An Impassioned Defense of the Status Quo

So, Hanna Rosin makes the incredibly bold suggestion in the Atlantic this month that breastfeeding is not all its cracked up to be! Did you know that it's difficult and inconvenient to breastfeed when you are trying to hold down a full-time job away from your baby? Did you know that it's awkward to breastfeed in public in a culture where acknowledging the function of women's breasts as a food source makes people nervous? Did you know that babies wake up often in the night and demand to eat and that their fathers can only provide them with liquid nourishment if it's in a bottle? Well, that's why we have groundbreaking publications like the Atlantic and insightful writers like Rosin to tell us what we couldn't possibly figure out for ourselves!

Rosin gathers together all her anti-breastfeeding insights and makes the logical leap to an incredible conclusion: if our society doesn't value breastfeeding, it is clearly breastfeeding that's the problem! And when only 1 out of 10 babies is exclusively breastfed until six months, the recommendation of WHO, AAP, and the US HHS, it is quite obvious that breastfeeding is becoming far too popular in the US, and someone needs to speak out against the Gathering Storm that is mothers feeding babies in the way that mammals have done for millions of years. Rosin then spends some late nights at her computer and concludes in contrast to decades of research and thousands of studies that the health benefits of breastfeeding for children are not as stupendous as she thought they would be (and she's a trained research scientist who understands statistical significance and what a preponderance of evidence in epidemiology and nutrition might look like! Oh, that's right, she's nothing of the sort).

So, there are plenty of avenues to criticize Rosin from, but I'll just focus on one. Here is a woman who is arguably in one of the most privileged demographic slices of the US in 2009. She's white, well-educated, a reporter for many of the nation's most influential publications (the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Republic) married to an equally privileged husband (David Plotz, editor of Slate where Rosin has a blog.) And we can probably safely guess she's part of a household with an income far above the national median. She has three children, all of whom she has been able to breastfeed because she's had the economic and social resources needed to do it. She combined her career with breastfeeding, and whether that was because of a workplace that allowed her to pump or a flexible schedule or working from home or maternity leave or being supported by her spouse, who knows. Like many upper-middle class women, it worked out for her. But, it still wasn't particularly easy: Pumping at work is at best a pain. Waking up at night to feed a baby if you need to work in the morning can be exhausting and soul-sucking. Not all husbands take up the slack when you take on the admittedly major project of feeding another human from your body (and it sounds like Plotz wasn't quite up to the job.)

So, does Rosin, from her position of privilege think to herself: Even with all the advantages I have, breastfeeding is actually really taxing. How could I help women who don't have all these advantages and make it easier for them to exercise this basic physiological function that every human baby comes into the world expecting from its mother? What could I do as a reporter with access to some of most influential media outlets to improve the lives of mothers and babies in the US? How could I illuminate the many barriers that prevent American mothers from providing their babies with human milk --- lack of maternity leave paid or otherwise, lack of health care, lack of family-friendly work policies, lack of legal protection for breastfeeding (or pumping) mothers in public or the workplace?

Nope, luckily for everyone, Rosin decides to focus on the real problem in this country: upper middle class women like herself condemning other upper middle class women like herself to hours of mind-racking guilt about whether they managed to breastfeed their babies. Whew, close one there! Let's not lose sleep over the 1 in 5 children under the age of 6 living in poverty in this country many of whom could use a boost of five IQ points in order to overcome all the other disadvantages they start off life with. Let's worry about the tiny percentage of extremely privileged adult women in this country whose feelings are hurt when someone criticizes them (possibly unfairly) for not having breastfed. Hurt feelings are a wonderful basis on which to catalyze public health policy that would benefit the fewest and most powerful at the expense of the least powerful many. Once again, it looks like we can count on our media elite to spend their time and passion defending unjust privileges, i.e. defending the status quo for the wealthier members of society.

