Light and Momentary

A Story

Once there was a boy whose teacher was giving away a pair of zebra finches.

Problems and Solutions

I am doing my best to raise children who solve their own problems. Starting in toddlerhood my children hear the word "resourceful" used frequently as a compliment and an exhortation. My children know that we will help them to resolve their conflicts if necessary, but that the expected first step is to ask for what they need from the other party. This is not to say that I delight in uncomfortable conversations myself, or that I am the queen of conflict resolution -- only that I believe it is a crucial life skill, one worth a few awkward feelings.

I have been following the comments on this post with dread and disbelief. In a nutshell: newly divorced dad with weekend custody moves from suburbs to rural area and leaves his kids inadequately supervised. The predominant response from commenters: call CPS.

Now I accept that there are limits to the solve-your-own-problems mentality. When I observe that the utility pole in my yard looks like it would fall over if I sneezed on it, I'm calling the power company to come check it out --  not heading out there with a baseball bat to conduct experiments on how much force it can withstand. I want the people with utility pole experience to offer me an informed judgment about safety in that situation.

But if you have a difference of opinion with a neighbor, should your first step really be to call a lawyer? If the friendly college kids across the street are blasting their music at bedtime, can't you ring their doorbell and say pleasantly, "Hey, my kids are trying to get to sleep," before you call the police? And if you think a neighbor is missing the boat with his or her kids, can't you say, "I was worried when I saw..." instead of jumping right to CPS involvement?

I understand that there are situations you don't want to mess around with. I'm not going to walk into a fraternity house full of drunken 20-year-olds to ask them to turn it down. There are certainly parents whom I would not cross. But in general, if the issue is good intentions coupled with bad judgment, I just can't see involving the state as a first step.

I have been slowly drafting that final post on our CPS case -- slowly because I find it painful. I have seldom felt as vulnerable as the day I invited the caseworker into my home and said, "This is the kind of mother I strive to be," only to have him say, in effect, "Well, I'll have to get back to you about whether that's adequate." I still cannot get my mind around that neighbor's choice to call the police instead of saying, "Let's walk to your house together," or, "Let's call your mom and tell her she should come get you because you're not being safe when you cross the street." And then, as if that wasn't enough, to report me to CPS -- I still can't believe she thought that was a good idea.

If these Redbook commenters are representative, though, she's far from alone. Do people not recognize that calling CPS about questionable parenting isn't like calling the power company about a questionable utility pole? Do they really think it's a harmless choice? CPS caseworkers tend to be underpaid young adults with little parenting experience, confronting some of the most evil things human beings can do. Their mandate is to decide whether parents pose an imminent danger to their children -- not, repeat NOT, to spare you three minutes of awkwardness as you muster the nerve to say to a clueless new neighbor, "You know, we don't usually leave kids alone out here until they're quite a bit older. Some of us find babysitters through the local college/NanniesRUs/etc. -- would you like the number?"

I do agree, of course, that the dad in the story used bad judgment. But parenting judgment develops over time and is shaped by the community a parent is part of. I have learned so much from friends who were willing to say, "Did you ever think about...?" I hate to think of this man's neighbors saying, "Hey, welcome to the neighborhood! We can't be bothered to talk to you, but meet your new CPS caseworker."

Camazotz

Yesterday I was thinking about writing up the story of this month and pitching it to Brain, Child or another publication. Not just as <dramatic intonation> one woman's saga </dramatic intonation>, but as a reflection on shifting societal norms.

An example: when I was a kid, I played all the time in the creek that ran behind our house. A fellow fifth-grader drowned in that creek, but nobody ever told me to stop, or to make sure I had direct parental supervision. Those were some of the most delightful hours of my tenth and eleventh years -- poking around in the mud with my dog, swinging on the branches, naming my favorite spots.

These days a much smaller creek runs through our neighborhood. Honestly, a person would have to work at it to drown in that creek. But my kids are forbidden to play there. This is our fourth year here and they've never set foot in it. When I was a kid the line was drawn in one spot: it was normal for kids to play in creeks. Now it's drawn in another. How do we balance the suffering of the one family whose child drowns against all the hours of fun to be had playing in a creek? How much room is there for individual families to make decisions that go against the norm?

