When fathers do it, it's balanced and rewarding.
Laydeez!
I bet that kid is totally full of flame retardants.
Williams' journey begins when, alarmed by a news article about toxins in breast milk, she decides to get her own milk tested. And, surprise! It's packed with toxins--specifically, chemical flame retardants--that Williams is funneling directly into her baby. ("Well, at least your breasts won't spontaneously ignite!" her husband jokes, because that's exactly what you want to hear when adjusting to the news that you're a human baby-poison factory.)
I knew I'd read about flame-retardant chemicals recently, when posting below, and I couldn't figure out where. Thanks, SP!
The camo pants on the boy make it somehow stranger than otherwise.
They're really trying to make him look as old as possible and the whole thing as skeevy as possible.
"That's it son. Take my nourisment. Take my anger, my fire, my determination. Remember this when you're older and the Macedonians come. Either with it your shield, or on it."
6: When my daughter was little and people would ask me what made me decide to have children, I would say "to avenge me on my enemies".
"Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
that we'll have mommie issues 'til the day we die."
(I should have said Persians in 6.)
I think you have it right, heebie -- the phenomenon is demand-driven. Sears is just cashing in on an existing impulse.
I wonder though if it's a gendered impulse, or a gendered expression of a more-general cultural impulse. Extreme attachment parenting is like an extreme sport.
Something I've wondered about for a few years now: was it always the case that so much of print journalism was just cheap trolling? Or has in gotten worse recently?
I wonder though if it's a gendered impulse, or a gendered expression of a more-general cultural impulse.
I think it is gendered. In my classes, the perfectionism/over-achiever bit is very gendered. And SAHMs dominate the obsessive parenting message boards online. And of the people I know who take parenting waaaaaaay too seriously, our narrative is that it's coming from the woman.
Is progressive motherhood an extension of go-getter feminism or is it just a misogynistic ploy to take women out of the workforce and rob them of their freedom?
To the last question, IMO it's neither.
Both and.
"Go-getter feminism" stresses the UMC and discourages those in lower classes who try to keep up. Parenting as competitive consumption.
And the Great Recession has had an amazing number of job losses in lower-than-UMC government jobs, mostly women and minorities, just about the last unionized sector. Teachers. This is tragic and will have terrible wide-ranging consequences for the Left.
I don't like convenient coincidences.
That kid is going to get hella teased in school.
Oh, it's absolutely gendered. If you look at the Sears book, it's like a guided tour of gender essentialism. A woman "just knows" what is right for her child. Do you feel sad when you put your baby down for a nap and she cries? It is your mommy instinct telling you it's wrong to let her cry in her crib! You know it's wrong because you feel bad!
In my limited exposure to mommy blogs, one topic I've never seen addressed is why there aren't daddy blogs.
They're really trying to make him look as old as possible and the whole thing as skeevy as possible.
Yup. Also with his looking at the camera.
Or has in gotten worse recently
Definitely this. I picked up a copy of the Murdoch Times yesterday for the first time in years and it had four pages (I kid you not) commenting on a current child rape case in England and saying how the perpetrators were culturally predisposed to this because they were Muslims.
This used to be a serious paper of record.
Also with his looking at the camera.
Yes, this is key.
(Tedra's blogging and other explicitly feminist blogging excepted.)
I'm kind of curious about the daddy blogging thing, but don't know enough to know if there are big-time idolized dad blogs. In knitting blogs, there are several prominent gay men who might not have gotten the same level of attention if they'd been women, because the fangirl aspect of other bloggers' adoration seems to be different. I've seen a little of this on quilting blogs too, though I don't know them well. But I don't read enough mainstream parenting blogs to know if there's a similar dynamic there.
The title of the Hannah Rosin commentary on the cover also points out its second most salient feature: Why Is This Attractive Woman Breast-Feeding This Giant Child?
Just imagine the cover with a thirtysomething, average sized woman of average attractiveness. Pretty different thing.
This is the international cover. So they're not just trolling. They're trolling just to us. Again.
16: I used to read this daddy blog, but ultimately turned away due to his awful taste in modernist baby furniture.
Maybe because all the other countries have sane parental leave policies, so breastfeeding isn't as big of a deal.
In enlighted topless Europe, breasts like hers are an everyday sight.
16: There are plenty of daddy blogs. I just can't think of them right now. Well, there was Dean Dad, but he wound up blogging more about Dean stuff than Dad stuff, and now seems to be at inside Higher Ed.
Sweet Juniper, The Wind In My Vagina (now defunct), I forget which others I've read.
23: It could have been worse. The original idea was to show Francois Hollande feeding on Angela Merkel's breasts.
Huh, apparently the cover mom also has a 5-year-old son adopted from Ethiopia whom she also breastfeeds. I think using him instead of her younger biological son would certainly have been more inflammatory.
Maybe they should have had Hollande breastfeeding from Merkel.
23: Oh dear God. Before the page loaded, I was thinking that it was a variation of the US cover, and all I could see on the browser frame were the names "François Hollande" and "Angela Merkel", and, well, I wish I could unthink the image that came to mind.
See, I went and checked if I was spelling Merkel right, and look what happens.
I'm so, so glad it wasn't just me who thought that.
That would have been fantastic.
Wasn't there a case of a father (minority, natch) charged with child pron because he took a picture of his wife co-feeding their newborn and their toddler, and the photo processing shop reported him? Presumably he could point to the publication of millions of copies of a similar image as a defense.
There is one valuable role for the father when it comes to attachment parenting, however: he can argue against the whole thing.
http://ideas.time.com/2012/05/10/the-detached-dads-manifesto/?tw_p=twt
36- Admit it, you meant it would have been fantastic to see Angela letting it all hang out.
30: still? At age 5?
Cover could have been worse; wait for the "Filial Piety" special edition with a couple of models standing in for Grandmother Tang and Madam Zhangsun.
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/shiaw/TwentyfourEnglish.pdf
36: Yeah, I totally assumed you were on Team Merkel with that one.
I'm sort of torn about the whole attachment parenting thing. We/I do a lot of things that are attachment-intensive, but I think you sort of have to when you have a child who's been through what Mara has been through and needs to learn that we're not going to just disappear someday. Originally I was working much harder at all this than Lee, but Lee is very active now and I've moved into the role mentioned in peep's article as being the dad job, saying "Let her go play on her own. If she gets hurt, she'll scream and we'll hear her." Right now, Mara makes it clear that she would give anything to be able to "breast" me but I don't think I'd try to induce lactation with an adopted infant and definitely not an older child.
it would have been fantastic to see Angela letting it all hang out
Apparently conservative female politicians have more to offer.
Wow, the piece in 38 is horribly destructive advice, IMO. If you're married to someone who is going overboard in some way, and you make a pointed effort to do the opposite, you're going to polarize the issue and make them defensively work twice as hard on their side, because they feel unsupported.
If you actually want them to tone it down, you have very few options. All you can do is:
1. have a rational discussion where you get them to express their fears around the issue
2. respect their fears, and then place your behavior where you'd like to operate from. Not the extreme opposite meant to manipulate them.
40: I don't actually follow her blog and when I went to look now see that the server is overwhelmed, but that's what the Time Q&A with her said. They got pregnant while in the adoption process and brought the older boy home in 2010, so he would have started breastfeeding at age 3. (I don't know of any Ethiopian orphanages with wet nurses and highly doubt he'd have been breastfeeding there.)
I do think that this sort of thing, while not a self-consciously misogynistic attempt to keep women out of the workforce, is a form of misogynistic narrative that people find very attractive: generalizing it, the ideal that women are supposed to aspire to is something that's contemptible as a way for people to behave, so you're either an inadequate woman or, if you're a successful woman, you're an inadequate and contemptible person.
The cover image is an idealized woman, young, beautiful, maternally self-sacrificing. And the maternal commitment she's demonstrating by breastfeeding a kid who looks like a pre-teen makes her look to most readers like a lunatic who's going to make her kids insane. If you're less feminine than she is, you're a failure as a woman. If you're as feminine as she is, you're a psycho.
A commoner spot for a similar double-bind is grooming and beauty standards. Less than total commitment, you're an unfeminine uggo; total committment, you're a shallow narcissist. It's not that all that many people actually buy into the double-bind, I don't think, but it seems to be a very attractive story to tell.
She also talks in the Q&A about having been breastfed herself until age 6, and how the experience made her feel so loved and gave her incredible confidence throughout her childhood. The difficulty with talking about parenting practices is that they automatically get read as norm-setting, even if the person doesn't mean them that way. Oh, you weren't a supremely self-confident child? Too bad your mother took the breast away!
What if you think their fears are fairly transparent attempt to manipulate you because of their very opportune timing?
A friend of mine who's been a part time SAH dad for a few years (Actually, I think both kids are now in full time school, so) started a blog called Competent Parent, basically in reaction to the trope that dads deserve extra credit for being minimally competent parents.
Needless to say, men partly avoid the "low-self-esteem perfectionist streak" through privilege - we're inherently awesome thanks to our genitalia, even if we're slacker manchildren - but I also think that similar tendencies manifest in other non-work facets of life: lawn care, handyman stuff, various forms of suburban masculinity performance. There's a valorizing narrative relating to gadgetry and manliness, in contrast to the anxiety-producing narrative about "are you mom enough?", but I don't think that means that the male narrative doesn't actually generate anxiety and self-loathing.
N.B., this isn't "what about the men?", I'm just contrasting how a similar societal impulse - making sure everyone is filling their roles - applies to the genders.
Wow, 24 comments since I started composing 50.
47: Settle in for a long, slow, covert battle, in which no open hostility is ever expressed, but no chance for strategic advantage is left unexploited. Or, maybe that's just how my family does things.
47: What's the context? It seems like that could be a half-dozen different things. Also I'm curious and you're already presidential, so.
I'm curious also, because the kinds of fears I took 43 to be talking about would be things like "if we don't do _____ for the baby, it will be [horrible thing]." She's manipulating me into wearing a baby sling! Oh noes!
One of us has "fears" while the other just has preferences and opinions. It doesn't work very well for compromise.
If she's manipulating you, then she's not operating in good faith, and that itself needs to be addressed. There's two different things:
1. She's sabotaging straightforward communication, which is a problem.
2. People don't reveal their fears if they're worried it will be immediately invalidated and trampled over. I'm not saying you'd do that, just that that's everyone's big secret meta-fear.
In other words, there's some actual fear that she's covering up and using bullshit-fears to manipulate you instead.
Do you have any intuition about the actual fear underneath all this?
55 gets at the tyranny of the sensitive. X gets whatever s/he wants because to do otherwise would crush him/her.
57 gets at what I felt like I was leaving out, in 56.
I've had some of that with Buck -- I'm lazier and less cautious, so I've been readier to let the kids do things independently earlier than he's been. We've ended up compromising, but I had the same issue with how do you argue against a fear with a preference.
You can frame your preferences as 'fears' about the kids' development, sometimes -- if they can't go outdoors without supervision, and we both work full-time, then we're going to breed pasty-skinned sessile troglodytes, and who wants that?
The thing is, when you're in the throes of the tyranny-of-the-sensitive, you have to work extra hard to pay attention to your own preferences and value system, and be very intentional about making sure you're behaving in a way that's square with you.
we're going to breed pasty-skinned sessile troglodytes, and who wants that?
Discerning cannibals?
C'mon, Frank. You can be specific. Unless you really can't. But surely you can.
Re the OP: Strikes me as yet another example of traditional "news" magazines being desperate to keep readers. Ms bill subscribes to Newsweek and I've been struck by the cheesy stories and low level of reporting/analysis. If Time had wanted to be more topical, of course, Carla Bruni should have been the mom on the cover...
Similar to LB's 60, I've found (in my limited experience) that waiting Lee out can work and sometimes she just needs time to come around to my way of thinking. Or you can turn the fear into what the outcome of playing to that fear might be, like LB was saying. We just had "I know you don't want her to go to bed hungry but if she learns she can skip her dinner and have unlimited snacks when she whines for them, then how are we ever going to get her to eat dinner or stop whining?" And so now Mara has a designated small bedtime snack and everyone is happy, though only because we started doing this last night and it will all probably go to hell tonight.
I am interested in the Pierce's specifics, mostly because I'm wondering what the cost is of doing it Mrs. Pierce's way. If you've got a fear that can be catered to with no significant cost, it's hard to argue against. You need a cost that you can present as of equal or greater value than the risk mitigation to push back with.
A good friend of mine is ending a (terrible) relationship, which had zero sense of collaboration and teamwork. It was always "The pie is finite, we're pitted against each other, etc."
Anyway, I've been struck by how essential it is to be able to trust that you're on the same team as your spouse. Not the most enlightening detail ever, but wow is it key.
63: I don't really want advice. I just wanted to argue against respecting the fears of others in all cases.
Who says we're offering advice? We're nosy, you're anonymous, it's a match made in heaven.
One of the things we're doing in couples counseling now is getting Lee to realize that it's not actually helpful to tell me that if I want to do something she doesn't want to do, I should just go do it. It's really been hard for her to understand that I'll go to Applebee's occasionally because I know it's something she enjoys and I take pleasure in seeing her happy, but it's totally unfair and frustrating that if I want to go eat at a restaurant I like and she doesn't I'm just expected to go alone. I make that sound stupid and obvious, but even though we'd talked about it many times before, she somehow thought she was being empowering and supportive instead of annoying. Having someone outside saying, "Well, and what does that do for the relationship?" made something click that I wasn't able to on my own.
Not recommending therapy necessarily, just that a different approach can sometimes help and people don't always know what their blind spots are. We're mismatched in that I'm an "everyone should sacrifice" person and she's an "everyone should put herself first" person and there are obvious drawbacks to this that get really unfair to me really fast if we don't get a better system going.
This is a fine line, but respecting someone's fear isn't actually the same as being always obligated to obey someone's fear. The difference is staking out how you want to live and operate, and telling them (compassionately) ahead of time (if possible) how you plan to do something they're not comfortable with, and why.
Obviously this is way too nonspecific.
68: Sorry, I was kind of offering advice. Also sorry you're in what sounds like an unpleasant situation without obvious good resolutions.
I will say that it's sometimes more respectful to the person not to be respectful of a fear. If someone wants the kids to wear meteor-proof helmets when they're outside, treating that fear with respect is tantamount to presuming that the fearful person can't be rational about it. You treat the person with respect by discussing it politely, but agreeing that there's anything significant to worry about there is itself problematic.
Becoming detached is my resolution and it works fine. Or at least better than other things we've tried.
I don't really understand the original post. Maybe I don't know the right sort of people. The families that I know who do the most attachment parenting are probably the least likely to be giving a shit about doing it to appear perfect.
