On a recent shopping trip to Marshalls, Colleen Weston decided to skip the parenting advice about teaching kids life lessons at every opportunity. Instead of explaining to her son why he couldn’t have a toy that day, which surely would have triggered a tantrum, she took the easy way out: She lied.

“My son, who’s 3, started to fuss about wanting a toy, some gladiator or Transformers man I wasn’t going to waste my money on,” Weston, 35, a Middletown, Conn., mother of two, recalls. “I told him, ‘That’s for 8-year-olds. The checkout clerk won’t allow you to have it. You’re too young.’”

In effect, she told her tot that he’d be carded at the toy counter — and he believed it. “Weak, I know,” says Weston. “But we got out of Marshalls with only what we needed and no fit.”

No meltdown. No embarrassed, distraught mother. No problem?

Child experts say the old advice about honesty being the best policy generally still holds — though not necessarily always. An occasional little white lie such as Weston’s probably won’t cause any lasting damage. And at times, telling the truth — particularly the whole truth to a child who’s not at an age to handle it — may do more harm than good, they say.

“It depends what you’re lying about,” says Victoria Talwar, a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal who studies children and lying. “The answer in many cases is that lies are not necessary.”

But Talwar doesn’t knock parents like Weston who, in moments of desperation, sometimes resort to a little white lie — as long as it’s not the parent’s standard MO.

Weston doesn’t see the harm in an occasional white lie for a good reason: “If you buy into Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, what’s another here and there?”

The risk with too many lies, though, is that over time they can erode the trust a child, particularly a perceptive teen, has in a parent, Talwar cautions. And serious untruths, such as not disclosing an adoption, for instance, can be devastating. “We really feel betrayed when someone lies to us, especially someone close to us,” she says.

Teaching fibs

Talwar has observed that kids as young as ages 3 or 4 can detect when someone is lying to them. This is also the age when children start lying themselves, and the more they’re exposed to it, the more likely they are to model it.

“They’re definitely influenced by their parents,” she says. “If the parents’ lie, the kids will pick that up more as a strategy. They learn it as a way to manipulate and get what they want or conceal things they want to get out of.”

In some cases where it might be considered socially appropriate and even polite to tell a lie, such as when receiving a disappointing gift or being served an unsavory meal, parents may actually encourage kids to lie — and kids generally do as they’re told, Talwar says. In a study published last year in the International Journal of Behavioral Development, she and her colleagues observed how more than 300 children ages 3 to 11 responded after receiving a wrapped up bar of plain white soap instead of an expected cool toy. Kids were more likely to lie to the gift-giver and say they liked the gift when parents encouraged them to lie than when parents didn’t coach them at all.

In more serious circumstances, such as the death of a relative or even a pet, young children cannot always process all the unpleasant details of the truth, Talwar and other experts say.

At these times, “parents have to weigh the risks and the benefits” of telling the truth and how much of it, says Dr. William Coleman, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics and a professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

A young child, for instance, could be deeply troubled by knowing that a relative or beloved pet was buried in the ground or cremated, he explains, so what’s the point in divulging those details?

That doggie farm in the sky

When Eileen Neuwirth’s dog died several months ago, she and her husband told their preschooler that the dog went to heaven. In hindsight, though, she wishes she’d told her son the classic white lie about the dog going off to a big farm to live happily ever after frolicking with the other animals.

“The idea of heaven really weighs on his mind and he is constantly asking about it,” says Neuwirth, 32, who lives in the Los Angeles area. “I think that the notion is too abstract for him but he gets it enough for it to make him insecure. … He tells me all of the time that when I go to heaven he will be so mad that he will knock all of his toys and our whole house down. It’s so sweet and heartbreaking because I can see the anxiety in his face when he thinks about it.”

After an elderly neighbor died, Neuwirth tried to use the occasion to explain to her son, who’s 3, that people — and dogs — usually die and go to heaven when they get really old, like the neighbor and their dog. But it doesn’t seem to have helped. “Again, it was too much info,” she says.

