Grandparents are the key to the success of the human race, according to new research. When human beings started living beyond 30, some 30,000 years ago, they passed on skills that helped their descendants to thrive and assisted in providing for the family unit. As a result, humans took a huge leap foward - artwork became more sophisticated, tools became more complex and food production rose.
But what is the grandparents' role in the modern world? Some new parents are reluctant to let their own parents near their children, so negative is the memory of their upbringing, while many lean heavily on grandparents as a source of free and willing childcare and to ensure their own fond memories of childhood are experienced by their children. The only wise thing to say about being a good grandparent is that there's no single right way to do it. While remaining true to yourself, you have to be a bit of a chameleon, blending in to the ways of the family each of your offspring creates.
What's your role as a grandparent?
Your role is to be supportive to your sons and daughters and to offer a pleasurable experience to your grandchhildren. Apart from practical support such as babysitting, the most valuable thing you can offer is your time, which perhaps as a busy parent you were unable to offer your own children. Spending time with you will give your grandchild a huge sense of themselves as an individual - rather than as lumped together with siblings at home. You can also give them a relationship that is free from pressures and expectations. Grandparents who have time can introduce grandchildren to their own personal passions, or help a grandchild to pursue his or her own special interests. Or they can simply offer more "cuddle time".
How can you give advice without interfering?
Every new mum dreads the sound of their own mother saying "well, in my day we did it like this". The biggest issue as a grandparent is how to offer guidance without appearing to interfere or criticise. Don't say: "I wouldn't do it that way." It is every parent's prerogative to do it their way with their own child. If you do feel your insight might be helpful, a gentle way of offering an opinion is to ask a question: "Have you wondered whether you might be being a bit harsh?" for example. I love looking after my four-year-old granddaughter but I only ever contribute my opinion when I am asked. That said, I do give positive feedback about my grandaughter's achievements. When parents consider a child problematic, as they sometimes do, and worry that they're not working hard enough, or misbehaving, a grandparent can usefully step in and say "he'll be just fine." With the benefit of their experience, grandparents know that all children pass through ages and stages. So many 'problems' are time specific and will pass.
Is it OK to spoil your grandchildren?
Many grandparents are tempted to treat their grandchildren - be it to sweets, ice creams or presents that parents may not approve of. After all, you know by now that resentment has a more enduring and damaging legacy than a little indulgence. Children can have a tough time in families: there are rules to follow, things that have to be done by a certain time. Time spent with grandparents can be the oportunity to relax the rules a bit. So, yes, there can be a certain amount of spoiling - just as long at it doesn't undermine the parents' wishes. There is a difference between taking a child out for an ice cream and stuffing them full of sweets between meals. I don't think you have to ask the parents' permission before treating a child, but you could mention the treat later, and give the parent the option of saying "in future I'd really rather you didn't."
Their rules or your rules - can you lay down the law when grandchildren come to stay?
Clashes over parenting styles may be hard to avoid if you are the kind of grandparent who has been roped in to undertaking regular childcare. Whether or not you follow your instincts or your grown children's house rules over food and discipline to the letter depends on how much time your grandchild spends in your company. If you are doing the lion's share of the childcare while a parent works, I think there should be some respect given to that. Otherwise it's the equivalent of the parent saying, "I trust you to look after my child but the way you're doing it is atrocious". In that case, they shouldn't be giving you the child to look after. Of course, if their child comes back from days or weekends with you tired out and unmanageable, then it's fair enough for parents to raise concerns. There is a big difference between relaxing some rules and disregarding parents' values. One way to pre-empt problems is to have a discussion with the parent and give him or her the opportunity to say "one thing I really care about is X, Y or Z". Then the rest can be up to you.
How can you let go if you no longer feel up to it?
There may come a time when you don't feel physically up to looking after your boisterous grandchildren any more, other than for short visits. And it is important that you say so. I know grandparents who looked after young children far longer than they should have because they knew that their own child's need for cheap childcare was so great. But your own child has no right to be resentful if you say: "I've done as much as I'm able to, and I've loved every minute, but it's time to move on to the next stage." Meanwhile emphasise that you still want to carry on your relationship with the grandchildren - for your sake and theirs.
What if you have a favourite grandchild?
Few things stir up family resentment more than favouritism. Remember to treat each grandchild equally. They will have their own personalities, and you will inevitably have more in common with some than with others. That shouldn't matter as long as you are equal with treats and with presents at birthdays and Christmas, as these are the things that the child notices. Similarly, although it is tempting to do this, since it gives you genetic status, try to resist the temptation to compare them with their parents ("your mother was stroppy as well"). If you're desperate to make the comparison, content yourself with mentioning it to your partner once the child has left the room, or to the child's parents. It is terribly important to allow a child to be the unique individual that they are.
What Kids Really Want
Children all want the same things from life, a major report published today finds. Hundreds interviewed in Sweden, Spain and Britain by the United Nations Children's Fund said that they liked spending time with family and friends, taking part in creative activity or sport and being outdoors. These three things were named spontaneously by almost every child in the survey.
But it became clear from the British interviews that families from all backgrounds struggled to give children the time that they so clearly wanted within the course of daily life.
British parents complained that they were simply too tired to play with or even talk to their children when they came home from work. Britons work among the longest hours in the EU.
Researchers said that there was a strong sense in British households from all income groups that children were more 'in charge' than in Sweden and Spain. Family studies showed that children regularly ignored their parents' wishes and got away with it, or bossed their parents about.
Parents told researchers that they struggled to get their children to eat what they wanted them to, or to go to bed at a sensible time. Children did fewer chores and showed more resentment when they were asked to help.
The lack of time together was aggravated by the abundance of leisure activities and products available in British homes. Children's bedrooms contained TVs, the internet, games consoles and phones, independent of the rest of the family.
"Members of a family may well all be in the home at the same time but they co-exist rather than share time and space. Indeed, for younger children, television was often used as a babysitter, keeping children occupied while parents got on with other things," the study said.
The findings are based on observations of family life and interviews with 150 families in each of the three countries. Researchers were taken aback by the volume of toys in family homes in Britain. The researchers said that there were typically "boxes and boxes of toys", many of which were forgotten or broken. Parents spoke of having "clear-outs" of toys to make room for new things, and not being able to control what other family members and friends gave to their children.
"Consumer culture in the UK appeared in our research to be 'disposable', with households full of broken and discarded toys and a compulsion to continually upgrade and buy new."
This stands in stark comparison with Sweden and Spain where toys and electronic gadgets were looked after, often mended when broken, and were cherished as long-term companions," the report said.
"While many UK parents were complicit in purchasing status goods - indeed almost seemed to be compelled to do so - this behaviour was almost totally absent in Spain and Sweden."
British children went outdoors less often than those in the other two countries. Although younger children were generally taken to the park, that diminished as they became older.
In Sweden, on the other hand, outdoor activities and sport were used by parents as a positive alternative to watching TV or using the computer.
Parents often saw themselves as collaborators in their children's active pursuits, whether through taking part themselves or taking them to the place where the activity was held.
In Spain, mothers promoted a range of organised activities which were scheduled to be part of the normal weekly routine, even if it meant they spent a great deal of time driving their children around.
British parents also felt constantly criticised for their shortcomings. "[They] often referred back to their own childhood as some sort of benchmark to which they compared themselves. Behind this comparison was a sense of parenting being a sort of performance on which they were being constantly judged," the report said.
Reg Bailey, head of Mothers' Union, led an independent review of the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. He said the Government was dragging its heels on improving family life. "If it is serious about creating a more family-friendly society, and it has repeatedly set out to do so, this report is to be welcomed for its thought-provoking challenges. We all have a responsibility to seek ways of overcoming the sense of helplessness that parents feel in seeking to address materialism and inequality."
Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the Children's Society, said that the Unicef report could have gone even farther. "We need to tackle the pressure that parents feel in this country to buy material goods for their children," he added. "We need to educate parents so they know what their children want, because our research has shown us time and again that what they want is time together with their families,"" Mr Reitemeier said.
Daughter of 'Dirty War,' Raised by Man Who Killed Her Parents
Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernan Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where "subversives" had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his "slamming his gun on the table," she said.
It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father - nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.
Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said. He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her - Maria Sol - after falsifying her birth records.
The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation's top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.
Jorge Rafael Videla, who led the military during Argentina's dictatorship, stands accused of leading the effort to take babies from mothers in clandestine detention centers and give them to military or security officials, or even to third parties, on the condition that the new parents hide the true identities. Mr. Videla is one of 11 officials on trial for 35 acts of illegal appropriation of minors.
The trial is also revealing the complicity of civilians, including judges and officials of the Roman Catholic Church.
The abduction of an estimated 500 babies was one of the most traumatic chapters of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The frantic effort by mothers and grandmothers to locate their missing children has never let up. It was the one issue that civilian presidents elected after 1983 did not excuse the military for, even as amnesty was granted for other "dirty war" crimes.
"Even the many Argentines who considered the amnesty a necessary evil were unwilling to forgive the military for this," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch.
In Latin America, the baby thefts were largely unique to Argentina's dictatorship, Mr. Vivanco said. There was no such effort in neighboring Chile's 17-year dictatorship.
One notable difference was the role of the Catholic Church. In Argentina the church largely supported the military government, while in Chile it confronted the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and sought to expose its human rights crimes, Mr. Vivanco said.
Priests and bishops in Argentina justified their support of the government on national security concerns, and defended the taking of children as a way to ensure they were not "contaminated" by leftist enemies of the military, said Adolfo Perez Esquivel, a Nobel Prize-winning human rights advocate who has investigated dozens of disappearances and testified at the trial last month.
Ms. Montenegro contended: "They thought they were doing something Christian to baptize us and give us the chance to be better people than our parents. They thought and felt they were saving our lives."
Church officials in Argentina and at the Vatican declined to answer questions about their knowledge of or involvement in the covert adoptions.
For many years, the search for the missing children was largely futile. But that has changed in the past decade thanks to more government support, advanced forensic technology and a growing genetic data bank from years of testing. The latest adoptee to recover her real identity, Laura Reinhold Siver, brought the total number of recoveries to 105 in August.
Still, the process of accepting the truth can be long and tortuous. For years, Ms. Montenegro rejected efforts by officials and advocates to discover her true identity. From a young age, she received a "strong ideological education" from Colonel Tetzlaff, an army officer at a secret detention center.
If she picked up a flier from leftists on the street, "he would sit me down for hours to tell me what the subversives had done to Argentina," she said.
He took her along to a detention center where he spent hours discussing military operations with his fellow officers, "how they had killed people, tortured them," she said.
"I grew up thinking that in Argentina there had been a war, and that our soldiers had gone to war to guarantee the democracy," she said. "And that there were no disappeared people, that it was all a lie."
She said he did not allow her to see movies about the "dirty war," including "The Official Story," the 1985 film about an upper-middle-class couple raising a girl taken from a family that was disappeared.
In 1992, when she was 15, Colonel Tetzlaff was detained briefly on suspicion of baby stealing. Five years later, a court informed Ms. Montenegro that she was not the biological child of Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife, she said.
"I was still convinced it was all a lie," she said. By 2000, Ms. Montenegro still believed her mission was to keep Colonel Tetzlaff out of prison. But she relented and gave a DNA sample. A judge then delivered jarring news: the test confirmed that she was the biological child of Hilda and Roque Montenegro, who had been active in the resistance. She learned that she and the Montenegros had been kidnapped when she was 13 days old.
At a restaurant over dinner, Colonel Tetzlaff confessed to Ms. Montenegro and her husband: He had headed the operation in which the Montenegros were tortured and killed, and had taken her in May 1976, when she was 4 months old.
"I can't bear to say any more," she said, choking up at the memory of the dinner.
A court convicted Colonel Tetzlaff in 2001 of illegally appropriating Ms. Montenegro. He went to prison, and Ms. Montenegro, still believing his actions during the dictatorship had been justified, visited him weekly until his death in 2003.
Slowly, she got to know her biological parents' family. "This was a process; it wasn't one moment or one day when you erase everything and begin again," she said. "You are not a machine that can be reset and restarted." It fell to her to tell her three sons that Colonel Tetzlaff was not the man they thought he was.
"He told them that their grandfather was a brave soldier, and I had to tell them that their grandfather was a murderer," she said. When she testified at the trial, she used her original name, Victoria, for the first time. "It was very liberating," she said.
She says she still does not hate the Tetzlaffs. But "the heart doesn't kidnap you, it doesn't hide you, it doesn't hurt you, it doesn't lie to you all of your life," she said. "Love is something else."
Proper Parenting
Too much in the way of home comforts will only encourage grown men never to fly the coop
As the crisis in Greece deepens, fears are naturally growing of a knock-on effect across the whole of the eurozone. But, desperate as the situation is, it is not the fallout from Greece that I fear the most. It’s the influence of Italy.
A new report from the Office for National Statistics has recorded a 20 per cent increase since 1997 in the number of young people living at home with their parents.One man in three aged 20-34 is either moving back in, or refusing to budge in the first place. Only one young woman in six makes this life choice. This can mean only one thing: we have already been contaminated by Europe. British men are turning into Italians.
This is grave news indeed. For while the average British male is far from perfect, he has one distinct advantage over his Italian counterpart: he is rarely in love with his mother. This is not because British women lavish less affection on their sons than Italian women. It’s because British females, on the whole, are rubbish at doing the housework.
The legendary slovenliness of the British wife and mother is one of the reasons why most British males can, if needs must, operate the simpler types of domestic machinery. While they may not always have quite as firm a grasp on the purpose of the laundry basket as one might hope, they nevertheless do not imagine (like most Italian men I have known) that their socks, pants and other items of soiled clothing get from bedroom floor to drawer on their own.
The decline of woman as a domestic drudge is still seen in certain quarters as one of the root causes of the deterioration in our society; actually, it is indicative of huge social and cultural progress. Equality is as important in the home as it is in the workplace — and in this respect the example a mother sets her children is as vital as any lesson learnt at school.
Cast yourself in the role of humble servant and you will produce an intolerable princeling with little or no respect for the opposite sex. Spare the rod and spoil the child, they used to say. Rubbish. It’s ironing his underpants that does it. A house should be a home, not a ruddy five-star hotel.
My own mother understood the damaging effects of mollycoddling perfectly, perhaps even more so once she had upped sticks from Britain and emigrated to Italy. Surrounded by doting, selfless mothers of all sizes, ages and backgrounds — and exposed to the spectacular hopelessness of the average Seventies Italian male — she retained a classically English approach to child rearing. Which was: if it’s not bleeding or broken, I’m not interested. And if you want your socks folded, you can do it yourself. I’m off to play tennis.
I have tried, as far as I can, to emulate her example. My own domestic incompetence has so far produced a seven-year-old male who can, in no particular order, fold his own pyjamas, run a bath, locate his school uniform in the mornings and strip down a hamster cage in less than five minutes. I’m now training him to make the perfect gin and tonic (highball, one measure of Sipsmith, four ice cubes, Fever-Tree tonic, slip of lemon).* My hope is that, by neglecting to treat him like a prince, he will grow up into a half-decent bloke. Or at least one capable of doing his own laundry. And if you’re a mother yourself, and your young (or even not-so-young) son has recently moved back in with you, take my advice and kick back for a week or two. He’ll be back out the door before you can say “arrivederci mamma”.
'Big Brother'? No, It's Parents
When her children were ready to have laptops of their own, Jill Ross bought software that would keep an eye on where they went online. One day it offered her a real surprise. She discovered that her 16-year-old daughter had set up her own video channel.
Using the camera on her laptop, sometimes in her bedroom, she and a friend were recording mundane teenage banter and broadcasting it on YouTube for the whole world to see.For Ms. Ross, who lives outside Denver, it was a window into her daughter’s mind and an emblem of the strange new hurdles of modern-day parenting. She did not mention it to her daughter; she just subscribed to the channel’s updates. The daughter said nothing either; she just let Mom keep watching.“It’s a matter of knowing your kids,” Ms. Ross said of her discovery.
Parents can now use an array of tools to keep up with the digital lives of their children, raising new quandaries. Is surveillance the best way to protect children? Or should parents trust them to share if they are scared or bewildered by something online?
The answers are as varied as parents themselves. Still, the anxieties of parenting in the digital age have spawned a mini-industry, as start-ups and established companies market new tools to track where children go online, who they meet there and what they do. Because children are glued to smartphones, the technology can allow parents to track their physical whereabouts and even monitor their driving speed.
If, a few years ago, the emphasis was on blocking children from going to inappropriate sites on the family computer, today’s technologies promise to embed Mom and Dad — and occasionally Grandma — inside every device that children are using, and gather intelligence on them wherever they go.
A smartphone application alerts Dad if his son is texting while driving. An online service helps parents keep tabs on every chat, post and photo that floats across their children’s Facebook pages. And another scans the Web in case a child decides to try a new social network that the grown-ups have not even heard of yet.
The spread of cellphones and tablets in the hands of children has complicated matters, giving rise to applications that attract the young and worry parents. Earlier this month, for instance, came revelations that an app designed for flirting, called Skout, had led to three sexual assault cases involving children across the country. Even on Facebook, studies have repeatedly shown, there are plenty of children younger than 13, the minimum age for members, and many of them join with help and supervision from their parents.
The average American family uses five Internet-enabled devices at home, including smartphones, a recent survey by Cox Communications and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children found, while barely one in five parents uses parental controls on those devices.
In Richmond, Va., Mary Cofield, 62, is one of the careful ones. She struck a deal with her 15-year-old granddaughter last year. The girl was offered an Android phone with full Internet privileges, so long as Grandma could monitor her every move.
“My theory is, you’ve got to be in the game to help them know what’s wrong and what’s right,” she said. “Keeping them from it is not going to work. You can either be out there with them in the game — or they’ll be out there without you.”
Ms. Cofield, a retired government tax agent who runs an online travel business, chose a tool called uKnowKids.com, which combs the granddaughter’s Facebook page and text messages. UKnowKids sends her alerts about inappropriate language. It also offers Ms. Cofield a dashboard of the child’s digital activities, including what she says on Twitter, whom she texts and what photos she is tagged in on Facebook. It translates teenage slang into plain English she can understand: “WUD” is shorthand for “What are you doing?” Ms. Cofield checks it daily.
