From Slate this week, more dish from one of the study’s authors on interpreting their findings - and dismissing (or resigning yourself to) the media hype of the permanent damage to children from daycare.
Are you with me now, despite my disruptive bubble-blowing and cantankerous personality?(sh*t, there’s that formidable vocabulary again…)
In the last 10 years, a few trends have swept the different companies I keep. First there was the wedding wave of my late twenties; these days it’s the baby boom. In between, many of us - single and married alike - have been fortunate enough to purchase our first homes - both suburban homes and urban condos.
Yet, it seems at least half of my home owning friends were, like me, dependent on a large financial gift from their parents for their down payments (this is especially true in the NYC co-op market, in which the liquidity required to cover ~25% of the asking price up front is inconceivable for many, if not most, Americans). I bought my condo just two years ago, close to the peak of the market, and instead of living rent free as a residential counselor in MIT’s undergraduate dorms. Though my independent consulting helps to make ends meet, the reliable annual income I earn from MIT as a research and teaching assistant is only a couple hundred dollars more per month that my monthly housing costs. While I appreciate the value of building equity and the amazingly generous gift my parents have given me by helping me buy this home (especially when I think of the $80k in rent we paid in Manhattan over seven years), owning a house demands a certain level of financial stability that I’m unlikely to possess as a graduate student without their on-going support (undoubtedly one of the perks of our four to one parent-child ratio).
The recent spate of coverage on nationwide foreclosures and subprime lending sheds light on the financial precariousness for households that lack such a safety net. In particular, foreclosures are disproportionately clustered among the elderly and non-white (especially African-Americans) in urban and inner-ring suburban communities, due in large part to the invidiousness of predatory lending in the subprime lending market.
Funny that the Boston Globe should use the term “acting out” to describe recent research in Child Development (link leads to the full report) on the associations between early childhood care (from 3 months through age 4 1/2) and problematic, pre-teen classroom behaviors (i.e., 5th and 6th grade). This is the term my mother - for years a pediatric nurse and working, single mother - often employed to describe my potentially disruptive classroom antics that erupted on and off from pre-school through 12th grade.
I am a product of the main type of child care that is linked to pre-teen problem behavior in the classroom, that is, center-based care at a private child care and school for kids 2-6 called Bridge to Learning in Convent Station, NJ. (For first and second grade, I was in non-relative, home-based care after school in New Jersey, and day camps in the summer. I was also in a home-based child care after school and in the summer, run by my aunt and godmother, my mother’s sister, from ages 8 through 12/13.)
My problem behavior, as in the study, was teacher-reported and not clinically-described, and included:
- refusing to do my homework in fourth grade because I’d decided I’d learned everything I needed to know;
- reading secretly under my desk in grades four and six rather than listening or participating;
- consistently bringing home mid-term reports of incomplete assignments and poor grades (only to score As and Bs by the close of the semester);
- talking through class and having my seat changed to the back of the room (especially in middle school);
- skipping school (high school);
- blowing bubbles and making wisecracks (still);
- and occasionally getting into fights with boys at the bus stop and on the playground (elementary and middle school).
I also was tracked into my school system’s gifted and talented programs, graduated in the top 5% of my high school class, and have gone on to multiple fine institutes of higher ed. I exhibit the above average vocabulary (and subsequently, reading) skills compared to my peers that is also attributed to early childhood care.
The study shows that the length of time (quantity) and quality of care matter, though the latter is more strongly articulated in previous studies. So what gives? Is it my early childhood child care at Bridge to Learning that is responsible for my acting out and overachieving?
And no more of that depressing stuff! I’ve been quiet on the blogging front this week as a) try to reintegrate myself into society, and b) get ready for a visit to my dad and spring training in Florida this weekend. Go Sox! But while I resume my web surfing on campus instead of from my couch, the rest of my neighborhood and city tries to recover from one of the more raucous weekends in memory.