Rosin, of course, is not the first woman (or man) to do this. In fact, as we've seen certainly for the last couple decades (and probably longer), women and family issues only merit interest in the mainstream media as cat fights between upper middle class women at the playground aka the Mommy Wars? Read the New York Times style section lately? The Atlantic itself is notable for giving Caitlin Flanagan's ravings a platform. And who could forget "Dan Quayle was Right"?

When women and family issues are presented as being solely about whether individual moms feel guilty about their choices, there is no reason for them to be taken seriously by the people---still mostly men---who have the power to change the set of options women have to choose between. It also distracts the very women who have the resources to push for changes to laws and allocation of government resources (yep, we're still looking at you, Rosin!) away from addressing the real problems at hand (e.g. the lack of any mandatory paid maternity leave in the US). Instead, it encourages them to spend time worrying about something as absolutely unimportant as whether some women condemn other women's choices.

(As an aside, why is breastfeeding lumped in with the other choices that the moms in Rosin's demographic niche spend a fair amount of time worrying about anyway---cloth vs. disposable diapers, cosleeping vs. cry-it-out, montessori vs. waldorf preschool, etc. etc.? Characterizing the normal physiological process that baby humans start life with as a "choice" makes me wonder when we’re all going to be hooked up to dialysis machines and IVs at work to make us more efficient employees. We’ve got the choice to pee and eat but not everyone wants to exercise it because they value their career goals more!)

Ultimately, this trivialization is the real harm of Rosin's article. If you can dismiss breast-feeding and infant care as something that does not really need to be done by mothers---a silly optional whim with limited benefits in which the lucky few can indulge---then why should we as a society ever make it a priority to provide the maternity leave necessary to making breastfeeding a realistic option for the majority of mothers? Why should we have any laws mandating accommodation of breast-feeding mothers and their babies? Why should we make it easy for parents to continue to pursue their career goals after or while taking time out to care for small children?

And so, Rosin's perversely myopic perspective from inside her socioeconomic cocoon ends up simply reinforcing the depressing truth behind the status quo in the US mentioned above which is that only 10% of babies are lucky enough to be exclusively breast-fed until six months old. It is beyond me why the Atlantic would think it necessary to publish Rosin's case against breast-feeding when, quite obviously, for the majority of moms and babies, the case against it is being made convincingly every day.

Go Go Geoghegan: Why care about IL-5

Early voting for the March 3rd primary in the 5th district to replace Rahm Emmanuel continues until Feb 26th. Do you live in the 5th district? (check this map or put your zipcode in here!)

Here's a good discussion of the dynamics of the race. Geoghegan just got the endorsement of Democracy for America, so that should mean a lot of valuable ground game help. Nate Silver thinks Sara Feigenholtz is the favorite but thinks Geoghegan does have a chance.

Here's some good endorsements for Geoghegan from more reliable sources than me:

• James Fallows
  
• Thomas Frank
  
• Hendrik Hertzberg (New Yorker)
  
• Michael Tomasky (Guardian)
  
• Katha Pollitt
  

He's also been endorsed by The Nation and Progressive Democrats of America.

Kathy Geier has had some of the best discussions of why Tom would be such a great congressman:

Because really -- what Tom has to give is exactly what this country is starving for. I think he has the potential to become a Paul Wellstone-type figure -- a political leader who is so inspiring, and such a fearless and eloquent champion of underdogs, great causes, and the public good, that you marvel at the fact that they somehow slipped by and got elected to anything. Yet every once in a while, a bloody miracle occurs, and one of these people finds their way to elected office. And we are truly blessed to have them around.

Does someone who is such an awesomely balls-out progressive -- let alone someone who is so genuinely nice -- have a prayer of succeeding in the dirty, brutal, and fairly reactionary world of American politics? In all honesty, I don't know. But damn me if I'm not excited as hell to have the opportunity to find out.

So why do I, someone who doesn't even live in the 5th district, care so much about this election? Voting or volunteering for the Geoghegan campaign is a rare chance to help build a broader progressive coalition in Congress! Electing someone like Tom Geoghegan would probably do more towards the goal of reaffirming and increasing a social safety net in the US than any individual efforts we make as private citizens. (For example, if health care were universally available in this country, it would be an amazing step towards economic justice---more people declare bankruptcy because of medical-related costs than for any other reason.)

