There was an article in today’s Sunday Star Times Sunday magazine that was interesting and not completely misogynist. I almost died of shock (for non-New Zealanders Sunday’s speciality is that it no longer calls it’s ‘beauty’ section ‘beauty’ or even ‘health’, but maintenance. I’ve no idea what you’re supposed to be maintaining with blue eye-shadow).
The article was looking at rates of depression in parents, and particularly among mothers. What I really liked about the article is that it showed how depressing and isolating the work of child rearing can be in our society, and that saying that the work is hard wasn’t an attempt to devalue it.
Too often feminists are blamed for devaluing the work of raising children. All they said was that society didn’t value the work, and that the way child-rearing was done was extremely isolating and hard.
Unfortuantely it’s as true now as it was then. I like a lot of Betty Freidan’s analysis in The Feminine Mystique, but disagree with her conclusions. While increased access to childcare, and the opportunity to do paid employment has helped some children, it doesn’t solve the problem. Those who stay out of the paid workforce are still isolated, and those who work outside the home are still doing all the unpaid work they would before, only with less time.
Earlier last century children were seen as a duty, now they’re seen as a luxury, I think we could do better. I don’t often imagine the world that I’m trying create, maybe I don’t do it enough. But I do know how raising children would be resourced (and I’m not talking about money, because I think a first step to the world I’m talking about would be ending capitalism).
I believe that all the resources required to raise children should be provided collectively, not individually by the parents. Raising children should be recognised as important work, and whether it’s done collectively or individually, it should be seen as a contribution to society as important as any other. At the same time anyone in a parental role should be able to do other work that they enjoy, or are good at, or see as important, and in then their children would be looked after collectively.
This is why I find arguments about staying at home vs. working very frustrating. Neither individual choice is going to make a slightest bit of difference, and it’s stupid to fight over the limited resources available when what we actually need to do is smash the whole pie (or something).
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I don’t see how childcare can be well supplied collectively–children get attached to smallish numbers of individuals. Or do I misunderstand what you mean by collectively?
Is automatic preview for comments gone forever? I was very fond of it.
I think society has an obligation to avoid anyone living in poverty, whether they’re children or adults or have children or are childless. I’m all for government intervention to achieve this.
But I just don’t get the idea that all the resources required to raise children should be provided collectively. Presumably, this means that in an ideal world the legal obligation to pay child support should be abolished? This strikes me as nuts. It seems perfectly just that parents should have more financial obligations to their children that non-parents do, they are after all responsible for creating them. It also seems to me that people have children because they get all sorts of benefits from having them. That’s great, but because of it I can’t why they shouldn’t have to pay a higher financial contribution to the costs of raising children than people who don’t get those benefits.
It also seems to me that people have children because they get all sorts of benefits from having them.
If you’re referring to things like tax write-offs, that would be one of those collectively-provided benefit thingies. If you mean some other tangible, economic benefit, the Western world is long past the point where children are actually an economic gain.
Most middle income parents don’t benefit from tax write offs as much as you’d think. In Canada, for instance, the level of parental benefits is keyed to income tax assessments and if you’re earning more than $40 k a year, you get peanuts. To be honest, I don’t want a tax credit or a paltry amount of money given to me to help pay for my child’s costs. I want affordable day care in my workplace.
I agree that there should be some collective responsibility for raising and nurturing children. I think society would benefit hugely from abandoning the unworkable nuclear family model and moving towards something more communal in terms of child care. Children are our future as a society. Whether you choose to have a child or not, we will get nowhere if families aren’t given the resources to raise kids well. If that means providing adequate day care at reasonable prices to moms who want to work outside the home or providing support and services to moms who stay home, society as a whole will benefit.
I was trying to get at the intangible non-economic benefits of having kids, believe it or not. Things like getting watching your child grow up, and having someone to love, and so on. I’m probably not the best person to be trying to verbalise those sort of feelings, but people who have kids do really seem to enjoy having them.
beachcomber:
Let’s suppose that I’m a sour old curmudgeon and I’ve decided that I don’t want to have any kids of my own, or to play any role in helping to raise other people’s kids.
