Easy enough to say

“The notion is, let’s transform higher education into job training,” Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale, told me disapprovingly.

From here. Those who disapprove must either not have children going on to college, or they are in the top 10%. The notion is also incorrect.

The context of course is college and what it's supposed to be. The argument that college should be one or the other is a bit of a straw man. One is job training and the other would be the lofty and nebulous goal of "education" preferably in the liberal arts tradition. The fear of many including parents and students is that college may have strayed too far to one end without keeping its eye on the other. (I would say more so parents than students since students appear not to have changed much.)

Who bears the greater responsibility of learning what we used to call "marketable skills" (here called job training) - the parent or the school? Should the parent take a hands on role in steering their child toward a marketable major or at least toward learning some marketable skills or is college the time where students should learn to fail - by either choosing a wrong major or learning the wrong "skill"? Of course, this dichotomy is also false.Should the learning of some kind of marketable skill take place in college or outside (either through volunteer activity or extracurricular activity - e.g. college reporter, club web site designer, or through work-study or part-time work)? Again, this either or question is also false. It is the responsibility of the student and/or the parent to pursue all these avenues, but (except of outside part-time jobs), it is the responsibility of the college to make as many of these activities available as possible.

Virginia Postrel's post is worth reading (emphasis mine):

The commentators excoriating today’s students for studying the wrong subjects are pursuing certainty where none exists. Like the health fanatics convinced that every case of cancer must be caused by smoking or a bad diet, they want to believe that good people, people like them, will always have good jobs and that today’s unemployed college grads are suffering because they were self-indulgent or stupid. But plenty of organic chemists can testify that the mere fact that you pursued a technical career that was practical two or three decades ago doesn’t mean you have job security today.

I was lucky to graduate from high school in the late 1970s, when the best research said that going to college was an economically losing proposition. You would be better off just getting a job out of high school -- or so it appeared at the time. Such studies are always backward-looking.

I thus entered college to pursue learning for its own sake. As an English major determined not to be a lawyer, I also made sure I graduated with not one but two practical trades --neither learned in the college classroom. At the depths of the previous worst recession since the Great Depression, I had no problem getting a job as a rookie journalist and, as an emergency backup, I knew I could always fall back on my excellent typing skills. Three decades later, nobody needs typists, and journalists are almost as obsolete.

The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyze texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn’t that I didn’t learn Fortran, but that I didn’t study Dante.

The most valuable skill anyone can learn in college is how to learn efficiently -- how to figure out what you don’t know and build on what you do know to adapt to new situations and new problems. Liberal-arts advocates like this argument, but it applies to any field. In the three decades since we graduated, my college friend David Bernstein has gone from computing the speed at which signals travel through silicon chips to being an entrepreneur whose work includes specifying, designing and developing a consumer-oriented smart-phone app. 

But it is also worth remembering that today's job market is not the same job market that Virginia or I graduated into. Employers seem to be more reluctant to train and seem to want the ideal worker right away.  Nor does college cost the same in real dollar terms as it did when I was there. It is not surprising that costs is one of the primary drivers for this question. Throw in the double whammy of the recession and it is almost a knee jerk reaction to ask whether all the money for college is worth it.

After all, it may be okay and even acceptable back when Virginia was in school to support herself as a typist and as she points out both typists and journalists today are obsolete. Today's version of supporting yourself as a typist would be either to work as a barista or a waiter or in retail sales. The fact that these jobs are in fact becoming the fall back for many college graduates has not only prompted the debate on acquiring tangible skills in college, the usefulness of college, and whether college is worth it but also the debate on "underemployed" or "mal-employed" or "over-skilled" or "college labor markets".

Both Virginia and Bruce Ackerman in the quote that led this post (and perhaps even myself) are probably reliving the romanticism of our college days when we believed that college is the time to "find ourselves". This meant pretty much doing what we wanted whenever we liked and somehow or other we would come out okay since we have in fact come out okay. There is a danger to this bias since we don't really know what happened to those who did not fare as well. The come back to finding ourselves in life is that it is not so much to "find" but more to "create" ourselves and today creating means being able to not just survive in the tumultuous labor market but to exact revenge by living well. That college was able to allow us to exact our vengeance on life in the past but not as well today is the problem that college students and their parents are facing.

