Opinions I hold that almost no-one agrees with

1.

Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme is progressive because it treats maternity leave with the same degree of legitimacy as sick leave for women in the workforce, and his scheme also provides more generous leave entitlements for parents and their newborns. (Hopefully the scheme also helps encourage women with great career potential to stay attached to the workforce long enough to rise to positions of seniority where they can remove institutional barriers that are holding back disadvantaged women). But for goodness sake, I know what Abbott meant when he said ‘women of that calibre’ and it was not a clumsy way of saying ‘I hear you sisters, ‘work life balance’ is crazy difficult and we must do what we can to assist you all’. Abbott’s comment was transparent snobbery. It should alarm us as feminists because the conservative side of politics has a long history of promoting motherhood to patriarchy-approved women – ie. white, married, middle-to-high income – while not only denying support for, but actively undermining, mothers outside that spectrum – eg. single, disabled, non-white, incarcerated, poor. I’m not suggesting that the parental leave scheme is harmful to poor mothers but it isn’t immediately helpful to them, and particularly not if it is sold with the overt message that some mothers are more equal than others.

2.

Angelina Jolie wrote a perfectly sound (and engagingly heartfelt) article about her decision to have a double mastectomy.  Her article will be beneficial for women encountering the choice in similar circumstances, and also for destigmatising mastectomies generally. But it is not a particularly insightful piece. The screening Jolie promotes in her article is unaffordable to many in the US and the preventative surgery she ultimately decided upon has problems of its own that are not explored in the piece. Her article also emphasizes genetic risk at the expense of environmental factors which are far more significant in contributing to cancer rates. This is a concern because genetic factors are corporation-friendly but environmental factors are decidedly not. (For an excellent overview of this criticism of the breast cancer campaign I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Cancerland”). Jolie is not a writer or a medical specialist, she is an actor, so there is nothing offensive to me about her article being relatively narrow and personal in focus, but the response to it almost everywhere has been somewhat.. star-struck. Jolie didn’t write the bravest and most important story for women this year – can’t we just be satisfied with her writing a significant story?

3.

Australia has a problem with anti-intellectualism but this bold article, “Why Australia hates thinkers” doesn’t prove it. Credit to Alecia Simmonds, the author of the piece for getting people talking and also for naming names when she makes her criticisms. Both of those achievements are important but Simmonds’ article reads like having dinner with a scoffing ex-pat. And I should know, I have dinner with such an ex-pat every year when they come back to Australia to visit. (Love you, Dad).

In her article, Simmonds cherry picks a handful of idiot commentators from Australia and then unfavourably compares us to the cultures of France and England. But having been to both those countries I know that these lovely places have their share of over-exposed buffoons, too. Australia’s anti-intellectualism could be demonstrated with less anecdotes and more identifiable measures. I find Simmonds’ swipe at Andrew Bolt for dropping out of a university degree depressing also. His views are repellent but so are those of Dr Steven Kates (ie. “the damaged women” vote), and Kates completed a couple of degrees and teaches in a university. Judgementalism about education levels is a perfect way to prove that anti-intellectualism is justifiable in Australia.

And while we’re madly dividing between us and them, those of us with higher degrees would do well to be careful of defensive statements like those in Simmonds’ article about how poorly paid and noble academic professions are compared to other jobs. I agree that such jobs are paid less than the general public understands but neither description plays too well to the 50 per cent of the Australian workforce who work in full-time jobs for less than $58,000 a year. Some wages truly are embarrassingly humble and so are the working conditions, which can include plenty of unpaid overtime but with none of the autonomy of academic jobs. And who is going to tell a childcare worker her job isn’t a noble one? We’d be better to say that there is a squeeze on workplace conditions that many occupations and industries, including academia have in common.

The article has some very tired old Australian stereotypes, too, that could benefit from re-examination; like, are children here still ashamed of being smart? A huge surge in private tutoring and an obsession with NAPLAN testing among parents suggests otherwise to me. And what of the idea that Twitter is no place for academic thinkers – my feed is teeming with them and links to their work.

But I absolutely agree with Simmonds’ belief that there is a problem with anti-intellectualism in Australia, I just don’t find her article terribly convincing of the fact. Anyway, if you haven’t had enough of this complaint then Jeff Sparrow makes some of these arguments and others in a great response, “Why Andrew Bolt is not an imbecile” at New Matilda.

