Spending Time With Your Kids: A Wise Human Capital Investment

If you’ve got kids, it will do them well, and prospectively, the parents well, to spend time with them. Not to satisfy feminist ideology (why shouldn’t men spend more time with their kids—so we mothers can go out and do shots with the girls?) and not because of the smooshy cultural prompts (all of the unshaven, man-boys being schooled by their kids in the grocery store), but because, in these times particularly, it makes good economic sense. Spending more time with your kids increases their chances of getting into college:

“Since the early 1990s, college-educated mothers have reallocated more than nine hours per week from leisure time to childcare time. This reallocation occurred at the same time that competition to get into college intensified, as a combination of demographic forces and the increase in the college premium led to a surge in the demand for college slots.”

Dads are re-allocating almost 6 hours per week from leisure (there goes the Saturday morning golf time) to childcare. Competition for college slots is intensifying.

“The children of the baby boomers are flooding colleges with applications, making the process more competitive than ever.”

This I know. In the last two years, we have run the college admission gauntlet twice and were successful twice—but what it puts your kids through is harrowing. First, when high school starts and I mean freshman year, your kid is on the college application clock. Every single thing they do beyond going to school and getting good grades (that goes without saying—because in today’s hyper-inflated grades world—everyone gets A’s) counts toward gaining entry into college. Did your kid man a bake sale after school to raise money for a band or sports team trip? Document it and your kid’s role in it. Get your kid in as many after-school clubs and sports as you can (our boy child did varsity tennis, honor society, etc, the girl child was an officer of about a half-dozen clubs and committees)—not just as members, but in leadership positions. ALL of this stuff counts on college applications. (On one of the applications, there is a space to describe ORIGINAL research and/or experiments conducted.)

But your kid just doesn’t start being one of those “doing stuff all the time” high school kids unless parents have taken the time before that to be with them, take them places, and give them opportunities to experience things beyond what’s on cable, the internet, and Wii—get them outdoors, take them to big cities and little craphole towns on a two-lane road out in a county with a name you can’t pronounce, and make sure they see you being involved in stuff beyond the four walls of where you live. And it does mean chauffering them around a lot (mothers spend 2+ hours per week for kids under 5 and almost 3 hours per week chauffeuring kids older than 5—for dads its about an hour and a half per week).

Unless UGA, Georgia Tech, GSU and all the rest dramatically increase capacity, increased competition for college slots will be the trend—as will increased time spent by parents with their kids to prepare them for those slots.

Global Warming Pushback?

There's this Mastercard commercial where the school-aged kid helps his dad become a better man by helping become more eco-conscious. (I sort of expected the kid to stand beside his dad while he was taking a dump and offer him 2 Sheryl Crow squares of toilet paper):



Presumably, the kid is more environmentally aware than his doofus dad and presumably the little green kid learned his global warming chops at school. Kids do learn about global warming at school--there are plenty of guides, lesson plans, and free materials out there to teach global warming to PreK-12th grade. Nickelodeon even has global warming specials on so that every child ca be inculcated in this man-made disaster as early as possible.



But there may be a pushback brewing. For the first time EVER, among all the usual pile of educational catalogues and materials that go straight to the recycling bin, was a teaching material that refutes global warming--The Skeptics Handbook. Here is the opening plaint from the author, Joane Nova:

"Rise above the mud-slinging in the Global Warming debate. Here are the strategies and tools you need to cut through the red herrings and avoid the traps."

I'm guessing Joanne means the traps of getting cornered in the gym or the cloak room by one of those little eco-scolds from the Mastercard commercial. Ms. Nova's slim volume goes over topics with headings like The Global Warming Gravy Train Ran Out Of Evidence, Believers Are Becoming Skeptics, and Cutting Through The Fog. Ms. Nova finishes her treatise with this bottom line:

"Carbon doesn't seem to have driven temperatures before; probably isn't doing it now; things are not getting warmer; and computer models can't predict the weather. An emissions trading scheme is a bad solution to a problem that's gone, fighting a cause that never was..."

This handbook seems about as alarmist as the global warmers talking about floods all the way to the Alabama line in the coming decades--so I don't know what the educational value might be. But I will say its the first educational pushback on global warming that I've seen come through my mailbox.

Big Headed Kids & Autism

Seems as if the larger the head of an autistic child, the more trouble they have generalizing, but do well with detail-focused processing:

"Macrocephaly in the context of autism may therefore be a biological marker of abnormal neural connectivity, and of a local processing bias."

Macrocephaly is an abnormally large head. Big headed kids also tend to be taller and to be male. They also have less adaptive behaviors. I was curious though as to what "big-headed" might mean in context of babies at different ages. From the CDC:

--At birth, the 95th percentile for head circumference is a tad more than 15 inches.
--At 6 months, the 95th percentile is right at 18 inches.
--A one year old child that has a head bigger than 95% of other kids will have a 19 inch head.
--A two year old will have a head slightly under 20 inches and a three year old will have a head about 20 and half inches.

