Pet or National Treasure?

Uwe Reinhardt's Seriously, What Is a Child? is right on target.

An intriguing question to which I have sought the answer ever since coming to these shores is what Americans think of children. Do they view children as the human analogs of pets? Or do they view them, as do most Europeans and Asians, as precious national treasures? Perhaps a mixture of both?
...
We have about 3.3 working-age Americans per elderly American in this country now. According to the Social Security Trustees, that ratio will decline to close to about 2 by the 2030. In light of this trend alone, can anyone doubt that children really are precious? We should give medals to parents who have them, not penalize them financially.

The post is concerned with funding of health care for children, but it is applicable to any of the costs associated with raising children. If society benefits from well-educated taxpayers, then who should shoulder the burden of paying for education? What about health and disability insurance and pensions for parents (mostly mothers) who reduce their market work to take on the extra family work? Do we owe them something, too?

Do read the whole thing. Sadly, the comments have been hijacked by nuts comparing helping parents with Nazi eugenics. Seriously.

I am Ms./Dr. Crankypants this week because a small health matter for Iris turned out to be a very scary matter, due to her own reckless behavior. She doesn't want me to blog about the specifics, but I did my part, dragging the doctor into this century. When consulting with him on the phone about whether I should take her in to his office again, I asked if I could email him a picture of the affected area. (He had to consult with his staff to learn his email address, but he had one.) A minute after I pressed send, he called back saying that it was a very impressive picture. We both looked at the pix in high res on our computer screens and decided that it wasn't necessary to come in again that day. He wants me to email him follow-up pictures of the site though.

Related:
Insufficient Margin

More depressing news

From Crooked Timber:

1. Are you male, or female. (If you’re not sure, just pick one, if you reject the question, sit out the exercise).

2. During your teen years did you get paid to do babysitting more than 10 times?

3. Do you anticipate having children? If not, sit this out.

Here are three kinds of parenting arrangements.
A)Father led parenting: the father spends substantially more time than the mother looking after the children and thinking about their wellbeing over the course of their childhoods
B)Mother led parenting: the mother spends substantially more time than the father looking after the children and thinking about their wellbeing over the course of their childhoods
C)Egalitarian parenting: the mother and father spend roughly the same amount of time looking after the children and thinking about their wellbeing.

4. Think just about yourself for the moment. Which of A, B, and C best characterizes your expectations for your prospective family life.

5. 5. Now think about your FIVE best friends. Which of A, B, and C best characterizes your expectations for most of their family lives? (eg, you expect 3 or more of them to be Father-led, answer A).

I get my TA to collate the answers, and then read back the answers to the students.

I only recently added question 2), so I have less confidence about the answers to that one than the others. The one time I’ve done that in a large class, about 5% of the boys answered “yes”, whereas about 65% of the girls did. (The point of that question is abut socialisation, which has a key role in Okin’s argument).

But for 4 and 5 I get almost exactly the same numbers almost every time. Here they are.

4. Boys: A 0%; B 85%; C 15% Girls A 10%; B 25%; C 65%
5. Boys: A 0%; B 85%; C 15% Girls A 0%; B 75%; C 25%

Look at the disparity between the boys' answers and the girls' answers. In the competition to find mates, is there any doubt that a large percentage of the boys will lie to potential spouses?

Where is the Lysistrata for our times?

The wisdom of Sadako Ogata

Sadako Ogata is 81 and she is not retiring. She still has much work to do. From At 81, Japan's Outspoken Force for the World's Poor:

But unlike many high-powered U.N. officials, Ogata never mastered the art of speaking at length while saying nothing. She even chided Japan for failing to be serious about humanitarian work.

"I think it would be pretty good if Japan, in becoming an economic power, becomes a humanitarian power as well," she said just before she took office.

Years later, she is still chiding Japan. What upsets her now, she said, is the government's failure to address the country's extraordinary demographic crisis. Japan has the world's oldest population and is projected to lose up to 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.

Yet Japanese leaders have done "nothing" to increase immigration, "nothing" to ease the strain on working mothers and "nothing" to change a work-obsessed culture that keeps many young couples from having children, she said.

"Everybody knew this was happening," she added. "Nothing was done. Do we have political leaders who are farsighted? No!"

Recall this graphic from Is this the future?

Look at the long tail of the kite. The very old and the very young need enormous amounts of care. That care falls exclusively on the shoulders of women. Ogata speaks the unfortunate truth. This society is in its death throes. Unless they both increase immigration AND make life less difficult for working mothers, their nation is dead.

Where are the men?

