American parenting is killing the American marriage (2014)
qz.com
qz.com
But seriously, the whole "children as a religion" point is great. I mean, think of some of the bills and laws that get passed because "think of the children". It's not too different from religious laws.
> parenthood became a religion in America...Nothing in life is allowed to be more important than our children...a human achieves its peak value at birth and declines thereafter
Most Americans tend to believe their children come first. This isn't a religion, it's an evolutionary instinct. A species can't continue if its organisms don't put enough effort into their offspring if their offspring are completely defenseless for the first decade of their life and only 3 are born to every female. If I kick a 40-year-old out of my house he'll find a hotel to stay at temporarily and be fine. If I dump a 2-year-old on the street, they'll be roadkill within the hour. Caring more about children isn't any more unique to this time period than it is to this species.
> Another sign of the parenthood religion is that it has become totally unacceptable in our culture to say anything bad about our children, let alone admit that we don’t like them all of the time.
I grew up in a household where my parents weren't afraid to tell the truth to me and it was pretty brutal. There's enough negativity at school that it feels like people are surrounding you at all sides with insecurities. Honesty isn't bad but if your kid goes to public school he already knows where he falls short. Also, saying things behind your kid's back isn't any better. It'll come back around to them.
> Mothers are also holy in a way that fathers are not expected to be. Mothers live in a clean, cheerful world filled with primary colors and children’s songs, and they don’t think about sex.
I don't know where this is coming from. Maybe this was Jesus' ideal for a mom, but nowadays the ideal mom seems to be one that argues over who's carpooling next week and buys their 16-year-old birth control just in case. I think anyone who can could and do laundry probably automatically counts as a good mother nowadays.
I think the problem is the author treats kids more like a car than a living being. Your car's muffler isn't going to get fixed until you admit it's broken. You don't fix your kid by bringing him into the shop one day after work. Being a parent requires being a teacher, boss and friend at the same time. In no way is "owner" ever part of that definition.
Thank you; you put it better than I could.
A small example that demolishes his crackpot theory: we just had a kid a few weeks ago. We have a cat, who has never been around children, and who has never had children. And yet, when the child cries, the cat comes running; and if the cries do not subside soon enough, she'll start howling. And then there's this example: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30893297
Is the cat following some religion too? Hogwash.
"Enough effort" is not the same as "Nothing in life is allowed to be more important".
OTOH, evolutionary, if you die, that 2-year-old and its siblings do not have a bright future, either. If that 2-year-old dies its sibling may survive. Even if it is your only child, you may be able to bring another child into the world.
If you model this, I expect that you can make either strategy optimal, depending on small twists to your model's parameters (increase family ties a bit, and chances are that 2 year old will get adopted; increase child mortality, and that 2-year-old may only count as half a 10-year-old in terms of expected number of surviving children, even if its parents stay around to care for it)
As a parent, I constantly think back to the 70s as a benchmark for open mindedness and freedom with my children. In my honest opinion, we've lost a lot of perspective and become much less tolerant. In Australia, someone called the police because children walked a short distance to the local park by themselves. Taking a photo at a swimming carnival is taboo. None of these attitudes were around in the 70s.
I felt the relationship aspects between adults missed the mark. Not only the relationship breakdown aspects, but the women and sex. That reminds me of the woman who runs she++ (a sexist business name that no one calls out) who said in a Forbes interview that sex was bad and a man thing. There is a social stigma in admitting that women can like sex. Even Sam Mechkovich from Ars commented about bond women not falling for bond in his Spectre review, because that's not a woman thing to like sex. My response to these people is "what's wrong with it?" Most of the women I know and respect are open about sex. That doesn't mean free sex, it means being open minded and confident in yourself to be free to speak your mind. My sort of people...
Ultimately, I lump all these social and parental problems down to Political Correctness. For the nay sayers, you can treat people with respect and not be PC. PC is a set of perverted rules that bully people into what to think.
I have been told, "You can't say that, we have to be open minded here" when expressing the belief that political correctness does more to damage discourse than almost any other idea in western society. Way to provide a demonstration of my point!
Consider how many things we accept as valid today (say opinions related to equality) were once almost blasphemous to mention. It would be arrogant of us to assume we are not making similar mistakes.
I suppose the lesson is to keep an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out.
Recently did some pre-marital counseling where they recommend that you put your spouse above your children. Seemed really strange to me and counter-intuitive. I don't know much about marriage at all, but if you think about it, the trickle-down effect does seem to make sense as setting an example is a good lesson for kids.
I think the takeaway is to keep a balance. Also, it's not like Ayelet Waldman is a revolutionary, as other old-school practitioners seem to have been recommending that advice for years.
