Tag Archives: Day Care

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.

Commentary

Why do women flock to movies like Switch and Eat, Pray, Love?

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My friend Robert, who has an amazing apologetics-enabled wife, asked me to write about this topic. And Mary helped me to edit it, because the first version was really really mean. Now the last half of the post is a lot more positive, thanks to her input. The meanest part is right after the movie review excerpts and before the advice for Christians.

First, a little blurb about Switch.

Excerpt:

It’s a feminist adage that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, but Hollywood actress Jennifer Aniston is taking that message a step further, saying that women don’t need to “fiddle” with men in order to have and raise a child, thanks to artificial insemination.

Aniston, 41, is the star of an upcoming Miramax film “Switch,” in which Aniston’s character decides she is tired of waiting for a man to come into her life to have a baby, and elects for artificial insemination. Apparently the film is supposed to be a romantic comedy, as it turns out that the best friend of Aniston’s character is the sperm donor.

A reporter at a Sunday press conference in Los Angeles, where the actress was highlighting her movie, questioned Aniston’s character, suggesting it was “selfish” to deprive a child of a father in order to fulfill a personal dream of parenthood.

“Women are realizing more and more that you don’t have to settle, they don’t have to fiddle with a man to have that child,” the actress asserted in their exchange. “They are realizing if it’s that time in their life and they want this part, they can do it with or without that.””The point of the movie is, what is that which defines family?” Aniston continued. “It isn’t necessarily the traditional mother, father, two children and a dog named Spot.”

She stated, “Love is love and family is what is around you and who is in your immediate sphere.”

Second, a little blurb about Eat, Pray, Love.

Excerpt:

The movie stars Julia Roberts as Liz Gilbert, a writer who suddenly decides she doesn’t like being married to her husband any more.

[…]…Liz decides to visit India to look up her former lover’s Hindu guru. At the guru’s place, she gets into Hinduism, including Hindu meditation, really heavily. She also befriends a young Indian girl going into an arranged marriage and a troubled former alcoholic who’s lost his family. From all these experiences, Liz comes to believe in meditation and pantheism, where the believer uses meditation to become like God. She also comes to believe she has to forgive herself, not apologize to the people she’s harmed, especially her former husband, who seems to be a decent, sincere man.

Finally, Liz heads to Bali to consult an elderly spiritual healer and fortune teller she had met before. In Bali, Liz helps a battered wife, finds further spiritual anti-enlightenment and a new lover.

[…]The biggest problem, however, is that the female protagonist is a selfish woman trying to find personal enlightenment and happiness apart from the God of the Bible. Sadly, she jumps from man to man. Even worse, she eventually finds spiritual darkness in the false religion of Hinduism and pantheism, the belief that everyone is god or has a piece of god inside herself.

Another problem with the movie is it presents a negative, feminist view of marriage.

I know that many young unmarried women really really like these movies – even Christian women – so what message are they finding so attractive?

Here’s what the popularity of these movies tells me about what young unmarried Western women believe. (This is the mean part)

Moral obligations are bad

Young, unmarried Western women oppose the idea that their will to be happy can be constrained by moral obligations, especially obligations to their husband and children. They want relationships to be all about fulfilling their emotional needs, which often includes their need for a career so they can be just like men. They want to be able to enter relationships like marriage and parenting when it pleases them, and then to walk away from those relationships when it doesn’t please them. They also want to avoid being judged morally when they act selfishly and destructively. And they believe that any financial difficulties they suffer that result from acting selfishly can be solved with bigger subsidies from the government – like single-payer health care (abortions, IVF, etc.), single-payer education, single-payer day care, etc. And when they act selfishly and impose these social costs on others, they want to be celebrated for it, perhaps even using the force of law in order to censor and coerce dissenters into celebrating their selfishness.

Knowledge and planning are bad

Young, unmarried Western women don’t invest much time and effort into learning the requirements of marriage and parenting. They don’t research the difficulties that men and children will face (e.g. – taxes, public schools), and they don’t research the needs of men and children. For example, they won’t study no-fault divorce, school choice, state-run day care, tax rates, etc., and they won’t make plans to help their husbands with any of these challenges, because it doesn’t make them happy to solve problems for other people. If they read anything then it will be probably be something that blames men for being “controlling” or blames children for not being “resilient”. They aren’t going to be  supportive of men as protectors, providers, and moral leaders, either, because they resent the traditional role of men. They are especially resentful of being supported, of being corrected on facts, and of being judged by men on moral grounds. Any authority that constrains their freedom to pursue happiness at any moment will be harshly criticized.

An amusing, entertaining man is the best man

If you read down a typical young, unmarried Western woman’s list of desirable attributes in a man, you’ll find that what they are looking for is amusement and entertainment – things that are not the main focus in a serious Christian marriage founded on self-sacrificial love and service to God. They really haven’t thought out what marriage is about, so they don’t know what men do in a marriage – they think that the best mate is the one who makes them feel happy. They especially avoid virtuous men, because those are harder to blame if they get caught being selfish. Women who watch these movies want Mr. Right Now, not Mr. Right. And that is why they are now thinking that men are not necessary for raising children – they’ve learned that “all” men are unreliable because all the men they freely chose using their hedonistic criteria didn’t pan out as husbands and fathers. This is what’s behind the impulse to replace men with sperm donors, welfare checks and social programs. “You can’t trust a man” these women say – and of course, they’re right. You can’t trust a man who is selected based on his ability to be amusing, entertaining, unchaste, passionate, exciting and amoral. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – they get the bad men they set out to find, and the bad men abandon/abuse them. And then they blame the bad man that they freely chose for being bad!