I was thinking that as an illustration I might mention Camazotz, from A Wrinkle in Time. Remember the neighborhood where all the kids bounced their balls and jumped their ropes in time? One child was out of sync with neighborhood expectations and had to be reported to the authorities for inappropriate ball-bouncing. I am not willing to live in Camazotz, I was going to say in my essay. But I was talking it over with Elwood last night when it occurred to me: even in Camazotz, for heaven's sake, children played outside without their parents.

The larger reason why Camazotz isn't a great analogy is that we're not out of sync with neighborhood norms. Yesterday I was talking about this on my front porch with another neighborhood mother who used to work for CPS. Two kids came running down the middle of the street, no parents in sight. "Look! Negligent parenting!" I said, and she rolled her eyes at me. A moment later a different trio came along from the other direction. "More negligent parenting!" This is the way our neighborhood runs -- our kids have some freedom. We all keep an eye out for them. We like it that way. Or at least most of us do.

My anger toward the neighbor who reported me has waned since last week, when I ranted to one of my friends, "I just want to go over to her house and...and...and spit on her porch." (That's me all over: my wildest revenge fantasies run to reckless acts of public expectoration.) I cannot stop wondering what she was thinking, though. What good did she imagine would come out of this for Joe? Because I tell you true: her decision to report a calm and carefully reasoned mothering choice to CPS has caused more stress to my children, and will leave a more enduring mark on them, than any consequence I would ever impose.

RIP

Harriet McBryde Johnson died last week.

I had never heard of her until her 2003 NYT article on Peter Singer, which made me want to stand up and cheer. Sometime in the preceding year or so, in a short article I cannot find now in the NYT archives, the magazine had written uncritically about the practice of killing disabled babies in the Netherlands -- taking a syringe filled with poison and injecting newborns with painful congenital conditions. I sat at my kitchen table and wept, reading it. Two weeks later I wept again when I read the letters page, because not one published response -- not one -- suggested that there was anything immoral about this practice. 

I thought about writing in myself but I could not even think where to start: "News flash! There is a profound difference between alleviating suffering and poisoning a baby with the intent to kill." What kind of world do we live in where that distinction even needs to be made? I was delighted to read Johnson's account of her visit to Princeton -- it is smart, brave, ambivalent, unforgettable. It seems cliched to call her brave, but I cannot leave it out so cliched I will be.

Johnson provided a breath of fresh air in the Terry Schiavo case. The political posturing and media maelstrom made me want to hide under the bed until it was over, but I love her piece from Slate. "Florida law would not allow a husband to kill a nondisabled wife by starvation and dehydration; killing is not ordinarily considered a private family concern or a matter of choice," she wrote. Damn straight.

More than her writing on end-of-life issues, it is her views on day-to-day life with a disability that will stay with me. I have spent a sizable chunk of my professional life in long-term care facilities, trying to help people who, like Johnson, have brains and muscles that don't communicate effectively. She wrote in another 2003 NYT essay on the stripping away of small freedoms that many of her friends had faced, of the small things, like long hair and a gold bracelet, that marked her as an outsider when she visited them.

The essay made me think about my own choices in my work with with chronically disabled people. In long-term care, at least 75% of an SLP's workload is assessment and management of swallowing disorders. Can a resident keep liquids out of his airway? Can she chew well enough for adequate intake? If not, we recommend thickened liquids or pureed foods or both. Many SLPs approach these decisions conservatively, since aspiration pneumonia can be rapidly fatal. If you suspect aspiration and don't recommend thickened liquids, you could get sued in a hurry. (Oh, yeah, and also your patient could die a painful death. Much as I hate the tendency to emphasize the potential lawsuit over the human cost, it's easy to think that way.)