Last weekend was an organic hat trick of debauchery, three days of fun usually designed for an official long weekend where Monday is available for recovery, sitting in traffic, etc. This year, St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Saturday, with the annual South Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade occurring per usual that Sunday. Add to that a snow storm began Friday afternoon, right around lunch time. By the time the M.A.S. and I got back to Brighton mid-afternoon, the Screamin’ Eagles
were out in full effect, moving cautiously down the slippery sidewalks to different impromptu parties, taking special care not to drop their thirty packs of Coors Light, Bud Light, and Busch Light. When I passed by Roggie’s at 7pm, headed home again after yoga, drunk co-eds were comparing notes on how long they’d been living it up at happy hour, with one young woman whining that she’d only got off work at 5. I traipsed past them only to run into three dudes crowding the sidewalk, one of them bleating like an antelope I saw on safari in the Serengeti, as his friend reassured him, “we’re sleeping until like, noon tomorrow.” More college kids crowded the bus stop, this time with their thirty packs resting in the snow, while they waited for the BC bus to come pick them up and drop them around the neighborhood. Saturday was a repeat of Friday, only with everyone out in their green finery.
Seven years ago today - March 19 - I had spine surgery that fused three of my vertebrae together after a cliff jump gone horribly awry on spring break in Jamaica. I spent one week in the hospital and months in physical therapy over the next year and a half, the length of time it took for my bones to fully regenerate and permanently fuse together. I left the hospital 25 pounds lighter and re-acquainted with a size 4 for the first time in 10 years, had friends, family and colleagues rally around me in ways I could never have imagined (homecooked daily meals from Nikki, nightly walks with my superintendent’s wife, and the gift of a new tv with remote control from my classmates), and ultimately spoke at my graduation because I addressed movingly and eloquently the care NYU-Stern and its students showered on me. In red sandals on the stage at the theater at Madison Sq. Garden, no less. There I was: a skinny, glam 20-something living it up in NYC. Full of promise.
If only recovery were as easy as watching daily episodes of The Wedding Show on TLC with Nikki, and whiling away Saturdays with my mom admiring the architecture of the Upper East Side on lazy walks around my neighborhood. Instead, it was a narrow escape from almost being paralyzed, six months of virtual confinement to upper Manhattan, learning to walk without a cane, wearing lace-less shoes and learning to put things on the shelves above instead of in the cupboards below because bending down was both difficult and painful; monitoring my own emotions lest I leave my mother in tears; and managing a general feeling that I’d lost control of my body and that I was responsible for almost permanently injuring myself. In addition to the size 4 sundresses and b-school celebrity, I gained new fears of heights, enclosed spaces, and falling, and lost my self-confidence and trust in my judgment. By the time the rest of the country was confronting the random and brutal shock of 9/11, I was navigating my own major trauma from narrowly avoiding never walking again, or the unthinkable worse, dying.
By the winter of 2001-02, with the help of my mom, I’d begun seeing a psychotherapist specializing in trauma. By the summer of 2002, I’d made arrangements to move in with friends from graduate school, leaving behind my once beloved apartment on the Upper East Side that became permanently colored from my sense of confinement following my accident. From the shrink I learned coping strategies to learn how to manage my anxiety and panic, especially sleep strategies. Eventually, I regained the courage to leave a job I was unhappy in and follow my simmering desire to work and live abroad. Though the experience in Tanzania was not long enough for me, it was certainly long overdue. In most respects, I resumed a life I believed was put on hold when I broke my back. Still, I think of the time following the injury as a permanent disruption - two years of my life I’ll never get back.
And I’m not convinced I made a full recovery from the accident. For me, the passage of time has definitely helped. I essentially understand that it was a freak accident - both in its occurrence and my deciding to even engage in the activity of cliff jumping. And ultimately, I walked away from the fall (with assistance), and was never closer to paralysis than sheer probability and several hours of tingling feet due to bone fragments temporarily resting on nerves. But still…
I’ve made what feels like major headway this week on enhancing this blogging business (it’s all for you, my adoring hordes of fans). Notice:
But, before I go blind or develop a permanent squint a la Clint Eastwood, or possibly worse, fail out of school, I need to take a break from teaching myself code and put on hold the other changes I hope to bring about soon:
It’s going to be AMAZING, life changing. Surfing the internet at work will never be the same.
