liberated adulthood

Emailing (in angst) about other people’s second pregnancies
1 comment
2/11/13
Posted in:
fertility panic, happiness, liberated adulthood, pressure, Uncategorized
Otis reading my Time article on only children.

From the when things start getting real files: I wanted to share an email exchange I had with my dear friend Julia this morning. Julia is a psychologist in Santa Cruz, married to a singer-songwriter named Nels, raising an awesome kid names Otis.  We met in pre-natal yoga in Brooklyn (still the only yoga class I’ve taken—I think I have 9 sessions left on a 10 pack if anyone in Brooklyn wants it).  The six of us, would have dinner on Friday nights, a little chosen family, until Julia’s work moved them across the country.  We are sisters in angst. Today, Julia more than myself (I have dibs on tomorrow).  I thought these angsty missives might be relatable.  Lord knows …

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The new vogue of hating motherhood
0 comments
2/6/13
Posted in:
happiness, home economics, home v. work, liberated adulthood, personal stories, policy, washington
imgres

For the first time in five years, I rang in the New Year without a child to put to bed before midnight, or to wake me before dawn. In fact, I spent the last several days of 2012 giddily cramming in consecutive nights of bad behavior, drinking shots of whiskey in dirty bars, dancing the night away in platform shoes, eating to excess in downtown restaurants, all rarities in my post-maternal life. My husband felt guilty he was so deeply enjoying our time away from our daughter. I didn’t. My remorselessness was underscored within an hour of our daughter returning home from her grandparents, when her first tantrum began, which she opted to stage naked, on the toilet. Perhaps she …

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Low fertility is about liberation, not economics
1 comment
10/31/12
Posted in:
american dreaming, economics, fertility panic, liberated adulthood, new research, new research, PARENTS, SOCIETY, Uncategorized
How liberating!

This month, the Center for Disease Control reported that birth rates had dropped again, for the fourth year in a row, bottoming out under 4 million babies born for the first time since 1998.  Commentators immediately rushed to their laptop, ringing the alarm bells to fault the economy for our flaccid national desire to procreate. To be sure, low fertility accompanies a weak economy without fail. But to blame the markets for what happens in our bedrooms misses a radical reshaping of our worldview. It’s not just the economy, it’s liberation. The pursuit of happiness has emerged as our new national ideology, trumping the age-old belief that parental duty is the very definition, of adulthood.  Some think it’s the height …

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Why do we have bad science about only children?
3 comments
7/25/12
Posted in:
american dreaming, liberated adulthood, ONLIES, PARENTS, SOCIETY, stereotypes, suburbia, The Conversation
WeirdScience1985

I’m preparing to talk to a group of high school psychology teachers about “bad” science. (How is “Bad Science” not an eighties movie? Was “Weird Science” enough?) I’m reeling, as I have many times before in reporting on the science of only children, from the disconnect between what studies about only children show us, and what we tend to believe, regardless.

I visited birth order guru and scientific historian Frank Sulloway at Berkeley last year.  We talked about why bad scientific reasoning about onlies tends to occur outside the data sets. He believes a Darwinian impetus may well underlie the stereotype. Our relatives had an evolutionary imperative to spread their own genes.  “They need a good story to convince us …

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A view from the backseat
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7/24/12
Posted in:
liberated adulthood, loneliness, ONLIES, PARENTS, personal stories, The Conversation
3350539292

There was a plaid wool blanket in my parents’ car, just big enough to cover me when I would stretch out across the backseat. During snowy Massachusetts weather, I would wrap it around me, cocoon-like, and lean forward to wedge myself between the front seats where my parents sat, making plans, cracking jokes, or listening to the hum of “Weekend Edition.”  Summertime meant I would ball it into a pillow, and prop my head on it to re-read every book in the Anne of Green Gables series, inhaling the permanent rubbery smell of our boxy blue Jetta.  These days, my daughter sleeps under it when she stays in their apartment; I am always amazed at how small it is, and …

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