Hiya from the Council on Contemporary Families conference in my hometown Chicago.  It’s 70 degrees and sunny, and only a gathering like this one could keep me inside.

This morning Virginia Rutter, Stephanie Coontz, and I offered a media workshop, where I heard some of the best ever rationale for why “popping it up” (meaning, learning to write/communicate your complex and researched ideas for a broader audience) is not “dumbing it down”:

Barbara Risman: “If your idea is truly smart, it can be conveyed without jargon.  It’s laziness to think otherwise.”

Josh Coleman: “Reducing a complex idea to a soundbyte is a form of wisdom in itself.”

Stephanie Coontz: “It’s not a compromise to your intellectual integrity.  If you can’t reduce your complex idea to one or two sentences, it may be because there’s a hole in your argument.  It’s not merely a matter of laziness but intellectual self-deception.”

Virginia Rutter: “If you can’t boil it down, maybe media isn’t the medium for you.  Maybe it’s meant for a smaller discussion.”

!!!

I’m heading to Chicago today for the Council on Contemporary Families conference today and guess who wants to come with me.  Tula, you’re staying home with your human father.  Awesome program posted here.  See some of ya’ll there!

Lisa Belkin, ever on top of the nuances and foibles of dating, mating and family making in our time, points in a recent Sunday New York Times magazine section to a new study that is sure to make (at least some) men squirm and women, as she puts it, “chortle” with delight, although the news is, for anyone who thinks about having kids, actually sobering.

Women often bear excruciating pressures around choosing when to have a child, from all angles, while men are told their biology is limitless, hence their chance at fatherhood is as well.  Not so anymore.  Throughout the past few years more and more evidence is coming to light linking a father’s age at conception to schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder, as she points out (while the mother’s age at conception shows no such correlation).  Two years ago the New York Times also ran a piece entitled “It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too.” Now, Belkin highlights an Australian study that shows that children born to “older fathers have, on average, lower scores on tests of intelligence than those born to younger dads.”

There are those who will take issue with the research, claim there’s no adjustment for environment, individual father’s IQ, parental involvement and more.  But here are the two lines that made me want to sit up and shout “so there!”: “French researchers reported last year that the chance of a couple conceiving begins to fall when the man is older than 35 and falls sharply if he is older than 40.”  Later in the article Belkin quotes Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center who says, it turns out the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father.  Ha! I wanted to shout at the screen as I was reading.

Really, what I wanted was to do was shout this to all the 50something men who, when I was 35 and entering into the online dating world, contacted me, ignoring their agemates, specifically because they felt they were “finally ready” to get around to starting a family.  Most were utterly unapologetic that part of what they were seeking was a woman they perceived to be still fertile enough to incubate their suddenly desired offspring.  My response that being contacted in part so I could incubate a legacy child for them was insulting often fell on deaf ears.

But what Belkin gets to at the end of her article — and what I think bears far more exploration — is how scientific evidence that men too have a ticking biological clock could undermine what is a commonly socially accepted timeline  women, shelf life and expiration date with fertility is fixed, men, well, they can always Tony Randall it, and procreate as he did in his 77th year.  (Nevermind that in this New York Times article, “He’s Not My Grandpa. He’s My Dad,” Randall’s widow, left with two children under age 10, questions if her own long-range planning was all that wise and admits she’d tell her daughter not to marry an “older man.”

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A dear friend and colleague of mine–and fellow blogger!–Shari Cohen is leading a fabulous workshop here in NYC for anyone currently looking to jumpstart their career.  Looking to make a move from an unsatisfying position to something more meaningful?  Or between jobs and searching for what’s next?  Then you seriously might want to check this out.

Shari’s Career Action Group is a 4-week career transition workshop starting on May 5. She’s doing it in partnership with Next Step Partners, a firm that is launching similar groups across the country, including in Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area.  Why is this workshop different from all other career workshops?  Shari has an intense background in leadership development work, and she’s awesome at helping people figure out ways to contribute their talent and creativity in new directions.  I should know.  I’ve worked with her myself.

Here’s the formal bio:

Shari Cohen, Ph.D., a senior consultant with Next Step Partners, focuses on leadership development.  She has been working for over ten years to help leaders in international development, health, philanthropy, advocacy, market research, technology and publishing, to access their potential, build their confidence and expand their creativity.  She has consulted for the World Bank, Carnegie Corporation, Bain, Demos and Doctors without Borders.  Previous experience includes senior management positions at two non-profits where she built leadership programs.  She also served as a professor of international relations at Wellesley College.  Shari holds a Ph.D. in political sociology from University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from Cornell University.  She has a certificate in organizational and executive coaching from NYU.

For more info about the Career Action Group, go here.  But whether you’re career-shifting or not, definitely check out Shari’s blog, Unstuck Future, where she’s been writing lately about thinking about your career from the inside out, and her own career transition, as well.  Like me, and like many GWP readers I know, Shari is a postacademic, so her insights really resonate, if you know what I mean.

