go to this link or cut and paste it into your browser.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bslZ4jvZcXw
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Blessed are the Poor, For They Shall Wait
It is 7 degrees Fahrenheit this morning in rural Minnesota, Isanti county to be exact, colder, about -22 F if you factor in the windchill. Most of the people waiting outside look like they are dressed for a day of Minnesota ice fishing in padded snow pants, boots, fur hats and leather gloves. There are several balaclava, and a few ushanka, the Russian Soviet soldiers' winter army fur hats, making this look like a Siberian Soviet dispatchment. I even see some raccoon and fox tail lumberjack hats. The man in front of me points to one and informs me that the orange suit guy made his own hat, complete with fox ears standing up on top. A few have kids with them, dressed identically. Each holds two large produce boxes or laundry baskets for their haul today. I am totally unprepared to stand out here. I ask the man ahead of me in line how long do you typically wait to go in. He tells me it is usually about half an hour. I go into meditation mode: think about tropical islands, hear the waves, feel the sand between my toes and the sun on my face. It works for the next 5 minutes.
I turn to see the line behind me has grown another several dozen people. At least 50 are ahead of me in line, exactly 53, but who is counting, and cars are still coming, circling the totally inadequate church parking lot. I try again to transport myself to Bali without much success.
I see many of the people smoking and wonder to myself if that warms them. I am tempted. Finally the doors open and as if this were Macy’s on Black Friday, the line attacks the vestibule. The
The first two people are admitted to the check-in table housed inside another space. Christian rock music roars from the room. Coffee machines and platters of cookies stand ready along one wall. Little tables and chairs are spread out in this second space. After one registers you are given a poker chip with your number on it and told to wait until you are called to go to door number three.
Each of us funnels in, stopping at the registration table and pay our $20. Some food pantries are free and some ask for donations to be able to supplement their costs. There are three tables with children’s books we are invited to choose from; one book for each child or grandchild in your household. And now we wait once more.
I pull out my knitting. I am getting to be a pro at this. I have finished four major needlework projects in the past year made just during the waits like this one. I am on to a sweater this time, the wool collected from various local thrift stores. It is amazing what one can find in thrift stores and Goodwill. I call the yarn “rescued” like shelter dogs and cats. If I hadn’t found them, they would be consigned to a back shelf in a thrift store for the rest of their dusty, unlucky lives until they are similarly euthanized.
Today I am number 54. Five numbers are called at a time. There seems to be about a ten-minute gap between the calls on the megaphone. It really is a megaphone. I look around to find the caller. It is an older 70-ish man with a white pony tail in military fatigues. He announces that incoming people are entering on the right, near the free coffee and when he calls the numbers, we must exit through the left door. These instructions are repeated every time he calls the next numbers out.
The piped-in music stops and a woman gets on the P.A. system, inviting people to take books home and then announces a prayer. The
I knit as I watch people coming and going. There are still people packing the vestibule, waiting to register and cars are still circling the parking lot. I ask one of the women at my table what number are they up to. She tells me 35. I can’t hear well when I am in a totally silent room even with my hearing aids. This place renders me completely deaf.
The food is all part of a larger network of grocery seconds and soon-to-be-expired goods from major food chains and warehouses throughout the state. The
Van Hengel began to actively solicit this unwanted food from grocery stores, local gardens, and nearby produce farms. His effort led to the creation of St. Mary's Food Bank Alliance in Phoenix, the nation's first food bank.
In 1975, St. Mary's was given a federal grant to assist in developing food banks across the nation. This effort was formally incorporated into a separate non-profit organization in 1976.
In 2001, America's Second Harvest merged with Foodchain, which was the nation's largest food-rescue organization at that time.
In 2005, Feeding America began using an internal market with an artificial currency called "shares" to more rationally allocate food. Currency is allocated based on the need, and then individual banks bid on which foods they want the most, based on local knowledge and ability to transport and store the food offered. Negative prices are possible, so banks could earn shares by picking up undesirable food. The previous centrally planned system had penalized banks for refusing any food offered, even if it was the wrong type to meet their needs, and this resulted in mis-allocations ("sending potatoes to Idaho"), food rotted away in places that didn't need it, and the wrong types of food being delivered (e.g. not matching hot dogs with hot dog buns).
In May 2007, it was featured on American Idol, and named as a charity in the Idol Gives Back charity program. September 2008, the organization name was changed to Feeding America.
In August 2009, Columbia Records announced that all U.S. royalties from Bob Dylan's album Christmas in the Heart would be donated to Feeding America, in perpetuity.
There has been a rise in the numbers suffering from hunger since the financial crisis of 2007–2008. In 2013, the USDA reported that about 49 million U.S. Americans were now facing the condition, about one in six of the population. In September, they launched Hunger Action Month, with events planned all over the nation, to raise awareness and get more U.S. Americans involved in helping out.
In 2015, Feeding America saved more than 2 billion pounds (907 metric tons) of food that would have been thrown away otherwise, but could instead be distributed to hungry families.
Feeding America works to educate the general public and keep them informed about hunger in America. The national office produces educational and research papers that spotlight aspects of hunger and provides information on hunger, poverty and the programs that serve vulnerable Americans. Feeding America's public policy staff works with legislators, conducting research, testifying at hearings and advocating for changes in public attitudes and laws that support Feeding America's network and those the organization serves.
In 2017, Feeding America announced a plan to increase the nutritional value of food from food banks. By 2023, the group plans to offer more fruits and vegetables, and provide training so they can distribute more produce, whole grains and lean proteins. (End of article.)