Neuwirth says all the parenting advice she heard and read about prompted her to be true to her beliefs. But her own experience hearing the farm story from her mother when she was 7 and her dog died showed her that sometimes honesty may not be the best approach. “It wasn’t until my sisters and I were in our teens that we all figured out what had really happened,” she remembers. “I feel that her white lie spared us all from the anxiety and trauma we likely would have felt had she told us the truth.”

Snowballing tales

The risk of telling the farm story, though, is that the child may then endlessly ask to go visit the dog on the farm and wonder why he can’t, says Talwar. “The problem with telling a lie is it’s not always as easy as you think.”

Lies have the potential to snowball and cause more problems, she notes. One of her colleagues, for instance, decided to replace a child’s dead hamster rather than explaining that it died. But the new model was thinner, leading to more lies about how the animal went on a diet while the child was away on a day trip, and on and on.

Every situation and every child are different, and there aren’t always simple solutions, says Jonathan Pochyly, a psychologist at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago who specializes in anxiety disorders and counsels youngsters who are grappling with issues such as moving, divorce, and death or illness in the family.

He recommends that parents ask themselves how much they think their particular child can handle. “Stop and think before sharing something questionable,” he says.

In many cases, Pochyly says, a simple response might suffice, and the parents won’t need to lie at all. If grandma has cancer, for instance, parents can say, “She’s sick and she’s being taken care of.” If the family is having financial troubles and the mortgage company keeps calling, parents can say, “Mommy and Daddy are taking care of that.”

As a mother and stepmother of four children, ages 6 to 22, Nancy Helton says she firmly believes in telling her kids the truth, though she acknowledges this isn’t always easy, particularly as they get older. Sometimes she’ll even delay answering one of her kids until she’s had time to think over what she’ll say so that her response is honest, informed and, for things of a sensitive nature, delicate.

“I believe a large part of building trust is to be there for them and to shoot straight with them whenever possible,” Helton, 46, of Leawood, Kan., says. “I know that I trust people who are honest and forthcoming so I have to assume if I operate this way, then my kids, too, will know it.”

Occasionally, though, she might stretch the truth, just a tad. “When my [8-year-old] son asks if his hair looks good when he has a bit of a bed head, I say he looks more handsome than anyone. Again, not a lie, because when I look at his ruffled hair and his expression as he asks the question, there is not a more handsome one in the world!”

Source: Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/id/146283/page/1

On the face of it, Luke Burton is a shining example of how someone from an economically disadvantaged background can succeed in education. His mum at one time was working in a chip shop and doing three other jobs to make ends meet, he didn’t go to a high achieving school and, by his own admission, he messed around in class more than he should have done.
Yet at 24 he is training to be an actuary with a big firm in London, has a maths degree from Oxford and an MA - the first graduate in his family. Why is it that some young people seem inoculated against less advantaged beginnings while others don’t? New UK and US studies are pointing the finger ever more clearly at particular kinds of parenting and home environments that do the trick. But the big money still doesn’t go into parenting education, despite research that proves it can be an enormous force for change. Yet stark facts suggest more finance for parenting education would be money well spent.

Attainment gap

Sizeable gaps in school readiness exist in the UK despite universal nursery education for three- and four-year-olds; in the US half the eventual gap in attainment between children from less advantaged and more advantaged homes exists when the child starts school. Here a bright but poor child can be overtaken in test results by a less bright child from an affluent home by age seven.

In England, poor children among the top performers in tests at 11 are much more likely to have lost that critical advantage by the time they take their GCSEs. All the money Labour has poured into the education system since 1997 has failed to increase the tiny numbers of young people from the lowest socio-economic groups getting into university. So why do Burton and others like him do so well?

Scratch the surface of Burton’s “disadvantage” and you soon start to see answers. He comes from Clevedon in Somerset and is the eldest of three. His father was a mechanic and his parents split up when he was small. Money was tight. His mum, Wendy Doig, had gone to what she describes as a “rubbish school - a Grange Hill type of school” where the idea of university was never considered, and she was seen as “posh” as she went on to work in an office rather than get pregnant or work in the local sausage factory.

But she chose to do part-time jobs rather than work full-time because she wanted to be in when the children came home from school. She also wanted money to pay for the Montessori nursery a friend told her was good. For Burton she feels that was a turning point. “Of all my children he was the most difficult to steer. It worried me how determined he was. I thought he was going to do something brilliant or terrible. I could see his strengths and the potential for disaster.