I will always remember Johnson's choice to decline a feeding tube, even when she weighed 70 pounds. By the time I read her essays I had moved away from the hyper-caution of my first year of practice, preferring to outline options and risks for families and encourage joint decision-making. Johnson's voice, though, is a potent reminder of the ways that we strip away patients' autonomy "for their own good." I'm not going to practice like that ever again. You want to bring your husband some homemade chicken soup? Sounds delicious. Let's talk about how we can keep it out of his airway, so you don't feel like you have to give it to him on the sly. 

I don't know how much clinical work my future holds, since I am in training to be a professor and not a clinician. But I hope I can share Johnson's wisdom with my future students: When you work with people who have disabilities, you can help to make their world a little narrower or a little broader. Go for broad.

Abhominable

All right -- I was always going to be hard to please when it came to the Narnia movies.

ZETZER

Sarah emailed to ask if I had any ideas about stemming the "tsunami of whining" that has invaded her home. In general, my response to whining is feigned deafness, with a healthy dose of goofy. "What's that? [furrowing of the brow] It... sounds... almost... like... English, but I just don't speak Whining." Or I will sing, "Oh where, oh where, has your pleasant voice gone? Oh where, oh where can it be? You can't get what you want if you whine, my friend, so try your nice voice out on me." (So, yeah, the scansion doesn't quite work. But hey, they're preschoolers.)  If the whining is tsunami-esque and you are pulling out your hair and they are whining even louder, I suggest a different strategy. I call it ZETZER.

I believe that most annoying kid behaviors are incidental -- they just go with the territory. Have you ever shaken your head at a rant from the ranks of the child-free? "Those kids! They were whining! And not listening! And-- and-- breathing to boot!" Part of the work of the early years of motherhood for me was getting it through my thick head that my child was usually not being deliberately annoying.

Occasionally, though, I found that a negative emotional reaction seemed to be weirdly appealing to my oldest son. "Hey, I can't get what I want," he seemed to be thinking, "but neither can you. Fair's fair." Out of desperation, ZETZER was born.

ZETZER stands for ZEro Tolerance, Zero Emotional Response. It started in response to hitting -- I expended so much energy trying to teach my oldest son not to hit. Say what you will about spanking in general, I think it's a bad idea for parents who are dealing with aggression. "No! We don't hit! Hitting is wrong! And to enforce that moral teaching, I'm going to...hit you!" But what to do?

In those days the consequence for hitting was time-out; now I usually require acts of kindness or service. Even a two-year-old can put away his brother's clean socks for him, and I think that right actions can nudge kids toward right thinking. The ZET- part of ZETZER is to be absolutely rock-solid consistent in following up, because the "ignore it and it will go away" approach is not your friend in a tsunami situation. To crib from Barbara Coloroso, what is a practical response to whining that leaves everybody's dignity intact? How can you best send the message that whining is a waste of time because it will never, but never, get you what you want? How can you handle it if they are whining about a need that is actually urgent, and not just a preference that you can safely ignore until they lose the awful torturous gouge-your-eyes-out voice? (It could be as simple as saying matter-of-factly, "You really need [fill in the blank] right away. Next time you need to use a nicer voice to tell me.")

The -ZER part is the harder element for me: I respond to infractions as if I am discussing something as remote and uninteresting as infrastructure improvements in Myanmar. If my negative reaction is feeding a behavior in a kid who enjoys a little chain-yanking, I'm going to starve it out. 

Do not underestimate the difficulty of -ZER. You cannot will yourself not to twitch internally when they do the same STUPID thing YET AGAIN. You can only choose to moderate your visible response, a practice I find exhausting when the problem behavior is at tsunami level. In advance, figure out a place to vent your frustration -- a friend, perhaps, who will not be alarmed by a Krakatoan cloud of invective. Don't try ZETZER when you've got a looming deadline, or when the weather is going to keep you stuck indoors for three days, or when you anticipate hormonal chaos. Nobody, but nobody, can push my buttons like one of my children. I wish it weren't so, but alas, it is. If it's true for you too, plan accordingly.

