I'm a 31 year old American expat living in Oslo, Norway, with my bulldog, Ada, and my husband, Johannes. My interests include interaction design, especially information architecture, philosophy of mind and ethics, cognitive psychology, sociobiology, feminism, yoga, fat acceptance, knitting, pottery, and cooking.
Very good article about living with a disability. There’s a lot here that can be applied to both living as a fat person and living as a depressed person. I’m going to have to get this book!
Bitch PhD points out the five-part series at Crooked Timber (1,2,3,4,5) about kids and work. Lots of good points in both the texts and comments, and lots to think about. For example:
We take care of the people in our society who can’t take care of themselves (Norwegian society,that is!). We do this by offering a certain amount of cash per year to these people. Children are people in our society who can’t take care of themselves, therefore we take care of them by providing that certain amount of cash to them. That cash can either go towards paying a parent to take care of the kid (as if the kid was paying the parent’s salary) or it can go towards child care (as if the kid was paying the care worker’s salary). The kid gets taken care of, regardless, and if the parent wants to take care of the kid, the parent can do so without going broke.
I talked about this with Johannes, and he informed me that Norway has already put this line of reasoning into practice in the form of “kontantstøtte”. It was the Christian Democrats (Kristelig Folkeparti, or KrF) who were most strongly promoting the idea, and it’s looked upon as being the height of “family values” here in Norway. Johannes found it amusing that I’m in agreement with such an idea, but I come at it from the completely opposite direction than KrF. I see it primarily as a way to minimize the burden of childrearing on people other than the parents, as I discussed in my earlier post on this subject. I think it goes a long way towards ameliorating that problem while also solving a lot of problems for the parents themselves. It’s apparently a very controversial idea, however.
Other thoughts: Some parents in the US would like to work part time to better be able to take care of their kids, but part time jobs in the US don’t provide as many benefits as full-time jobs. If benefits (pension, health insurance, etc.) are provided by society automatically to all people, however, this is no longer an issue. The same goes for parental leave and health care for childbearing-age women–these are an incredible cost to American employers. Shifting this financial burden from the employers on to society in general goes a long way toward making parenting a feasible option while also relieving non-parents of having to pick up the slack.
Of course, in a welfare state, the strong, productive members of society are always going to be paying for the weak, needy members of society. So someone’s always picking up someone else’s slack–it’s just abstracted a level, so it isn’t so obvious. I’m not going to argue here about the pros and cons of the welfare state. But having lived both in the US and in Norway, I can say that I feel 100 times safer living here than in the US. I also feel that I’m living my life in a more morally responsible manner.
It seems to have stopped working agagin. My apologies if you’re having trouble viewing the page–I’ll do something about it as soon as I’m motivated to start fighting with the code again. It’s such a simple concept, unbelievable that it’s so difficult to get working right.
At least if your kids aren’t yet school-aged. And for at least another 6 or so years after that, kids are still at least a part-time job. why can’t people understand this? (Modern) parents’ lack of understanding of this fact has always been a pet peeve of mine, and I was recently reminded of it by a posting by Bitch. Ph.D. (be sure to check out the comments, too).
Parents these days complain that universities and workplaces are not accommodating enough of their special needs. Examples include lack of child-care services, inflexible hours, lack of changing tables in bathrooms, lack of advancement opportunities for those on the “mommy-track”, etc. Non-parents complain that those accommodations that parents actually do receive are given at their expense. Examples include non-parents having to pick up the slack when parents have to leave early to pick up their kids from day-care, extra days off for taking care of a sick dependent, institutionally-subsidized child-care, health insurance for entire families.
I have to admit that I side with the non-parents on this one (big surprise, right?). Of course you’re going to meet problems when you try to raise a child at the same time as you’re pursuing your career or studies! You wouldn’t try to hold two full-time jobs at the same time, would you? You wouldn’t expect one of your employers to make accommodations for your other job. You certainly wouldn’t expect your boss at your day job to allow you to do work for your night job while you’re on the clock at your day job. It’s just not reasonable or fair. When you try to take on two full-time jobs at once and both suffer, you need to re-evaluate your ability to keep both jobs. Raising a kid at the same time as you work or study full-time is no different. Mothers, please remember this fact the next time you think about complaining that you’re not advancing as quickly as the man or single woman in the cubicle next to you.
