died, and will come in as if nothing happened. I have found it frustrating, as a teacher, that you can only give extensions/exceptions for students who've come to you with their problems, when for all you know the kid who always gets Cs - but who doesn't seem depressed or troubled in such a way as to allow you to ask how he is - might well be going through a worse crisis that he just hasn't told you about. Or - perhaps more poignantly, the kid who gets A-/B+ grades, and would be a star but for some crisis... that you don't know about, or have any way of finding out about. 


I've also, however, found it frustrating as a student when someone comes to a teacher with an utterly B.S. excuse (in one memorable case from pre-grad-school, a student who felt entitled to an A in a language class on account of having lived for a time where the language was spoken, a fact that somehow hadn't led to As on the assignments) and actually gets somewhere with it (as that student did, who went and got that A). As someone who was not raised to expect teachers to care about my feelings, who was never encouraged to take "mental health days" (or physical health days) or to expect to be able to forget my homework at home without consequences, that one could make a fuss about nonsense and get results has always struck me as unfair. To me, but also to students who had super-legitimate reasons to hand work in late, but still managed to get it in on time. 


On the other hand, it can seem self-defeating when a student with legitimate what-have-you fails to mention it, out of pride or cultural background or who knows. 


There's certainly a class distinction when it comes to self-advocacy, but in my experience, it's only a small number of the wealthy students thinking the teacher cares about their problems. I'd almost go as far as to say that there will be that kid in the class who expects sympathy for her hangover/his upcoming family vacation to Tuscany/her chemistry exam later in the week that will determine if she gets to med school so is it OK if she skips her Creative Writing assignments just these few times with no consequences thanks in advance? 


What leads to this attitude? Much of it could be innocuous, like when a student accustomed to life at a tiny private school (or homeschooling) switches to a large college. Just as it's not the instructor's job to know what other responsibilities/leisure activities each student in a 40-person class has that week, it's not the student's to understand that the instructor has 240 other students that semester. Sometimes it really will come as news to a student that a class of 40 will fall apart if each student has his or her own syllabus. But there are no doubt some upper-middle-class parents teaching their kids that the teacher is always wrong, and that the way to an A is complaining, not working hard. Other times still, kids pick up that message without having been taught it, simply by observing what gets results. As in, sometimes that which looks and quacks like "entitled" has no more profound explanation.

So. Self-advocacy can get grades changed, even without the proverbial threat-of-lawsuit-from-parents. But it's almost never something the top students engage in. The top students may also come from wealthier/better-educated family backgrounds, but they'll have been raised in in the Amy Chua "tiger mom" manner, which is to say, as if they were struggling immigrants, whether or not this bore any resemblance to their actual socioeconomic situation. Or they didn't grow up in the States, and so are unfamiliar with the nurturing, "American" classroom environment. Lots of people who make it to grad school were, not surprisingly, raised to get As without insisting upon them, and so are mystified, if not necessarily annoyed, by this kind of behavior.

Is the answer simply to be less indulgent across the board (with whichever exceptions for extreme circumstances), or to encourage all students to come by if they have a problem, as in, to actively reach out any time a student gets grade below an A, just to be sure that nothing external and unfair has stopped them from reaching their full potential? I suppose I lean closer to the former. I'm not confident that I'm in a position to rank my students' obstacles, let alone when I know I'll never have the full story. Many really tough life situations aren't ones a student - rich or poor - will want to tell a teacher. While I do hope students are getting whatever help they need outside the classroom, I think it's reasonable that they won't want to share everything in exchange for the possibility of an extension on some assignment, and thus am totally fine with students sharing, or not, according to what they're comfortable with.

Also, class background isn't always so transparent in a classroom setting, especially in this age of scrappiness one-upmanship. You can guess quite a bit by the type of school it is, but at schools with a great deal of socioeconomic diversity, it may well be your students/classmates with the least financial concerns whose financial concerns you'll hear the most about.

And finally, in terms of teaching not just the subject, but Life Lessons, a (good) boss will be understanding if there's a real problem, but will think less of you, perhaps stop paying you, if a non-problem prevented you from doing your work. But you also don't want to be too harsh, just to make a point. Flavia's approach - a strict policy on the syllabus, paired with an insistence that students in genuine crisis feel free to come to you to work something out - does seem the best way.