“I spent a lot of my time trying to find things to interest Luke. His playgroup lacked structure and it made him hyperactive. Joining Montessori was pretty key. That’s when the maths got off the ground.”

Burton remembers a male primary school teacher who told him he had potential and to stop mucking around. He remembers parents proud when he did well but who didn’t put him under pressure. He found it harder to respect teachers once he got to secondary school because there was less time to build relationships with them, but he does remember a maths teacher who took it as a given that he was going to university.

Burton’s mum remarried when he was 11, so he went to live with his dad for more freedom. His stepfather’s mother spotted a newspaper story about the Sutton Trust summer school at Oxford University for youngsters from families with no tradition of university. It was held at Magdalen College. “I thought: ‘This is quite nice. I’d like to come here.’ I didn’t know what other universities were like so it was not a big deal. It didn’t cross my mind that I wouldn’t get in once I’d decided to go.”

Doig says her own parents had been easy and supportive but she also read books on parenting to help her when the children were small.

Home learning

And it is that mindful attention to parenting style and home learning which is shown to be vital in a spin-off study from Europe’s largest piece of longitudinal research in this area - Effective Provision of Preschool Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) - which for more than 10 years has been following the educational development of 3,000 children from the age of three for the government .

The study has proved that high-quality preschool can ameliorate the effects of social disadvantage and break the cycle of deprivation, but it needs to be coupled with a good home-learning environment.

This is backed by unpublished research carried out for the Equalities Review by Iram Siraj-Blatchford, professor of early childhood education at the Institute of Education in London and a principal investigator for EPPSE, with 24 of the families whose children were succeeding against the odds in their education. Half were on free school meals, more than half were living with a lone parent, and four out of five were living in deprived areas.

In-depth interviews uncovered strong evidence of an adult or adults in the child’s life taking parenting seriously and valuing education either in the immediate or wider family or the child’s wider community, such as a religious community.

She believes the shift towards sending reading books home with children, which began in earnest in the 1980s, may be having an effect now those children are parents. In the interviews, it is clear that parents and their children think success at school is down to working hard and concentrating on what is said in class; when they hit difficulties they are not deterred. By contrast, the children from poor home-learning environments put school success down to ability and feel helpless in the face of lessons they find hard.

The crucial importance of the home is also pointed out by a new study, which has documented income related gaps in areas such as literacy, numeracy and behaviour. It shows between one-third and half of these differences are the result of parenting style and home-learning environment. But it is a particular kind of parenting, described as “sensitive and responsive”, that works.

The research is based on data from 19,000 UK and 10,000 US children born in 2000 and 2001 analysed by Jane Waldfogel, professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University in New York, and Liz Washbrook, a research associate at Bristol University’s Centre for Market and Public Organisation on secondment to Columbia. The analysis was delivered to a private summit on social mobility and education policy organised by the Sutton Trust and the Carnegie Foundation in New York in June. Ed Miliband, minister for the Cabinet Office, who leads the government’s efforts to tackle social exclusion, was one of the leading politicians and education figures who attended.

Detailed observation of children in the US part of the study found parenting style having the biggest impact on school readiness gaps between low-income and middle-income children, accounting for 19% of the gap in maths, 21% of the literacy gap and a massive third of the gap in language. Sensitive and responsive parenting had the biggest positive effect. Observational data was not available from the UK.

Waldfogel says sensitive and responsive parents are able to provide “warm, supportive and nurturing parenting” and can respond to a child’s changing needs. Experience of parenting received as a child may affect responses to your children as may personal temperament and stress, she says.

Parenting programmes can and do help. Sure Start has been found to improve effective parenting and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) announced last week that it was extending the pilot of the Family Nurse Partnership, which works with vulnerable young women expecting their first child. Early signs suggest improved aspirations among the mothers after an intensive visiting programme from nurses who work with them from pregnancy until the child’s second birthday, advising on healthier lifestyles, baby and childcare, and planning life goals.