I know if I had a baby child I might be getting out the tape measure right about now.

No Weird Fridays

We in the office are serious about our No Weird Fridays. No time suck psychodramas allowed. So of course, about 12 seconds after we were hooting about the time one of our substitutes was convinced she was receiving radio signals from her earrings and our fire alarm sensors were actually video cameras tracking her every movement (yeah, I sent her home, like, for good), into the office walks two guys--both wearing jeans, one in an Atlanta Falcons t shirt the other in an untucked golf shirt.

They announce to the three of us in the office that they are from the Department of Homeland Security. We howled. We couldn't help it. Right in the middle of our No Weird Friday declarations and our reminisces about prior paranoid schizophrenic weirdness, weird squared walks in.

No really, they insisted we are Homeland Security They both whipped out badge holders. Sure 'nuff. Golf Shirt guy says we have tracked an illegal alien to within 100 meters of this location.

"You mean, right now?" I ask.

Yes. He says they believe a woman, who we recognize as a parent, is harboring an illegal and we believe he is here.

"In school?" I ask, I think quite reasonably. And really, it is serious--the guy they are after is wanted for rape and assault in Florida. I'm thinking about locking down the school now. Or maybe evacuating it. This would certainly count as Friday weirdness.

"So how do you know he's here? Are you tracking him somehow?"

Golf Shirt guy says, "Homeland doesn't track cell phones, but we have traced his cell phone to within a 100 meters of this location." Aaaaaah. I see. How did I end up in Enemy of the State, II? But razor sharp school brains prevailed--we figured out who the kids were of the parent that was illegally harboring a fugitive and then figured out that one of the kids had the CELL PHONE.

The Homeland Security guys seemed almost peeved that their dangerous fugitive wasn't cowering in the Media Center behind the Captain Underpants display or hiding behind the tether ball pole out back.

I took Golf Shirt guy's card and promised I would call him if a guy we didn't know showed up to pick the kids up. They left and we in the office just looked at each other. It wasn't even 9:30 yet on our No Weird Friday.

School Lighting Mostly Sucks

That's one half of the fluorescent lights in my office. There is another bank right over my head that I won't turn on because I'm convinced that it irradiates my brain and makes me surly and migrainish. So, my office is pretty dim most of the time. I'm not alone:

"Results showed that classrooms that are lit with 100 Hz fluorescent lighting can cause headaches and impair visual performance."

Turn the fluorescent lights off. Use natural light or lamps. The glare of fluorescent lights makes kids crazy. And staff. Truth.

Breastfeeding Backlash?

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I'm still curious as to how prevalent a potential breastfeeding backlash is in Savannah. From The Case Against Breastfeeding:

"In certain overachieving circles, breast-feeding is no longer a choice—it’s a no-exceptions requirement, the ultimate badge of responsible parenting. Yet the actual health benefits of breast-feeding are surprisingly thin, far thinner than most popular literature indicates. Is breast-feeding right for every family? Or is it this generation’s vacuum cleaner—an instrument of misery that mostly just keeps women down?"

I wonder if most women now feel that breastfeeding is an instrument of misery that's keeping them down? The author traces the rise of formula and from that the creation of the LaLeche League in the late 1950's who rebelled against scientists and formula:

"La Leche League mothers rebelled against the notion of mother as lab assistant, mixing formula for the specimen under her care. Instead, they aimed to “bring mother and baby together again.”

Later, the author characterizes the LaLeche League as veering into anti-science feminism:

"Over time the group adopted a feminist edge. A 1972 publication rallies mothers to have “confidence in themselves and their sisters rather than passively following the advice of licensed professionals.” As one woman wrote in another league publication, “Yes, I want to be liberated! I want to be free! I want to be free to be a woman!”

I see cars in my drop off line with LaLeche League decals and I wonder if moms are using breastfeeding their children as some sort of class signifier like the author notes:

"In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic. But breast-feeding is the real ticket into the club."

I've waded into this topic before, mainly as breastfeeding relates to autism and I've always been a staunch believer that breastfeeding presents numerous advantages to the child and even to the mother. But is the wheel turning again--ready to throw LaLeche Leaguers and SouthernMamas into a panic that their practice isn't jibing with the latest science?

If science doesn't support breastfeeding as the optimal way to feed infants anymore, maybe that means that eventually breasts will be superfluous on a woman. Like lips on a chicken.

From a man's perspective, that would be really, really sad.

Little Red Riding Hood For The NCLB Era

For all the data we collect on students achievement for NCLB and AYP, it was only a matter of time before our fairy tales reflected this obsession. Data is even collected on the nutritional value of Grandma:


Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.