Tag Archives: America

Commentary

Are French parents superior to American parents?

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From the Wall Street Journal, a shocking story.

Excerpt:

Rest assured, I certainly don’t suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I’m not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don’t want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

But for all its problems, France is the perfect foil for the current problems in American parenting. Middle-class French parents (I didn’t follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.

Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. “For me, the evenings are for the parents,” one Parisian mother told me. “My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.” French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.

And:

Authority is one of the most impressive parts of French parenting—and perhaps the toughest one to master. Many French parents I meet have an easy, calm authority with their children that I can only envy. Their kids actually listen to them. French children aren’t constantly dashing off, talking back, or engaging in prolonged negotiations.

One Sunday morning at the park, my neighbor Frédérique witnessed me trying to cope with my son Leo, who was then 2 years old. Leo did everything quickly, and when I went to the park with him, I was in constant motion, too. He seemed to regard the gates around play areas as merely an invitation to exit.

Frédérique had recently adopted a beautiful redheaded 3-year-old from a Russian orphanage. At the time of our outing, she had been a mother for all of three months. Yet just by virtue of being French, she already had a whole different vision of authority than I did—what was possible and pas possible.

Frédérique and I were sitting at the perimeter of the sandbox, trying to talk. But Leo kept dashing outside the gate surrounding the sandbox. Each time, I got up to chase him, scold him, and drag him back while he screamed. At first, Frédérique watched this little ritual in silence. Then, without any condescension, she said that if I was running after Leo all the time, we wouldn’t be able to indulge in the small pleasure of sitting and chatting for a few minutes.

“That’s true,” I said. “But what can I do?” Frédérique said I should be sterner with Leo. In my mind, spending the afternoon chasing Leo was inevitable. In her mind, it was pas possible.

I pointed out that I’d been scolding Leo for the last 20 minutes. Frédérique smiled. She said that I needed to make my “no” stronger and to really believe in it. The next time Leo tried to run outside the gate, I said “no” more sharply than usual. He left anyway. I followed and dragged him back. “You see?” I said. “It’s not possible.”

Frédérique smiled again and told me not to shout but rather to speak with more conviction. I was scared that I would terrify him. “Don’t worry,” Frederique said, urging me on.

Leo didn’t listen the next time either. But I gradually felt my “nos” coming from a more convincing place. They weren’t louder, but they were more self-assured. By the fourth try, when I was finally brimming with conviction, Leo approached the gate but—miraculously—didn’t open it. He looked back and eyed me warily. I widened my eyes and tried to look disapproving.

After about 10 minutes, Leo stopped trying to leave altogether. He seemed to forget about the gate and just played in the sandbox with the other kids. Soon Frédérique and I were chatting, with our legs stretched out in front of us. I was shocked that Leo suddenly viewed me as an authority figure.

“See that,” Frédérique said, not gloating. “It was your tone of voice.” She pointed out that Leo didn’t appear to be traumatized. For the moment—and possibly for the first time ever—he actually seemed like a French child.

There’s a young woman I was very impressed by and I was spending some time with her last year. One day she and I were over at a friend’s house and they have 3 kids. The lady was paying attention to the eldest boy – smiling and being gentle. He decided to start wielding a bean bag around and there was a danger of knocking things over. The lady leaned forward and said to the boy “NO” sternly. He sat there staring at her for a few seconds defiantly, and all conversation in the room stopped. He was trying to decide if she was in a position to command him, and if she was serious about her command. She kept looking sternly at him, right in the eyes. He never looked at his parents. Then he put the bean bag down, and his parents laughed. They were delighted. And so was I – with her. It was such a joy her to see how she paid attention to the boy and set boundaries on him – and he listened to her.

Commentary

How faith, virtues and marriage are declining among blue collar Americans

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Brad Wilcox writes about a new book entitled “Coming Apart” in the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

So much for the idea that the white working class remains the guardian of core American values like religious faith, hard work and marriage. Today the denizens of upscale communities like McLean, Va., New Canaan, Conn., and Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Murray in “Coming Apart,” are now much more likely than their fellow citizens to embrace these core American values. In studying, as his subtitle has it, “the state of white America, 1960-2010,” Mr. Murray turns on its head the conservative belief that bicoastal elites are dissolute and ordinary Americans are virtuous.

Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends instead that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.

He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four “founding virtues”—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic.