My ex was in the Franklin Pierce situation in his marriage, in which her intensity about everything made his preferences null. It turned out she was hiding a double life with another dude and was using her power over my ex to hide the relationship until she convinced him to buy a house that she could try to take in the divorce. Not that this is at all what's going on here. But sometimes instincts that you're being manipulated are not idle. People who realize you will always cave to their more intense feelings (like my mom!) know they can get what they want.
W/r/t the girls and perfectionism thing, I would say that I certainly see that in some of my women, who one wants to congratulate for being the captain of their sports team, fluent in five languages, and spending months on every revision so that it is deeply and truly a *perfect* paper. And I tell them they should chill out, try having some fun maybe. You can't do much about it, and there's no impetus to do so if they're doing good work.
But now more and more I'm seeing it from boys too--that weird haunted, tortured look in the eyes that says "I just got back from hours at the gym to study philosophy and come up with a Truly Genius Idea for my paper and there is no room for mistakes." They ask me endless questions about how to be ideologically on the right side of everything. And some of them, like the perfectionist women, can't turn in work at the end of the semester because it is never perfect. It's very frustrating.
I've been making it my duty as a professor to make it very clear that we all fuck up and embarrass ourselves pretty much all the time, and that's the only way you can ever really get better at stuff.
76 was me. Also, I don't mean to give advice. I just support your non-respect of fears.
Sure, then. I mean, Jammies does things that I wouldn't choose, but it's not worth picking that battle, either.
76.1: That might be something different.
I am sad that 76 did not contain the phrase "genuinely novel sexual activity" but I guess nobody's perfect.
I don't really understand the original post. Maybe I don't know the right sort of people. The families that I know who do the most attachment parenting are probably the least likely to be giving a shit about doing it to appear perfect.
I wouldn't call them the "right" people, but yeah, they're out there.
And some of them, like the perfectionist women, can't turn in work at the end of the semester because it is never perfect.
"Second best tomorrow", besides being the approach that saved us from the Nazis, is a very good principle for life in general.
81: I actually thought about bringing that up with my students, but then I figured it would be one more thing to torture themselves about.
84: the literature search to establish novelty would be tricky. It's not like the USPO covers that. At least not through its website.
84: And then you'd have to tell them that, no, torturing oneself isn't really all that novel.
"Gomez, darling, don't torture yourself. That's my job."
I think it's a little more complicated than just being perfectionist. A lot of my highly educated friends have dropped out of the workforce to be SAHMs. In addition to an upbringing that makes them want to get gold stars in everything, there's also this sense that if they're giving up having a career, it must be because childrearing is so ridiculously complicated that it takes the full-time attention of a highly educated woman who has chosen to perform the Most Important Job in the world.
If it turns out that the kid is probably going to be okay with a wide range of parenting styles, then the justification for the huge self-sacrifice is a little suspect, so anything that is perhaps a little better for the baby turns into the only thing standing between them and a horrible fate. Hence everything gets overmagnified. We had a professor on the radio here recently (I think it was local PR) who was pointing out gently that things like breastfeeding have a tiny positive effect that could be easily swamped by the need to consider mom's well being and you'd have thought she'd recommending dipping babies in sulfuric acid.
It does sort of suck knowing that I'm going to be thought to be ruining any hypothetical children we have, but that's the breaks.
Maybe they should have had Hollande breastfeeding from Merkel.
Will Boehner and Reid do in a pinch?
you'd have thought she'd recommending dipping babies in sulfuric acid.
"Why You Should Bleach Your Baby"
#slateproposals
I use a sling because it's more comfortable, not for any attachment reason. F*** that Swedish bear.
Yeah, I agree entirely with 88.
And also, I know plenty of perfectionist mothers whose bent isn't attachment parenting. There's lots of ways to make yourself batty.
88: Cala is entirely correct. A lot of the insanity surrounding AP stuff is recompense* for the things educated and ambitious women give up in order to parent.
*not the right word.
I was slightly victimized (or O was) in the lunacy surrounding breast feeding, which justifies essentially lying to (obviously stupid, lazy) women in order to make sure they breast feed, by god.
The families that I know who do the most attachment parenting are probably the least likely to be giving a shit about doing it to appear perfect.
I think attachment parenting plays itself out differently in liberal yuppie circles and full blown hippy circles. Attachment parenting was a big deal among our friends in update NY, and it definitely wasn't a "I must be a perfect woman" thing. It was more of a "We already raise our own chickens and have a composting toilet, this is the last piece of the Little House on the Prairie Puzzle for us" thing.
I mean, it was great that Ma and Pa made dolls for Laura and Mary out of clothespins, but the best thing about their lives was that they had each other.
88, 96: I think there's also a certain amount of magical thinking almost necessarily that goes into being a baby's parent. You really want to believe that if you just do things right, good results will be assured. I realize that's a banal thing to say, but the self-induced emotional pressure was high for me in the beginning and has gotten better sense. (It does help in some sense to have a pre-ruined child, but there are emotional downsides to that from the parental perspective too.)
95: Yeah, it can be any mom-intensive style of parenting.
100: I've found that most of my friends and acquaintances get over it pretty quickly, usually by kid #2. But there's a phase of "So I didn't finish my dissertation, but I'm a MOM so I'm doing what's really IMPORTANT!!" that sounds a little desperate from my perspective.
Part of it, too, I think, is that highly educated ambitious women are pretty easily bored. If I were a stay at home mom I'd probably be making artistic bento boxes too just to keep Elmo from eating my brain.
that sounds a little desperate from my perspective
Yes. Yes yes yes.
I never know how to discuss the sheer massive boredom of staying at home with your kids without insulting people who enjoy it.
88: Isn't this what The Feminine Mystique was about? Hasn't something changed?
105: Talk to golfers for practice.
The funny thing about the heavy focus on breast-feeding is how completely it's flipped in the course of one generation. My mother will tell stories on this topic of a doctor telling her in the 1970s that breastfeeding would cause me to be a "village idiot."
Agree that 88 is describing a real dynamic. I'd probably put it a little differently from the perspective of someone whose family is, currently, experiencing this dynamic. There's just a huge amount of energy that many professional women are used to putting into a job and it's not clear that a kid or two can or should be soaking up that much energy in quite the same way.
I do think it's somewhat about the money. For most families, making it on one income is pretty tight. Deciding to raise kids on one income, every time you feel short on resources, you have to be revisiting your decision not to work for pay, and that's going to drive people into an aggressive attachment to the decision they made.
It's a neverending puzzle to me to judge how much to care what other people think. 88 describes an attitude that I recognize (the sacrificer, not Cala), but which seems very strange to me. I care what my kid thinks very much, similarly a handful of other people I respect or love, but some stranger? I'll put on clean clothes and say polite things to preserve appearances, but I completely do not give a shit. Probably not quite right, I should care more.
109 to 110 -- even if you don't care about what other people think, if you know your family is, e.g., going into debt while you're not working, you're going to get very attached to the idea that your reasons for not working are extremely important.
110: you probably care what strangers think when what strangers think is both dead-on and something that you don't want to admit to yourself, right?
In enlighted topless Europe, breasts like hers are an everyday sight.
It makes work here tough because I'm always disrupting meetings by saying, "yay boobies!".
You could try to work at an aviary.
106: I think the argument is that it has in fact gotten worse. The mother must not only be entirely self-abnegating, but indeed revel in it (or, in the words of Elizabeth Badinter, experience jouissance). All the recent AP stories are tied to the release of Badinter's book The Conflict, which makes that claim. This Slate discussion is pretty interesting.
Yeah, I agree entirely with 88.
I don't. I am opposed to dipping babies in sulfuric acid. Not unless its highly diluted.
I think that argument is wrong -- that is, that the ideal may be a more oppressive one, but the situation as a whole is much better because there is more social room to say "Screw the ideal". I know a couple of women who, I think, took attachment parenting over the top in a manner that would have driven me nuts, but not a lot, and while I think stories like the one in the OP are trying to create the double-bind I talked about in 45, I don't think many women actually feel like failures because they're imperfect adherents to the mommy-intensive parenting ideal.
115:
Periodic forays into Lacan do little to allay my general sense that he is full of shit.
Then he would just start saying "woohoo! Hoopoe!"
Damn. 119 to 113. Or to Lacan, whichever.
The hoopoe, rather splendidly, is Upupa epops.
106,115: I think it's a backlash and it's worse in some ways. Ex recto, it's not just that motherhood is being played up as this career that you need an Ivy League education to do, it's also happening at a time where the expectation is that kids are overscheduled, not expected to be playing on their own for hours at a time with mom just keeping an ear out while reading a book, etc.
The other thing about all the brouhaha about attachment parenting as oppressive to mothers -- eh, if you worship unquestioningly at the altar of Dr. Sears, there's a lot of skeevy stuff about how self-abnegating mothers need to be.
OTOH, there's a lot of attachment-parenty stuff that I did because it seemed to me like the easy, practical way to manage. A sling is immensely less hassle than a stroller, or at least I found it to be. If you have the luxury of a generous maternity leave, which I did, and breastfeeding works for you, which it did for me, it's easier than formula. Co-sleeping some, at least when the baby's very young? Means everyone gets more sleep, or again, that's how things worked for us.
Being a perfectionist mom will make your husband have affairs. Science says so.
121: Yeah, I'm really kind of puzzled how two-career families manage to have overscheduled kids someplace where they can't travel on public transportation. This last year, we had a mess with Sally on a crazy-intense swim team in an inconvenient location that turned into my mother doing four days a week of pickup, but that's I think the worst we're going to have to deal with -- from here on out, she can get anyplace plausible under her own power.
I'm really kind of puzzled how two-career families manage to have overscheduled kids someplace where they can't travel on public transportation.
I think it's heavy reliance on car-pooling with SAHMs, having local grandparents, or having a nanny.
76: I just got back from hours at the gym to study philosophy and come up with a Truly Genius Idea for my paper
They could save a lot of time by coming up with an idea while at the gym.
No kids, but carrying a friend's baby in a sling is awesome. Referring to it as "babywearing" should mean I can punch you, but hmm, a system in which the baby is snuggled and my hands are free? Pretty sweet.
Also, who spends hours at the gym? In college? Unless they are on athletic scholarship, they need to learn about opportunity cost.
I never tried a sling, but the baby bjorn sucked. You get kicked in the nuts too often (once). Also, a stroller works with much bigger kids and is a good reason to take elevators instead of the stairs.
123: they could use that article as an example of utterly idiotic journalism.
You start with a press release that says "According to this website, Park Slope is the fastest growing area for adultery, and most of the people signing up to have adulterous affairs are 25-34 year old women" and then you write an article about how having kids makes men want to have affairs? It's a complete non sequitur.
I have so many goddamn slings. O hated them and I kept buying new ones to see if he liked them better. He ended up adoring the Baby Bjorn -- and still does, although it would break me to carry him that way.
But then, it's written by a female journalist, and they make stuff up all the time. For example, Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass!
130: If you were mom enough, you wouldn't have that baby bjorn problem.
The baby liked the baby bjorn, but the baby's nuts aren't put in the line of fire.
130: Yeah, it's all very YMMV, but we tried a bjorn-kinda-thing first and hated it -- it hurt my back, the baby seemed floppy.. Got talked into the sling, actually, by a neighbor who I thought of as over-the-top attachment-parenty nutty, but it was awesome.
And actually, part of that is that if you take the subway a lot, it's really hard to dodge stairs. Once you're dealing with stairs, strollers suck.
I've been readier to let the kids do things independently earlier than he's been. We've ended up compromising, but I had the same issue with how do you argue against a fear with a preference.
"It's not your fault you were raised to be a giant pussy but do your kids a favor and don't pass it on."
I think that argument is wrong -- that is, that the ideal may be a more oppressive one, but the situation as a whole is much better because there is more social room to say "Screw the ideal"
I dunno. My mom never found work she especially enjoyed, and was happy to be a SAHM. But she was the very model of an unattached parent - I'd ply on the floor of the living room while she watched soaps (the things I learned!) and did the crossword puzzle. She was in some ways bored, as any intelligent woman would be (at least once I passed the age of hands-on needs), but she felt free to read books and go bowling and chat with friends over coffee.
Which would be viewed with horror by fellow moms of our generation, no? My only playdates were with kids of moms she liked. My only scheduled activity was baseball. We went to the library occasionally. That was about it. She was neither working nor doing a lot of parenting (by today's standards). A bit like Betty Draper, without the sociopathy.
Also, who spends hours at the gym? In college?
My sister did. Every semester she would start her classes, get all her assignments, and do all the work for the semester in the first several weeks. Then spend hours a day at the gym.
(And you can actually use a sling up to fifty pounds or so, with the kid straddling your hip. Sally wasn't too big for the sling before she was old enough to keep up with us on foot, and she was a big kid.)
139: Your sisters professors wrote much better and more complete syllabi than I ever did!
I'd ply on the floor of the living room
Even then you were all about surfaces and veneers.
140: That's huge. Unless he managed to gain a great deal of weight very quickly, mine will hit six before getting that big.
139: That's pretty cool, actually. I assume that by senior year she could outrun a car, or kill a man twice her size with the little finger of her left hand?
But it doesn't sound like she had the same kind of perfectionism problem AWB's students are. My guess is that she was going to the gym because it was fun, which is a whole nother thing.
143: Mara will probably get there by the end of summer. She does still occasionally like to be carried in the Ergo backpack we have and it soothes her and isn't horrible for my back, but I wouldn't go long distances. I'm pretty sure we're breaking the weight limit on the one we have, but I'm also pretty sure they build in some wiggle room. I'm tempted to buy one of the ones that goes up to 90 pounds, but I don't want to still be giving her backpack time when she's twice as big as she is now.
137: I try to keep that unstated. No, actually, he was running through the woods killing squirrels with fire-hardened wooden spears and eating them with BBQ sauce, while befriending porcupines in their dens, and gardening with a rototiller that outweighed him and cooking dinner for the family by eleven or twelve. I'm the one who grew up sheltered and useless.
it doesn't sound like she had the same kind of perfectionism problem AWB's students are
No, and she was also doing biology, which mostly seemed to involve her memorizing tons of stuff.
No one has ever accused her of challenging herself too much or aiming too high.
The whole "controversy," to the extent this is in the media now, seems like it's just another way to tell women that whatever they do is wrong, and that their choices are everyone else's business to judge. I can't even really tell what the concern's supposed to be. The Slate exchange linked in 115 is a good example of how this all works - the "proattachment" side there mostly discusses serious ways in which society doesn't support families and mothers, and Hanna Rosin says "But a blog comment somewhere made me feel judged! Attachment parenters are the real oppressors!"
145: I just started refusing to carry him (unless it's part of a game or something).
Yeah, same here. Somewhere probably before four was the last time Sally got anywhere other than on her own feet.
149: I never carry her to get from place to place, but if she's really upset or sad, she'll ask for backpack time. If I carry her around for 20 minutes at the most, that's enough to comfort and reset her emotionally.
