Part 3 of the Overparenting Series

My previous posts offered an introduction to metaphors used in three different national contexts in order to lay a foundation for my claim that both the concept of overparenting and the words used to describe it are culturally constructed. I also introduced the historical and disciplinary origins of the metaphors. The next paragraphs identify important sociological threads that tie together the obsession with American helicopter parents, Danish curling parents, and British lawnmower parents.

Anxiety, Social Class, and Overprotection. Despite the differences between the metaphors, all of them are about parents who have the means to enact them. In most of the sources referenced here, authors are quick to point out that it is primarily affluent parents who are transforming into helicopters, sweepers, and lawnmowers. The effort put forth for the sake of protecting children and preparing them for the world is recognizable as a form of cultural capital that only the select few have the resources to enact (and the resources to read and talk about), something that sociologist Annette Lareau has discussed in her work on middle class parents’ efforts to intentionally cultivate skills in their children. But even as affluent parents make the efforts to protect their children, the ideals associated with being a “good parent” spread to all parents regardless of class.

In addition to the class-based popularity of overprotective parenting, the metaphors connote anxiety in a sea of saturation of bad, good, and in-between information. As sociologist Margaret Nelson has written in her book Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times, today’s parents, especially ones with means, are overwhelmed with metaphors, messages, and scary clip art about effective parenting. The metaphors lead to a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t world. Parents feel inadequate in their seemingly excessive (class-based) efforts to try to curtail the perceived dangers that lurk around the corner for their children. And feel anxious about whether their impulse to protect is messed up, too.

If we think about the metaphors used, they are meant to convey protection, but they can create unforeseen problems. Indeed, these layers of action that the images suggest is why metaphors are particularly compelling, and why the types of parents they represent can be deemed as both good and bad. The helicopter can rescue, but it can also blow away the prized scarf. The sweeper can smooth a path, but also carve too shallow a spot in the ice that leads the stone to the edge. The lawnmower can clear the blades, but also propel itself into the flowerbed where the spiders live. The metaphors evoke the infinity of “what if” moments that could make anyone have butterflies in the stomach, in terms of both success and failure of the image. Maybe that scarf is ugly. Maybe the stone needs to find the edge before it gets back on track. Maybe spiders are interesting creatures to spend time getting to know. In other words, the collateral damage may be harmless, or it may even simply be not harmful at all to begin with.

Admittedly, creating the best designed fuselage, studying the science of ice brushing, and inventing a stop button on a self-propelled lawnmower are reasonable pursuits to enhance actual helicopter flying, curling, and lawnmowing. But these pursuits done in the name of preventing imaginary things or things inaccurately defined as negative, or done so that parents can have yet more scary imagery in their anxiety arsenal, doesn’t seem to be a good use of time and resources.

MY VIEW: We spend time thinking about the quality of other people’s parenting because other people’s children may affect our child; because thinking about others’ parenting affects how we assess our own parenting; and because it matters beyond our families to locations as large as the nation-state. After all, it’s not hard to find opinion pieces on how a particular country is faring, given the characteristics of the youngest generation. Or on how some parents who are trying to instill the asset of autonomy in their children are reported as UNDERdoing it, thus offering commentary on the role of the state, the neighborhood, and the voyeuristic role of other parents. In other words, the act of assessing the quality of other people’s parenting is contextualized by important sociological factors. What I hope to add is that the words used to describe all of this also need context, too.

Art Gallery of Advice. At the risk of subjecting myself to my own critique about both parenting advice and social class inequality, I offer here another metaphor. But this time, the parent and the child are not metaphors. The parenting advice is. What if each parenting advice column and conversation was an art piece hanging on a wall? What if the world in which parents try to operate is the art gallery? There’s a reason art galleries allow a lot of space between pieces. The space allows the viewer to absorb the art with little distraction and enough time, so that she can uncover the art piece’s story and context, and can decide whether it’s worth looking at longer, ignoring, or obsessing over until she buys a copy for her own home.

Why not take a step back and look into the entire gallery, in order to recognize that we often find ourselves in front of a cluttered wall of parenting advice? Wall clutter that contains different artists competing for the most clever use of metaphorical imagery or best use of genre or media, and different nations competing over who has submitted the best art. Why not take a step back and look at the gallery-goers, recognizing that their artistic preferences are all influenced heavily by their cultural context? Heck, why not recognize that art galleries are classed, and not everyone has time to visit one or care whether it exists?

Imagine a gallery where there was no white space, and the space between crowded pieces was filled with mirrors etched with superimposed scary images. Like viewers in an art gallery who are well-served with calm space between art pieces, parents can benefit from less, not more. Let’s stop making so much clutter, or at least help viewers realize that they can ignore it and just focus on the art that brings them joy and just the right amount of challenge. I encourage people to remember that actual children and parents are not metaphors. What I would like us to realize is that our preoccupation with turning them into metaphors is very real, and could use a careful calm stroll through the gallery of information so that we can best choose what art makes us feel the best about our amazing (and yet, totally mundane) role as parents.

Michelle Janning is Professor of Sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and serves as Co-Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. She has taught and served as a pedagogical consultant for the Sociology and Child Development and Diversity programs at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad. She also let her son ride public transportation in Copenhagen by himself when he was eight years old. More about her can be found at www.michellejanning.com.