When we censor ourselves what does it say about us?

I was looking forward to getting Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series for the kids. I had enjoyed them when I was in the pre-teen/early teen years. Here are some comments I found when I looked them up on Amazon:

By Titan

This book is not Enid Blyton's original text but an edited version. It is an outrage that this is not made more clear. If I want to read Enid Blyton, I want to read the original words, not a doctored 'modern' version. Apparently the original (first folio) version is still available so you might want to look for that instead of buying this one. I would give the original version 5 stars, incidentally. I loved the Famous Five books as a child.

By Tatyana A Privalova

Chapter one, this edition: She wants a good talking to.

Chapter one, older editions: She wants a good spanking.

Enough said.

By emma_e_brown

Like the last reviewer I am thoroughly disgusted that the publishers have "updated" the text. I was looking forward to a big nostalgia trip, but no lashings of ginger beer here by jove! This is hardly replacing a racially offensive toy with naughty teddies and I see no reason whatsoever for butchering these classic stories. What next - The Lion, The With, and the Ipod?!! Surely contemporary children are just as capable of appreciating a period story as we were?

These reviewers gave the book one star because of the edits. I’m not sure I’d go that far. I had noticed this ‘politically correct edits’ when the kids were younger. In Curious George Goes Fishing, the current edition has George seeing a large man go by. In an older edition of Curious George Flies a Kite (which we got as a hand me down) from which Goes Fishing was excerpted, it was a fat man.

What is the message that we are trying to send? That we don’t want to mislabel someone? Or is it that we don’t want the kids to think badly of us -- that we used to call people fat, that we used to spank? When kids grow up as they all inevitably do, they’ll know what fat and spank are - so what did we achieve by withholding these ‘truths’ from them?

Does how the EFC is calculated penalize savers

This is probably not a revelation to many people but with K1 approaching the age where we need to start thinking about college, this has been bugging me.

EFC is the expected family contribution calculated by colleges as well as the feds when applying for financial aid for college.

Family A: Household income of past 5 years of $100,000. Hand to mouth consumers who spend on luxury goods and expensive vacations. Savings = 0. Net worth = 0.

Family B: Household income of past 5 years of $100,000. Saves for college. Savings = $100,000. Net worth = $50,000.

All else being equal.

Will Family A’s EFC be the same as Family B’s EFC? True, Family A’s kid might graduate with more debt but it is also likely that they will also qualify for grants so that the net price paid will be lower than Family B.

Websites such as this one make the calculations even more stark.

For Bowdoin college, I used household income of $170,000 with AGI of 120,000 and zeros for almost everything else except primary residence and savings. For Family A I assumed net worth in residence was $500,000 and had savings of $100,000 $10,000. For Family B I assumed net worth in residence of $100,000 and savings of 0. Family A's EFC was about $16,000 per year while Family B's was $6,000.

Update: Found an Atlantic article with the same theme.
Update: I also assumed entering college in Fall with an additional child not yet (but going to be) in college.

Lying heroes

Two years ago K1’s unit of study was ‘Heroes’ and one of the books they read was Greg Mortensen’s Three Cups of Tea. At the end of the school term, it was revealed that almost all of the book was a figment of the author’s hyper imaginative mind. Or did he succumb to all the things that he thought he was?

On page 129, Mortensen quotes Edmund Hillary:
But I’ve learned through the years, as long as you don’t believe all the rubbish about yourself, you can’t come to too much harm.

In retrospect, the fallout from Mortensen’s Central Asia Institute was almost inevitable. The board could not get him to account for anything and his coauthor David Oliver Relin remarked about how difficult it was to work with Mortensen (pg. 229).

At the end of the term the teacher spoke about the CBS ‘60 Minutes’ expose to the class. My sense was that universally the kids felt betrayed although this was not the word they used. The most important lesson I think they learned from this was that “Anybody can lie” and “Don’t believe everything you read”. In may ways I saw this an almost transformative experience as they shifted from 6th to 7th grade that year. And perhaps it’s a good thing to learn early and together as a class that lying is leads to distrust.