What a week. I’m an old woman, beat down from taking on YouTube, html code, and generational gender shifts.
I’m reading Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both. This book was released recently with the usual hype about whether this older feminist-mother-journalist was getting it right when she decries the apparently-sexually-liberating practice of hooking up among today’s young women. As the title indicates, she thinks it robs women of genuine chances to experience love, intimacy and healthy, stable relationships, the latter of which most of her interviewees claim to want later in life. From the NY Times ($):
“…criticism [of the book] has exposed a generational divide between Ms. Sessions Stepp, whose battles for women’s rights focused mainly on equality in the workplace rather than in the bedroom, and some members of a younger generation who equate feminism with sexual freedom.”
I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book, and I’m processing it on multiple levels - a social commentary on women, sex, and feminism as well as a piece of research aimed at a popular audience. But, I can say already I observe a lot of generational differences between myself and these women, currently in high school and college. It’s striking. A lot of their opinions about love and relationships resonate with me, their statements are not unlike how I justified my own adventurous single life in NYC. But their actions seem much more wild or cavalier or brazen than my behavior ever was. I’m certainly not some middle-aged mom, we all know that, and so I’m struck by how I can relate emotionally to these women yet feel absolutely aged by their behavior. I was amused enough by Stepp’s response to the criticism -
“Ms. Sessions Stepp said that she welcomes criticism, though not from people who have not read the book or who have never conducted research. ‘This is what I love about the bloggers,’ she said. ‘They haven’t been out there interviewing young people for 10 years. They’re talking about their own college experience. Everyone’s had some sort of sexual experience and they all think they’re experts on it.”’
to purchase the book so I could authoritatively weigh in on her findings and analysis. (Apparently she missed that Time magazine thinks we’re all geniuses.) Stay tuned. Any more sleepless nights like this past week and I’ll be through it in no time. Because unlike Stepp’s young women or the women they’ll become, the only thing I’m wrestling with at 2 a.m. these days is the meaning of life. Clearly I’ve been lost these last weeks without the spiritual guidance of my generation.
I had the pleasure of celebrating NYC Weboy’s birthday last friday evening, where, among other topics, I enjoined him in a lively debate over the phenomenon of globalization. While he was ready to dismiss it (a blip, if you will, a la Bridget Jones and the el nino phenom of Latin music), turns out I’ve got him thinking.
I’ve been wondering when I’d start introducing the topic of globalization here at the RP. For now, my thoughts are still taking shape and it’s much easier for now to hammer repeatedly at domestic problems at home without thoughtfully bringing in the broader context. So while I lie around with my head in a book, I’ll leave here the links to the conversation Wesley and I are having over at his site.
Thanks for taking the bait, Weboy!
Chronic sleeplessness of the last few days rendered today about as productive as last Tuesday. But all was not lost. Though my globalization reading remains undiscovered in my bag, I made progress on making more of this blog than I ever did my Treo, and I bought - and rejected - some test paints for my living room. (What size homes does Benjamin Moore think we own, by the way, that they recommend a test area of 4 square feet??)
And signing on to YouTube isn’t the only small step I’ve taken into the twenty-first century. I’m also, for the first time, sitting in front of American Idol. (I’m seriously so out of touch about some pop culture references that I almost used the Gong Show instead of Idol here.) It’s actually serendipitous, as one of my fave idols, Diana Ross (memoralized in print over my kitchen table), is tonight’s mentor. But honestly, are Simon and Randy always so rude? Must we have so much violence - emotional and otherwise - in the world?
Blame the tube for such a saccharine transition into the real reason for this post. I finally bit into YouTube today to share with you the following three short documentary videos on the public housing battle in New Orleans.
Courtesy of The Advancement Project and YouTube, may I present The Fight for Housing in New Orleans,
“>Part 1 “>Part 2 “>Part 3.And while it only points to the serious internet addiction I suffer, something we should probably discuss, as I may require an intervention (yes, this is my cry for help), today was also a day to really spend some time digging around in the news.