And to finish up.. a less controversial view of mine? This article is well worth reading. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “How to make the U.S. a better place for carers” in The Atlantic:

Focusing on infant mortality is not typically on a white feminist agenda in the U.S.; the babies at risk are children of poverty, who are in turn more likely to be rural whites and ethnic minorities. But an infrastructure of care must provide care for everyone, just as roads and bridges provide transport for anyone who can drive or afford a bus ticket. Care is for the vulnerable, the sick, the disabled, and the dependent. All of us, rich or poor, qualify as vulnerable and dependent for at least some period after birth and before death.

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My new article: The sexualisation of girls

I have a new article in Essential Kid discussing the four biggest problems I see with the conversation around the sexualisation of young girls. And I almost never say this about an article I have written but you can read the comments.

Not so long ago there was controversy over child models being photographed in French Vogue mimicking sultry adult poses and being dressed in women’s clothing and makeup. Everyone agreed that it was little girls looking like adults but some people still wondered what the fuss was about. Even some feminists view the concern about the sexualisation of children as really being a sneaky resurrection of female purity obsessions. To my mind, there’s nothing bad about little girls playing dress-up, or even playing with sexy dress-up ideas, if they’re genuinely choosing this play idea from a range of gender-diverse options. Shaming girls about femininity, even artificial constructs of it, is a big mistake. But the Vogue photos weren’t pictures of little girls playing – they were adults playing dress-up with little girls. That’s an important difference and we should pay attention, particularly when it is for commercial purposes. What was the magazine selling? Notably, little boys are not typically used to represent miniature versions of sexy adult men, why is that? It could be that this collapsing of sexiness and materialism into displays of girlhood is part of a wider trend in sexually objectifying women.

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On ethics, beauty, abuse and art

From Rachel Cooke in The Guardian with “The idea of ‘ethical art’ is nonsense. We have to separate art from life”.

Last Friday morning, I stood in front of this cartoon, a cup of tea in my hand, and I thought yet again about the fraught line between a man’s life and his work. Moments before, I’d read that the Tate had removed from its online collection 34 prints by Graham Ovenden, the artist who was last week found guilty at Truro crown court of six charges of indecency with a child and one count of indecent assault. And while I didn’t disapprove of this decision one little bit (the gallery, quite properly, is seeking information about whether any of these images of children portray Ovenden’s victims), I could feel an old anxiety creeping over me.

Where, I wonder, will this investigation end? According to what I read, the Tate is also considering the “wider ethics” of showing work by Ovenden, and until this review is complete, these 34 prints “will not be available to view by appointment”. Wider ethics. What does this mean, exactly? It sounds a touch North Korean. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the images in question do not portray Ovenden’s victims. What then? Will the Tate return them to the public view? Surely it must, for if it is unethical to show work by a paedophile, what are they going to do about all the other artists who had dubious sex lives? Unless, of course, this rule only applies to perverts who are living.

It’s baffling to me, the belief that art must be “ethical”, as if it were so much fair trade chocolate. It’s so much more complicated than that. The laughable idea that it can pass or fail some kind of tick-box test! What was art in March must surely be art in April. You can’t un-art art, though Hitler had a go, when he decided that what was modern was also degenerate and set about destroying it and, far worse, those who made it.

There are those who will say that Ovenden’s images of children are now revealed to be porn rather than art, but that argument crumbles to dust in this case, since the subjects of many of the Tate’s images aren’t even naked. Just to be clear, though – even if the children were naked, I wouldn’t feel any differently. The qualities that won them a place in the Tate’s collection can’t be extinguished – rubbed out, like chalk on a board – by the perversions of the man who created them. If those qualities now make you feel uncomfortable as you look on, well, that is a part of their power. Live with it.

I disagree with much of this.

You know, I haven’t ever seen child porn (thank god) but I would bet that some of it is quite beautiful. By that I mean, some of the photographs and films are probably artfully composed and professionally shot with very pretty children as their subjects. It is still child porn though, and producing it involved the same amount of pain, abuse, degradation and manipulation as any amateur child porn image.

The measure for whether something is ethical for us to consume or display is not beauty or artistic merit (and nor is it the degree of nudity), it is about something bigger than that.