Positive changes

Another successful and rapidly spreading UK scheme is the Peers Early Education Partnership (Peep), which has been proved to boost cognition and self esteem in pre-school children by promoting parents’ and carers’ awareness of very early learning and development, and supporting adults in their relationships with the children.

Peep programmes are delivered mainly in children’s centres but are gradually being taken direct to vulnerable parents in their homes. But the programme remains a charity rather than mainstream provision. The government is spending £1bn on its ambitious 10-year Children’s Plan to ensure a better deal for children - including making sure 90% of them are ready to learn when they go to school - but education in providing a good home-learning environment currently doesn’t figure in it.

Last week it was revealed that an 18-month government initiative aimed at helping parents of young children from disadvantaged families become effective supporters of their children as learners was successful in making positive changes to parents’ behaviour. The Early Learning Partnership Programme, funded by the DCSF and undertaken by researchers from Oxford University’s departments of education and social policy and social work, aimed to support parents in socially disadvantaged areas across England.

It brought together the main agencies in the voluntary sector working with the parents of children aged between one and three but, because it was only funded for 18 months, it could not show whether it made differences to children’s long-term learning.

One good piece of news came last week when the DCSF announced £12m in backing for the Centre for Excellence and Outcomes in Children and Young People’s Services, which will gather and analyse information about what works in tackling a range of issues linked to child wellbeing.

This kind of work can’t come a moment too soon. Parenting is harder to influence, but without it good pre-schools and schools can only go so far - and it could take decades for the most disadvantaged to catch up.

Parental dos and don’ts

Sensitive and responsive parenting is about tuning into what your child needs from moment to moment, and adapting your behaviour.

Your child gets a new toy
Do watch how the child responds to the toy and let him/her explore it alone if he/she seems to want to
Don’t automatically show your child how it all works

A father bounces a child on his knee to cheer her up
Do watch for cues that the child is enjoying herself
Don’t carry on if the child cries. Think about what else she might need and experiment with meeting those needs, for example feeding or cuddling

Source: guardian.co.uk, UK
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2290865,00.html

Too many parents have the wrong approach when raising their children.

That’s according to sociologist and youth minister Jim Hancock, who says parents should not raise children. They should raise adults.

“Our task has often been defined as raising children and ultimately that’s what we’ve ended up with - adult-aged children who don’t feel very well prepared for life in the real world,” Hancock said. ” I think if we were to shift our emphasis to raising adults, everybody is happier.”

In his book, Raising Adults: A Humane Guide to Parenting in the New World, Hancock explains that the main difference between raising children and raising adults is summed up in a key word from the recent Fourth of July holiday: independence.

“It begins with the notion that I do not want to be a daddy forever,” Hancock said. “It starts with getting them away from being dependent on us. A lot of it has to do with how we interact with them around problem solving.”

Hancock emphasizes that his parenting philosophy is not based on permissiveness. He fully agrees that parents need to set guidelines and apply discipline.

If a child forgets to pack a lunch or bring along lunch money, the child will be hungry that day. But Hancock says the child probably will not forget to prepare for lunch again.

“We have almost no record of children starving from one missed lunch on the North American continent,” Hancock said, adding that in this context, parents let their children forget or make a mistake so they can learn a skill that increases their likelihood of becoming a responsible adult.

Hancock tells the story of a woman who skipped a business meeting in order to take her adolescent son’s homework to him at school. “I thought, ‘how long has she been doing that?’ Probably since he was 6 years old, and he’s learned to depend upon her for those kinds of details. He will be very angry with her one day when she takes a vacation or dies and he’s left without his homework.”

Not to mention when he’s 32 and the boss needs the memo, and his mother is not there to bring the document to him.

In his free, online book, Ten Things We Should Never Say to Kids, Hancock tempers this advice by suggesting that parents should never say to their children, “You can do anything you set your mind to.”

“That’s the kind of wishful thinking that leaves kids not quite trusting us,” Hancock explained. “We have blown smoke at them instead of talking about goal setting and hard work and dedication. The setting of one’s mind on something does not equal success.

“If you think you can’t, you won’t. If you think you can, you might.”

And if you think you can implement these parenting philosophies, you just might raise a well-adjusted adult instead of raising a child.

