Tag Archives: mother

The social norm of calling the authorities regarding the mothering of others

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Mothering is not an activity just left to individuals or families; it is a communal activity that occasionally veers into differences of opinions and the actions of authorities:

I was beginning to understand that it didn’t matter if what I’d done was dangerous; it only mattered if other parents felt it was dangerous. When it comes to kids’ safety, feelings are facts…

This has actually been confirmed by researchers. Barbara W. Sarnecka, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues presented subjects with vignettes in which a parent left a child unattended, and participants estimated how much danger the child was in. Sometimes the subjects were told the child was left unintentionally (for example, the parent was hit by a car). In other instances, they were told the child was left unsupervised so the parent could work, volunteer, relax or meet a lover. The researchers found that the participants’ assessment of the child’s risk of harm varied depending on how morally offensive they found the parent’s reason for leaving…

“It’s not about safety,” Dr. Sarnecka told me. “It’s about enforcing a social norm.”…

These women’s critics insist that it’s not mothers they hate; it’s just that kind of mother, the one who, because of affluence or poverty, education or ignorance, ambition or unemployment, allows her own needs to compromise (or appear to compromise) the needs of her child. We’re contemptuous of “lazy” poor mothers. We’re contemptuous of “distracted” working mothers. We’re contemptuous of “selfish” rich mothers. We’re contemptuous of mothers who have no choice but to work, but also of mothers who don’t need to work and still fail to fulfill an impossible ideal of selfless motherhood. You don’t have to look very hard to see the common denominator.

Social norms and expectations about roles are powerful parts of social life. Everyone has social guidelines to follow but the expectations can differ dramatically across groups. As the piece goes on to note, what individuals and society expect from fathers in similar situations differs.

This leads me to a few other thoughts:

  1. The appeal to third-party authorities rather than talking to the mother or just keeping an eye on the kids for a few minutes without alerting anyone reminds me of Baumgartner’s The Moral Order of a Suburb. She argues suburbanites help keep the peace by not interacting with each other. When they have problems, they may call the police or the city or some other party who can mediate in the situation. The same seems to be happening here.
  2. Part of the issue here is that these laws were enacted because there are situations where children can be helped. So, how exactly can the public be shaped to react when it is truly needed and ignore the situation when children are not really in danger? This is a big task and goes beyond the ability of laws and regulations to shape society. At the same time, I would not say that there is some zeitgeist that will just change. How people view mothering and the safety of children is dependent on numerous concrete actions and values.

Sociologists: home-cooked meals may not be worth the stress, money

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A new study examined mothers and families in order to look at the value of home-cooked meals:

But while home-cooked meals are typically healthier than restaurant food, sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton from North Carolina State University argue that the stress that cooking puts on people, particularly women, may not be worth the trade-off.

The researchers interviewed 150 mothers from all walks of life and spent 250 hours observing 12 families in-depth, and they found “that time pressures, tradeoffs to save money, and the burden of pleasing others make it difficult for mothers to enact the idealized vision of home-cooked meals advocated by foodies and public health officials.” The mothers they interviewed had largely internalized the social message that “home-cooked meals have become the hallmark of good mothering, stable families, and the ideal of the healthy, productive citizen,” but found that as much as they wanted to achieve that ideal, they didn’t have the time or money to get there. Low-income mothers often have erratic work schedules, making it impossible to have set meal times. Even for middle-class working mothers who are able to be home by 6 p.m., trying to cook a meal while children are demanding attention and other chores need doing becomes overwhelming…

Beyond just the time and money constraints, women find that their very own families present a major obstacle to their desire to provide diverse, home-cooked meals. The women interviewed faced not just children but grown adults who are whiny, picky, and ungrateful for their efforts. “We rarely observed a meal in which at least one family member didn’t complain about the food they were served,” the researchers write. Mothers who could afford to do so often wanted to try new recipes and diverse ingredients, but they knew that it would cause their families to reject the meals. “Instead, they continued to make what was tried and true, even if they didn’t like the food themselves.” The saddest part is that picky husbands and boyfriends were just as much, if not more, of a problem than fussy children.