Often, she says, she gleans when the girl is having trouble with a boy, or when there is conflict among friends. Most often, Ms. Cofield knows to keep her mouth shut. “Being privy to that information and not using it is also difficult,” she confessed. “If I did that, she would definitely go underground. I would be hopping on her every day.”
Surveys, including by the Pew Research Center, have found that two-thirds of parents check their children’s digital footprints and nearly 40 percent follow them on Facebook and Twitter. But the Pew study suggests that this monitoring is also likely to lead to arguments between parent and child.
What’s more, technology is at least as nimble as adolescents, and neither parents nor the technology they buy can always read a teenager’s mind. Sometimes children deactivate their Facebook accounts except at night, when they know their parents are not likely to be logging on. They roll over to new sites, often using pseudonyms. Very often they speak in code designed to stump parents.
Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research who studies American youth online, offered the example of a teenage girl who was growing increasingly frustrated with her mother’s leaving comments on everything she posted on Facebook. Once, when she was feeling particularly low, she posted the song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
Her mother took it literally, which is what the girl had wanted. Her friends, however, read it for what it was: The girl was sad, and her post was meant to be ironic.
Technology companies now market tools for parents of children at every age group. The next version of Apple’s mobile operating system will offer a single-app mode so a parent can lock a toddler into one activity on an iPad.
Security companies like Symantec and Trend Micro offer computer software that detects when a child tries to visit a blocked Web site or creates a new social network account. Infoglide, based in Austin, Tex., whose bread and butter is making antifraud software, recently introduced a tool called MinorMonitor, which like UKnowKids mines children’s Facebook pages for signs of trouble.
Independent measurements of the market for family safety tools are hard to come by, and most companies do not release sales information. But that the market is large — and growing — is evident in two things: every security company and cellphone carrier is pitching such products, and start-ups in this field are popping up every month.
Symantec says it added a million new subscribers to its Norton Online Family service last year.
A text message application for the iPhone called textPlus allows Kyle Reed of Golden, Colo., to be copied on every text message his teenage son sends his girlfriend. “I feel torn a little bit. It’s kind of an invasion of privacy,” he said. “But he’s 13. I want to protect him.”
Dan Sherman of Jackson, N.J., is what you might call the alpha monitor of his children’s digital lives, which is not surprising considering that he works in computer security. At home, he has installed a filter that blocks pornographic sites and software that tracks Web visits. He has set parental controls on the iPhones of his 8- and 13-year-old daughters so they cannot download applications. Access to the app store on the 8-year-old’s Kindle Fire is protected with a password. And the older daughter’s Facebook account is tracked by MinorMonitor, which alerts Mr. Sherman if there are references to bullying or alcohol.Does he worry that his daughters think he does not trust them? Mr. Sherman says they should learn that they will be monitored throughout their lives: “It’s not any different from any employer.” The older daughter, Alexis, said that for now, at least, she does not mind the monitoring. She feels safer for it, she says, “like I’m being watched over.” She also knows that it affects what she posts for public consumption. Recently, for example, she was tempted to rail on Facebook against a friend who had spread rumors about her, but she checked herself when she thought about what her mother might say. “Having your parents monitor makes you think twice about what you put,” Alexis said.
Ms. Ross, of Colorado, once had a tool that disabled Internet access in the house after a certain number of hours. But her children kept turning it off. Now another program helps her keep an eye on how much time they spend online, so if a child complains about not having time for homework, Ms. Ross need only say: “Want me to tell you how much time you spent on Facebook this week?”
Last Christmas, one of Ms. Ross’s friends, Lynn Schofield Clark, gave her 11-year-old daughter a disabled iPhone on which to listen to music. The child brightly said that a friend at school had showed her how to download an app that let her send text messages and make calls — which is not what her parents had in mind.
Ms. Clark, who has written a book about parenting styles and technology called “The Parent App,” says she was relieved her child had confided in her. She hopes she will continue to confide, so she does not have to track everything her daughter does online. “It’s too easy to get involved in surveillance,” Ms. Clark said. “That undermines our influence as parents. Kids interpret that as a lack of trust.”
Grandmothers
WHEN Stevie Wonder crooned “I just called to say ‘I love you',” he was bang on when it comes to men and women in their sexual prime. Were the ballad sung by a post-menopausal matron, though, the person at the other end of the line would probably be her daughter—and the conversation would revolve around grandchildren. That, at least, is the picture which emerges from a study published in Scientific Reports by Robin Dunbar, of Oxford University, and his colleagues.
Evolutionary psychologists like Dr Dunbar are interested in how investment in close relationships differs between the sexes. Dr Dunbar, indeed, has just published a book on the phenomenon of sexual love, analysed from a scientific point of view (see article). These differences reflect distinct strategies that have evolved to maximise reproductive success across a lifetime. One prediction that makes intuitive sense, but which has been difficult to nail down empirically, is that when women hit the reproductive wall of the menopause they funnel their remaining energy into bolstering their children's—especially their daughters'—odds of producing viable offspring. (Sons spend less time minding their progeny than their spouses do.)
The main obstacle to testing the grandmother hypothesis, as it has come to be known, is that most studies have involved small numbers of people, making it hard to draw sweeping conclusions. Dr Dunbar leapt this hurdle by tapping a trove of 2 billion anonymised telephone calls and 500,000 text messages between customers of an unnamed European mobile-phone operator over the course of seven months. After eliminating those for which age and sex data were unavailable, they identified the people each subscriber contacted most often. Frequency of contact is a good proxy for emotional closeness, so this yielded a list of 1.2m “best friends”, and 800,000 “second-best friends”.
For any given age, the researchers then calculated the average sex of men's and women's phone pals. They did this by adding 1 every time the friend was a man and subtracting 1 every time it was a woman, and dividing the result by the number of friends for the age/sex group in question. If every person in the sample had a male best friend, the average-sex index would be 1; if all the best friends were women, it would be -1. An equal number of male and female best friends would mean the index came out at precisely zero.
Between the ages of 20 and 40 men and women behaved similarly (see chart). Both tended to have best friends of the opposite sex. The proclivity was slightly more pronounced among ladies, whose best-friend sex index peaked in their late 20s at 0.46 (equivalent to roughly three male best friends for every female one in the sample) and stayed more or less the same throughout their 30s. Men reached a maximum of -0.41 a bit later and remained there for less time. In both cases, these best friends tended also to be of a similar age, suggesting they were actually sexual mates. Second-best friends, meanwhile, were typically of the same sex—chums, in other words.
Things change markedly, though, as people enter middle age. For men, the best-friend sex index falls steadily from its peak until it levels off at the age of 50 or so, while remaining skewed towards females for the rest of their lives. However, any sexual bias for second-best friends more or less disappears when men reach their 40s, consistent with the hypothesis that these “friends” are by then no longer chums, but children (who are about as likely to be male as female) and that fathers do not favour those of any one sex.
Among women, by contrast, the best-friend sex index plummets around the time menopause strikes. By the age of 55, it actually turns negative, in favour of other females who are, tellingly, about half their age. At around that time, women's second-best friends are increasingly men from their own generation. Older women, it appears, do indeed invest more time in furthering their daughters' welfare—and reproductive success—and less in nurturing relationships with their husbands, no doubt to the latter's chagrin. Strong evidence, then, for the grandmother hypothesis. And possibly an explanation for men's mid-life crisis.
Who Knows What Works?
Whether you’re a strict parent or a liberal one, it’s all a bit of a guess. There’s no real evidence to say what works.
My father was a professor of measurement. Actually not just a professor, the Professor. In my life I’ve attended quite a few lectures with titles like: “What is Measurement?” I learnt as a boy never to say “How long is a piece of string?”, because Dad would probably have a theory.
When I asked for help with my maths homework I had to accept that it might take a while. We would start from first principles, as he ensured that I had the historical and intellectual origins of the centimetre nailed down before eventually assisting me with my long division.
So when I read the comments of Claire Perry, David Cameron’s adviser on childhood, on the dangers of intrusive parents, I wondered about my reaction. Was my response the result of nurture or nature?
I know Claire Perry a little and admire her a great deal, and my first (and almost invariably reliable) instinct would be to trust what she has to say and take it seriously. So was it genes or environment that meant that on this occasion I simply could not?
You see, almost every day someone makes a sweeping statement about bringing up children. The day after Mrs Perry’s contribution, Richard Harman, the incoming chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, warned about pushy parents doing long-term damage.
Today there is a contribution from Netmums (not to be confused with Mumsnet, the two organisations being the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea of parenting websites). Netmums argues that children are becoming adults not too late but too early, becoming so-called “tweenagers” at the age of 12.
And there is a ready market for this sort of stuff. Last week a survey suggested that lack of parental discipline is viewed by 60 per cent of survey respondents as the major source of crime in Northern Ireland. In other words, while you have been blaming Martin McGuinness for all the violence, he has been quietly convinced that it is your fault.
Now, as the son of Professor Ludwik Finkelstein, past president of the Institute of Measurement and Control and winner of the Distinguished Service Award of the International Measurement Confederation, it is my filial duty and my biological impulse (both? either?) to tell you that none of this stuff does it for me.
I may not have mastered the philosophy of measurement completely, but I am reasonably sure that “a lot” and “too many” aren’t official SI measurement units.
In order to establish whether being pushy or intrusive is damaging, it would be necessary to have an objective definition of pushiness and some way of gauging intrusion. Then a causal link would have to be established between these things and undesirable outcomes. And we are simply nowhere near that.
For more than a century we have been talking about parenting with great confidence without having made any great advance in understanding what works and what does not. We are reasonably confident that serious abuse is damaging, but that doesn’t seem to me a massive scientific step forward.
In her hugely well researched book Raising America, Ann Hulbert has traced the history of advice about bringing up children. She begins at the turn of the 20th century as the authority of religion declined and the prestige of science rose. A new movement began of scientists who had an almost messianic belief that they could identify the right way to raise children and use this to eliminate social ills.
In the early days, these scientists found allies among well educated women who saw a way of making motherhood a vocation, a career. But Hulbert’s history is a sad one. The scientists could never agree. They contradicted each other and sometimes themselves. And parents became both confused and anxious that they should be doing the right thing, but couldn’t discover what it was.
In each generation there has arisen a guru who believed in a tough approach — don’t touch too much, set a strict regime, be careful about diet and so on — and one who supports a softer idea — let the children express themselves, be their friend, bond with them.
These patterns recur in such a way that it becomes obvious that parents are less interested in the scientific battle than in seeking the advice that suits them. And they ignore the bits that don’t. When he conducted a study into the use of expert guidance, the most famous adviser of them all, Dr Benjamin Spock, was taken aback by how little parents who were theoretically his adherents actually followed his teaching when looking after their children.
In her powerful book The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris adds to this. Almost all studies of child rearing, she argues, suffer from two failings. The first is a failure to adjust for genes. We assume that the children who behave badly do so because their parents set them a bad example. It could, however, be that both parents and children, being biologically similar, have the same genetic tendency to poor self-control.
The studies that show that the children of divorced parents are more likely to divorce may not be showing the traumatic impact of parental separation. They may be showing only that children inherit from their parents a personality that may lead them to behave in similar ways.
The second common error is to assume an identity between nurture and environmental factors. There is behaviour whose origin is neither nature nor nurture. It comes from peer group interaction and it may be more significant than anything that parents do.
Parenting style, Harris argues, has a bigger impact on the relationship within the family than it does on the development of personality and on social behaviour outside the family. Even if, therefore, the scientists ever agreed on the parenting ideas that work to produce the optimum child, it isn’t obvious that the benefits would be shared beyond the family.
It would be wonderful if the century of parenting science had been more successful and we could build a better world on what we have learnt. As it is, I think all the confident advice is a massive over-reach. I am reminded of that line from a Woody Allen film: “How do I know why there are Nazis? I don’t know how the can opener works.”
Parenting Words and Attitudes
New parenthood is a desperate search for certainty: When you start knowing nothing, you are desperate to know something. And when you finally figure that something out—how to get this creature to eat or sleep—that becomes the answer. Any parent this side of sanity clings to that certainty for dear life.
Sara Harkness, a professor of human development at the University of Connecticut, has spent decades compiling and analyzing the answers of parents in other cultures. They have a lot of answers, it turns out. And they are very certain about those answers. To read her work and the work of her colleague and husband, Charles Super, is to be disabused of a lot of certainties about child rearing. For the anxious, easily unsettled parent, it should be followed by a chaser of Brazelton and Karp, just to restore your world to its locked and upright position.
It’s not a shock that child care varies across cultures, of course. But it is still hard to comprehend just how many ways there are of looking at a baby. I have been reading various ethnographic works on child rearing for years now, and yet, when I talked to Harkness last week, I started by asking her what child-rearing practices vary most among cultures. This is a worthless question. All child-rearing practices vary hugely among cultures. There’s only a single shared characteristic, Harkness says: “Parents everywhere love their children and want the best for their children.” (Even this is a controversial statement; some academics would argue otherwise.) Everything else, including the way in which they love their children and what the best might mean, is subject to variation.
I am not talking about National Geographic bare-breasted, hunter-gatherer pictorials. Those are the most memorable variations in child care, the sort we can see: Think of the live-in Mongolian livestock in Babies. What makes the work of Harkness so interesting is that it highlights the variations we are unable to see. Even when compared to other Western cultures, we Americans are a deeply strange people.
Every society has what it intuitively believes to be the right way to raise a child, what Harkness calls parental ethnotheories. (It is your mother-in-law, enlarged to the size of a country.) These are the choices we make without realizing that we’re making choices. Not surprisingly, it is almost impossible to see your own parental ethnotheory: As I write in Baby Meets World, when you’re under water, you can’t tell that you’re wet.
But ethnotheories are distinct enough, at least to an outsider, that they are apparent in the smallest details. If you look just at the words parents use to describe their children, you can almost always predict where you are in the world. In other words, your most personal observations of your child are actually cultural constructions. In a study conducted by Harkness and her international colleagues, American parents talked about their children as intelligent and even as “cognitively advanced.” (Also: rebellious.) Italian parents, though, very rarely praised their children for being intelligent. Instead, they were even-tempered and “simpatico.” So although both the Americans and the Italians noted that their children asked lots of questions, they meant very different things by it: For the Americans, it was a sign of intelligence; for the Italians, it was a sign of socio-emotional competence. The observation was the same; the interpretation was radically different.
Every society interprets its children in its own way: The Dutch, for example, liked to talk about long attention spans and “regularity,” or routine and rest. (In the Dutch mind, asking lots of questions is a negative attribute: It means the child is too dependent.) The Spanish talked about character and sociality, the Swedes about security and happiness. And the Americans talked a lot about intelligence. Intelligence is Americans’ answer. In various studies, American parents are always seen trying to make the most of every moment—to give their children a developmental boost. From deep inside the belly of American parenthood, this is so obvious it isn’t even an observation. It is only by looking at other societies that you can see just how anomalous such a focus is.
Looking back at her research, Harkness can trace the history of how we got this way. During interviews with middle-class Boston parents in the 1980s, she and her colleagues kept hearing about the importance of “special time” or “quality time”: One-on-one time that stimulated the child and that revolved around his interests. Nearly every American parent mentioned it, she says. “It was this essential thing that all parents seemed to think they should do—and maybe they weren’t doing enough of it.”
This seems obviously reasonable. I would likely say “special time” with ironic quotation marks, but I still feel pretty much the same way those parents did. How else would a halfway-decent parent feel? But when Harkness talked to other halfway-decent parents in other cultures, even other seemingly very similar Western cultures, they were oblivious to this nagging feeling. Harkness recalls that “in the Netherlands, a father said, ‘Well, on Saturday mornings, my wife sleeps late, I get up with the kids, and I take them to recycle the bottles and cans at the supermarket.’ ” That was their special, stimulating, child-directed time: recycling bottles and cans. Asked if an activity was developmentally meaningful, the Dutch parents would brush off the question as irrelevant or even nonsensical. Why think of every activity as having a developmental purpose?
What you notice reading these accounts is how much more intensive—how much more arousing—American parenting is. Harkness has characterized it as trying “to push stimulation to the maximum without going over the edge into dysregulation of basic state control.” This is true even if you think you’re different—that you’re not like those other parents at the playground. Culture operates at a deeper level than any individual parenting choice. In a survey Harkness and her colleagues conducted of parents in Western cultures, the last question was, “What’s the most important thing you can do for your child’s development right now?” “The American parents almost to a person said, ‘Stimulation—stimulation is what my child needs.’ Interestingly, even the attachment parents, who were very adamant about being different in a lot of ways—they still gave the same answer.” And all the parents meant a very particular sort of stimulation. The parents talked about themselves in almost curatorial terms: They’d create a setting for intellectual growth. It went almost without saying that the actual stimulation came from the toys.
But ask an Italian mother about stimulation and her thoughts immediately go to her husband: He comes home and makes the baby jump, she told the researchers. “He is the ‘baby skier,’ ” she says, wonderfully. “The ‘baby pilot.’ ” Meanwhile in Spain, everyone—experts, doctors, mothers—stressed the importance of a stimulating daily walk: You see the people in your neighborhood. Objects aren’t stimulating. People are stimulating.
Of course, we have now taken special time and squared it. It’s now translated through the buzz-phrased, consultant-happy language of early cognitive development, with talk of “developmental spurts,” and “brain architecture,” and “maximizing potential,” and “making new connections,” and “pruning synapses.”
All this worries Harkness. “We’re on the verge of trying to export very ethnocentric ideas about what competencies children need to develop at a very early age, which is really unfortunate,” she says. “The U.S.’s almost obsession with cognitive development in the early years overlooks so much else.”
What else? Well, nothing in American parenting is anything like the concept of ng’om, which is used by the Kipsigis people in rural Kenya to describe children who are especially intelligent and responsible. This concept of intelligence, as Harkness and Super have written, highlights “aspects of social competence, including responsibility and helpfulness.” These aspects, they add dryly, “have tended to be overlooked in Western formal theories of children’s intelligence.”