Are you suggesting that I should be forced to support your communal child-raising collabo?
Are you suggesting that I should be forced to support your communal child-raising collabo?
I would suggest that. Although I don’t much like the communal child-raising pipedream, if that were the mechanism we selected as a society, you would owe it support and fealty.
Humanity is an ongoing enterprise. To keep it moving down the generations, new generations have to be brought into being. This is the first priority, and the organizing principle, for any society worth supporting.
If you don’t want to rear children, that’s a private decision and (a BG-esque near-annihilation of society, requiring everyone to breed for racial survival, aside) none of society’s business. But you owe the childrearing aspect of society your general support – whether that’s taxes under a civilized order, or time in the babysitting queue under Maia’s red nightmare, or whatever. If you want to argue that the taxes are too high or that the babysitting queue is fascist and that the system ought to change, that’s one thing; arguing that the childless owe nothing is another.
Otherwise, get out. If you won’t support society’s requirement to transmit itself through time, then you don’t deserve to participate in the side benefits that such societies tend to provide. Go live in the woods and be a lonely hermit.
Why support children? Why support anyone else in this country, or this world, other than that they are human beings in need? Children-as-possessions is such a damned disturbing theme, and it seems bloody universal.
Just for the record under my red nightmare no-one would be required to work doing child raising. It would just be one of the many forms of work that people would do. It’s just if you made clothes some of the clothes you made would go to people who raise children, whether or not you had children or not.
I think child raising can be done in a less isolated manner. In the article I was reading a woman was talking about post-natal depression and the only adult conversation she’d get was a few minutes at a grocery store. It doesn’t have to be like that. It does seem likely that at the beginning of children’s lives they benefit from stable caregivers (although I don’t know a huge amount about that research), but that doesn’t mean that everyone doing that work has to do it completely isolated from everything else, or that is the only work they get to do.
When I read “resources required to raise children collectively”, I didn’t think of communes, I thought of accessible day care. I thought of amenities like city parks and public schools. I thought of things like being able to take time off of work to care for a sick child, or to attend a parent-teacher conference without fear of losing one’s job or being demoted. All the little things that effectively demonstrate to parents that we aren’t deadbeats, but valuable members of society.
I don’t know about New Zealand, Maia, but here in the U.S. there is a disturbing trend against “the commons”. In my city, most of the basketball courts have been removed from public parks, because they attract “the wrong element”. Most of the schoolyards are on lockdown, with no one allowed to play there after school hours. There is this feeling that paying for amenities like playgrounds and ballparks should be a private, not a public enterprise. What this does in real life is separate the haves from the have-nots at an even earlier age, as children whose parents cannot afford the high price of private sports clubs (say $50 for six or eight weeks of playing on a team) for their children don’t sign up—their kids are SOL. I mean shit, you can’t complain about childhood obesity on the one hand while taking play areas out of parks and locking up the schoolyards with the other!
Not that public schools are immune to this view. There’s a growing trend that says all schooling should be private, too. That if a parent can’t afford the cost of private schooling, too bad.
The attitude toward children in the U.S. is pretty much to view children as burdens, and that if the needs of children assert themselves into the public sphere in any matter, it’s a transgression. Children are not even to be seen, let alone heard. And it’s an attitude that probably started with the heyday of television and the suburbs—when people started separating themselves from their community. No more gathering on the front porch—it’s barricade in the back yard behind the suburban stockyard fence. I mean shit, I’m not even that old, and when I was a kid my folks took me out to restaurants, and I would see other kids there, even at the nicer places. Now, take your kid out to eat, and even if your child is perfectly behaved, folks look at you as if you took a steaming shit on the table. There is this idea that the only restaurant a child should enter is a fast-food place.
I don’t know what Maia is envisioning when she refers to the collectiveness of child-rearing, but I’d like to see some acknowledgement of the necessity of certain institutions needed to simultaneously raise children and keep a roof over one’s head—things like day care, school hours that coincide with working hours, recognition of the fact that if I take a day off from work to care for my ill child I’m not “fucking off”, and hey—a little respect wouldn’t hurt, and doesn’t cost a damn thing.