Part 2 of the Overparenting Series.

Helicopters, curlers, and lawnmowers defined and differentiated. Previously, I discussed the proliferation of metaphors that refer to Parentus Overprotectus – when parents overparent, overindulge, overprotect, and that these are concepts that are not exclusive to the U.S. In this installment, I consider the helicopter parent (in the U.S.), the curling parent (in Denmark), and the lawnmower parent (in England). These metaphors have different origins, disciplinary expertise of the originators, and meanings. They are inseparable from the cultural context in which they originated.

A chronology of overprotective parenting metaphors reveals a picture that starts with Israeli psychologist Haim Ginott in his 1969 book Between Parent and Teenager. The oft-cited quote, “Mother hovers over me like a helicopter and I’m fed up with her noise and hot air.… I’m entitled to sneeze without explanation” shows the use of helicopter as simile, not metaphor, for a certain type of parenting.

Jump forward to the early 1990s, when education consultant Jim Fay and medical doctor Foster Cline introduced Parenting with Love and Logic to a largely American audience. In their parent typologies, the term “helicopter parent” is presented as one of two negative types of parents, in which parents hover over their offspring and, as is often left out of the definition, rescue them when things go badly. This metaphor has been present in their writing, workshops, and popular media ever since, and has spread internationally to the point where scholars from countries outside of the U.S. reference the term as they construct new ones.

Denmark is often cited as a place where hovering parents are less likely to be seen and heard. But this place is not exempt from a Parentus Overprotectus metaphor. In 2004, Danish psychologist Bent Hougaard coined the metaphor “curling parent” in his book Curling-Forældre og Service-Børn (Curling-Parents and Service-Children, translated into Norwegian and Swedish, but not English), referring to the winter sport where a “sweeper” uses a broom to smooth the ice in such a way that the polished granite stones move across the ice to a desired end. In the same way, parents smooth the icy path for their little stone children to prevent them from struggle. And the children end up feeling entitled to whatever they want to make their lives easier as they grow. Parents are, as the title suggests, at the service of their little stone children. I’m fairly certain there’s a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that could illustrate this.

Lawnmower parents have a British origin. A British pair of “behavioural research strategist” authors Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory coined the term in a 2014 book about business entitled Selfish, Scared, & Stupid. This is a text marketed to business people seeking advice on how to effect change, have strong leaders, make more money, and get a grip on how real people work. The authors argue that, in reality, people are selfish, fearful, and stupid, traits that have been glossed over as children are raised with parents who clear the way and tell them that they are perfect. Lawnmower parents, then, are partly to blame for (especially millennial generation) business people’s unreal expectations for themselves and others because too many paths have been cleared for children who grow up incapable of handling failure. Similar arguments are made by U.S. authors who discuss problematic characteristics of the millennial generation that stem from parenting practices, using the helicopter metaphor.

Helicopter, curler and lawnmower parents have been compared to one another in popular and academic venues inconsistently. Sometimes they are presented as the same, sometimes as versions of the same thing, and sometimes they are presented as part of an evolving sequence. Specifically, one scholar has said that curling and helicopter parents are “equivalent metaphor(s).” Another articulates that curling is “much like lawnmower parenting,” or that these latter two “correspond to” each other. And finally, in a twist that suggests etymological evolution, one writer offers that helicopter parenting has evolved into lawnmower parenting, as if the latter is a more aggressive and potent version of the former. I can’t help it: do they mean that this could be a hard-to-kill immune-from-gunfire new kind of genetically modified dinosaur killing machine type of parent? You laugh, but I assure you I am taking these metaphors seriously. I mean, just for the fun of it.

Cultural context. What I like most about sociology is the ability to examine cultural context. To see the forest amidst the trees. Overprotective parenting metaphors come not just from different places, but also from different disciplines – from psychology, education, medicine, and business. These are disciplinary contexts that, like nations, have their own cultures. Parentus Overprotectus, then, becomes about individual well-being, learning abilities, bodies, and the bottom line. What all of this does is construct parenting and childhoods as individualized projects that require measurable outcomes and a dose of imagery-induced anxiety at a cultural level.

Hovering helicopters, curlers brushing away obstacles on the ice, and lawnmowers clearing a path in the grass have important differences as they represent overprotective parenting, yet it is easy to conflate their definitions. The choice of imagery matters in the cultural context. Lumping them into one category of overprotective parents (most often as “helicopter parents”) may misrepresent important yet subtle qualities that the image seeks to convey. What this review reveals is that each of the terms has stemmed from a different country, a different disciplinary lens, and a different time period. Helicopter parenting is about hovering and rescuing, curling parenting is about carefully smoothing ice for an idealized version of childhood, and lawnmower parenting is about mowing over all obstacles so that children have a visibly clear and easy path, with no harmful sticks or tall grass blades standing in their way. The latter two are about prevention, the first one about fixing things after the fact.