Part of the lesson of parental ethnotheories is that when we look for certain qualities, we stop seeing others. It’s a cruel circle: Because our version of intelligence overlooks ng’om, we don’t prize it. Because we don’t prize it, we don’t see it. Because we don’t see it, we obviously don’t encourage it or acknowledge it—we don’t create its condition for possibility. And yet none of this stops us from wondering, years later, why our children insist on leaving their damn coats on the floor.
Britain and Only Children
Britain is becoming a nation of only children, with almost half of all parents now having just one child. There are 3.7 million only children, half a million more than in 1996, and they make up 47 per cent of all families.
The soaring costs of bringing up children and the trend towards later motherhood are thought to be behind the shrinking British family.
But increased use of fertility treatments, such as IVF, is also playing a role. It means that thousands of couples, who, a generation ago, would have been childless can now have a baby, but they often stop at one because of cost or age.
The cost of bringing up a child has risen to an average of £222,500 from birth to 21, a jump of 58 per cent in the past ten years. Education is the main reason, with uniforms, clubs and university fees a struggle for many parents, even when their children are educated in the state sector.
Having three children has particularly fallen out of fashion. There are now only 829,000 of families with three children compared with 949,000 a decade and a half ago, when the figures were first collected.
The sharp increase in only children comes as Britain is in the midst of a baby boom. The Office for National Statistics (ONS), which published the figures, said that the two trends were not incompatible because there were more people having children. Last year there were 7.7 million families with dependent children compared with 7.4 million in 1996.
“The demographic profile also suggests we are capturing a group of immigrant women who are still quite young and have only had one baby so far, but they may be at the beginning of their family building,” a spokesman said.
The report also noted that families with more than two children were less likely to have a parent in employment. Ninety-five per cent of two-children families have at least one employed parent, but only 87 per cent of couples with three or more children have either parent in work.
Previous studies have also noted that large families are becoming the preserve of the very wealthy or very poor. A generation ago, only children were pitied as lonely or spoilt, but recent research suggests that they may be happier than children with brothers and sisters.
A study by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex found that the fewer siblings children had, the happier they were. It concluded that competition for their parents’ attention and fighting, often physical, makes a childhood with siblings far more stressful than previously thought, eclipsing the benefits, such as having someone to play with.
Some high-achieving children say that their solo childhood was a crucial factor in their success. The actress Natalie Portman said that she would have never been allowed to act had she not been an only child because her parents would not have let her be the centre of attention at the expense of brothers or sisters. Other famous only children include Tiger Woods, Al Pacino, Mahatma Gandhi and Queen Victoria.
The study indicates that some of the poorest parts of the country have the highest percentage of families with three or more children. The greatest concentration of big families is in the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets (28 per cent) and Newham (25 per cent), which both have high levels of deprivation.
“This may be related to the ethnicities of people living in these areas, as previous research has shown that fertility rates in the UK are higher among women born in Bangladesh and Pakistan than women born in the UK,” the ONS said.
Blood Types and Inherited Characteristics
There are some schools that think it's cool to show examples of simple Mendelian inheritance by collecting and analyzing the blood types of their students and their parents. What could possibly go wrong?
Let me tell you why this is a bad idea. It's true that 99% of the time the blood type of a student is going to be consistent with that of their presumed biological parents. But what if it's not? That could mean that a child is adopted and the child may not know or not want that information to be public. It could also mean that the child's biological father (or mother) is not the same person they call "Mommy" or "Daddy." Is the trauma associated with that discovery worth the benefits of the experiment?
I have a blog post on The Genetics of ABO Blood Types. It's quite popular and every few weeks I get a letter from a distraught parent who has just discovered that the blood type of their children doesn't match the blood type of the parents. Here's the latest example (posted with permission) ...
Dear Professor Moran: I hope you don't mind my writing to you, but I just came across your blog, Sandwalk after doing some research about blood types and wondered if you might have an opinion.
My daughter, in 7th grade is working on a blood type project at school and came home quite upset yesterday after telling the teacher that she was type A+ and both her Dad and I are O+. The teacher (whom I have not yet dragged over hot, burning coals....) told her that that was impossible - that she would either have to have been adopted or have a genetic defect.... It got me thinking that perhaps I had made a mistake somewhere along the way and we spent some time last night digging through info to try to figure it out. I checked with our doctors this morning and our daughter's pediatrician and all blood types have been confirmed. Both my husband and I are O+ and our daughter is A+ She is definitely not adopted and unless she was switched at birth, then there is no doubt as to parentage -- should I be concerned? I do recall that when she was born she had mild jaundice which one doc explained was due to blood type incompatibility.
If high school teachers aren't knowledgeable enough to handle these situations then they should avoid these "experiments."
These "anomalies" are quite frequent and they have simple explanations once you know the real genotype. For example, one parent could be heterozygous for two different O alleles. One with a mutation near the beginning of the gene and the other with a mutation near the end of the gene. Any germ cell recombination event between the two alleles could generate an A allele or a B allele depending on the origin of the O allele.
I think it's also possible for one of the parents to actually be AO or BO but the functional allele is expressed at a very low level giving an O-type phenotype. The A or B allele could, by chance, be much more active in the child. There could be epistatic effects such that splicing or transcription is defective in the parent but compensated for by enhanced activity in the child due to unlinked mutations. (These are known as "suppressors" in bacterial genetics.)
There are many other possibilities. They're rare but it's certain that they will show up in some school class somewhere. It's usually not a good idea to investigate the personal genomics of students because of these problems.
Genetic Testing
First Jackie learned her brother Alex was her uncle. Then things got a little weird.
In the spring of 2012, the 34-year-old and her older sibling (their names have been changed) spit a few milliliters of saliva into plastic tubes and shipped them off to 23andMe, a personal genomics company, for consumer-grade scans of their DNA. Their family has a long history of cancer, alcoholism, and bipolar disorder, and Jackie, who happens to work for a biomedical research lab, wanted to learn all she could about her health risks and propensities.
Alex wasn't quite so into it. Jackie is curious by nature, the kind of person who's always asking questions. ("You never, ever, ever know anything for sure," she tells me. "As a kid, I was always saying, 'How do I know the sky is really blue?' ") Her brother's just the opposite: a military man with little time for facts that don't bear directly on his mission goals. Growing up, she called him "Robot," because he's so even-keeled and self-sufficient. When they both got emails saying that their genome data could be viewed online, Alex didn't open his.
The two agreed to look over their reports together, though. Meeting at their mother's place, they logged into 23andMe.com and checked the hints about their health and heritage that had been extracted from their genomes. None of what they found was so surprising or distressing, at least until they reached a screen that promised access to "close relatives" who might be in the system. Opting in, the siblings learned a fact about themselves that would have been disturbing, were it not so obviously in error: Jackie had an uncle, the software told them—an Uncle Alex.
When Jackie wrote about the glitch on the 23andMe message board, she got a quick reply: That's not an error, another user wrote; it means that you and Alex are more distantly related than you think. The scientists in Jackie's lab agreed: Full siblings have about one-half their DNA in common, as do parents and their children. But the genome scan must have showed that she and Alex share one-fourth of their DNA instead. That proportion could imply that two samples came from a niece and her uncle, or from a girl and her grandfather. But it could also mean that Jackie and Alex were half-siblings—that they shared one parent but not the other.
Alex, who is eight years older than his sister, refused to believe the news. When Jackie called him to explain what the "uncle" thing was all about, he snapped at her. She'd never seen the "Robot" so angry or distraught. "Mom did not cheat on Dad," he said. "It's a data-entry mistake. You're crazy!" But for Jackie, something had begun to click. She and her brother had never looked that much alike, and their personalities were opposite. Their parents had been separated for 20 years, and Jackie was never close with the man she’d always called her dad. Though he lived just 10 minutes down the road, they rarely talked at all. When she had a baby last year, he didn't even come to visit.
Jackie had sent in her DNA to learn something new about herself but ended up more confused than ever. That night, she went to her mother's house and heard about a one-night stand with a much older man, her biological father, now dead for many years. When she got home that night she went to the bathroom to wash off her makeup. "I didn't recognize myself," she says. "I looked in the mirror and thought, who is this person?"
Last December, 23andMe announced that it would be cutting prices for its genome scans. The 7-year-old company reduced the cost from $299 to $99, in the hopes of building a database of 1 million users by the end of 2013. (They’re one-quarter of the way there.) If that happens, how many of those clients will find themselves in the same dismaying situation as Jackie and her brother?
The study of false fatherhood, or nonpaternity, has turned up a wide variety of answers. University of Oklahoma anthropologist Kermyt Anderson says that measured rates of nonpaternity vary quite dramatically depending on the group of people being tested. Among those men who are quite confident of their status as biological fathers—the ones who volunteer their families for genetic studies of inheritance, for example—Anderson found a rate of nonpaternity of roughly 1.7 percent. At minimum, he says, 1 in 60 dads raises children that don't belong to him.
Anderson also went through data from companies that make their money testing for paternity. The men who send off DNA for these commercial tests presumably have cause to be suspicious. These men should have the highest incidence of nonpaternity, Anderson says. When he checked the research on this population, he found a median rate of close to 30 percent.
The true number across the U.S. population likely falls between these two extremes, but while it's often said that 10 percent of fathers are raising someone else's child, this interpolation isn't quite supported by the facts. The best summations of the data figure an overall prevalence of nonpaternity at more like 2 or 3 percent. One analysis from 2008 looked at several dozen studies going back to the 1890s and found an average rate of 3.1 percent, but also hinted that the numbers might be declining over time (possibly in concert with increasing contraceptive use).
Which is all to say that the expanded 23andMe database may include as many as 30,000 customers like Jackie (3 percent of 1 million) who have gone their whole lives without knowing that their father doesn't share their genes. Even now, among the 250,000 people who have already been genotyped by the company, one might expect that 6,000 or 7,000 were unwittingly involved in cases of nonpaternity. Some of these people have sent off their saliva and gotten back a secret that changed their families forever, for better or for worse.
The rise of personal genomics has not created this phenomenon, of course. Nonpaternity results can arise even in the course of routine medical testing. What happens if a doctor sees that a baby's blood type could not have come from its father? (If the baby's is AB and the father's turns up O, the doctor knows that something is amiss.) In the last few decades, the medical establishment has decided that these findings should be concealed, to protect the mother's privacy and avoid unnecessary harm.
Those who seek that information can get it elsewhere. As of 2011, you can buy an over-the-counter, mail-in paternity test in every state. (The kit costs about $30, plus $129 for analysis.) But these customers know exactly what they're getting into. When people sign up for a service such as 23andMe, they may have no idea that a family secret is about to be exposed.
23andMe does take some steps to warn its users of the risks. The top question on the company FAQ is "What unexpected things might I learn?" and the answer mentions that "genetic information can also reveal that someone you thought you were related to is not your biological kin. This happens most frequently in the case of paternity." The terms of service specify that "once you obtain your Genetic Information, the knowledge is irrevocable," and that "you may learn information about yourself that you do not anticipate" and "may provoke strong emotion."
Yet it's also true that the chances of discovering a case of nonpaternity through 23andMe, and the relative significance of that discovery, far outweigh almost every other finding that the service can provide. Much of what the scan can tell you is perfectly trivial. Do you have the genes for blue eyes or red hair? (For a first approximation, try looking in the mirror.) Do you have the genes for tasting bitterness in Brussels sprouts? (Maybe, but who cares?) After Steven Pinker signed up for 23andMe, he wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "For all the narcissistic pleasure that comes from poring over clues to my inner makeup, I soon realized that I was using my knowledge of myself to make sense of the genetic readout, not the other way around."
Other data points from your personal genomic scan will be more suggestive than deterministic. The test might tell you that you're at a somewhat heightened risk for diabetes or arthritis, but it can be hard to know which bullet points are based on solid science, and which are based on single studies with unconvincing correlations. I asked the company's senior research director Joanna Mountain which genome data would have the most real-world significance for customers, and she named four: Major risk factors for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, a form of heart disease called TTR-related cardiac amyloidosis, and breast and ovarian cancer. (The latter are similar to the risk factor discovered by Angelina Jolie. 23andMe reports on three well-studied variants of the BRCA gene, but there are hundreds of others that may be associated with cancer.)
These are serious conditions, and the risks conferred by certain gene variants appear to be severe. With breast cancer, for example, the relevant mutations may increase the risk of getting the disease from about 13 percent to 60 percent. In Parkinson's, the risk goes up from about 1 or 2 percent to 74 percent. The gene for cardiac amyloidosis can increase the risk of heart failure among elderly African-Americans from 15 percent to 38 percent. Having two copies of the Alzheimer's gene might boost your risk of that disease by a factor of 11.
Given the stakes, 23andMe tries to protect its users. To check your status as a carrier for the genes in question, you must confirm that you're prepared to know the truth and understand the consequences. Even so, the actual risk of carrying these genes is very low. Just 0.013 percent of the population carries the relevant mutations predisposing them to breast and ovarian cancer, for example. (Among Ashkenazi Jews, it's 2 or 3 percent.) One or 2 percent of people will turn out to have the major risk factor for Alzheimer's, and the gene for cardiac amyloidosis matters most to African-Americans, among whom the rate is still just a few percent.
So the chances that you're carrying these genes—the risk that you're at a heightened risk for one of these diseases—tops out at 2 or 3 percent, even in the ethnic groups that are most heavily afflicted. That's directly comparable to the risk of nonpaternity, except when it comes to nonpaternity, we're not talking about people who are merely "carriers" of a twisted gene. If your father's not your father, that's the end of the story. It's not a risk factor; it's a fact.
23andMe asks for two layers of consent before it shows family relationships. First, users are given the chance to turn off the "relative finder" function, which shows relations as close as second cousins. Less than 1 percent of the site's customers choose to opt out. The rest are given the chance to click through to see their "close relatives," and about 40 percent proceed. It's the people in this latter group who may uncover a case of nonpaternity.
This quirky system shows the difficulties that arise in managing genomic data. It used to be that people chose to learn about themselves or not, and doctors helped determine which bits of information were appropriate for each of us to know. Now we're heading for a place where secrets flow more freely, where wise consumers must play defense with the facts.
A certain gene might increase the risk for a certain kind of cancer; that's easy to assimilate. But what about the data points that tell us how we fit in with our families? And how does this relate to our changing sense of what it means to have a family at all? "We are living in an awkward interval where our ability to capture the information often exceeds our ability to know what to do with it," said NIH director Francis Collins last summer, in an interview with Gina Kolata of the New York Times. Science is getting personal. Medicine is getting personal. Information is getting personal. That means each of us will have to figure out a personal approach to the swelling stream of data. At some point, all of us may have to decide: Do I want to know the truth or not? Am I a Jackie or an Alex?
As time went by, Jackie found some satisfaction in her newfound knowledge. Her lack of closeness with her father wasn't from some failing on his part or on hers, she thought; it wasn't cause for guilt or shame or disappointment. It was only nature. Their relationship had been doomed by mismatched nucleic acids. "I didn't connect with my dad, and now it makes sense," she says. "It's fine. It is what it is."
Jackie doesn't plan to tell her father what she knows. There's no point in hurting him, she says. If they were closer, maybe they would need to have a conversation; but then again, if they were closer, the truth might be more painful still. For now, she's decided not to bring it up, and she won't mention it again to her brother Alex or her mom.
She's been searching for descendants of her biological father, though, and reaching out to his relatives on Facebook and Ancestry.com. A distant cousin passed along a family history that her grandfather, Emmet, typed out in 1964, after five years spent sifting through state archives and church registers. The painstaking document traces Jackie's ancestors back to Norway across 17 generations—an early analog to her own project of self-discovery done through spit analysis and social media. "His attitudes sound just like mine," she says, referring to Emmet's urge to look into his background. "I can tell you that before this whole experience, I would have told you that I believed more in nurture than nature, but since then I've seen how strong nature is."
Some people seem to have this inborn curiosity, a need to dig into their pasts. (A future version of 23andMe might tell you if you're the type of person who would be interested in 23andMe!) Now those people have a better tool for excavation - and when 1 million customers start to pick away, they're sure to tap a heavy vein of secrets.
If this is good or bad it's hard to say. Near the bottom of his history, Emmet jotted down some thoughts that Jackie says she shares exactly: "Many people when discussing genealogy comment that we should let the sleeping dead lie," he wrote almost 40 years ago, "and the other cliché heard so frequently is the warning to be careful lest you turn up a horse thief. The trouble with the first saying is that the sleeping dead just don't lie; something of them is with each of us, dormant or dominant."
Family Traits
Introduction
Has anyone ever told you that you look just like one of your parents or grandparents? Some characteristics, such as the shape of your hairline or whether your earlobes are attached or detached, are inherited. In this activity you'll get to see how writing some characteristics onto a family tree can help you determine just how you inherited them. You will likely discover some characteristics that you got from your dad's side of the family, and for this Father's Day you can thank him for giving them to you!
Background
When we look at members of a family it's easy to see that some physical characteristics, or traits, are shared. In the 1860s botanist Gregor Mendel discovered that in pea plants some physical features, such as flower color, are passed down in clear and predictable patterns. Today we know that offspring inherit their DNA from both parents—half from each. This results in two copies of every gene, which is composed of a variety of pairs of DNA. Many genes come in different versions, called alleles. Alleles are differences in the DNA sequence of a gene. If you have two identical alleles, you are said to be homozygous for that gene whereas if you have two different alleles you're heterozygous.
Some alleles are dominant, meaning that if you have one copy of that allele you will display that trait. Other alleles are recessive, meaning you need two copies of that allele to display the trait. For example, Mendel took pea plants that were homozygous for different traits and crossbred them. When crossing homozygous purple flowered plants to homozygous white flowered plants, the offspring (which were heterozygous) had purple flowers. The purple allele was dominant and the white one was recessive. When the heterozygous purple-flowered offspring were crossed with one another, some of their offspring would wind up with two copies of the recessive allele, giving them white flowers.
Materials
• Paper and a pencil or pen
• Four sheets of paper
• At least three generations of people from the same family. The more members of the family that are available, the better the results will be.
Preparation
• Draw a family tree, or pedigree, showing the different members of your family. Include all of the family members from whom you will be getting data. You can designate the males by a square and the females by a circle. You can look at this resource on “Your Family Health History” (pdf) for examples of family trees.
