How do you afford a baby?? (teenagers, problems, sibling, better)
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The point was that 45%, a significant percentage, of infants are on WIC. It's a small jump from there to most parents getting some kind of help.
I hear you - and that's why I chimed in saying it's a great program. I think more families should use the program. Some countries offer all kinds of free programs to all their families, but here in the states it seems like you have to be poor, disabled, elderly, or unemployed to qualify for anything. If the rules are the same as when we used the program many years ago, it's one of those rare resources that all families can benefit from if they choose.
Team sports appear to be about the only venue I can see where kids can get the opportunity to work towards the good of the team where they see the result of their labors these days....I'd love to come up with some more examples.
When I was a young person, I think the role that most gave me a sense of real importance and consequence was performing in a competition marching band. I was very aware that my personal effort was essential to the group's success, and we were very successful. My high school's marching band won the the MBA National Championships and has placed in the top 10 nearly every year they've competed. It was intense, wonderful, and made a huge difference in my life. Even after many years, watching that clip brings back powerful emotions and makes me stand a little taller. (No, I'm not in the trailer. The film was made long after I graduated.)
My husband played both football and soccer, and he says that it was his participation in team sports that did it for him. He was also a member of high school and college AFROTC, which I think had a significant effect, too.
Last edited by formercalifornian; 03-09-2010 at 12:12 PM..
There is a lot of longitudinal research supporting this. I'm referring to studies in the US. If you're Brazialian then I guess you'd use the Brazilian studies. I'm not sure how culture differences might effect outcomes.
Hey, don't ask me. You're the one using Brazilian statistics to support your position.
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Originally Posted by Ivorytickler
Twin studies are small and don't trump longitudinal studies. They're done more to find out the influence of genetics over environment. I'm surprised you'd bring them up. If genetics is all that matters, who cares if mom stays home or works? Results will be the same, right?
Okay, stay with me here. What I said was that there are statistics supporting both sides of an argument. Science (and particularly behavioral science), quite unlike engineering, does not rely only on the colors black and white. There are a million shades of gray out there, Ivory.
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Originally Posted by Ivorytickler
There is also strong evidence for peer influences being stronger than parnental influences. Peers are determined, in large part, by where you live which is determined by SES. I find this one kind of scary but I believe it. It makes sense that our children's peers would matter more than we do. After all, it is their peers they must go out with and make their own society.
You've long been championing the cause of sending children out to spend great blocks of time in an artificial social construct with their age-mates...and now you find it scary?
Our children don't "make their society" with like-aged peers, no more than we did or our ancestors did. I don't shop at Publix only with like-aged neighbors, I don't go to a physician specializing only in the medical needs of fifty-year-old Caucasian women of a specific socioeconomic background, even my clinical group in nursing school ranged in age from 23-55. I cannot conceive of a situation in which, as adults, my younger children will be interacting solely with peers born between 1997 and 1999. My older children certainly haven't experienced anything of the sort, and they've been adults, married and out of college for several years now.
Well, originally I said Mercedes, but I figured it was such a cliche...
The thing I find most entertaining about the "it's the safest car on the road!" claim is that it's frequently made by people talking on their cell phones while driving.
We planned and budgeted for our twins (we're a gay couple and purposely had twins via surrogacy/egg donor), but didn't budget for me getting laid off and my partner having his salary significantly reduced! We had a nanny the first year, and we were starting to really feel the pinch since we were paying her $2400 a month. Then I was laid off, which actually worked out well because I've been getting UI for the past year. And yes, I've been very actively looking for work the entire time. On the one hand, it's been great to be home and bonding with the kids, but we've had to watch our money. It really isn't worth it for both parents to work unless you're both making over $60K. Daycare is expensive for twins... the nearest daycare wants $2800 a month for them both! We found a good non-profit daycare that will be $1600 a month, so we're hoping to have two slots next August to get them in and me go back to work. By then the boys should be potty trained, so it gets cheaper for daycare.
Twins are definitely a LOT more expensive. Initially we were spending well over $100 a month on formula, probably $75 in diapers, then every 6 months you need to buy two new sets of clothes for them. We have many babies in our neighborhood, so neighbors tend to donated clothes to one another, which has helped. We don't eat out hardly at all, don't spend much on ourselves at all, but we'll make it and it will get easier. As for staying home, I've found that some mothers like it, and others don't. I now can see how it can be stressful at times, especially w/twins. But amazing too.
Multiples can be astonishingly expensive. Check with your local parents of multiples club; they tend to have clothing/equipment sales on a regular basis.
Well, originally I said Mercedes, but I figured it was such a cliche...
The thing I find most entertaining about the "it's the safest car on the road!" claim is that it's frequently made by people talking on their cell phones while driving.
More than a little off-topic, but if you are in the mood for an enlightening read, may I suggest Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile & Its Effect On Our Lives.
Here's a excerpt...
