An Instant Classic

It is hard to find words when you have just read a (literally) classic children's book. But I just have and it is Lemony Snicket's The Composer is Dead. The problem is that I don't want to describe any part of this book to you. It is a rare instance that, I, as parent and reader-out-loud did not know how the book was going to end as I read it. I did not know that it would strike so many chords. I did not know it would be so amusing. And I did not know it would be so dramatic. The next time you find yourself in a bookstore with a child, seek this book out and force your child to listen to you read it. I can't vouch for whether they will like it. You will and it still counts for any book-related parenting points you might wish to earn.

New Maths

This site will make your day. A taste.

360 degree evaluations

So how do your kids rate your parenting? Is it much different than how you would rate yourself? According to a study reported in Ellen Galinsky’s Ask the Children: What America's Children Really Think About Working Parents, apparently there is a quite a bit of correlation (even when pooling parents and kids together rather than matching them).

Bryan Caplan provides a neat discussion. Apparently, on the question of whether parent’s control their tempers, both parents and kids give themselves the lowest marks but the kids also rate the parents more poorly.

I'm tempted to say that this shows that parents and kids would be better off if parents focused more on themselves.  Parents would feel better about their lives if they gave themselves a break; kids would indirectly benefit because their parents would express less anger toward them.  "See a movie on your way home from work - and smile at your kids when you get home," would be my slogan.  But the fact that parents agree that they have an anger problem makes me wonder.

I’d rate myself low on that question too. In fact, I am not known for getting angry and shouting but my kids know that I can.

Kids in the Kitchen

A few weeks ago, Slate railed against kids cooking programs. Their lament was the whole public saturation of various cooking programs, restaurant reviews and whathaveyou, featuring kids. I must admit that my reaction was if you don't like it just switch off. As of today, I think the real crisis is in kids' cooking in the home.

Actually, our kids have been doing pretty well helping out in the kitchen. They are, in fact, net contributors. But today, it was our 8 year old son's desire to cook dinner for everyone.

"What are you going to cook?"

"Not sure. I'll work it out."

"OK, just don't take too long."

An hour later.

"What are you cooking?"

"I'm not sure. It doesn't have a name."

"How's it going?"

(Trying to mix something in a bowl too dense to mix without a jackhammer) "It is really quite hard."

The problem is: you can't just switch off this show. Everyone is eating it.

So we sat down at the table and were presented with a bowl of stuff that if I took my glasses off could have been mistaken for breakfast cereal. Unfortunately, there was one sense that wasn't going to escape this show.

My reaction, like most caring parents in this situation, was to wait and see whether others survived before delving in myself. Our 4 year old seemed happy to dig right in. She liked it (and ended up finishing her entire bowl). Our 10 year old was less sure but had the good sense not to complain. The cook himself displayed some uncertainty after the first bite but kept going. Their mother smiled and thanked him for the wonderful meal doing her best Meryl Streep in the process which is even harder given the amount of chewing that was required.

That prompted me to suggest that surely she didn't have enough but she covered without losing a beat and said, "surely we want there to be enough for the children should they want more."

So the moment of truth came for me. I'll tell you this much, it was not something I had tasted before. It had the consistency of broken crackers, the coolness of frozen cheese and another quite tangy ingredient that I couldn't place.

"Umm. What's in it?"

"Well, first I took some seaweed rice crackers and corn rice cakes and blended them together. I mixed in some grated cheese which I took from the freezer because I didn't have time to let it warm up and then I added three bottles of Yakult." (Yakult is a milky drink that is designed to ensure that 'good' bacteria stays in your stomach although in this case, I am not hopeful of their survival.)

"Yes, you can really taste the Yakult. I am certain we are the first people to ever taste this. How do you like it?"

"Well, I don't mean to be rude to myself, but I don't really want to finish this."

"That's OK. How about giving what you have left to your mother who finished all hers?"

That prompted a look that suggested I might want to leave home ... quickly. Alas, with this thing in my stomach that it was not clear could be digested, I really was in no position to run anywhere.

More answers for Akst

Bryan Caplan, who is authoring a book that I have termed, "The Real Parentonomics," provides an answer to this question from Daniel Akst at the end of his WSJ review of Parentonomics.

It's a pity that Mr. Gans misses the chance to cover the most interesting question an economist might address in the parenting arena: Why he decided to have children in the first place? They're no longer an economic asset, after all. So is human reproduction nowadays irrational? Is it even ethical? If a pill is invented that would confer the joys of parenthood without all the mess or expense, should people take it? Dreary speculation, I know, but what better topic for the dismal science?

Bryan's answer to (i) is because we like them. The rest follows. Read on.

WSJ Review: Don't spare the rod!

The first US review of Parentonomics (non-Amazon that is) has come in and it is from a big media outlet, the Wall Street Journal. I won't dress it up, the reviewer, Dan Akst didn't like it. Put simply, he seems tired of pop economics books and certainly didn't want to read one where the author uses his own experiences as the base (or to use his term a "bore").