• Make three copies of your family tree (so you have four total).
• Label each family tree one of the following: "Earlobes," "Widow's Peak," "Mid-Digit Hair" and "Hitchhiker's Thumb."
Procedure
• Gather the family members together that you put on your family tree. Alternatively, you can do this activity with some members separately.
• Determine whether each family member has attached or detached earlobes. (Attached earlobes are clearly attached to the side of the head at the bottom of the earlobe whereas detached ones hang free.) There can be a range of attachment—just do your best to determine how attached the earlobes are. Do many relatives have the same type of earlobe or is there variation? Can you see how this trait was inherited? Write down your results in your "Earlobes" family tree.
• Determine whether each family member has a widow's peak or not. (A widow's peak is where the hairline comes to a V-shaped point above the person's forehead.) Keep in mind that widow's peaks can vary considerably—when determining if a person has a widow's peak, count any sort of V-shaped hairline as a widow's peak. Do many relatives either have a widow's peak or don't have one? Can you see how this trait was inherited? Write your results on your "Widow's Peak" family tree.
• Determine whether each family member has hair on their mid-digits (the middle joints of the fingers) or does not have it. You may need to look closely at each person's hands—if they have any hair on the mid-digit, even a tiny strand, then they have mid-digit hair. Do many relatives have hair on their mid-digits or are they hairless? Can you see how this trait was inherited? Write your results on your "Mid-Digit Hair" family tree.
• Have each family member make a fist with their thumb sticking up. Determine whether their thumb when extended is straight or curved. (A curved thumb is also called a hitchhiker's thumb.) Keep in mind that thumbs come in a wide range of curvedness, from completely straight to completely curved—do your best to decide if a person's thumb looks curved or straight. Do many relatives have a hitchhiker's thumb or are their thumbs mostly straight? Can you see how this trait was inherited? Write your results in your "Hitchhiker's Thumb" family tree.
• Overall, can you see how different traits were passed down through your family? Are there traits that skipped a generation? Are there traits that were in every generation? Can you figure out which traits might be mostly recessive and which might be mostly dominant?
• Extra: There are several other genetic traits that you could investigate using this activity: How does it look like other traits are inherited, such as freckles, cleft chins, toe lengths (whether the big or the second toe is longest) and which thumb is on top when you interlace your fingers?
• Extra: In this activity you looked at existing family members to investigate how different traits are inherited. Can you use your knowledge from this activity to predict what traits future offspring of different family members might have if you know what traits their partner has?
• Extra: People have long debated whether handedness is a genetic trait. One scientific study showed a correlation between handedness and hair whorl direction, specifically suggesting that a greater percentage of left-handed people have counterclockwise hair whorls than do right-handed people. Can you find a correlation between handedness and the direction of peoples' hair whorls in your family?
Observations and results
Could you see how some traits were passed down? Did it look like having detached earlobes, a widow's peak, mid-digit hair and a straight thumb were all dominant traits?
Although the presence or absence of attached earlobes, a widow's peak, mid-digit hair and a hitchhiker's thumb are thought to be primarily genetically inherited traits, there is some controversy over exactly how they are inherited—in other words, they may be affected by more than one gene, more than two alleles or factors other than genetics. That said, having detached earlobes, a widow's peak, mid-digit hair and a straight thumb are generally considered to be dominant traits, although clearly their inheritance is complex. A dominant trait is one that only needs one copy of the dominant allele to be displayed. For a person to show a recessive trait, they generally need two alleles for the recessive trait. Because a person only needs one copy of the dominant allele to show the trait, they could be homozygous or heterozygous for the allele. This means that a person who shows a dominant trait could have a child with a person who shows the recessive trait (or even another person who shows the dominant trait) and the child may show either trait (because the parent with the dominant trait may be heterozygous). Two people who both show a recessive trait are most likely to have a child that also shows the recessive trait, but inheritance is often affected by other factors.
China Child Trafficking
Ten babies found by Chinese police after they broke up a child trafficking ring last month have had to stay with the families that illegally bought them after their poverty-stricken parents refused to claim them.
The infants, aged between six days and one year old, were rescued by Xuzhou railway police, thousands of miles from where they were born, after a two-month sting on a nationwide human trafficking operation.
Since the children were rescued on August 20, there has been silence from their genetic families, who will not reclaim them because they fear that they will have to pay back the original purchase fee.
The case has shocked middle-class China and exposed the dismal realities of dirt-poor rural life that exists, largely unreported, behind the country’s economic boom.
“It is as if we caught someone buying an illegal property and, even after tracking them down, they get to keep the illegal property,” an exasperated police officer told local media.“We can’t return the children to their original owners, and they can’t be legally looked after by the relevant [local government] departments. Isn’t this embarrassing?”
The economics of Liangshan, a rural district in the western province of Sichuan, where the children were born, have turned baby sales into one of the few profitable local industries. In villages where a husband and wife will between them earn an average of £200 a year, the temptation to sell a baby to a wealthy urban couple for £2,000 is overwhelming.
Under an exemption from the one-child family planning policy that applies in most of China, Liangshan couples are allowed a maximum of three children, a limit that is routinely broken by parents seeking to produce in the space of nine months a source of cash that it would take them ten years to earn.
One of the chief suspects arrested in the trafficking crackdown said that he had visited Liangshan ten times over the past six months, trawling the area for parents happy to sell their children.
Newborns would change hands for Rmb20,000 (£2,100) in Sichuan province, and that price would increase to Rmb50,000 by the time they had reached the wealthy east coast cities where families are only too willing to buy a baby.
Police described their astonishment at the conditions in which the babies were produced. Houses are shells without furniture and families appear to survive without bowls and chopsticks and on little more than a small sack of potatoes.
Yu Shaobin, one of the Xuzhou policemen sent to Sichuan to investigate the case, said: “Children are raised like cows and sheep. A child gone is a burden gone.”
Indian Surrogates
Sitting on the floor and patting her pregnant belly, Farzana Subratu Diwan is part of one of India’s fastest growing industries — producing babies for a booming global market in surrogacy.
She is the key human element of a rapidly industrialising process catering to a soaring demand from infertile couples for affordable surrogate births.
“This is my second time,” said Mrs Diwan, 32, caressing her bump. “It’s for an English couple. The first time, I used the money to buy a house.”
Around her in a drab suburban compound are 59 other women, mostly from poor villages across Gujarat, in various stages of pregnancy, effectively renting out their wombs to carry babies for mostly overseas clients.
“My neighbour did it first,” said Seema Katan Chauhan, 25, from the arid Kutch district, one of the state’s poorest regions. “They were very poor, but after nine months, suddenly they had a new house and started sending their children to school. I decided to do it too.”
A few miles away, outside the Akanksha IVF clinic, taxis and auto-rickshaws drop off childless couples — Indian, British, American and Japanese — fresh from the airport, many with faces strained with emotion, wondering what they are about to experience.
“We had been married for 11 years but I had no opportunity of carrying a child,” said Rozyn, a 37-year-old banker from London who lost her uterus during botched IVF treatment in a British private clinic. Her first baby, a girl, was born to an Indian surrogate in Anand last week.
While the rapid growth of surrogacy in India has offered hope to thousands of couples such as Rozyn and her husband Adam, as well as a financial boost for the women they employ, the trade is still struggling to shake off accusations of exploitation and mistreatment of the poor and vulnerable.
Those who run it say the industry is simply responding efficiently to overwhelming demand for a service.
Nayna Patel, a pioneer of surrogate births in India, runs a clinic that delivered its first surrogate baby in 2004 and expects to deliver its 600th next year. Dr Patel has catered to customers from 34 countries, including the United States, Japan, Britain, New Zealand, Botswana and Turkey.
The rising number of surrogate births in Anand is constrained, she said, only by the capacity of her over-stretched clinics, currently spread across three sites. Next year she will open a 100,000 square foot hospital devoted exclusively to the delivery of babies from surrogate mothers and big enough to accommodate 100 surrogates, 40 “client” couples and 20 newborn babies under one roof. It will be a surrogate baby factory, conceived and executed on an industrial scale.
“Nobody has ever done anything like this before,” said Dr Patel, “It’s a one-stop shop.” Dr Patel claimed that for surrogate mothers, the process could be a tool of female empowerment, offering a rare path out of the grinding poverty in which so many Indians live.
“The demand is there,” she said. “We have the patients who need it and females who want to do it.”
The females include Rinku Rajubhai Mekwan, 32, from Ahmedabad, who is five months pregnant with her second surrogate baby. She admitted the experience had not been easy. “The first time it was twins,” she said. “They were for an American couple and when they were born I didn’t want to hand them over. I felt sad and wanted to keep one.”
She said that her own three children helped her to get over the separation, as well as the knowledge that she was helping a couple who could not have a child. “I am still in touch with the wife. We still speak,” she said.
Sitting nearby is Pipahya Patel, 24, who is eight months pregnant with her second surrogacy. Her husband earns 3,000 rupees a month (£30). The 375,000 rupees she will receive for the pregnancy is more than he will earn in ten years. “We are living in a rented home and I’m worried for my son’s future. It’s painful to give away a child but I know it’s not my own. We are doing it for the money.”
In a country where 841 million people — 69 per cent of the population — still live on less than $2 per day, it is a sentiment that is not hard to understand. Dr Patel insisted the women were well looked after and carefully vetted. In her clinics, only those who have already had their own children are allowed to apply, and no woman is allowed to have more than three surrogate births.
While tales abound of more unscrupulous operations, Rozyn passionately rejected the idea that she was exploiting India’s poor. She will stay in Anand with her newborn daughter until the British High Commission finishes the paperwork allowing them to return to the UK.
“When we first came here to visit, we thought ‘we can’t do this’. We had this mindset that it was exploitative. Then we met the surrogates, spoke to others who had done it and realised this place really works. “The surrogates are giving this amazing gift to you — and you are giving them something in return as well.”
12 Deadly Sins of Parenting
How many of us recognised ourselves, albeit rather shamefacedly, when head teachers’ leader Russell Hobby criticised the parents who do their children’s homework. A survey of 2,000 parents with children aged 5 to 15 for last week’s Bett education trade show revealed that one in six parents regularly do every scrap of their children’s homework, and another quarter had to physically stop themselves finishing it off. “Why sacrifice their children’s learning in an attempt to make their children look good?” asked Hobby, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers.
The answer is probably that we haven’t really thought it through: we do it with the best of intentions — to save arguments, to make sure our child presents work of which all can be proud and because we pity them their workload, which seems heavier than ours was at the same age.
It’s not the only well-meaning mistake that parents make, says education consultant Hilary Wilce, the author of the eBook Backbone: How to Build the Character Your Child Needs to Succeed (Endeavour Press). “Parents really want to do our best, but it isn’t easy. So often expert advice changes; the world can be such a confusing place now with conflicting messages, and it’s often not possible to know what’s the right thing to do.”
Here are our guiltiest well-intentioned sins – and how to put them right:
Never get involved in food wars
It starts with cajoling a baby to eat the puréed celeriac you have lovingly prepared, and before you know it you’re hovering over every mouthful and pleading with a toddler: “Four more peas, then you can have pudding”. Food wars happen because we invest too much emotional energy in the process, says Professor Tanya Byron. “Food is such a primeval thing: it’s the basic component of a child’s development, it’s the colour in their cheeks, and once we see there’s a problem we do all the wrong things,” she adds. “Our anxiety stops the child eating and before you know it you are saying, ‘Just one more spoon for mummy,’ and you’re doomed.” The answer is to step back: don’t load the plate, don’t offer choices, don’t comment on the food but chat positively about other things to keep the pressure off, and clear away quietly if they haven’t eaten it (but no emergency yoghurt or banana). Research out last week from the University of Illinois said children who helped themselves from bowls rather than had their plates filled by parents had fewer weight problems because they had learnt to read their own hunger levels.
Never do their homework for them
“If parents do the homework, the child learns it is not their responsibility,” says Noël Janis-Norton, parenting consultant (www.calmerparenting.co.uk) and author of Calmer, Easier, Happier Homework (Hodder, £14.99). “People often say it’s a fine line between helping them and doing it yourself but it’s not a fine line, it’s a very wide line. It’s easy to stay on the right side as long as you remember the purpose of homework is for the child to learn something – both about the topic and life skills such as problem solving, the importance of doing your best, perseverance and delayed gratification.” She advises a three-step approach: spend five minutes on a joint “think-through” before starting the work. Don’t give answers but use questions as prompts (What do you always start a sentence with? How many pages do you need to write?). Next, they do the homework with no input from the parent. Afterwards each of you finds three points to praise then three things (and no more) to improve, and the child makes the corrections. “You must not improve it to the point where the child couldn’t have done it themselves,” she cautions.
Don’t be sanctimonious about television
How many of us nodded in agreement with David Cameron when he said recently he didn’t allow his three children – Nancy, 9, Arthur, 7, and three-year-old Florence — to watch TV on weekend mornings? Maintaining our slightly pious position does rather depend on what our children are doing instead. “Some parents are sanctimonious about TV but then give them an iPad and let them go on iPlayer, Netflix or YouTube, which isn’t so very different,” says James Diamond, children’s e-safety consultant. Watching television as a family can be positive, says psychologist Dr Pat Spungin, who conducted a survey in which 12 per cent of families said watching TV together was the only time they were together in a room. “Television often gets a bad press but for time-pressed families watching television together is an opportunity to share interests, bond and provoke discussions,” she said.
Never talk to them while texting or tweeting
Sending children the message that they are less important than the urgent-sounding noise of a bleeping phone is never going to be good — and, of course, will prompt them to make themselves immediately more urgent to you by misbehaving. But as one of the key advantages of a smartphone is for parents to be able keep in touch with work while at home with the children, some clashes are inevitable. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong in pointing out to an older child that you are able to be at home more precisely because you have the phone and that they may have to put up with the occasional disturbance,” says Lynn Huggins-Cooper, the author of Raising Teenagers (Infinite Ideas, £12.99). “It’s a good role model, especially for girls, to see that you can be mummy but also work. I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with using your phone to send e-mails while they are playing in the park. But it’s different if you are supposed to be doing an activity with them or are in the middle of talking — then they are going to feel less important to you, which isn’t a great message.”
Don’t force them to play the cello
Making them persevere with Grade 5 violin just because we want to teach them a lesson about perseverance may not be as logical as it sounds. Spending time on something they are not enjoying is a waste when children are under pressure to discover their passions and talents before leaving school, says Huggins-Cooper. “If their ‘thing’ isn’t the violin, we should be helping them finding out what they are passionate about, which — sadly — they really need to do by 15 or 16 and are thinking about their CVs for university,” she says. “Our role is strewing lots of options in a child’s path, flagging things up they may not have thought of. They need time to try things, fail at things and drop things. I was forced to carry on with the violin even though I hated it and I’ve never touched one in adult life. So I’ve always said to my children, it’s fine to give things up but you have to try something else instead.”
Don’t drink regularly in front of them
Children mirror our attitudes to alcohol, and they do as they see rather than as we say. So if they are seeing us drink most days or they see us drunk (as nearly half of children aged 10-14 have, according to a survey last autumn), we cannot be surprised if they drink earlier and more. “I think we all need to be more careful what we say and do about alcohol in front of children,” says GP Sarah Jarvis, the medical adviser to the alcohol education charity Drinkaware. Saving wine o’clock for after their bedtime is fine if they are still young enough to be in bed by 7.30pm, but not realistic for those with older children. The key is moderation, says Drinkaware: don’t drink every day in front of them, don’t say things like “I’m gasping for a glass of wine” and keep to the 2-3 units in a sitting advised for women, equivalent to a surprisingly measly medium glass of 13% wine, and 3-4 units for men. Over the past five years, the advice has shifted on introducing children to alcohol: the average age to have a first supervised drink is 13 (unsupervised it’s 14.7) yet the Chief Medical Officer has recommended an alcohol-free childhood until 15 since 2009. That means taking a tougher line on teenage drinking, says Dr Jarvis. “Explain that when you were young, we didn’t know so much about the human brain, but we now know even a small amount of alcohol can have a bad effect on a developing brain.”]
Don’t constantly tell them they’re amazing
Generic praise that is just “happy noise” scattered about is not only meaningless (and the children know it too) but can harm them as it creates narcissism and self-entitlement rather than healthy self-esteem. Psychologists in the US report seeing a wave of anxious, unhappy twentysomethings whom college deans call “teacups” because they shatter at the tiniest setback — and this could be why, says Wilce. “They have been told for so long that they are amazing that their expectations of life are too high and they are angry with their parents.” Experts say praise should be specific, for effort rather than attainment and genuine. Over-inflated praise, especially among children with low self-esteem, can backfire badly according to research at Ohio State University published last month. When children were given a painting to copy, the ones with the lowest self-esteem who were given over-the-top praise were less likely to pursue a challenge in the next task. “If you tell a child with low self-esteem that they did incredibly well, they may worry about meeting those high standards and decide not to take on any new challenges,” said co-author Professor Brad Bushman.
Don’t say “we’ll discuss this tonight” to a teenager
Child psychologists constantly exhort parents to “keep the channels of communication open” and it’s tempting to try to achieve this by fixing nice neat times to have a “proper talk”. This rarely works, especially with teenagers who will clam up at the mere thought of quality time with parents. The best communication is ad hoc, winding chats while both of you are half-doing something else, according to Janey Downshire, whose book Teenagers Translated, comes out this spring — and that won’t happen if they are burdened with too many structured after-school activities. Communication is about being available but in a low-key way, she says. If they sidle up to you when you’re busy doing something else it’s worth downing tools and waiting to see what comes out. With younger children the whole notion of short bursts of intensive quality time is misguided, according to Roni Jay, author of The 10 Most Important Things You Can Do for your Children (Pearson Life, £10.99). If an hour a day after work is all you have with them, better to spend it on routine, mundane tasks like bath and bed or reading practice than fun things because it gives them security and consistency.