I also make him do his own taxes.
And to the degree there are concerns raised about attachment-y parenting being unhealthy for the parents,they mostly seem to be concerns about obsessively perfectionist parenting, which is consistent with a number of approaches - there's no inherent link between that and attachment parenting. It just gives people a chance to condemn hypothetical unbalanced SWPL moms, which I guess is always great sport, but what does it have to do with using a baby sling?
137: I try to keep that unstated.
I say stuff like that all the time. I usually get a laugh or a punch out of it, sometimes both. If we didn't have similar senses of humor my wife probably would have killed me in my sleep a long time ago.
the "proattachment" side there mostly discusses serious ways in which society doesn't support families and mothers, and Hanna Rosin says "But a blog comment somewhere made me feel judged! Attachment parenters are the real oppressors!"
I think the Rosin arguments have more to them than that. There are pressures and cultural narratives and yes, judgments, that influence the choices women make about parenting.
I'm tempted to buy one of the ones that goes up to 90 pounds, but I don't want to still be giving her backpack time when she's twice as big as she is now.
Well, it would mean you wouldn't have to waste time going to the gym. Just a few sets of 20 reps with the baby every morning. As the baby grows, your upper body strength increases - just like Milo and the ox.
148 - It's never a bad time in the American media to tell women (or, for that matter, black people) that they R DOING IT WRONG.
156: But there is a point that the intensity of the judgment isn't tightly related to the direction of the advice being given. IRL, I've seen as much judginess directed at attachment parenting types as I have at people perceived to be insufficiently 'attached'. There's a lot of judgment of mothers as being not good enough somehow, but I don't think the AP ideal is an important source of it.
for that matter, black people) that they R DOING IT WRONG.
Some of the fresh off the boat ones are definitely doing it wrong.
159: But... that's what Rosin is saying! The first entry in that series unfortunately names AP, but Rosin's overall point is yet another iteration of asking people to examine what "I choose my choice" really means.
I don't have much time to comment today, but I will say that my view of attachment parenting has gone from mildly supportive to dead set opposed. I would shoot Dr Sears in the face if I could get away with it -- I've seen it pretty literally ruin people's lives. I don't think perfectionism is the right diagnosis, though -- it's something else.
To Franklin Pierce, my advice is simple -- you are doomed.
But Rosin really is coming at it from "Teh hippies are oppressing women!" rather than "People generally have ridiculous expectations for mothers." I'm being defensive on behalf of teh hippies, who I'm not quite one of but closer than not, but I really don't like the part of this discussion that blames the oppression of mothers specificially on lefty-granola-AP expectations, rather than society-wide expectations of total focus/enrichment at all times whether or not it's in an AP style.
I would shoot Dr Sears in the face if I could get away with it...
Florida, obviously. Except that he can shoot back too.
23, 42: This is proof once again that Americans prefer social cleavage.
163: I think this is wrong. I was actually oppressed, O worse than I, by an institution, not hippies, that made it its mission to "support" breast feeding. I don't really feel like getting into it, but it was a real thing, with no hippies anywhere, that caused badness. She's talking about that sort of thing as much as anything else.
this discussion that blames the oppression of mothers specificially on lefty-granola-AP expectations, rather than society-wide expectations of total focus/enrichment at all times
She's not talking about hippies, though. She's talking about a certain subset of UMC women (the same ones buying all organic at WF) where these pressures are a real thing.
"Social Cleavage" would be a good name for an overly thought-out burlesque.
I generally find Rosin to be non-insane and pretty thoughtful, especially on motherhood-related topics about which many other writers are judgmental or defensive. I thought this was response from her was pretty good.
166: I think people here are talking past each other, because we have very different experiences and associations with attachment parenting and Le Leche League types.
Also, we might also have very different judgements about what counts as a hippy and what counts as a yoga/whole foods yuppie. You could put the same person before this group and some people would think Dirty Fucking Hippy and the other would think wealthy-foodie-social climber.
167: If I read Rosin as just being concerned about pressures on parents, I'd agree, but from this and past pieces it sounds to me like she really does have something against attachment parenting specifically. I guess I agree with you about your concerns, I just don't read Rosin as speaking to them.
162: For a while I was bookmarking the really extreme assholery in his book. Set up: "Do you think of your baby's naptime with relief, a break from her needs during which you can meet your own?" Unsuspecting reader nods. "Then you ought to reconsider your relationship with your child and try to be less selfish."
167: But attachment parenting is used by Rosin as a synecdoche for UMC control-freakery. I'm like Alison, in that the baby-wearingest/breastfeediest/co-sleepiest parents I know were also on the less-freaked-out side about total control of risk and total management of the kids' development. That may not be the core of what we're talking about, but I'd be happier if people weren't making that connection.
Would that mean they climb wealthy foodies or are wealthy and a foodie and a social climber? I'm very confused by hyphenation.
There is no way a hospital administration is either a WF yuppie or a dirty hippie, though.
I'm not judgmental towards moms or dads who are into attachment parenting -- they're genuinely trying to help their children, to the point of extreme self sacrifice. Unfortunately they're in the sway of an insane, destructive and pressuring cult. Most people are stable enough to take the good (it's OK to hug your kids) and leave the rest, but there's a really substantial minority that isn't.
(it's OK to hug your kids)
In moderation, sure.
They are wealthy and they climb on social foodies, while wearing yoga pants to whole foods.
I'm sorry, but I'm really curious now -- you had someone at the hospital pressure you not to use formula under circumstances where O needed it? Or what happened, if you feel comfortable explaining at all?
I also don't think it's useful to bring attachment parenting into the mix of some broader bourgeois UMC (self) hatred. It's a specific thing that some UMC folks are into and some aren't, and should be thought about on its own merits.
I'm not judgmental towards moms or dads who are into attachment parenting -- they're genuinely trying to help their children, to the point of extreme self sacrifice. Unfortunately they're in the sway of an insane, destructive and pressuring cult.
Again, stories? This is not at all my experience with people who parent in an attachment parenting style, although I admit the book is maddeningly sanctimonious and unpleasant.
you had someone at the hospital pressure you not to use formula under circumstances where O needed it?
That was close to our experience. I really never sat down to figure out who to blame in terms of social groupings.
I suppose I'm also taken aback by the link between AP and perfectionism. Like LB above, my wife and I are both attachment parents by most of the AP markers, and at the same time firm believers in half-assed parenting. It's just easier to carry the kid around and to let her sleep in the bed with us, rather than having to actually get up in the middle of the night.We also often stick the 10-month-old in the backyard and try to remember to keep a vague eye on her. Who speaks for the lazy attachment parent?!
Me! Me and Asilon!
184: What happened?
Halford's in LA. Come on, it's the home of Scientology for god's sakes. Up here it's the Mormons and a weird affinity for multi level marketing schemes.
I am acquaintances with at least two women whom I feel have literally been driven insane by attachment patenting stuff -- breastfeeding their kid until age 6 and getting a divorce in one case, quitting a great job and neurotically obsessed with never leaving her kid in the other (and probably about to get divorced). My own Ex is nowhere near at that level, but by far her biggest patenting struggles have come from attachment parenting type stuff -- OMG my child is not behaving because she's not attached enough to me!
189: Someone at the hospital told you and your wife not to use formula, the kid wasn't getting enough breastmilk, and got dehydrated/malnourished to the point of needing to go to the NICU? Jesus, that's awful. Or do I have the story scrambled?
by far her biggest patenting struggles have come from attachment parenting type stuff -- OMG my child is not behaving because she's not attached enough to me!
A lot of those harness thingies are already patented, but maybe she could do something new with high strength velcro.
I've mentioned before that the main drawback to attachment parenting is that you wind up with big kids who are attached to you. Physically. "You are nine. You can sleep in your own damn bed. Leave me alone."
My own Ex is nowhere near at that level, but by far her biggest patenting struggles have come from attachment parenting type stuff --
That's the sort of patenting struggle where the rules don't need to be clarified.
biggest patenting struggles
Does this entail describing a hitherto unknown parental practice?
190: Bilirubin, too much of it not being removed. It may have been for reasons unconnected to the volume of fluids.
Apparently, I've trained my IPhone well to reflect my interests. Probably because it stays attached to my body at all times.
192: Yeah, I can't be having with cosleeping past somewhere in in the first year. I need my sleep. But I know a bunch of families who have that same problem and got there from someplace other than attachment parenting -- they just ended up with kids who wouldn't sleep in their own beds.
192: And even after they leave and go to college, they have their wireless umbilical cords.
181: Yeah, I was being annoyingly vague. But yes. O was born in a hospital that doesn't offer formula and has signed some kind of pact to promote breast feeding (heavily promoted by LLL and other groups). I was making no milk. I was told just to keep nursing. O screamed and screamed. "Just nurse more." This went on for several days (I was in the hospital for 5.) He was only 6 lbs at birth and was getting smaller and smaller. "Just keep nursing," they repeated as O screamed more. Look up Dr Sears on this issue and you'll see he says that baby's do just fine on colostrum for a week or more. O's arms were covered in nursing blisters. Finally, a nurse came to me (unprompted except presumably by O's suffering) and said that recommending formula was a fireable offense. If I wanted formula, I was going to have to demand it. So I did. BUT EVEN THEN, since they are worried that east of formula will be too great a temptation, they had to make its use as inconvenient as possible. So instead of being given a bottle, I had to pour tiny bits of formula into wee little shot glasses and try to get that in O's mouth. I was half crazed (for all sorts of obvious reasons) and so it wasn't quite occurring to me at the time that the only reason for this insane method of feeding (trying to make a days-old infant sip from a tiny cup!) was to make me not want to formula feed. I didn't want to formula feed! I just wanted my child to fucking eat in the time before my milk came in. When O went to his one-week pediatrician visit, the doctor took one look at his nursing-blister-covered arms and his weigh and said, "Give this child a bottle."
So, yeah. That "no formula, no bottles" policy for hospitals is something that a lot of folks would like to see spread. Was O going to die? No. Was it shitty and condescending for them to set up bullshit roadblocks because they're worried women -- even women who *need* to supplement -- are too lazy and self-indulgent to resist formula's siren call? Not a doubt.
I can't be having with cosleeping past somewhere in in the first year.
Yeah, that was us. Breast feeding the first year and quite a bit of co sleeping, but for immune system boosting and convenience, not because it was some magical bonding thing.
God, "east" s/b "the ease" -- just going to let it ride now, or I will be printing cx sheets.
199: Holy shit, oudemia, that's terrible and abusive, which has a much lower bar than "not going to immediately kill the child." I'm so sorry you (pl.) went through it.
so it wasn't quite occurring to me at the time that the only reason for this insane method of feeding (trying to make a days-old infant sip from a tiny cup!) was to make me not want to formula feed
It sounds like they were completely in the wrong, but wouldn't you assume the crazy shot-glass routine was about avoiding nipple confusion, as opposed to pure harassment?
109. Good point.
112. Sure, and if I only had strangers to listen to, then I should and hopefully would pay more attention.
199. Yikes. Sympathies.
202: Yes, and commiserations with you and your kiddo as well.
199 -- how horrible. Fuck those guys.
But certainly, what happened to you and O and the policy that prompted it both stink.
People shouldn't go into hospitals unless they have a taser on them.
199: That's awful.
You'd think they would have had enough situations like yours to show them the policy is stupid.
207: I was, of course, the least affected family member. And the whole thing was over in 3 days.
(Now that I think about it, isn't the whole point of being a hippie that it's supposed easier to be free-flowing in your life than to conform to society's standards? If you're putting more effort into being hippieish than it would take to live up to society's mainstream expectations, you're doing it wrong!)
You'd think they would have had enough situations like yours to show them the policy is stupid.
Googling, the policy was probably something related to the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative. Their policy includes "Give newborn infants no food or drink other than breastmilk, unless medically indicated," and clearly they were way too tight on what they considered a medical indication.
east of formula will be too great a temptation
I have an idea for a title for my new AP book.
People shouldn't go into hospitals unless they have a taser on them.
I've probably mentioned this before, but civilian models are a thirty second ride. Thirty! Our standard cycle is five seconds. I've done the full five, thirty would be insane.
214: Right. They weren't totally insane, since when O's blood sugar started crashing shortly after birth they had someone come find me in recovery and ask me if it was ok to give him formula.
199:
That really stinks.
Sorry you had to go through that.
Ive spent a fair amount of time around the midwife/doula/homebirth/breastfeedingnazis crowd.
Most of them are amazingly accepting and open to whatever the mom wants.
Some of them are just insane and really seem to enjoy shaming.
199. Fuck that noise. That's horrifying.
216: I don't understand what the means. 30 seconds of electricity?
199 Horrible. You have my sympathies.
218: I hate to blame a hospital making an abusively bad judgment call on the midwife/doula/homebirth crowd. Breastfeeding nazis, maybe, but I can't see where doulas or the rest come into it.
As far as attachment parenting....somehow I ended up with the autistic kid who is obsessed about being around me. Hello!!?!?!? Arent you supposed to want to sit in a corner, rocking yourself, and letting me have A MOMENTS OF PEACE!?!!?!
And my 16.5 year old son??? Shouldnt he want to go drive away and have sex with girls???
For the love of Ganesha, give me a moment of privacy!!!
222:
There are many in the anti-traditional medicine crowd who go off the deep end. Not most. But, a decent percentage.
30 seconds of electricity?
Yes. The civilian model is designed to give someone time to run away.
225:
Just not the guy who just died from getting tased for 30 seconds.
225: I'm fast enough that I only need maybe 15 seconds.
Last night, just down the street from my office, some guy with a concealed carry permit shot a guy who was trying to mug him. The mugger had a gun, so the shooting was probably justified, but the mugger only got a scratch and the victim was critically injured.
Two things:
1. Has anyone else had their hippie friends on FB post the picture of the naked lady doing a headstand while her naked baby nurses (while sitting right-side-up)? That is, in someways, a much weirder image.
2. Is it just the MPD, or have cops in other cities started not carrying a shotgun in the space between the front seats of their prowl cars? Used to be, every car had one, but now I only see a shotgun there maybe 1 out of 10 times, if that. I'm assuming the shotguns are still there, just in the trunk, but it is very singular, given how CHANGEBAD most police depts. and individual cops are.
229.2: Maybe the computer stuff had to go there.
This thread is convincing me that I really don't want to be a parent. It's not just the judginess or the lifestyle changes they deal with - although those are daunting too - it's a few things in my own life that would be almost as bad for a baby as a blender.
199: Jesus. Sorry. How long ago was that? Please tell us that hospital's policy has changed since then.
Carbines are more common than shotguns these days and often they're in the trunk. I'm a big fan of slugs in a 12 gauge myself.
have cops in other cities started not carrying a shotgun in the space between the front seats of their prowl cars?
