Tag Archives: Children

Podcasts

New version of Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse’s Love and Economics talk

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Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

If you’ve heard it before, it might be worth listening again – this version is clear and new, and there is Q&A. This is my favorite lecture on marriage because she makes marriage seem like the Lord of the Rings or some similar epic. There’s good and evil, and it’s very dangerous and adventurous and important.

The MP3 file is here.

Her goal in this lecture is to explain what families do to help to raise children who can participate in society and the free market. Her audience is fiscal conservatives and libertarians who think that marriage and family are not as important from fiscal issues. She is making a connection between marriage and civil society, and civil society to limited government, and limited government to liberty. Family should be very important to fiscal conservatives and libertarians.

My favorite part is about 26 minutes in, when she is discussing government-run day care, government-provided meals for children and being very aggressive about how she doesn’t want government taking over the roles of mothers and fathers. The push to make government take over the parental roles flows from the idea that women need to be more like men, and that means they need to be separated from their children so they can work like men do. Also, government programs attempt to communicate to women that men are unecessary as protectors and providers and moral leaders, since the government can protect, provide and educate.

What she does not mention is that socialists also love the idea of taking money from the hard-working, frugal parents and redistributing it to single mothers so that all the children will be equally screwed with loveless day care and lousy public-school educations, which are really more indoctrinations than preparation for a profession. They like the idea that everyone will be equal and the only way to do that is to yank children away from their parents.

Consider the words of this radical feminist:

“We really don’t know how to raise children. If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality. […]In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.”

(Mary Jo Bane:  Former Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services of the Clinton administration)

This is what they think about the traditional family. The left thinks that the man’s job is to work, and the woman’s job is to work, and the government’s job is to steal their money so that everyone’s children are raised “communally”. This is what the left believes about marriage and family. That’s why they enact policies to break up marriages and push women out of the home to make them work like men. Leftists also don’t want parents teaching their children conservative views and values.

This lecture is highly-recommended. Christians really need to think about marriage and family the way she does. There are two things a woman needs to do to convince a good man to marry. 1) Treat marriage and family as a war against tyranny and socialism. 2) Understand and assist men with their needs and plans.

Commentary

Mary Eberstadt’s book “Home Alone America”

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I thought I would write quickly about Mary Eberstadt’s book “Home Alone America”, which I read a few years back.

Here’s an article from National Review by Stanley Kurtz.

Excerpt:

Up until now, public discussion of issues like day care has been dominated by feminist journalists and academics who take their own career decisions for granted and call on society to make their lives easier: How can I be equal to a man if society won’t give me better day care? Eberstadt strides into this situation and asks a totally different series of questions: Are children any happier in day care than they are with their mothers? If not, should that effect a woman’s career decisions? Are unhappy children who bite and get aggressive or ill in day care growing tougher, stronger, and more ruggedly individualist, or is it we adults who are being coarsened to needs of our children?

[…]Increasingly, we’re medicating children for mental illnesses that barely existed in the past. Take “separation anxiety disorder” (SAD), defined as “developmentally inappropriate and excessive anxiety concerning separation from home or from those to whom the individual is attached.” This syndrome is now said to affect about 10 percent of the nation’s children. One of its symptoms is “refusal to attend classes or difficulty remaining in school for an entire day” — in other words, what used to be called “truancy.”

Are 10 percent of the nation’s children really in need of treatment for SAD, or are most of these children actually behaving more normally than mothers who have little trouble parting from their children for most of the day? Is it surprising that children get SAD in the absence of their parents? As Eberstadt suggests, maybe we need to define a whole new range of disorders: “There is no mental disorder…called, say, preoccupied parent disorder, to pathologize a mother or father too distracted to read Winnie the Pooh for the fourth time or to stay up on Saturday night waiting for a teenager to come home from the movies. Nor will one find divorced second-family father disorder, even though the latter might explain what we could call the ‘developmentally inappropriate’ behaviors of certain fathers, such as failure to pay child support or to show up for certain important events. There is also nothing…like separation non-anxiety disorder to pathologize parents who can separate for long stretches from their children without a pang.”

And here’s an article from National Review by Rich Lowry.