Don’t run over every time they fall
It feels like the right thing to do if a toddler is lying spreadeagled on the path, but it’s better to wait a few seconds to see if they can pick themselves up, assess the damage for themselves and ask for help if they need it. It’s all about creating resilience and “grit” in a child, says Paul Tough, the author of How Children Succeed (Random House, £12.99). “In trying to protect our kids from bad things we’re actually harming them,” he says, “we’re denying them these opportunities to develop their characters.” And it’s a child’s “character” – their perseverance, ability to plan, concentrate and focus that’s a bigger predictor of life success than IQ or exam results, says the neuroscientific research. For older children, similar rules apply: parents shouldn’t rush into school if their child hasn’t been picked for a play or is the victim of a perceived injustice. “You learn to be resilient by having setbacks,” says Wilce. “If you can straighten yourself out, realise what’s happened isn’t the end of everything and carry on, it makes you stronger. Children are being denied chances to develop those resilience muscles because parents don’t want them to be upset or disadvantaged even for a minute.”
Don’t insist upon being friends on Facebook
Five years ago this was standard advice to parents of teenagers. And it’s still fine – indeed essential – if you are among the parents who have allowed their children to set up a Facebook profile before the official minimum age of 13 (55 per cent of 12-year-olds are on Facebook and 33 per cent of 11-year-olds). But after that, and especially after 14, we should stop insisting on being their friend (unless they’re happy to). “If you carry on insisting you have to accept that this is not the account they will use to talk to their friends,” says James Diamond. “In fact, this is probably the reason Facebook has become so uncool for teenagers and they are migrating in droves to chat apps like Kik, Touchchat, Snapchat and WhatsApp which give teens more privacy to talk without being spied on.” But that presupposes parents have drummed home the “rules” of social networking aged 10-13 when they will still listen: think before you post, respect friends’ confidences, don’t over-share and don’t allow online relationships to displace real friendships. It’s also advisable to do occasional spot-checks on their phones and tablets, says Diamond. “That approach is a lot more realistic now, when the average teenager will be using seven or eight different platforms to talk to their friends, than trying to watch their every move.”
Don’t hide parental disputes from your children
Actually, it’s fine for them to see you argue occasionally — and somewhat unnatural if they never see conflict. But it’s how parents argue that determines whether it has a detrimental effect on children, according to a review of academic research by Dr Catherine Houlston from the OnePlusOne relationship charity. “Destructive” tactics such as physical or verbal threats, sulking, walking away or making children the focus can, in extreme cases, cause headaches and tummyaches and even affect their growth rate because of the insecurity. “Not arguing is unrealistic, but you can learn to argue better,” says Houlston. “What that means is trying to resolve the argument using negotiation, putting different suggestions forward and listening to the other parent’s point of view. Using humour and affection, and staying as calm as possible when you are arguing can reassure children that the disagreement does not constitute a threat to family stability.” They need to see you resolving the disagreement, so don’t send them out of the room halfway through a row.
Never drive to school with forgotten PE kit
Living with the consequences of your actions — or non-actions — is a vital part of growing up, and by secondary school parents shouldn’t regularly save their children from detentions by racing to school to drop off forgotten kit. In New York, these are called “lawnmower” parents because they are constantly smoothing the path in front of their treasured offspring. But it actually stops them growing up, says Wilce. “How do they learn to remember if someone always remembers for them? They are not able to develop their own responsibility or learn to face the consequences of their actions.” It can also sap their confidence. “Confidence comes from taking charge and steadily feeling the power of running your own life,” she says. “If your parents are always running after you with things you’ve forgotten you are always the child.”
China's One-Child Policy
Cliche has it that the Chinese are an inscrutable people. If anyone still believed in that ignorant stereotype, their assumptions would have been confounded by the hysterical wailing of relations of the many Chinese passengers now known to have perished on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 — a display of extreme grief made vivid to us all via the cameras and microphones of the world’s media. Sudden and violent death is the worst tragedy that can befall a family, especially when it involves children predeceasing their parents; but what if he or she were the only child such parents had — and there was no possibility of having any other?
It is invidious to categorise degrees of grief in the loss of a child — the pain of any such bereavement is pulverising — but there does seem something especially horrifying in the death of an only child, as if the future of the family as a whole has been extinguished.
This is the appalling fate of so many of the families bereaved by the as yet unrecovered flight MH370. According to the Beijing News, about a third of the 153 Chinese adults on board had been born in the 1980s — that is to say, after the ruling Communist party had introduced the one-child policy. Its wider human consequences are well known: forced late-term abortions, a grotesquely skewed gender balance because of the desire for a son and (often for the same reason) abducted infants.
Yet the destruction of the Malaysian aircraft has shed light on a less widely described phenomenon: parents who have been “orphaned” as a result of losing — more usually by illness — the solitary child the state has permitted them. According to that country’s media, about 76,000 of its families are “orphaned” annually. The figure was much higher in 2008, when the Sichuan earthquake killed 87,000 people, including many thousands of children.
It is when a name and a face is put on the individuals snuffed out that the destruction of all a family’s hopes is put into sharpest focus. So, for example, there was passenger listed as No 156 on the flight manifest of MH370: 27-year-old Wang Yonggang, the only child of parents now in their fifties.
It is commonly noted how these state-mandated only children have faced the sometimes intolerable burden of being the solitary focus of their parent’s hopes — and by no means all can live up to those expectations. Yet Wang was a model of such parental wish-fulfilment: he was a stellar pupil at every stage of his development. His former head teacher told the press that the admissions tutors of a number of leading universities had travelled to the school to try to persuade Wang to study with them — and last year he had completed his PhD after studying electronics, engineering and computer science.
Pride in academic performance apart, his parents would have been justified in believing that Wang would have been able to support them in their declining years. This is a particular concern in a country such as China, with a much less developed welfare state than ours.
Last year the Beijing Evening News reported that there were more than 10,000 applicants waiting for one of the 1,100 beds in the capital’s No 1 Social Welfare Home, with only a dozen or so places becoming available each year. Hardly surprisingly, private sector care homes can charge astronomical prices in Chinese terms. The same paper reported that one well-regarded care home outside the capital charged 250,000 yuan (£24,000) a year — more than 15 times the average urban family income.
In centuries past, the elderly would have been looked after by their children, but when there is only one child, this is much less likely to happen, especially give the more peripatetic nature of work in the China of the 21st century. Nevertheless the state still operates a system known as “nine-seven-three”, on the basis that 90% of elderly will be looked after at home by their families, 7% in government facilities and 3% in private care homes. The latter, when not of the ultra-expensive sort, can be dreadful, with neglected residents sleeping several to a room.
Yet that is the likely fate of many of the “orphaned” elderly, in a country enduring what amounts to a deliberately engineered demographic crunch: by the middle of this century it is estimated that China will have only three workers for every two retirees, a ratio that no one can think economically sustainable.
Paradoxically, the one-child policy was launched in 1979 on economic grounds, though this was in part because of a wilful misinterpretation of the cause of the great famines of the 1950s and 1960s. The Communist party described them as the Natural Disasters, as if they were the inevitable consequence of nature failing to feed a growing population. In fact they were caused by the forced collectivisation of farmland and Mao Tse-tung later ordering millions out of the fields and into production of iron and steel (the Great Leap Forward).
Now Chinese economists are agreed that the one-child policy — which aimed to control population in the way that communist regimes would traditionally control pig-iron production — has been a disaster; the government has found it remarkably hard to change the policy, though last November it conceded that couples could have two children if either parent was an only child. Previously the rule applied only if both parents were only children.
The political problem is that the family planning commission (now merged with the health ministry) had become a vast bureaucracy — and like all such institutions, it is ferocious at defending itself and its privileges. It has roughly half a million employees and generates about £1.6bn a year in income from imposing fines on those rich enough to pay the swingeing financial penalties that are the only alternative to forced abortions.
Some regional authorities even allow whoever collects the fines to keep part of them as personal income — so the true vested interests are palpable. This is quite distinct from the false claims that it is all in the Chinese national interest. As Wang Feng, Yong Cai and Boachang Gu conclude in Population, Policy and Politics: How Will History Judge China’s One Child Policy?: “While the collectivisation campaigns of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s cost tens of millions of lives, the harms done were relatively short-lived and were corrected shortly afterwards.
The one-child policy, in contrast, will surpass them in impact by its role in creating a society with a seriously undermined family and kin structure, and a whole generation of future elderly and their children whose well-being will be seriously jeopardised.”
Even the cataclysmic grief and rage of the families of the victims of flight MH370 is a small thing set against that dystopian vision. Such rage on the part of the Chinese generally is now directed at the Malaysian government, for its alleged incompetence in the search for the missing plane. But one day they may suddenly turn on their own government, the author of their wider demographic and familial crisis. That reckoning would also be terrible to behold, only with blood flowing, rather than tears.
Dads (Scientific American blog)
In the 1994 film Junior, a male scientist becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl. It’s a rather ridiculous tale, but if any man could be given the superpower of giving birth, my dad should have been the one. I have never met anyone who loved kids and parenting more than my father did.
One time when I was six, my best friend’s mother dropped her daughter off at my dad’s house, her 18-month old son in tow. My dad invited the little guy to stay. He could “play” with my brother, he said. (My brother was four.) The mom was amazed; this was the early 1970s and my father was offering be alone with four small children, including a toddler. “He’s still in diapers,” the mother pointed out. “I can change diapers,” my dad said. That mother still remembers the free time my father gave her that day, and how much she needed it. But it was no act of altruism for my dad, who once told me he liked people in reverse relation to their age. Consoling crying, fixing boo boos, cleaning up poop was all part of the fun.
I was lucky. I grew up with a father who loved spending time with me, taking care of me, solving my problems, organizing my schedule and helping me learn. Because my father played such a huge role in my life, and played roles that, in many (if not most) families, only women play, I never really questioned the ability of a dad to parent.
Many people do, however, or they discount a father’s role outside of providing financial stability and maybe dispensing discipline. Even scientists who ought to know better have been negligent in this respect. Author Paul Raeburn writing in the latest Scientific American Mind cites a 2005 review article that showed that nearly half of 514 studies of clinical and child and adolescent psychology excluded fathers (see “How Dads Influence Teens’ Happiness”). Only now are we “discovering” fathers. I believe it, but…wow.
Whenever I had any worry or concern, I could get emotional and practical help from my dad. He always had time. I probably also benefited subconsciously from my father’s attention. In Raeburn’s story, I learned that for girls, in particular, when dad leaves or the bond between father and daughter is weak, their bodies tend to develop faster physically. The evolutionary reason for this effect might be that since men don’t stick around, speed is of the essence. And such accelerated development makes teenage pregnancy more likely.
Along the same lines, other studies suggest that girls in whom an incident in which dad failed to support her had been top-of-mind showed riskier attitudes toward sexual behavior. And overall, research strongly suggests that girls who grow up with dads like mine are less likely to enter puberty early, to have sex early and to get pregnant early.
In addition, a father’s behavior toward his children matters to their happiness. “Children who feel accepted by their parents are independent and emotionally stable, have strong self-esteem and hold a positive worldview,” Raeburn writes. Those who feel rejected, however, are hostile, unstable and negative. And a father’s acceptance matters as much as a mother’s.
I could go on, but to me, the main question is not whether fathers matter, but how to let fathers know how much they matter. Men need to feel empowered by and accepted in their jobs as parents. My dad was such a rarity decades ago, not only because he rejected what society told him his role was supposed to be, but also because he received my mother’s support. Although my mother and father did not live together after I was four, my mom was undoubtedly instrumental in enabling his involvement, and I don’t take this (or anything else she did for us) for granted. When couples split—and they do quite often—whether dad sticks around for the kids is, in part, up to all of us. We need to change our attitudes toward them or most of them won’t change for us.
I think we’ve made considerable progress in taking men seriously as parents over the past 40 years. More often now, I meet dads who seem like mine was. (The other day, I stood behind a man in the checkout line at Target who was shopping alone with four children, three of them very small, and he seemed quite okay with it.) But as a society, I believe that we can do a lot more to make sure men know how much we value the job of Dad.
I treasure the memories I have of my father, and perhaps my rehearsal of some of them here will help me keep them alive. I remember the pictures he drew on my bag lunches, his excursions to deliver a forgotten bathing suit or notebook, the TV dinners and overdone steaks he cooked, his volunteer judging at the local debate tournament, the endless board games and math lessons…Much of it was great, some of it, less so. All of it mattered.
Corporal Punishment
When it comes to disciplining their young children, there’s a big gulf between what parents say they do and what they actually do. New research finds that parents spank or hit more often and for more mundane reasons than researchers previously thought.
The study followed 33 families from four to six evenings while parents wore audio recorders documenting all interaction with their toddlers, who averaged four-years-of-age. Participants were mostly working mothers—80 percent were educated beyond high school and married.
Those parents who approve of corporal punishment contend that they only spank as a last resort, do it only for serious misbehavior and only when they are calm. But the recordings often revealed the opposite. Parents seemed angry when striking their child, they did it reactively and for minor transgressions.
On average, spankings happened only 30 seconds after a conflict started, and half the time parents sounded angry before any conflict began. The study is in the Journal of Family Psychology. [George W. Holden, Paul A. Williamson and Grant W. O. Holland, Eavesdropping on the family: A pilot investigation of corporal punishment in the home]
Previous studies using parental self-reports have estimated that parents spank about 18 times per year. But this study using real-time audio found the median rate to be 18 times per week—and this is among people who knew they were being monitored. That means that among the mothers who spanked, half of them spanked more than 18 times per week.
My Mannequin Family
Suzanne Heintz, a photographer and art director from Denver, Colorado, has spent more than a decade travelling America and Europe with her husband, Chauncey, and daughter, Mary Margaret, documenting their domestic bliss in a series of touching, intimate portraits.
Here's Chauncey and Suzanne reading the paper over breakfast. And here's Suzanne kissing Mary Margaret goodnight. An ordinary enough set of photos, you might think, except for one deeply eccentric fact: Chauncey and Mary Margaret are mannequins, a plastic family Heintz bought from a shop before it closed and has since carted from country to country in suitcases.
But there is method in the seeming madness of all the staged Christmases, birthdays and holidays. Heintz is making a serious point about the pressure women still experience to conform to a life of marriage and motherhood. She says the questions began in her early 30s. Why wasn't she married yet? Didn't she want children? Did she realise her eggs wouldn't last forever?
"It came to a head one Christmas," she says, "when I was complaining to my mom about a boyfriend I'd just broken up with. She said, 'Suzy, nobody's perfect. You're just going to have to pick someone if you want to settle down.' I went through the roof. I said, 'I can't just make this happen, Mom! It's not like I can go out and buy a family.' "
Then she chanced on the shop full of dummies for sale. "That's when the light bulb went off – maybe I could buy a family." She went home with a brooding male mannequin she named Chauncey, and ginger-pigtailed Mary Margaret.
Using her home as backdrop, Heintz set about posing Chauncey and Mary Margaret in a series of "Kodak moments". She put herself at the centre, a pastiche of idealised femininity in a flared dress and red lipstick. The message was clear: this was a dewy-eyed remembrance of a way of life that no longer existed – if it ever did. She could stage what her mother wanted for her, but it was no more her life than the mannequins were real people.
The series – which she called Life Once Removed – was a tongue-in-cheek retort to people who suggested her life was lacking. "It didn't seem to matter how well I'd done in my career, or that I had a great social life. If I didn't have a husband and child, somehow I was failing. So I filled in the gaps. My life was now officially perfect, as proved by my pictures – which, as everyone knows, are the part that really matters."
Chauncey and Mary Margaret first appeared in a spoof Christmas round-robin letter to friends that became more ambitious with every passing year. "Before I knew it I was taking Mary Margaret to the mall to photograph her sitting on Santa's lap," says Heintz.
Then, when a friend went to live in Paris, she took her plastic family on holiday, spending more than she paid for her own airfare to ship Chauncey and Mary Margaret to France, where she shot them in front of the Arc de Triomphe and Eiffel Tower as bemused Parisians looked on.
"It was quite a thrill having the chance to explain my work as I was making it, and it gave people the opportunity to share their own experiences with me. When I explained why I was doing the project, so many people told me they'd also been pressured to get married, or that they had one child but their parents were bugging them for a second."
Heintz has been hailed as a feminist heroine for her witty take on a situation familiar to many women. However, she is not anti-marriage. She grew up in a Mormon family in Utah, fully expecting to walk down the aisle one day.
"There was no other option, as far as I could tell. You played with dolls, you played house, then you grew up and did it for real. There was only one person in our family who hadn't married and she was always referred to in pitying tones: 'That's Great Aunt Ruthie, she just never married. I don't know what happened. She was such a hoot, too.' "
At 21, Heintz turned down the first of several marriage proposals. "I had just started out as a designer in Manhattan and it didn't feel right. It hasn't ever felt right. I'm not against marriage ... I just have a problem with the idea that you're not complete without it."
She decided that motherhood wasn't something she wanted, either. Now in her mid-40s, Heintz has a life she chose for herself. She has a partner she's been with for seven years – she says he was taken aback when first introduced to her fake family – and a career she loves.
A wedding is on the cards, however. This month, Heintz will "renew her vows" to Chauncey in a ceremony attended by friends and family, with her real-life partner as best man. Her mother must be so disappointed. "Well, she definitely didn't appreciate the joke initially, but now she's my biggest fan," says Heintz. "Or maybe she's finally given up."
The Joy of Children?
On Facebook, having kids certainly seems to make people happier. Parents inhabit an online world of giggles and grins, of swings and autumn leaves and silly, profound one-liners. Even calamities – Vivid on the boss’s white couch, another stint of sleepless nights, three under-threes with chicken pox – are presented as hiccups on the happy road that is life with kids.
But what’s parenting really like?
Extreme, says a huge new study from Princeton University. Using data from 1.8 million Americans, economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Arthur Stone found that parenting is an emotional roller coaster: on a daily basis, parents tend to experience higher highs and lower lows than those who don’t have children.
Those surveyed were asked how they had felt the previous day, gauging both the good bits, such as happiness and smiling, as well as negatives, such as worry and stress.
On most of the positives, parents had only a slight edge over non-parents. Their happiness scores, for example, were 1.4% higher, while on “smiling” parents were 2.3% ahead. Parents and non-parents reported virtually identical levels of “enjoyment” and “sadness”.
