Judith Warner

ISarah Comito, Matthew Comiton my latest incarnation as a thought leadership coach, I’m often on the hunt for excellent examples of “thinking in public”—TED talks, reports, articles, blog posts, even tweets—to share with clients.  So, I figured, why not share them, when I find them, with GWP readers, too?

I’m experimenting with a new column format here (and please, please, tell me what you think!).  I envision highlighting from time to time a piece of public thought leadership that I come upon in my travels, one that translates academic or industry-specific knowledge for a broad audience in a stand-out way.  I’ll let you know why I love it, what’s surprising about it, and what’s fresh.

To start us off, I bring you Judith Warner’s first report as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.  I’ve long been enamored of Judith’s deft ability to bring a structural lens to the public debate around “domestic disturbances,” as her popular New York Times column so famously phrased it.  In this new report, Warner melds journalism and policy paper to tackle domestic disturbances writ large.

Who:

Judith Warner is a Senior Fellow at American Progress. She is also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Time.com. She is best known for her New York Times bestseller, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, and her former New York Times column, “Domestic Disturbances.” Her latest book, We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication, received numerous awards, and she is currently a recipient of a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. A former special correspondent for Newsweek in Paris, she hosted “The Judith Warner Show” on XM satellite radio from 2005 to 2007 and wrote the 1993 New York Times bestseller Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story, as well as several other books.

What:

Lessons Learned: Reflections on 4 Decades of Fighting for Families, a report for the Center for American Progress

Why I Like It:

The topic is a tough one – and well traveled.  Yet I like how Warner gets in there, challenges perceived wisdom, and works to change the frame:

“It’s long been accepted wisdom that Americans view family matters as purely private concerns and that public policy solutions for families—other than the very poorest—have no place in our culture. Yet polls consistently show that support for family-friendly policies is, in fact, overwhelming.”

Based on interviews with more than three dozen veterans of the fight for family-friendly policy in America representing a variety of perspectives, generations, and stake- holder groups, she quotes all my favorite experts.

She pays close attention to language and narrative:

“Personal responsibility” plus “opportunity” was a winning message combination.  Stressing “equality” or the ending of disparities was a nonstarter for conservatives, but talk of “fairness,” “opportunities,” “choices,” and “tools” were acceptable.

And she links the issue she’s writing about to others:

“The power of the personal played a strong role in building support for the Family and Medical Leave Act, and in recent years such narratives have been essential to shifting public and political opinion on marriage equality.”

But what I like most of all is the sense of possibility Warner invokes.

Much has been written about why progress has been slow in this arena, and so paltry.  What feels different here is the emphasis on the seismic internal shift that must take place in order for the outward change to occur.  We need to “replace the belief that ‘this is just how it is’ with the argument that ‘it doesn’t have to be this way.’”

The report takes a close look at public policies promoting caretaking—through paid family leave, paid sick days, and high-quality public pre-K—that already exist in some states and cities. Warner looks at why they are proving to be highly popular and successful, and how we might replicate what works.

Refreshingly, she leaves us with hope:

Bleak though the legislative outlook now seems in our bitterly divided Congress, this is potentially a very fruitful time for thinking creatively and productively about creating a better future for our families.”

Since I’m already interested in the unfinished business of feminism, and how the issues travel and repeat across generations, Warner had me at “lessons learned.”  But the optimism in the report made me want to share it.  Warner brings a much-needed burst of energy to a topic that can easily deflate readers—especially those of us living this fight.

Four years ago, Judith Warner made the argument that “hyper-parenting” in the U.S. has caused plenty of mothers to lose all semblance of balance in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. While the book received its fair share of criticism (for example, see the thoughtful analysis of Warner’s book on The Mothers Movement Online), I recently confronted the bubbling up and spiraling out of my own anxiety–slightly irrational but nonetheless all-consuming–which found its source in the shadowy threat of the H1N1 virus.

A few weeks ago, I was totally caught up in H1N1 anxiety. No doubt some of it had to do with media stories about cases of mortality; the rest of it was wrapped up in having young children. I was managing to control my anxiety surrounding my youngest son, who’s in nursery school, but couldn’t manage to quell the fears about my oldest daughter. J. is in elementary school and has asthma plus multiple food allergies, including to egg; this means she can’t get flu shots. We had plans to travel to see their grandparents for Thanksgiving on two planes. Given our past history of taking her to hospitals for various asthma- and sickness-related issues, both my husband and I were nervous about the whole plan.

What to do? Forego the trip to see aging grandparents because of our generalized anxiety about the possibilities of the kids catching H1N1 (from which plenty of kids have recovered)? Grit our teeth and try our best to get a grip on the anxiety and fear we knew were being influenced by media hype? Silence our concerns about a relatively new vaccine and do everything we could to find out if it was possible for both of our kids to get vaccinated?

In the end, we settled on choice #3. This wasn’t hard for my youngest one, but proved more time- and labor- intensive for my oldest. We finally managed to score a dose of the vaccine from the pediatrician, which we transported to the allergist–where we sat, all morning, watching Sponge Bob in the waiting room while the doctor skin-tested her for reactions to the vaccine and eventually administered the dose in two stages.

So, what does this have to do with global motherhood? For one, our little family drama was set into play by globalization, which not only affects the pathways of pandemic viruses and the constant flow of information about them, but also the fact that we were living two plane flights away from my parents. At the same time, our experience represents parenting from a position of privilege: we had health insurance, access to the vaccine, and the ability to take a whole day off from work in order to vaccinate our daughter. It reminded me how many U.S. families don’t have the resources to access preventative care, or even to navigate relatively minor medical issues.

Subsequent phone conversations with friends in other states made me realize how this global scenario was at the same time very local. My friend in Boston? Couldn’t get the vaccine for her two kids but didn’t seem overly worried about it. The pregnant friend of friends in Atlanta who wanted the vaccine? Wanted it but couldn’t get it. Those same friends in Atlanta? Had one child who got sick with H1N1, recovered, and subsequently got the vaccine with the rest of the family. These geographical differences are exacerbated when we look at other countries, where H1N1 has sometimes not even registered on the radar. In many countries, it’s diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and HIV/AIDS that threaten children on a daily basis. (Here’s a link to UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children 2009 report.)

Parenting in the time of H1N1: for those of us with some degree of resources, it highlights how caring for children often boils down to managing risks. Does the risk of a relatively new vaccine outweigh the potential risks of contracting a virus? Or is it the other way around? (For that matter, how risky is a plane flight to visit grandparents? The car trip to the airport? The list goes on and on.) Thoughtful parents perceive and weigh risks in different ways. There don’t seem to be right or wrong answers, except in hindsight, which can be kind or cruel. We can never know in the moment.

Families without resources have fewer choices, less ability to take control of these anxiety-ridden situations. I suspect it’s far more stressful not to have choices, to care for small children when you can’t take control and you can’t battle fate with much more than prayers and crossed fingers. Even if “control” is anything but.