For fun, I like to think about the use of a large metal machine used in military exercises as particularly American, the image of a parent who already knows the rules of most winter sports on account of the fact that it’s cold in Scandinavia as particularly Danish, and the clearing of a smooth row of mowed green like Wimbledon and paths in the symmetrical gardens at the Queen’s residence as particularly British. Or maybe that’s a stretch. Over the next couple days, you can do the same for Parentus Overprotectus metaphors beyond these three countries, in preparation for my next installment.

In the next post, I discuss how these metaphors, despite their varying cultural context, disciplinary history, and etymology, have a very important common theme: social class matters. And I offer a metaphor of my own to add to the mix.

Michelle Janning is Professor of Sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and serves as Co-Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. She has taught and served as a pedagogical consultant for the Sociology and Child Development and Diversity programs at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad. She also let her son ride public transportation in Copenhagen by himself when he was eight years old. More about her can be found at www.michellejanning.com.

This is part one of a three-part series.

As parents of school-age children transition out of summer and into fall, we add to our daily list of things to think about. Making friends. Having the right outfit. Knowing the latest terminology for inappropriate recess conversations. I don’t know about you, but I think this list of concerns goes for my kid, too.

But is there such a thing as too much when it comes to parenting, especially as we ponder our kids heading back to school? More importantly, why do we spend time assessing parenting as if it were a lesson in prepositions? As in, OVERparenting. OVERprotective. OVERdoing it. It’s easy to find pieces written that contain judgment towards parents who hover, micromanage, or insert themselves loudly and proudly into children’s spaces. There are also entire organizations and websites devoted to asking parents to self-assess and read articles by experts. We live in a world where we scrutinize our decisions as parents, and we have no trouble finding resources that can help us with what I like to call The Parenting Scrutiny Project. This goes for parents who are judged to do too little, and those who are judged to do too much.

I must admit that there is good that can come from this. After all, I descend from a certified parent educator whose ideas are brilliant and whose love for all children and their parents is immeasurable, and I would never advocate neglecting children and their needs. To avoid self-awareness and love as a parent doesn’t feel right. I’m probably a better parent if I think about whether listening to my son is a better choice than ignoring him when he comes home from a science class that made him squeamish because they showed a real sheep brain. But as a sociologist, I would assert that even labeling ignoring a child as bad, as well as the best way to demonstrate self-awareness and love, are themselves socially constructed.

This scrutiny would occur in our own heads naturally, I suppose, but the proliferation of news stories, typologies, and listicles about parenting sure does make this more likely. The scrutiny occurs both inwardly and outwardly, perpetuating a simultaneously individualistic and other-centered ethos. This can be deemed good (let’s help each other build a sharing community of parents and incorporate those ideals into our own families), or bad (the world revolves around me and my stressful neoliberal parenting project, and others are terrible at it). I recognize that it’s a risky road to traverse by offering yet another writing about parenting. But the twist here is that I am offering some words about why we keep seeing so much about parenting, what metaphors we use to describe it, and why our national context may matter for both.

Overprotective Parenting Metaphors: Helicopters, Curlers, and Lawnmowers

There is no shortage of metaphors in international academic and popular venues for overprotective parenting, which I like to refer to as Parentus Overprotectus. Images of tigers, snow plows, blackhawk helicopters, curling brooms, and lawnmowers are introduced, debated, compared, and replaced, seemingly continuously. Objects and animals and inclement weather are anthropomorphized into anxious caretakers of little ones with varying scary traits, as if naming a style of parenting just right might help to prevent the next generation from hitting their heads or using their heads without any help from a grown-up.

But the proliferation of overprotective parenting metaphors itself may fuel the parental anxiety that persists.

Search online and you will easily encounter columns about the pitfalls of overprotective parenting, occasionally with a new term introduced to give parents a broader vocabulary to refer to their own anxiety. Just as easy to come across are stories about how parents from other countries are happier because they do not overparent or overprotect; rather, they value children’s independence and exposure to adult themes and emotions so that their children will be better off. We see reports about the lessened physical activity of children because their parents are afraid to let them play outside, which ultimately leads to a “protection paradox” – where the protection of kids from harm diminishes children’s skills to combat future harm. We also see news stories about parents who are criticized for not hovering enough because they allow their children to play alone on playgrounds. I’m fascinated by the endless stream of research and commentary on this phenomenon and the metaphors that are introduced within it.

Protection of children by adults is culturally constructed. When I return to the U.S. from research trips to Scandinavia I tell stories of babies sleeping in baby carriages outside in the cold winter air to colleagues whose jaws drop just as they remember that they should probably not drop their jaws in polite conversation. “How can that be safe? They are not protected from the elements! Let alone strangers walking by!” they argue. To this, I respond with my usual discussion of how the Scandinavian good childhood is defined by early childhood education scholar Judith Wagner as one where children can be independent, where there is a lot of social trust, where democracy is ensured when children are allowed to be on their own, and where brisk air on cheeks is seen as good for the skin and the soul, starting at birth. The variations in how parents parent across cultures, and in what is defined as good and bad, and over and under, is what I mean by cultural construction. But even scholars and friends who already accept this variation sometimes find themselves with dropped jaws.