First, it seems public housing residents aren’t the only folk rallying around their cause. These Northrup Grumman unionized employees on the Mississippi Gulf Coast have walked off the job, seeking a living wage that covers the real expenses of their post-Katrina world. At $18/hour forklift drivers, pipe welders and painters can’t make ends meet. It’s a whole new world, where milk costs $4.19/gallon. As NG gives them the Heismann, the workers are settlin’ in: “If we can survive Katrina, we can survive this,” one remarked.
Well, David Brooks at least thinks they’ll get their day. Turns out neoliberalism (along with God and the Roxy), is dead. According to Brooks ($), neoliberals, a boisterous, energized set, were “suspicious of brain-dead unions,” reformers of welfare, and cheerleaders of capitalism. But the blogging proletariat has had enough, coming of age and finding their voice since “the late ’90s, when spectacles like “Ken Starr, the Florida ballot fight, the Bush tax cuts, the K Street Project and the war in Iraq” took down not only rollerrinks-cum-Chelsea-boy-dance-clubs, but our generation’s global capitalist project as well. And we’re single handedly taking them down!!…
…Really, Brooks is writing this to shield himself from the pink slips he anticipates will come raining down in the neoliberal media, as he likely suspects recent changes to The New Republic will have a ripple effect. Who can blame him, we’re all just trying to keep a roof over our heads here, maybe even spruce it up a bit with some corals or soft, warm greens.
(Meanwhile, Wesley thinks these guys should be next in line for a media makeover.)
That’s me. Just signed up for an account.
Testing it here, with a tribute to the Swedish M.A.S. and his little bro with whom I watched
“>this while we prepared food for their sister’s housewarming party.Enjoy and stay tuned!!
(Have I mentioned I loathe technology??? But I do love the Mexican lobster gang in this broadcast. Bizarre, and hilarious.)
Fancying myself a rabblerouser, I look around me for guidance and mentors, and even anti-role models. From my ever growing academic CV, some highlights of contemporary political historymakers (mostly for worse…a sort of political What Not to Wear, if you will):
A major part of my heady romance with the M.A.S. is intense discussions about race, class, poverty, cities, and architecture (not an inclusive list). My friend Maureen has learned that when we impromptu call her up to grab a beer in Southie, we’re most likely in the ‘hood because of some urban history/geneaology field trip, and not just because the Harpoon IPA is especially tasty at the Beer Garden or Stadium. One of my favorite stories the M.A.S. told me about himself as we were getting to know each other was when he was at a party and realized people were wandering away from him and his preferred topics of conversation. “You’re depressing!” he loudly exclaimed, describing himself on their behalf. I cracked up, knowing my own proclivity to trap people in earnest, intense conversations they probably hadn’t anticipated as part of cocktail chatter (though my urban planning interests do give a wide range of people the leeway to ask me what I think about “the projects.” I’m not the only one fascinated by these neighborhood monoliths.)
That I’m depressing (or that one of my favorite topics, “poor people,” to quote NYC Weboy, is), is the message I’m getting in the last month. My good buddy Jake framed it rather diplomatically, asking last week when my blog got so “professional.” My web-addicted friend Tergie unintentionally signalled that the RP was no longer one of his list of must-see websites, when he responded in a recent phone conversation that he didn’t realize my grandmother had passed away. I also realized last Thursday I was transferring a lot of personal emotion and professional frustration into this blog, when this piece about Bloomberg’s homeless agenda derailed me for hours as I ranted like a disappointed parent or hysterical right-wing radio host. Generally, the emotion I bring to my work is an asset, but it feels less beneficial when it derives from two chilly, low months dealing with the loss of my grandma, career transitions, and the “what am I doing with my life” late-night anxieties such change inevitably produces.
That said, my monthly visits have been growing steadily (as has the spam), and I’m beginning to receive occasional policy-oriented comments and links from well outside the RP inner circle. And one thing I’ve learned in the braniac competitive world of academia, is that I am combattive, argumentative, contentious, and polemical. All in a day’s work…and no hard feelings, ok? Arguing is the nerd’s form of exercise.