Sure, you can’t un-art art, but being art doesn’t over-ride problems of exploitation, particularly when it involves children. I don’t want to be limited to only consuming art, music and literature produced by those who lived admirable lives and nor do I want to be limited to only seeing art which doesn’t disturb me, but given art affords a certain level of power to the artist and the audience at the expense of the muse, contrary to Rachel Cooke’s view, it is always worth considering the ethics of that power.

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Once more around the dancefloor (on work life balance)

Somehow I missed this public argument between Jeremy Adam Smith and Linda Hirshman when it happened several years ago.. how? Anyway, with all this leaning in and out the argument is as fresh as if I cooked it up this morning for you.

So what’s really behind Hirshman’s attack on caregiving fathers? Dads like me and Rebeldad are not really her target. Instead she is attacking the very idea of caregiving, a position ably dissected by my colleague Chip. Hirshman has argued that if taking care of children “were the most important thing a human being could do, then why are no men doing it?” I’d like to turn that around: if no men are doing it, Linda, then why are you attacking me and Rebeldad? It is as if she finds the very fact of our existence threatening–as do a lot of people.

In fact, men take care of children every day, which in her masculinist mind might make childcare a more worthy activity. But instead of allowing the reality of male caregiving to modify her ideas, she simply denies that it exists. To Linda, childcare isn’t something to be shared equally and happily between men and women; that’s not her agenda. Instead childcare is an unpleasant, undesirable task that the privileged classes should outsource to women who have less education, less money, and fewer options. I don’t see how this is going to make the world a better place.

I’m totally on Jeremy’s side with this argument because he’s a friend and he’s right, Hirshman has missed some critical steps in her thinking  about feminism and maternal desire (though I still appreciate some of her contributions), but no doubt about it, the woman can write a rather snappy jab.

The Dialectical Smith didn’t even stay home a year, but lived exactly the life the mommy activists dream of. He posts: “You know, my wife and I tried [both working part time] (she . . . is fortunate to have a unionized part-time teaching job that provides full health care) and I must say that it was extremely difficult to maintain . . . I’m interviewing for jobs. For our family, it might better for one of us to work full-time while the other stays home . . . I’m sort of thinking that maybe it’s my wife’s turn to stay home.” A few hours later: “Well, for us the issue is resolved: yesterday I accepted a full-time job . . . Poof! I’m no longer a stay at home dad and now it’s my wife’s turn to stay home — actually, she’s still thinking about whether she wants to go back to work. I hope she doesn’t; I want her to have time with the boy.”

Poof. I’d hate to be the woman with the desk next to Dialectical Dad, taking family leave while he minds the workplace.

Further on the issue of neo-liberal economics and its hold over feminism, the discussion is currently getting quite a head of steam on it (I’ve written about it a lot over the years, too) and here are two worthwhile articles on the matter.

“Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who wins from leaning in?” by Kate Losse in Dissent:

The fact that Lean In is really waging a battle for work and against unmonetized life is the reason pregnancy, or the state of reproducing life, looms as the corporate Battle of Normandy in Lean In. Pregnancy, by virtue of the body’s physical focus on human reproduction, is humanity’s last, biological stand against the corporate demand for workers’ continuous labor. For Sandberg, pregnancy must be converted into a corporate opportunity: a moment to convince a woman to commit further to her job. Human life as a competitor to work is the threat here, and it must be captured for corporate use, much in the way that Facebook treats users’ personal activities as a series of opportunities to fill out the Facebook-owned social graph.

By arguing that women should express their feminism by remaining in the workplace at all costs, Sandberg encourages women to maintain a commitment to the workplace without encouraging the workplace to maintain a commitment to them. And by launching a feminist platform, Sandberg is able to contain the broader threat that a feminist critique poses to Facebook’s business, simultaneously generating more power for herself and her organization — Silicon Valley “revolution” at its finest. This maneuver, as I learned in my years at Facebook, is how the game is played, and both Sandberg and Zuckerberg play it well. The question the rest of us have to ask is, what does the game do for those not at or near the top? Are workers playing or are we getting played?

“Hijacking feminism” by Catherine Rottenberg in Aljazeera:

This, unfortunately, is how the “truly liberated” woman of the 21st century is increasingly being construed. What is particularly troubling about this feminist moment – especially since both women espouse liberal ideals – is exactly how little emphasis either Slaughter or Sandberg ultimately places on equal rights, justice or emancipation as the end goals for feminism.