Budget cuts.
Blenders are very bad for babies.
229.1: I had never seen that before, but it cracked me up when I found it just now. What's the commentary when someone posts it on FB?
almost as bad for a baby as a blender.
I'm emphatic that babies in my house only get margaritas on the rocks.
232: Patrol officers travel with rifles?
Maybe the computer stuff had to go there.
Yeah, my 2006 Impala had no room for a gun rack. Didn't have a fucking cup holder either. I just got a 2012 and it's a much better design and has a rack in the center as well as a cup holder. As it happens it's quite a bit faster too but my primary source of joy is definitely the cup holder.
234: For something that solid you're going to want a food processor.
I second 218.
Especially fun when you're going through acute post traumatic anxiety and one of the breastfeedingnazis is actually clinically insane, and in your house & refusing to leave.
231.2: Almost 15 months ago! The "Baby Friendly Hospital" initiative and others like it are very popular and as I understand it gaining ground.
Didn't have a fucking cup holder either.
In my experience, enough officers dip that they should just figure on two cup holders per person.
Patrol officers travel with rifles?
It's pretty common. Handguns are for up close and personal. You start getting a situation where either the other guy has some type of long gun or the possibility of taking a shot farther than 15 yards and something more precise is a good idea.
A shotgun is good until at least 50 yards. If you miss, a rifle bullet can go well over a mile and will go through several walls on a newish house.
Now I want a brick house and I feel I should call my mother.
240: Second on the yikes. Crazy people in your house, very bad.
I didn't read Rosin as being against hippies because IME (and I'm betting hers) the parenting olympics aren't a hippie thing. UMC affecting hippie styling, maybe. It's more the parenting olympics than the attachment parenting or any other method that's the problem (although if one has decided to medal in Baby Wearing and Co-sleeping, that does affect how much the mom is expected to sacrifice.)
It's extra fun when religion is added into it.
Note that things like the baby friendly initiative are succeeding in part because hospitals make mucho money on births of UMC and richer babies. The race between St Johns, UCLA and Cedars* to add similar amenities is an interesting anthropological feature of my particular world.
United Methodist Church? (that's what the googles gives me).
249: I don't really get this -- the BFI isn't an amenity for UMC people, it's a policy for supporting breastfeeding that sounds like it's being applied in a freakily draconian manner. But not something that makes the hospital more luxe.
250. Upper middle class (which I thought was totally a Brit concept, but, y'know).
A shotgun is good until at least 50 yards.
Oh yeah, especially these rifled Federals we're issued, they're very good.
252 No, I know it well, just didn't catch the context in which it was first used and thought it stood for something Medical Center or some new child-birthing protocol. Thanks.
251: But if insurance has to cover a five day hospital stay for breastfeeding purposes, could that make it a money-maker?
I think, based on my limited E, that UMC parents want reassurance that the hospital will not do things like "force" formula or epidurals on them and will generally cater to hippy-ish sentiments, and that therefore a hospital that signs up for something like the BFI does so as a signal that the hospital is a particular kind of place and not the bad old fashioned kind of hospital your doula warned you about. But that's just speculation.
I thought "upper middle class" was the US equivalent of what the UK calls "middle class", that is, people well above average income.
||
Totally of topic but too funny not to share:
The former Sun and News of the World editor was asked about the frequency of text contacts between the two when she was head of News International.
She said the prime minister signed off most texts with the letters DC but occasionally used the acronym LOL.
But she said he stopped this when he learnt the text shorthand stood for "laugh out loud" not "lots of love".
|>
I didn't read Rosin as being against hippies because IME (and I'm betting hers) the parenting olympics aren't a hippie thing.
I guess I read it as taking reasonable frustration with the parenting olympics generally, and focusing it on the hippiest elements of it. There's a really really small percentage of kids getting breastfed past 2 -- this from the CDC shows 8% at 18 months. Halford's friend who's breastfeeding a six year old is very rare -- she may be making herself crazy, but she's not the face of a largescale movement. So making the face of the parenting olympics a woman who's breastfeeding a kid who needs to shave seems like it's focusing the high expectations for mothers on the sproutsiest element, which isn't all that significant a part of the broader problem.
255: Does any insurance company cover that? I was figuring oudemia was in the hospital for five days because she was recovering, not to establish breastfeeding.
257: Similar concepts both side of the ditch, but shunted up a few notches this side. Brit UMC = successful lawyers, senior managers, heads of dept. in universities, etc.
based on my limited E
That's a bridge too far, acronym-wise, for me.
259: She also mentions a lot of items that are emblematic of a moneyed faux-hippieism. Blume understands me here. That said, she probably does overstate it -- I hear just as much complaining about the expectations as I see anyone trying to live up to them. But I think the pressure is real. When all of your friends say "when you get pregnant, don't read the baby books unless you want to snark at them" something is kind of wrong.
BOMLE there are worse acronyms than that.
Formula and a C-section? What kind of monster are you?
263: We're going around in circles. I agree with you that something's fucked up about What To Expect When You're Expecting and the rest, and the ideals are insane. I just want to push back against what I'm seeing as Rosin's claim that the insane is tightly linked to the level of crunchy-granola-dom; it feels as though part of the argumentative goal is to delegitimize anyone who's questioning the consumer-industrial norm. It is possible to breastfeed and not be a contestant in the Mommy Olympics; to eschew most heavily processed food and still not be a contestant in the Mommy Olympics; and so on and so forth. How hippie/crunchy you are is a terrible stand-in for how pressured you are, and Rosin's treating them as the same thing.
It seems like a certain style of SWPL-ness is being conflated with hippydom, which isn't quit right. They overlap at points but they're not the same thing.
I think Rosin's beef is with the following scene, which (to me at least) rings completely accurately:
ONE AFTERNOON AT the playground last summer, shortly after the birth of my third child, I made the mistake of idly musing about breast-feeding to a group of new mothers I'd just met. This time around, I said, I was considering cutting it off after a month or so. At this remark, the air of insta-friendship we had established cooled into an icy politeness, and the mothers shortly wandered away to chase little Emma or Liam onto the slide. Just to be perverse, over the next few weeks I tried this experiment again several more times. The reaction was always the same: circles were redrawn such that I ended up in the class of mom who, in a pinch, might feed her baby mashed-up Chicken McNuggets.
In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic. But breast-feeding is the real ticket into the club.
It's not hippydom per se but a particular link between things vaguely hippyish and class markers (the defining characteristic of, dare I say . . wait for it . . . SWPL?) The Chicken McNuggets reference, which is 100% accurate, is the tell.
SWPL's only going to be confusing here, I think. That was pointed at a particular demographic that's mostly not parents.
271: But what do you mean that Chicken McNuggets is the tell? The only Chicken McNuggets in the story are what Rosin's fantasizing other mothers are thinking about her.
(And, you know, if you're in the habit of saying things to people just to be perverse because you think they might be shallow and closed-minded enough to shun you for them, I wouldn't be surprised if your demeanor is offputting, regardless of whatever you're saying substantively.)
OT: Why did they scratch out the "& Ike" on the box of "Mike & Ikes"? Is it because the Republican moderate are all gone?
SWPL's only going to be confusing here, I think. That was pointed at a particular demographic that's mostly not parents.
But when they DO become parents THEY GO CRAZAZAZAY
Skinny jeans and oversized sunglasses /= hippie.
There's a marketing campaign on the premise that Mike and Ike are splitting. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/business/media/mike-and-ike-campaign-concocts-a-dispute.html
271.1 -- That other moms would feel that it is incredibly declasse, and also vaguely harmful to your child, to mash up Chicken McNuggets and feed them to your kid? That it would be a source of shame in this particular world to admit to the other moms that you took your kids to McDonalds? That certainly rings 100% true to me.
277: Now I'm going to picture Ike as an Ike Turner-like domestic partner of Mike and assume he's going to have a very good solo career.
I don't think I'd let my son eat Chicken McNuggets because those are rank and if he pukes I'm likely to have to clean it up. He gets cheeseburgers, like a normal person.
The chicken sandwiches, the new kind, aren't half bad. They just don't come with a toy.
How would one mash up a chicken mcnugget? I mean, I get that they're compressed industrial chicken goo, but I picture smushing one with a fork, and very little happening.
The whole turn the this discussion has taken makes me think that we (and others) are obsessing over issues that are salient for a tiny, tiny segment of the population. We've narrowed it down to women who can afford significant time off and significant cash investment in (the right) baby stuff, and who have this peculiar set of values.
I'm not saying they don't exist; I'm saying that this is like all those NYT articles about insanely wealthy Manhattanites and their problems.
How would one mash up a chicken mcnugget?
How should I know? That's why I have a staff.
I totally see where Halford is coming from. I know exactly the type Rosin is trying to mock here. These are the SWPL types for whom hippiesh things are adapted as class markers to distinguish them from poor people who eat at McDonalds.
Thing is, there is no real way from the outside to distinguish people who don't eat at McDonalds because they are resisting consumer culture and unhealthy industrial food from people who don't eat at McDonalds because that's where poor people eat. You can't look into people's souls while chit chatting on the playground.
It gets even worse when you don't know that the people you are talking to don't eat at McDonalds and in fact you are just imagining the distain that they might be feeling for you.
257
I thought "upper middle class" was the US equivalent of what the UK calls "middle class", that is, people well above average income.
I think the US understanding of "middle class" is intended to describe the lifestyle and culture of people in, say, roughly the middle third or even the middle half of income distribution, but the standard of living people expect of it is - number of cars, amount of leisure time, etc. - at least 20 years out of date, describing a lifestyle that isn't feasible at that income. See complaints about rising inequality. I wasn't aware that the UK had any other meaning for it.
Although now that I think of this, maybe "middle class" should be considered higher than I thought, because my definition would make "working class" basically meaningless, and that's a term that gets thrown around a lot too.
"I'm middle class, my high school classmate is working class, that random asshole over there is poor."
278: Again, I'm not getting this exactly. There are circumstances where I'd get judgy about feeding McNuggets to a baby -- if the baby were too young for solid food, or if I knew enough about the family to know that McNuggets were a significant portion of it's diet. And from what Rosin said, I honestly can't tell if she means "Look, these mothers are so uptight they think feeding McNuggets to a baby is bad," or "Look, these mothers are so uptight they think my saying I might stop breastfeeding means I'd do something as selfevidently awful as feeding McNuggets to a baby."
It can hardly be hippiedom if it's in the baby books and coming from the nurses. (I read something Rosin wrote a while back but not her recent piece.) Every time I saw a nurse, throughout my pregnancy, in childbirth classes, etc., they would say, "Are you planning to breastfeed?" and it was clear what the answer was supposed to be. Which was find, because I planned to breastfeed.
On the other hand, after they moved me to maternity from the delivery room, it took hours before they brought the baby--because I had been up all night and needed to rest. That night, again, they took the baby for something and didn't bring her back until I asked--against the pro-breastfeeding crowd's rules. So whether the pressure was coming from within the nursing staff is hard to say. It seemed to be more honored in the breach than in the observance. It's hard to say. The hospital's internal lactation consultant also turned out to only work weekdays, which wasn't so helpful when I went into labor Friday night and checked out first thing Monday morning. (All I can say is around that point I lost my patience. I would have appreciated a little bit more accurate of a heads-up.)
You can't look into people's souls while chit chatting on the playground.
If you stare hard and intensely enough, you can.
I get the point that these are issues that seem to only affect a small percentage of (probably mostly white) urban relatively well educated relatively well to do families. OTOH the Sears books are, as far as I can tell, by far the most popular parenting books on the market, the La Leche League's book is super popular, etc. Only some relatively small percentage of the people who buy the Sears books go full throttle into attachment parenting, but we're not talking about 24 people in Silverlake or Williamsburg, either.
285: Well, right, and I think people like Rosin make a strong effort to present any kind of hippieish anticonsumerism as conspicuous consumption, which pisses me off. I mean, breastfeeding may be associated with the highly educated upper middle class, but if the childcare is coming from the mother either way, it's certainly cheaper. Formula costs the earth.
285: there is no real way from the outside to distinguish people who don't eat at McDonalds because they are resisting consumer culture and unhealthy industrial food from people who don't eat at McDonalds because that's where poor people eat
I agree with this and would venture to say that I suspect it is actually remarkably difficult to do from the inside, too. I mean, presumably anyone who refuses to eat at McDonalds as a matter of principle would, if asked, give some variant of the first, attractive reason. And I suspect there are few, if any, people who would perceive themselves as lying when doing so in order to cover up the second, less attractive reason. Yet it's hard to say that the second reason isn't a real thing that matters to a lot of people too.
She's saying "These mothers are so uptight* they think my saying I might stop breastfeeding is like doing some vague something you associate with poor, obese families with Type II diabetes."
*"These mothers are so uptight" is fun to say.
289: But if you do it moderately, which is the vast majority of people, it's really very harmless. Sears' book is awful, but pretty much all the baby books are awful.
292: I'm just trying to figure out if we're angry at the mothers in the playground for having contempt for McDonald's eaters, or if we're angry at them for having such contempt for Rosin that they privately compare her to (self-evidently contemptible) McDonald's eaters.
Or, to put it another way, she's one UMC professional trying to call her socioeconomic peers evil snobs for (she thinks) having contempt for her. And really, given that Rosin's writing for the Atlantic, I don't think she can claim that dislike for her is class snobbery.
287 -- she's saying that breastfeeding is part of a compendium of values that include not going to McDonalds, that these values are connected to valuing things that are "organic," and that there is a strong class/aspirational/moralistic component to those values. Just as it would be declasse to take your kid to McDonalds (but declasse not just in the sense of pure snobbery; you would genuinely think that McDonalds is bad for you, loathe the fast food industry, etc), it would be declasse (but also presumably unhealthy) to stop breastfeeding.
I mean, I'm actually having a little trouble understanding how you could not recognize this type.
I think people like Rosin make a strong effort to present any kind of hippieish anticonsumerism as conspicuous consumption, which pisses me off.
Yeah, it pisses me off just as much as people who actually do use anticonsumerism as a form of conspicuous consumption.
It is enough to make me think that the politics of consumption is completely bogus, and to focus on something sane, like electoral politics.
I mean, I'm actually having a little trouble understanding how you could not recognize this type.
We all recognize the type, we just resent being assimilated to it.
And really, given that Rosin's writing for the Atlantic, I don't think she can claim that dislike for her is class snobbery.
Heh.
See complaints about rising inequality. I wasn't aware that the UK had any other meaning for it.
I think "middle class" originally meant the bourgeoisie, that is, people between the actual aristocrats and the working class. So not the average person, more like the 90th to 99th percentile of wealth.