One thing struck me about Abortion foes begin to make their case in Russia. Why are all the efforts about getting women to carry their babies to term? Why aren't they making any effort to prevent unwanted pregnancies? To persuade men to accept contraception? Why do Russian men derisively refer to condoms as "rubber raincoats" and refuse to use them? Why don't Russian women have more power in their relationships to negotiate contraceptive use?

Here is one clue:

The government is desperate to persuade citizens to bear more children. Russians are dying faster than they're being born, a trend that has emerged as one of the most serious challenges faced by this sprawling, scantily populated land.

Why not make their country a better place for mothers, with and without husbands? It's just easier to blame the women for selfishness.

Birthrates again

I am still thinking about birthrates, but haven't posted about it lately.

The NY Times Magazine ran No Babies?, a long article about Europe's declining population and low birthrates. I only skimmed it and will reread it more carefully after the costuming ordeal. It looks like Russell Shorto covers a lot of ground in the article. I don't completely agree with his analysis of why birthrates are higher in the US and Scandinavia.

I met a Swedish mother of two (spaced 12 years apart) in New Zealand. She attributed her willingness to bear a second child to a robust economy and job security, not the welfare state. She said that Swedish people tend to be planners; they save ahead for things. She saved for a second child; labor laws also gave her confidence that she could retain her job or find another high-quality job if she bore a second child.

Women in the US are not as secure about their ability to regain a place in the paid labor force as he suggests. If you take away recent immigrants from high-fertility countries, the US fertility rate would be much lower. My fertility rate, one, is par for highly educated women in the US. Immigrants from east Asia, like myself, also have the lowest fertility of all immigrant groups in the US. I am only slightly sub-par for that group. (Coincidentally, east Asian immigrant women and black women have the highest paid workforce participation and lower than average fertility.)

How Alert!

Wandering Scientist has been discussing sleep (or lack of it) since she became a mother. I have been keeping mum about some of the not so warm and fuzzy aspects of motherhood. I don't want to scare future breeders and cause birthrates to plummet even further. But, I don't want others to be as surprised as we were. And, it may provide comfort.

When Iris was a newborn, staff at the hospital kept remarking, "How alert!" when they saw her huge beautiful eyes. (They were a dark grey with navy blue rims. I got lost in them for hours at a time.) That should have been a clue. What kind of newborn is open-eyed for hours at a time?

First time parents, we had no idea that they were really saying, "You are never going to get a full night of sleep again." Some babies are naturally more alert than others. They are more aware of their surroundings and require much less sleep than normal babies. While the other newborns doze in the nursery, super alert babies stand out because they appear to be studying their surroundings with wide open eyes.

Forget about all those parenting books' estimates that say "your baby should be sleeping x hours per day by this age. " You can scale those numbers down by a factor based upon past performance.

Eventually, she did sleep 3-5 hours at a time during the night. We co-slept and Iris and I became adept at breastfeeding while semi-dozing. My goal was to breastfeed her through her first two flu seasons; she was born in November 2000. In May 2002, I weaned her. That meant that we lost the only reliable means to put her to sleep. Eventually, she learned to sleep through the night, about 6 hours at a time.

Mark and I were high-fiving each other when, in late June, she taught us not to count your chickens (or hours of sleep) too soon.

We had rented a Chautauqua cabin in Boulder, CO. The cabins are spaced closely together. They are not air conditioned so everyone sleeps with their windows wide open.

What a great place for Iris to wake up screaming. She continued screaming for two more hours. She was inconsolable. She didn't respond to any of our normal methods of soothing her. In desperation, we called our pediatrician back in Los Angeles.

The triage nurse who answered the phone understood the problem immediately. She asked if we were first time parents. "Why, yes. How did she know? "

"Because you haven't heard about night terrors yet. She is just having a night terror. " She explained that Iris didn't respond because she wasn't really awake. 18 months was awfully young for onset; it usually starts at 2 or 3. She continued, "Congratulations, you have a highly imaginative child. It usually happens to imaginative children." Imaginative and precocious.

Mark took her outside, walked her round and round, and she calmed after 10 more minutes of screaming. Maybe the night air woke her up. Maybe she noticed the beauty of the moon. She was a happy baby when he brought her back to bed.

The next morning, the manager of the Chautauqua came by to talk to us. It appears that someone in another cabin had turned us in for possible child abuse.

That's all for now. We will discuss the night-time wheezing and sleep apnea later. It is a saga with no end.

Mommy Blogging, Part 2

The blogosphere lit up after Salon published a "Dear Cary" (advice column) letter, I get grossed out when I hear, "I'm a mom!" A thirty year old married woman is planning to have children soon, and quit her job to stay at home with them, but she doesn't want to end up self-identifying as just a mom.