If you are thinking about ZETZER, I suggest a little preemptive problem-solving first. Are they whining because bedtime has been late and they're overtired? Are they hitting because they're bored watching you read blogs and negative attention is better than no attention? Are they disobeying flagrantly because things have been tense between you and your husband and they're trying to draw your fire to divert you from fighting? The fewer times you have to respond in a bland and neutral voice to this behavior that's driving you up.the.freaking.wall, the easier it will be for you.

Verb. sap.: I have found that I often see a temporary spike in the target behavior when I begin to work on it assiduously. "We do not hit." Oh, yes, we do. "We do not hit." You just watch me! "We do not hit." Tra la la, were you saying something, Mom? I'm busy smacking my brother over here.

Despite its difficulties, I have found that ZETZER can be really effective when I am caroming toward crazy and my kids seem to get a kick out of pushing the cart toward the cliff. Most of the time, patience and consistency will do the trick with annoying behaviors. But when they are creeping up (or exploding) instead of inching down, ZETZER is my secret weapon.

An Empty Space

"Are we having a new baby soon?" Joe asked us last night.

Let Them Eat Emergency Rooms

There is no problem with access to health care in this country, says GWB. Why, if you need to see a doctor you can just go to the emergency room.

Yeah.

I have been thinking all afternoon about health care, remembering when we scrounged our own pathetic high-deductible health insurance. I am remembering the night I walked the floor with my oldest child while he screamed. "Better bring him to the emergency room," said the nurse manning the 24-hour helpline. "He sounds miserable." I knew it was an ear infection; I knew he needed care. But did he have to go to the ER? Could we make it until morning with Tylenol and TLC? I paced; he screamed. I cried; he screamed. I prayed; he drifted off to sleep. We saw the doctor first thing in the morning, but I will never forget the tension in his feverish little body while we waited for the pain reliever to kick in.

I am remembering the Saturday that my second son gashed his head on an end table, and how I hated myself for thinking, "If we don't get it stitched, how much of a scar will there be? If we do get it stitched, how much of a bill will there be?" A friend had just paid a thousand dollars for an ER repair of a very similar injury. A thousand dollars -- it took my breath away.

Here in the land of opportunity we think that poor must mean lazy or irresponsible. If you would just get a better job, you could have health insurance. If you would just plan better you could afford your medical bills. But I have a different perspective on that than I used to. While my husband was working toward an academic career, I wanted children and I wanted to be with them full-time. I didn't complain about our little house in a dicey neighborhood, or about the rattly car that was entering its third decade of operation. When we decided to live without a car, I didn't complain about walking. I could cook you lentils every night for three weeks without repeating a recipe, because lentils were 44 cents a pound and I bought a lot of them. We had no debts and we had no complaints. Or almost none. You know what was hard? Health care.

Toward the end of our time without health insurance, I sold an essay about it. One of the published responses said, in essence, "Quit kvetching and get a job." I tried to shake it off, but I felt ashamed: maybe I shouldn't complain. Maybe I should have put the kids in daycare to give them health insurance.

Almost five years later I have a job (two, actually), and I have health insurance, and I have an even stronger conviction that our existing system is rotten. I reject categorically the idea that the vagaries of the health insurance industry should dictate whether people can pursue their dreams. If you want to stay home with your children (or start your own business, or try to make it in the arts, but this post is specifically about coverage for children), I think it is preposterous that health insurance premiums -- the requirement that we put more money in the coffers of for-profit agencies so they can refuse to pay it to the providers who render the actual services -- would be the thing holding you back. Anybody who has priced individual health insurance policies or faced a medical bill without any insurance discounts can tell you: this system just doesn't work very well for individuals. If you want affordable health care, you need the clout of a group behind you. Like an employer's health plan, or Medicare. Or SCHIP.

I cannot even think about President Bush's threat to veto SCHIP without gnashing my teeth in apoplectic fury. Health care for children is a social justice question. "As ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me" -- would Jesus tell sick children to suck it up? would he say that their parents should just work harder and get better jobs? "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ" -- the burden of paying for children's health care is one I am happy to take up.