Unfortunately, Rad Geek, you live in a society that has a minimal level of communal support–you know, tax breaks for charity, funding for soup kitchens, and so on. Even if you think all poor people should curl up and die, you still have to pay taxes that go to feed poor people. If you think the elderly should be put on an ice floe, ditto.
If this makes you curmudgeonly, do consider that you’ve been the benefit of ‘public good’ projects–if not directly, then indirectly.
What about the elderly poor? Can we curl them up on an ice floe and float them to the location of the hungry poor people, and kill two birds with one stone?
Mythago:
Your point is . . . what? That since we have “public good” projects now, and since everyone has arguably received some benefit from them in the past, that nobody can ever legitimately object to new or existing “public good” projects? That’s rather convenient, isn’t it?
mythago, this doesn’t have to do with my personal preferences. As it happens I like kids a lot and I’d be glad to help out; that’s why I framed it as a hypothetical to be supposed. What I’m concerned with is how we ought to treat people who don’t happen to be interested in volunteering.
That said:
I can’t see how this appeal cuts any ice at all. I was also born into a society where heterosexual marriage is widespread, where homophobia is widespread, where a minimal level of sexist jokes, are widespread, etc., but that’s not an argument for sexist jokes or homophobia, and it’s not an argument for forcing me to get heterosexually hitched either. Why should the fact that I was born into a society where people carry on a certain way affect whether or not (1) I ought to support them carrying on that way, or (2) I ought to be forced to carry on that way myself?
I’m aware that I am. I’m questioning whether forcing people to contribute to causes they don’t support is right, not whether it is done.
You might say that if I’m taking advantage of communal support that I’m unwilling to contribute to later, then that’s at least a vice on my part. Perhaps that I’m, say, selfish or ungrateful. Maybe so, but I don’t think that just pointing this out:
… proves that to be the case. I wasn’t asked whether or not whether I wanted to benefit from various cooperative or tax-funded projects, so I don’t see how I have even any prima facie moral obligation to support them now. Let alone an enforceable debt to them.
Robert:
If you want to voluntarily dissociate from childless people who don’t support the raising of other people’s children (by whatever means is prevalent in a given community), then you are of course free to do so. I don’t see, however, where you think you get the right to tell me whether or not I can live on my own land (which happens to be in the middle of a city, not in the woods), or whether or not I can interact with and trade with other people who happen not to share your views (most shopkeeps don’t care very much whether or not their paying customers are sufficiently child-friendly, and while I happen not to be a child-hating curmudgeon, I know plenty of people who wouldn’t hold it against me if I were).
If you’re just suggesting that I have a right to be a sour child-hating curmudgeon, and you have a right to ostracize me and encourage your neighbors to do the same, then we’re in agreement (although I think the reasons you’re suggesting for the ostracism are rather silly). But if you’re suggesting that you have a right to force me to move out, or to force other people not to interact with me, then I have to wonder what you think gives you the right to treat me and them that way.
Maia:
Well, that’s fine. I don’t have any problem with it, then. I think it sounds pretty nice, in point of fact.
My concern is with the phrase “collective responsibility.” People sometimes use “responsibility” to mean something that you can choose or not choose to take on; sometimes they use it to mean something that you are required to do, and can be forced to do, whether you like it or not. And when they start talking about how X or Y is a “collective responsibility” a lot of times they mean the latter rather than the former (since it suggests that you’re talking about a burden for everyone to bear, instead of something that they willingly choose to take on because they want to do it). Why not talk about child-rearing being something “open to all,” or something “everyone can help out with,” instead of a “collective responsibility”?
La Lubu:
I would too, and I happen to dislike sour child-hating curmudgeons on both an individual and societal level (although not because I think they’re somehow ungrateful; the problem with them is that they’re generally petty and mean).