I'm having a hard time identifying valuing breastfeeding or disapproving of McDonalds as a reason to despise someone. Separately, those are both fine things: valuing breastfeeding is only a problem when you're torturing Oudeima's baby over it, or generally being an an ass about it, or if you're being shitty to people about how you're better than them because you don't go to McDonalds. But the class snobbery that you seem to be pointing at as the problem hasn't got a blessed thing to do with not liking McDonalds.
Most mothers I know would agree that breastfeeding where possible is a good thing, and that feeding babies McDonalds is generally a poor idea. And yet they're not all obsessive hell-bitches. So, no, I really didn't find that a telling detail.
OK, so "hippie" means laid-back, back-to-the-earth stuff, "crunchy" means cute and affecting hippie-ism but probably only superficially, "middle class" means "not middle income," "SWPL" is short for "stuff white people like" but actually means a long and very, very contentious list of traits that might or might not be intended to denigrate a certain culture and I'll leave it at that, and "yuppie" is short for "young urban professional" and therefore seems like it might overlap with "SWPL" or other terms but by now just means "a person in the 80s," right? I'm sure that's just a start. What did I miss?
Also, since I can't read the Time article, can anyone tell me how closely related this "attachment parenting" fad is to "attachment therapy"?
We're not talking about despising anyone. I thought the point of the Rosin's article was to say, there's this thing, breastfeeding, that advocates have described as absolutely necessary for the health of your child, sufficiently so to engage in a massive shaming campaign for folks who don't do it for many months over an infants life, but it's not actually as important for health as people have made out, and a good chunk of what's going on in enforcing things like breastfeeding as a strict rule of behavior has more to do with status marking and trendiness than any rigorous assessment of health benefit.
So people should chill out about breastfeeding and take the costs of it (e.g., difficulty in the workplace) seriously and not be such snobs about it.
301: you mean that there's a form of nutrition which is clearly the one which humanity has evolved with and which is exactly the same as that consumed on the Paleolithic veldt, but which is nevertheless not measurably superior to a normal First World balanced diet?
That's unpossible!
301: And I really think that the amount of breastfeeding-shaming is wildly inflated. Oudemia's experience was awful, and hospitals with screwy policies like that should be brought back into line ASAP. And breastfeeding activists who are assholes about it should stop.
But if you look at the stats I linked, only half of babies are ever exclusively breastfed, and only half are being breastfed at all past four months. In any plausible group of mothers, the ones who don't mind a little formula outnumber the breastfeeding nazis. It just doesn't ring true to me that social pressure to breastfeed is a major problem, and the cavalier equation Rosin seems to make between mothers who do breastfeed and mothers who make other women miserable about not breastfeeding seems overblown, and like it's distracting from more significant pressures on mothers.
Really, I guess what pisses me off about Rosin is that she seems to me to be locating the source of the pressures that make life difficult for mothers in snobby stuck-up other women. Not employers, not their male partners, not the difficulty in finding adequate child care... if those bitches in their sunglasses would just stop being such status-conscious snobs about their healthy food and their co-sleeping, then life would be easy. I find that disagreeable.
In any plausible group of mothers, the ones who don't mind a little formula outnumber the breastfeeding nazis. It just doesn't ring true to me that social pressure to breastfeed is a major problem, and the cavalier equation Rosin seems to make between mothers who do breastfeed and mothers who make other women miserable about not breastfeeding seems overblown
That's the question, and I just disagree. I've seen it in the wild! It might not be a huge slice of the population, but it's a very real one, and I suspect one not unfamiliar to other people here.
302: I didn't say formula wouldn't make your kid fat.
I think the problem is that if you have trouble breastfeeding and want to ask for help, you are very likely to find yourself being helped by someone toward the "activist" end of things. That activist doesn't knows LB's stats but doesn't think that the population of women who actively seek help are going to be far more likely than expected to have some biomedical issue that doesn't respond to social pressure or coaching or whatever.
That's the question, and I just disagree. I've seen it in the wild! It might not be a huge slice of the population, but it's a very real one, and I suspect one not unfamiliar to other people here.
Yup.
Also, milk is not on the paleo diet [as interpreted by my gym owner] because "do you want to be weak like a baby? milk is what babies drink." QED, my wealthy Welsh friend.
I'm probably projecting from the things that I have been annoyed about by the various medical people I've had to deal with.
do you want to be weak like a baby?
I thought babies could lift hundreds of times their body weight.
There are circumstances where I'd get judgy about feeding McNuggets to a baby -- if the baby were too young for solid food, or if I knew enough about the family to know that McNuggets were a significant portion of it's diet.
You mean "its".
304: yes, this exactly. It's like, if we can just get moms to turn on each other judgmentally, then we don't have to worry about societal barriers for families. It's a Caitlin Flanagan type of thing.
Also, the notion that Rosin is just pushing back on judgmentalism is clearly not the case - she is the one judging other mothers for being too uptight. Again, in the Slate exchange, her interlocutor (whose name I forget) keeps saying, we should look at the challenges society creates for all mothers. And Rosin keeps saying, no, let's talk about those uptight bitches I think are judging me - they can't even appreciate a beautiful view!
I forgive you for not breastfeeding, Blume.
I'm not denying that breastfeeding assholes exist in the wild, but people who are assholes about a lot of things exist in the wild. I'm saying that I don't think breastfeeding assholes have a dominant enough social position to make the majority of women who use at least some formula oppressed by them.
306: This is a slightly different problem, and it's one I don't mean to weigh in on. I have heard a lot of people claiming that lactation consultants (or the non-professional version thereof), specifically, were mean to someone they knew when they had unresolvable breastfeeding problems, and I don't know about that because I don't think I've ever met a lactation consultant.
308: I don't really have any opinion on the whole paleo thing, but I tend to be extremely suspicious of all exotic diets because their proponents often say foolish things.
On the other hand, my wise old high school chemistry teacher said that adults shouldn't drink milk because milk is designed for babies - and the stuff from the supermarket was deisgned for baby cows. This seems very sensible to me.
I forgive you for not breastfeeding, Blume.
Now if my best friend could only get out from under the internalized expectation I have watched her struggle with.
314.2: It is a different problem, but I think it causes a great deal of ill will in the whole area.
She can't breastfeed, or has stopped breastfeeding, and feels bad about it? I think the most reassuring thing to say is "Look, in our generation, basically no one was breastfed. And individually, we're fine. You need to do huge population-wide statistics to find the benefits -- for any individual kid, they're very very minor."
Although, come to think, I don't know if 'our generation' is true at your age. My age, breastfeeding was weird for mothers when I was a baby, but I couldn't tell you when that flipped.
If this conversation isn't sanctimonious enough for you: where is the mommy-war for the motherless child?
I think the most reassuring thing to say is "Look, in our generation, basically no one was breastfed. And individually, we're fine. You need to do huge population-wide statistics to find the benefits -- for any individual kid, they're very very minor."
Why on earth would that work?
Look, in our generation, basically no one was breastfed. And individually, we're fine.
I think maybe I had asthma as a kid because in our generation basically no one was raised without a cloud of smoke in the house.
321: I dunno, it'd reassure me, and it's a conversation I've had with other women who were feeling bad about possibly having to stop breastfeeding? Am I missing something that makes it obviously unhelpful?
@312
Definitely.
Although it's less openly trollish than Caitlin Flanagan, the meta-point of the article does seem to be "Here's yet another way in which women are wrong."
I'm not familiar with Rosin's writing at all, so I don't know to what extent she's entitled to the benefit of the doubt and I'm just misreading her tone somehow.
322: I think I was emotionally scarred by taking several-hour drives in a VW Beetle with two chainsmokers and the windows rolled up. It was a wonder they could see to drive.
I'm really not comfortable going into any details of her situation. But LB, you keep talking about how this thing Rosin is talking about doesn't exist, when jesus, I have watched it happen.
The first time I was with my friend during a fellow-mom size-up on the playground, you could have picked my jaw up off the ground. It seems like exaggeration, right? Nope. The kind of shit Rosin describes is absolutely real.
My mom was kind of insane about pumping milk while my sister was in the NICU.
Also, I think there were/are ways to be a SAHM that aren't boring. They involve volunteering for civic organizations mostly.
328.2: Also, you can hire a nanny and write articles for the Atlantic and the New Yorker.
Speaking of smoking and child-having and things back a while, when my cousins were born, a doctor suggested that my aunt continue to smoke so the delivery would be easier (smaller baby).
But LB, you keep talking about how this thing Rosin is talking about doesn't exist,
meet
I'm not denying that breastfeeding assholes exist in the wild
Assholes are assholes, and if they're not assholes about breastfeeding, they're going to be assholes about something else. I'm denying that exclusive breastfeeders have the kind of socially dominant position that makes it seriously oppressive when they're assholes.
Most of what Rosin writes about it is projection about what she thinks other women are thinking about her. I don't know about your friend's social interactions, but I seriously doubt she's a pariah for the way she's feeding her baby.
At our playground, AB once received parenting advice from a teenage boy/father (he wasn't there with his kid - I think he was hanging out while skipping school - but he talked to her about handling newborns).
It's probably just male privilege that lets me laugh - literally - at people who try to judge my parenting. I'm not saying that to be flip, but I know I'm a great parent (well, good enough, anyway*), and so when anyone tries to tell me otherwise, I laugh at them. WTF do they know?
* I'll admit that my breastfeeding record was pretty poor.
They involve volunteering for civic organizations mostly.
You have a different definition of boring than I do.
There is, literally, no possible set of parenting decisions that someone else won't judge. So I'm with LB in finding dubious the idea that La Leche is uniquely awful. Awful, sure. But uniquely so? Hardly.
Presumably the underlying issue is that people of the relevant SES don't care that poor people judge them for withholding junk food and Disney videos and that suburbanites judge them for raising their children in the horrible city and that the 1% judge them for sending their children to schools that aren't the very best and that Republicans judge them for raising their children to be accepting of others. But they do care when someone they recognize as being their own kind judges them for imperfect performance of SWPL (or whatever) parenting.
It's not chiefly being shunned on the playground or anything like that: it's way more subtle and internalized than that, having to do with all the things Cala mentioned in 88, as well as other factors specific to my friend, but I think not uncommon with the current economy. I just mentioned the playground experience because it's one of the seemingly more hyperbolic things we've discussed, when actually it does happen. But I'm with Halford in really not understanding how you are getting all these things from what Rosin writes.
But if you look at the stats I linked, only half of babies are ever exclusively breastfed, and only half are being breastfed at all past four months. In any plausible group of mothers, the ones who don't mind a little formula outnumber the breastfeeding nazis. It just doesn't ring true to me that social pressure to breastfeed is a major problem
Just logically, the stats you linked don't say anything about the prevalence of social pressure to breast feed. Perhaps many people don't breastfeed, but UMC mothers probably self-segregate into groups where most people do breastfeed and exert pressure for others to do so. Population percentages don't get at that at all.
I was at a friends house and took a photo of him lookin' cute feeding his baby with a bottle, and he freaked out about the possibility of my posting it on the web -- 'you don't understand what people would SAY about us!'
But I'm with Halford in really not understanding how you are getting all these things from what Rosin writes.
It really comes down to the fact that she localizes the problem in terms of one group of women being interpersonally cruel to another. While I think there are all sorts of incompatible pressures placed on women and mothers these days, reducing it to something that can be blamed on snobby bitches, which I think Rosin does, seems to me like covering up structural problems by appealing to misogyny.
Of course, it was a bottle of Boone's Farm.
I just want it to be clear that I am looking down on Rosin for looking down on the moms at her playground for looking down on moms who take their kids to McDonalds.
What are you, Yertle the Turtle?
Wait, we're talking about the old Atlantic breastfeeding article now? I am confused. I thought we were talking about Rosin's contributions to the Slate discussion on Badinter?
And she doesn't localize the problem to that.
Actually, this reminds me of something: "Don't you judge me" is a phrase I never heard (except ironically, and with a different connotation) growing up, and that I associate with lower class families - people on Jerry Springer and BOGF's trashier relatives. It really stood out for me, because I hadn't grown up with any conception of being judged by others - what mattered was how you lived up to your own (presumptively high) standards.
Maybe this is my own idiosyncrasy, but I've never really seen anything to change my sense of its status. Nobody likes being judged, but people of higher SES tend to worry about it less. Or, again, maybe they only worry about it from fewer people
Here, from Rosin on Badinter:
Without infant formula, legions of mothers would have a much harder time going back to work, especially in a country like ours with pitiful maternity-leave policies. But it's taboo to embrace formula these days, so we scoop it up in shame and secrecy in our own kitchens.
That's simply untrue. I'm sure breastfeeding nazis exist, but formula's just not taboo anywhere outside of some intentional hippie community on an island in Oregon that probably doesn't exist.
but formula's just not taboo anywhere outside of some intentional hippie community on an island in Oregon that probably doesn't exist
That's just wrong.
And this:
In any number of them I saw some version of this tableau: A mother, blind to her beautiful surroundings, instead chasing her toddler with some organic snack. In one case it was actually homemade marmalade and crackers made from hand-ground wheat.
Here, she's not calling the women she disapproves of aggressively snobby, but pathetically blinkered: so oppressed by their delusional standards of parenting that they can't even appreciate the scenery. Honestly, how the hell would she know if some other woman handing her kid a snack was looking at the view?
346: What do you mean by taboo? I'm thinking it's got to at least mean "something that people would be surprised or shocked to see". If there's a place in the US you could shock people by feeding a baby with a bottle, there aren't a lot of them.
Sorry for leading off with the 'um', that was unnecessary.
349: You don't recognize the thing that Rosin is writing about and I truly don't know how to convince you that it is actually a thing, so I'm going to stop here.
. I'm sure breastfeeding nazis exist, but formula's just not taboo anywhere outside of some intentional hippie community on an island in Oregon that probably doesn't exist.
What? That is completely false. I mean, you're just wrong about that, and I suspect you wouldn't have to venture far from your own immediate circle of acquaintances to find examples.
Don't worry about it -- I never figured out why 'um' was offensive. But metaphor or not, what is it about seeing someone feeding their kid a snack that lets her generalize that they're so wrecked by parenting that they can't even appreciate the landscape? She's got a lot of contempt for mothers she thinks are doing it wrong.
351: If 'something that people would be surprised or shocked to see' indicates to you that I don't know what Rosin's talking about when she uses the word 'taboo', I'll agree with you that I don't know what she's talking about, but I think she's using the wrong word.
Don't worry about it -- I never figured out why 'um' was offensive.
Really? It's like a 13 year old giving you serious 'tude.
There are plenty of mothers who are pressured into feeling significant shame about using formula instead of making heroic efforts to extrude breast-milk, and admission to using formula is a social taboo in their particular world of mothering. That should be 100% clear and is not dependent on any kind of esoteric meaning of the word "taboo."