The time for arithmetic and poetry is past. Nowadays, my brothers, take your lessons from the Kalashnikov and rocket propelled grenade
- graffiti spray painted on the courtyard wall of the Korphe school.

Take your children to work day

No, it's not today but I've been thinking.... We have been watching some old movies with the kids: Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, etc. and we have been enjoying the bonus features of how the movies were made. It would have made for one very exciting take your children to work day if they could see all the work that goes into it.

Given that many of us now work in offices I gather that take your children to work day must be pretty boring (for the kids anyway). Take what Anne-Marie Slaughter considers exciting and rewarding:

In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts.

Well, maybe not this aspect of it but one can’t help but think that she misses it.

What about giving some praise for their self esteem

The school year came to an end about 3 weeks ago for K1 and K2. One of the the complaints that K1 had over the course of the year was the lack of feedback from her piano teacher and another teacher at school. By feedback she meant praise.

I mentally rolled my eyes when I heard it and said nothing. Whatever happened to just sucking it up and doing it - or doing it for the sake of doing it well? After all, it is getting hard to distinguish praise from positive feedback these days.

Here are some of my favorites from Lori Gottlieb’s article:

...all of this worry about creating low self-esteem might actually perpetuate it. No wonder my patient Lizzie told me she felt “less amazing” than her parents had always said she was. Given how “amazing” her parents made her out to be, how could she possibly live up to that? Instead of acknowledging their daughter’s flaws, her parents, hoping to make her feel secure, denied them. “I’m bad at math,” Lizzie said she once told them, when she noticed that the math homework was consistently more challenging for her than for many of her classmates. “You’re not bad at math,” her parents responded. “You just have a different learning style. We’ll get you a tutor to help translate the information into a format you naturally understand.”

With much struggle, the tutor helped Lizzie get her grade up, but she still knew that other classmates were good at math and she wasn’t. “I didn’t have a different learning style,” she told me. “I just suck at math! But in my family, you’re never bad at anything. You’re just better at some things than at others. If I ever say I’m bad at something, my parents say, ‘Oh, honey, no you’re not!’”  
Yet the kids seem to know when praise is genuine and when it’s not. At summer horse camp the counselors used to give out ribbons to everyone for something vague like “most improved in …” Fill in the blanks with your favorite. This supposedly protected them them from the “ravages of competition” and kept them from competing with each other. (In elementary school, they play kick ball but the PE teacher prohibited them from keeping score - but some kids kept score anyway and would shout it out. Then PE teacher would then say “We are not keeping score!”) One of the things that surprised me then was what would happen when they actually competed? They went in for a horse competition and got thirds or fourths or even fifths. (There are only 5 riders in each competition.) I was glad to hear them say something like “Finally, a ribbon that actually means something!”.

From the article:

Last month, I spoke to a youth soccer coach in Washington, D.C. A former competitive college athlete and now a successful financier, he told me that when he first learned of the youth league’s rules—including no score-keeping—he found them “ridiculous.”

How are the kids going to learn? he thought. He valued his experience as an athlete, through which he had been forced to deal with defeat. “I used to think, If we don’t keep score, we’re going to have a bunch of wusses out there. D.C. can be very PC, and I thought this was going too far.”

Eventually, though, he came around to the new system, because he realized that some kids would be “devastated” if they got creamed by a large margin. “We don’t want them to feel bad,” he said. “We don’t want kids to feel any pressure.” (When I told Wendy Mogel about this, she literally screamed through the phone line, “Please let them be devastated at age 6 and not have their first devastation be in college! Please, please, please let them be devastated many times on the soccer field!”) I told the coach this sounded goofy, given that these kids attend elite, competitive schools like Georgetown Day School or Sidwell Friends, where President Obama’s daughters go. They’re being raised by parents who are serious about getting their kids into Harvard and Yale. Aren’t these kids exposed to a lot of pressure? And besides, how is not keeping score protecting anyone, since, as he conceded, the kids keep score on their own anyway? When the score is close, the coach explained, it’s less of an issue. But blowouts are a problem.

He told me about a game against a very talented team. “We lost 10–5, and the other team dominated it. Our kids were very upset. They said, ‘We got killed!’ and I said, ‘What are you talking about? You guys beat the spread! The team we beat last week lost 14–1!’ The kids thought about this for a second and then were like, ‘You’re right, we were great! We rule!’ They felt so much better, because I turned it around for them into something positive. When you get killed and there’s no positive spin, the kids think they’re failures. It damages their self-esteem.”