But on most of the negatives, parents really suffered. They were five percentage points ahead on anger and six on worry. And as for stress, parents were way out in front – a whole 10 percentage points ahead of those who didn’t have children. It’s hard to pin down what that gap in stress would feel like or what difference it might make to one’s life. But Deaton and Stone calculate it to be as profound as a 97% drop in income.
AW SHUCKS MOMENTS
This research is unusual in that it gauges how participants feel day to day. Over the past couple of decades, a different type of study has dominated the literature about life with children: researchers seem to have been fixated on figuring out what children do to parents’ overall happiness or to the way they feel about their lives.
Lately, most findings from these studies have tended towards the “miserable – don’t do it” end of the scale.
Ignore them, urges Deaton. In their paper, published in January, he and Stone systematically myth-bust the bulk of such research, arguing that it is pointless and scientifically flawed.
Journalist Jennifer Senior, author of All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, points to a more nebulous gap in the parenting research. Much of it, she believes, fails to capture “the joy part”.
Senior has a six-year-old son and two grown stepchildren. She tells the Listener that “parents do seem to experience these unrivalled moments of awe”. Although such moments fall into a social science blind spot, she says, “those moments of grace, they’re everything. They’re everything.”
Science is certainly doing a good job of chronicling the bad bits. In her book, Senior outlines a slew of depressing studies, in particular highlighting some 2004 research in which 909 working women from Texas were asked to rank the activities that gave them the most pleasure. “Childcare ranked 16th out of 19,” Senior writes, “behind preparing food, behind watching TV, behind napping, behind shopping, behind housework.”
Senior also cites the new Princeton findings on the emotional highs and lows of parenting. She foreshadowed them somewhat in the then-novel 2010 New York magazine piece that prompted the book deal.
Subtitled “Why parents hate parenting”, the story starts with Senior experiencing one of parenting’s typical euphoric highs: her then-toddler son running to greet her. That’s immediately followed by an exhausting stint spent repairing things he’s broken and dodging things he throws at her. She eventually packs her little boy off for time out and starts trawling the house for alcohol.
“My emotional life looks a lot like this these days,” she writes. “I suspect it does for many parents – a high-amplitude, high-frequency sine curve along which we get the privilege of doing hourly surfs. Yet it’s something most of us choose. Indeed, it’s something most of us would say we’d be miserable without.”
Her book examines the effect children have on their parents; it is a knitting-together of science and closely observed case studies, not a memoir or a parenting manual, Senior says: “I was trying to hold up a mirror and show everyone what [middle class] parenting looked like at this time in a very neutral and unpolemical way, and in a very generous way to parents.
“The answer is that it’s everything: it’s both great and it’s hard, and it’s both terrible and wonderful, and it’s joyous and hideous.”
And it’s different from what it used to be. Senior notes that the shift to smaller families and delayed childbearing has brought pressure to produce not just a healthy happy child, but a perfect child.
She points out women were once called “housewives” if they stayed home. The expectation then was that they keep an impeccable house and serve splendid meals. Children were “told to go tolerate their own boredom, go out in the street and find other kids to play with. Parents did not feel responsible for structuring their kids’ play.”
All that’s changed. Housework’s gone to hell in a hand basket, Senior says. “Now, our jobs are to entertain and stimulate our kids – take them from soccer practice to piano lessons and to check their homework.” Ten years ago, sociologists dubbed this extracurricular hamster wheel “concerted cultivation”.
And, Senior observes, “if a woman stays home with her kids she’s no longer called a housewife. She’s called a stay-at-home mum. Because now, being a mum is the emphasis.”
Rather than maintaining an exhaustive knowledge of furniture polish and sweat-stain removers, Senior says women now “have to know the difference between toys that encourage fine motor skills and gross motor skills … between toys that encourage imaginative play and analytic play.”
Author Jennifer Senior says we only need look at the examples set by American presidents to see how parenting has changed. “Barack Obama is very famous for having dinner with his kids,” she points out. “What the American public knows about him is that he is a guy who eats dinner with his family at least twice a week, he has this extremely bonded nuclear family, and if the president can do it, I think other fathers feel like they’ve got to do it. That’s really intriguing modelling happening at the top.”
BABIES AND BUDGETS
None of this comes cheap. Senior groans as she talks about the cost of childcare and the fact that American parents are going broke or remortgaging the house to cover their children’s university fees.
New Zealand parents, too, are increasingly stumping up extra cash for their children. Last year the Families Commission released the first of what will be an annual report on the status of New Zealand families. It paints a picture of today’s Kiwi parents having to go without many of the props their parents enjoyed, particularly “universal family benefits and low-interest State Advances-type housing loans” (although increases to paid parental leave are on the horizon). Meanwhile, it says, as a result of modern life becoming more complex, even parents with kids in the public education system are obliged to cover “additional expenses”, such as field trips, stationery (which now runs to laptops) and uniforms. “Even something as worthwhile as legislated safer car seats for children involves costs which families in the past did not face,” the report says.
Some of the extra costs come down to choice. Parents of children of primary school age and upward are increasingly turning to the private tutoring industry, worried that their kids won’t keep up otherwise. At high-school level, many parents are paying for their kids to sit Scholarship exams as well as NCEA, or covering the cost of the more expensive Cambridge or International Baccalaureate qualification systems.
The costs don’t stop when children leave school. A basic university degree, once virtually a guarantee of a good job, is now considered a first step, so many parents are supporting their children through hugely expensive postgraduate study. With rents rising and a graduate-flooded job market, some of those very qualified, very indebted children end up “boomeranging” back home while they job hunt. Census data show that children are leaving the nest later: in 2001, one in five were still at home after their 20th birthday, but by 2013, that figure had climbed to one in three. And then there’s the recent tightening of the rules around mortgage deposits, which means lenders routinely point first home-buyers to the bank of Mum and Dad.
Even when families stick to the basics, it’s almost impossible for most to get by on one income – and that pressure is forcing fundamental change in the parenting arena. Senior notes the leaching of work into family time; the endless pings of smartphones and laptops. But more important, she believes, is the rise in the proportion of women who are juggling young children and a paying job.
Comprehensive data on family finances are emerging from the longitudinal Growing Up in New Zealand survey, which has been tracking nearly 7000 children and their parents since the mothers were pregnant four years ago. In the Families Commission report, the Growing Up researchers note their surprise at finding that – during the nine months after the babies were born – only 14% of families relied on income from just one source, as would be the case in the classic “one parent at home, one parent at work” scenario. More than half the families reported that they had experienced financial hardship in that time: 50% had “been forced to buy cheaper food in order to afford other necessities” and nearly one in five had put up with feeling cold to save money on heating.
It’s unsurprising, then, that by the time the babies were nine months old, 35% of mothers and 85% of partners were back at work. On average, the fathers were back in the office two or three weeks after the birth, and mothers followed suit after four or five months. As the report notes, this is a catch-22, as the cost of childcare can often suck up most of one parent’s income. But many parents clearly decide it’s worth it – they need all the money they can get.
“When JFK Junior was born, I think JFK saw him a couple of times in the first four months. He was busy travelling the globe. I think Jackie went somewhere too, for a long vacation. Attitudes are just so different now.”
THE FAMILY BENEFIT
On the other hand, being a parent can come with priceless perks. Putting what Senior calls “the joy part” aside, here’s one big bonus: parents, and particularly mothers, tend to live much longer than people who don’t have kids. In 2012, Professor Oystein Kravdal and colleagues at the University of Oslo analysed data for the entire population of Norway born between 1935 and 1968, and found a startling difference in the lifespans of parents and non-parents.
It’s well established that being married tends to boost life expectancy. So the researchers zoomed in on the men and women who were married, looking at how many children they had and whether the parent died before the age of 73.
They found that having one child increased the parents’ life expectancy – and having two or more kids pushed lifespans out even further. “Mortality is higher by about 50% among the childless compared with those with two or more children (36% among men and 61% among women),” says the paper, published in the journal Population and Development Review.
The paper makes it clear that having a child won’t magically make you live longer. But it could well make you rein in risky behaviour, such as smoking, drinking or base jumping, and make you more inclined to look after your health.
Having a stepchild should have much the same effect, right? The researchers thought so, but were surprised to find step-parents had “no clear benefit” over childless people. They believe this could be because any boost from the child is washed out by the strain of the probably messier family situations.
Women with biological children were clearly the big winners. In explaining this, the researchers point to the growing literature suggesting that pregnancy can have direct physiological effects. For example, it seems to decrease a woman’s risk of developing certain cancers, such as cervical and breast.
As Kravdal writes in a paper that’s still in review: “These findings are probably not well known to the public. There may, of course, also be other such health effects that no one currently is aware of, and that may be revealed in future research.”
The researchers also note that the woman’s health is more important than the man’s in determining whether a couple can have a child in the first place, which may skew the results.
And, they point out, because women tend to shoulder most of the responsibility for children, they may be more careful to look after themselves, too.
FILLED ROLES
Jennifer Senior says that on the home front, the balance is improving. “If you look at the trend lines for men doing childcare and men doing housework, it’s still abysmal, but it’s so much better than where it was even 20 years ago. It’s changing pretty rapidly and attitudes are changing pretty rapidly.”
But aggravation abounds. As she writes, the weight of research shows the arrival of children negatively affects the parents’ marriage, with another dip in marital satisfaction levels when the kids hit adolescence. Further, it seems that strife over the division of labour is what does the most damage.
“Many women can’t tell whether they’re supposed to be grateful for the help they’re getting or enraged by the help they’re failing to receive,” Senior writes. Many men, meanwhile, are struggling to get their heads around “the same work-life rope-a-dope as their wives”.
Studies show that when they’re at home, men are still much more likely to take it easy or at least stick to just one task at a time: women remain the chief multitaskers.
“When women are at home, it feels like a video game,” Senior says. “They’re dodging debris. They’re doing eight things at once at all moments. They’re just trying to make sure nothing smashes and hits a wall.”
So, despite the fact that men are increasingly feeling the need to help out at home – and many are, to be fair, stepping up – Senior says “home is not a haven for a woman in quite the same way”.
A Penn State study that hit headlines around the world this month suggests that for all of us, work may now be more of a haven than the home. When researchers tested cortisol levels of the 122 participants, they found everyone’s level of the stress hormone dipped at weekends. But on work days, cortisol was higher when participants were at home. This will no doubt ring true for working parents who dread the morning rush and the evening grind of dinner, homework, baths and bed. Further, lead researcher Sarah Damaske was not surprised that when asked where they were happiest, women said “work” whereas men said “home” (this feeling didn’t match men’s cortisol results).
As Damaske told the New York Times: “It speaks to something that we’ve long known – women have more to do at home when they come home at the end of a workday … They have less leisure time. There is all this extra stuff to be done, that second shift.”
Another gender split persists in the type of childcare that men and women typically carry out. “This is borne out by data,” Senior says, as if anticipating pushback. “It’s not observational. Women have more deadline-centred childcare responsibilities”.
They do more nagging, in other words. “The dinner has to be on the table at 6pm, the homework has to be checked by 8 – that’s definitely nagging. Getting out the door in the morning to get the kids to preschool, that’s nagging: ‘Put on your shoes, put on your shoes, put on your shoes.’”
In this regard, not much seems to have changed. Senior cites a Harvard study carried out in 1971 in which researchers observed five hours of interaction between 90 mothers and their toddlers. On average, those mothers “gave a command, told their child no or fielded a request (often “unreasonable” or “in a whining tone”) every three minutes. Maddeningly, the kids listened only 60% of the time.
Although today’s mums are still nagging, Senior says the childcare that men have picked up sounds much more fun. “When you look at the breakdowns in the American Time Use Survey and some of the more granular observational studies that have been done on a smaller scale, [men] do the more interactive stuff: they go outside and they play catch, right?”
Demographer Janet Sceats, a research associate at the University of Waikato’s National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis, found similar trends in a study she carried out in New Zealand 10 years ago.
“The men put out the garbage. And they may do the lawns, and some of them will read stories at night and these sorts of things. Very few of the men took much in the way of parental leave. And I was quite staggered at how clearly gender defined a lot of the roles were within the family … The burden fell very unequally.”
Women are also generally the ones left to care for their ageing parents, Sceats points out. She contributed to the Families Commission report, which warns that the “sandwich effect” – where the middle generation find themselves responsible for looking after their parents at the same time as their kids – is set to get even more severe as women delay childbearing.
At the same time, the report predicts that over the next decade Kiwi parents could have to cope without much of the crucial support traditionally provided by grandparents.
This is partly because extended families are now much less likely to live within cooee of each other or even in the same country. But it’s also because life expectancies are creeping up, which means this older generation will have to be more careful about protecting their assets rather than pitching in for the grandchildren’s school fees or music lessons. They’re also going to be older and more frail by the time there’s a kid in the picture, making it more difficult to help out with childcare.
Increasing numbers of New Zealanders may not live to see their grandchildren at all.
No wonder peer groups – like parents who get to know one another through playgroups – have become such important sanity safety nets. Sceats has watched with interest the recent growth in antenatal coffee groups, and suspects that as families spread out geographically and in age, these other social support systems will assume even more importance.
How else will families cope? The report suggests a broadening of gender roles: men may have to pitch in more with childcare and care of their elderly parents. And in the workplace, leave to look after ailing parents could one day become as important as parental leave is now.
Some would-be parents already give this serious thought. Sceats remembers one woman approaching her after a lecture and saying: “I’ve done the arithmetic and there’s no way I can have any children because I know what my mother’s going to be like.”
Sceats insists more couples need to think about “that longer picture”. They should consider how they will share the load between themselves, as well as what help grandparents might realistically be able to provide – or whether it’s going to be all one-way traffic.
“What is the situation with your parents? Are you going to be the sole child to provide [for them]? Even if it’s the emotional support, can you do that, how’s that going to work out? So I think that’s a really critical thing that people don’t really discuss in their thinking about having a family: they need a long view and they need to think about a more equal distribution of familial duties.”
But let’s put the gloom and doom in context. Sceats and her husband, fellow demographer Ian Pool, who also contributed to the report, say one crucial point often gets drowned out in researchers’ “pathologising” of families: despite what they’re up against, most Kiwi families are coping – and coping well.
“They’re surviving and they’re adapting and they’re bringing up good, healthy, successful children,” Sceats says. “That’s one of the things that we feel quite strongly about: that we really do need to acknowledge that. You don’t hear that. The addendum to that, though, is that it’s hard without the traditional support systems.”
PLANNED PARENTHOOD
Jennifer Senior’s key piece of advice for making it through the parenting roller coaster unscathed is that couples sit down and explicitly nut out a plan around who does what, preferably before the baby arrives. “Most couples go in and they say, ‘Oh it’ll be 50-50’, or ‘It’ll be as fair as we can’, but it’s very vague.”
She points to extensive research by Berkeley husband and wife team Carolyn and Philip Cowan, who found that couples who went into more detail – down to the level of who will get up to baby on which nights and who will get free time on Sunday mornings – “were much happier, much less inclined toward resentment, and if the men weren’t living up to their end of the bargain they felt guilty, they wanted to do more”.
Most people, Senior notes, don’t have the wherewithal to draw up such a contract before the baby is born.
“My husband and I certainly didn’t. But at any stage along the way, you can still do that … You can do the exact same thing, you can map it out and then you’re not passively aggressively duking it out for who gets what time off on the weekend. You’d be amazed at how often that happens.”
Interview-based research on 44 Kiwi stepfamilies by Jeremy Robertson, published in April by the Families Commission, suggests it’s also crucial that parents – and children – keep talking. These were families who had held it together for at least five years, despite facing stressors over and above those of the typical nuclear family. Children in these families, as well as the adults, emphasised the importance of “clear and open communication”. Asked how they worked through problems, such as how to discipline children and adjusting to sharing space or new routines, these families pointed to talking, talking, talking – and the parents presenting a united front.
And Senior has another piece of wisdom specifically for stressed-out mothers: make like the fathers. Try to ease off on the self-flagellation and “anguished perfectionism”, she writes, and get more aggressive about protecting your own free time.
Sound like an uphill battle? Some of this certainly doesn’t mesh with those rose-tinted parenting posts on Facebook. But towards the end of the interview, Senior says something that could explain a lot.
What has stuck with her most after researching her book, she says, is work by Nobel-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who theorises that we each have two selves. The experiencing self gets us through moment by moment: this is the self that parents presumably inhabit as they lurch through the extreme highs and lows picked out in the Princeton research. But it’s the second self – the remembering self – that Kahneman believes to be more powerful and more truly ourselves.
This is because, as Senior puts it, “we are really a collection of our memories”. What does any of this have to do with parenting? Everything, she says.“You’ll remember parenting in the most beautiful way. You’ll think it’s one of the best things you’ve ever done, even if in real time you find it hard. Even things that were hard in real time – like if you’re up with your baby at three in the morning going ‘Please go to sleep please go to sleep please go to sleep’, what you’ll remember two years later is ‘Oh my god, that kid was so small and he was in my arms …’”
So Senior, not by nature a sentimental person, has made the decision to optimise her memories of parenting.
“I should be taking as many pictures as possible, because when I look at them my heart will melt. I should be taking as many videos as possible, because when I watch them, I will tear up. And I should be writing down every funny thing my kid says … It will be a highlights reel and it will be what I make of my parenting experience.”
Much of the research on kids and happiness is misleading.
Every few weeks, it seems, a new study appears claiming children make people happy – or miserable.
Princeton economist Angus Deaton tells the Listener from his home in New Jersey that these studies are carried out “because people like you come after them … Almost everything to do with happiness and well-being is like that, in that it does get a lot of press attention.” As for the comment threads such stories generate, which quickly descend into spats between parents and non-parents: “Oh, God save us,” Deaton mutters.
He insists that the question itself – of whether children make people happier – is a “stupid” one that researchers should quit trying to answer.
“The fundamental thing is people with kids are different from the people who don’t have kids,” Deaton says.
Most obviously, people who have children generally set out to have them. For whatever reason, they anticipated that children would bump up their happiness or life satisfaction levels. On the other hand, while some cannot have children, many choose not to because they genuinely believe they’re better off without. The fact that most people “select” into or out of parenting like this is a serious scientific stumbling block and, what’s more, makes it nonsensical to compare the happiness of the two groups, Deaton argues.