Marriage-minded men are not willing to suppress their God-given inclinations to be protectors, providers and moral leaders, just to be approved by selfish women. And so women reject those marriage-minded men, and instead prefer to pursue dramatic, passionate hook-ups and temporary cohabitations with immature alpha males and pick-up artists. And that’s why 70% of divorces are initiated by women for “unhappiness” and 50% of all marriages end in divorce and 40% of children are born out-of-wedlock and 77% of young unmarried women voted for bigger government and more welfare in 2008. Not to mention abortion,  which is supported by most (77%) young, unmarried Western women because they vote for Democrats, a party that supports abortion to the point where they want it to be funded by pro-life taxpayers.

What about Christian women – are they any better?

(This is the nice part) Well, the ideal for Christian woman is to not be like this at all, although some are like this. Now initially, I wrote this section as a mean rant against fake Christian women, but Mary urged me to re-write it to express what Christian women ought to do to avoid all the mistakes I had before. So I hope this is better, because all my male  friends liked the first angry version better.

OK, so, Christian women are supposed to be Christian, and that means that they even have to love in Christian ways. So, instead of looking at men as a source of happiness, Christian women should think about how to love men SELF-SACRIFICIALLY. In other words, they should spend more time trying to find out what wounds a man has that are stopping him for contributing more to the Lord and heal those. Then she can turn to helping him with his work, his investing, and other major projects. And she should be rigorous about interviewing him, reading books about men and marriage, and then having a plan to invest in him as a person to make him the most effective Christian he can be. That is how a woman scores with a man, by loving him well and helping him to be a better Christian. Part of that will come back to her as he becomes a better husband and father.

Christian women also make it easier for a man to concentrate on the morals and skills that will help him in the marriage. For example, she encourages him to choose a field that will allow him to earn a living or make a difference. Good fields are fields like engineering, and engineering and engineering. That way, he can build up a nice-sized portfolio so that he is ready to shine in his traditional Biblical role as provider. She should encourage him to lift weights, fire guns and learn self-defense, and she should vote for laws that favor parental rights, school choice and firearm ownership – so that he can be a protector. And she should regularly submit herself to moral criticism so that she encourages him to hold her accountable for her selfishness to prepare him for his role as moral leader of the home. That all starts in courtship, and it takes planning to be effective. It’s not about having a good time, and having passionate experiences – it’s about intentionally and intelligently building something together. Serving together.

Not only is the woman supposed to be effective at molding a man into his role by taking an active interest in his work, strength and character, but she has to give him the opportunity to exercise and practice those skills. She should let him provide gifts to her, and defend her from skeptics and atheists. She should take his advice and learn from him about how to defend her faith. She should read books he hasn’t read so that she can solve problems for him, like problems of how to buy a home, how to rollover a 401K, and how to apply for a Ph.D. And finally, she should also encourage him in Christian virtues like chastity, chivalry and sobriety. She should be the first and best person that he can rely on to honor him for his dedication to Christian morality. She should NEVER EVER make him feel bad about being a virgin, being self-controlled and stoic, being a prude, etc. In the whole world there is no one who encourages a Christian man to be virtuous -it’s the woman’s job to stand by that man. She should also read about things like no-fault divorce, oxytocin, gender identity disorder, etc. and encourage her man to be strong in his moral convictions – even if that leaves her with no one to blame but herself when she’s selfish. She’ll just have to realize that the love of a good man is more important than being able to deflect guilt and responsibility by blaming men.

A Christian woman should not think of a man as an accessory for creating feelings of happiness in her. We’re beyond that now. There’s a war on, and every man who takes his faith seriously is busy trying to serve the Lord effectively. For myself, I am focused on charity, writing and doing apologetics with non-Christians. Things like these should be  more interesting than fun for a Christian woman – in fact they should be the ONLY things on her list of criteria of what makes a good match. She should put her desire for happiness behind her and love a good man self-sacrificially as a way of serving God by making her chosen man more effective at serving God. And that is why it is so important to screen a man about his faith, and especially about how that faith works out practically, before marrying him. A Christian woman loves a man before the face of God – she is trying to honor Christ in the way she chooses a man, and in the way she loves him. Her satisfaction about his appearance and his conformity to a secular alpha-male ideal should be the LEAST of her concerns. (In any case, many of those trivial things are easy to change)

Good movies

Oh, and if you’re looking for movies where you can learn something about what really happens to selfish women, watch “Madame Bovary” (1949) and “Anna Karenina” (1948). If you want something newer, I like “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Ordinary People”. I also heard good things about “Mommie Dearest”, but have not seen it.

By the way, if you want to go see a movie that’s out now, go see “The Expendables” instead. (Here’s a good review) I also thought that the new Rambo was good.

Here’s my full list of good movies.

  • Rules of Engagement (Samuel L. Jackson)
  • Bella
  • Henry V (Kenneth Brannagh)
  • The Lives of Others
  • United 93
  • Taken (Liam Neeson)
  • Cinderella Man
  • The Blind Side
  • Cyrano de Bergerac (Gerard Depardieu)
  • Amazing Grace (Ioan Gruffudd)
  • Gettysburg
  • We Were Soldiers
  • Stand and Deliver
  • Blackhawk Down
  • The Pursuit of Happyness
  • High Noon

These are good movies for courting – to teach women what men are like, and how they ought to treat men.

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