I realize that being a mother is fun and rewarding, and all-consuming at times, but why does it have to be the primary identifying factor in some women's lives? I would think being a mother is sort of a family affair, and making it your calling card, so to speak, is no more appropriate than saying, "I'm a wife."
[snip]
I don't plan on working in an office when I have small children -- I want to be at home and my husband agrees -- but I'll be damned if rearing children is all I'll do for five to 10 years.

She didn't mention the part about motherhood being physically and emotionally arduous and dangerous. She will learn that soon enough.

[I wonder if women who self-identify as mothers only are merely echoing back the message society sends them.]

Moreover, she is planning on being financially dependent upon her husband while the children are young and then returning to the workplace when they are older. Good luck with trying to find a job after the mommy resume gap. From Off to Work She Should Go:

The Center for Work-Life Policy, a research organization founded by Sylvia Ann Hewlett of Columbia, found that women lose an average of 18 percent of their earning power when they temporarily leave the work force. Women in business sectors lose 28 percent.

And despite the happy talk of “on ramps” back in, only 40 percent of even high-powered professionals get back to full-time work at all.

From the likes of the letter, it sounds like she works in an office at something that is less than a calling. Perhaps she is in the set of mothers that will lose 28 percent of their earning power.

Grasshopper has much to learn.

I covered much of this territory last April in Mommy Blogging.

It is worth noting that women don't generally refer to themselves as wives anymore. Women don't usually leave the paid workforce any more when they get married. For the most part, the workload and subtle discrimination doesn't hit the tipping point until women become mothers. In The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild found the tipping point generally occurs after the birth of the second child.

A friend says that no one in the media has picked up that staying home makes more sense AFTER the children are in elementary school. I agree with her.

Daycare centers are much more working mommy-friendly than schools. They are open much longer hours, they don't expect volunteers at the center and they provide all the class materials. Wait till you see the treasure hunt shopping lists that the schools send home with your kids! Additionally, all the school teacher training and prep days catch working parents by surprise. Add the way the schools always call the mothers, not the fathers, about every sniffle and forgotten lunch...

Enrichment activity providers come to daycare centers instead of expecting the children to come to them. They understand that the children attend daycare centers because both their parents work. Once the children enter the school system, all that stops. There is so much more kid schlepping as they get older. I don't know why people tell me that "it just gets easier and easier" as the children get older.

FYI I describe myself at parties and such as a scientist with both a special needs child and a special needs husband. I deserve credit for all the difficult roles I play.

Asides:
Has anyone read the Word Court in the back of the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly? WC deals with how to describe when you are trying to conceive a child, but not yet pregnant--the position of the Dear Cary letter writer. The March issue is not yet online so check back in month if you don't subscribe to the hard copy. (You really should subscribe and help pay their excellent writers. )

Also, don't miss Lori Gottlieb's article, Marry Him! The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough.

Cloud's comment brought Universal Sorrow to mind. Motherhood changed my persona forever.

Addendum
I have two friends that left the workplace AFTER their first child hit elementary school age. That's when kids most need their parents' guidance. I understand that is the less financially feasible option. Isn't it crazy that financial considerations trump developmental concerns?

The whole act of bearing and raising children in the post-industrial era runs counter to parents' economic self-interest. Yet, we let economics rule how families divide up their work and time.

Insufficient Margin

Addendum:
Men can get kudos for this out of office message. I suspect women can not.

[I am not so coherent but Cloud's comment about parents in the workplace got me fired up to write about it, even in my extreme fatigue.]

We identified "Insufficient Margin" as a risk factor in a "tiger team" report* about a satellite program last year. It meant that the schedule was so tight that any small surprise can throw the whole project into chaos and behind schedule. That's life for the two-career family. (I don't know how single mothers do it. I can only surmise they are superheroes in disguise.)

Ask any mother who gets the dreaded phone call from school or daycare, "Your child is sick and must be picked up within an hour." (Don't ask why they always call the mother instead of the father, even when the contact sheet lists the office and cell phone numbers of both.)

Or maybe you stayed up all night with a sick child. You and your partner need to split shifts so one can stay home with the sick child at all times. But the amount of work that needs to be done at the paying jobs has not been reduced to fit the available hours. Moreover, all that work has to be done without any sleep.

Did you see the Ravelry group, Childfree By Choice (CFBC)? They call us breeders. Guilty as charged. (Though parents of adoptive children are every bit as guilty.)

Have you seen those out of office automatic email replies that apologize for staying home to take care of a sick child? This is my fantasy auto reply:

I am out of the office today with a sick future tax-payer; I will reply to your email as soon as I can. Rather than thank me when you collect Social Security and Medicare, please give me your help and understanding now.

