Starting Points: family

Showing posts with label family. Show all posts

Apr 6, 2010

Surprisingly, Family Time Has Grown - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

Working parents perpetually agonize that they don’t see enough of their children. But a surprising new study finds that mothers and fathers alike are doing a better job than they think, spending far more time with their families than did parents of earlier generations.

The study, by two economists at the University of California, San Diego, analyzes a dozen surveys of how Americans say they use their time, taken at different periods from 1965 to 2007. It reports that the amount of child care time spent by parents at all income levels — and especially those with a college education — has risen “dramatically” since the mid-1990s. (The findings by the husband-and-wife economist team of Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey appear in a discussion paper presented in March at a Brookings Institution conference in Washington.)

Before 1995, mothers spent an average of about 12 hours a week attending to the needs of their children. By 2007, that number had risen to 21.2 hours a week for college-educated women and 15.9 hours for those with less education.

Although mothers still do most of the parenting, fathers also registered striking gains: to 9.6 hours a week for college-educated men, more than double the pre-1995 rate of 4.5 hours; and to 6.8 hours for other men, up from 3.7, according to an additional analysis by Betsey Stevenson and Dan Sacks, economists at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Family researchers say the news should offer relief to guilt-stricken working parents.

“Parents are feeling like they don’t have enough time with their children,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, which conducts research on the work force. “It’s a function of people working so hard, and they are worried they’re shortchanging their children. I’ve never found a group of parents who believe they are spending enough time with their kids.”

Although previous studies have shown increases in parenting time starting in the 1990s, the study by the Rameys is important because it links so many time-use surveys and also breaks the data down by age of the child and education level.

The rise in child-centered time is just one of the ways the American family is changing. Couples are typically waiting longer to get married and begin having children. Divorce rates are dropping with each generation.

And notably, children are no longer so widely viewed as essential to a happy marriage. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans said that children were “very important” to a successful marriage, but by 2007, the number of adults who agreed with that statement had dropped to 41 percent, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

In fact, the surge in parenting time may say more about modern marriage than about modern child care practices, Dr. Stevenson said. She notes that among college-educated parents, two- to two-and-a-half hours of the increased time takes place when both parents are together. “Everybody gets in the car,” she said, “and mom and dad both cheer on the kid.”

That may reflect a rise in what Dr. Stevenson calls the “hedonic marriage,” in which couples share home and work responsibilities so they can spend more time together.

By contrast, couples from earlier generations typically had “specialized” roles that tended to keep them apart — the husband working at a job to support the family, the wife staying home to raise the children.

“We’re seeing a rise in marriages where we’re picking people we like to do activities with,” Dr. Stevenson said. “So it’s not surprising we’re going to see that some of the activities we want do together involve our children.”

So where is the extra time coming from? Women, in particular, are spending less time cooking and cleaning their homes, while men are putting in fewer hours at the office. A 2007 report in The Quarterly Journal of Economics showed that leisure time among men and women surged four to eight hours a week from 1965 to 2003.

Notably, the data in the Ramey study do not count the hours mothers and fathers spend “around” their children — at the dinner table, for example, or in solitary play. Instead, the survey tracks specific activities in which the parent is directly involved in the child’s care.

“It’s taking them to school, helping with homework, bathing them, playing catch with them in the back yard,” said a co-author of the leisure-time paper, Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “Those are the activities that have increased over the last 15 to 20 years.”

Dr. Galinsky notes that although working parents typically feel guilty for not spending more time at home, children often have a different reaction. In a landmark study published as “Ask the Children” (Harper, 2000), she asked more than 1,000 children about their “one wish” for their parents. Although parents expected their children would wish for more family time, the children wanted something different.

“Kids were more likely to wish that their parents were less tired and less stressed,” Dr. Galinsky said.

Apr 1, 2010

Incentivizing Adoption | The American Prospect

Image by kafka4prez via Flickr

Incentivizing Adoption | The American Prospect

Nov 4, 2009

An Obama Relative in China Relates His Own Journey - NYTimes.com

Cover via Amazon

By ANDREW JACOBS

GUANGZHOU, China — Maybe it is the easy smile. Or perhaps the eyes, at once self-assured and searching. When Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo walks into the room, the similarities with President Obama, with whom he shares a father, are unmistakable if hard to pinpoint.