My question isn’t about the ends to be achieved; it’s about the means used to achieve them.
Being a working mother myself I know how hard it can be.
You have to laugh every once in awhile right?
I discovered this hilarious blog yesterday…
http://goofyblog.net
And thats gone a long way into making the days a bit easier to handle.
:)
Mary
I wasn’t really envisioning a particular sort of society (certainly not a commune, which in many ways is my idea of hell), I guess I was trying to say how I thought it should work, before I got to the practicalities of how it would work. What would a society that really valued the work of child-rearing look like.
I imagine them working in a non-capitalist society, because that’s where . But I think you can, like La Lubu was, use the same sort of ideas to evaluate our current society and figure out what to work for.
I didn’t use the phrase ‘collective responsibility’, and I wouldn’t. The only way I would refer to childcare as a collective responsibility is in the sense that I think that the resources required to raise children (and by that I mean all the things La Lubu mentions, but also things like food and stretch and grows, and bikes, and toys and high charis) and also the resources to support those raising children, should be provided by people collectively, not just by the parents.
Maia, I’d also like to say that here in the U.S., there seems to be a trend toward viewing children as luxury commodities. I think that’s where it’s hard to convince folks of the need for societal institutions that value parents and children. There’s this idea that children are something you acquire like any other luxury good—and that thinking is toxic to supporting, extending, creating, or reforming that part of “the commons” that benefits parents and children directly, and everyone else indirectly.
And about the “tax-break” issue; non-parents have this absurd idea that because I am a single mother, that I can deduct the entire cost of child care that is necessary for me to go to work. Nope. I get to deduct a very small portion of that cost—a fifth of what I pay out. I paid fewer taxes as a childless adult. Our tax code is set up to assume that because I am a breadwinner, I therefore must have a live-in, unpaid child-care provider (you know, a wife). Child-care is viewed as a luxury good purchased by women that “allows” us to work. No one becomes a parent because they’re going to make out like a bandit at tax time! Contrast that with the tax benefits of purchasing a house.
Barbara Kingsolver (I think) made the argument that even if you’re child-free by choice, you still have a vested interest in the way kids in society in general are raised. Because when you’re old and sick, who’s going to be providing your medical care, repairing your house, doing your taxes, cooking your food, making the laws that affect you, and so on? People who are in the generation after you – all those kids that the people your age had, and you didn’t. And if all those people are deliquents or fucked-up because society didn’t look after them and their parents couldn’t cope on their own, and if there aren’t any qualified doctors because the educational system collapsed, who suffers? You. (The context of this was her argument against people who didn’t want to pay taxes that supported schools.)
I think that a lot of family friendly workplace changes would end up being good for everyone. For example, if a workplace chooses to increase the amount of personal time an employee has so that those with children can more easily take a day off if their child needs them, that means the childfree get the extra days too which allows them flexibility in their lives (perhaps to care for an aging parent). All in all, those kinds of changes are good for everyone. I support them but mostly out of my own self-interest.
As for collectively supporting children, I think that things like having tax money go towards schools, affordable daycare, parks, etc is about as much collectively supporting most other people’s children as I want to go. I dont think people should be obligated to do more. I make exceptions for the children of some close friends, of course. There is a certain amount of joy in being the spinster aunt and it is a valuable relationship for the kids too. But, certainly that is less obligation than personal preference.
Maia:
Right; that was beachcomber who used the phrase. Sorry for not making that clear.
I still do have some concerns about the phrase “collectively,” actually, because it tends to have some of the same ambiguities as “responsibility” (does it mean a burden everyone has to bear together, or does it just mean something that a bunch of people can choose to co-operatively take on?). I guess in your case the question I would ask is: suppose that I’m the aforementioned curmudgeon, and I don’t want to contribute either labor or material resources to child-raising, and I deliberately choose the work that I’m going to do and the transactions I’m going to make in such a way that I don’t. Can I be forced to go along with the child-raising scheme, and forced to support child-raising whether I want to or not?
If so, why?