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The car ideology that we take for granted consists of a set of myths and draws nourishment from preexisting American values that have led us to embrace the system, or at least to consider it as unavoidable as the weather or ignorable as background noise. This way of thinking and seeing leads us to treat as normal what would otherwise seem untoward at best or bizarre at worst -- like putting our beloved children in the thing most likely to kill them, or spending hundreds or thousands on autos during our working years when we do not have adequate college funds for our children or retirement caches for ourselves.
The issue isn't accepting it but, rather, being unable to change it. Just growing a garden doesn't bring back the sense of belonging to the family team that must have existed 100 years ago on the family farm. It's just playing where that was reality.
Pretending things haven't changed, won't change that they have. Kids know that sewing and cooking from scratch are no longer needed functions. What is lost is the importance of the job not the ability to do it. We can still bake bread or buy a cow and milk it but that doesn't change that we no longer NEED to do those things so they have lost their importance. It was in the importance of the work children and teens did that the sense of being part of the family team was born not in the job itself. You can't replace that by growing a garden or making jelly.
One of the reasons women have pushed their way into the work force is the importance of the job they did at home is gone. It's no longer a case of the family can't survive without her labors at home. Not only can they survive without them, they can do so well now because much of what women, traditionally, did is easily and cheaply replaced. In working a job and bringing in an income, women can replace the importance of what they do. Children don't have that option. Well, they do but, usually, they're not handing over their paycheck to their parents to help pay the bills.
So....I should go out and get a paycheck doing something I'm not really excited about to pay someone else to do the things I do now (but who won't have the investment in seeing they're done properly), to make the things I make now (more cheaply, as long as I don't mind shelf-life-extending chemicals), and to tend the children I planned to have because I like spending time with my offspring? For...what? To buy a bigger house for someone else to spend time in? Maybe a bigger yard so I can spend more on the lawn and pool guys? To spend on vacations to get away from that unenjoyable job and reconnect with those kids?
Er...no thanks.
By the way...I don't mean this as a slam at women (or men) who are doing exactly what they want to do. If you have a job you love and balance it with a family...good on ya! It's a wonderful thing, when it works. For me, it simply isn't worth the balancing act. And for someone to suggest that it's the Only True And Right Way of Being a Responsible Adult (TM) is kind of...well, dopey.
I probably never will teach my kids how to can jelly, spin wool, slaughter pigs or churn butter. You're right, people don't do these things like they used to. Why would they?
Taught the Girl Scout troop to make butter, and our neighbor taught us to make strawberry jam last year. I'd love to learn to spin and weave; I have a friend who is a textile artist and that's definitely on my list for art projects someday.
OTOH, supplying the ingredients for barbecue is totally Publix's job.
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Originally Posted by springfieldva
But there are still plenty of chores to do around the house and, yes, my kids are expected to pitch in and help out every day. They do their jobs at home and work hard in school. We have taught and will continue to teach them the skills that they need to live in today's world - how to do their own laundry, type on/troubleshoot/use the computer, fix their own meals, change a flat tire, paint their own house, steam clean a carpet, basic yard maintenance, how to balance a checkbook....
Seriously, we are not at a loss for what to teach them because there is so much for them to learn. So, while it's true that our kids will probably never learn how to shoe a horse, they will be shown how to change their car's oil/air filter/battery. Mode of transportation may have changed, but basic maintenance is still needed .
Well...yeah. The idea that "we have other people to do menial chores" is great, until the peasants revolt.
Aconite, your argument with Ivory is nonsensical, and you're taking this too personally. What she's talking about is the human need for accountability and relevance. You can achieve it by making butter for your family, and she can have it by working as an engineer. Her point remains, though, that many children and adults don't feel as if what they do really matters, and in many cases it's actually true. I think there is a wide-spread feeling of futility in America today.
Last edited by formercalifornian; 03-09-2010 at 12:37 PM..
I think the point is that while you can give your kids as many chores as they like, kids aren't dumb--they know the house isn't going to fall apart if they don't make their bed, nor is anyone going to starve if they don't do the dishes. 100 years ago, if you didn't milk the cows or tend to the fields, people WERE going to starve.
I had plenty of chores growing up, but they certainly didn't make me feel needed in my family. My parents could have done the dishes and mowed the lawns and vacuumed and done just fine. The chores were assigned to me to "teach me responsibility", not because it was needed to keep the house running and the family fed.
Sure. I could, theoretically, do all the work and the kids can sit on their bums and the ceiling won't literally fall in. Any society, even back several hundred years, has a certain small number of slackers. And should the resident adolescents think they'd like to try the life of a slacker, there will be great weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, because guess what? Their laundry won't wash itself, the dishes will not get done, and their cat will get mighty hungry and cranky (and probably pee on their bed when the box gets too dirty). Their needs will go unmet. My job description does not include doormat, and if there's a perception on the part of the child that their work is unnecessary to the family as a whole, that's a parenting issue.
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Results will be the same, right?
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