Years ago, I read about a discussion in Japan's parliament about their demographic time bomb. One legislator railed against women who didn't breed and wanted to make women's pensions dependent upon how many children they raised. I thought this was horribly unfair. Why pick on women and not the entire society that makes raising children such a chump job? What about infertility?

On second thought, why did I take on a whole 'nother job that comes with no pay, compresses my salary and costs tons of money. (Have you priced quality childcare lately? Bring smelling salts.) When I get my Social Security Benefits statements each year, I see red. For doing two demanding jobs, I will not be rewarded in retirement. In fact, I will lose benefits relative to the CFBC because I have been given much lower raises ever since I dared to breed. My husband, another breeder, has enjoyed increased raises. For many of those years, our raises were determined by the same man. It just makes my blood boil.

Breeders shoulder responsibility for a sustainable society. It is not unreasonable to expect nonbreeders to understand that we are also performing a service FOR THEM.

* I've updated Why don't smart people have children? with advice given by a woman who has served on many more "tiger teams" than I have.

Motherhood stories in the news

The Washington Post ran an article about the divergence of motherhood. Well-educated women typically give birth in their 30s while less educated women do so in their 20s. Bringing Up Babies, And Defying the Norm profiled several college-educated women who bucked the trend by reproducing in their mid to late 20s.

Ginsburg is Latest Justice to Reflect on Faith is an article supposedly about faith. But I found the most telling quote at the end.

As for her career, Ginsburg said, being a woman provided more obstacles than being a Jew. She graduated tied for first in her 1959 Columbia Law School class, she said, but did not receive a job offer from any New York law firm. That she was a woman hurt, she said, but that she was the mother of a young child was "the real killer."

Most appallingly, I don't think things have changed much in the intervening decades. Read Joan Williams' book examining the plight of women in the legal profession, Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It. Actually, the book discusses a great deal more than that and should be more widely read.

Shedding Skin

This post, from six and a half stitches, just about made me cry.

Today I resigned.

I've alluded before to the fact that I haven't been comfortable back at work. I always felt I returned because I had to, not because I wanted to. Once back at work, I've felt incredibly torn between how I am defined - a mother, an architect, a designer. Up till now it's always been a relatively free definition, without much compromise or contradiction. But 2 children have changed the balance. I myself, the person I am, has changed the balance. I've been frustrated at my inability to lock down each role as I need to. Work crossed over into home life, and home life crossed over into work life, and I really felt I was being pulled in too many directions. Compromise is viscous.

Go read the whole thing, and the comments, especially the one by Wenchequilts:

Hi, as a woman architect in Norway, with full time architect job, 4 kids (3-14y), I have to say that I respect your decision. But how are things to change? My daughters have to learn that a woman must work and earn money to be independent of her husband...

Is it really her choice? Or was she pushed over a cliff?

What are women for?

I have quit weeping sniveling and am busily doing research and gathering materials for our big meeting with the school officials in two weeks. I am aghast at the number of "experts" that have suggested that I quit work and home school. Not one suggested that my husband do the same.

She is a girl. I, too, was a girl, full of idealism and spatial skills that rarely occur in nature, much less in the same person. ;-) Through much effort and expense, I trained for my dream career, performing environmental science research in the public interest.

Like I wrote in The Mommy Wars,

One point that is not discussed much is the obligation that women in traditionally male occupations feel to not let down the women coming up after them. Throughout my education, I heard comments about how so and so (professors) had a point in not supporting female graduate students because women were going to quit science anyway when they had kids. Thus, scarce resources were preserved for men who would presumably stay in science. Therefore, if we quit, then we will prove those people right and make it more difficult for younger women.

While I was ill last month, I watched Raise the Red Lantern. Read a description of the movie and the criticism about 'Confusion Ethics' here. The wives depicted in the movie have value only as bearers of male children.

What was the point of educating me if I were to quit (paid, market) work now? What is the point of educating my daughter? Why go through this charade cycle if our only value to society is when we bear a male child/future worker? (Hopefully, one that shares our spatial and analytical reasoning skills.)

Fear

I had lunch with some coworkers and a woman from another company yesterday. She was early in her second trimester, but afraid to ask her company about maternity benefits out of fear.

Why must she be so afraid?

Remember the post, Why don't smart people reproduce?

This woman had recently earned a PhD after many years of struggle with a research project that was more complex than originally believed. (Is there any other type of PhD research project?) Throw in some family tragedy that also slowed progress. If she wants children, she can't put it off any longer.

The birth of a first child, any planned and hoped for child, should be a joyous occasion. Additionally, I would like to see more smart and nice people like this woman and her husband in this world. Why does she have to be made to feel like a criminal?