OK, so "hippie" means laid-back, back-to-the-earth stuff, "crunchy" means cute and affecting hippie-ism but probably only superficially, "middle class" means "not middle income," "SWPL" is short for "stuff white people like" but actually means a long and very, very contentious list of traits that might or might not be intended to denigrate a certain culture and I'll leave it at that, and "yuppie" is short for "young urban professional" and therefore seems like it might overlap with "SWPL" or other terms but by now just means "a person in the 80s," right? I'm sure that's just a start. What did I miss?
"do you want to be weak like a baby? milk is what babies drink."
bad news for the Masai, actual dwellers of the actual veldt, who kill lions for fun. Milk and cow's blood, that's a real man's breakfast.
It's a blind spot. Lots of other things piss me off irrationally (I miss baa. Man, he could talk about the weather and I'd be blind with rage.), but whatever's annoying about the 'um' sort of thing goes right by me.
356 gets it right, and I cannot believe LB has not encountered this anywhere in NYC.
Can't Mommy-Peer-Pressure be actually Mommy-Low-Self-Esteem, where you only interpret all these slights (possibly correctly) if your ear is tuned to that exact frequency?
I'm part of an extremely silly local mothering facebook group, and the type of things they fret about tend to ring 1) not quite UMC, and 2) seriously over-thinking it. They don't fit the stereotype we're discussing, mostly for class reasons, but they are stressed out and anxious about mothering.
Oh, that was me.
Also, 42 is hilarious. I see from googling that it got national attention. Somehow I missed hearing about it at the time, but I guess that was in August, and I didn't arrive till September, by which point it was probably old news.
admission to using formula is a social taboo in their particular world of mothering
Are you literally claiming that you know women who feed their kids formula and conceal the fact? They don't feed their kids where other people can see them, they hide the bottles, they sneak out of sight when the baby starts crying, they lie and claim they're nursing? Because I don't think you are. That's what a taboo on admitting using formula would look like.
You're talking about women who feel bad about using formula. That's very different.
When you try to serve blood at a birthday party, it isn't just the moms that complain. Most of the dads are upset also.
The UHB thing was me, I mean. Blargh.
Um, don't you, like, actually *live* with an actual *tween girl*? How can you *not* be sensitized to this way of talking? I mean, really.
Blume, a question for you. Do you not read Rosin as expressing contempt for mothers whose parenting approach she disagrees with? I think that most of what you're saying is quite reasonable; I just don't think it's what Rosin's saying. To me the quote in 347 sums it up - nothing those mothers are doing, or even what Rosin projects onto them, affects or judges Rosin's parenting, yet she's very harshly judging them. It's hard for me to see how that's Rosin protecting other women.
Women always fight in brutal ways. As near as I can figure, that is all that keeps heterosexuality from becoming a minor fetish community among women.
367:
1. No
2. I reeeeeally am not getting further into this.
356: Jessica Valenti was attacked six ways to Sunday for not being able to breast feed her critically ill and premature infant.
A blog war erupted after that post. Many people failed to cover themselves in glory.
I'm sorry, what role does the character of the snack in 347 play? Would Rosin praise the mother in question of she were chasing the toddler with McNuggets?
Seriously, all of the "color" in that scene is irrelevant hippie*-bashing. Are the only bad parents in American the ones who grind their own wheat?
* or whatever - it's pointing at the exact same things as "giant puppets"
Are you literally claiming that you know women who feed their kids formula and conceal the fact?
Oh, hey, I do.
I'll say that I'd be perfectly willing to believe in a taboo on saying, e.g., "I didn't feel like breastfeeding, so we used formula from the beginning." There's real social pressure to claim to have tried to breastfeed. But better than half of the mothers I knew were unable to breastfeed, and I didn't see (first or secondhand) any pressury inquiry or judgment of whether they were really really unable to or whether they'd tried hard enough.
To be specific, I know a mother who concealed the fact that they fed their baby (at the hospital) formula from 1. her best friend and 2. nurses, because she didn't feel like dealing with their offended horror.
This woman also breastfed, incidentally.
.. and she was feeding the kid additional formula on the advice of a doctor.
375 should not be read as a denial that anyone is ever an asshole about that sort of thing -- just that I've never seen a social circle where feeding a baby with a bottle would be surprising.
Maybe it's changed in the past couple of years or something? Because I am certainly not terribly plugged into, like, new-mother circles, and even I've seen it.
I don't know personally of a case of active sneaking formula at night and not telling anyone, but I had someone admit to using formula in a very confessional, don't spread this around, I know it's shameful kind of way.
It's number one one the list of "mommy guilt trips" so I'm pretty sure that there's some hiding of the use of formula going on. OK, that's not scientific but, yes, there is serious shaming going on in using formula for infants.
I wasn't thinking about someone who was breastfeeding but actively concealing the fact that they were supplementing with formula -- that sounds less absurd than the idea of hiding how you fed your kid all day from everyone you knew.
Still, I'd hear that story as someone who avoids bringing up using formula because they're sensitive about talking about it and don't want to take the risk that someone will be an aggressive jerk; someone who's a little fragile about exposing herself to judgment. That's still a long way from a world where it's a norm to be an aggressive jerk about formula.
Actually, I think one of the best things Hanna Rosin does in her breastfeeding article is to point out how thoughtless the statement "breast feeding is free" is. As she puts it, breast feeding is free if you literally believe a woman's time is worth nothing. One can afford such a price easily if one has fab maternity leave and a nanny -- not so much for people with less money and/or less accommodating workplaces. Yes, let's all work harder to make all workplaces less hostile to women and mothers, but let's not pretend that it's the case right now.
LB, seriously, you are just wrong about this.
someone who's a little fragile about exposing herself to judgment
This is a hilariously inapt description of my friend, no. She hid it because she knew there would be disapproval (based on prior statements) and didn't want to hear it.
As she puts it, breast feeding is free if you literally believe a woman's time is worth nothing.
Breastfeeding is free if the mother is the primary caregiver, which is true for more women than breastfeed. That's not saying that the woman's time is worth nothing, that's saying that breastfeeding doesn't take significantly more time than bottlefeeding, and if the mother is available to do it formula costs and breastmilk doesn't. It affects the division of labor between partners, but feeding a baby isn't all of the work of infant care, and the rest can be shared.
It's more burdensome than formula when the mother has to be away from the baby for a significant part of the day, but women who care for their own infants aren't exclusively an upper class phenomenon.
Or maybe Camberville has an especially poisonous atmosphere?
Seriously, these are local cultural norms. In much of western PA, you wouldn't face scorn for smoking while driving your baby around, let alone feeding it formula. This is what I was getting at up above - this problem (at "taboo" level) affects maybe thousands of women nationwide. I'm sorry that this particular form of assholery is ascendant in Sifu/Blume's and Halford's social circles, but it's not just non-ubiquitous: it's rare and isolated. I'm on the board of the M/idw/fe Center, right? Ground Zero for LLL insanity, surely? Know who else is on the board? Our family doctor, who directed AB to feed Iris formula when she had some sort of flu that was making her throw up all the time, resulting in AB stressing out about producing enough milk. The past board president breastfed for a few months, then switched to formula - no taboo, no judgement (I know her very, very well - I would know if she'd felt scorn about pulling out a bottle).
The problem isn't LLL assholery; it's a society that puts so much pressure on mothers that they feel bad about whatever set of decisions they make. Pointing out that LLL can be assholes in no way obviates that fact.
it's rare and isolated
Oh how the fuck would you know that
I mean maybe it's rare and isolated in the hick-ass rust belt.
We're a simple, honest people incapable of guile or having fewer than 10% incidence of mullets.
385: It still seems like a jump from hiding formula from a friend because the woman believed she'd be disapproving to saying formula is taboo. There are lots of things that some people disapprove of that aren't taboo.
389: Well, and in the less rarefied strata of NY where I hang out.
It still seems like a jump from hiding formula from a friend because the woman believed she'd be disapproving to saying formula is taboo. There are lots of things that some people disapprove of that aren't taboo.
This is truly world-class hairsplitting.
So, late to the party (because, um, I was at Whole Foods), and I don't want to defend Rosin exactly, but:
1) This is real. Not every woman is affected by it, but I'd put it on the level of a microaggression, where a lot of individual slights are not a big deal but together they can be overwhelming. And women who aren't stressed by it acknowledge it ("Yes, he's having a Cheeto. Don't tell the mommy police!") so there's an undercurrent there.
2) A lot of it is passive-aggressive. I'm sure stopping breastfeeding at six months is fine for you because you have to get back to your career, but I really want EmmaJacob to have the best start. They're only little once, you know. But I'm sure your kids will be just fine. Two days later, you're so brave for letting her have that Elmo doll! She really seems to love it. OliverAva would love one, I just get so worried about toxins. &c.
3) I get the sense that this has really ramped up in the last five years. This might just correspond to my awareness of my friends' lifestages.
4) To the extent that I have sympathy for Rosin's approach, it's because I've frequently been in the role of the childless friend comforting a be-babied friend who is in tears over a lot of needless judgment. Sometimes a little snark and a few well-placed swearwords are helpful in restoring a bit of sanity.
Given that this has gotten contentious, I think there's a certain amount of 'help, help, I'm being oppressed' going on -- that the 'offended horror' the woman in 376 was concealing formula use to avoid would have been, in practice, something along the lines of "Oh, dear, that's a shame. Was it really necessary? I've heard supplementing can cause supply problems later," or at worst "Goddam doctors, I totally don't believe the formula was necessary, and they completely risked disrupting your chance of successfully nursing." The possibility that someone will secondguess your parenting decisions is getting turned into oppression.
And of course no one should be secondguessing anyone's parenting decisions unless they're intimately involved with them, it's very annoying and rude. But reports of the oppressive pressure from the breastfeeding mafia, if you don't go nutpicking through the internet, seem largely to be pretty mild.
And, it's a little limited by class and geography, but it's also on the cover of Time here. You can get that in Pittsburgh. (Though I suspect the city is more sane because it is full of people like my mother who having reared several children exude calm about parenting trends.)
As a general principle, "I've never really encountered this, and it doesn't seem like it ought to bother someone," is not a good response to "this is a thing that happens to people, and it can be extremely upsetting and stressful in certain contexts." The analogies should be obvious, and are obviously banned.
392: No, it's really not hairsplitting. 'Taboo' means it's not societally acceptable to do something openly. Feeding your child formula isn't taboo in that sense. People may comment negatively, but it's not a taboo anywhere I've ever heard of.
Walking down the street naked is taboo. Walking down the street in several unmatching plaids is something people who know you may be rude about. There's a big distinction between the two.
My family lives in the hick-ass rust belt. When my sister had her kid, the pressure on her to breastfeed was immense, so much so that she refused to talk to anyone about her final choice. And when my wife, who, for a variety of reasons, could not breastfeed our first kid, traveled to visit my hickass rustbelt family with me, two of my sister's friends expressed (heh) horror that my wife was bottle-feeding our kid. Was this sort of pressure, which also existed in Denver at the time, why my wife fed our kid pumped breast milk for nine months? Despite the fact that she was working full time, was near exhaustion, and had to pump in her office (which activity everyone -- and I mean everyone -- supported as totally healthy and appropriate) several times a day? I don't know. The second kid, fortunately, wasn't a sadistic little fuck and took the breast.
All of this is anecdotal, sure, but I honestly don't know what LB is on about at this point.
Pittsburgh isn't exactly same. It has less of the child-raising assholery because everyone spends so much time figuring out how to make the most inconsiderate and pointless U turn.
there's a certain amount of 'help, help, I'm being oppressed'
No one is being sent to concentration camps by the SS, that's for sure. But it's usually a bad sign for your argument when you're at the point of going to the "they're all a bunch of whiners" defense.
Plenty of moms feel significant shame for their decisions. Being a new mother is also kind of an inherently isolating and vulnerable-making event, that this sort of thing makes worse. Is it the worst crime in the history of the universe? No. Is it a real issue that's causing pain for a significant number of real women? Yes.
394: A friend of mine just posted something about this that said "Why must everyone be so judgmental all the time?" and I really wanted to ask if really literally every single person is constantly judgmental every moment of her day, but then again, I figured that's just how it feels for her. Whether it's some percentage of people she runs into or not, it could still feel very oppressive. If one out of every thousand people I see told me that they thought I was obviously ruining someone's life, it would still feel pretty oppressive.
Let's cut LB some slack on these accusations of hairsplitting. She spent two years in the BIRTHPLACE of the word "taboo".
Holy fucking shit, Sifu. Yes, where you live is representative of the country as a whole. That's why they just amended the US Constitution to enshrine equal marriage.
I live in exactly the same milieu as you, in a city only somewhat smaller. And yet what you insist is normal and so common that any random non-parent would find to be ubiquitous is unfamiliar to me, an actual fucking parent with 2 kids who were breastfed. It's such a taboo topic that I can probably only tell you the breast milk/formula decisions of 80% of our peer group. The rest were too terrified to reveal it.
Again, this is New York Times articles about how many people are flying their children to summer camp. If you live in the right place, among the right people, you'll encounter it. If you jump from that premise to thinking that this is a common problem nationwide, then you have no fucking clue.
I'm very sad for the 50,000 UMC women who are being oppressed by the LLL. I'm sure the 4,450,000 other mothers of American babies, who can't afford to feed or house their children, who can't afford to take time off work to be with their kids, who get judged every day for how their kids are clothed, transported, and generally raised, feel all the sympathy in the world, and will soon be joining together to lift the oppression of the breastfeeding mafia, without which every American mother's life would be bliss.
402: It is kinda fun realizing there's basically nowhere in that half of the state where one can make a legal U-turn, so everyone just figures "hey, that hill isn't *really* blind" and just goes for it.
I also want to underscore that what happened to me and O wasn't really anecdotal in the same way that any given random mommy drive-by is. What happened was due to the policy of an enormous, nationally-ranked Manhattan hospital. It is happening to several women right now and has been every day for years. This policy didn't materialize from thin air -- it was the product of lobbying and pressure to enact these sorts of ultimately punitive measures.
404.last: You forgot the starving children in Africa.
This is where I want to loop back to "the tyranny of the sensitive" mentioned in another context early in the thread. Rosin, in her breastfeeding article, was mindreading scorn from other mothers; she wasn't getting berated or abused, she was saying things to tweak other women, and then being offended that they didn't want to be her best friend.
And I've seen some of that kind of projection firsthand, where one mother looks at another's different practices and interprets them as a hostile judgment on hers -- more of that than I've seen (or heard of) formula-related shaming. I'd like to distinguish 'felt pressure' from actual shaming coming from other women.
"Feeling pressured". You mean, like how people expect parents to move to the suburbs, or not to send their kids to public schools, or to take lessons in something, or to read to them X hours a day, or to buy a fucking minivan?