At the end of the season, the league finds a way to “honor each child” with a trophy. “They’re kind of euphemistic,” the coach said of the awards, “but they’re effective.” The Spirit Award went to “the troublemaker who always talks and doesn’t pay attention, so we spun it into his being very ‘spirited,’” he said. The Most Improved Player Award went to “the kid who has not an ounce of athleticism in his body, but he tries hard.” The Coaches’ Award went to “the kids who were picking daisies, and the only thing we could think to say about them is that they showed up on time. What would that be, the Most Prompt Award? That seemed lame. So we called it the Coaches’ Award.” There’s also a Most Valuable Player Award, but the kid who deserved it three seasons in a row got it only after the first season, “because we wanted other kids to have a chance to get it.” The coach acknowledged that everyone knew who the real MVP was. But, he said, “this is a more collaborative approach versus the way I grew up as a competitive athlete, which was a selfish, Me Generation orientation.”

I asked Wendy Mogel if this gentler approach really creates kids who are less self-involved, less “Me Generation.” No, she said. Just the opposite: parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they deserve special treatment. “A principal at an elementary school told me that a parent asked a teacher not to use red pens for corrections,” she said, “because the parent felt it was upsetting to kids when they see so much red on the page. This is the kind of self-absorption we’re seeing, in the name of our children’s self-esteem.”  

Teaching programming in middle school

One the things K1 will need next year is a TI-84 calculator. This calculator retails for $140, $99 at Amazon for now without shipping. At a time when many kids have computers (at home) which come with Microsoft Excel as well as a plethora of freely available software such as R, Python, Scilab, etc. (OpenOffice is also a free spreadsheet program.) I wonder about the utility of such a pricey calculator.

The only advantage that I can see is that students are able to bring with them into an exam hall. At a time when programming skills seem to be gaining importance and it is possiblel that even college graduates in economics don’t know how to use Excel, it seems questionable for schools in general to adopt a math curriculum that adheres to the use of such an archaic instrument.

I find it the whole middle school math curriculum where she’s at (it’s the IB math curriculum) decidedly backward. Even when graphs and plots are taught there is very little hands on use of software to explore lines and curves. (Graph paper is fine for the beginning, but after awhile it just gets tedious - and that’s what computers are for.)

How hard is it to teach programming at the middle school level? I have no doubt that the concepts are hard - which is why an early introduction even to Excel and VBA is essential. Alice is one organization that is trying to make programming teachable at the high school level. Storytelling Alice is an option for the middle school level but doesn’t seem to have made much inroads.

In general, I am disappointed not only in the math curriculum but in the way programming instruction is being taught at the high school level.


Update: Duke University has some nice Alice teaching material.

YouTube in the classroom

When K1 was in 5th grade they learned French songs using YouTube. They learned this one by Francis Cabrel - Il Faudra Leur Dire.

Now that K2 is in 3rd grade, there seems to be more YouTube in the classroom. This time, it’s Yannick Noah - I remember him only as a tennis player.

Aux arbres citoyens seems to be a favorite. Les Lionnes is another and so is La Voix Des Sages.

Classical music is just not ‘fun’?

K1 and K2 have been taking piano lessons for a few years now going through the usual classical approach. We’ve also sat through many recitals and classical concerts and thought I’ve enjoyed them - some more than others, I’ve noticed that the atmosphere at most of these events is one of stiffness, seriousness and stuffiness. The performers themselves seem more interested in proving how technically adept they are rather than having fun performing. (There are exceptions - Lang Lang is one.)


Getting K1 and K2 to practice can also be difficult as any parent especially Tiger Mother can attest. Even when they do practice, there is a lack of joy in their playing that comes through - and by this I mean exuberance, delight, just pure joy of the music. Is classical music training destroying their appreciation?
Is this lack of fun more because of the instrument or the tradition? What happens when classical instruments cross over to the pop/rock field? One obvious example is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. There are others:

1. David Garrett - violin
2. These two duelling cello dudes playing Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal
3. Wired Strings - violins/cellos: Violins with Kanye West? May be better with Adele!
4. Piano guys - cello/piano. My favorite? What do you get when you cross Adele with Holst? Bach with seven cellos? These guys rock!