The move from a discourse of equal rights and social justice to “internalising the revolution” or, in Slaughter’s case, “a national happiness project” is predicated on the erasure or exclusion of the vast majority of women. Put differently, the feminist project these women advocate does not and cannot take into account the reality of the vast majority of US women. A national project it is not.

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A couple of things to bear in mind with the ‘slacker mum’ movement

Jane Caro has just written a rather charming article, “Over-mothered? No, over mothering” for the Sydney Morning Herald.

For birthdays, I bought two packs of 12 lamington fingers and stuck a candle in each one. They served a whole class.

I was very bad at any sort of preparation. I only once helped a daughter with a project – we couldn’t find a ruler, the glue had dried up, as had the textas, and the eventual product on creased blue cardboard looked like the cat threw up on it. The only photo we could dredge up of a marine creature was of brain coral. ”That’ll have to do!” I screeched at her. I think she’d had fantasies of whales, dolphins or seahorses. I went into the classroom a few days later only to see it displayed on the wall alongside other pristine, laminated dissertations on more glamorous sea creatures. Surprised to see it so honoured, I asked the teacher why it took pride of place. ”Ah,” she said, ”because she so obviously did it all by herself.” Once again, sheer incompetence came up trumps.

When it came time for the weekly swimming lessons, I invariably realised I hadn’t unpacked the cossie from last time. ”Oh well,” I reasoned as I forced them to don their damp, mouldy, smelly togs, ”they’re only going to get wet again anyway.”

There’s a lot I love about this piece but it reminds me that I am also a little skeptical of this stuff. I’m a big fan of slacker mums and relate to much of what the movement is expressing about unrealistic standards in mothering. But I want to raise a couple of cautions here given such confessions are becoming big in the media at the moment. Firstly, there’s a lot of in-built classism in slacker mothering, as I noted way back in 2008 when I first wrote about the ‘slacker mothers/mothers who drink’ phenomenon.

Almost certainly, a mother from a low socio-economic group wouldn’t get away with a book of this kind of humour, she’d risk being seen as neglectful rather than endearingly chaotic – imagine if the mothers in that New York Times article were drinking bourbon and cokes instead of Cavit pinot grigio, would this be seen as the emergence of a trend in sophisticated motherhood?

And as I also observed back then in 2008, the slacker mum movement often neglects to directly acknowledge the debt it owes feminism. It’s frequently liberation without the radicalism. This means the discussion can lack perspective and a sense of purpose. And that becomes particularly apparent when you read supposedly confessional pieces that are pulling their punches, something I refer to in this article of mine at Daily Life. If your ‘revealing truths’ reinforce how much you belong to the most powerful income/class groups of mothers then while you’re taking a risk in revealing them it’s not a particularly big one, and you’re probably not liberating a genuinely marginalised mother, such as a teenage mother, or a mother with a drug addiction, or a mother in poverty who wouldn’t get away with that same slackness without facing the threat of more serious repercussions.

Finally, the slacker mother movement seems to be taking a nasty turn lately towards judging mothers it sees as being too dedicated to the pursuit of motherhood. This begs the question what business is it of yours how another mother does her care work, because it’s inherently sexist that we routinely consider women’s lives our business and that we also have so many ways to criticise women? Also, are you sure she isn’t the oppressed minority, rather than you? In which case, step off her neck you big bully, she’s got enough on her plate. Lauren Rosewarne’s piece for The Drum was a classic example of this problem, in my opinion, as was Mia Freedman’s piece about birth activists, which I tackled in this article of mine at Essential Baby. Even Caro’s piece, which is notably about “over-mothering,” pictures ‘intervention-free birthers’ as some dominating group of mothers she is bravely breaking free of when, actually, having a medicalised birth is hardly taking the path of most resistance in Australia. (I should probably disclose here that I have a foot in both camps having chosen a birth centre ‘intervention-free’ birth for my first baby and a hospital birth with an epidural for my second baby).