Consider what has happened with marriage. The destructive family revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s has gradually eased—at least in the nation’s most privileged precincts. In the past 20 years, divorce rates have come down, marital quality (self-reported happiness in marriage) has risen and nonmarital childbearing (out-of-wedlock births) is a rare occurrence among the white upper class. Marriage is not losing ground in America’s best neighborhoods.

But it’s a very different story in blue-collar America. Since the 1980s, divorce rates have risen, marital quality has fallen and nonmarital childbearing is skyrocketing among the white lower class. Less than 5% of white college-educated women have children outside of marriage, compared with approximately 40% of white women with just a high-school diploma. The bottom line is that a growing marriage divide now runs through the heart of white America.

This whole article is worth reading, because it talks about some of the other areas that are declining in middle class America. I have added the book to my wishlist.

It seems as though Theodore Dalrymple’s description of the British lower classes in his book “Life at the Bottom” has come to America. He argues in that book that the new moral relativism of the elites works well enough for them because they have money, but it is very harmful to the poor, if the poor adopt moral relativism. I always believed that America would be safe from moral relativism. Recently, I was trying to argue with some British Christians about how the secularization of Britain was leading to the decline of marriage and the nuclear family. I point out their 45% out-of-wedlock birth rate, and they pointed out our 40% out-of-wedlock birth rate. We are right behind them, and it really makes me sad. Children need a mother and a father to take care of them.

When arguing with liberals about the importance of marriage, I like to use two good articles from the Heritage Foundation. I argue that when marriage goes, many bad things happen, like child poverty and child abuse. You would think that the government would do something about the decline of marriage, but people on the secular left often don’t like marriage, because there are traditional roles for husbands and wives that clash with their feminism. They don’t like the working father and the mother staying at home – not even if that creates the most stable environment for the children

News

Pew Research: U.S. marriage rate slumps to a record low

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Marriage and family
Marriage and family

UPDATE: Welcome, visitors from IOwnTheWorld. Thanks for the link! Readers should check out John Hawkins’ list of the top 40 conservative blogs for more great blogs!

ECM sends me this depressing article from the BBC.

Excerpt:

Barely half of Americans – a record low – are currently married, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census data.

Just 51% of adult Americans are married, compared with 72% in 1960.

The median age of first marriage has also hit a new high, of 26.5 for brides and 28.7 for grooms.

Pew said the number of adults co-habitating, single-person households and single parents had meanwhile increased in recent decades.

The study found that 20% of adults today aged 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59% in 1960.

It is unclear whether they are delaying matrimony or abandoning it altogether.

The analysis also found the number of new marriages in the US had declined by five percentage points between 2009-10.

This may not necessarily have been caused by the economic downturn, since a similar trend has continued in Europe regardless of business cycles.

Pew, a nonpartisan think tank and polling organisation, found the percentage of those Americans who have been married at least once had declined as well – 72% in 2010, from 85% in 1960.

If the trend persists, in a few years less than half of Americans will be married, Pew said.

I think that there are many causes for this problem. One of them has to be that the recession has hit men harder than women, and it is harder for a man to contemplate marriage when he isn’t the provider. A second reason is that the expansion of government makes it less important for women to men to fit the provider role, and men sink to those expectations and concentrate on other things that women want. A third reason is the men are performing poorly in school and earning fewer degrees, probably for the reasons that Christina Hoff Sommers explained in “The War Against Boys” – i.e. – feminism in the schools. A fourth reason would be the decline of prestige associated with marriage – men marry more when they get respect from their wives and society as a whole for doing something challenging and difficult. A fifth reason would be feminism’s drive to push premarital sex as something natural and normal to women – if women offer premarital sex to men as a form of recreation, then men have a big disincentive not to marry – they can already get the sex without having to commit for life to one woman. Furthermore, I don’t think that men feel comfortable about marrying a woman with a lot of previous sex partners – men know, and research confirms, that the higher number of prior sex partners is a huge risk of divorce. A sixth reason is that men’s incomes are taxed more and more, so that the government has more and more authority to interfere with his leadership – e.g. – a man cannot afford to select a private school or a religious school because the government takes the money and he is left with a politicized, failing public school that doesn’t accomplish the goals he wants for his children. A seventh reason would be that divorce is very bad for men’s finances – men have to pay alimony and child support, too.

I was chatting about this post over with ECM, and he said that the easy availability of pornography was another cause for the decline of marriage.

I wrote a longer, snarkier post about the decline of marriage here.