Update (5/15/2010): Here is one of the perhaps more talented kids that are in the same music school as K1 and K2. There are other videos of her on YouTube as well but mostly I was struck by the intense concentration and grace but not enjoyment.

Performing arts

There has been a lot of hand wringing over the state of STEM in the United States and I’ve added my share. In that same post was a link to an MR post that said:

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

As far as performing arts (versus visual arts) is concerned, when I’ve thought about it in the past, I was and still am uncertain whether majoring or even encouraging our kids to be part actors or singers is a good thing. Yet with the increasing fragmentation in the delivery of entertainment into our homes (even Hulu is producing original shows) and the proliferation of ‘reality’ talent shows, is the market signalling that the opportunities in this field are increasing? (The BLS begs to differ on actors but not singers.) The entertainment industry is perhaps the few industries that have had some success in the global marketplace. Is this industry becoming a growth industry as well?

After all the general audience would prefer to sit back, relax and enjoy watching a play or a singer rather than say, someone reciting the periodic table of elements. And while quiz shows such as the Spelling or Geographic Bee or Jeopardy have a decent sized audience, it is not quite the same thing as trying to be the next Kelly Clarkson or David Archuleta or Ramin Karimloo. You can’t turn being a contestant in Jeopardy into a vocation or profession as easily as when you’re a good singer or actor.

Unfortunately performance arts is also a field where luck could matter as much as talent. Perhaps I am not a good judge of talent but I am always surprised to see so much of it in the instances when I watch American Idol or it its ilk. And there are more out there on YouTube who are waiting to be discovered. Talent itself then is not a sufficient condition for success. Consider Christina Perri:

Perri's song "Jar of Hearts" was featured on So You Think You Can Dance during the June 30, 2010 show. It was featured in performance by Billy Bell and Kathryn McCormick. Perri's friend Keltie Colleen passed the song to show choreographer Stacey Tookey; Perri and Colleen watched the performance in the audience. Following its exposure on the show, "Jar of Hearts" sold 48,000 digital copies, debuting on the Billboard Hot 100 at #63 and reaching #28 on Billboard's Hot Digital Songs. Within a month, it sold more than 100,000 copies. Then, her music video for "Jar of Hearts" landed on the VH1 top 20 music video countdown.

What if her song hadn’t been featured? Would she still have been as successful? And what about those who have been successful? Fame can be short lived. Whatever happened to Judge Reinhold after the Beverly Hills Cop movies? Or Erik Estrada? Remember him? I’m half-expecting them to appear on DWTS. Yet these fields can also be an ocean of opportunities. If they can’t remain a singer/actor they can work in the studio in other capacities.

In so many ways this is a field where it isn’t only what you do with your talent, it’s also what else you can do with your interest, willingness and talent.

Camps

This is the first time K1 was at sleep away camp. She returned from Camp Strawderman with the desire to go away for a month instead of 2 weeks the next summer. We’re extremely glad she got to experience the feelings of camaraderie and the joys of just being together that seems to be missing from her school life. In terms of facilities, I thought that the camp was more rustic than what was featured in this NYT article. The article may be a harbinger of things to come for summer camps in general:

The pressure is on as never before. The tight economy has made private traditional sleep-away camps like Pine Forest seem even more of a luxury, even for many upper-middle-class families who have sent their children to such programs for generations. All the usual business headaches — personnel, logistics, marketing, customer service — matter more than ever.

But beyond the slack economy is a profound change in the business of summer camp. As in just about every industry, slick, nimble upstarts are muscling in on the establishment. These newcomers hold out 21st-century promises: We can groom the modern organization kid, hone lacrosse skills, improve algebra, pad the high-school résumé.

No more the quaint summer idyll of lake and volleyball and s’mores. Today, former Brazilian pros coach soccer camp, Oscar winners officiate at film camp, computer game developers teach tech camp — all the better, the pitches go, to get Holly or Howie into Harvard, or at least to sharpen their skills.