If you actively engage with the feminist parenting community then you’ll find that breast-feeders, baby-wearers, home-birthers and even, the organic food types aren’t all the stereotypes you believe them to be. I’ve found many of these mothers have the more radical feminism of parents in the feminist community. And they are often political and quick to defend marginalised mothers, too. Maybe this is because I’ve found that quite a number of them are also, themselves, black or single or disabled or very young or a multitude of other identities that lead them to be marginalised. Mothers are rarely simple stereotypes. If slacker mothering is about liberating mothers then it’s important that it actually does.

Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town.

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It’s not just the private sector that preys upon the poor

It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.

The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009 for failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her 16-year-old son’s incarceration. When she received a back paycheck, she thought it would allow her to pay for her son’s jail stay. Instead, it was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration…

.. I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on the poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken seriously even when it’s committed by millionaire employers. No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on. These are no-brainers, and should take precedence over any long term talk about generating jobs or strengthening the safety net.

Before we can “do something” for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them.

From Barbara Ehrenreich with “How the poor are made to pay for their poverty” in The Guardian. Essential reading for policy makers. The slippery slope where extra government fines, fees and policing ensnare the poor and if they can’t pay these charges they begin to land in jail is one of the key factors behind the over-representation of Aboriginal Australians in prison. Traffic violations as a conveyor belt to incarceration.

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Lighting up

Five years ago when I first started a blog about feminist motherhood I looked all around for feminist discussions about motherhood and found very little, so, I often tried to write about everything. But these days I can barely keep up with all the stuff about motherhood in the media and I have increasingly noticed that feminist perspectives on the topic are becoming mainstream. There’s a long way to go but that’s incredible progress in a short number of years.

So, when an Australian media identity, Chrissie Swan was photographed pregnant and smoking and a subsequent storm of condemnation broke out I didn’t have to wait more than 24 hours before a bunch of feminist commentary started appearing in the media to unpack all that hypocrisy. (This topic is of particular interest to me because my blog is named after the shaming of pregnant women who occasionally drink alcohol – a topic I’ve written about often.)

Here are my favourite and not so favourite bits of what’s being said by feminists about the supposed scandal around Chrissie Swan smoking while pregnant.

From Karen Pickering in The Hoopla:

It’s an unofficial sport in our society to speculate on the bodies of women – are they too fat, too thin, pregnant yet, not pregnant, showing stretch marks, using contraceptives, having abortions, having too much sex, not enough sex, or wearing “appropriate” clothing. In every culture, women’s bodies are battlegrounds where patriarchy and capitalism intersect to make life difficult for women trying exercise bodily autonomy.

Women’s bodies are scrutinised and policed from every angle, and this process only intensifies during pregnancy.

From Clementine Ford in Daily Life:

No one’s suggesting that it’s right to expose your unborn child to cigarette smoke – but concern for the welfare of children isn’t what’s driving public outrage here. We know that shaming people doesn’t inspire change, particularly not when you’re dealing with addiction. If the public is so concerned about Chrissie Swan smoking, the last thing they should be doing is adding to her stress levels by standing around in a ring and chanting BAD MOTHER at her. Addiction is hard enough without also exposing yourself to the inevitable backlash of millions of people only too eager to flex their sanctimony muscles.

Because this is what drives backlash. It’s not a concern for the well being of a child. It’s certainly not concern for the well being of its mother. It’s sanctimony, and the gleeful feeling one gets from being part of a bullying mob whose circle of burning pitchforks is unique protection against having to answer for their own sins. It’s the ever present idea that a woman’s body does not belong to her, especially not when she’s carrying a foetus. It’s looking for cracks in the armour, calling the services of the Pregnancy Police so we can engage in a spot of Outrage Olympics.

From crooked fences:

There is another aspect of the rightfully compassionate response to Chrissie Swan that made me twitch, and which I am still struggling to articulate clearly. It is the feeling that were it a different woman, one who was less ‘one of us’ and more ‘other’, I don’t feel confident that there would have been the same outpouring of compassion. And to complicate things further, would the compassionate response extend to an ‘other’ mother whose addiction was to a substance other than alcohol or tobacco?

Our image of who smokes during pregnancy is not a middle class white woman with her own radio show. It is the single mother, the poor mother, the teen mother, the Indigenous mother.

As Chrissie herself said on air: “I knew it was wrong that there is so much terrible judgment that only awful people and bad parents and idiots and bogans smoke during pregnancy – and I didn’t feel like I belonged in any of those categories – so I kept it all under wraps and dealt with it how I could.”