I believe this is incredibly important for a lasting, loving relationship. I've observed a few relationships where one partner's priority shifts so much to the children that the other partner is left with little love or consideration and their bond quickly degrades.
I could understand this behavior in a place where there's a shortage of food and resources, but in developed countries with an abundance of food and relative safety people are sabotaging their happiness and adult bonds by elevating developing humans above the person they originally committed to.
Additionally, some adults infantilize their household culture to the point where adult activities become a sort of taboo. I think we short-change children by not exposing them to regular adult behaviors and conversations. Certainly there are some things children should not be exposed to but the household should be as accommodating for old and young as possible. A healthy balance needs to be struck.
Your kids will adjust to the lifestyle you set for them and happy parents have more to give.
I get this is mainly an emotional argument, but it's still startling to me how opposite it is to the purely economic argument I made above. In fact usually people think I'm just trolling when I'm stating my opinion on the matter but I'm dead serious.
All babies will turn into all 22 year olds. Only some babies will turn into college graduates.
Therefore some of a population, if selected artificially (i.e. college graduates) will always be better than the whole population (i.e. all babies.)
I completely disagree and as a college graduate I would never say something like that.
A test statement may be: A certain population is at the top of the IQ bell curve therefore they are smarter.
The IQ bell curve being the context.
Well, they will or they will die trying.
Most fresh graduates also become retired seniors. All retired seniors eventually become corpses. Can you maybe see potential declining over time now?
A baby could become anyone.
FCG: fresh college grads (natch) LDE: lame-duck elderlies BMPP: babies; max-potential persons
Someone has never had a baby.
I at least down voted it because, the comment it was quoting from was supposed to be a "purely economic argument" and it acknowledged that most argument come from an emotional view point.
There are valid points that go a long the lines of the comment and your follow ups starts to add them but:
> Someone has never had a baby.
Does not add that detail or those arguments.
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/01/children-ar...
"are most valuable to society, since we just finished investing a ton of money into them"
"In traditional microeconomic theory, only prospective (future) costs are relevant to an investment decision. Traditional economics proposes that economic actors should not let sunk costs influence their decisions. Doing so would not be rationally assessing a decision exclusively on its own merits." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs
People usually make the sunk cost mistake when they aren't evaluating the immediate potential of the options, just the emotional tie to the money invested. That's not the case here.
Actually, that's exactly what they said and I even quoted them on it.
Future cost of making a baby productive? ~20 years of varying levels of investment.
The common assumption that ajmurmann and vasiliys are likely working form is that value has been retained during the ~20 years of investment and the cost is proportional to the value and there cost is a reasonable proxy for value.
It is an assumption that does not always hold, but is common enough to do as a first order approximation.
But society, luckily, isn't some autonomous macro-organism that can treat people like individual cells in your body. So when we say that we value babies above all else that's a projection of the individual aspirations of the members of that society.
An average member of society will care much more about the health of their family and children than maximizing the GDP of their country, and government policy and rhetoric luckily at least partially reflects this.
The only valid explanation I can think of for our obsession with babies is evolutionary - you need some overkill hormonal persuasion to bond with babies. So every individual who has gone through such a period has some understanding of other individuals' love for babies - they're being empathetic when they hear someone say "I love my baby more than anything".
People at large want to have kids, they want to not die from treatable illnesses. Even when those two goals are at odds with optimal economic realities societies will still try to attain them, because we build societies and economies as a means to an end to attain our goals, we don't live our lives purely to satisfy economic efficiencies.
We're an organism that's the product of billions of years of evolution, all organisms try to spread their genes to the next generation. To say that you're better off with one child who's a collage graduate than two who aren't might be true economically, but ignores what's fundamentally driving us all forward as an organism.
Does anyone really think the primacy of reproduction can be superseded by some clever economic theories?
This seems to be a popular opinion on here and I really don't understand that. In fact its kinda fucked up. I can only guess there's a lot of fresh college grads on HN.
It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. I certainly don't want a society made up of fresh college grads who think they know it all.
Edit: Typos
I guess from an economical sense college is expensive but... I don't know... how many college grads actually use their degree?
20 years into your career we've recovered a lot of that invested value, whereas right out of college is near or at the point that the handover of civilization between generations actually happens.
In a way, your argument works against your conclusion. The more you've already spent, the less remains to be spent before the person takes off on their own trajectory. Fresh grads don't scale like startups do. They don't need ever-increasing investment to keep up with growth. They're (ideally) more like established companies, already capable of generating their own income and no longer in need of infusions from outside. They don't need our attention as much as babies do. That's why we call them incubators. ;)
> Babies on the other hand are easily replaced
sounds like something a sociopath would say about it.