Oh no. This is the unique one. Only people who judge about breastfeeding are applying pressure to mothers.
This is what the whole argument is about. Not whether people use breastfeeding to judge, but whether this is the salient issue in American parenting.
If no one ever again asked a stranger about her nursing strategy, would mothering in America become non-fraught? Or would a million other things (toxins in your fire-retardent couch!) continue to create stress and pressure on mothers?
I'd like to distinguish 'felt pressure' from actual shaming coming from other women.
Yeah, those women should just stop making shit up and get over it.
407: No, I carefully considered them, but they're so much better off than UMC mothers using formula that I didn't want to rub it in.
where one mother looks at another's different practices and interprets them as a hostile judgment on hers
You mean like meat-eaters feel judged by vegetarians?
Yikes.
Dumb ladies! They should just grow a pair.
406: What happened to you is awful, and it's a real problem, and the hospital should fix it, and breastfeeding advocates are a but-for cause of it, and someone should get a handle on the breastfeeding advocates who are being nuts on this level. But still, you could do everything on that BFHI list without running into that problem -- the hospital had formula and was willing to provide it to babies when they recognized the medical need, they just had a sadist or an idiot drawing the line as to what counts as medical need.
Well, I mean if you have a nanny and servants you can host your own salon.
I mean, the wife of the vicar at my church is a SAHM who's had a varied career which included teaching adaptive skiing. I think she thinks about going back to school to be a nutritionist, but in the meantime she's trying to improve nutrition for the local schools in a half really well-off and half kind of poor area and doing things with the library etc. it's kind of like part-time unpaid work.
They should just grow a pair.
Fucks with the hormones though, maybe not recommended while breastfeeding.
I dunno, LB. I don't think we're applying an unusual standard to these women here than we would in other social contexts. 'Felt pressure' is pretty powerful (compare with, say, the desire to achieve a certain look or weight), and there's a whole industry of how to raise your baby that capitalizes on that pressure (likewise.)
I'm sure it's much stronger in certain circles than in others, but I see it here (students boldly asking colleagues if they worry about their toddlers being in daycare), and in the experiences of friends all over the country.
408.1 and .2 -- If you're not saying "What are these crazy bitches whining about? It's all in their heads?" I'm not sure what you are saying.
You have, you know, actual examples of real-life incidents of shaming, with significant costs, happening to real people in this very thread.
I've been reading along baffled by LB's bafflement--I think Cala may be on to something when she says that it's the childless friends who are most likely to hear when a mother feels ashamed about breastfeeding.
But LB, here's what I don't understand about your position. On the one hand, you seem to be saying that it makes sense for oudemia's hospital to be very cautious about not risking nipple confusion (even at the cost of causing real suffering to her and her child). But on the other hand, you also acknowledge that the benefits of breastfeeding are marginal for any individual child. To me, though, the marginal benefits mean that women should only breastfeed when they genuinely find it easier and more pleasurable, as you seem to have done. They should not blearily be pumping at the office, like von wafer's wife, and certainly not suffering as oudemia did. And if they are, shouldn't we wonder about the kind of pressure that's making them do that?
414: LB, the problem wasn't "a sadist," the problem was "a system." There is no single bad apple we can blame.
409: Wait, who was saying this was the only issue? I didn't mean to give that impression, certainly.
You mean like meat-eaters feel judged by vegetarians?
If by meat-eating you were harming your poor innocent child, instead of just harming your lazy oaf of a self.
On the basis of careful examination of the North London baby scene, which is about as fucking bourgeois and chichi as you're going to find, my observation is that the basic problem is that, as one of you correspondents occasionally notes, bitches are tripping. There is a lot of competitive and passive aggressive bollocks about breastfeeding but if it wasn't that it would be something else. It's not exactly difficult to understand - looking after a baby is so important that there is a powerful psychological need to be convinced that the particular way you're doing it is exactly the right way and superior to all others. This makes it almost uniquely prone to self-organising cliques and local optima, and to preachy nonsense from those members of the community who have access to media organisations. Pro-breastfeeding nonsense and shaming is likely more prevalent than pro-ostentatiously-not-breastfeeding nonsense and shaming but it's the same underlying phenomenon.
418: Though you couldn't tell it from the way I've been talking, I've been trying to push back against "The problem is that women who breastfeed or approve of breastfeeding are mean and oppressive" rather than "The problem is that mothers feel that every decision they make is terribly important and someone's convinced they're doing it wrong and that they're a bad mother for it." I do agree with you that the latter is true (a hair hyperbolic, but you know what I mean) and it's a real problem that's not about oversensitivity, it's about a society that doesn't support women's autonomy. Damn, that trailed off. I don't know exactly what the problem's about, but it's broader than one group of women abusing another.
I don't like the breastfeeding wars, because even though the pressures on women to breastfeed can be painful, the degree to which that pressure gets blamed on mean breastfeeders and activists seems disproportionate to the actual bad behavior, which, while it exists, isn't, I think, all that severe.
On the one hand, you seem to be saying that it makes sense for oudemia's hospital to be very cautious about not risking nipple confusion (even at the cost of causing real suffering to her and her child).
No, just that the cup thing wasn't totally irrational; avoiding nipple confusion was a reason for it other than just making the process harder.
421: You think? The hospital had a policy that formula should be provided when medically necessary, and they had someone making the decision as to when that was. It looks to me like that decisionmaker was getting it badly wrong in your case. Could be they were incompetent, could be they were sadistic, could be someone made a policy decision that 'medically necessary' meant 'on the brink of death'. But whichever it was, your situation could have been avoided by a hospital with all the policies in the BFHI list so long as they had a saner, kinder version of 'medically necessary'.
OK, to actually get something positive and productive out of this thread, I will use my extremely powerful position on the board to make sure that the M/dw/fe Center is nonjudgemental on the breastfeeding issue. Encouraging it is part of the mission, but we need to be certain to be accommodating, understanding, and accepting of horrible mothering techniques.
Seriously.
It has less of the child-raising assholery because everyone spends so much time figuring out how to make the most inconsiderate and pointless U turn it's been decades since most of the populace has been of child-raising age.
426: I don't think, I know. Any given nurse had the authority. They also knew that seeming to recommend formula was a firing offense.
Incidentally, O never had nipple confusion. I know that that was the worry. But immiserating all mothers on the (very) off chance that future breast feeding might temporarily be impinged upon in a few cases? Cruel.
Or, they could ever have said, "You know, we're reluctant to give bottles, because we're worried about the baby taking the breast afterward, but it's up to you." That isn't what happened, because they didn't trust women.
There is a lot of competitive and passive aggressive bollocks about breastfeeding but if it wasn't that it would be something else.
That is 100% true but at least the something else wouldn't require having to breast pump at work, or avoid working altogether.
Urple, may I ask how you found that link? She's someone who overlaps my blog world for obvious reasons, but there's also the entertainment masochism of watching someone who's part of the official Christian "orphan mission" establishment when I think fuck that shit.
Oh, and I admit to being pleasantly surprised to learn that Mara's mother breastfed her when she was an infant. This means a lot to Mara in a way that bottle feeding probably wouldn't and definitely stands in for how her mom did some things well, even while failing at overall childcare. I hope to someday get to ask her rationale on this.
bitches are tripping...It's not exactly difficult to understand - looking after a baby is so important that there is a powerful psychological need to be convinced that the particular way you're doing it is exactly the right way and superior to all others.
I endorse this take on it. You put together the actual significance of child care with declining family size with the (ridiculous) middle class cultural belief that people are supposed to be Excellent and Achievers in all areas of life, the general lack of realism about how imperfect life is and people are, and you get a perfect formula for tripping out.
I mean, think about it. The reality is that *every single mother will do avoidable harm to her child by her own actions*. Just because people aren't perfect, life isn't perfect, it's not in the nature of parents or children or families to come out of the process with no bumps and bruises. But how can you possibly be realistic about that or comfortable with that in our culture?
I don't believe that our erstwhile front-pager *ever* used the phrase "bitches be trippin'" to mean, "ha ha -- dumb bitches!" but rather only to focalize the sentiments of asshole males.
PGD, I'm not sure you do the 'we are all of us, each and every one, imperfect' line -- which is an obvious truth, though I'd substitute "human" for "imperfect" -- any favors by insisting that every single mother will do avoidable harm to her child by her own actions. Last I knew, there's no consensus on what counts as perfection in child-raising, right? Nor should there be. So there's little sense in speaking of avoidable harm.
I never really did understand what "bitches be trippin'" meant. I thought it was faux down-with-the-gente speak or something.
There is secretly a lot of comity here. LB and Blume and Halford and JRoth would all agree that women should be allowed to breastfeed or bottlefeed in public without feeling pressured or bad about it. The choice belongs to the mother and no one else.
The argument isn't over what should be allowed, but over who is more likely to make judgments against people who are doing something perfectly legitimate. Are people who bottle feed judged more harshly than people who breastfeed? Actually, that would be some kind of sociological question that would take real science to answer. But since no one here is making that judgement of someone else's choices, we can just set the question aside.
438: The breastfeeding wars are over!
The meta-breastfeeding wars have hardly begun!
428: The age distribution has been shifting lately and the number of completely fuck-headed U-turns is through the roof. I have statistics to back me up, but they're in my other coat.
439.2: Oh, I dunno. One "Kennedy" (is that the Kennedy?) has a post up at Reason.com* about how un-libertarian attachment parenting is.
* I don't know why I'm reading there. It's a phase, I imagine.
Are people who bottle feed judged more harshly than people who breastfeed?
In a certain subset of the population, absolutely positively yes, for sure. Don't think you need sociology to answer that one. For the population as a whole, I don't know, and there are definitely still annoying barriers to public breastfeeding and the like.
There was, briefly, a nursing room at my auxiliary office site. Then new regulations came about physical security for records and we had to move the refrigerator into that room and that ended that.
442: The overall effect seems to be that you must breastfeed, but you can't do it in public.
428: In the words of a friend of mine before moving to Chicago, "I don't want to be part of the problem, but, I want to get laid."
there are definitely still annoying barriers to public breastfeeding and the like
From what I hear, most definitely. I don't want to revive the debate, but my impression is that quite a few people find "popping your tits out", even under a blanket, to be quite unseemly. It seems pretty clear that there's a class difference on these matters.
445: People are less picky in Chicago?
That would explain the doughy pizza.
that quite a few people find "popping your tits out"
What is this quoting?
But, I agree with you.
I can't figure out what making U-turns has to do with getting laid.
When Robert Halford makes a U-Turn, it has everything to do with getting laid.
If the U-turns had anything to do with getting laid, I'd be less angry about it. Mostly I think people just don't want to go around the block.
450: It's actually quoting a friend of mine who went on a rant a couple of years ago about a woman on a flight he was on who "popped her tits out" to breastfeed on the plane. We exchanged words about the whole thing. Eventually he backed all the way up, or down, to saying that on that blog (the one on which we were speaking), everyone got to be offended and outraged at one time or another, and now it was my turn. Which was sort of lame, though he had a point, in a way.
adults shouldn't drink milk because milk is designed for babies
What should they drink, then?
Revisiting it now, I think that Time cover photo is in such bad faith its caption could be "Let's you and her fight."
444: Sure, and that's part of the problem, too, I think. If to be a parenting olympian you have to breastfeed, and to breastfeed you have to stay at home because no one is going to accommodate you outside the home (or you're just plain uncomfortable nursing in public), then you have a recipe for a bunch of stressed out and socially isolated women (so the sacrifice better be worth it, etc.)
Haha. I'd been thinking the caption should be "Are you ANXIOUS ENOUGH?"
456: For one thing, I've seen a couple of other pictures of the mother and kid, and the kid looks not much more than 4. Maybe 5? I'm not sure, but not pre-teen. Admittedly, I'm not an amazing judge of children's ages, but this doesn't look like a kid who's ready to start shaving.
So, aren't there moose around there fairly frequently? That is to say, my mom who lived in New Hampshire saw them often enough (every few months?) -- they were mostly considered a traffic hazard, as in, be very careful when driving in certain areas, especially at night, because you wouldn't want to hit a moose.
Obviously you wouldn't want to hit a moose which is a living being going about its business.
Yeah, they're quite common and are considered a traffic hazard in the same way. This is the first time I've seen one literally on my route home from work, though.
Obviously you wouldn't want to hit a moose which is a living being going about its business.
Also because they're fucking huge and will total your car.
Right. They'll do that, but it won't be their fault, which is why you have to be careful. That was the general idea.
My age, breastfeeding was weird for mothers when I was a baby, but I couldn't tell you when that flipped.
IIRC I'm a year older than you and I know my mom placed a pretty heavy emphasis on making sure I was breast fed, even though it was a major pain in the ass (or something) with me in an incubator. She said that the various Americans around her had said it was better. OTH I gather that when we moved to the suburbs the local moms felt it was a bit weird that she'd breast fed me for however long it was. So my guess is it was changing right around when we were babies.
So, aren't there moose around there fairly frequently?
Well, I'm very impressed with your moose, and glad you showed it to us, even if others are totally jaded.
Obviously you wouldn't want to hit a moose which is a living being going about its business.
I have engaged, as a representative for my commercial affairs, a moose. Does that mean you won't kill him until he starts work?
Last I knew, there's no consensus on what counts as perfection in child-raising, right? Nor should there be. So there's little sense in speaking of avoidable harm.
Right, I thought about this after I posted. It's all about the baseline -- from a baseline of really lousy parenting the great majority of mothers give their children an enormous gift. It's only from a baseline of hypothetical perfection that the problem appears. Basically another way of putting what I was trying to get at is that our culture encourages people to set an absurd baseline of hypothetical perfection (in a lot of endeavors). Our heads are always being pumped full of achievement/excellence/beauty fantasies of various sorts. It's easier to let go of this in some areas of life than others -- in parenting, where you are deeply responsible for someone you love, it's harder to be comfortable with imperfection. Never mind that it's not possible to even hypothetically define what 'perfect parenting' would look like -- a child needs exposure to mistakes and risks and reality in order to develop as an individual.
Periodic forays into Lacan do little to allay my general sense that he is full of shit.
I had a psychoanalyst friend whose judgment I trusted implicitly and one time at showtunes night at a dreadful bar in Boystown, I asked him "is it really worth trying to understand Lacan?" and he smiled a little sheepishly and said "no, probably not," at which I considered the matter settled.
Sorry if I seemed totally jaded! I too was impressed with teo's moose. I just was surprised if he doesn't see them all the time (which is awesome). I harbor a secret desire to go to Moosehead Lake, in Maine, some day. Last time I checked, you kind of have to helicopter in or something, which is prohibitive.
As I mentioned in comments to the picture on Flickr, my part of Anchorage is pretty urban and the moose don't spend a whole lot of time here (some, obviously, but a lot less than in the more wooded suburban areas). This is actually only the second one I've seen in Anchorage since I've been here. I've seen a whole bunch down on the Kenai Peninsula, though.