Overprotective parenting metaphors exist in different forms in different geographic locations. And the metaphors seem to be multiplying. In one U.S. source that has a chapter discussing “Hyper-Parenting,” I counted no fewer than twelve (twelve!) types of parents who are overprotective, overinvolved, excessive. This leads me to two questions, which are the subject of the next two posts: first, does the process of constructing a metaphor for overprotective parenting tell us about the culture, time period, and discipline in which it was created? And second, why are we seeing a proliferation of metaphors used to describe overprotective parenting across cultures?

Stay tuned to the next installment, where I consider the overprotective parenting metaphors from three places where I have spent lots of time living, researching, teaching, and parenting: helicopter parent (in the U.S.), curling parent (in Denmark), and lawnmower parent (in England).

Michelle Janning is Professor of Sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and serves as Co-Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. She has taught and served as a pedagogical consultant for the Sociology and Child Development and Diversity programs at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad. She also let her son ride public transportation in Copenhagen by himself when he was eight years old. More about her can be found at www.michellejanning.com.

As a new semester begins and college professors polish their syllabi, I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to also consider the climate of their courses – that is, do the syllabus requirements and course activities take into account that some of your young protégés will likely have more pressing life commitments than football games and Greek Rush? The answer is likely complicated, but well worth considering.

In a 2012 report to Congress, The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance presented evidence that single mothers are the fastest growing student demographic, and a more recent report from the U.S. Department of Education projects that women’s enrollment in college will increase 15 percent by 2024. Based on my own analysis of data drawn from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, it appears likely that much of this growth will be driven by single mothers enrolling for the first time. The same data indicate that about 20 percent of undergraduate women students are single mothers, so if you are teaching college courses this fall, the chances are high you will have single mother students in your classroom.

Since many of you are parents, too, much of this won’t surprise you. But I ask you to consider what it would be like if you were sitting in those seats while also caring for your families, and it will be likely that much of the following will not surprise you.

Sociologist Amanda Freeman penned a piece in the Atlantic yesterday and reviewed the many ways that single moms face a “higher education dilemma.” She discusses the barriers that single mother students face in simply getting enrolled in school, and impossibilities of finding child care, housing, time, and even support from their professors.

Likewise, I interviewed 30 single mother students and asked them to share their motivations for pursuing a post-secondary education. Their reasons were as diverse as the women themselves, but a common theme is they believe a college degree will bring added value to the lives of their children by improving their financial security and uplifting their status in society. In other words, they view going to college within the framework of their role as mothers. They convey an uneasy relation to the single mother label, because this label has historically been posited against the ideologies of individualism and personal responsibility – which leaves them feeling economically vulnerable and socially marginalized. They view a college degree as a way to earn social legitimacy and reverse the patterns of discrimination their families contend with.

I pursued this line of research because I was a single mother while I was in school, and I designed my project to give voice other single mother students. I asked my informants to talk about their experiences on campus, and many shared stories of inflexible deadlines, conflicted commitments, and what Duquaine-Watson (2007) called a “chilly climate” in the classroom. Although single mother students have a significantly higher risk of dropping out, none of them believe their professors have nefarious intentions or intend to push them out. However, they suggest that it would be more feasible for them to persist in school successfully if their professors changed a few things up – and these are small things that do not compromise the integrity of the course or violate the boundaries of fairness.

Drawing on the talk of the women in my study, I present the following list of five things a professor can do to help me stay in school (from the perspective of a single mother student):

1. Acknowledge I exist in your syllabus. I am making enormous efforts and sacrifices to be in your course – if I am running late or miss a homework deadline because my child was ill or needed to have a green bean extracted from his ear, I’ll find a way to make it up to you. Please put it in writing that you will make provisions for this possibility by stating explicitly that students with family responsibilities should contact you by email regarding missed or late work.
2. Rethink your phone rules. When you make the rule that cell phones must be turned off in class, consider that I need to be available if my child is running a fever or gets trampled by a herd of elephants while I am listening to your lecture, and that will take precedence over your wisdom. I’ll put it on vibrate, but its got to stay on.

3. Help me to network with others like me. When assigning group projects, devise a way for students with children to work together. If I have to meet with these strangers for periods of time outside of the classroom, I will be much more engaged and able to learn if my colleagues are willing to put Powerpoints together at Chuck E. Cheese’s instead of the library.

4. Consider that I’m financially strapped. I understand we need to have books in order to learn, but please don’t force me to make a choice between giving my daughter a new My Little Pony for her birthday or an expensive supplemental style guide. She is going to win. Every time. I’ll look the style guide up online or borrow it from another student.

5. Reach out to me and find out who I am. I know you have hundreds of students and it’s impossible to connect personally with each and every one of us. Even so, it’s likely that I’ll never tell you I’m a single mom, because I’m afraid you will think I am less committed to my studies. I’m not – most of us are more committed than other students. The women who have gone before me are more likely to have persisted if they had personal connections with their professors, and your recognition of me as a student facing overwhelming obstacles to be in your classroom means I will likely stay around longer –and eventually graduate.

Happy Fall Semester!

Perry Threlfall completed her PhD in Sociology at George Mason University in May 2015. Her research focuses on the institutional and structural forces that influence inequality and mobility in single mother families. You can read her occasional blog at the Single Mother Sociologist found at smsresearch.net.  