Where I part ways with the virulently child-free crowd on this point is that I believe that society should look upon childrearing as the necessary job it is, and offer benefits to parents choosing to take up that job. First, society should make it financially possible for parents to raise their own children: Borgerlønn, perhaps, and continued earning of pension points (borgerlønn means that every citizen of the country automatically gets a living wage, which would replace the need for programs like social security, pregnancy leave, disability, unemployment, etc.). If you want to take on another job in addition to your primary job as the child’s caregiver, however, it’s up to you to make sure that someone else can take care of the child so you can devote yourself to your second job during working hours. Meaning, you pay for your own child care, which you should be able to do with the income from your second job. Otherwise, no, it’s not fair to the non-parents.
Secondly, and this is an extremely important point, the work of raising a child needs to be given the respect it deserves. Women should be able to proudly answer “stay-at-home mom” when asked what they do, and actually be granted some respect for that answer. Until that happens, women will always feel like they need to have another job in order to be respected and seen as interesting, intelligent people. The way things are now, if you’re “only” a stay-at-home mom, people look at you a little askance, as if you must be somewhat dim in order to be satisfied with such a boring, mundane life. the more “liberated” the culture, the more this is true–I see it a lot here in Norway and read about this attitude a lot in the alternative press, for example. This is one of the biggest problems I have with modern “feminism”, especially in Norway: women can do whatever they want, but they’re only respected for the work they do outside the home. Some “choice”.
My point is that there are only so many hours in the day. Feminism has taught women that they can “have it all”: a job outside the workplace in addition to kids. When women who try to “have it all” feel exhausted at the end of the day and have no time for themselves, instead of blaming society for a lack of accommodations, then should instead evaluate whether or not “having it all” is indeed a reasonable goal, and one that society should support. Taking care of the home and kids is a full-time job, and a necessary one at that (”…but a woman’s work is never done.”), and women who don’t recognize that fact are going to suffer the consequences. So will the rest of us who suffer when they try to take on more than they can handle–particularly their own kids.
Of course, none of this even begins to address the father’s role in childrearing. That’s enough of a topic for a whole ‘nother post.
It’s not the fact discussed in the post that’s disturbing, but rather educated Americans’ lack of understanding that the system was designed to work that way, and for a reason. Thankfully “Army of Dad” pointed that out in his comment, but it still seems to have gone over the heads of most of the commenters. This is middle school civics stuff, people. *shakes head*
The Well-Timed Period: Does Abstinence Work?
When it comes to abstinence we have no data on its typical-use* effectiveness. In other words, based on the available evidence [as opposed to belief, wishful thinking, and/or ideology] we don’t know how well this birth control method does [or does not] work.
Of course it’s true that if you abstain from sex, you won’t get pregnant. These abstinence pledges don’t work in practice, however. Nubile bodies demand sexual gratification, good intentions be damned.
This problem reminds me a lot of the dieting conundrum–of course if you eat less and exercise more, you’ll lose weight. Granted, you may have to eat a whole lot less and exercise a whole lot more if you’re a diet refugee, so much as to be completely impractical, but you will eventually lose weight. In practice, however, permanent weight loss is highly unlikely to result from eating less and exercising more. In the short term, when a body gets less food than it needs, it’s going to demand more food, and the dieter will be hard pressed to resist (hence “cheating” and “bingeing”). In addition, over time, the body realizes that it has to become much more efficient if it’s going to survive, so it adjusts its metabolism downwards. Hence plateauing and eventual weight regain.
Point being, just because something works in theory doesn’t mean it’s going to work in practice, especially if human psychology and complex systems are factors. Idealism doesn’t work. If you want the world to be a better place, you have to be pragmatic. Teens are going to have sex, whether you like it or not–the best way to prevent disease and pregnancy is to educate them about safe sex. Likewise, there are going to be fat people in the world whether you like it or not–the best way to keep people healthy is to emphasize a healthy lifestyle, not weight loss.
The Protestant church has brought Americans together and soothed their emotional wounds. In frontier towns, it often provided social interactions as well as schooling, as do today’s megachurches for people who perceive the rest of the nation and the world to be as dangerous as anything on the frontier. At the same time, Americans retained what Lieven calls
the traditional European peasant fear and hatred of the state, without being exposed to the dense web of state influences, institutions and benefits which in Europe later diministed this fear[,]
making the church seem the more reliable institution.