The researchers quote food writer Mark Bittman, who says that the goal should be “to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden.” But while cooking “is at times joyful,” they argue, the main reason that people see cooking mostly as a burden is because it is a burden. It’s expensive and time-consuming and often done for a bunch of ingrates who would rather just be eating fast food anyway. If we want women—or gosh, men, too—to see cooking as fun, then these obstacles need to be fixed first. And whatever burden is left needs to be shared.

It seems like there is a bigger issue here: while such meals may be healthier but more stressful and expensive, the bigger issue is the idealization of home-cooked meals. In other words, the standard of “normal” mothering and home life is one that is difficult for many people to regularly meet. When they fall short of the standard, mothers feel guilty because society suggests this is one of the markers of a good mother. If it came down to it, might the particular food on the table be less important than the fact that the family regularly eats together?

Research shows new mothers are less active on Facebook, aren’t flooding news feeds with babies

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A researcher finds that new mothers are quite a bit less active on Facebook after their children are born:

Recently, Meredith Ringel Morris—a computer scientist at Microsoft Research—gathered data on what new moms actually do online. She persuaded more than 200 of them to let her scrape their Facebook accounts and found the precise opposite of the UnBaby.Me libel. After a child is born, Morris discovered, new mothers post less than half as often. When they do post, fewer than 30 percent of the updates mention the baby by name early on, plummeting to not quite 10 percent by the end of the first year. Photos grow as a chunk of all postings, sure—but since new moms are so much less active on Facebook, it hardly matters. New moms aren’t oversharers. Indeed, they’re probably undersharers. “The total quantity of Facebook posting is lower,” Morris says.

And therein lies an interesting lesson about our supposed age of oversharing. If new moms don’t actually deluge the Internet with baby talk, why does it seem to so many of us that they do? Morris thinks algorithms explain some of it. Her research also found that viewers disproportionately “like” postings that mention new babies. This, she says, could result in Facebook ranking those postings more prominently in the News Feed, making mothers look more baby-obsessed.

And a reminder of how we could see beyond our personal experiences and anecdotes and look at the bigger picture:

I have another theory: It’s a perceptual quirk called a frequency illusion. Once we notice something that annoys or surprises or pleases us—or something that’s just novel—we tend to suddenly notice it more. We overweight its frequency in everyday life. For instance, if you’ve decided that fedoras are a ridiculous hipster fashion choice, even if they’re comparatively rare in everyday life, you’re more likely to notice them. And pretty soon you’re wondering, why is everyone wearing fedoras now? Curse you, hipsters!…

The way we observe the world is deeply unstatistical, which is why Morris’ work is so useful. It reminds us of the value of observing the world around us like a scientist—to see what’s actually going on instead of what just happens to gall (or please) us. I’d hazard that perceptual illusions lead us to overamplify the incidence of all sorts of ostensibly annoying behavior: selfies on Instagram, people ignoring one another in favor of their phones, Google Glass. We don’t have a plague of oversharing. We have a plague of over-noticing. It’s time to reboot our eyes.

This study suggests the mothers themselves are not at fault but the flip side of this study would seem to be to then study the news feeds of friends of new mothers to see how often these pictures and posts show up (and how algorithms might be pushing this). And who are the people more likely to like such posts and pictures? This study may have revealed the supply side of the equation but there is more to explore.

Moms really like libraries

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A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests moms use and support libraries at much higher levels than the general population:

“Mothers are outliers in their enthusiasm for libraries and their use of libraries for their own purposes, like visiting the library, checking out books, using library websites and connecting to libraries with mobile devices,” concludes a report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, which Rainie directs.

It turns out that 94 percent of mothers surveyed contend that libraries are important to the community, 82 percent have library cards and 73 percent of them visit the library, compared with 53 percent of the overall population. More than half of mothers surveyed visit library websites, and nearly half use computers at the public library, the Pew research reports.