Reference:

Duquaine-Watson, Jillian M. 2007. “Pretty Darned Cold”: Single Mother Students and the Community College Climate in Post-Welfare Reform America.” Equity and Excellence in Education, 40: 229–240.

When assigning blame for our nation’s persistent poverty problem, many policymakers tend to focus on underlying demographics or behavior of the poor—factors like racial background or the prevalence of single parent households— instead of the stark economic reality with which poorest Americans have had to contend. But, the fact

is, growing inequality is the primary reason the poverty rate has remained elevated over the last several decades.

It is true that women, people of color, and single mothers do experience disproportionately higher levels of poverty, as shown in the table below, which compares the share of the population in poverty by age, gender, race, and family composition with those groups’ share of the total population.

At first glance, it would seem that family structure and racial identity are significant determinants of changes in poverty, as these groups account for a disproportionately high number of people in poverty. However, over the last three-and-a-half decades, it was not growth in the population of single mothers or of certain racial groups that drove poverty. When these demographic factors are compared with the effect of income inequality on poverty levels since 1979, inequality dwarfs them all.

This is illustrated in the figure below, which examines a set of factors commonly associated with changes in poverty over the past three-and-a-half decades: changes in the U.S. population’s racial composition, education levels, and family structure, as well as overall income growth and income inequality. The figure shows how much (in percentage points) each factor contributed to the change in the poverty rate from 1979 to 2013.

Since 1979, increasing inequality has been the largest poverty-boosting factor, outweighing racial identity and family structure and completely eclipsing the positive effects of overall economic growth and educational attainment in driving down the poverty rate. Despite our growing economy and the fact that poor workers are now more educated than ever, rising inequality has worked to keep low-income people in poverty. This increase in inequality was driven by stagnating wages for low- and middle-income households (for example, 10^th percentile real wages were actually lower in 2013 than they were in 1979).

Our research looks at how this lack of wage growth for low- and middle-income families fuels poverty. We explore what could have happened to poverty if wages had actually grown over the last several decades and if the poor and the middle class had shared more widely in the gains made by a growing economy. We find that adopting policies to promote full employment and significant wage growth could bring down poverty as much as 4.2 percentage points—bringing 11.2 million people out of poverty.

It’s not fair to say the poor aren’t holding up their end of the social contract when almost two-thirds of employable poor people work and over 40 percent work full time, and their incomes have become more dependent upon wages over time. The truth is that the economy the poor are working in –an economy that has grown more unequal over the last several decades because of intentional policy choices—has made it harder and harder for them to get by.

Instead of focusing on the characteristics of the poor when assigning blame for poverty, we should examine the intentional policy choices we have made that led to such an unequal economy. We should promote new policy choices that help reduce inequality and alleviate poverty. Although the safety net has made significant progress in decreasing poverty, it needs to be complemented by a better labor market for low-wage workers. Without hourly wage gains, the tax-and-transfer system needs to work harder simply to keep poverty rates from increasing. Going forward, we should strengthen the safety net and focus on policy solutions that will spur wage growth—such as raising the minimum wage, targeting full employment, strengthening worker’s bargaining power, and updating labor standards—in order to make our economy work for all.

Elise Gould is a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C. Her research areas include wages, poverty, economic mobility, and health care. She is a co-author of The State of Working America, 12th Edition. Twitter: @eliselgould

 Alyssa Davis joined EPI in 2013 as the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Fellow. She assists EPI’s researchers in their ongoing analysis of the labor force, labor standards, and other aspects of the economy. She holds a B.A. in Plan II and Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Twitter: @alyssalynn7

This paper is part of the Council on Contemporary Families Gender Revolution Rebound Symposium. The growing wage premium for long work hours slows progress toward gender equality. If the relative hourly wages for overwork had stayed constant between 1979 and 2007, the gender gap in wages would be about 10% smaller than it is today.

The new data presented by David Cotter and his co-authors suggest that support for gender equality and respect for women’s ability to combine work and family have resumed their upward progress. Other evidence reveals that millennial men express greater interest in more involved fatherhood and want more balance between work and family than previous generations. However, it remains to be seen whether these ideological changes will substantively reduce such structural inequalities as men’s continuing earnings advantage over women and women’s underrepresentation in highly paid occupations. more...

Originally published on RH Reality Check.

As reproductive politics are once again consumed by an attack on Planned Parenthood, it is worth stepping back and

asking why this organization is so particularly reviled by the anti-choice movement. This is a demonization that goes well beyond the shady outfit, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), that organized the latest undercover filming, or its affiliated group, Live Action, infamous for releasing other debunked videos over the last decade. True, Planned Parenthood was reportedly not CMP’s only target, but the videos taken of its physicians have been the only ones to be released. Some Congressional Republicans, we now know, had prior knowledge of these videos, and predictably have issued calls for an investigation of the organization, joined by various Republican presidential aspirants. The videos have also given new ammunition to Republicans’ annual efforts to withhold all funds from Planned Parenthood for Title X services (primarily contraception and cancer screenings), which are subject to a yearly review. In short, the puzzle is why a national health-care organization—in which, as its spokespersons repeatedly point out, abortion only comprises 3 percent of all services delivered—is such a prime target of abortion opponents.