I have a whole series of posts about birthrates, but What do I tell her? is most especially pertinent.

When Smart Women Reproduce

Update: Di gave permission to post the photo of baby C in hat here. Go over and see more of her sewing, knitting and baby photos. She also makes shoes.

You have got to see this picture. Elizabeth Zimmerman's spiral (conch/snail/Dairy Queen) hat pattern, Malabrigo wool, and a baby the equal of my little Iris at that age. It is sure to inspire baby lust and bring about an uptick in birthrates.

Speaking of Rockin' Women

Meet my new boss. She's a mom, too. She joked that the whole company watched her sons grow up because she brought them in with her so often.

Why don't smart people have children?

When I first moved out to LA to join Mark, I went bike riding with a senior manager at our company. He was not in my management chain and he is a personal friend so he could ask about my reproductive plans. He pointed out other couples we knew, all PhDs and MDs, none of whom had children. He was perplexed and unhappy. He wanted to know, "Why don't smart people have children?"

I didn't have a good answer for him. I still don't. But I have a few (in)coherent ideas. As usual, it starts with a digression and a narrative.

I spent the past week reviewing the plans for a satellite program and trying to come up with a coherent report about it. Independent reviewers are supposed to help reduce the risk of these large programs by spotting and heading off trouble early.

In one briefing, a key engineer/physicist for one of the sensors on the satellite explained what she (and her team) had already done and what she still needed to do. She was clearly nervous. I could see that she had deep subject matter understanding. But, I could also tell that she had an awful lot left to do before launch and a small team to do it.

That's not that unusual. What was unusual, was that I kept staring at her stomach. I couldn't tell, but I kept wondering, "Is she pregnant and beginning to show?" Thoughts of an important (to my career) briefing I gave about another troubled satellite program when I was 4 months pregnant with Iris raced through my mind.

I looked at her tummy. I looked at the timeline. I looked at her scheduled software delivery milestones and mentally added notations for birth, maternity leave, teething, first steps and potty training. I added margin for all the unscheduled interruptions of parenting. There wasn't enough time. Even if she wasn't pregnant there was scarcely enough time.

Maybe she wasn't pregnant. Maybe that is her nominal body shape. I couldn't bring myself to ask her point blank. I doubted it was legal for me to inquire. Yet, I had a responsibility to report back about the availability and quality of key staff and whether the staffing ratio was adequate for the schedule.

She wasn't forthcoming and she has every right to be afraid if she is pregnant. Yet, it would be nice for others to know as early as possible in order to make contingency plans. Why do we feel like we have to hide our pregnancies as long as possible? The first trimester is often the worst. Yet we suffer in isolation, hiding how terrible we feel, pretending that nothing is happening. It is troubling that we even need laws to protect pregnant women in the workplace against discrimination. (The protections end after pregnancy which is why there is so much workplace discrimination against mothers.)

What to do?

By the time a woman has an advanced degree in Physics, she is usually in her late twenties or even early thirties. Add a few years to become established in a position and the biological clock is ticking awfully loud. You can't plan reproduction around satellite deliveries and launches because they are delayed all the time. (I work with one satellite that was delayed three years.)

The circle of life must go on. Bearing and raising children is important work. There is no earthly reason we should take women with exceptional drive, talent and skill out of the gene pool.

What to do? My report is due on Monday. I should be working on it now instead of blogging.

Read more thoughts about Career and Birthrates

Update:
Well, my preliminary report is in. I consulted a more senior woman who had led another study in which I was a team member. She told me that a pregnancy for a contractor is not our business. A man could quit at any time; the manager would have much less notice than a pregnancy.

She suggested that, in any program with a tight schedule, it would be appropriate to put a sentence asking for a contingency plan in the absence of any key personnel.

So when in doubt, ask people with more experience.

Is this the future?

The Economist ran a cover article about Japan's changing demography. Birthrates have a huge impact upon pyramid schemes pension plans.

This graphic is also inspirationally information-dense.

There is so much I want to say about birthrates, sustainability, pension programs and equity towards mothers, but I have so little time right now. Aack! Too many projects at work.

Birthrates Stories

I have been meaning to blog about birthrates again, but haven't had time to formulate my ideas properly. However, don't miss these recent news stories about birthrates.

Career Women in Japan Find a Blocked Path in the NYT. Link will expire in 4 days or so.

They [women’s rights advocates] point to studies showing that nations with greater workplace participation, like the United States, actually have higher fertility rates. Advocates say this is because working women in other countries start having children earlier in life, while many who leave the work force do not do so until their 30s.