If not, I have no problem with the arrangement (indeed, I think it’s a very good suggestion), but I think maybe “co-operative” (or one of the other phrases I mentioned above) might be a clearer way of putting the nature of child-raising as you see it than “collective.”
Grace:
Whether she’s right about this or not, I don’t think that the argument supports the claim that people who are “child-free by choice” should be forced to pay for schools.
Provided that she’s correct, all that she’s proven is that it may be foolish or imprudent for people who are “child-free by choice” not to contribute money to schools because they run the risk of losing out on some future benefit (just as it may be foolish of me to spend all my money buying DVDs and potato chips when I could be putting down money for a vacation that I’ll enjoy a lot more than the DVDs and the chips). But the suggestion here is not that childless people be encouraged or exhorted to contribute money to schools; it’s that they be forced to do so, whether they want to or not.
Merely showing that it would be foolish not to do something isn’t the same as showing that the government should make you do it against your will, unless you are employing a further premise that it’s the government’s job to force you and me not to be foolish. (I don’t think that it is.)
Maybe there’s some other reason why the government should make you pay for government-run schools, but I don’t think that this is enough reason as it stands.
Rad Geek:
Likewise.
It’s strange that this thread has boiled down to a hardcore Libertarian vs. hardcore Marxist debate. My position is a minimalist one that the state has a duty to keep everyone out of poverty. I find it very hard to understand Maia’s position.
People enjoy having children and have them for fun. They do it for their own benefit (and I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with this). But given that, I can’t see why they shouldn’t be expected to provide the funds needed – if they are able to. If people do something for their own enjoyment, then I can’t see how going it this gives them a legitimate claim on other people’s money. I think the state has a general obligation to alleviate poverty, and it should intervene in order to prevent children falling below the poverty line. But I see this just as one instance of a general obligation to prevent anyone falling below the poverty line.
False dichotomy, nik. You assume that if people have children because they want kids, that’s the only reason to have kids–there certainly can’t be any social good in it. Conversely, you seem to think that the argument ‘producing the next generation helps society’ is negated by private reasons for having children.
that nobody can ever legitimately object to new or existing “public good” projects?
No, Brandon, that argument came entirely out of your own head.
“Why should I support the public good?” Because Libertarian Utopia, where you don’t spend money on anything that doesn’t equally and directly benefit you, is imaginary.
Now, if y’all are arguing that children (that is, people having them in general, not you having them personally) is NOT a public good, why, say so. But the argument that we should all get to pay taxes that go towards only things that benefit us is pretty silly and unworkable.
Mythago:
My apologies for miscontruing your argument.
The problem with saying is that we should subsidize public goods is that you invariably have to tax other public goods to pay for it. If you want to fund subsidies for raising children with income taxes, then that means that you have to tax labor and investment, both of which have positive externalities (it’s true that they also have considerable private benefits, but so does raising children). It’s not enough to say that raising children is a public good (which it is only in a very broad sense of the term)–you also have to make the case that the benefit from subsidizing it will be greater than the cost.
But if we’re going to subsidize raising children because of its positive externalities (and we already do, to some extent, via tax credits, free education, and good, old-fashioned hand-outs), then we should structure the subsidies so that we get the most bang for our buck. Maybe we could look into paying greater subsidies to those whom we believe will make the best parents and reducing the subsidies for those who generally don’t make very good parents. So, for example, we would give a bit more money to middle-class married couples and less to lower-class single women. And maybe the government should check in every once in a while to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth.
What do you think?
That’s hard to be to answer, because I was just trying to give principles about what would be a society that values women’s labour, and I get terribly wishy-washy when it comes time to talk about my ideal society.
On one level no I don’t think my ideal society would involve forcing people to do anything.
On another level I think it is reasonable that the needs of the old, the young are met by everyone, because everyone is going to be in that situation at some stage of their life. Even if the hypothetical curmudgeon didn’t want anything to do with children now, when they were a child they were supported in a similar way (see wishy-washy – Naomi Klein says that democracy is a very zen thing, because if you’re truly committed to democracy you can’t insist on an outcome, and I get very like that when I try to talk about ideal societies).