One answer, of course, is size: Even if only 3 percent of its services are abortion, Planned Parenthood still performs a healthy share of all the procedures occurring in the United States. But the answer goes well beyond that. It speaks to an interesting historical split among Republicans over matters of reproduction and sexuality—and the eventual triumph of the most socially conservative wing among the party base.

Before it became seemingly mandatory for Republican political figures to condemn Planned Parenthood, many were enthusiastic supporters. In a step that would be unheard of today, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former Republican president, agreed in 1965 to to co-chair an honorary Planned Parenthood board along with Harry Truman, a former Democratic president. The conservative icon Barry Goldwater and his wife, Peggy, were stalwart supporters of the Planned Parenthood chapter in Arizona. Sen. Prescott Bush was a strong advocate of the organization and of contraceptive services in general, as was his son, George H.W. Bush, during his time as a Texas congressman, though the latter had to renounce his support in order to become acceptable as a vice-presidential candidate for Ronald Reagan in 1980 (who himself had some years earlier signed a bill liberalizing abortion in California). Mitt Romney, who famously said in the 2012 presidential campaign that he would “get rid” of Planned Parenthood, had attended a fundraiser for the organization with his wife some years earlier, where she had made a donation. And of course it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who in 1970 signed into law the aforementioned Title X, the nation’s only legislation specifically for family planning services. Planned Parenthood became a significant grantee of this new program.

To be sure, this mainstream conservative support for Planned Parenthood’s widespread ability to provide contraceptives was not always rooted in the best of motives. The field of family planning has always contained contradictory impulses of population control as well as women’s liberation, and some of the early supporters of Planned Parenthood were involved with the eugenics movement that was prominent in the first part of the 20th century. Later, the disproportionate location of Title X clinics (some associated with Planned Parenthood) in Black areas shortly after the bill was passed, along with the history of racism and classism in many arenas of medical care, created a lingering distrust of the organization in some sectors of that community, on which the anti-abortion movement has long tried to capitalize. Prominent Black leaders, however, including Martin Luther King Jr. (who accepted Planned Parenthood’s first Margaret Sanger Award in 1966) supported the organization and were, as King put it, “sympathetic” with its “total work.”

The real hardcore animosity toward the organization that lasts to this day, though, has its roots in the emergence of the religious right as a force in Republican politics in the 1970s. As a fundraising appeal of an anti-abortion group put it in 1980, “Planned Parenthood promotes sexual perversion, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, family destruction, population control.” As the quote makes clear, far more than Planned Parenthood’s connection with abortion caused such wrath. The organization’s provision of contraception and its commitment to offering confidential services to teenagers, both made possible through its Title X funding, have been particularly enraging to sexual conservatives. Though abortion may have served as the “battering ram,” as Rosalind Petchesky aptly put it, to mobilize the religious right, in fact, conservative groups oppose all sexuality that does not take place within heterosexual marriage in order to procreate.

Because of its size and history as a recipient of public funding, Planned Parenthood, of course, serves as a useful symbol of an enabler of out-of-control sexual behavior. Contraception’s brief moment of acting as “common ground” between abortion supporters and opponents shortly after the Roe decision in 1973 broke down as the religious right gained strength throughout the 1970s and beyond; the religious right increasingly began to frame contraception as “supportive of the abortion mentality” rather than as something that prevented abortion.

It is too soon to tell what the political fallout will be from this latest attack on Planned Parenthood. Right now, there are two competing narratives about this incident. There is that of CMP and its political allies, which attempts to convince the public that Planned Parenthood is “selling” fetal tissue, in spite of clear evidence, even on the edited tapes, that this is not the case; and that of Planned Parenthood, which is that the undercover operatives used unethical and illegal means to promote lies about the organization’s practices. (A third narrative that this case could have evoked is disappointingly missing thus far—scientists testifying to the importance of research using fetal tissue and the social good that donation by abortion patients represents). Anti-abortionists’ efforts to use Planned Parenthood as a wedge issue in the 2012 election cycle were a dismal failure; analysts acknowledge that the organization’s support of Obama, symbolized by the high visibility of Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s telegenic president, at campaign events, was a plus. Thus far, polling data have not shown any appreciable drop in support for Planned Parenthood as a result of the videos, and most Americans continue to support the organization, which at least one in five U.S. women will visit at some point.

How U.S. residents will ultimately come to view this controversy—that is, which of the two competing narratives mentioned above will prevail—might be an interesting test case of whether the realities of people’s sexual and reproductive lives in the 21st century are making the religious right an increasingly irrelevant force, in spite of its current hold on Republican politicians.

Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, professor emerita of sociology at U.C. Davis, and the author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients and the Rest of Us, and co-editor, with Jennifer Reich, of Reproduction and Society: Interdisciplinary Readings.

Signs of economic recovery are beginning to show. After climbing for several years, the child poverty rate dropped between 2012 and 2013 for the first time since the start of the recession, according to the annual Kids Count Report released last week by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The report also reveals that children have yet to recoup the losses suffered during the recession. Nationally, 22 percent of children lived in families with incomes below the poverty line in 2013, up from 18 percent in 2008. Furthermore, despite recent gains, the child poverty rate among black children (39 percent) was more than double the rate for white children (14 percent) in 2013.