The father, Barack Obama Sr., was an imposing presence, a baritone-voiced charmer prone to haughty outbursts. The sons turned out to be thoughtful and unafraid of self-doubt. In height, complexion and gait, the resemblances are striking.

Mr. Obama hardly knew his father, who left home when the younger Obama was 2. Mr. Ndesandjo, however, grew up in the stormy presence of a man he said he came to hate. “My father beat me and my mother, and this is something you just don’t do,” said Mr. Ndesandjo, 43, who was raised in Kenya but whose American accent is the product of international schools. “He was a brilliant man, but as my mother used to say, he was a social failure.”

Over the last decade, as Mr. Obama’s political career took him to the apex of the world’s most powerful nation, Mr. Ndesandjo’s life fell apart, then slowly came together again. After losing his job at Lucent, the telecommunications equipment company, he left the United States in 2002 to start a new life in China. He taught English, gave piano lessons to orphans and helped a friend open a chain of barbecue restaurants. Last year, he married a Chinese woman.

The president is significantly closer to his relatives on his mother’s side of the family. Friends say he knows his half brother, who traveled to Washington earlier this year, but does not have a close relationship with him.

Until now Mr. Ndesandjo has avoided the press, wrapping himself in the anonymity of Shenzhen, a former fishing village near Hong Kong that is now a city of eight million newcomers. Friends say he never spoke of his connection to the president. “I didn’t want anything to do with the Obama name,” he said.

But Mr. Ndesandjo has now decided to publicize himself, having written an autobiographical novel, “Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East,” that reflects his wanderings, the wrestling over his racial identity, his quest to find acceptance in modern China, and mostly, the struggle to understand his father. “I wanted to find something redeeming about him,” he said in an interview last week, the prelude to a modest book publicity campaign culminating Wednesday in a news conference here.

Mr. Ndesandjo’s journey mirrors that of the president, whose autobiographical memoir, “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” details his own drive to make peace with his father, a Kenyan goat herder who went on to earn a graduate degree from Harvard but who abandoned Mr. Obama and his mother in Hawaii. In all, the elder Obama had eight children by four women before dying in 1982 in a car accident at age 46.

At the end of his memoir, Mr. Obama weeps at the grave of his father in a cathartic moment. “I felt the circle finally close,” he wrote. “The pain I felt was my father’s pain.”

Mr. Ndesandjo finds his own closure by inventing his father’s diary, which gives the book’s protagonist insight into his father’s philandering, outbursts and a self-destructive decline that paralleled Kenya’s descent into corruption and tribal conflict.

The two boys, born of American mothers but half a world from each other, knew little of each other growing up and Mr. Ndesandjo declined to fill in the blanks of their relationship. The details, he said, would have to await a true autobiography that he said was in the works.

He did say that Mr. Obama’s election was a crystallizing moment, prompting the completion of his book and forcing him to confront issues that had dogged him. “Emotions and attitudes that had been around for so many years were turned upside down within a few weeks,” he said, tearful.

Mr. Obama, in his book, describes his first encounter with Mr. Ndesandjo, in which he heaped scorn on his father and the backwardness of Kenya. “You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing,” Mr. Obama quotes him as saying. “Well, you’re right.”

Like his half brother, Mr. Ndesandjo struggled with issues of racial identity. His mother, Ruth Ndesandjo, is an American Jew, born Ruth Nidesand, who met the elder Mr. Obama during his time in Cambridge, then followed him to Africa. Mrs. Ndesandjo, who still lives in Nairobi, had two sons. The other, David, died in a motorcycle accident.

Being of mixed race has never been easy, Mr. Ndesandjo said, whether in Kenya, America or China, where non-Chinese can become inured to stares. “I think to a certain extent I’ve always been an outsider,” he said.

After high school Mr. Ndesandjo moved to the United States, earning degrees in physics from Brown and Stanford and an M.B.A. from Emory University. He also devoted himself to classical piano, inspired by his grandmother, a Lithuanian immigrant whose love of the arts left a mark on him. “The thing that kept me going were the strong women in my life,” he said.

Despite his decision to publish a book, Mr. Ndesandjo said he remained fearful of losing his privacy. Before agreeing to an interview, he asked that questions be provided in advance and that they avoid politics and personal matters.

“He almost canceled five times,” said Harley Seyedin, a friend who runs the American Chamber of Commerce in South China and helped orchestrate publicity for the book. “He’s very, very sensitive. He’s also worried about offending Obama.”