Source: Warrick Publishing, IN
http://www.tristate-media.com/articles/2008/07/11/warricknews/editorial/03parents.txt

Parents’ general approach to raising their children is often apparent in how they manage their kids’ diets — suggesting that efforts to control childhood obesity need to consider family dynamics, according to researchers.

In between these two groups, the researchers found, were “authoritative” parents. These parents set limits on their children’s diets, but often used more positive approaches — like following a healthy diet themselves — to get their kids to eat well.

The findings show that parents’ general styles are important in their children’s diets, according to Dr. Laura Hubbs-Tait and colleagues at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

They also suggest that efforts to help obese children lose weight are “not likely to be successful” unless the underlying family dynamics are addressed, the researchers report in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

In general, experts recommend that parents use positive approaches to get their children to eat right — by setting a good example with their own diets, for example.

But in this study, both the strict and permissive parents typically failed to serve as good dietary role models for their children.

“Due to the infrequency of healthy eating modeled by both permissive and authoritarian parents,” the researchers write, “food and nutrition professionals might encourage both to begin more healthy eating — for the sake of their own health and that of their children.”

A lack of attention to family dynamics may help explain why child obesity treatment is often less than successful, according to Hubbs-Tait and her colleagues.

“Food and nutrition professionals who are implementing dietary change or obesity treatment programs need to include more complex approaches to behavioral change that include parenting styles and family dynamics,” they conclude.

Source: Reuters
http://tinyurl.com/5vwx95

I can’t believe what I just read. We are going to spend millions for our teachers to teach our children how to be lazier.

The question was, “How do you solve the turkey problem if you are a third grader who doesn’t know how to multiply?”

If the kids are really supposed to stretch their math muscles, you teach them the multiplication tables in the second grade. Are our children as smart as we were? A teacher told me they are not. They sit in the classroom and will not listen, will not work, and will not try. This is not a learning problem, this is a parental problem.

Out with the rules, in with the real world. That’s the problem to begin with. We have become so lax in our parenting that we are developing generations of lazy, unproductive, overindulged children. Their parents grew up the same way. They only learn what is fun for them. They can tell you all the words to every song on their Ipod but they can’t remember 5 X 5 = 25. They can’t spell because they use text message lingo and everyone accepts that. Parents, teachers and society do not demand excellence from an early age, so the children don’t demand of themselves.

There are too many parents who think children will learn by osmosis. They are so self-absorbed with themselves and by life outside the home they don’t see or care what happens inside.

On the other hand, there are caring parents who teach their children self-control, the importance of learning and how to work for something they want. There are good teachers who have their hands tied when they try to teach excellence. Many are getting discouraged and changing their profession.

And there are children out there who put forth the effort to learn and apply it to a productive life. They are the ones I hope will become the teachers and leaders of tomorrow. The rest will be draining our welfare system forever.

There are some special-needs children who require special learning skills. They deserve all the help we can give them. However, we are raising generations of “special needs” children because parents are neglectful, society accepts mediocrity and school boards look for expensive ways and new fads to educate rather than teach the basics.

5 X 5 equaled 25 in 1930 and in 1960, and it still does in 2008. New Math didn’t work in the 60s and it will not work now. Stop wasting our tax dollars.

I cannot support the school board anymore until they start coming up with ideas that make sense. My vote will be “no,” until they get back to teaching basic principles and build from there.

Source: Idaho Press-Tribune, ID
http://www.idahopress.com/?id=11471

Parents’ interactions with their baby during the first year of life can predict the odds of behaviour problems later on — as can the baby’s natural temperament, research suggests.

The study, which followed nearly 1,900 children from infancy up to age 13, found that children whose mothers gave them plenty of intellectual stimulation in the first year of life — reading to them, talking to them and taking them out of the house — were less likely to have serious behavioural problems.

At the same time, the odds of behaviour problems were also linked to certain measures of the children’s temperament during infancy — such as how “fussy” they were, or whether they had a generally happy or more moody disposition.

The findings suggest that both early parenting style and infant temperament are strong predictors of future behaviour, the researchers conclude in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology.

The findings also point to the potential benefits of teaching new parents the skills they need, according to the investigators, led by Dr. Benjamin B. Lahey of the University of Chicago.