I mean really, is the answer not obvious? Babies need constant care and attention or they die.
A great book. It can also be read profitably in conjunction with Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High. School districts are weirdly tied to real estate in the U.S.; many places with good districts also have severe land-use control laws that prevent the creation of new housing units on a given parcel land; and, consequently, people will pay a lot of money for scarce housing that comes bundled with good school districts. Two-earner households make paying for the housing easier, but two-earner households are often also more economically fragile (especially considering the prevalence of divorce).
Rich people want nicer schools. These same people have a lot of influence and or control in our society, so they dictate how the money was divvied up, to make sure their kids got the best.
In many other countries the money is put into a large "pot" and then redistributed from that. So most schools per student budget is similar but with adjustments for cost of living. The US is actually the odd duck for how monied some public schools are, while depriving almost impoverishing others.
Charter schools only make the situation worse, since many utilise public funds while also charging parents (so effectively a private school that keeps poor kids out, but gets to utilise public money to do so).
I am talking about an issue of fairness. You're just pointing out the status quo.
Can you elaborate on that? It doesn't make sense to me. When we were on a single income in my family, it felt a lot more fragile than now that we have two incomes.
So, instead of having a household where you have one parent working to support the family and another parent who can occasionally add income but doesn't have to, now you have lots of people where they are fully tapped out and both parents are working full time.
As a couple with two high incomes you actually have to try really hard not to let expenses get to the point where you can't live without both incomes. So in effect you now have 1 big income that you rely on.
In terms of the fragility, there is more chance of losing 1 out of 2 jobs (i.e. 50% of the income) than there is of losing 1 out of 1 jobs (i.e. 100% of the income). (I hope I explained this right - but it's how my thinking goes).
There's three things you need to understand about personal finance:
1. The first is that shit happens and most people don't plan for it (because they haven't been educated on personal finance). Most resources suggest that you keep an emergency fund of 6-12 months of living expenses saved up for when shit happens. We know that most people do not have this. I'm not even going to bother providing a source because there are so many sources on how Americans don't save.
2. The number one expense for any given household is going to be housing (whether owned or rented).
3. While you can cutback on many things, you cannot cutback on a mortgage. So if there are permanent setbacks to your finances: someone loses their job and gets another one that pays less, someone gets hurt and can't work for a while or ends up on disability, someone has to stay home to take care of an unhealthy relative, etc, then you can be pretty much shit out of luck unless you're house has equity on it and you can sell and downsize (although most people will just take a loan out against their equity lol).
So these are the characters of our stage. If you get a mortgage based on 1 person's income and something happens, there is another person there to step up. This provides a powerful safety net for the family. If you get a mortgage based on both people's incomes, you are putting yourself at greater risk because if something were to happen to either person you would not be able to afford to keep your 15-30 year agreement. And the cost of getting out of that agreement is enormous (as we saw with the recent housing crash).
I encourage you to read more on personal finance. It's incredibly fascinating.
You realize that a lot of people don't have savings because they live paycheck to paycheck trying to survive?
http://badmoneyadvice.com/2009/03/whats-wrong-with-the-milli...
Right now we pay more than what we'd like on rent, but next year we'll move to a cheaper place.
We're saving for a large down payment for when it comes time to buy a home. Also, we'll get a mortgage as if only one of us were working, we have already agreed on that. And we're planning on moving to a state with a low cost of living when that time comes.
So in our case, two incomes is pretty solid.
It is more fragile because 1) it encourages living well beyond your means and 2) the odds of job loss/income reduction is now doubled and the stakes are higher as the second partner can't get a job to pick of the slack in the event of job loss.
It goes back to the old observation that people living paycheck to paycheck on $30,000 tend to also live paycheck to paycheck if their income increases to $60,000.
So if there is a hypothetical one income family making $40,000/year is unable to pay bills instead of reducing spending (who wants to do that?) the other partner starts working. Their lifestyle tends to rise with income and now they are just getting by with $60,000/year and put themselves in a more fragile place. This is how people tend to behave.
Instead they could have reigned in on their expenses a bit and perhaps taken on a second income to save for a rainy day.
The way to do two incomes (if at all possible) is to base your standard of living on just one. Use the other income to invest, save, or fuck around (travel, dinner, etc.). This type of two income house is much less fragile as savings and investments can accumulate, emergencies are easily taken care of, and spending can be reeled in in case of financial heartship. Either way with two incomes savings should be a very high priority to reduce fragility.
So two income households certainly can be less fragile but often aren't in practice.