Toward the end of the presidential race, Mr. Ndesandjo said, he had a nightmare about his half brother. A week later, at his wife’s prompting, he boarded a plane for the United States. The two men, he said, greeted each other with a long embrace and Mr. Ndesandjo gave him a scroll of calligraphy he had painted. It roughly translated as, “Even though we are far apart I feel close to you.” He said he planned to introduce the president to his new wife when he visits China this month.

After the interview, Mr. Ndesandjo strode down a crowded sidewalk, turning heads with his charcoal blazer, gold stud earring and Balinese scarf wrapped around his shaven head. A group of schoolgirls asked to take a photo with him. No one seemed to recognize him until a pair of Nigerian men asked if he was the American president’s half brother. “No half brothers,” he said. “He’s my brother.”

Jun 28, 2009

The Way We Live Now - The Overextended Family -

PEGGY ORENSTEIN

I would never have pegged my parents as early adopters. At 79 and 82, they are, like most people their age, blissfully uninterested in technology. To them, a BlackBerry is a late-summer fruit; tweeting is something a bird does. So I was unprepared when they called to tell me about their thrilling new discovery: Skype, an online service we could use to video chat. It’s free, my mom explained, eagerly. All we’d have to do is get something put on our computers (translation: download a program) and they would be able to talk to their 5-year-old granddaughter face to face! We could leave the gizmo on all the time, my dad suggested, and they could watch her go through her day. “Maybe you could bring it to her school,” he added, only half-joking. “We could see her classroom!”

Now, I like my parents. A lot. I really do. That’s why I make the 1,500-mile trip to visit them three or four times a year. I did not, however, spend the bulk of my adult life perfecting the fine art of establishing boundaries only to have them toppled by the click of a mouse. If I wanted them to have unfettered access to my life, I wouldn’t have put the “keep out” sign on my room at age 10. I would have lived at home through college. I would have bought the house next door to them in Minneapolis and made them an extra set of keys.

Even they might have found that a little extreme.

But the mere existence of video chat forces me to lay down a whole new set of rules and to rethink, yet again, the line between inclusive and intrusive, the balance between their yearning to shrink the distance between us and my need for limits — something I thought we resolved decades ago to our mutual satisfaction.

So I did what any sensible adult child would do. I stalled.

“Gee,” I said, “setting that up seems awfully complicated. I’m not sure I’d know how to do it.”

o Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, those that result in T.M.I. and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love.

I may curse e-mail for destroying my workday, for turning me into a lab rat on a drug unable to stop clicking on “send-receive.” Yet it has been a godsend in my relationship with my mom: her hearing is severely impaired, much beyond help from aids or amplification, making phone conversations frustrating. E-mail has allowed us to “talk” again more fully, to share complex thoughts and feelings. We sometimes correspond five or six times a day.

Likewise, digital cameras are a boon: the near-instant photos I send to my folks — my daughter’s school play or maiden bicycle voyage — are truly the next-best thing to being there. Each technology strengthens our bond, but each also preserves my privacy. I’m in touch more often than ever before but entirely on my schedule. I manage the flow of information. I set the terms of my self-presentation. Everyone wins.

Apple hints at something similar in one of its “there’s an app for that” iPhone ads, demonstrating how, with the flick of a finger, you can turn an incriminating snapshot into “at least one photo you can show your parents.” The message is that this achieves the elusive balance between access and control in personal communication. But I wonder. Cellphones may be smart, but they’re also tricky. On one hand, you don’t have to answer them if you are, say, in a crowded cafe (and oh so very often, I wish people wouldn’t) but the assumption has become that you will. Depending on your viewpoint, perpetual availability to everyone you know can be a comfort or a shackle, can intensify closeness or subvert it. One of my brothers grabs his cellphone before heading out for his morning run in case his wife or kids want to reach him. My other brother considers that excessive. Let’s just say that it is best to draw the curtain on that dinner-table debate.

The very technology with which we choose to communicate in a relationship has become a barometer of our willingness to reveal ourselves within it. Racy photos, amorous texts and nonstop Skyping may be just the thing for lovers who are separated during the giddy days of new romance. At the same time, all that virtual togetherness may overaccelerate a courtship. There is something to be said for the slow burn, for anticipation over immediacy. I’m relieved not to be single in a time when you can flirt, fall in love, sext and break up with a guy without ever so much as meeting for coffee. And, really, what is more erotic, more personal, more potentially vulnerable than handwriting on a page? My husband won my heart by sending a witty postcard from a film shoot in Hawaii. No return address, no way for me to respond at all, let alone instantly in three platforms. These days, it seems, the only time we put pen to paper is when someone has died.