“The current findings are consistent with the hypothesis that interventions focusing on parenting during the first year of life would be beneficial in preventing future child conduct problems,” the researchers write.

The study involved 1,863 U.S. children and their mothers. When the children were infants, researchers visited their homes and observed their mothers’ interactions with them. Mothers were also interviewed about their babies’ typical temperament.

Overall, Lahey’s team found, babies who were often fussy or had unpredictable behaviour patterns — being hungry or tired at different times each day, for instance — were more likely to have behaviour problems later in childhood.

These problems included things like acting out or cheating at school, lying, bullying other children or disobeying their parents.

In contrast, children who were less fussy and had predictable moods as infants were at “very low risk” of future conduct problems, the researchers report.

A similarly low risk was seen among children whose mothers had provided them with plenty of intellectual stimulation in infancy — by reading to them or taking them out of the house regularly, for instance.

But stimulating activities during infancy might also allow facilitate language development — which makes it easier for children to communicate and socialize.

As for early-life temperament and childhood behaviour, it’s known that both are to some degree determined by genetics, Lahey and his colleagues note.

However, the researchers conclude, “much remains to be learned about the mechanisms through which infant temperament, parenting during infancy, and later conduct problems are related.”

Source: Canada.com, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/5bpqn8

As they get more involved, dads may face even more challenges than women in balancing work and family.

Women aren’t the only ones having a rough go of it in Europe. Men, these days, are embracing fatherhood with the round-the-clock involvement their partners have always dreamed of– changing diapers, handling night feedings, packing lunches and bandaging knees. The time British dads spend with their kids has risen eightfold over the last 30 years. Today, 79 percent say they’d be happy to stay at home and 9 out of 10 say they’re as confident as their partners in looking after the kids. “These dads are going to be guide and a mentor in a much more visible way than their own fathers were,” says Armin A. Brott, author of “Fathering Your Toddler.”

That’s good news for Europe, whose economic future depends on a rising birthrate. Studies show that women with involved partners are more inclined to have more than one child. To tempt moms back to work, governments are also putting in place more policies to help dads take time off. Britain, for instance, announced recently that fathers would be entitled to up to six months of paternity leave. In Germany, companies are required by law to give all employees up to three years parental leave and guarantee their jobs on return.

But all these devoted dads may have a harder time with the same issues women have faced for decades: namely, how to balance work and family. “There’s a constant feeling of guilt,” says Robin Mungrah, a 37-year-old London accountant with two children. “No matter how early I leave work or how often I take the kids to Legoland on the weekends, it never seems like enough.” Unlike women, many find they’re negotiating their new roles with little support or information. “Men in my generation [25-40] have a fear of becoming dads because we have no role models,” says Jon Smith, author of “The Bloke’s Guide to Pregnancy.” They often find themselves excluded from mothers’ support networks, and are eyed warily on the playground.

The challenge is particularly evident in the workplace. There, men are still expected to be breadwinners climbing the corporate ladder; tradition-minded bosses are often unsympathetic to family needs. In Denmark most new fathers only take two weeks of paternity leave–even though they are allowed 34. As much if not more so than women, fathers struggle to be taken seriously when they request flexible arrangements. Though Wilfried-Fritz Maring, 54, a data-bank and Internet specialist with German firm FIZ Karlsruhe, feels that the time he spends with his daughter outweighs any disadvantages, he admits, “With my decision to work from home I dismissed any opportunity for promotion.”

Mind-sets are changing gradually. When Maring had a daughter, the company equipped him with a home office and allowed him to choose a job that could be performed from there. Danish telecom company TDC initiated an internal campaign last year to encourage dads to take paternity leave; 97 percent now do. “When an employee goes on paternity leave and is with his kids, he gets a new kind of training: in how to keep cool under stress,” says spokesperson Christine Eiberg Holm. For a new generation of dads, kids may come before the company–but it’s a shift that benefits both.