Excerpt:

Eberstadt writes: “Of reported cases of chlamydia in 2000, 74 percent occurred in persons age 15 to 24, and that number is judged to be ‘a substantial underestimate of the true incidence of chlamydia among young people,’ in the words of The Alan Guttmacher Institute. An estimated 11 percent of people age 15 to 24 are infected with genital herpes, and 33 percent of females in the same age group are thought to be infected with human papillomavirus (HPV). This age group is also thought to account for 60 percent of gonorrhea cases. … Of the 18.9 million new STD cases in the United States in 2000, about 9.1 million, or half, were found in people between the ages of 15 and 24.”

[…]Where are many of these kids having sex? In empty homes. A study in the journal Pediatrics of public-school kids found that 91 percent were having sex in a home setting — usually after school, when parents aren’t around. Absent parents are practically an invitation to early sexual initiation. According to Pediatrics, “Youths who were unsupervised for 30 or more hours per week were more likely to be sexually active compared with those who were unsupervised for 5 hours a week or less.”

[…]This is just the beginning of Eberstadt’s distressing catalog:

There has been a dramatic increase in ear infections, technically known as otitis media, in children. Eberstadt quotes a specialist: “Virtually every study ever done on the increase in otitis media has shown that day care is the most important difference.”

According to Eberstadt, “Practically every index of juvenile mental and emotional problems is rising.” Many of these maladies are linked to absent parents. A Department of Health and Human Services report found that “children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems.”

And so on.

A sample chapter is here.

If you’ve never thought about the effects of day care and parent-child separation, you should take a look. I thought that there were places in the book where the argumentation was a bit loose, and evidence was suspect or absent, but it is a good thing to get a different point of view on these issues. My concern is that parents will be all too ready to blame the suffering of the children on “mental problems” caused by “genetics” or “brain chemistry”, rather than give up their two-parents-working lifestyle, and the economic perks that it brings. Frankly, children are a pain, and some parents will prefer to have to deal with grown-ups at work instead of screaming babies at home. Somehow, they feel ashamed for having to take care of children – as if raising children is somehow useless work because the government doesn’t get any tax revenue from it. And the government might encourage parents to keep working even if the children are showing symptoms of anxiety, depression, etc.

Imagine how this works out in a single-payer system, e.g. – Canada. The government wants women to work, so they can get more tax money for taking over more of private businesses and redistributing wealth in more areas to make everyone “equal”. They raise taxes, and now more women must work instead of staying home. Children go into government-run day care centers funded by the government via tax money from working mothers. The day cares educate the children instead of the parents. What happens when the children develop mental problems or behavioral problems? Can the state-run medical system blame the government for forcing women to work? Of course not – the child is somehow to blame, and will have to be medicated. The parents believe this because they do not want to believe that their drive for more material possessions has caused their child any harm. It must be the brain chemicals that are to blame – not the intrusion of government and not the selfishness of the parents.

News

How mistrust of men prevents fathers from parenting daughters

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Stuart Schneiderman explains how the war against men has made it harder for fathers to parent their daughters.

Excerpt:

In today’s America a man knows that he can be sued for workplace sexual harassment if he looks at a woman in the wrong way, if he makes a sexually suggestive remark, or if he touches her inappropriately.

He also knows that children, especially female children, are strictly off limits. Speak to his daughter in the wrong way and a man can find himself charged with child molestation. Even when the charges are false, it is very, very difficult to restore a reputation tarnished by the suspicion of child abuse.

It isn’t easy being a man in America today. The culture has made men into a threat, into the enemy of women and girls.

Not everywhere, not for everyone, but enough of the time for men to be wary in their dealings with female children.

The attacks on men, the stigmatization of men, the distrust about their motives have created a cultural miasma. If you were a father living in such a culture, would you want to talk about sex with your preteen daughter?

The toxic environment produced by the war against men has made men more likely to shut down lines of communication with their daughters.

Then, these same men are criticized for being too reticent, for not opening up, and for not expressing themselves.

The culture strongly encourages girls to discuss intimate matters only with other women. Who but a woman would understand a woman’s experience?

Of course, this deprives girls of a good relationship with the most important man in their lives. And it also tells them that the only people they should listen to are people who are just like them.

His post was linked by Instapundit and Helen Reynolds. It’s a great post. Some women are so busy bad-mouthing men that they don’t realize that men shut down and withdraw from family life unless they get encouragement and respect. Men rise to the expectations of women.