PS: Nik although every Marxist supports the redistribution of wealth not everyone who supports the redistribution of wealth is a Marxist, he had a few other ideas.
Maybe we could look into paying greater subsidies to those whom we believe will make the best parents and reducing the subsidies for those who generally don’t make very good parents. So, for example, we would give a bit more money to middle-class married couples and less to lower-class single women. And maybe the government should check in every once in a while to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth.
What do you think?
Tell you what I think—that the key phrase in this is “whom we believe”, the unspoken “we” of course, being upper-middle class, white suburbanites. Bah. Effective parenting comes in all classes, just as dysfunctional parenting does. I think a policy of this nature does nothing more that to legitimize pre-existing biases. Frankly, I’ve known more reprobates who were raised by those good white middle-class parents, because such parents consistently used their clout to shelter their progeny from the consequences of their actions.
Then again, I’m one of those “lower class single women”, so what do I know? I just get to hear shocked commentary from the middle class that my daughter is bright, well-behaved, and has a large vocabulary. I heard the same commentary as a child; the idea that “those people” couldn’t possibly do a good job of child-raising is still with us.
I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I heartily believe that those parents that need help should get it, and I’m not sure what the best way to fund that help would be in any world. However, there are those that can and do raise their children without any assistance from the government.
My mother became physically disabled after my parent’s divorce. She raised her kids on disability, child support, and the paltry assistance that the state would give her. We barely existed above the poverty line, and yet she raised two intelligent, well-behaved, well-rounded daughters. Now she is caring for her aging father with Parkinson’s, and though he and my Grandmother were frugal and “smart” about their finances…it still isn’t enough. He pays something like $1200 a month out of his pocket for his medication, that amount is more than my mortgage payment.
I am concerned that a purely Libertarian, read as the current political label, view would leave the survival and welfare of the poor, poor children, and the elderly in the hands of fate. I would like to see a balanced and fair policy for preventing dire poverty and elder poverty.
Any ideas?
I don’t think children are a public good, at least as I understand the term. A public good is something like a lighthouse, which everyone benefits from regardless of anyone elses use of it and no-one can be excluded from. Kids aren’t like that. The parents of a kid get benefits that no-one else gets, and other people are routinely excluded from those benefits. (To clarify: I’m refering to the intangible benefits I was talking about earlier.)
My basic argument against Maia is given that parents get benefits from having kids that no-one else gets, surely it’s unfair that paying for their upbringing should be communal? I’m not assuming there’s no social good in having kids. I’m just questioning whether if people do something for their own private reasons, do it unasked, and do it because they gain private benefits from doing it, it should be funded publicly just because there are some positive external spillovers.
(Maia – sorry, I wasn’t trying to call you a Marxist. I was just trying to point out the debate seemed to had split between (1) “collective provision of all childcare costs!” and (2) “all taxation is theft!”).
No need to apologise I don’t think it’s insulting to be called a Marxist, just inaccurate in this case.
La Lubu that’s a lot more civil than my response to Brandon Berg could ever be.
La Lubu that’s a lot more civil than my response to Brandon Berg could ever be.
Thank you. I’m just bone-tired of stereotypes and prejudice being trotted out as “evidence”.
Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be any general admission that there have been significant structural changes to our social infrastructure, and how lack of a social safety net impacts the average person. Social infrastructure has never been just about having friends, family, and neighbors to say hello to; it’s also been about a safety net of concrete resources that one could rely upon in times of need—the ties that bind. Back in my grandparents day, networks of large extended families and other people who grew up together their entire lives lived in fairly close proximity to one another. These people were a vital source of resources for one another—not just people to sit on the stoop with and shoot the shit. What’s more, it didn’t feel like charity; the mutuality of these relationships guaranteed a certain dignity. Efforts to help were social obligations, not handouts.