From Zoey Martin at The Shake:

I know that is hard to process. But they do. Somehow one thing that you do doesn’t get to define everything else.

Good mothers yell at their children.

Good mothers feed their kids McDonalds

Good mothers let their kids watch TV all day.

Good mothers let their kids go to bed without brushing their teeth.

Good mothers let their kids have chocolate for breakfast.

Good mothers lose their children in shopping centres.

Good mothers go to work.

Good mothers stay at home.

And my not so favourite, from Lauren Rosewarne at The Drum:

A couple of weeks ago when the whole Kochie/boobgate thing exploded, I was uncharacteristically apprehensive about writing anything. So exceptionally well have I internalised how verboten it is to question the lactaters, or the baby-carriers, or the gluten-free vegan wholefood earthmothers, that for days I thought it best to just keep quiet.

Far, far more scary than the charmingly misogynist men who round out my inbox daily are the mothers. They’re tweeting and they’re blogging and they’re boycotting all kinds of stuff. Messing with them is done at your own peril.

As a feminist, apparently, I should know better than to ever dare take on any woman who has ever Created Life.

And I’m pretty sure it was the fear of these holier-than-thou Über mums that motivated Chrissie Swan’s smoking mea culpa.

But here’s a good reply to that from No Place For Sheep:

I am not interested in having a smoking while pregnant debate, and Ms Swan’s perceived moral failings. Neither am I a fan of vicious pile-ons. What does interest me is the language Rosewarne uses to describe those criticising Swan, whilst simultaneously calling for us to cease “scrutinising and loathing” other women.

Swan’s critics are, according to Rosewarne, members of the “militant mummy mafia” and “holier than thou über mums.” Rosewarne claims she feels it is “…verboten to question the lactaters, or the baby-carriers, or the gluten-free vegan wholefood earthmothers.”

She continues, in an outstandingly anti feminist and alarmingly patriarchal-like complaint:  ”As a feminist, apparently, I should know better than to ever dare take on any woman who has ever Created Life” (note Dr Rosewarne’s use of capitals here).

Well, I’m a woman who has Created Life, lactated and been a baby-carrier and I have no objection at all to being questioned (“taken on?”) about that or anything else. I do, however, wish to note my objection to being cast into the inexplicable abyss of Rosewarne’s only too-evident prejudices against women, all women, who give birth.

For those interested I took part in an impromptu Twitter debate on these last two links today if you want to look me up and see what we all said – @bluemilk.

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This is important

What is missing from all this analysis about discrimination against marginalised groups? (Or at least in my case, wasn’t being highlighted?) Race!

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Education is a political issue. This is why.

This, “For many poor students, leap to college ends in a hard fall” is a very well-executed piece in The New York Times. It follows three talented, but terribly disadvantaged, girl students who make it into university but then manage to go no further, and it shows why education doesn’t always lead to social mobility; in fact, it very often holds poor people down while further elevating middle-class and upper-class people. How education systems can actively work against the poor is an area of injustice I find deeply concerning because it is frequently ignored.

By now, almost every policy-maker can acknowledge the returns to education as a social investment, but what they don’t always appreciate are the ways in which poor people find the path through education more difficult to navigate than do students from more wealthy families. Not because they’re somehow less canny, but because the institution is rigged against them. The concept of not being able to afford university fees is something most people can grasp, but the other kinds of barriers poor kids face in getting an education can easily look like disinterest, a lack of motivation, and mindless self-sabotage from the outside. This is dangerous when it comes to policy-making.

Reading that article by Jason DeParle I am struck by the number of times a lack of social capital (ie. inside knowledge and the prerogative to use it) disadvantages these three students as they try to succeed. Social capital is a type of capital that tends to get inherited and locked down by class. It can be difficult to observe because it won’t show up in a tax return. My own single-parent family lived below the poverty line while I was going through the tail end of primary school and then high school and university, but we had one big advantage – my mother had come from a well-to-do family and she had the social capital from those beginnings to know how to navigate the system and to feel entitled to do so when push came to shove. I don’t want to down-play how difficult I found my time growing up in poverty or how lasting its effects have been for me, but social capital is a type of advantage I’ve seen up close and been gifted.. and  I will never under-estimate it.