Pew’s research is part of an ongoing project to study libraries and their patrons in the digital age. Those most recent figures, gleaned from a survey of 2,252 Americans ages 16 and above, are encouraging but hardly a call to stop the presses, until one considers what is driving those numbers.

Here is more from the full report:

The importance parents assign to reading and access to knowledge shapes their enthusiasm for libraries and their programs:

  • 94% of parents say libraries are important for their children and 79% describe libraries as “very important.” That is especially true of parents of young children (those under 6), some 84% of whom describe libraries as very important.
  • 84% of these parents who say libraries are important say a major reason they want their children to have access to libraries is that libraries help inculcate their children’s love of reading and books.
  • 81% say a major reason libraries are important is that libraries provide their children with information and resources not available at home.
  • 71% also say a major reason libraries are important is that libraries are a safe place for children.

Almost every parent (97%) says it is important for libraries to offer programs and classes for children and teens.

What American parent wouldn’t like the idea of a place that can help their kids get ahead? There is a section later in the report that notes people with incomes under $50,000 say the library is more important.

These findings lead to several other questions:

1. Why are fathers behind in seeing the value in libraries? Is this because mothers still tend to have primary childcare responsibilities?

2. If mothers (and fathers) are likely to see the value of libraries, this also suggests there are large segments of the population who don’t use library or see much value in it. Who exactly are these people and why do they have these views?

3. While there is plenty of research about the achievement gap in education, how much do libraries help close this gap?

Some thoughts on Progressive and Matt Fisher

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By now, you’ve no doubt run across Matt Fisher’s blog post titled “My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court”. (If you haven’t yet seen Matt’s post, take a moment to read the original and his follow up). There have been lots of reactions to Matt’s story (to put it mildly), including over at Above the Law, where blogger “Juggalo Law” makes the following two observations:

1. Matt Fisher’s “grief is impossible for most, if not all, of us to imagine.”

Katie Fisher died in a car crash and her brother lashed out at the insurance company that made life for her surviving family more difficult. Matt Fisher’s overwrought tumblr post can be excused by the fact that, you know, his sister died in a car crash. His grief is impossible for most, if not all, of us to imagine. And yet thousands of people put on their imagineering hats and did just that.

As an initial matter, this seems like a denial of even the possibility of empathy. Is ATL really arguing that it is “impossible” for people generally to even imagine another person’s grief in the wake of death? Except for the very young, virtually everyone has known someone who has died, and we each face the inevitable prospect of our own mortality. Of course no one besides Matt Fisher knows the precise contours his grief, but this is hardly a persuasive, blanket argument that humanity generally is incapable of even imagining what his grief is like.

Furthermore, the tragedy at issue here is a death caused by an automobile accident. While the number of motor vehicle deaths in the U.S. varies from year to year, during the years 1981-2010 it ranged from 49,301 (1981) to 32,885 (2010). In all, 1,268,122 people died over this 30 year span. Even in a nation of over 300 million, this is an enormous number. Matt Fisher’s loss of his sister is tragic, but, sadly, it is not unique.

2. Insurance companies are “inhuman” entities whose “existence…is predicated on their attempts to make money. ”

Sometimes, life deals you a sh**ty hand. Death, however, always does. And yet, those stuck behind will undoubtedly encounter a world that barely shrugs in acknowledgement. And that’s how it should be. You will still be asked if you want a coffin with gold plating and you may be asked if you want your loved one’s ashes compressed into a beautiful diamond that you can wear around your neck for a lifetime. And all the mundane features of our economy will seemingly laugh at your grief. But they’re not laughing and insurance companies and all of the other businesses that survivors must joust with aren’t “inhuman monsters.” They’re merely inhuman. And they will follow protocol and attempt to minimize their own exposure as much as is possible. The existence of insurance companies is predicated on their attempts to make money. And nothing in this case suggests that their actions were borne out of anything other than this absolute truth.