I noticed that some people were getting confused by all the initialisms flying around in this thread, so I made up a quick reference guide to help them out:
UMC=Universal Motocross Championship
BFI=British Film Institute
OTH=Odin, Thor, Heimdallr
LLL=Lambda Lambda Lambda
SES=Super-Excellent Sinsemilla
SWPL=Single, White Progressive-Labor
BFHI=Big Fuckin' Hippie Institute
BOMLE=Big Ol' Mother-Lovin' Echidna
470: Did you know that Buñuel and Lacan were super tight and Lacan used Buñuel films, especially El, Buñuel's most autobiographical work, in his lectures?
||
Okay, maybe this is only news to me, but I saw a copy of this in the thrift store today and was a bit flabbergasted. Only in America!
||>
Castle Wolfenstein is on-line. There goes my weekend.
DON'T TOUCH IT! IT'S PURE EVIL!
349
What do you mean by taboo? ...
Presumably that there is a stigma associated with it (at least in certain circles).
... I'm thinking it's got to at least mean "something that people would be surprised or shocked to see". ...
It isn't particularly surprising or shocking to see fat people but there is still a considerable stigma attached to being fat.
I don't know what world LB and JR inhabit: anti-formula stigma was strong in Montana 25 years ago. Strongly class-based, to be sure, but it's the kind of thing, unlike most NYT fodder, that actually trickles down. And it's not about LLL, but about a series of social expectations enforced by self-appointed mean girls. And I don't see calling out mean girls as being equivalent to what mean girls are doing.
I'm really just commenting to brag, though. I've never thought myself (and don't today think myself) some kind of medalist. After a pleasant day with my firstborn, though, I'm feeling pretty good about how things have turned out.
Nice to see that Unfogged has scooped the BBC.
478: Birmingham, AL (academia/medical environment) was mildly pro-boob forty years ago but not enough so to make using formula a problem.
However, I think the general attitude towards social pressure of any kind was more "fuck off" back then.
235: Hippie friends very approving. Yoga + breastfeeding = Hippies FTW!
386
Breastfeeding is free if the mother is the primary caregiver, which is true for more women than breastfeed. ...
Actually it isn't. The mother has to eat more to produce milk, apparently about 500 calories a day more.
Increasing your food intake by 500 calories is much, much cheaper than formula.
485
Especially if you eat McNuggets.
McNuggets seem to run about $.25 and 50 calories each. So $2.50 a day or $75 a month.
This gives $78 a month for formula (although I am sure you can pay more).
But you could eat, say 2 Arby's Jr. Roast Beef Sandwiches per day, get almost the same calories, a lot better nutritional value, and save $15/month.
You need to soak the nuggets in free ketchup/sauce.
Some women lose weight breast-feeding. Think of the savings! Not me, though.
489
Some women lose weight breast-feeding. Think of the savings! Not me, though.
Sometimes the eating more takes place (in part at least) prior to birth and breast feeding burns off the stored surplus. Are you at your prepregnancy weight?
Which is killing our budget to maintain.
A pound is about 3500 calories. So if you aren't eating extra you could expect to lose about a pound a week breast feeding. Some weight gain as you age is normal of course. For a while I was gaining about 2 pounds a year.
I was noticeably hungrier when I was breast-feeding, I'll grant you that.
Gaining 2 lbs a year, at $.25/50 calories, is $35/year. You could be spending that money on formula.
493
Which is killing our budget to maintain
According to this site it takes about 12 calories per pound per day to maintain your weight. So you are probably eating about 120 calories per day more. Or maybe you aren't exercising as much.
496
Gaining 2 lbs a year, at $.25/50 calories, is $35/year. ...
As noted above there is also a cost to maintain the extra weight, 24 calories (or $.12) a day for 2 pounds.
Anyone who tries to make money off gaining weight is truly playing a fool's game.
But maybe that's how Stanley should gamble his $20 this weekend - at the all-you-can-eat buffet.
A difference of 19 calories per day is all there is to the typical middle aged weight gain. Your body is better at this than you are and you are not going to fool it easily.
I should really start drinking my coffee black.
A difference of 19 calories per day is all there is to the typical middle aged weight gain.
Whaaaaat?
I'm number 1 on the upgrade list: think positive thoughts, friends, for the next 15 minjutes or so . . . .
(It's not just for me, it's so someone else in steerage doesn't have to sit next to the old fat guy.)
502: The sports scientists guys did a back of the envelope thing -- figure 20 pounds per middle-aged spread, figure out calories per pound, etc., figure 20 years for adult weight gain... and yeah, it's not that much per day. Your body is really good at stasis.
Success! Now i'm assured at least 200 gratuitous calories.
But you don't actually mean that the weight gain comes from eating an extra 19 calories a day, right? Because I'm pretty sure the body doesn't work that way.
It is really good at stasis! How did you know?
503.2: You're a pillar of altruism.
My body is really good at stasis if the chair reclines or has beer within reach.
506: Yes, but in a kind of boring sense. It's not like -- oh, you ate half of a mini Reeses, you're doomed! -- but more like -- your body balances millions of calories over that time. It is good at doing so (hence: stasis) but it doesn't need to slow down much for weight to creep up (or down.)
My conclusion: it's kinda cool.
At 3500 calories per pound of fat, 20 excess calories per day amounts to two extra pounds of fat per year.
And at a typical intake of 2000 calories per day, that's a difference of only 1%. I'm with Cala, it's pretty amazing.
I was upset when I learned that my half marathon didn't even burn enough calories to offset a single night out.
Those weight calculators scare me a little. I should be eating X, according to the calculators, and when I bother tracking (which is almost never) I eat about 1.1X-1.3X. I'm sort of active, but not that active...
Blume, you are awesome at yoga. Any tips on getting over the fear of falling on your nose in beginning arm balances? This is pissing me off because I am totally strong enough to do them but I can't seem to get the balance point.
If I understand this correctly, I'm just going to leave 25 calories worth of food on my plate every dinner and I'll not only avoid age-related weight gain plus lose some of what I've alway gained.
516
If I understand this correctly, I'm just going to leave 25 calories worth of food on my plate every dinner and I'll not only avoid age-related weight gain plus lose some of what I've alway gained.
This would reduce your equilibrium weight by about 2 pounds.
Maybe I'll leave 100 calories on my plate for the first year.
Do you mean crow in particular, since you're talking about falling on your nose? Something that has helped me to understand that particular pose better is to tip back and forth between a squatting pose (with a block under your ass if you need it) and a tucked tripod headstand. The more controlled you can make the tipping (which I'm guessing you're plenty strong enough to do), the better you start to understand the weight shifts. And then later you can pull it back and try to go just to the balance but not tipping point.
Also, getting your knees as close up by your armpits as possible, so that you've got the maximum amount of upper arm shelf to balance on.
I'm also afraid of tipping into tripod. Bleh.
Hrmmmm. Think a lot about your head and your feet as counterbalances? Thinking of your head as a counterbalance to your feet brings it up, and makes it really unlikely that you'll faceplant. Look at a spot on the ground several feet in front of you.
It is interesting to see where different people come up against fear in yoga.
Another case where breast feeding didn't work out.
522: It's funny. I have a good friend who was terrified of Wheel (upward bow, whatever), which is one of my favorites. She can do crow and I know I'm stronger than she is....!
One of the things I really enjoyed about breastfeeding was the hunger. It made eating so satisfying.
It is interesting to see where different people come up against fear in yoga.
Back when I was taking classes -- very friendly, relaxed classes in the instructor's home, with mixed genders and ages -- the thing people confessed to most often was a fear of farting.
I'm not being goofy: that's what people, particularly men, admitted to, off the record, of course. Fear of hurting oneself seemed to be relatively far down the list; that may have had something to do with the fact that the instructor was firm that this was in no way a competition, it was about breathing and focusing, attending to how things felt in this part and that part of your own body, and so on.
The fear of farting would have been a control issue, I imagine. In my first couple of classes, I and a few others had to leave the room because we were overcome with giggle fits, at how silly we must look, I guess. It was actually a great step forward to get over that kind of fear!
Yoga would be a lot scarier if it were full-contact.
Flip, I've been missing you lately in comment timing. I want to apologize for yelling at you the other day about the old people. I should have been more measured.
Full contact yoga: there is actually partner yoga, but basically yoga happens slowly, so unless you're not paying enough attention, it's not going to be like wrestling (though I think there's a hot/heat yoga and maybe a speed yoga, which sounds like a horrible idea to me).
of the record
I already have a permanent record. I don't want farting on it. Not even sub rosa to hide the smell.
529: Even I don't think it's nice to beat up old people doing yoga.
Is partner yoga something new arising from American health club culture or does it have classical antecedents (to the extent, I guess, that anything about what we call "yoga" in America today has classical Indian/Hindu antecedents)?
531.2: I have no idea of the history of the thing, but there are any number of things you can do with the help of a partner to assist the stretch. That's mostly how we did it in classes: as a mutual assist first to the one party, then to the other. So, not two persons doubly twisted about together in a sort of double posture (asana), though I imagine you could do that.
It would be potentially dangerous, as the other person could try to push you beyond what you could do.
If pushed too far, you might break a bone or wind.
So are men more prone to farting or something? Or more prone to a fear of it? Or just don't stretch much, so are more prone to the, erm, occurrence?
We also, in those classes, had (almost always) men falling asleep during the deep relaxation at the end of class, and snoring. I'm telling you, the rest of us weren't awfully bothered by it, since we were by then totally cool with life, the universe, and everything, but they were awfully pink-faced over it.
I always blamed the baby until he got old enough to say "not me". We'll have to get a dog soon.
537.2: Whenever I have attended a yoga class (maybe 6-7 occasions?), my thoughts during the "lie down and Relax, damn you! Relax! listen while some hippie murmurs at you" phase have always drifted to the Holy Wounds of Christ. I think it's because the hippies always talk about relaxing from/feeling warmth in one's hands and feet.
it would have been fantastic to see Angela letting it all hang out.
I am not familiar with the relaxing from/feeling warmth from the hands and feet. From the center! Breathe! Do a complete breath. Feel how your stomach feels, feel how your arms feel, do your shoulders feel hunched up to your ears? Drop them down. Are you arching your neck? Tuck your chin down. Observe your legs, are your legs down there on the floor [we are lying on the floor] even, are your hips even?
I did love my first yoga teacher: she murmured, but she was extremely good at it. It was guided relaxation, so we were asked to find and imagine a safe space, maybe a grassy field, maybe a sand dune, imagine the sounds and the wind. Etc. etc. There was super hippie soft instrumental music playing in the background.
Anyway, relax from the center.
Is there a special level of pwnage when 500 comments intervene?.
544: Yes, but you were only at 498 this time so you narrowly averted it.
In my defense, I'm really, really high.
546: I consider it my payback for pwning everyone in the other thread.
What is with #3 in that series? (http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-30590-3.html)
Extensive skin graft? Crazy spray tan? World's worst photoshopping? Has Spiegel online been hacked?
though I think there's a hot/heat yoga and maybe a speed yoga
While I can't say it doesn't exist anywhere, I have never encountered a 'speed yoga' class. The closest would be something with 'flow' in the name, vinyasa flow or dynamic flow or something like that, which would be a class where you do long series of poses moving into one another without pauses.
As for farting, there's actually a position called the 'wind relieving pose'; it's basically the same leg pumping thing you do to babies to try to relieve their gas.
Several people I know went to an expensive master class last fall with a yoga teacher visiting from India, and he apparently went quite on about digestion and gas, and moved the mic around several times to best pick up his own wind noises.
Yeah, that was pretty much their reaction. Well, that and "I paid money for this?"
551.last: The stigmata don't seem so bad now, do they?
550: It just looks like they're in an unevenly lit room and there is maybe a balcony or something overhead creating strange shadows. There are other weird shadows throughout the photo, so it doesn't seem strange to me. But I know nothing about photoshop, so I could easily be wrong.
I first became aware of extended breastfeeding in a couple of impoverished pockets of Appalachia in the '60s as a somewhat desperate form of birth control. Otherwise my impression via my white bread middle class experience of those better living through chemistry times was that most everyone was bottle-fed (my sibs and I certainly were).
With our children in the late-80/early 90s the pendulum had definitely swung to bottle-feeding, although much of the "political" content at the time seemed to be in reaction to things like the Nestlé infant formula abuses. I have no real sense of the degree of social pressure with regard to deviation since our children were almost entirely breastfed. The pregnancy/birth judgmentalism that unexpectedly and unpleasantly arose for us was when my wife was diagnosed as prematurely effaced and told to go home to bed for 2-3 weeks until she was closer to term. The consensus among our relatively athletic crowd might not have been that she should get up and run a marathon, but it wasn't that she shouldn't.
555: But there seems to be a full range of high to low lights in her hair, face and shoulders. I don't see a difference in the lighting of the dress. The shadows of her shoulders disappear abruptly when they hit the line of demarcation. The pearls seem to change color on one side but not at all on the other. It looks like she's wearing prosthetic cleavage. It's bizarre.
ok, here's a thought to revive the argument.
A college friend of mine on FB who now teaches middle school was lamenting the difficulties of her job, and mentioned that most of the winnable battles were actually in pre-school and grade school. This is a common enough refrain--I think people will agree that it is true.
But of course, the younger the child, the bigger the role of home life in shaping their character. So all this policing of other people's parenting is actually the product of people paying attention to something they have a legitimate interest in. Furthermore, it is actually working. By increasing the investment we make in each individual child (and reducing the overall number of children) we are improving the quality of the people we are turning out.
And the Flynn effect is proof of this.
And the Flynn effect is proof of this.
Probably isn't, though.
Annoy strangers for the good of the human race? Pass.
You guys don't think that decreased child mortality is the result of annoying strangers? Why not?
I think it was pretty much toilets, vaccines, and antibiotics. I suppose the vaccines took some small bit of annoying by strangers.
562: re: vaccines -- problems start when the annoying strangers switch sides.
560: Moby is so misanthropic that he'll forgo the pleasure of annoying strangers to avoid any possibility of benefiting the human race.
Probably isn't, though.
So what's the story on this? I'm pretty sure Flynn himself would agree with you, but what's the alternative?
Lions are eating the less intelligent but the press is too focused on celebrity gossip to report it.
565: task demands of modern industrialized society correlate with what IQ tests test for.
566: Are you saying that celebrities are too intelligent to get eaten by lions?
Sifu is right...it's not just work demands, pop culture is saturated in abstractions of the IQ-test type. Everything from playing Tetris to watching the evening news. (Maybe even sitcoms...it would be surprising if listening to endless hours of scripts written by highly educated super-verbal Hollywood types didn't have some effect on verbal IQ).