All of this reflexivity is to say that the content of the RP is unapologetically here to stay, though as I emerge from the hibernation of the last couple months my tone should lighten up considerably. As Mama Dramas told me, my blog is (at least) intellectually stimulating. I can only hope, because without cable and only a PBS-loving boyfriend, New Yorker subscription, Netflix and Wikipedia to keep me entertained, there’s only so much yammering on I can do about pop culture (E-mail redstarperspective at gmail dot com for the password). So I’ll leave that to the experts. There’s plenty else out there that pisses me off.
Bloomberg is the only Republican man I’ve ever voted for (I have voted for Republican women in local elections in a increase-women-in-office strategy), and I’ve generally been pleased with his job performance to date. (Other than his insistence on being a Yankees fan; traitor!)
Needless to say, I am quite disappointed to read the following in this morning’s coverage of record numbers of homeless in NYC (my emphases, per usual):
…halfway into the Bloomberg administration’s five-year plan to reduce homelessness by two-thirds…Last month’s total, 9,287 families, was the highest since the city started keeping and publicly releasing such figures in 1979, according to the group, the Coalition for the Homeless…while more homeless families were seeking refuge in city shelters, the number being moved into permanent housing fell last year by 11 percent compared with 2005…The report comes at a time when the amount of housing affordable to low-income residents continues to shrink and the gap between average income and rent continues to grow…
Foolish me, I equated Bloomberg’s relatively progressive public health, education and housing policies with an above-average political intelligence regarding strategies to alleviate inequality and poverty and increase opportunity and mobility. Turns out, he’s just as susceptible to age-old “culture of poverty” beliefs about poor people’s behaviors as the rest of us:
One major problem…is the 20 percent annual reduction in housing subsidies, which is intended to encourage participants to find better-paying jobs…
Actually, as a senior policy analyst from the Coalition points out:
“…It [effectively] serves as a work disincentive [by prohibiting] families from gaining employment income because that would cut them from welfare…In the meantime, their housing subsidies are cut, leaving them unable to pay rent and, often, sending them back into shelters…”
With considerable sangfroid, Arnold S. Cohen, president and chief executive of Partnership for the Homeless, suggests that we see these findings as illustrative of “growing inequality in New York.”
“This is the story about the other New York,” he said, “another city of unimaginable poverty.”
True dat, Arnie.
I’m re-reading Chicago School sociologist Louis Wirth right now, his seminal Urbanism as a Way of Life (1938), and I’m pleased to see that in his first paragraph he writes “…the beginning of what is distinctively modern in our civilization is best signalized by the growth of great cities…from which radiate the ideas and practices that we call civilization.”
Yeah Louie.
I bet he would have laughed at my Starbucks joke.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune has a terrific series - “Last Chance” - on the coastal wetlands loss threatening the region and our nation this week. Check out the rad interactive map that describes how the wetlands developed over 6,000 years, only to be reduced by one-third from regional development of the last 75 years (apparently we’re losing about one football field every 45 minutes. That’s a lot of glum little boys and men out there). One LSU veteran scientist describes the last 20 years of modest coastal restoration projects as “putting makeup on a corpse” (and a period in which we lost a coastal area approximately the size of Los Angeles. And Hollywood floats out to sea…).
Experts now warn we have 10 years to reverse the trends of coastal erosion. And, akin to the Walter Reed disaster and so many other suddenly dire circumstances, this massive problem has been no little secret for quite some time. Researchers have been documenting the “scope” of the land loss since the 1970s, yet
the state did not officially commit to coastal restoration until 1989…during the next 15 years, most proposals were stifled by lack of financing and the conflicting concerns of competing wetland user groups such as commercial fishers and oyster harvesters, the oil and gas industry, property owners and developers. “…the few meager state and federal restoration efforts that escaped political purgatory [have] not only failed to reverse land loss, they didn’t even slow it down.”