Some of the big policy messages coming out of that article in the New York Times include:

• low-income kids lack social capital which would otherwise help them navigate educational institutions and their place in them;
• low-income kids need to earn money while also studying full-time;
• low-income kids often have to leave their community and family to go to a good university and therefore encounter emotional disadvantage;
• low-income kids often provide the unpaid care services their families require at the expense of their own education and needs (and low-income families are less able to pay for therapies they need and so rely more heavily on unpaid care work in their own families, plus, being poor is stressful and physically depleting);
• low-income kids try not to achieve too much academically in order to protect their families from further expenses and a sense of rejection;
• low-income kids are expected to adapt to the culture and lifestyle of high-income kids when they attend university;
• low-income kids are disadvantaged by not being able to afford the extra-curricula help that high-income kids receive with their education;
• low-income kids go into debt to pay off their education but with the risk of lower chances of graduating and consequently lower chances of gaining a high salary job to pay off their debt;
• low-income kids are more likely to see education as a ‘selfish’ pursuit on their part; and,
• low-income kids lack a safety net when things go wrong.

And here are some recent Australian examples where similar experiences are holding poor children back in education – “Children hide poverty to protect parents, study finds”:

”Their demands were incredibly modest,” the nation’s leading poverty researcher, Peter Saunders of the University of NSW, said.

The study is the first in Australia to hear children’s accounts of what it is like growing up poor. Almost 100 young people from 11 to 17 were interviewed, as well as teachers and parents.

The children’s tendency to deny wanting what other children ordinarily had was a way to ”protect themselves from the pain of missing out and their parents from the anguish of having to say no”, the report said…

… The children felt keenly that their parents were not respected by school staff. Many were bored by and disengaged from the curriculum, and they were frustrated with teachers who could not maintain discipline and didn’t seem to care. The children appreciated enthusiastic teachers and meaningful curriculum but ”this type of opportunity for learning was too often missing from young people’s accounts of school”.

The increasing trend for schools to impose ”user pays” levies for some activities was also detrimental. One parent reported her fury at the discovery, after four years, that the school had a fund to help. Professor Saunders said the schemes were not widely advertised for fear that demand would outstrip supply.

And, “Aussie school children left hungry report”:

Ms Chambers said some parents were keeping their children home from school on days they couldn’t afford to put food in their lunchbox, and often missed meals themselves to ensure their family was fed.

Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town.

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“every man became a version of my future son”

Gawker is publishing some really good writing at the moment. Here’s a great piece, “Slanted American Tradition: Broken Children and Unbroken Barriers” from Rosa Cabrera about raising a son and her reflections upon violence in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings (the quote below describes a minor sexual assault):

Two months before giving birth to my son, I walk the four blocks from the train station to see my mother. A boy catches my eye. That looming look in his eyes has something in it that should not belong to a young boy. He begins walking my direction. I hold the heavy door open for him to walk into the apartment building standing on the Concourse of Hip-Hop’s crowded womb.

I hit the elevator button. I notice the baby flesh he still hasn’t lost in the back of his brown hands as they grip a bag of groceries. He asks me questions about the child my body has been carrying for seven months. There’s a quiet fascination, and a strange nervousness in him that I’m embarrassed to fear. I walk into the elevator with him, hating myself for thinking about the knife I forgot at home.  The door slides to a close, and a hand quickly reaches for my shirt to expose my swelling breasts. I knock his hand away.

His face never shifts.

He’s done this before, at least once. The space in the elevator squeezes us closer together. I want to hurt him, but I realize this is a child who could hurt the boy still growing inside me. I ask him what the hell is wrong with him.

And.

I look at the mix of teenage boys and middle-aged men marking the corners with bodies that rock with a tilt. Their faces carry the same stone as the boy in the elevator. The Concourse turf is womanless. I want to not feel so far away. I look down at my swelling womb and wonder what it must feel like to have a son standing among those slanting male bodies.

I relate to that experience she describes there in the second quote, of suddenly looking at men and older boys around me and wondering if this is who my son would become. I remember starting to see these boys and men as boy babies grown up, rather than as male people. It made me see men in a new light – they were now possibilities for who my baby could become, a baby I had grown inside my body. It was a new way of interacting with masculinity with all its good and bad manifestations.

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