SO EXCITED bout this: Girls Write Now will be featured some time this week on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams reported by national correspondent Amy Robach.  Tune in or set your DVRs to see some familiar faces! And please spread the word!

NBC Nightly News airs daily at 6:30 PM Eastern/Pacific, 5:30 PM Central. Check out your state’s local listings.

For a great summary of last week’s panel, Women’s Economic Equality: The Next Frontier in Women’s Rights, hosted by Legal Momentum (and starring Heather Boushey, Linda Hirshman, Mimi Abramowitz, and Irasema Garza), check out Kyla Bender-Baird over at The REAL Deal.

I’ve been rather quiet around here these past few and am soon to jump back on the horse (or in the saddle, or however that phrase goes). Just wanted to throw out a quick one, courtesy of the CCF listserv, from today’s WSJ:

Money Matters Can Make or Break Marriages by Jeff D. Opdyke

Even in the best of times, couples regularly argue about finances. But at this juncture, when so many Americans are feeling stung and frustrated by a weak economy, a housing-price collapse, and a stock-market crash, it’s particularly critical that newlyweds — and even long-time spouses — are on the same page when it comes to money.

Sigh.  Note to world: though Marco’s job situation is still precarious, we are going strong, in our 9th month of marriage.  I chalk it up to open communication, giving each other lots of space in which to unfold, and of course our kitten, Tula, who keeps it real.

Image cred

Over at TalkingPointsMemo, the TPMCafe Book Club features a fabulous book discussion about Jessica Valenti’s The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women. I was thrilled to see the dialogue–and the book–at TPM. Jessica at TPM satisfies my political news junkie and my feminist blog junkie all at once. Posts from diverse thinkers advance the dialogue: Women as Goalies…Sending a Message, Doing it Better…Bristol Palin and Two Kinds of Virginity…America’s obsession with Women’s Sexuality: Prescription for Change?

But Jessica’s latest commentary, Wanna Know Where the Purity Myth Is: Start with TPM Readers, should not be missed: She does a pithy close reading of comments that were left on the page: Here’s an example of a comment and Jessica’s analysis.

“Shooter242, for example, believes that the virgin ideal is in place because of ‘the simple idea that guys want to marry women they can trust’ and that a virgin has ‘the discipline and foresight to retain something she considers valuable.’ Shooter actually proves my point – why is it that a woman who has sex is someone not to be trusted? Or that in this day and age, someone can still talk about ‘retaining’ virginity and chastity as ‘valuable’ as if it was a commodity.”

For pure pleasure, read the whole thing.

–Virginia Rutter

One of my most vivid memories of first grade is when Mrs. Gerry wouldn’t let me have a counting strip. It had lily pads on it and a frog at zero. When I got up to get in line to get my counting strip, Mrs. Gerry told me to turn around and sit down. “You don’t need one.” I was embarrassed to have my math skills announced like that to the class. But she was right, I didn’t need it. That was the start of my math nrrd status.

Last week I had my daughter at my office because of report card pick up. Yes, in Chicago, that means the kids have the day off so teachers can focus on parent conferences. She loves being at my office because I have a white board and I let her draw all over it. Normally she draws pictures, but this time she was doodling math problems. I turned around and saw that she was trying to add 15 to 20 and had figured it out. How did my kindergarten daughter figure this out? Well, she drew counters. First 15 then 20 more and counted them up. I also noticed that she wrote the problem out vertically, so I thought it was a good time to teach her how to add double digits. I drew boxes around the right column and told her to add those numbers, then did the same with the left column. I knew it would work because there was no carrying involved.

She looked at me like I was a genius. Then she asked me to write some more problems for her to do on the white board. Yes, I was proud.

The first thing I did when I got to the WAM! Conference at MIT on March 27th was to buy her a MIT sweatshirt. I buy her shirts from almost every campus I visit. Even though I work at a university, I want her to know that college is part of the plan and that there are so many more options than just the one mommy works at. While I was flooded with college brochures in high school, I had no idea how to navigate them. I threw the MIT one in the garbage because I didn’t think it was worth it to apply just to be denied. I want to keep that mentality from rooting itself in my daughter’s head. One of her favorite sleeping shirts is from Spellman.

So while I am a math nrrd and it is obvious that my daughter has some great math skills, I know that parents and teachers are key to making a skill into a passion. The next day when I was busy working when she asked me to write some math problems for her. “Some big ones!” So I did. And I did again when she was done and wanted more.

Girls have caught up with boys in math test scores and I give us parents a lot of credit for it. We stopped listening to naysayers who said math is a boy thing. We listened to feminists who said, hell no! We encouraged our daughters to explore the numbers dancing in their heads. It’s easy to be jaded and think that kids don’t listen to us, even as early as kindergarten. But we need to remember that we can still wow them with simple math magic. You never know where that might lead them.

Now to figure out how to teach her about carrying numbers in a way that keeps me looking like a genius.

I’ll be offline for the next few days, observing Passover and eating lots of matzah. I have no idea who “Matzah Woman” is (not in the Hagaddah, last I checked), but I just had to post this. Image cred here.

May all beings, everywhere, be free!