Very few people in the U.S. have access to that kind of network anymore. Economic circumstances have scattered families to the four winds, in search of jobs, or in search of affordable housing. Economic destruction in the Rust Belt and in small towns/rural areas means there may not be any jobs available in the old family stomping grounds. The integrity of the eight-hour-day has been decimated for most folks; now the standard is the ten-hour day. Lack of affordable housing close to employment means long commutes. Second jobs are taken even if the immediate economic need isn’t there, as a hedge against job instability.
These conditions do not contribute to the rebuilding of community, to say the least. In my neighborhood, people do tend to know each other, but it hasn’t replaced the community of old. For example, there have been plenty of break-ins in my neck of the woods—not because neighborhood residents don’t give a damn about each other, but because during the day the neighborhood is a ghost town. Thieves know that everyone will be at work. In the early evenings, it’s not much better—folks are either scrambling to get to their second job, or hustle their kids off to extracurriculars (yes, the working class does this too—it’s an inoculation against drugs and gang violence). Old folks have a hard time making ends meet, trying to buy medication and still pay utilities in drafty old houses.
What I’m getting at, if that folks can look around them and see that physical infrastructure is falling apart. But they don’t see that our social infrastructure has fallen apart, too. We are told that taxpayer monies should only go towards physical infrastructure—perhaps because contractors that provide physical infrastructure have deep pockets and powerful lobbies. We keep being told that the “free market” will provide us with things like day care, yet in my city, day cares are shutting down even though the need for that day care is still great. Why? No one wants to invest in a business like day care, which has a relatively low profit margin. Why should that be such a surprise? Profit-earning companies are offshored for much less. We are told that charity should replace taxpayer-supported programs (that are accessible by all), at a time when fewer and fewer people feel any sense of attachment to the community they live in.
Age segregation is common; old folks are more likely to live away from younger people. Race segregation has always been operative, but it is increasing in schools—white people who may find themselves living in an integrated neighborhood still make sacrifices to insure their kids are attending an all-white or near-all-white school. Class segregation is getting ridiculuous—the rich have always segregated themselves from the rest of us, but now neighborhoods are getting as tightly formatted by annual income as radio stations are by the individual songs they play.
Just as our roads, schools and railways aren’t going to magically fix themselves, public monies have to be shunted off to institutions that are either going to replace or rebuild the organic societal infrastructure that no longer exists. Look, I have a large extended family that loves one another very much—but we can’t be of much practical help to one another because we all live hundreds of miles away from each other. We did all the “right things”, got an education, kept our noses to the grindstone, and we still don’t have a safety net. We’re not looking for “handouts”. We’re looking for some way to meet all the conflicting obligations of our lives.
I kept my part of the social contract. I have a career. I pay my own bills. I’m not a criminal. Yet, if I even complain about the lack of means for me to meet my obligations as a daughter, as a mother, as an employee, as a community member….somehow that gets translated into “she just wants a handout.” No. I want recognition that no matter how hard I work, I will never earn enough money to be able to purchase “private” help. I want recognition that I’m a taxpayer also, and that my needs and the needs of others like me need to be taken into account. Yes, there will be times I need to take off from work in order to care for my daughter (or to care for my mother). Why is it asking too much to ask that I still have a job to go back to? Am I not also contributing to the well-being of our society by providing these services? I think it’s pretty telling that those who care for children and the elderly are among the least paid of our citizenry. Might as well say, “fuck those kids; fuck those sick old folks.”
Look, I gotta get to work. I hope some of this made sense. I’ll be thinking about it for the next couple of days (I have a tight schedule this week), and maybe I can come up with something coherent on my own blog over the weekend.
Thanks, Maia, for bringing up the topic.
La Lubu’s post reminds me why I seldom take members of either big party seriously when they start babbling about how much they looooooove “community.”
Hell, La Lubu, why aren’t you running ?!
The place of a woman in business society has changed substantially over the past 50 years. Countless women are business professionals and also full time moms. There is much controversy over the topic, many people question if a woman can successfully run a household and also work as a full time professional women without sacrificing one of the two. One woman’s ability to effectively run her business and still be full time mommy is not only empowering but shows that it one really can have the best of both worlds, there’s just a right and a wrong way to do so. But some still find a woman who doesn’t just stay home with the kids to be a disappointment and do not think that woman should be so consumed with their professional lives. Although it sounds old school there are still many people out there who truly believe the woman’s “place” is in the home barefoot and pregnant if you will.