Similar findings are highlighted in a recent report by Eileen Patten and Jens Manuel Krogstad at Pew Research Center. The researchers analyzed Census Bureau data to contextualize child poverty by race and ethnicity and found that overall child poverty dropped 2 points (from 22 percent to 20 percent) between 2010 and 2013, while remaining flat for black children. In fact, “black children were almost four times as likely as white or Asian children to be living in poverty…, and significantly more likely than Hispanic children.” The raw numbers are even more daunting; it appears that for the first time since the Census Bureau began collecting poverty data in 1974, the number of impoverished black children may be surpassing the that of their white counterparts “despite the fact that there are more than three times as many white children as black children living in the U.S. today.” This trend fuels ongoing concerns regarding the impact of the financial crisis on the racial wealth gap for the next generation, as outlined in a June report from the Social Science Research Council.

Purple Policies: The effect of economic inequality on children was the focus of a panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute on June 22nd in Washington, D.C., which began with Robert Putnam, who reviewed the ways in which his newest book demonstrates how growing inequality has created an environment in which the “summer camp gap” is setting the stage for greater inequality in future generations. Curiously, he did not acknowledge the long tradition of sociological research that has consistently documented the relationship between parental resources and the life chances of children (i.e. Annette Lareau, Sarah McLanahan, etc.), and yet he argued that the establishment of compulsory, free, secondary education was “the best public policy decision America ever made…because it turned out, the economic historians show, that most of American growth of the 20th century came from the decision that everybody should pay for everybody’s kids to go to secondary school.” This is why, he suggested, policies that promote early childhood education are a no brainer. He remarked, “I think there have been periods in American history when we have been very individualistic, and now is probably the most dramatic instance of that – but there have been periods in America when we’ve been very egalitarian and also very communitarian.” These communitarian periods, his data suggest, preceded “gilded ages” of prosperity, growth, and opportunity. This trend incriminates practices that prohibit access to extracurricular activities as harmful to American progress, such as “pay to play” – which requires fees for sports and extracurricular activities in public schools. As a result, he advocates for what he calls “purple policies” that level the playing field for all kids, merging the interests of “Red” and “Blue” America.

Dr. Putnam’s co-panelist, sociologist William Julius Wilson, responded by arguing that economic inequality is most closely associated with income segregation in communities, and intra-racial inequality poses the greatest threat to the goal of equality of life chances for all children. His most pressing critique of Dr. Putnam’s work, therefore, is that his “purple” initiatives do not devote sufficient attention to the issue of persistent racial disparity.

Proposed solutions blocked by Congress: One such “purple policy,” that may have a deeper impact on reducing the poverty of children of color than free access to playing football, is currently under consideration. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM AT-14-13), from the Office of Child Support Enforcement, would decrease the accumulation of arrearages and interest for incarcerated non-custodial parents, provide job training and employment services to non-custodial parents, and incorporate visitation language into child support orders. Melissa Boteach and Rebecca Vallas at the Center for American Progress recently highlighted the benefits of the proposal by pointing out that “one in eight South Carolina inmates are behind bars due to nonpayment of child support” and only 21 states count incarceration as voluntary unemployment, causing non-custodial parents to accumulate arrearages and interest that make it impossible to get current upon release. Michelle Alexander has suggested such practices perpetuate the debtors prison cycle (The New Jim Crow:154), in which arrears are accumulated under the auspices of the state with the authority to garnish up to 65 percent of the meager wages the ex-offender will earn when released. This, she argues, is evidence of a racial project that engenders recidivism and perpetuates poverty in black families.

Regardless of its merits, the proposal is being blocked by the introduction of legislation (H.R. 2688) that would prohibit congressional intervention in state welfare and child support enforcement policies due to fears that it “could potentially let delinquent parents off the hook when we should be focused on structuring these important programs to promote strong families” (Boustany R-LA). However, research continually demonstrates that increasing employment and active involvement with one’s children is the best way to hold non-custodial parents accountable and promote strong families through financial support and parental attachment. This is just one example of a “purple policy” that could move the needle toward the communitarian periods that Dr. Putnam longs for, and ensure that economic recovery is granted to all of our nation’s most vulnerable citizens equally.

Learn about the proposed changes to child support enforcement policy here.

Track legislation to block these proposed changes here.

Perry Threlfall completed her PhD in Sociology at George Mason University in May 2015. Her research focuses on the institutional and structural forces that influence inequality and mobility in single mother families. You can read her occasional blog at the Single Mother Sociologist found at smsresearch.net.  

In the 1989 cult classic movie When Harry Met Sally, Harry says that in friendships between men and women, “the sex part always gets in the way.” This was precisely my concern when I began writing about friendships between men and women in the early American republic. How could I convince modern readers steeped in the When Harry Met Sally claim that friendships between men and women were impossible that the opposite was true, even 200 years ago?