That's what I told my representative today, and I'd like to encourage you to send yours a similar message if he or she voted against the measure. Every time I get an EOB from our insurer, I say a little prayer of thanks that we have coverage now. I will never forget the feeling of dread I had in those days when a child was sick or injured. Would he be okay? And would we be able to afford the bill? I hate knowing that there are mothers going through that every day, and I hate that GWB is telling them blithely that the emergency room is the solution.

Let's tell him he needs a better fix than that.

Inequalities, Tame and Savage

For my summer class I just read Shirley Brice Heath's lovely book Ways With Words, the story of two working-class communities in the Carolinas.  She looks at the way parents raise children, and at how those children fare in school.  Her book was much on my mind as I read Elizabeth Weil's article in Sunday's NYT magazine, on holding kids out of kindergarten, or redshirting them.

Schools excel, I think, at teaching kids to be like other kids.  They pick up each other's slang; they learn each other's games; they try on each other's values.  But schools routinely fail, IMHO, at meeting the needs of kids who don't want to be, or aren't able to be, like other kids.

I read Weil's article with incoherent fury bubbling in my head.  I have been trying for a couple of days now to articulate why it made me so angry, and I think there are two related reasons from different sides of the special-needs spectrum.  The backdrop, as always, is the NCLB nonsense that drives me nigh unto apoplexy, but I'll mostly spare you that rant except to ask why (oh why oh why oh why) are we wasting so much classroom time and taxpayer money on the preparation for and the completion of standardized tests that measure mostly how successful a child will be at standardized tests?

I cannot read about kids who are either old or young for their class without lugging my own bias into the picture:  I have a summer birthday and I didn't go to kindergarten.  This meant that I graduated from high school at 16, college at 20.  It meant that junior high felt like a three-year sojourn in the sizzling cauldron of Satan's own refectory (not that I was bitter or anything).

When my oldest son was approaching kindergarten, we opted to homeschool because he was ahead of the curve academically and a bit behind it socially.  I expected that this combination in a conventional classroom would lead to his spending much of the year in trouble; homeschooling allowed us to foster the growth of both his heart and his mind.  That angle is missing from Weil's article, as far as I can see.  Yeah, the redshirted kids are confident.  Aren't they bored, some of them?  When they spend their first academic year studying things they've already figured out, doesn't that teach them that school is a snore?

I don't have personal experience with schools that prioritize gifted education.  I do have ample experience with schools that regard support for the smart kids as a frill.  Some smart kids entertain themselves.  Some try to blend in; some make trouble.  It strikes me as a staggering waste of human potential to keep kids sitting quietly in their seats for six hours a day, 180 days a year, while they are bored out of their skulls.  What happens to kids who spend years being told implicitly that they're too smart for learning?  If they're even older when they enter kindergarten, it only amplifies the boredom factor.

Mostly, though, those kids will get by.  I'm not so sure about the kids at the other end of the spectrum.  For lower-income families, schools are a crucial source, if not the only source, of services for special-needs kids.  Federal law requires schools to provide those services starting at age 3, but [SLP horror stories typed out and deleted here] it doesn't always work out that way.  It often gets easier in kindergarten, when the teachers join with the families in saying, Hey, we've got a problem here.  Should we really be lengthening the time these families spend in limbo?

At the agency where I work, we talk every week about the school district dropping the ball with families transitioning out of early intervention services.  The middle-class families can ask their lawyer pals to write letters saying, "Actually, providing these services is a federal mandate and not a serving suggestion.  Are you going to get it in gear or pay for this kid to receive services privately?"  The lower-income families are a lot less likely to have lawyer pals, a lot less likely to navigate the appeal process successfully if services are denied.  Lower-income families with preschool-aged special-needs children are seriously underserved, and delaying school entry for their children will only exacerbate the problem.

Here's the thing:  maturation helps in a lot of areas, but sometimes kids need intervention and not just time.  Symptomatic lead poisoning is not a self-limiting problem.  A genetic predisposition to language problems does not resolve spontaneously in an impoverished* environment.  And kids who struggle with spoken language may well struggle with reading, in ways that simply will not improve on their own.  It compounds the harms these kids face if we use arbitrary timelines to keep them out of school.