But there was actually more to it. He has a very different view of how to punish kids, to me, jaw droppingly, so.

Some of the author's child-rearing ideas will not strike such a universal chord. Mr. Gans doesn't believe in spanking, but he admits that he and his wife frequently punish their children by means of shunning -- making their kids stand in a corner, in keeping with the modern preference for emotional pain over corporal punishment. At one point Mr. Gans even uses hunger as a weapon, sending a helpless child to bed without her supper (prompting in him a meditation on whether the punishment is costlier to parents or child). Wouldn't a quick swat to the tush and a full belly be preferable all around?

Wow. And I was getting in trouble for suggesting using incentives with kids. I know parents angst over whether 'time outs' are effective but they are usually not reaching for the rod as an alternative. This was definitely a new kind of reviewer.

So I figured I might investigate some more. And when you look at Mr Akst's past writings, this is not a new theme. Take this offering from the WSJ back in 1999:

I say "mere," but it’s startling how casually this creepy technique is advocated. A whack to the bottom is held to violate the taboo against violence, but for some reason ostracism, physical isolation and emotional withholding are broadly approved, often in the widely adopted form of the "time out," which for the uninitiated resembles very closely what Dennis the Menace’s parents must have inflicted when the cartoonist drew him sulking in a rocking chair in the corner.

With its emphasis on silence and isolation, coupled with its faith in rehabilitation, the rise of the time out recapitulates the Quaker-inspired embrace of solitary confinement prison generations ago as a proper response to transgression. The idea was that the the wrongdoer could reflect on his sins without distraction. The time out is supposed to have the same effect, and justreplacement for corporal or other punishments in society at large. And just as America is a world leader in penitentiaries, American parents seem to lead the world in time outs (as well as in disrespectful children, it sometimes seems)., so too are we world leaders in incarceration.

Actually, I call it "incarceration" in the book (p.138) so I hardly glossed over these issues. But that was after, for the book at least, a fairly thoughtful and research-informed look at spanking that basically said, if you have to do it often, it is a bad and ineffective idea (and by the way, that is consistent with the economics of punishment).

But he goes on.

As the With its sporty name and air of thoughtful "hold everything," The time out is the emblematic punishment of our times, the time out is . It’s in keeping, to cite one example, with our preference in recent years for economic sanctions in lieu of war. Leaving aside our recent belligerence in Iraq and Yugoslavia, generally speaking we prefer to punish rogue countries nowadays by expelling them "from the community of nations." Diplomatic ties are broken, and trade is at least threatened. If you can’t be good, we won't let you play in our markets.

On a more prosaic level, the time out reflects a certain feminization of culture in which traditional fatherliness has become as dispensable as fathers themselves. Calling a time out--shunning your child until he does what you like--substitutes emotional manipulation for physical force, thereby replacing one dubious form of compulsion with another. Its lasting effect, such as it is, arises from the fear of psychological rather than physical pain, and contrary to appearances, its widespread adoption is based not on kindness but on weaknessselfishness. Except in the case of abusers and other sickos, whacking a kid’s bottom probably does hurt parent more than child, and inflicting pain on the psyche has somehow come to seem more palatable.

That theme comes through even more strongly here. But before you think that Mr Akst is favouring spanking, reading on, he is in favour something else:

Aside from these humane ploys, I’m a pragmatist. On mornings when it's up to me to dress bmy sons, for instance, I throw shirts and pants onto them as fast as I can, regardless of what they think or whether they're ready. I know I'm supposed to solicit their views in all this, but that usually results in a wrestling match. Work fast, and by the time they figure out they're missing a golden opportunity to argue, it's too late: they're already dressed. I figure if I keep this up, before I know it pretty soon they'll be old enough to read Bartleby instead of emulating him.

And neither of us will have to suffer through too many time outs or sore bottoms along the way.

He just goes for full command and control. No wonder he didn't like the book. At its heart is the idea that we are parenting kids so they can exercise good judgment themselves. Punishment is one means of communicating the dimensions of that judgment. If you decide instead to give them no control, you avoid the need for punishment and much else. Mr Akst doesn't like books like Parentonomics for a reason. Its philosophy shares much with that of economics that we want to allow people (including children) to make their own choices but to feel the consequences rather than to deny the choices themselves. Forget the spanking issue, this is an area where we seriously disagree,

See, it's a misunderstood condition

From The Onion:

NEW YORK—A new study published in The Journal Of Pediatric Medicine found that a shocking 98 percent of all infants suffer from bipolar disorder. "The majority of our subjects, regardless of size, sex, or race, exhibited extreme mood swings, often crying one minute and then giggling playfully the next," the study's author Dr. Steven Gregory told reporters. "Additionally we found that most babies had trouble concentrating during the day, often struggled to sleep at night, and could not be counted on to take care of themselves—all classic symptoms of manic depression." Gregory added that nearly 100 percent of infants appear to suffer from the poor motor skills and impaired speech associated with Parkinson's disease.