Seriously? Outcomes-based summer camps? Certainly, if the outcome is memories. But I can commiserate with the parents especially since today’s schools are already too outcomes based to to make other offerings available. Hence, the blossoming of niche camps such as computer animation, movie making, rock camp (and other musical variants) as well as the ever present test prep “camps”.

Keynesian economics from an 8-year old's perspective

There is some utility work of some kind going on in our neighborhood. Every few days the road would be closed and we’d have to take a detour. It’s not clear from driving by what they’re doing or who the “they” are. “They” have been at it for about a month.

“What are they doing anyway?” K2 asked?
I jokingly replied, “It looks like they’re just digging holes and then filling them back up again”. (Actually metal plates over the holes.)

Pause.
“Well, that doesn’t seem very useful”, K2 responded.

Privacy vs security

K1’s grade had their first encounter with cyber-bullying which goes without saying that all the kids and some parents (including me) are in a tizzy about it. The incident happened as a name-calling post via Google Buzz. Privacy advocates have won in the sense that the cyber bully was able to get away with it since Gmail is as anonymous as you can get (without a court order at any rate). Since all the kids have one other as their contacts on their Gmail accounts, a single person (already with an account) can create an anonymous e-mail and reach all the kids in one post via Buzz.

There is a sense that with advances in technology privacy advocates are fighting a losing battle - but as this case shows, this ain’t so. And the trade off that is depicted here is perhaps a false dichotomy between privacy and security, but what if everyone knew more about you. Would you feel safer? If e-mails could not be anonymous we would all worry less about cyber-bullies.

If my credit card company could somehow track my whereabouts and link the location with some physical characteristic about me then I would worry less about fraudulent charges. If I were home alone and had not moved in more than 10 hours someone could be sent to check up on me at whatever location I happened to be. Yes, there is good privacy and bad privacy but perhaps we need to give up on the idea that having privacy is always good.

Supporting the arts

It seems almost universal that no matter what the culture, we love to celebrate the successes of artists, performers and sportsmen. We have been to several school performances this school year and there is no doubt that there is a lot of talent – yet when is their talent good enough that we should encourage and cultivate it? There is also no doubt that talent by itself is not enough for commercial or even limited artistic success. Do we sow the seeds of desire in these young men and women to strike out into the artistic world when we clap and shout 'Bravo!' or 'Author, author!'? And if so, are we responsible for helping them find their way whatever that may be – or should we tamp down our enthusiasm and clap politely and whisper 'Don't quit your day job'.

For while the returns to college may be an expensive gamble, so is the returns to artistic and sporting endeavors. Just how much should we as parents encourage any kind of artistic or sporting career or be responsible for their chosen paths?

Incentive effects of prizes on children

This is in K2's primary school. The classroom that collects the most boxtops gets a prize. Along the course of the year, the teachers realized that kids were starting to steal box tops from one classroom and claim them for their own classroom. Zip lock bags used to be taped to the door of their classrooms so that parents can just drop them off whenever was convenient. Now, the box tops are kept by the teachers and submitted by the kids.

Children, marriage and divorce

Again from the New York Magazine:

... couples probably pay the dearest price of all. Healthy relationships definitely make people happier. But children adversely affect relationships. As Thomas Bradbury, a father of two and professor of psychology at UCLA, likes to say: “Being in a good relationship is a risk factor for becoming a parent.” He directs me to one of the more inspired studies in the field, by psychologists Lauren Papp and E. Mark Cummings. They asked 100 long-married couples to spend two weeks meticulously documenting their disagreements. Nearly 40 percent of them were about their kids.

If wanting children causes marriage, does having children cause divorce?

Assessment gap

K1 got her results from a standardized test over the summer. She did pretty well. One thing that surprised me about the report was the following:

In one sub-test she was in the 72 percentile when normed against "Independent schools" which I read as private schools. But when normed against the national norm (which I read as including public schools) she was in the 95 percentile. This tells me that the gap between the achievement of private and public school students is pretty large - larger than I had expected - which was no more than 10 percent at the 50-75 percentile range.