*"impoverished" meaning "not providing adequate language stimulation," as distinct from "poor"

This is too long already and I haven't even touched on the biggest question:  what about family culture?  That's why I kept thinking about Shirley Brice Heath's book, with its careful descriptions of working-class families and their parenting practices.  I have been sitting here for ten minutes trying to condense a hundred pages of her book into a couple of sentences, and I guess it boils down to this commonsense observation:  if you grow up in a community where dropping out is the norm, you are far less likely to succeed in school.  You can spend another year at home, but it won't teach you that "I see Emma and Ella sitting quietly with their hands in their laps" is code for "So sit down and quit fidgeting before I yell at you."  Another year might provide you with the brain development to map phonemes to letters a little less effortfully, but you probably won't have any more books in your apartment and your mother probably won't have any more time to sit down and read to you.

And that, my friends, raises a host of thorny questions which I am not even going to attempt to enumerate tonight.  Please do discuss if you're so inclined.  I will leave you with one last thought, which is that for five- and six-year-olds, twelve months will always be a significant chunk of time.  As long as kindergarten eligibility spans a calendar year, the Day 1 kids will always be more mature, on average, than the Day 365 kids -- it matters not a whit whether those days are January 1 and December 31, or July 1 and June 30.

To be a kindergarten teacher is to confront every day the breadth of the range of children's development.  It troubles me that schools seem to view that range as something to be compressed, and not something to be celebrated.

In Which I Pull Plato Off The Shelf To See What Socrates Said About Roth IRAs

I haven't paid much attention to Linda Hirshman.  Her name conjured up vague images of incensed bloggers burning through bandwidth in their outrage over her errors, but there are lots of incensed bloggers and lots of scorched bandwidth out there.

Yesterday I happened to read her piece from Wednesday's NYT (hey, Jody, if you see this, how do you do that cool linky thing with the non-expiring RSS feed of NYT articles?) and I had to wonder what I'd been missing.  Why, exactly, should mothers Get To Work?  Is it so we can boost the GDP? so we can find true fulfillment, far away from the annoying barracuda children we are foolish enough to enjoy? so we can retire in comfort, unafraid of our husbands' possible foibles and faithlessness?

I googled around a little, but I have to say, a person who compares herself to the persecuted Socrates sends my Self-Aggrandizo-Meter right into the red zone.  It's been a long time since I read Socrates, but I seem to recall that he encouraged the pursuit of truth, not money.

Hirshman, conversely, says, "Money is the marker of success in a market economy."  She says feminism has failed to be adequately radical, lamenting the decline of views like Betty Friedan's:  "Vacuuming the living room floor...is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman's full capacity."  Nowhere, in anything I read before my S-A-M klaxons started going ah-ooo-gah, does she acknowledge the pleasures of time spent with small children, the delights of slow-paced days spent grinding the lenses through which another human being will one day see the world.

How do I reject this? Let me count the ways.

At bottom, Hirshman and I are measuring success with different yardsticks:  I will consider it success when I can say with St. Paul, "I have learned, in whatever circumstances I find myself, to be content."  We have lived on significantly less and on significantly more money than we have right now.  Our goal is not to make the most money possible, but to be responsible and at peace in our situation today.  For what it's worth, I like the middle ground, with less money and more time together.

I have posted before, coincidentally, about how much I enjoy vacuuming.  Does it challenge my full capacity?  Of course not.  But doing it cheerfully is another facet of striving for contentment.  The floor needs to be vacuumed.  I can do it gladly or I can think bitter and useless thoughts about how my husband never vacuums.  (Which he doesn't.  But in the time available to him now that he doesn't work 80 hours a week at a high-paying consulting job, he cooks, tidies, does his own laundry, and takes the kids to soccer on Saturday mornings.)  For me the choice is clear.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about mothers and employment because of my own job -- partly because I am spending a little time away from Pete each day, partly because my job takes me into homes and daycare centers and I talk with mothers, at least superficially as we are scheduling sessions, about their decisions.  I despise the polarization, the pro-employment voices, like Hirshman's, that assume at-home motherhood equals cortical atrophy, and the anti-employment voices that equate any non-maternal childcare arrangements with Brave New World-style creches.  Because (a) my cortex is just fine after those years at home, thankyouverymuch, and (b) there is tremendous variation in childcare arrangements. 