If the 2008 presidential election has shown us anything, it's that getting people into office that share your views is the fastest way to change how things work. Barack Obama has been president for less than a month, and just in that time we have the Lily Ledbetter act; health care for 4 million more children; executive orders to close Guantanamo, end torture, and reverse the idiocy of the Bush policy on funds for international family planning and abortion; and a stimulus bill that is far from perfect but includes things like almost twice as much money ($100 billion) for education as was in the budget for the Dept of Education---something that never would have happened under a Republican administration.

To get reasonably liberal policies, like comprehensive health care reform, to pass requires strong, intelligent voices further to the left in Congress:

"...the way your ideas get to carry the day is when there’s about as much political clout to the left of your ideas as there is to the right of them. If you succeed in muting all your critics to the left, all you do is create a situation where your program is defined in the press and the congress and the public imagination as the most-leftwing-possible proposal. And the furthest-left proposal can’t possibly win. It’s never helpful to have fratricidal warfare and battles to the death, but it’s necessary for there to be meaningful pressure to do more than is popular or possible or even necessary in order to lay the groundwork for accomplishing anything."

I really think Tom Geoghegan is uniquely suited to be one of those voices that could apply that 'meaningful pressure'.

So, please go vote if you live in the 5th district! Here's his webpage. Here's the Facebook page. And here's his declaration of candidacy on a progressive Illinois politics blog. In addition, it's really easy to volunteer here. (Join me for phone banking this coming weekend and on election day! Woo-hoo)

And for you still undecideds, here's the Chicago Reader's guide and Chicagoist's guide to the special election candidates. Progress Illinois (blog of SEIU IL who've endorsed Sara Feigenholtz in this race.) also has a policy comparison of the top five candidates.

How Green Was My McMansion

A recent story on NPR on a power company installing solar panels on its customers' homes and businesses was presumably intended as a glimpse of one utility's novel approach to cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions. The story began, however, with the most disturbing of anecdotes:

"When Sean Durkin built a 4,000-square-foot house in Charlotte, N.C., he wanted to install solar panels. But he gave up when he learned that it would cost about $40,000.

"We'd love to have the panels — if we could afford it — and be completely green," Durkin says. But given that his utility bill is only about $200 a month, he says "it made no sense."

Then he heard that his local electric company, Duke Energy, wants to install solar panels on hundreds of customers' roofs and vacant lots.

"If Duke could put them up and they're going to get a better deal with it, then at least I'm helping the cause, and that's what I wanted to do," Durkin says."

Yes, Sean Durkin apparently thinks he could be "helping the cause" if only he could afford solar panels on his 4000 square foot house. 4000 square feet!

Ok, clearly I could just end this post right there at the point where I snarfed out my coffee in disbelief upon hearing this tale of woe because what else do you need to know, right? There's been only about a majillion electrons spilled on the topic of green housing and grotesque overconsumption and general insanity that's been powering the US housing bubble. Nonetheless, I, as your intrepid blogger, will forge on because clearly Elizabeth Shogren, the reporter on this piece, and her editors at NPR did not feel the need to point out that if only Durkin had a teensy bit of sense, he'd be doing a hell of a lot more for The Cause if he'd built a reasonably sized home (and maybe would have had a bit of cash leftover to buy some solar panels himself.)

In fact, the US used to be a land of reasonably sized, though frankly still pretty darn large, homes. In 1970, the median new house in the US was 1385 sq feet, with a quarter of new homes still under 1200 sq feet in 1973. But by 2006, it was up to 2248, with 24 % over 3000 sq feet and only 4% under 1200. At the same time, the number of people per household, however, is dropping, down to 2.59 in 2000.