“Birthrates here are declining because of a lack of equality for women,” said Ms. Inoguchi, the former minister. “The population shortage is forcing a change in attitudes.”

I wouldn't point to the US as a feminist utopia, but I have no argument with their statement that we have it better than women in Japan. Like I wrote in What do I tell her?, none of my female cousins in Japan with children are employed outside the home. None of my employed female cousins have children. None. Without exception.

NPR recently broadcasted a story about how the wealthy are having more children. Kids are the new luxury.

When people see a large family, "they just know that they have to be making serious, serious money."

"I am not working, this is what I do." Having more kids make them more comfortable with not working outside the home. "This is a full-time job."

This isn't a new phenomena. During the whole "remaking welfare" debate, some sociologists actually crunched the numbers. They found that mothers on welfare had only slightly more children than the average. In fact, the highest fertility in the US was among the ultra-wealthy. Billionaires had, on average 5 children. (This was more than a decade ago when there were fewer billionaires.)

That 1990's study found that two career families with slightly above average incomes, my peer group, had the lowest fertility. We tend to be concentrated in areas where wages are high, but the cost of living is even higher. I look around me and the one child family is as normal as the two child family.

Birthrates in the US are highest among immigrant women at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder and wives of the very rich. Those two groups do not enjoy the most egalitarian marriages. I have not seen convincing proof that egalitarian societies produce higher birthrates.

Links:
Economist story about European Birthrates
My birthrate blogging

Birthrates again

I promised to post some thoughts about the Economist fertility article so here goes. Remember, I am NOT a social scientist; but I am an employed mother of one child who has traveled widely.

There are several assumptions in the Economist articles that I do not believe are proven by the facts they presented alone. First off, the fact that some European countries have higher birthrates than others (e.g. Spain, Italy and Germany) may not be because marriages in the first group of countries are more egalitarian or that their laws and workplaces are more friendly toward mothers. Look at this table of estimated 2007 global fertility. Mali, Niger, Uganda, Somalia and Afghanistan are the top five. High fertility does not represent egalitarian treatment in any of those countries.

The Economist states that France and Sweden experienced a recent uptick in birthrates and concludes that it is due to mother-friendly laws in both countries and more egalitarian marriages in Sweden. On what basis can they make this claim? Has anyone asked women why we do or do not have children?

(They rule out immigration effects by showing that; in France, if immigrant women are excluded, the birthrates would be lowered only slightly, but still remain higher than those in neighboring countries. They also rule out Catholicism because Spain and Italy have abysmally low birthrates.)

Germany has the most childless women in Europe. Let's use the way-back machine to the summer of 1983. I was an exchange student staying with a family in Germany with three kids and a professional mother. Germany is the country cited in the Economist article as having the most childless women in Europe. How did my host mother do it?

She did it by marrying a much older man when she was an university student. My host father told me that she was incredibly beautiful and all the men in their apartment complex were after her, but she wouldn't give any of them the time of day. He told her that, if she married him, he would quit work and stay home with the kids. Moreover, he had quite a large sum saved up and would build her a live/work situation in the location of her choice. He was a man of his word.

Each morning, she prepared a cold breakfast and ate with us before heading downstairs to work. Then I walked to school with the eldest daughter, a girl slightly younger than me. (No need to chauffeur any of the kids if one lives in an urban village.) Her husband stayed home with the two sons that were too young for school. Her mother lived in the apartment above hers if he needed any help. A cleaning lady came in once a week to clean, do laundry and stock the pantry. She walked upstairs for lunch and returned downstairs to continue work; she joined the family for good at dinnertime.

All was not perfect, though. Back then, Germany had strict laws about when stores could be open. Thus, shopping is nearly impossible for working people. Yet, I never saw the father shop for groceries or household goods. (Come to think of it, I never saw him clean or do laundry either. He was very involved with the kids though.) One morning, she noticed that I was up early (jet lag) and she told me to go with her. We walked to the grocery store right at opening time. I helped her carry the groceries home and put them away. I watched as she prepared breakfast for everyone as the household slowly awoke and came to life. I could see that she had a very long workday.

It worked for that family. However, marrying someone 25 years your senior and with lots of money is not an option for all women. Germany needs to come up with something better than that.

After I said good-bye to the German family, I took the train to Sweden to spend two weeks with the family of an exchange student that had previously been at my high school back in California. I sharply recall the conversation at the family Sunday lunch with the parents and all three children. The eldest daughter lived with a boyfriend who worked at the same office she did, in a slightly more senior position. They had lived together for several years and the parents were asking her why she didn't marry her boyfriend. I could tell this was a frequent topic and she didn't want to discuss it again. The guy in question just sat there at the table, not helping her deflect her parents' attack. Why did he say nothing? Why didn't she want to marry?

