Yay!

[rivka]

bosssio and I submitted a proposal to do a workshop at SUUSI this year. We just got word that it was accepted! It will appear in this year's catalog, and if people sign up for it we will be SUUSI workshop leaders!

Here's what's going to go in the catalog:

214 Parenting in the 21st Century Limit 12
Is it harder to raise children today? Many parents feel expectations are rising while support is eroding. We'll discuss the social/cultural/economic context of parenting and brainstorm ways to support families. Not a how-to-parent class, all are welcome, parent or not. Infants in arms are welcome. [Siobhan's Name] (anthropologist, international development expert) and Rebecca Wald (clinical psychologist) are both working moms of two, and are Conscientous Objectors in the Mommy Wars.
$10.00 TTh Preferred 14+ 2pm

And here's the long-form description which we provided to the SUUSI staff:

Is it harder to raise children today than it was 30 years ago? Many parents feel that expectations are constantly rising while social and economic supports for families are eroding.

Key questions to explore:
* How has family life been affected by changes in the workplace, in the media environment, in social policy?
* Given Americans' increased ability to limit or delay childbearing, or forego it entirely, how do parents and children fit in to our new kids-optional culture?
* What are the influences - overt and covert - that parents and communities need to be aware of in defining family and the choices available (or not) to us?
* To what extent are dominant cultural messages about the dangers and necessities of family life supported by evidence, and how do these messages warp our perceptions of the family environment?

This is not a how-to-parent class, but rather a discussion about family life. In the first session, we'll discuss the social, economic, and cultural context of family life today, sharing the groups personal experiences as well as discussing research available on changes in the American family context. In the second session, we will brainstorm ways that we can be more supportive of families as individuals, as a denomination, and as a culture.

I am SO EXCITED. And I can't think of anyone I'd rather do this with than bosssio.

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Oh, congratulations! Have fun!

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

Congrats, and can I say I'm glad to hear that some people are going to be having this discussion! I know it's been written about, but I don't ever hear much about people talking "from the trenches" about how modern corporate culture and "kids optional" affects parenting.

Will be very interested to read a summary should you decide to write it!

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

I am soooooo excited and just a little bit terrified.

I am sure we can get the WWW to come!

[naomikritzer]

Many parents feel that expectations are constantly rising while social and economic supports for families are eroding.

That pretty much nails it, I think. My parents were excellent by 1970s and 1980s standards, yet it was perfectly OK for them to have the 11-year-old babysit for the 8-year-old and 5-year-old, at least if it was only going to be for a couple of hours. They were very generous about signing me up for lessons, but to a significant degree they expected me to get myself to them, from an early age. At eight, I was walking myself to Hebrew School (crossing an extremely busy street at a traffic light), and by ten or eleven I was riding the bus to my piano lesson. They were also extremely conscientious about car safety by the standards of the day -- I had a car seat as an infant (in 1973) -- but considered it just fine to let a kid ride shotgun, or even shove four or five kids in the back when giving rides to friends, which made things like carpools much easier to arrange. (OK, no carpool I was in ever required kids to share seatbelts. Kids riding shotgun, though, was a given.)

I have a kick-ass support network for a mom in 2008, but I'm still jealous when I think back to the neighborhood where I grew up.

On the other hand, I have blogs and message boards and my parents did not. It's a thin substitute for human contact, but it's a pretty good auxiliary brain when you're dealing with a problem you're not sure how to handle.

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

That sounds terrific! I'd take it.

[ailbhe]

I'll be so interested in reading about that afterwards. If it wasn't for the home ed group, I don't think I'd know *any* useful support network locally, since we don't have relations around. Also, I'm on call for my children more than my parents were for us, because as well as fewer neighbours around during the day I expect more support available for my kids at night than my parents did.

Cars had no rear seatbelts as standard when I left Ireland ten years ago.

And my *god* the food we ate. Peanut butter with sugar in it, tuna tinned in brine, salty butter, salty tinned soups, salty tinned beans... and my mother did try to avoid junk food.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

It sounds like we were raised by very similar standards, and I have to say that I don't think our parents were wrong. I actually had a thriving business babysitting other people's toddlers by age 11-12.

The underlying stimulus for this workshop, for me, was reading Judith Warner's Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. When that book came out, its press, and the discussions about it in the blogs, made it sound like it just made fun of mothers (and parents in general) for being crazy anxious, controlling, and overprotective. So it was a huge shock to read the book and discover that her thesis is actually that mothers wind up crazy anxious, controlling, and overprotective because our society says that they're on their own to make their kids turn out right. And takes away the social safety net so that, if kids don't turn out right, the consequences are disastrous.

An example: for many years college tuition has been rising at double or triple the rate of inflation, and the increase in things like Pell grants is not nearly enough to keep up. The burden of financial aid has shifted dramatically: twenty or thirty years ago, the average financial aid ratio was 70% grants/30% loans, and today it's 30% grants/70% loans. At the same time, the necessity of a college degree for employment keeps increasing.

And yet, disregarding that context, we (and I'm not blameless) make fun of or condemn parents for worrying about their eight-year-old earning a college scholarship someday, and pushing their child to achieve, and trying to intervene in their child's education to give them the best chance possible. That becomes all about bad parental pressure, or "helicopter parenting," or being status-crazy, and the intensely difficult economic context motivating the parental pressure goes unrecognized.