So, first of all, the per household consumption of energy for a 4000 sq foot house is 155.2 million BTU; for a home with between 1000-1500 sq feet, only 75.4, and for the range that the median new home falls in, 106.8. In other words, Durkin's house is consuming 45% more energy than the median new home and more than double that of a very reasonable living space of 1000-1500 sq feet. On top of that, a not-so-well insulated 1500 sq foot house is still better than a very well-insulated 3000 sq foot house. (And of course, an apartment in a multi-unit building is an even bigger winner: 60.2K BTU for a three+ bedroom apartment vs. 101.2K BTU for a three bedroom freestanding house.)

Sure, you say, but what crazy people could live as a family in a 1000 sq foot? Well, actually in Japan, the average home is about 1,020 sq feet, about the same as in Europe. Nonetheless, Europe, Japan, and the US all have roughly similar number of people per household, ranging from 2.1 to 3.1. In the US, though, even the median home size is a bloated 1795 sq feet.

And our gigundic houses correlate closely with our gigundic energy appetite, with the US per capita energy consumption, almost twice that of Japan and Germany. Our productivity doesn't quite make up for it either with US energy intensity (i.e. energy consumption per dollar of gross domestic product) exceeding theirs as well, 9113 BTU/$ for the US vs. 7021 for Germany, and 6539 for Japan.

When it comes down to it then, both Sean Durkin and NPR missed the point, stated quite nicely by Matthew Yglesias today:

"If you look at how people live in the United States, the real green individual is the poor person who lives in a small apartment, rides the bus to work, and consumes beef relatively sparingly. That guy’s environmental footprint is probably smaller in most ways than that of a prosperous person who goes out of his way to consume green products. [...] “to go green” on a social level would probably look very different from what an individual upper middle-class environmentally minded consumer’s personal efforts to do so look like."

Something's fishy. And it's not what's for dinner.

(Warning: disorganized draft version...)
Reading Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption has left me highly skeptical of claims that parents have control over their teenagers' behavior. So, it's not a surprise that after reading the recent New York Times article "The Family Meal Is What Counts, TV On or Off", about how family meals are the amazing panacea for healthy eating habits and health-risk-related teen behaviors like drug use, smoking, and eating disorders, I was left thinking, "Really?"

The Times article is a report of the latest published study from Project EAT at the University of Minnesota, which continues to find correlations between eating family meals and pretty much anything happy and healthy you can think of. The study itself isn't available online unless you cough up $15, and my local library won't have it on microfiche until about 2040, so you have to draw all your conclusions from the Times report and the article abstract.

Based on survey data of students in Minnesota in the late 1990s, students eating healthier diets also ate meals as a family more frequently. It's not clear from the story or the abstract whether this means their overall diet or the foods they ate during family meals were healthier, but presumably the former. It's also not clear whether they took into account such obvious confounding variables as the ability of the kids' families to afford healthier food (which is nearly always more expensive than unhealthy food on a price per calorie basis) or the ability of the families to afford having an adult at home to prepare and participate in a family meal (not easy if you are working multiple jobs or second shift or have only one adult in your household in the first place.) Nonetheless, the Times story concludes that "the best strategy for improving a child's diet is simply putting food on the table and sitting down together to eat it."

The Times story claims that the implied causal relationship between frequent family meals and a healthier teen diet is supported by the fact that in a separate study 'family connectedness', a proxy for the psychological health of a family, was shown to be "less important than whether they regularly dined together" for the incidence of these teen health behaviors. (This article on connectedness did take into account socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity, which leads me to believe that the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior article did too; but there's no way to tell without reading the latter.) How the discovery that one independent variable A is more strongly associated with a set of dependent variables than another B can lead you to conclude that the A must then be a cause of the patterns seen in the dependent variables is beyond me.

Once you look at this second study, however, things rapidly become even murkier. The authors' definition of the variable 'family connectedness' is actually an averaging of the answers to the questions, "How much do you feel your mother/father cares about you?" and "Do you feel you can talk to your mother/father about your problems?" They say, as stated in the Times article, that the correlations they've found between family meals and adolescent health behaviors hold even if the effect of family connectedness on their models was controlled for.