I am so amazed when I see parents nowadays devoting their entire life to making sure their children are spared of any tiny little inconvenience. These children will be very poorly adjusted and these parents are rarely happy.
Of course, there's an unfortunate prisoner's dilemma in that if two kids are involved, and one is volunteering all the time, the lazy one thinks, "Ha, sweet, I'm so clever I never do any work and things still get done!" Not really sure how to get around this - perhaps develop a turn-based cooperation game where two siblings take turns helping, effectively coopting the helpfulness of one to blunt the selfishness of the other. If they both defect, then I suppose you have to create an "existential baseline" that they don't want to endure, involving a) no toys, b) no freedom, c) bland food. But that's problematic because it turns you into a jailor, and it turns cooperation into "that thing you do to satisfy authority" again.
I don't put loads of time into my kids to save them every inconvenience, but to give them a thirst for knowledge, etc.
Maybe there's a bias such as the overmothering behaviour being overpresented in the media yet most families and mothers are absolutely regular people as parents, and possibly feeling bad themselves about never reaching the impossible expectations set in the media?
I'd happily read personal experiences here to figure out how much truth there is in it.
Most of the article is handwaving. The one part of it that's actually based on a specific event is the writer who got persecuted after saying she loved her husband more than her children. But this is the standard sort of nonsense that happens any time anything catches the attention of fringe crazies. Do something with national reach, and if 0.01% of your audience thinks you're a scumbag for it, you will suffer even if their opinion is not representative. You could write an essay about how chocolate is delicious and you'd still end up getting hated on, no doubt with lots of references to Indonesian fires and such. But there is no American chocolate crisis.
2) American parenting isn't killing marriage. Marriages are killed one at a time by the unique parents that choose to do so. And that's the problem with statistical conceptualizations. It rarely applies to you for those dealing with it at the present. Only in hindsight do the numbers compile anyway, so it really isn't all that helpful.
Anyone in a marriage knows that the will to be together is sacrosanct. Once two capable independent adults decide to part ways, nothing could be easier. The past could have been wonderful, and it's easy to feel good about what was good. But for many couples, divorce is the choice, and often a good choice for them. In other cultures, there are more bonds holding couples together. In the US, it's far easier to be independent or marry again. It's easier to live your life on your terms than on that of social perception or social dogma. Is this a good thing? Who are we to judge? If you feel the stats are tilted in the wrong direction, then we can try and tip it the other way with our own marriages. But "for the stats" is not usually what crosses our minds when we're not getting along.
This is a classic case of "is as does". Nothing is killing anything. This is the shape of the new American marriage.
It certainly is easier to live one's life on one's own terms. Indeed, that might be the only way to live one's life, in the long term. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance when choosing a partner to make sure that both parties have compatible terms.
Of course, the opposite is also true. When two capable independent adults decide to stick together, there really isn't anything that could keep them apart. Isn't that the beauty of it? This has been at the heart of the western philosophy of marriage.
Does anyone remember being a kid? Regardless of whether you were the victim, perpetrator, instigator or bystander just think back on how cruel bullies could be both verbally and physically.
Of course, at other times you can negotiate, and they get the tradeoffs rather than being absolute in their attitude, sticking to their guns, without thinking.
It is an ongoing commitment, a 'battle' of staying present, guiding them, drawing a line when necessary, and letting them win too... It is absolutely through contradictinction they will learn the most - what worked once, may or may not work again, behavior wise.... of course, there are absolutes - don't kill or hurt others, don't lie, cheat or steal...those are usually easier to teach. And then there's wisdom...that's lifetime learning.
I think it's still a good article. It comes down to balance in the end, I think. Kids are just another thing in your life that you have to balance—more plates to spin. If you're only spinning your children's plates, it seems obvious that your job and relationship plates are going to eventually fall...
On the other hand if you compare parenting in th 1970s there does seem to be something to the argument that parenting went from an occupation to a professional sport, where people compete at it. I object more to the tiger parenting where kids have to be at the top of their class, get in to MIT or Stanford, all that pressure. It's not healthy.
If anything, the American spending habits are killing the American marriage. Financial issues are the source of countless divorces.
These signs let other motorists know that the sign-toting car will swerve wildly, stop unexpectedly and misbehave drastically because a self-centered, totally implacable baby is present inside, jealously and continuously demanding the driver's attention by screaming, vomiting and pretending to fatally gag on nothing in particular.
Now I know I was wrong.
Thanks HN!
"Mothers are also holy in a way that fathers are not expected to be. Mothers live in a clean, cheerful world filled with primary colors and children’s songs, and they don’t think about sex. A father could admit to desiring his wife without seeming like a distracted parent, but society is not as willing to cut Ms. Waldman that same slack. It is unseemly for a mother to enjoy pleasures that don’t involve her children."