Source: Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/id/56905

In the cover story of this week’s New York Times Magazine, Russell Shorto seeks to explain falling fertility rates in Europe. He argues that the combination of a modern economy and traditionalist society tends to produce extremely low birth rates; I agree with him, and argued as much in reason’s July cover story. But I don’t think this conclusion, which he appears to endorse, is quite justified:

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. [Sociologist Arnstein] Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

By this logic, the worst sort of system is one that partly buys into the modern world — expanding educational and employment opportunities for women — but keeps its traditional mind-set. This would seem to define the demographic crisis that Italy, Spain and Greece find themselves in — and, perhaps, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other parts of the world.

By “flexibility,” Aassve means a flexible labor market. Women are less fearful of dropping out of the workforce for a while if they know they can jump back in, and labor markets in the United States allow them to do just that. By “generosity,” he means social benefits like mandatory maternity and paternity leave, monthly payments to parents, free daycare, and other pronatalist incentives.

This strikes me as an elaborate attempt to establish causation between Scandinavian social welfare schemes and high total fertility rates. As developed nations with unusually high birth rates, what distinguishes the United States and Sweden is less important than what they share, and what they share are relatively liberalized gender norms. The relevant divide is not over the provision of lavish benefits or the flexibility of the labor markets, but over the traditionalism and stigmatization Aassve mentions as an afterthought. In the United States, as in Nordic countries, working shortly after bearing children is less frowned upon than it is in Southern Europe and Asia. Women feel less pressured to choose between education and motherhood, and frequently choose both. Unsurprisingly, men in Southern Europe and Asia are less likely to help with housework or child care. Here is how Bruce Sacerdote and James Feyrer put it in a recent NBER study on the relationship between household status and fertility:

We believe that changes in the status of women are driving fertility change. At low levels of female status, women specialize in household production and fertility is high. In an intermediate phase, women have increasing opportunities to earn a living outside the home yet still shoulder the bulk of household production. Fertility is at a minimum in this regime due to the increased opportunity cost in women’s foregone wages with no decrease in time allocated to childcare. We see the lowest fertility nations (Japan, Spain, Italy) as being in this regime. At even higher levels of women’s status, men begin to share in the burden of child care at home and fertility is higher than in the middle regime. This progression has been observed in the US, Sweden and other countries.

While it’s plausible that the government can help liberalize norms by subsidizing daycare and supporting working women, it’s important not to conflate social acceptance with government incentives. You cannot simply start throwing benefits at a socially conservative society and wait for babies; were this an effective strategy, we would be seeing a lot more tiny Singaporeans. Pro-natalist incentives (which should probably be distinguished from an all-encompassing welfare state) may have a very small effect on birth rates, but the sudden, small increases demographers see may just reflect a difference in the timing of births. In other words, natalist incentives may encourage women to have the same number of kids today rather than tomorrow.

The end of the Times Magazine piece includes a fantastic discussion of creative ways to manage shrinking cities, which is as relevant here as in the population-stable U.S. as well. We move around; cities shrink; but politicians continue to nurse embarrassing delusions of bringing Buffalo back. Why not learn to decline gracefully?

Source: Reason Online, CA
http://reason.com/blog/show/127268.html

Work and family are organically linked by the people who split their days between home and workplace. Inevitably, there are conflicts between these two worlds, and the way we manage those conflicts determines the health of our society.

When faced with a conflict between work and family responsibilities, the majority of Canadian employees put work first, according to Linda Duxbury, business professor at Carleton University. They also strive to meet their family commitments, with the result that the employees themselves can become the victim of burnout and depression. The Globe and Mail series on mental health last week provided vivid personal histories of some of the victims.

Some of the most “toxic” working conditions affect professionals who serve the public – nurses, doctors, teachers, police, military and public service executives - according to Bill Wilkerson, chair of the Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health.

And Dr. Duxbury’s study of 6,400 employees working for large employers from business and the government shows that work-life conflict is affecting more people every year – rising from 47 per cent of the work force in 1991 to 58 per cent in 2001.

People are working longer hours, they are coping with email messages into the night and early in the morning, and some are off-shifting so one parent can be at home while the other works. What gets squeezed out is sleep.

The main indicators of distress are rising absenteeism and increasing costs of disability leave, with about 40 per cent of disability claims generated by depression. Other indicators relate to the health of the children and the number of adults who are limiting family size or deciding not to have children because of the pressures of work.