The author of the Times article repeatedly stresses the importance of the connectedness factor in showing that its truly family meals that are the beneficial phenomenon in her blog. In fact, the connectedness questions actually look like they in part measuring how open your communication is with your parents, not how functional your home life is. I suspect that very hierarchical, authoritarian parenting styles are not going to give you high connectedness, but may very well still correlate with frequent family meals and even happy, healthy teens. A teeny piece of evidence towards this is that in the abstract of another Project EAT study, "Family meal patterns: Associations with sociodemographic characteristics and improved dietary intake among adolescents," Asian-American ethnicity correlated with higher frequency of family meals. The Asian-American student population in Minnesota in the late 90s was likely to be children of first or second generation immigrants--households where non-mainstream American family practices are likely to still be strong before the immigrants are fully assimilated into the local culture. These are probably the exact kids who are not happily sharing all the secrets of their teen years with their parents but who actually participate in a lot of family meals. It would be nice to see the two types of connectedness questions separated out---sharing secrets with your parents vs. feeling like your parents care about you. The latter seems like it would be a far better way to estimate how functional your family life is. In any case, the authors of the study also admit that "[r]egular family meals may also be a proxy in this study for other elements of family connectedness that are not captured in the measures used here."

More importantly for my point here, although their primary conclusion is that family meals may enhance the health and well-being of adolescents and that public education efforts should stress the benefits of family meals, they also say explicitly that "the study's cross-sectional design meant the results do not imply a causal relationship between eating family meals together adolescent health behaviors." (Emphasis all mine!)

So, why should we think that family meals are this magical ingredient that keeps our kids healthy and happy? I admit that I am a strong proponent in my own household for family meals. My husband could actually eat three meals at work a day, and has on occasion suggested that this would be easier for him and us as a family. This inevitably leads to me jumping up and down and throwing pronouncements like "Hell no, you're not going to start eating dinner at work!" around. Eating dinner together provides a reason for me to cook an interesting nutritious meal on a daily basis. It gives us a chance to all hang out without any major distractions for at least one short stretch. And, I just plain like family meals. But is it the cure-all for the social and public health problems of the day? Will our daughter grow up with a protective vaccine against the trials and tribulations of adolescence because of it?....um, I doubt it.

Why am I such a doubter? This is where the Harris theory comes in. Her idea in short is that---based on many, many behavioral genetic studies of adult personality, behavior, and intelligence---there is little to no effect on these same factors of growing up together in the same household. Nearly every study that purports to find some benefits of a particular parenting style or particular feature of home life does not control for the fact that parents and children share their genes. Without taking heredity into account, you just cannot sort out whether the effects you are seeing are caused by genes or environment. And, on top of that, based on how dissimilar identical twins raised together are---just as dissimilar as twins raised apart---growing up in the same household does not appear to have more than a weak effect on behaviors like substance abuse/use, depression, academic performance, and self-esteem.

So, in light of all of Harris' evidence, the so-called "surprising power of family meals" appears to be just another case of causation-correlation confusion in parenting practices. Healthy, happy parents are more likely to have healthy, happy kids because those kids share their parents' genes. Happy families do things like eat family meals together, care for each other, spend time together, and eat relatively healthy diets. The kids get good grades, don't run around raising hell with smoking, drinking, and drug-taking kids, and don't think about suicide. Living in a wealthier neighborhood with more highly educated, wealthier parents makes all this stuff easier and more likely, but not having a lot of money or education does not make it impossible.

The number of studies telling us that eating family meals together 'leads' to happy, healthy teens, and thus adults, may continue to increase, and strong correlation can hint at causation.
But without studies that rule out other possible causes, the case for causation here remains weak. (Frequent family meals and happy, healthy teens may very well strongly correlate with how often a family needs to get their car repaired, the number of letters following the parents' names, and their use for high SPF sunscreen, but no one would mistake any of those associations for the causes of healthy, happy teens!) It remains perfectly plausible that there is some independent cause or set of causes of both frequent family meal eating and high-levels of adolescent health and happiness!