Even setting that aside, he says, it’s almost impossible to nail down a causal relationship between having children and life satisfaction or happiness.
Comedy option: blindfold a flock of storks and have them randomly deliver babies to a large sample of unsuspecting people. But for such a study to work, those people as well as those who didn’t wake up to a surprise baby would have to be very similar in other important ways. Deaton explains that in real life that is not the case. In developed countries (including New Zealand), people who have children also tend to be richer, more educated, more religious, healthier and married – “and those are all things that make people’s lives better”.
It’s impossible for researchers to know whether they have accurately whittled away all of these confounding factors. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in January, Deaton and psychologist Arthur Stone demonstrated just how much this matters by analysing a huge set of data looking at how satisfied parents and non-parents across the world were with their lives overall. They then controlled those results for more than a dozen factors, including those listed above as well as race, age, gender and household size. This saw the perks of being a parent in a developed country plummet, from the equivalent of a 75% jump in income, to a gap that Deaton says is so small it’s not even worth talking about. Parents actually ended up slightly less satisfied with their lives than non-parents, but the researchers warn that result, too, is “hardly conclusive”.
However, Deaton believes the other findings in the paper – that parents experience more extreme emotional highs and lows – are reliable, as they persisted no matter what he and Stone controlled for. And it just makes more sense.
“This idea that there’s a wide range of emotions associated with kids is probably right, that there are days on which it’s going to make you feel absolutely wonderful and there are days on which it’s not. That’s one of the great joys of being a grandparent – after the wonderful bit’s over, you can go home.”
Helicopter Parents
WELL-TO-DO parents fear two things: that their children will die in a freak accident, and that they will not get into Harvard. The first fear is wildly exaggerated. The second is not, but staying awake all night worrying about it will not help—and it will make you miserable.
Modern parents see risks that their own parents never considered. They put gates at the top of stairs, affix cushions to table corners and jam plastic guards into sockets to stop small fingers from getting electrocuted. Those guards are “potential choking hazards”, jests Lenore Skenazy, the author of “Free-Range Kids”. Ms Skenazy let her nine-year-old son ride the New York subway on his own. He was thrilled; but when she spoke about it on TV, a mob of worrywarts called her “America’s worst mom”.
Yet in fact American children are staggeringly safe. A kid under five in the 1950s was five times as likely to die (of disease, in an accident, etc) than the same kid today. The chance of a child being kidnapped and murdered by a stranger is a minuscule one in 1.5m.
What about academic success? Surely the possibility of getting into Harvard justifies any amount of driving junior from violin lesson to calculus tutor?
Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, says it does not. In “Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids”, he points to evidence that genes matter far more than parenting. A Minnesota study found that identical twins grow up to be similarly clever regardless of whether they are raised in the same household or in separate ones. Studies in Texas and Colorado found that children adopted by high-IQ families were no smarter than those adopted by average families. A Dutch study found that if you are smarter than 80% of the population, you should expect your identical twin raised in another home to be smarter than 76% but your adopted sibling to be average. Other twin and adopted studies find that genes have a huge influence on academic and financial success, while parenting has only a modest effect.
The crucial caveat is that adoptive parents have to pass stringent tests. So adoption studies typically compare nice middle-class homes with other nice middle-class homes; they tell you little about the effect of growing up in a poor or dysfunctional household.
The moral, for Mr Caplan, is that middle-class parents should relax a bit, cancel a violin class or two and let their kids play outside. “If your parenting style passes the laugh test, your kids will be fine,” he writes. He adds that if parents fretted less about each child, they might find it less daunting to have three instead of two. And that might make them happier in the long run. No 60-year-old ever wished for fewer grandchildren.
Does over-parenting hurt children? Probably not; but it exhausts parents. Hence the cascade of books with titles like “All Joy And No Fun” and “Go The F**k To Sleep”. Kids notice when their parents are overdoing it. Ellen Galinsky, a researcher, asked 1,000 kids what they would most like to change about their parents’ schedules. Few wanted more face time; the top wish was for mom and dad to be less tired and stressed.
The Rich-Poor Divide
SHANA, a bright and chirpy 12-year-old, goes to ballet classes four nights a week, plus Hebrew school on Wednesday night and Sunday morning. Her mother Susan, a high-flying civil servant, played her Baby Einstein videos as an infant, read to her constantly, sent her to excellent schools and was scrupulous about handwashing.
Susan is, in short, a very conscientious mother. But she worries that she is not. She says she thinks about parenting “all the time”. But, asked how many hours she spends with Shana, she says: “Probably not enough”. Then she looks tearful, and describes the guilt she feels whenever she is not nurturing her daughter.
Susan lives in Bethesda, an azalea-garlanded suburb of Washington, DC packed with lawyers, diplomats and other brainy types. The median household income, at $142,000, is nearly three times the American average. Some 84% of residents over the age of 25 are college graduates, compared with a national norm of 32%. Couples who both have advanced degrees are like well-tended lawns—ubiquitous.
Bethesda moms and dads take parenting seriously. Angie Zeidenberg, the director of a local nursery, estimates that 95% of the parents she deals with read parenting books. Nearly all visit parenting websites or attend parenting classes, she says.
Bethesda children are constantly stimulated. Natalia, a local four-year-old, watches her three older siblings study and wants to join in. “She pretends to have homework,” says her mother, Veronica; she sits next to them and practises her letters.
Veronica is an accountant; her husband is an engineer. Their children “all know that school doesn’t end at 18,” says Veronica. “They assume they’ll go to college and do a master’s.” Asked how often she checks her various children’s progress on Edline, the local schools’ website that shows grades in real time, she admits: “More than I should, probably.”
In “Coming Apart”, Charles Murray, a social scientist, ranked American zip codes by income and educational attainment. Bethesda is in the top 1%. Kids raised in such “superzips” tend to learn a lot while young and earn a lot as adults. Those raised in not-so-super zips are not so lucky.
Consider the children of Cabin Creek, West Virginia. The scenery they see from their front porches is more spectacular than anything Bethesda has to offer: the Appalachian Mountains rather than the tree-lined back streets of suburbia. But the local economy is in poor shape, as the coal industry declines. The median household income is $26,000, half the national average. Only 6% of adults have college degrees. On Mr Murray’s scale, Cabin Creek is in the bottom 10%.
Melissa, a local parent, says that her son often comes home from school and announces that he has no homework. She does not believe him, but she cannot stop him from heading straight out across the creek to play with his friends in the woods.
She has other things to worry about. The father of her first three children died. The father of her baby is not around. Her baby suffers from a rare nutritional disorder. And Melissa has to get by on $420 a month in government benefits. Small wonder that she struggles to enforce homework. And small wonder the gap between haves and have-nots in America is so hard to close.
Parenting has changed dramatically in the past half-century. When labour-saving products such as washing machines, dishwashers and ready meals started to spread, people naturally assumed that parents would soon have much more free time.
Not so. Although the average American couple spent eight hours a week less on household chores in 2011 compared with 1965, according to the Pew Research Centre, more than all of this extra time was gobbled up by child care (see chart 1). Women now devote an extra four hours a week to looking after their offspring; men devote an extra four and a half. This is largely a good thing. For most people, teaching a kid to ride a bike is more rewarding than washing dishes. A different Pew survey finds that 62% of parents find child care “very meaningful”, a figure that falls to 43% for housework and only 36% for paid work.
However, there are two worries about modern parenting. One concerns “helicopter parents” (largely at the top of the social scale), who hover over their children’s lives, worrying themselves sick, depriving their offspring of independence and doing far more for them than is actually beneficial. This gets a lot of attention, probably because media folk belong to the helicoptering classes (see article). The other worry concerns parents at the bottom, who struggle to prepare their children for a world in which the unskilled are marginalised. This is far more important.
In a study in 1995, Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that children in professional families heard on average 2,100 words an hour. Working-class kids heard 1,200; those whose families lived on welfare heard only 600. By the age of three, a doctor’s or lawyer’s child has probably heard 30m more words than a poor child has.
Well-off parents talk to their school-age children for three more hours each week than low-income parents, according to Meredith Phillips of the University of California, Los Angeles. They put their toddlers and babies in stimulating places such as parks and churches for four-and-a-half more hours. And highly educated mothers are better at giving their children the right kind of stimulation for their age, according to Ariel Kalil of the University of Chicago. To simplify, they play with their toddlers more and organise their teenagers.
The Adventures of Supermom
“I talk to him constantly,” says Lacey, another Bethesda mother, of her two-year-old son. “As we go through the day, I talk about what we’re doing. I try to make the regular tasks interesting and fun, like going to the grocery store.” Her older son, who is five, devours maths apps and asks his mother questions about arithmetic. At the weekend the family might go to the American History Museum or the Washington Zoo or a park.
Cabin Creek parents love their children just as much as Bethesda parents do, but they read to them less. It doesn’t help that they are much more likely to be raising their children alone, like Melissa. Only 9% of American women with college degrees who gave birth in the past year are unmarried; for those who failed to finish high school the figure is 61%. Two parents have more time between them than one.
And even two-parent families in Cabin Creek tend to be more stretched than those in Bethesda. Sarah, another Cabin Creek mom, has a sick mother and a husband who was injured in a coal mine. Her three boys, two of whom make it a point of pride to be on the naughty kids list at school, exhaust her. She helps them with their homework and reads to them fairly regularly, but often just lets them watch television. “Dora the Explorer” is somewhat educational, she says: “It’s got Spanish in it.”
Children with at least one parent with a graduate degree score roughly 400 points higher (out of 2,400) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (a test used for college entrance) than children whose parents did not finish high school. This is a huge gap. It is hard to say how much it owes to nurture and how much to nature. Both usually push in the same direction. Brainy parents pass on their genes, including the ones that predispose their children to be intelligent. They also create an environment at home that helps that intelligence to blossom, and they buy houses near good schools.
Nonetheless, there is evidence that parenting matters. After reading enough scholarly papers to make a life-sized papier-mâché elephant, Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, concludes that it accounts for about a third of the gap in development between rich and poor children. He argues that the “parenting gap” is more important than any other.
The two aspects of parenting that seem to matter most are intellectual stimulation (eg, talking, reading, answering “why?” questions) and emotional support (eg, bonding with infants so that they grow up confident and secure). Mr Reeves and his Brookings colleague Kimberly Howard take a composite measure of these things called the HOME scale (Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment) and relate it to how well children do in later life, using data from a big federal survey of those born in the 1980s and 1990s.
The results are striking. Some 43% of mothers who dropped out of high school were ranked among the bottom 25% of parents, as were 44% of single mothers. The gap between high- and middle-income parents was small, but the gap between the middle and the bottom was large: 48% of parents in the lowest income quintile were also among the weakest parents, compared with 16% of the parents in the middle and 5% in the richest.
Likewise, the difference between high-school dropouts and the rest was far greater than the gap between high-school and college graduates. Mr Reeves and Ms Howard estimate that if moms in the bottom fifth were averagely effective parents, 9% more of their kids would graduate from high school, 6% fewer would become teen parents and 3% fewer would be convicted of a crime by the age of 19.
From a public-policy perspective, nature is a given. Individuals can influence the genes their children inherit, by choosing the right partner, but the state is concerned only with how children are nurtured. America lavishes public money on school-age children (more than $12,000 per pupil each year, or nearly one and a half times the rich-country average) but virtually ignores the very young, despite strong evidence that the earliest years matter most. Only 67% of American three- to five-year-olds and 42% of under-threes are enrolled in formal child care or preschool. In France it is 100% and 48%.
Government meddling in parenting is politically touchy. As Mr Reeves writes: “Conservatives are comfortable with the notion that parents and families matter, but too often simply blame the parents for whatever goes wrong. They resist the notion that government has a role in promoting good parenting.” As for liberals, they have “exactly the opposite problem. They have no qualms about deploying expensive public policies, but are wary of any suggestion that parents—especially poor and/or black parents—are in some way responsible for the constrained life chances of their children.”
Nothing the government can do will give the children of Cabin Creek the same life chances as the children of Bethesda. But weak parents can learn to be stronger, and outsiders can sometimes help them. In West Virginia, for example, an organisation called Zero to Three (as in, 0-3 years old) sends “parent educators” to families. They find them via the local maternity clinic, visit their homes and identify the parents most in need of help by looking for simple clues. For example, are there fewer than ten books visible? Does the family go out less than once a week?
The parent educators don’t just nag parents to read to their offspring more and hit them less. They also teach them how to interact with their kids in ways that stretch their minds: reasoning with them, answering their questions and teaching them basic skills. “I see a lot of parents doing things for their children because it saves time,” says Heather Miller, a parent educator. “Even one mom who tied her 12-year-old son’s laces. You have to learn to stop and let him do things for himself.”
A home visit is supposed to be fun. Visiting a five-year old called Lily, Ms Miller brings a game called “Five Little Monkeys”, based on a popular nursery rhyme. It involves numbers, artful propaganda in favour of going to sleep and the thrill of watching plastic monkeys fall off a spring-loaded bed. Lily plays merrily, though her commentary is revealing. Asked to mime brushing her teeth, she says she uses bottled water because the stuff from the tap is “bad”. (A recent chemical spill polluted the nearby river.)
When Lily was 18 months old, she did not talk. Zero to Three had her checked out and found that it was nothing to do with her intelligence: she simply had weak muscles in her mouth. The cure was cheap and jolly: her mom was shown how to tear up little bits of paper, scatter them on a table and dare Lily to blow them off through a straw. This strengthened her mouth muscles; now she chatters non-stop.
Helping parents teach
Parent educators hand out books as presents for the kids and offer leaflets to the parents. “Of the nine families I see, none buy[s] parenting books. But most look at the material I leave,” says Jennifer Parsons, another parent educator. The programme in West Virginia is cheap: about $1,800 per family each year. It has not been around long enough for its effectiveness to be assessed, but others have. A review of 11 home-visiting programmes by the federal health department found that seven led to at least two lasting benefits (eg, making the child healthier or better-prepared for school). A pre-school programme called HIPPY, which aims to teach parents how to be their children’s first teachers, appears to boost reading scores significantly.
Do such benefits last? In the 1960s a group of vulnerable pre-schoolers in Michigan were randomly selected either to enroll in a programme of daily coaching from well-trained teachers plus weekly home visits, or to join a control group. The early results were amazing: after a year the kids who took part were outscoring the control group by ten IQ points.
Disappointingly, that difference faded by the age of ten, leading many to doubt that the Perry project (named after the school where it took place) actually worked. However, even if it didn’t boost their IQ scores for long, the intervention appears to have taught them other useful skills, such as self-discipline and perseverance. The Perry pre-schoolers were far more likely than the control group to graduate from high school on time (77% to 60%). And by the age of 40, they were more likely to earn $20,000 a year or more (60% to 40%) and less likely to have been arrested five times or more (36% to 55%).
Perry generated $16 of benefit for every $1 spent on it, by one estimate. Another pre-school programme in Chicago showed a benefit-to-cost ratio of 10 to 1; the Elmira project in upstate New York was five to one; the Abecedarian project in North Carolina was four to one.
All this suggests that, when it comes to education, the best returns will come not from pumping yet more money into schools but from investing in the earliest years of life. And that includes lending a helping hand to parents who struggle.
Co-Parenting
The traditional family is dead. Or at least it is for the tens of thousands of people who are choosing to go online to find the parent of their child.
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Men and women are finding each other on sites, similar to online dating, in order to have a baby through artificial insemination (AI). Within a platonic relationship, they then share the child without binding legal agreements.
Co-Parents.co.uk was begun by Franz Sof in 2008 when he wanted to meet someone with whom he could bring up a child. It now has 10,000 members. This website and others like it also cater for those who, rather than looking for someone to “co-parent” with, are looking for a sperm donor, but want to meet him first.
In 2006, Jenny Kearns and her partner were trying to find a donor they could personally vet when she set up Co-ParentMatch.com, which has more than 20,000 members.
PollenTree.com was launched by Patrick Harrison and his wife Rita, both lawyers, in 2011, after they discovered that one of their female friends was “looking for a sperm donor by going to nightclubs”. They now boast 120 “Pollen Tree babies” conceived through matches made on the website.
The three sites report that more than 30 per cent of those who join are looking to co-parent while the rest are looking for, or to become, sperm donors.
“For women, co-parenting is mostly a second-best option,” Mr Harrison said. “Either they haven’t found the so-called ‘Mr Right’ or a relationship they have had is ended.”
The lawyer described how members meet after finding each other online and decide whether they want to go ahead with bringing up a child together.
The websites, which attract single men and women as well as gay couples looking for a third parent, are designed like dating websites with members uploading what they are looking for, or willing to provide. Users can browse profiles and send private messages when they think they have a match.
One woman, describing her decision to join, said: “I’m a 33-year-old single woman; I’ve worked with children for a long time now and I’ve been a foster carer for just under a year for babies and it’s really made me broody. I always thought I’d be married before having children but that’s not happened and I feel I’m running out of time.”
Another said: “I would love children, and think I can give a baby a happy and fulfilling life. However, for various reasons, I haven’t found the right man for me. This seems like a good option before I get too old and my fertility drops.”
Legally, the father will have no rights over the child if AI is carried out by the NHSor in a private licensed clinic. Both parents, however, have equal rights if a home insemination kit is used, something these websites offer.
An agreement can be drawn up, to indicate intentions to courts later if there are problems, but it is not legally binding. Mr Harrison said he kept a close watch over his website, blocking any user who appeared to be exploiting the system. “We take it very seriously because of the nature of what we do,” he said. “Every person who joins is vetted; anyone causing suspicion is banned.”
He said there was a “spectrum” of co-parenting, ranging from two fully committed parents in a platonic arrangement who shared the child in separate households to donors who had only occasional involvement.
Simon Watson, 40, is a sperm donor who has fathered more than 500 children in 15 years, and sees some regularly. “I’ve made three women pregnant in the past ten days and four more since the end of November,” he said. “The first lady couple I donated to privately I have a close relationship with and often go and see the boy, who is nine now.” With others, he takes part in birthdays and with one woman, who lives near by, he takes his own daughter along so the half-siblings can play together.