In my book, Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic, I argue that heterosocial friendships were not just possible, but important and meaningful relationships that challenge the ideology that marriage was the supreme place for adult fulfillment. Initially, I had hoped to skirt the issue of sexuality, but that was impossible. Sex did get in the way of these friendships, though not in the way you might think. The problem was more often with public misunderstandings about whether men and women were friends or lovers. It was a constant battle to shape perceptions. At another level, sex—or at least physical intimacy or simply flirtation—was a constant specter in these friendships.

I define heterosocial friendships as “affectionate, reciprocal relationships that the historical actors themselves cast in terms of a friendship” between unrelated men and women, with the stipulation that “sexual activity does not factor into this definition of friendship.” Historians simply cannot know what happened in a private room in the past. We do know from letters and diaries, however, that friends could express their affection in what sounds to modern ears like sensual or romantic terms and share physical intimacy.

One of the key resources for untangling the role of sexuality in these friendships was a 1989 article by sociologist Donald O’Meara titled “Cross-Sex Friendship: Four Basic Challenges of an Ignored Relationship.” I was stunned by how closely his observations of relationships of the 1980s applied to the friendships from the past that I examined. Friends had to navigate their shared understanding of the status of their relationship—was this a courtship, an affair, a friendship?—as well as the public perception. While the stakes for misunderstanding were higher 200 years ago, when gossip about a woman’s sexuality could destroy her reputation and marriage prospects, similar concerns have been remarkably persistent.

Some of my historical examples of the role of physical and sexual intimacy in heterosocial friendships sound familiar to modern readers. In 1834, Elizabeth Peabody recorded a conversation with her friend Horace Mann about “the difference between love and friendship” and where their relationship stood. Then there were teenage girls like Patty Rogers in 1785 who struggled to understand their feelings for men in their lives. Patty was determined when it came to one male friend: “I only feel a friendship for him! I’ll steel my heart to every sentiment of Love!” As O’Meara points out, there are different types of love which can be hard to distinguish and identify, and it can be hard for friends to come to a shared understanding. This continued to be the case for Patty, who protested when the same man put his hand on her breast one night. She told him it was inappropriate, but he protested “No, not between two friends!”

A major source of difficulty for historical figures and contemporary historians is the lack of clear norms for the conduct of heterosocial friendships. O’Meara argues that such friendships have “a deviant status in American culture” and “the norms for cross-sex friendship remain unclear.” The situation was little different in early America, despite the ubiquity of conduct books prescribing behavior. The primary difference is that the language early Americans used sounds romantic to us today but was understood quite differently in the past.

All of this meant that readers brought their own assumptions, beliefs, and ideologies to my book. One reviewer on Goodreads argued that the book was not actually about friendships, because “the vast majority of these friendships seem to wind up with somebody’s hands up somebody else’s petticoats.” At the opposite end of the spectrum, writer Thomas Fleming published a piece on History News Network positing that the book could be “the answer to our hookup culture” because the book showed that heterosocial friendships were possible, entirely absent of sex.

This major divide in reception of the book has been largely a divide between lay readers and scholars. Scholars, now steeped in a literature of sexuality that has usefully complicated notions of what relationships were possible in the past, readily accepted that heterosocial friendships were possible. Outside of academia, there seems to be a narrower lens for reading these relationships. Understanding that men and women could be friends hundreds of years ago, long before women’s liberation and acceptance of premarital sex, is important for Americans today. Along with the changed attitudes towards and legal climate for same-sex romantic relationships, we have greater possibilities for cross-sex friendships: The possibilities for varied types of love, sexuality, and fulfillment are broader than most people imagine.

Cassandra Good is a historian, writer, and teacher of early America. She received her PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania and is Associate Editor of the Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington.

LINKS:

Founding Friendships: http://www.amazon.com/Founding-Friendships-between-American-Republic/dp/0199376174

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23027663-founding-friendships

O’Meara article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00289102

HNN article: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159632

Despite substantial increases in married mothers’ employment and the expressed desire of the majority of women and men to share employment and caregiving responsibilities, gender remains the most influential determinant of who does the housework and child care today. Many observers have attributed the seeming unwillingness of men to increase their time in housework and child care as the linchpin of gender inequality, a manifestation of men’s patriarchal power to prioritize activities that provide economic rewards, such as paid work, or enjoyment, such as leisure (Goode 1992; Jackman 1994).

One strain of feminist and academic scholarship holds that men feel no need to do more child care or housework because they reap the benefits of marriage and fatherhood (e.g. marriage and fatherhood wage premiums, living in a clean, well-run household, and children’s performance of filial duties) without having to spend time producing them — cooking, cleaning, or taking on the everyday, physical care of children. Rather, they can expect wives and mothers to shoulder the burden of feeding and caring for children and families, regardless of women’s other time demands. Such an analysis builds on the work of Jessie Bernard, an influential feminist sociologist, who argued that marriage is a gendered institution that privileges men and disadvantages women.

One key assumption of this argument has been that men do not want to become involved with children except when they can have fun with them. But this argument does not hold up when we analyze both the quantitative time diary data on mothers’ and fathers’ child care time and the qualitative literature on what fathers want. Instead, careful examination reveals a more complex story about the interplay between gender, marriage, parenthood, and class-differentiated patterns of childrearing that are more about ensuring upward mobility among children than about gender oppression. more...