Now, though Katrina finally focused public attention on the issue, “years of inaction have taken a toll that could prove fatal to the hopes of rebuilding critical basins near [New Orleans]”, claim experts.
aka, the Other Walter Reed.
Some highlights from the Washington Post’s breaking “reports about substandard conditions and bureaucratic tangles that affected the care of injured soldiers who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan” (my emphases here and throughout):
There’s the substandard housing:
Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room [in Building 18 at Walter Reed], part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
The “warehousing” approach for outpatients:
…5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely — a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients…they outnumber hospital patients at [the pristine] Walter Reed 17 to 1…”
Accompanying food insecurity, mental illness, and drug abuse:
…overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers’ families who are close to poverty…Seventy-five percent of the troops polled by Walter Reed last March said their experience was “stressful.” Suicide attempts and unintentional overdoses from prescription drugs and alcohol, which is sold on post, are part of the narrative here…
The demoralizing, inefficient and confusing bureacracy:
Life beyond the hospital bed is a frustrating mound of paperwork. The typical soldier is required to file 22 documents with eight different commands — most of them off-post — to enter and exit the medical processing world…Sixteen different information systems are used to process the forms, but few of them can communicate with one another. The Army’s three personnel databases cannot read each other’s files and can’t interact with the separate pay system or the medical recordkeeping databases.”
Having to prove you merit the services:
The disappearance of necessary forms and records is the most common reason soldiers languish at Walter Reed longer than they should, according to soldiers, family members and staffers. Sometimes the Army has no record that a soldier even served in Iraq. A combat medic who did three tours had to bring in letters and photos of herself in Iraq to show she that had been there, after a clerk couldn’t find a record of her service.
Adverse impacts to an already ailing system from privatizing lower-paying,lower-skilled support services:
…”patient care services are at risk of mission failure” because of staff shortages brought on by the privatization of the hospital’s support workforce…
The systemic nature of the problem:
Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the [military medical, including the VA] system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories — their own versions, not verified — of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets.
Yet, this is the alternative universe from how we usually categorize the poor:
Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, [now former] commander at Walter Reed, said…a major reason outpatients stay so long, a change from the days when injured soldiers were discharged as quickly as possible, is that the Army wants to be able to hang on to as many soldiers as it can, “because this is the first time this country has fought a war for so long with an all-volunteer force since the Revolution.”
As such, there is the usual hyper-active level of political shaming, finger-pointing and promises of reparations reserved for such seemingly unusual, if manmade, disasters, with once again, Bush catching on too late. Apparently, he “first learned of the troubling allegations regarding Walter Reed from the stories this weekend in The Washington Post.”
When I was in Toronto a few years ago, I joked for the first time that seeing a Starbucks made me feel like I was in “civilization.” Never mind that Toronto is a fabulous and vibrant global city, apparently I was rather unnerved by the preponderance of the more-creatively-named Canadian coffee chain, Second Cup. No doubt, that joke works a lot more effectively in more far-flung locales.
Excusing him for putting that terrible Squeeze song in my head, I want to follow up on Wesley’s recent posts on the Starbucks company’s effort to become the “third place” for folks (following work and home) in their communities. Because I (inexplicably) have access to Times Select articles, I was able to read the feature on Starbucks’s CEO Howard Schultz and his fear that the company was [losing]
“’the soul of the past and [reflecting] a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store.’ He said that the Starbucks experience was becoming commoditized, and he urged the executive team to ‘go back to the core.’”
Schultz celebrates the company’s extremely profitable growth even as he laments the character-assasinating qualities of corporate efficiencies and economies of scale. The article concludes with a silly dramatic warning to Starbucks not to become the next McDonald’s (even though Starbucks’s growth has been faster and bigger than McDonald’s).
But why shouldn’t this be the goal?
American public opinion is moving towards universal healthcare, but can this “marvelous” candidate for the Mayor of South Boston deliver? Only with your support:
Vote for “The Pride of the Lower End” Michael Pano for Southie Mayor today at the South Boston Public Library. Go Mike! (Of course, I’m crossing my fingers there’s room in his administration for this urban policy oriented ex!)