Doug Willms, Canada Research Chair at the University of New Brunswick and author of Vulnerable Children, says that 28.6 per cent of Canadian children exhibit cognitive or behavioural problems that mean they are not ready to learn at age 6. Children living in low-income households are more likely to be vulnerable, but, overall, 60 per cent of vulnerable children are not living in poor homes, and many live in well-to-do homes.

Why would children in well-to-do families experience these problems?

“What matters most is the kind of family environment a child lives in: the benefits of good parenting skills, a cohesive family unit and parents with good mental health far outweigh the negative effects associated with poverty,” Dr. Willms says.

How then, as a society, do we support men and women to be the best they can be in the world of work and in the home? Barack Obama, in his instantly famous Father’s Day Speech, started from the proposition that family is the most important rock on which we build our lives.

We need families to raise our children, Mr. Obama said. Only families can set the standard of excellence, pass along the value of empathy, and give the gift of hope – hope that something better is waiting for us if we’re willing to work hard for it.

Much of his speech focused on the personal responsibility of fathers, but, he said, “if fathers (and mothers) are doing their part, then our government should meet them half way.”

So, too, should employers. In a recent Health Canada publication – Reducing Work-Life Conflict: What Works? What Doesn’t? –Dr. Duxbury gives two reasons why having family-friendly policies on the books is not enough: the policies are not being applied effectively; and many employees fear repercussions if they ask for help.

There are two concrete things for employers to do to meet employees half way: Give employees a greater sense of control over their hours of work and their work schedule. Clear criteria should be agreed and transparent, the process for changing work hours should be flexible, and there should be mutual accountability.

Increase the number of supportive managers within the organization – managers who make work expectations clear, plan the work to be done, and openly discuss decisions that affect the employee’s work.

As for Canadian governments, there are four priorities: Ensure that people who work full time can earn a living wage by consistently adjusting minimum wages to reflect inflation and by expanding the Working Income Tax Benefit introduced in the last budget.

Expand access to affordable early childhood education by offering day-long junior and senior kindergarten, expanding child care spaces for children who are 3 and under, and making access to maternity and parental leave universal. (Only 2 in 3 working women are eligible under current EI rules.) Expand after-school options for recreation, the arts and homework clubs.

Ensure that every neighbourhood has a resource centre to support parents and healthy child development.

In acknowledging the organic links between work and family, employers and governments give parents choices about when they work, about giving their children a good start in life, and even about how many children to have.

In any aging society, we want every adult to be able to work to their potential, and every one of their children to be ready, willing and able to be a great parent as well as a great worker.

Source: Globe and Mail, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/5jhhx2

We must acquire a license to become a driver, a lawyer or a doctor, but should we pass certain exams to become parents? The result of a parents’ test conducted by a kindergarten in Zhejiang Province shows that the answer is ‘yes.’

“Parenting is probably the hardest job in the world. You never know which of your minor deeds will affect your children in their future lives,” Cheng Yanqing, head of the kindergarten, says.

In early June, parents of the kindergartners sat the parenting exam. Twenty percent failed the trial, according to the Zhejiang-based Qianjiang Evening News.

No one is born with the techniques to be a successful parent, so you have to learn, Cheng says. “This is the message we want to send to parents through the exam.”

The exam tests parents’ knowledge on raising and educating children. It includes questions like “How many hours of sleep do children need at different ages?” “Which foods contain nutrients that children need for their growth?” and “How does one deal with a child’s rebellious behavior?”

“The test rang the alarm for me, so I have to study more scientific ways of educating my child,” Zhu Songjun, the mother of a senior student in the kindergarten, says.

The kindergarten presented parents who passed the exam with a framed license, and plans to hold the exam regularly to refresh the parents’ skills.

Parenting licenses are nothing new in China, or even worldwide. Reports say that Austria is planning to give qualified couples government-issued parenting licenses. Licensed parents will enjoy preferential policies. For instance, the licensed parent can get custody of the child if the couple files for a divorce.

Many Chinese cities, such as Xiamen, Chengdu, and Nanning have also tried to give out certificates in recognition of successful parents.

Source: China Daily, China
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-06/23/content_6786851.htm