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Strollerderby
Katie Roiphe is a single mother. She lives in New York, theoretically the most open-minded city in the country. She works as a writer, theoretically a discipline peppered with creative, liberal, and open-minded people. Ten percent of babies in the U.S. are now born to women without partners. Given these things, you’d think Roiphe’s choice to have kids on her own might not raise many eyebrows. But apparently, you’d be wrong. So wrong, in fact, that she was reminded of that classic tome about single motherhood and social ostracism: The Scarlet Letter.
“One might be under the impression that tolerant liberal New York bears no resemblance to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s windy Puritan New England town, but one would be wrong. Our judgments are more polite, more subtle, more psychologically nuanced; latter-day critics of the state are thinking, of course, of what is best for the child, what is the healthiest environment; they are not opposed to extramarital philandering per se, but there is still underlying everything the same unimaginative approach to family, the same impulse to judge, the same sexual conservatism, and herd mentality.”
Check out some of these tasty nuggets of off-the cuff social critique Katie has come across in her six years as a single mom: Continue reading »
People between 18 and 29 think good parenting is much more important than good marriage, according to a recent study from the Pew Research Group. Study participants were asked to rank the most important things in their lives, including “Being a good parent” and “Having a successful marriage“. When this question was posed to Generation Xers ten years ago, responses showed the two as fairly closely aligned: the gap was only about 7% with parenting in the slight lead. But the gap widened significantly for the “Millennial” generation. More than half of them said successful parenthood was one of the most important things in life. But less than a third put a good marriage at the top of the list: a 22% gap.
This change has been mapped to a general downgrading of the importance of marriage in our culture, a finding that has been reinforced by a range of studies, including the Comprehensive Report on the Status of American Women recently published by the Obama Administration: the first report of its kind in over 40 years. But I can think of a few other reasons Generation 00 might care more about being good parents than good marrieds.
Has the institution of marriage outlived its usefulness?
On the heels of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s engagement announcement, Time magazine has published a major story on the status of marriage in general. One of the key themes is that marriage as an institution has changed so much that it’s becoming obsolete.
There’s still plenty of research that shows being married is good for you. But it’s no longer essential to be married to achieve other major life goals. Both men and women can have fulfilling careers, financial security, safety, love, sex, companionship and even kids, without ever taking on the mantle of marriage.
Yet most of us still marry. What keeps bringing us to the altar?
For a lot of people, it’s parenthood.
Is this woman wasting her time on this baby?
I agree, Paula, that feminist icon Erica Jong way overstates the strictness of “attachment parenting” in her piece over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal. She and others like her seem to think attachment parenting is an oath, as if before any Moby Wrap purchase mothers must first check an “I agree” box, obligating them to clear the home of formula, bury the binkies and draw baby baths the exact temperature of the womb.
In reality, AP is a buffet of options and strategies with all sorts of different ends: stopping your baby from crying, lowering expenses, getting extra sleep, and indulging in that strangely fixating thing called mother love.
Jong also conflates AP with helicopter parenting just to drive home her claim that today’s generation of mothers is letting down hers, because we’re goofy and sentimental and too susceptible to images of Heidi Klum’s baby bumps and Angelina Jolie’s carefully curated international family. Just as one woman’s Medela pump is another mother’s prison, though, one mother’s helicoptering is another mom’s advocacy. There’s no one size. We are not a monolith. There are no hard and fast rules. Continue reading »
Fatherhood changes the brain
Sympathetic pregnancy, or “couvade syndrome,” used to be a male myth. The idea that men undergo real physical changes, like gaining weight, when their wife is pregnant was relegated to the realm of the psychosomatic — an overly dramatic dad.
But it’s no longer a myth that men change during pregnancy and fatherhood. As I explore in this week’s Science of Kids column, both dads and babies undergo real chemical shifts when they’re around each other.
What are they? Continue reading »
When I run groups for new parents, dads sometimes say that in the newborn days, they don’t quite know where they fit in. Mom and baby have the physical connection of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding—some dads (even though they usually qualify it with, “I get it—this is the way it’s supposed to be”) just plain feel left out.
But in a Scientific American article this week, neuroscientist Brian Mossop talks about new research that suggests dads do have a very real biological role in the early days.
Recent animal studies show that fathers may actually grow new neurons in key attachment areas of the brain—regions that are involved in forming memories (the hippocampus), and processing smells (the olfactory cortex), when they’re around directly after the birth of the baby.
The data comes from rat fathers—using the “Degu rat,” a species that follows what the author describes as a very human-like family structure. Dad takes care of basic grooming, hygiene, and chore-related parenting tasks and hunkers down with the family in the days following the birth.
If he’s separated, though, the new brain cells do not form, making dad unable to bond. The babies also suffer—their neurons lose synapses in areas related to emotion and reasoning. The article makes the case that this could explain why children who are dad-less could be more likely to have all sorts of problems later in life: aggression, addiction, and run-ins with the law to name a few.
Do human babies suffer in the same way if dad is not around for the newborn days? Continue reading »
After several failed dates, Tom Henderson over at ParentDish decided he cared about his babysitter more than a potential girlfriend. This may sound either perverse or insane, but I think it actually makes a lot of sense. Continue reading »
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