I am using my non-atrophied cortex right now to offer an observation about all childcare and it is this:  caring for small children is not an ergonomically sound undertaking.  The inertia, the entropy, the chaos -- it is a highly inefficient enterprise.  For women with average earning power, employment usually requires an attempt to make childcare efficient -- in other words, reliance on group daycare.  As I mentioned recently, I just don't think it's an optimal setting for toddlers, with the hubbub, the constant competition for toys and attention, the stretched-thin caregivers doing exhausting jobs for little more than minimum wage.  I would like to silence the S-A-M long enough to see whether Hirshman addresses the happiness of young children in between her edicts to their mothers. 

And what about the happiness of those mothers?  Hirshman wants changes to tax law, assuming wrongly that all couples are focused on the bottom line.  What about workplace changes, to increase access to meaningful and consistent part-time work?  I am extraordinarily lucky to have landed in a field in which I can find flexible, fulfilling work that pays me well.  It shouldn't be so unusual. 

What about the needs of women outside the top income quintile?  What about untethering health insurance from employment, so that their children's need for health care isn't driving the job choices of so many mothers?  What about subsidizing childcare workers' salaries, so that the work is more attractive and women can choose it because they genuinely want to do it?  Hirshman would probably reject that idea out of hand, though, because she seems to think that caring for children is work for women who can't manage anything better.

Perhaps that's what irks me most about her writing: its echoes of dated second-wave feminism.  Free to be you and me, as long as you don't want to do anything crazy like spending time with your children.  Girls can too do anything boys can do, biological differences notwithstanding.  But what about those biological differences?  I think about all the oxytocin my posterior pituitary has pumped into my bloodstream over the past decade -- is pumping now, as Pete nurses in my lap.  Oxytocin increases one's capacity for repetitive work, decreases stress responses, facilitates bonding.  I am wired, biochemically, to do the work of mothering my children.  Hirshman's insistence that I should short-circuit the wiring to do work she finds more important is myopic and intrusive.

Here's Hirshman's take on the tasks of at-home motherhood:  "They do not require a great intellect, they are not honored and they do not involve risks and the rewards that risk brings."  Really, I could write another thousand words fisking that, but in the interest of time I'll forbear.  I will point out, though, that last Saturday when I skipped off to the computer lab to  do homogeneity-of-slopes testing and ANCOVAs, it was with a keen sense that I was getting the easy job.  Not that my husband would be doing the drudge work, but that he would be the one thinking about juggling our boys' many needs.

Full-time motherhood stretched me:  sharpened my thinking, shaped my character, satisfied my soul. Hirshman, predictably, disputes the idea that God might have designed the default child-rearing system, but for me the presence of the divine is palpable, when I permit it to be, in the mundane tasks of motherhood.  Which leads me, of course, back to Socrates -- to the Euthyphro, which considers the nature of holiness (in brief: mysterious, but unrelated to masterful money management).  I believe there is an essential and enduring rightness, a quiet sacredness, in the messy work of mothering. Does it pad the CV? Does it beef up the bank account? Does it confer status?  Obviously not.  But a person who compares herself to Socrates might pause to consider what he had to say about such things:  He is richest who is content with the least.

Hirshman excoriates the relativists who say this argument is exclusively about women's choices; she insists that she's a philosopher and philosophy is about what's fundamentally true. And hey, I'm all in favor of public acknowledgment that fundamental truths exist and should shape our decisions. But my observations lead me to believe it is fundamentally true that happiness and fulfillment are unpredictable.  Women's preferences vary; children's needs vary.  What mothers need is flexible options to accommodate those variations -- and not, if you please, any more condescending demands that we disregard what we want and Get To Work.  We've been working.