Here, the ATL blogger seems to argue that insurance companies automatically get a pass for distasteful behavior because they are “inhuman” (with a strongly implied “what else do you expect?”). I think this approach lazily obscures rather than thoughtfully resolves any of the issues Matt Fisher’s personal tragedy raises. Obviously, the facts in this case are disputed and not fully known (at least publicly), and I have no personal knowledge of this matter. However, taking Matt’s original post and follow up clarification at face value, it is clear that Matt is not blaming Progressive for his sister’s death. Matt’s argument (and the general outrage) against Progressive boils down to these alleged facts:

  • Katie was a Progressive insurance customer with underinsured motorist coverage.
  • Katie was killed in an automobile accident with an underinsured motorist.
  • Asserting that Katie herself might have been responsible for the accident (in which case Progressive would have no legal obligation to pay under Maryland law), Progressive refused to pay what it owed under Katie’s policy to her surviving family members.
  • When Katie’s family went to court and sued the other driver to establish that he was liable for the accident rather than Katie, Progressive sent in its own lawyer(s) to help the other driver prove he was NOT liable.

So far as I can tell, the general outrage being directed at Progressive arises from this last assertion. I think most people understand that “fault” in auto accidents can be murky, and I think that many people would have understood if Progressive had refused to pay Katie’s policy until this issue was conclusively resolved by a court.

But that’s not why Matt’s post went viral. It went viral because he alleges, as he puts it in the title, “My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court.” The extreme outrage is not that an insurance company wanted to be 100% sure it owed money before paying out. The outrage is that (allegedly) an insurance company unleashed its lawyer(s) against its own customer. I agree with ATL that one generally expects auto insurance companies to “attempt[] to make money.” However, I submit that many do not expect auto insurance companies to proactively work against their own policyholders who are involved in accidents by making common cause with the other driver. It is one thing to dispute liability and force a court to sort the issue out. It is another thing to send lawyer(s) into the resulting lawsuit on behalf of the opposing side.

On the same day that Matt posted about Progressive, Bob Sutton blogged about how “United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn’t Care” (it’s as bad as you think, assuming the facts Bob recounts are all true). Bob narrates one part of the story in which the father is on the phone with a United employee located at the same airport as the lost 10-year-old, who was flying as an unaccompanied minor. When he “asked if the employee could go see if [his daughter] was OK,” she replied that she “was going off her shift and could not help. [He] then asked her if she was a mother herself and she said ‘yes’—he then asked her if she was missing her child for 45 minutes what would she do? She kindly told him she understood and would do her best to help.”

Bob writes:

This is the key moment in the story, note that in her role as a United employee, this woman would not help [the parents]. It was only when [the father] asked her if she was a mother and how she would feel that she was able to shed her deeply ingrained United indifference — the lack of felt accountability that pervades the system. Yes, there are design problems, there are operations problems, but the to me the core lesson is this is a system packed with people who don’t feel responsible for doing the right thing.

“Juggalo Law” titled its ATL post “Progressive Insurance Is Inhuman,” as if this fact excuses inhuman behavior. But just because corporations themselves aren’t people doesn’t mean their shareholders, managers, and employees aren’t. As Bob Sutton notes in his article on United Airlines, “a key difference between good and bad organizations is that, in the good ones, most everyone feels obligated and presses everyone else to do what is in their customer’s and organization’s best interests. I feel it as a customer at my local Trader Joe’s, on JetBlue and Virgin America, and In-N-Out Burger, to give a few diverse examples.”

Assuming the facts Matt alleges are true, Progressive clearly didn’t act in their customer Katie Fisher’s best interest. That’s not simply a sign that it wants to make money–or is legally organized as a corporation. If true, it’s a sign that it will act against its own customers whenever it can. Ironically, in a competitive marketplace, that approach is not in Progressive’s best interest. Indeed, the near-universal condemnation levelled at Progressive over the past few days suggests that such a narrowly self-interested approach is suicidal once it comes to light.