Uh, are we living in the same society? Moms are more sexualized today than they ever have been. Have you ever been to a daytime CrossFit class? Lisa Ann has been the most popular adult film actress for years, for God's sake.
I agree there is much progress yet to be made in resolving a variety of gender-equality issues....but the argument that society's increasing valuation of children is driving a newfound societal demand for Victorian prudishness in mothers seems to fly in the face of all available evidence.
there are couples like this because the way they made kids + 2 careers work on middle class salaries is by dividing the day in half and each parent spends one half the day with the children and the other works. after ten years of this, you don't actually know your spouse any more - they've been living some life, but not one that you've had time to be a part of between your own career and your children.
this seems like an equally plausible explanation for this phenomenon, because when you sacrifice that much it must be for something and when someone else insinuates that maybe the sacrifice wasn't worth it, well, that would really piss you off...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_earning/shared_parentin...
I guess the hypothesis is you start to feel alone in your responsibilities and you lose touch with your spouse's life.
Who sets up their schedules like that in the middle class? Middle class jobs don't (typically) allow that one parent could work from 7-4 and another from 4-1am.
"Once our gods have left us, we try to pick up the pieces of our long neglected marriages and find new purpose. Is it surprising that divorce rates are rising fastest for new empty nesters? Perhaps it is time that we gave the parenthood religion a second thought."
So divorce rates for empty nesters are the kids fault or kids are holding together marriages that were doomed before they left the nest? This article is garbage.
"The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was ratified on 1920."
Womens suffrage has to reverb through political sphere. As a whole it's not good or bad, just different. Another thing coming from there: time passed since women gained vote seems to correlate with welfare spending.
I don't think religious fervor can be avoided in a society. It's just a matter of where it is directed.
Granted, there are definitely parents who hover, worry, or interfere with their kids', but, at least in the circles I run in, these are the exception more than the rule and most certainly don't represent parents (or marriages) at large.
Ask the men, however, and it is almost always the wife.
And none of these folks were married or had kids yet. It is something ingrained from before that occurs.
1. They have more life-years ahead of them. 2. If I saved my wife, she would hate the choice I made and be plagued by survivor guilt or resentment. It's not clear that my marriage would survive this. But the kids are young enough that they would probably accept the choice, to the extent that they could comprehend it.
See also Judith Rich Harris' The Nurture Assumption: http://www.amazon.com/The-Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revise...
China? S Korea? Japan?
The reason for less is cultural....plus, it's a bit easier to cheat and still stay married....most places aren't so hung up on "he cheated, let's divorce!" thing like the USA.
I think this has more to do with a kind of ethical posturing ("I am holier than thou") than it is about a sacred cow. There are parents who will give up their own interests for the sake of their children's interest, and not because there is peer-pressure to do so, or as a way to gain status within the community, or to be tyrannized by a cultural myth.
So thinking about it more, I think this article is BS -- not because the issues it raises are not true, but because it focused on the wrong thing.
There is also a spiritual and psychological transformation that takes place with becoming a parent.
Philosopher Ken Wilber had written extensively about modernity, and the way it throws pre-modern ideas such as the Great Chain of Being out the window, leaving members of modernity disconnected with their place in the universe. That's not to say that pre-modern ideas where they just told you where your place is a good idea. On the other hand, existential angst and a constant wondering of your place in society, in the world, in the universe as a whole is a constant them in the cultures of modernity.
What does this have to do with parenting? The idea of the Great Chain of Being is a kind of stand-in, or abstractions, that Ken Wilber claims ties the pre-modern religion together. They disagree on a lot of things, but one thing that is present in the religious teachings is putting the human experience in context of the cosmos as a whole. The search for the meaning of life was a search for your origins, of where you came from -- a search for who you were "born" from. It might seem obvious that your body was born from the DNA of both of your parents; however, where did they come from? If you trace things up your lineage, you still come to the question, "Where did life originate from?"
To use the mythic language in the context of the Great Chain of Being, you were "born" from the universe.
To become a parent is to experience -- just a little bit -- of what it is like for the universe to give life and creation. It might be accidental or intentional. Someone might enter this stage with naivete or with great wisdom. There are a lot of things you might have railed against growing up, but now as a parent, it makes you think and wonder.
My point is that, if you were to strip away the ethical posturing and political correctness, what you are left with is not a re-examination of parenting, that there is a sacred cow to be slaughtered. Parenting is an re-examination of your self and your place and purpose within the universe. Your growth does not stop there. You might gain a better appreciation of how things come together.