So, if family meals aren't a cause, does it matter? Yes! If family meals are not an actual cause of better health and more happiness, then devoting scarce public health resources to promoting them may take resources away from finding and promoting actual sources of health and happiness. And for all we know increasing the frequency of family meals in unhappy families may make things worse for those families!

Please, someone, somewhere do a study that compares happy, functional families that eat together with happy, functional families that don't eat together to see if there's anything important to conclude. A nice test demographic that comes to mind is day students at English boarding schools. Some schools may require day students to have dinner at school, and others might not. Is there really an important difference? (My husband and his siblings spent their teen years at school until late in the evening, rarely if ever eating a family meal because of required evening study sessions and school dinner hour. They are all happy, healthy, successful members of society today. Not eating family meals together may have had effects on them, but not ones that resulted in them or all their schoolmates being unusually drug-addled, eating-disorder ridden, suicidal basketcases.)

From the 'Interesting If It Were True' File

As a woman and a one-time computer scientist (at least I played one on TV!), I was immediately intrigued by Randall Stross's Digital Domain column headline last week, "What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?" In fact, the headline was completely inappropriate because Stross was actually asking why fewer women were entering the field than in the past, not why women already in the field were leaving. Sadly, things didn't improve much beyond the headline because it turns out that the premise of the article is Just Not True.

Stross's primary assertion is that, in contrast to computer science (CS) where the percentage of women receiving bachelor's degrees has been dropping, women "have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys."

In fact, closer inspection of the data shows that women are just as rare in many other technical fields. According to the National Science Foundation, in 2006, women made up 20.4% of bachelor's in CS, roughly similar to physics (20.6%) and engineering (19.5%) (including only 13.0% in electrical engineering!)

In addition, the 51% across "all science and engineering fields" is boosted by the fact the National Science Foundation statistics include behavioral and social sciences, like psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, where women achieved parity several decades ago. As the recipient of an NSF graduate research fellowship in linguistics, I have nothing against the NSF including social and behavioral sciences under its domain, and as a linguistics PhD, I would love for everyone to realize that linguistics is one of the sciences. Nonetheless, it's unlikely that the general readership of the Times would realize that these 'softer' sciences are part of the comparison set for CS. In fact, the graphic in this post comes from a New York Times op-ed inspired by the Larry Summer's 'Women scientists? ha!' controversy, and not surprisingly social and behavioral sciences don't make the list because no one is losing sleep over their female-to-male ratio.

Now, I admit that the percentage of women receiving bachelor's in CS is down from its peak in 1984 of 37%. But this means the real question of interest may not be why so few women are entering now, but why did so many women enter field in the mid 1980s. Maybe examining what briefly made CS attractive to women (and men) back then and comparing it to another boom-bust field like physics, like this far more insightful 2005 article in the Boston Globe did, could yield some insights on how to boost women's participation in all these fields which are so crucial to technological advancement and economic progress, but still so lacking in women.

Unfortunately, Stross's approach was to grossly oversimplify the problem of women's underrepresentation in science and engineering by ignoring the aspects of the data that didn't fit into his "Digital Domain" theme. Leaving us hapless readers to lament Where were his editors?

Hating on David Brooks

Welcome to Valedictocracy, a cozy little blog where we unleash our inner know-it-alls on all that is irritating, misguided, and just plain dumb.

And, of course, there's nothing more irritating than David Brook's armchair (or salad bar) sociological categories: the bourgeois bohemians, the organization kids, patio man, and now the valedictocrats, all of which are imaginary creatures with no greater basis in the here and now than unicorns, hobbits, or moderate Republicans.

Nonetheless, like Brooks, I, for one, welcome our new Achievatron overlords. And, being a cautious, washed-up valedictorian myself, rather than being the change I want to see, in this blog I will merely criticize the foolishness I love to hate!

Stay tuned for more overeducated pontificating coming your way shortly...