Parenting should not be all (or mostly) work

This article pretty much nails it:

She’s referring to the recent documentary that compares the lives of four newborns—one in Japan, one in Namibia, one in Mongolia, and one in the United States (San Francisco). “I don’t mean to idealize the lives of the Namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard not to notice how calm they were. They were beading their children’s ankles and decorating them with sienna, clearly enjoying just sitting and playing with them, and we’re here often thinking of all of this stuff as labor.”

This is especially true in middle- and upper-income families, which are far more apt than their working-class counterparts to see their children as projects to be perfected. (Children of women with bachelor degrees spend almost five hours on “organized activities” per week, as opposed to children of high-school dropouts, who spend two.) Annette Lareau, the sociologist who coined the term “concerted cultivation” to describe the aggressive nurturing of economically advantaged children, puts it this way: “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children, answering questions with questions, and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution. And this is very tiring work.” Yet it’s work few parents feel that they can in good conscience neglect, says Lareau, “lest they put their children at risk by not giving them every advantage.”

I overheard a conversation this morning at the check out register of Whole Foods. One of the clerks said she was the oldest of 8. I'd be willing to argue that raising 2 kids today takes more time and effort than raising 8 kids 20 years ago (especially middle and upper class).

But what do I make of this:

Martin Seligman, the positive-psychology pioneer who is, famously, not a natural optimist, has always taken the view that happiness is best defined in the ancient Greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful life. And the way we take stock of that life, in the end, isn’t by how much fun we had, but what we did with it. (Seligman has seven children.)

Piano recital

A couple of weeks ago I watched K1 and K2 in their piano recital. It all went well. I think they were relieved it was over - as was I because now it meant that we didn't have to nag them to practice their piano.

I also saw a lot of kids who no doubt had been directed to other activities by their parents: Art lessons, additional language (Russian/Polish/Hebrew) - mainly due to their ethnic/national origins, gymnastics, swimming, ballet, ice-skating, etc.

I wondered what the kids would think 10 or 15 years from now about being sheperded into all these activities. Do they feel like they're being groomed for something? Will all these lessons increase their awareness of our (high) expectations for them?

I am interested in what the answer to the following will be: The Happiness Project: Did Your Parents Make You Take Piano Lessons? If So, Have They Made You Happier?

I did not have piano lessons so I cannot know if it would have made me happier. This calls for a randomized trial!

What a generation of parenting fad can do

Some thoughts from The Atlantic (emphasis mine):

Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’” Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special.’”

In her 2006 book, Generation Me, Twenge notes that self-esteem in children began rising sharply around 1980, and hasn’t stopped since. By 1999, according to one survey, 91 percent of teens described themselves as responsible, 74 percent as physically attractive, and 79 percent as very intelligent. (More than 40 percent of teens also expected that they would be earning $75,000 a year or more by age 30; the median salary made by a 30-year-old was $27,000 that year.) Twenge attributes the shift to broad changes in parenting styles and teaching methods, in response to the growing belief that children should always feel good about themselves, no matter what. As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem—and to decouple it from performance—have become widespread.

These efforts have succeeded in making today’s youth more confident and individualistic. But that may not benefit them in adulthood, particularly in this economic environment. Twenge writes that “self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work,” and that “the ability to persevere and keep going” is “a much better predictor of life outcomes than self-esteem.” She worries that many young people might be inclined to simply give up in this job market. “You’d think if people are more individualistic, they’d be more independent,” she told me. “But it’s not really true. There’s an element of entitlement—they expect people to figure things out for them.”

Ron Alsop, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace, says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in many 20-somethings. They’re used to checklists, he says, and “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving.” Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, “need almost constant direction” in the workplace. “Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.”

All of these characteristics are worrisome, given a harsh economic environment that requires perseverance, adaptability, humility, and entrepreneurialism. Perhaps most worrisome, though, is the fatalism and lack of agency that both Twenge and Alsop discern in today’s young adults. Trained throughout childhood to disconnect performance from reward, and told repeatedly that they are destined for great things, many are quick to place blame elsewhere when something goes wrong, and inclined to believe that bad situations will sort themselves out—or will be sorted out by parents or other helpers.

The message from books like Learned Optimism was exactly this: Those who place the blame elsewhere when things go wrong and attribute successes to themselves even when they have little to do with it tend to be more optimistic and those who are more optimistic do better. For this generation of kids, I hope the book is right.