“It’s still a niche decision,” Mr Harrison said. “But it’s growing every month. There isn’t just one way of having a family any more.”
The arrangement has its critics, with Harry Benson, the research director at Marriage Foundation, saying that it is “spectacularly selfish to time-share a child like some designer appendage”. He said the child would “end up confused about their identity, attachments and relationships”.
The New Aristocracy
WHEN the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination line up on stage for their first debate in August, there may be three contenders whose fathers also ran for president. Whoever wins may face the wife of a former president next year. It is odd that a country founded on the principle of hostility to inherited status should be so tolerant of dynasties. Because America never had kings or lords, it sometimes seems less inclined to worry about signs that its elite is calcifying.
Thomas Jefferson drew a distinction between a natural aristocracy of the virtuous and talented, which was a blessing to a nation, and an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, which would slowly strangle it. Jefferson himself was a hybrid of these two types—a brilliant lawyer who inherited 11,000 acres and 135 slaves from his father-in-law—but the distinction proved durable. When the robber barons accumulated fortunes that made European princes envious, the combination of their own philanthropy, their children’s extravagance and federal trust-busting meant that Americans never discovered what it would be like to live in a country where the elite could reliably reproduce themselves.
Now they are beginning to find out, (see article), because today’s rich increasingly pass on to their children an asset that cannot be frittered away in a few nights at a casino. It is far more useful than wealth, and invulnerable to inheritance tax. It is brains.
Matches made in New Haven
Intellectual capital drives the knowledge economy, so those who have lots of it get a fat slice of the pie. And it is increasingly heritable. Far more than in previous generations, clever, successful men marry clever, successful women. Such “assortative mating” increases inequality by 25%, by one estimate, since two-degree households typically enjoy two large incomes. Power couples conceive bright children and bring them up in stable homes—only 9% of college-educated mothers who give birth each year are unmarried, compared with 61% of high-school dropouts. They stimulate them relentlessly: children of professionals hear 32m more words by the age of four than those of parents on welfare. They move to pricey neighbourhoods with good schools, spend a packet on flute lessons and pull strings to get junior into a top-notch college.
The universities that mould the American elite seek out talented recruits from all backgrounds, and clever poor children who make it to the Ivy League may have their fees waived entirely. But middle-class students have to rack up huge debts to attend college, especially if they want a post-graduate degree, which many desirable jobs now require. The link between parental income and a child’s academic success has grown stronger, as clever people become richer and splash out on their daughter’s Mandarin tutor, and education matters more than it used to, because the demand for brainpower has soared. A young college graduate earns 63% more than a high-school graduate if both work full-time—and the high-school graduate is much less likely to work at all. For those at the top of the pile, moving straight from the best universities into the best jobs, the potential rewards are greater than they have ever been.
None of this is peculiar to America, but the trend is most visible there. This is partly because the gap between rich and poor is bigger than anywhere else in the rich world—a problem Barack Obama alluded to repeatedly in his state-of-the-union address on January 20th (see article). It is also because its education system favours the well-off more than anywhere else in the rich world. Thanks to hyperlocal funding, America is one of only three advanced countries where the government spends more on schools in rich areas than in poor ones. Its university fees have risen 17 times as fast as median incomes since 1980, partly to pay for pointless bureaucracy and flashy buildings. And many universities offer “legacy” preferences, favouring the children of alumni in admissions.
Nurseries, not tumbrils
The solution is not to discourage rich people from investing in their children, but to do a lot more to help clever kids who failed to pick posh parents. The moment to start is in early childhood, when the brain is most malleable and the right kind of stimulation has the largest effect. There is no substitute for parents who talk and read to their babies, but good nurseries can help, especially for the most struggling families; and America scores poorly by international standards (see article). Improving early child care in the poorest American neighbourhoods yields returns of ten to one or more; few other government investments pay off so handsomely.
Many schools are in the grip of one of the most anti-meritocratic forces in America: the teachers’ unions, which resist any hint that good teaching should be rewarded or bad teachers fired. To fix this, and the scandal of inequitable funding, the system should become both more and less local. Per-pupil funding should be set at the state level and tilted to favour the poor. Dollars should follow pupils, through a big expansion of voucher schemes or charter schools. In this way, good schools that attract more pupils will grow; bad ones will close or be taken over. Unions and their Democratic Party allies will howl, but experiments in cities such as battered New Orleans have shown that school choice works.
Finally, America’s universities need an injection of meritocracy. Only a handful, such as Caltech, admit applicants solely on academic merit. All should. And colleges should make more effort to offer value for money. With cheaper online courses gaining momentum, traditional institutions must cut costs or perish. The state can help by demanding more transparency from universities about the return that graduates earn on their degrees.
Loosening the link between birth and success would make America richer—far too much talent is currently wasted. It might also make the nation more cohesive. If Americans suspect that the game is rigged, they may be tempted to vote for demagogues of the right or left—especially if the grown-up alternative is another Clinton or yet another Bush.
Too Much Mothering
This week one of America’s most dynamic and high-achieving intellectuals has been in Britain arguing that we need a revolution in the home and the workplace if women are to succeed on the same terms as men. While trailblazers such as Sheryl Sandberg have advised women how to adapt and thrive in a fundamentally male environment, Anne-Marie Slaughter has a different approach: it’s men and the workplace that need to change, and the key to everything is our attitude to care.
Slaughter had a high-powered job in Washington, running policy for the State Department and working away from her family for five days a week until one of her teenage sons started getting into trouble with the police and she realised that her long, inflexible hours made good mothering impossible. She resigned and returned home to Princeton University as a professor. When she wrote about her dilemma online it resonated with so many women that her piece had three million hits. Now she has written a book, Unfinished Business, saying that the answer to the work/life tension is that men and women should take joint responsibility for looking after others. We should all value work less, and caring more.
I admire Slaughter’s logic, but I don’t think this is the whole solution for women who have to manage jobs and children. The problem for parents in middle-class western culture isn’t that we don’t take caring seriously; it’s that we’ve invested it with far too much significance. We’ve turned it into a tedious, exhausting, unrewarding burden on adults.
I recently spent the day with a mother of young children. It was the end of a tiring week and she was desperate to read, talk to friends, or sleep, but she acted as the children’s devoted attendant. She sat on the floor building Lego castles, she pretended to be a train or a monster, she praised every careless scrawl they produced, she interceded every time one child hit the other or howled with rage because they couldn’t find a toy. She felt it was her duty to keep them happy, so she let them interrupt every conversation, eat whatever they demanded, dictate what they wanted to do next.
She was endlessly reasonable and soft-voiced and understanding when they snarled or sulked. Until the moment when she couldn’t bear it any longer and she snapped, yelling at them for being horrible little brats, and began sobbing in real despair. She couldn’t take it any more, she said, this endless perfect mother stuff. Well of course she couldn’t. Seduced by the current myth of the ideal parent, she hadn’t expected the children to play by themselves or resolve their own rows or to fit in with what she was doing, as a 1950s mother would have done. Instead parenting had become work, as if she was a nanny; a 14-hour exercise in falseness, acting, boredom and self-restraint.
It’s impossible expectations such as these that have driven so many of my contemporaries out of their interesting or full-time jobs over the past 20 years. Fearful about whether their children were getting enough stimulation or Kumon lessons or tutoring or violin practice, they chose to step back from challenging law, management or television production careers into freelance or less demanding jobs. They thought they were making an unselfish, noble choice for their families, and that their children would flourish as a result.
It’s proved to be much more complicated than that. Only small children need the intense attention of an adult. Older children rapidly outgrow the desire to spend all their time with a parent, frequently turning at-home mothers into anxious supplicants for their son’s or daughter’s time. Children who are always waited on can become imperious and entitled, expecting to be the centre of adult attention both at home and at school.
Worst of all, some teenagers, schooled by their parents to admire success, come to despise a parent who has little standing in the world, no life independent of the family, and who responds to their every whim. A few years ago a worn-out, onceworking mother of two expensively educated teenage boys told me that she and her friends were utterly depressed by being frequently sworn at by sons who didn’t take them seriously. “Like what?” I asked. “Like, you’re f***ing useless?”
It is this lack of respect, status and purpose that turns out to be the cruellest reward for the mothers who have retreated from work. I am surrounded by women in their fifties who are looking bleakly at their futures. Their children are skipping off to start independent lives, while the mothers haven’t the track-record to restart their early careers. Last month one told me that she had sacrificed 20 years. Now the remainder of her life looked like a wasteland. That is a terrible burden to live with or to place on a child. As a twentysomething said to me: I’d much rather my mother had missed playing pat-a-cake with me than that she had spent 40 years regretting what she did, and reminding me of it every day.
We have to free ourselves of the idea that parenting is a job. It isn’t; it’s part of life. Children want attention, but only intermittently, and not too much. What they need most is to see that the adult life they’re growing towards is happy, fulfilled and purposeful. The last thing mothers — or any parent — should do is to stunt their own potential in the delusion that it’s what their families need or want.
Siblings From Sperm Donors
Kianni Arroyo clasps 8-year-old Sophia’s hands tightly as they spin around, giggling like mad. It’s late afternoon, and there are hot dogs on the grill, bubble wands on the lawn, balls flying through the air.
The midsummer reunion in a suburb west of the city looks like any other, but these family ties can’t be described with standard labels. Instead, Arroyo, a 21-year-old waitress from Orlando, is here to meet “DNA-in-laws,” various “sister-moms” and especially people like Sophia, a cherished “donor-sibling.”
Sophia and Arroyo were both conceived with sperm from Donor #2757, a bestseller. Over the years, Donor #2757 sired at least 29 girls and 16 boys, now ages 1 to 21, living in eight states and four countries. Arroyo is on a quest to meet them all, chronicling her journey on Instagram. She has to use an Excel spreadsheet to keep them all straight.
“We have a connection. It’s hard to explain, but it’s there,” said Arroyo, an only child who is both comforted and weirded-out by her ever-expanding family tree.
Thanks to mail-away DNA tests and a proliferation of online registries, people conceived with donated sperm and eggs are increasingly connecting with their genetic relatives, forming a growing community with complex relationships and unique concerns about the U.S. fertility industry. Like Arroyo, many have discovered dozens of donor siblings, with one group approaching 200 members — enormous genetic families without precedent in modern society.
Because most donations are anonymous, the resulting children often find it almost impossible to obtain crucial information. Medical journals have documented cases in which clusters of offspring have found each other while seeking treatment for the same rare genetic disease. The news is full of nightmarish headlines about sperm donors who falsified their educational backgrounds, hid illnesses or turned out to be someone other than expected — such as a fertility clinic doctor.
And while Britain, Norway, China and other countries have passed laws limiting the number of children conceived per donor, the United States relies solely on voluntary guidelines. That has raised fears that the offspring of prolific donors could meet and fall in love without knowing they were closely related, putting their children at risk of genetic disorders.
Now the donor-conceived community is starting to demand more government regulation — so far with mixed results. Earlier this year, Washington and Vermont became the first states to require clinics to collect donors’ medical history and to disclose that information to any resulting child. Similar bills have been introduced in California and Rhode Island.
But last month, the Food and Drug Administration rejected a petition from a donor offspring group that sought to limit the number of births per donor, mandate reporting of donor-conceived births and require donors to provide post-conception medical updates. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, wrote that such oversight exceeds the FDA’s mission, which is limited to screening donors for communicable diseases. An FDA spokeswoman declined to comment further.
Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which represents most of the nation’s fertility clinics, said such proposals would have infringed on the right to privacy and to procreate, giving government “control over who has children with whom.”
“We think these decisions are best made by the families, not by activists and certainly not by the government,” Tipton said.
The lack of federal action has infuriated members of donor families such as Wendy Kramer, a Colorado woman who penned the FDA petition.
“There is no government agency that wants to step in to regulate or oversee the business of creating human beings,” said Kramer, whose son, Ryan, 28, has so far discovered 16 half siblings conceived with sperm from the same donor. “As wonderful as the connections are, there is an underbelly. ... It has really revealed how this lack of regulation has had ramifications for real families.”
Eighteen years ago, Kramer and Ryan founded what has since become the largest online site for the donor-conceived, the Donor Sibling Registry, or DSR. In simplest terms, the DSR is a matching site. People type in their donor number — an anonymous code assigned by the fertility clinic — and connect with others born from sperm or eggs from the same donor. It’s all voluntary, and contact is achieved through mutual consent.
Today, the DSR has more than 60,000 members and has helped connect about 16,000 offspring with their half siblings or donors. As the site grows, so does the potential for new connections. Ryan has discovered five “new” sisters in just the past four months.
Jennifer Moore, a 55-year-old graphic designer from Loveland, Colo., has two boys conceived with donor sperm. Through the DSR, they have connected with triplet half siblings in another part of the country.
The boys call one another “bro” and are all very athletic. They are also all “into crazy socks and hats and crazy fashion sense,” Moore said, adding: “As a parent, it has been a bizarre experience having that many clones of your children appear before your eyes.”
Their parents try to get all the half siblings together at least once a year, Moore said. Though her boys have a father, her ex-husband, she wants them to know more about their background and not wonder why they might look or act different from their parents.
“Foundationally, everyone has a right to know where they came from,” she said.
While a growing number of the donor-conceived are seeking to connect with half siblings, it can be harder to find the donors, who may not want to be found. But Internet sleuthing and the widespread availability of genetic testing is eroding the guarantee of anonymity they once enjoyed. So far, Moore’s donor has proved elusive, but she has been in contact with several of her sons’ genetic cousins, discovered on an ancestry site.
One of the most important revelations of the DSR has been to confirm the existence of prolific sperm donors — real-life versions of the Vince Vaughn character in the movie “The Delivery Man” who learns that he fathered 533 children through his donations.
Many countries set strict limits on the number of offspring a donor can sire. In Britain, it’s up to 10 families; in Netherlands, 25; in Taiwan, just one. But no such laws exist in the United States, where the American Society of Reproductive Medicine recommends limiting live births per donor to 25 per 800,000 population — about the size of San Francisco or Charlotte. In a nation of 326 million people, that works out to a staggering 10,175 possible children per donor.
Concerns about prolific donors are not theoretical. Kramer and other parents tell their kids to memorize their sperm or egg bank name and donor number, and to share that information with potential dates. She knows of a camp counselor who stumbled onto a half brother while talking with a camper. In another case, two women searching for roommates at Tulane University discovered they were half sisters.
Donor #2757
Kianni Arroyo had to work harder to meet her genetic family. The first person she found was her biological father.
Donor #2757 stands 5-foot-10 and weighs 185 pounds. He has hazel-green eyes, wavy brown hair and is descended from German, Irish and Native American stock. In his profile, he’s described as a photographer with a bachelor’s degree who likes biking, surfing and writing. He donated his sperm to pay off college student loans.
The women who chose Donor #2757 did so for various reasons. Arroyo’s mom liked his looks and his artistic background. Another woman, who would later give birth to Zac LaRocca-Stravalle, now 19, liked that he could trace his lineage to a brave military officer whose exploits were documented by historians. Rebecca, the mother of Sophia and twin Ava, thought “he seemed like someone I’d date.” (Rebecca asked that she and the twins be identified only by their first names to protect their privacy.)
Arroyo went searching for her donor’s identity in her teens and met a person active in the donor-offspring community who had somehow gotten that confidential information. She friended her donor on Facebook and contacted him shortly before her 18th birthday. They met when he was in Orlando on a business trip. She drove to his hotel and looked for a man who looked like her.
“When I found him, I didn’t know whether to hug him or shake his hand or not touch him at all. It was really awkward,” Arroyo recalled. “But then he kind of opened his arms into a hug and accepted me. It was kind of relieving.”
Donor #2757 told her he was still working as a photographer, that he was single and that he had no children of his own. Through Arroyo, he declined to be interviewed or identified, citing privacy concerns.
About a year later, the donor connected Arroyo with her first half sibling: JoAnna Alaia, 20, of Tampa, who works in business administration. She’s a twin, but her twin was not interested in meeting with Arroyo. So the two women rendezvoused near the highway, drove all night, got pulled over for speeding, and met with Donor #2757 the next day in his hometown.
Since then, their sibling group has mushroomed. Arroyo has discovered seven half siblings in Florida and seven more in New York, five in Massachusetts and four in Georgia. Because American sperm is sold widely overseas, she has also found half siblings in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
So far, Arroyo is the oldest, but not by much. There are 10 other 20-somethings. Then there seems to be a decade-long gap before another batch of half siblings arrived, children now in elementary school.
This summer, Arroyo’s vacation plans revolved around meeting her donor siblings. She, Sophia and Ava spent a few days on Cape Cod with a 9-year-old half sister from New York. Then they hosted a cookout in the Boston area for the Massachusetts-based families.
Five of Arroyo’s half siblings were at the reunion: Sophia and Ava, LaRocca-Stravalle and another set of twins, Addeline and Vivianna Juliani, age 8. Everyone noted the family resemblance: The laid-back, sporty kids all had wide smiles and prominent dimples on their right cheeks.
Kristen Juliani, one of the twins’ two mothers, recounted how a sperm bank sales person had recommended Donor #2757 as a “model” donor. She was not thrilled to learn that her donor was so popular.
“I don’t feel great about it,” she said. “There should be a cap on sales.”
Arroyo has mixed feelings, too. While every visit with her half siblings has been a blast, she finds it “worrying” that sperm banks permit so many children to be born from a single donor.
“Every time I find a new sibling,” she said, “I get anxiety and think to myself: When is it going to end?”
A few days before she left the reunion, Arroyo got a message from yet another half sister. Rylie Hager, 19, is a sophomore studying sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia. Arroyo invited her to join a group of half siblings who planned to meet Donor #2757 in mid-August. The first night, they went bowling, and Hager noted that three of the girls were wearing the same outfit: gray tank tops and shorts.
“It’s all really crazy,” she said. “These people are strangers, but because I’m related to them, they have all kind of accepted me.”
Hager said when she first found out about the size of her group of half siblings, she sent an alarmed text to her mom. “Is that exciting to you, or terrifying?” her mom asked.