Fast forward to 1993 when I met a couple who married after 10 years of living together. They had met at the office. The recent bride told me that getting married after living together for so long is just getting "permission to have children". Then I realized why my friend's sister didn't want to marry the guy who wouldn't stick up for her.

She didn't want to signal intention to reproduce to her employer. Previously at the lunch, she had already discussed the difficulty of getting challenging assignments at work. Marrying a slightly older, slightly more successful, male version of herself--one who works in the same office--would be career suicide. (I can say this with authority because I did just that.)

Perhaps the reason that so many Swedish children opt to have children out of wedlock is because of workplace discrimination against married women. Unlike the US, they are not penalized in figuring pensions or child support if they do not marry the father of their children. Hence, marriage offers Swedish women no carrot, just a stick. No wonder so many children are born out of wedlock there.

For Sweden, the forecasts say the population will grow by about a fifth. Some of this is the result of immigration and rising longevity but, according to David Coleman, a demographer at Oxford University, the recovery is also the result of older women having more children “almost sufficient to compensate for the sharply reduced birth rates of younger women”. This is exactly what was hoped for, but does not seem to be happening yet, in the Mediterranean and eastern Europe.

If you take account of late childbearing, you find that 16 European countries, with a total population of 234m, now have fertility rates of 1.8 or more. [snip] They are rare examples of bucking the trend that, as countries get richer, their birth rates fall.

Why? There are no obvious answers. The French run policies to increase the birth rate; the British do not. Most high-fertility countries are high-tax, high-welfare ones (France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia). But so is Germany, and its fertility has been declining for decades; whereas Ireland is not, and its population is growing. Maybe Ireland and France are responding to Catholic teaching on big families? Hardly. Remember Italy and Poland.

Though it is hard to be sure, the most plausible explanation is that some countries have struck a successful balance between life and work that enables parents to raise children without sacrificing their careers, and that this encourages child-rearing. If the explanation is right, it does not matter that France doles out presidential medals. But it does matter that it has an excellent, state-subsidised system of creches, to which mothers are happy to entrust their offspring.

How do they know that the late childbearing by Swedish women is not due to them hitting the glass ceiling and then "opting out" like many affluent American women? How do they know that French women with more children remain in the workplace because of the availability of subsidized childcare and not other reasons?

The Economist article also discussed the gap between the desired and actual total fertility of women.

A survey by Eurobarometer, the EU's pollsters, for example, found that women who had finished bringing up their families said they had wanted (on average) 2.3 children. But they actually had only 2.1. Perhaps they were not answering truthfully. But the evidence does suggest there is a mismatch between desired and actual fertility.

Delayed marriage can lead to fertility problems. Where women are punished in the workplace for marriage, they delay marriage. One needs only look at Japan to see this. To understand the fertility problem, we need to look deeper and earlier. We need to look at the global disincentives for women to marry. Why is marriage so punitive towards employed women?

Asides:
2.1 total female (lifetime) fertility is not the magic replacement number for all situations. The number depends upon the maternal age at birth and mortality statistics. In two populations with the same life expectancy and total fertility rate, the one with younger mothers, or a shorter generation length, would grow faster (or decline more slowly) than the other one. Draw out family trees with branch length along a time axis to prove it to yourself.

I wanted to also blog about an article from the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald on October 20, 2003 entitled, "Why the one-child family is looking good to women". However, I have run out of time. The article discussed the findings of Lyn Craig, an Australian researcher who studies "the gendered time impacts of children, motherhood and equity, work-family balance, the division of domestic labour, fertility, and comparative family and social policy." Click on her current research topics to see a list of worthy questions.

Her PhD thesis work supports the assertions in the Economist article that say that a more egalitarian marriage leads to higher total fertility. (So does a Brown University report I blogged about earlier.)

Looking around Sweden, 24 years ago, I noticed that women were predominantly in low-status, dead end jobs. My friends sister was the first woman I met in a professional job other than a school teacher. I read that women have made inroads into professional jobs in Sweden. But I wonder about the marriage and motherhood penalty. I hope to visit there again and find out.

In knitting and sewing news, I have very little to report. I sewed ties to the inside of our guest room duvet. In true imperfectionist style, I used what I had on hand rather than going out to buy cotton twill tape that matched. Who cares? It is on the inside. I even didn't change the thread in the sewing machine.

Iris' Latoya-inspired tank is half-way done. I ran out of yarn and it is discontinued. I scrounged in the stash and found a pale blue cotton that coordinates well, but is in a lighter gauge. I hope to hit the desired gauge by tripling it.