Every evolution in telecommunication has been greeted with ambivalence. Critics of the early telephone warned that eliminating the physical presence from conversation would increase isolation and undermine the family. Picture phones embody the future in dystopian and utopian sci-fi alike: Heywood Floyd uses one in “2001: A Space Odyssey”; ditto George of “The Jetsons.” When AT&T unveiled a test model at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, visitors lined up for a chance to talk to a stranger at Disneyland. Even Lady Bird Johnson gave it a whirl in Washington. In 1970, the picture phone was introduced for commercial use; the product tanked. Part of it was the expense — a three-minute call between New York and Chicago on the original version cost $27. But there was another reason: Who would want callers to know you were leafing through magazines or never made your bed or were trimming your toenails in the all-together? No one, that’s who.

Video chat, while obviously cheaper, would seem to have the same skewed ratio: too much access, too little control. But that’s speaking from the standpoint of a daughter. My perspective shifts significantly — as it does on so many subjects — when I mull this one over as a mother. It’s one thing to consider how much about me my parents have a right to know; it’s another to contemplate how much about my daughter I have a right to know — or even want to know.

I have friends who scroll through their teenagers’ text messages every night. They say it’s for their children’s protection, but to me it just seems the high-tech equivalent of picking the lock on a diary (something I know my mother never did, because if she had, I’d still be grounded). Their children don’t seem to mind the breach of trust. Maybe that’s because privacy is as foreign to them as analog television. Or because they’ve grown up far more tethered than any previous generation to their parents’ watchful gaze. It’s curious that today’s parents, who in their youth were so adamant about their own independence, are so lousy at fostering it in their progeny, even after the children leave home.

When I took off for college, I called my parents once a week, which was standard. They never saw my dorm room, didn’t meet my friends, had no concept of my schedule. It was My Space — the old-fashioned kind. Has cheaper and more plentiful technology made the difference, or is it something else? According to Quantcast, a service that analyzes Web site traffic, Skype users typically fall into one or more of four groups: white, male, between 18 and 34, and the “less affluent” — which in this case, probably indicates still in school. It could be such lads Skype only one another, but I doubt it. If they’re indeed checking in with Mom, I hope they at least cover up the beer-pong poster first.

Maybe by the time my daughter leaves for college, I, too, will wish for a 24-hour-a-day video feed (or, by then, perhaps, a continuous holograph). Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll be relieved not to see into her room, not to have to tell her for the 832nd time to clean it up. Maybe I’ll remind myself that magic mirrors are best left back in “Romper Room,” that, at some point, she has to figure out how to be her without me. She will need to cut the invisible cord — the phone cord, that is — and I will have to let her.

Doubtless, if circumstance takes her far away from home, my sense of the distance between us will be different from hers. That measure will change yet again — for both of us — should she have children, as it has, since her birth, for my parents and me. The truth is, I consider their tie to my daughter to be as precious as they do; the technology I use, I realize, may no longer reflect that.

So, I agreed to give video chat a try. We downloaded Skype and set a time to connect. They rang. I answered. My daughter waved. And then . . . we stared at each other. Short silences that seem natural on the phone become terribly awkward on video. Suddenly I understood why slumber-party confessions always came after lights were out, why children tend to admit the juicy stuff to the back of your head while you’re driving, why psychoanalysts stay out of a patient’s sightline. There is something exquisitely intimate about the disembodied voice. In my concern over letting my parents too far in, creating a claustrophobic closeness, I hadn’t considered that video chat might do just the opposite.

“Um,” I finally admitted, “I don’t have anything to say.”

That was a few weeks ago; we haven’t tried again since. It looks as if we’ll be among the two-thirds of Skype members who, according to Quantcast estimates, are passers-by who use the service no more than once a month.

“I think I’d rather e-mail,” my mom wrote me.

“Me, too,” I shot back, attaching a few photos of kindergarten graduation before hitting “send.”

Her response, which came instantly, made me smile: “Oh, Pegs,” she wrote. “Thanks so much for the pictures. It was exactly as if we were there with you!”

Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer, is the author of “Waiting for Daisy,” a memoir.