The “old school” way thinking is based more or less on older values and is a closed minded view to the possibilities that are readily available today. There are so many opportunities for a woman in the work force today, and it is any right to be able to learn and grow as much as possible and in order to do so it is important that a person has the opportunity to get out and make connections in personal and professional life. The way humans learn is through experience’s and if someone is cooped up in a house all day with only her children that doesn’t give her a creative outlet which is, for most people key to their happiness.
There are some women that would argue that they don’t have the desire to be in the work force and therefore they have trouble understanding why a woman would want to be away from her children. This is an understandable point of view considering that naturally no mother wants to be away from her child/children. For some the importance of success in a business or their profession is not something that brings them any feeling of gratitude. Which is completely acceptable but it’s hard for some people to wrap their heads around.
One woman shows that it is absolutely possible to productively maintain a household, two children and two businesses all from the top floor of her house which happens to be her home office. A day in the life of Amanda Steinberg starts at “7 a.m.: Our baby girl wakes all of us up”, while I’m sure there are days that do not always start this way, this statement of the beginning of her day shows that Amanda is a devoted mom, while she could let her nanny come over a bit earlier so she could sleep in she chooses to wake up with her daughter and get their family going with her husband. Next their family performs the usual rituals that happen in most households, getting ready for the day and having breakfast. Her husband always takes her 3 year old son to school and “Even if we’re running late, I depart for my home office (top floor of our house) at 9 a.m. sharp. This is critical to me. 9 a.m. Work.” The key to Amanda getting into her office at 9 everyday shows the importance of a definite schedule. It is easy to become lenient with one’s time schedule so it’s important to stick to a strict time frame in order to remain organized and on task.
Throughout her day Amanda stays on a strict schedule working from “9 a.m. -11 a.m.: After I clean out my inbox, I focus on DailyWorth. We send out a daily e-mail, and this requires about two hours of my day to orchestrate.” Devoting and divvying up her time is an important key to her time management and keeping her daily tasks structured. Even if the work for Daily Worth is not yet completed it is vital that she moves onto the next order of business from “11 a.m. – 4 p.m.: I focus on Soapbxx. The tasks I concern myself with include personally handling a lot of the planning and strategy documents that go with selling large, complex Web sites. I don’t worry about Soapbxx’s internal performance or quality because I’ve learned over the years how to hire only the best people.” Not only does Amanda is not only independently successful but she also manages a team of people who know exactly what she wants and accepts from them. Building a team like this takes a lot of time and patience and can be very challenging, but with much time and consideration she has formed them into a well oiled machine. This also helps to insure that she will have more time to spend with family and friends.
Once she is finished working for the day she goes to pick her son up at preschool and comes home with her family to go about their evening “4 p.m. – 9 p.m.: Family time! We run errands (Target, anyone?), make dinner; take baths, read books and do every other bedtime ritual that makes having kids so special.” Just like any mother would have errands to run she makes time to finish the same sorts of tasks that all mothers must do, it just comes after a hard day’s work at the office. With all of the success of course there are a few down falls from “9 p.m. – 11 p.m.: Here’s the part of my life that isn’t so ideal. I generally boot up my Mac and do more work.” This of course is not ideal when it comes to Amanda and her husband but he is understanding and knows how hard she works. It takes a special kind of man to be able to be with a woman that has such drive and ambition.
While there are many advantages and disadvantages to being a working mother it’s a matter of opinion on what is considered the “right” thing to do. Each individual has the right to choose their own path and if having a successful business life is something of importance there should be no excuses. It will undoubtedly take a lot of hard work and dedication but as Amanda and many other women have proven that this is something that can be successfully managed.
References:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/02/mother-family-business-forbes-woman-entrepreneur-balance.html