In the 5S department, I went through the huge stack of shelter and fashion magazines that had piled up and cut out the items that I wanted to save. I put them all into binders along with the cuttings saved from the last two years, the last time I did this. Whew! No wonder no gardening got done this weekend. I am just going to call the weeds mesclun and hope no one has a clue.

Links:

• List of estimated 2007 Global Total Fertility (The numbers in this table differ from the ones presented in the Economist article. However, they are supposed to be for different years.)
• Definition of Generation Length
• Relationship of fertility and generation length to population change.
• I blog about birthrates way too much. Click on the Birthrates tag below or to the right to read other posts.
• What do I tell her? More thoughts on the price of motherhood.
• I wrote about the French motherhood utopia in Perfect Madness.

Birthrates in Camp

We read a great deal while at camp. Camp is highly child-centered with kids running feral in the woods with counselors and all parents watching out for everyone's children. Renewing friendships with other families returning to camp is like watching time lapse photography of our children. What better setting than that for reading the Economist's take on European birthrates? The article is highly worthy of reading in its entirety. I would like to post more about it, but after we are done with unpacking and laundry. Here are a couple of tidbits.

Italy has no more childless women than France and Sweden, countries with much higher fertility rates (see table). But more Italian mothers have just one child. The pattern is still more marked in Russia, where a third of mothers have a single child. One possible explanation is that, squeezed between family obligations from the past and current social arrangements which limit job flexibility or cheap child care, many Italian and Russian women are reacting by satisfying social pressures to produce a family to the smallest possible extent—by having one child. Such a reaction may be hard to change.

...

Though it is hard to be sure, the most plausible explanation is that some countries have struck a successful balance between life and work that enables parents to raise children without sacrificing their careers, and that this encourages child-rearing. If the explanation is right, it does not matter that France doles out presidential medals. But it does matter that it has an excellent, state-subsidised system of creches, to which mothers are happy to entrust their offspring.

Birthrates and Housework

I have alluded before to the connection between distribution of housework and but I was not aware until recently about a small study that showed exactly that. I pulled a few quotes from a BBC News summary about the study.

The researchers from Brown University studied 265 married couples in which both partners were employed.

The husbands and wives were asked to report how much time they and their spouses spent per week on nine common household tasks, such as cooking, shopping and cleaning.

...81% of couples in which the husband does at least half the housework will have a second child.

...when the woman did between 54% and 84% of the housework, the likelihood of the couple having a second child went down to 55%.

...more traditional couples, where the woman did more than 84% of the housework, frequently went on to have a second child.

She (Christine Northam, a counsellor for Relate) said some couples may decide it is better for one half to stay at home and take on all of the household tasks. "If one of them is taking complete responsibility for the housework it means the other one doesn't have that on top of everything else. "It may well indicate that one of them had decided to stay home and look after the family, in which case maybe for that couple having a family is more of a priority than working," she said.

Reading this, it looks like women who expected an egalitarian marriage but did not get one, are the ones most likely to stop after one child. It is the expectation versus the reality that causes low birthrates.

The one child family is the norm in many countries such as Italy and Australia. No wonder health and pension ministers from those nations have been trying to get men in their countries to do more housework. I wonder when American politicians are going to "get it".

I am also surprised by people who talk about falling birthrates as if that would be the answer to the huge influx of immigrants we have experienced in recent years. The reason we need so many immigrants is partly because American parents, particularly mothers, are so overworked.

Remember the quote from Sharon Lerner from the What do I tell her? post? She said that birthrates in the US would be as low as in Europe if it weren't for high-fertility recent immigrants. It is easier to build 20 foot fences around our borders than to take a hard look at home.

The anthology, Global Woman, may be somewhat uneven, but it contains some excellent, well-researched treatments of the global effects of "the care deficit" at home. When women do not get the help that they need nearby, they look farther for solutions. That is as true for the wife in a dual-career household in the USA as the single mother in Mexico who leaves her children behind with relatives to seek paid work "El Norte". Both women are doing what they must do for the survival of themselves and their children. Why do we know Zoe Baird's name but not her husband's?

Aside:
In the preface to the second edition of The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild wrote that the narrowing of the gap between percentage of housework performed by husbands and wives in dual-career couples is not because the men do more. It is because the wives have outsourced more of it. In fact, husbands are doing less now than in her initial study.

I would like to add that people work at different efficiencies. Just because a husband expends 30% of the household work hours in a home does not mean that he performs 30% of the work. ;-)

I also encountered this article about division of labor between the sexes in Turkey in the BBC News archives. Mark wonders why Europe prefers immigrants from Turkey over east Asia.