I look around the room. The thing is I don’t feel poor. I live in a tiny apartment with my husband. It is enough for us. I don’t need and have never owned a house. We eat three times a day. Sure I make plenty of soups when I have extra vegetables or leftovers, and I never buy processed foods like pizza or frozen dinners. To round out the food shelves’ offerings, I try to buy in bulk at chains like Costco. I portion the food when I get home, freezing what I will use later in the month. Aldi’s is my next go-to store. Their costs still hover around 40% less than Cub or Rainbow. I receive Social Security retirement benefits and we are both still working, though we are over 65. $12 an hour isn’t stellar, but we are definitely not malnourished. We fall under the poverty line for income but we make just slightly over the cutoff to be eligible for food stamps or the SNAP supplemental food program in Minnesota. We actually chose to keep our income limited after the Vietnam war, our way of protesting the money going toward the military, staunch pacifists that we are, still.
We have a car and heat and clean water. Much of the world does not. The homeless in Minnesota have far less. When we are given food, especially cakes, donuts, cookies and things I shouldn’t eat since I have reactive hypoglycemia, a form of diabetes, I store these groceries until I visit friends that still have kids at home and must be worse off than we are. Canned soup has more sodium than is allowed for my husband’s low salt diet. I have an empty nest now, but when we had 5 children at home and lived in Wisconsin, and my husband was laid off, I applied and received food stamps. I schemed my utmost to make them last for a month and just couldn't stretch them past the three-week mark. I finally called a social worker and asked for any suggestions. She read to me from a guidelines pamphlet: “A typical lunch for a teenage boy should be 1 cup of cooked macaroni and cheese and ½ an apple.” I was incredulous. Really? You've gotta be kidding me! But that’s what it suggested. What did people with less wherewithal than I do?
Finally my number is called after knitting for an hour. I am whisked through the proper left door and find myself now paired with a spry little senior citizen pushing a small flatbed cart. He grabs my 2 boxes and sprints behind the flatbed to the first station. He grabs a 10-pound bag of frozen diced potatoes and hurls it into the box, frisbee-style. I have to jog to keep up with him. He tells me I can refuse any items I don’t want but they would prefer we take it all and give it to friends. The only item I refuse is a 12-pack of canned Coca Cola. We run to accept frozen hamburger packages, sausages, chicken, cookies, pizzas, boxed cereals, cookies, breads, hamburger helper, turkey stuffing, more cookies, oatmeal, and flour, and we finally come to the end. Both of my boxes are overflowing. I am silently calculating whether, when I give away the non-nutrient-filled groceries, is the rest still worth my $20? I decide it is. I will be back next month…dressed more appropriately.
My boxes are tossed onto the sidewalk outside the church, the dolly is whisked back inside and I am given a plastic-coated number in exchange for my poker chip, while being instructed to go get my car. When I drive up, I put the car in park and pop the trunk. I see beefy volunteers tossing the boxes in people’s trunks and adding cases of gourmet ice cream on top of the boxes. The trunk is slammed shut and I am waved on through before I have a chance to say thank you.
Whew, what a trip!
The following Friday rolls around. It is Manna Market day! Not a relative of Ruby, but still part of Second Harvest. It all started rolling when The Gray Panthers as they were once called, the senior citizens who braved the heat and cold, rain and snow and lobbied until they succeeded and put at least a little kink into the works and managed to recycle some of the tons of food being destroyed around the country and put it back on the tables of people who could use it. Back in the 1970s and 80s the big food chains reasoned that if they gave any of it away, people who ate outdated food and got sick could sue them, but their bigger concern was that people would stop buying at their stores having gotten free handouts. We now know both are not true.
When our husbands were in college, friends of ours who had grown up in India with their missionary parents introduced up to dumpster diving. You go out behind the biggest groceries and check out their dumpsters. Everything that didn’t fit on the already over-stocked shelves got chucked out. All the produce that didn’t win the beauty contests that day got tossed. Cheese and yogurt that would reach their expiration dates in the coming days had to go. We found whole trays of kiwis still in their green tissue paper wrappers. There was cheese from Holland, gourmet yogurts, heads of broccoli and cauliflower still sprinkled with ice chips from the displays. We’d work the stores in St. Paul and our friends would hit the Minneapolis ones. At the end of the day we’d compare our loot and trade over a potluck supper, our babies rolling around on the floor: If they got tons of cauliflower and we had plantains, we’d swap. We got so good at it we figured out what times of the day the produce guys had their dates with the dumpsters and we’d intercept them. One place just rolled the carts out the back door and didn’t even bother to dump it into the bins, knowing we’d take it off their hands. A year after that a new trend emerged: grocery stores started spraying the dumpsters with pesticides to deter the homeless and people like us from accessing them. Cub Foods brought in a crusher shortly after that where all the food got smashed beyond recognition before it was pitched. I wrote a letter to National Public Radio protesting this new state of affairs and it actually got read by Ian North on All Things Considered. I don’t know if anyone up the food chain noticed.
So it is again Friday night. Manna Market has developed into a seamless machine. I am duly impressed. The doors of the gymnasium at the local school open promptly at 5 p.m. Not more that 5 people are waiting outside, though the line inside quickly fills out after that. We shuffle past theregistration table signing ourselves in on our cards. Each person is given a raffle-type ticket. A woman at the end of the table rips the tickets in half, giving back the number and dropping its twin into an oversize pretzel jar. We continue to shuffle—there are lots of old people ahead of us—making their way to the coffee machines. There is no fee here and again the snacks are free, only Manna Market encourages healthy eating. They have the standard donuts and cookies but there are also platters of veggies and dip and apples and other fruit. We shuffle on to a table where we park our coffee and snacks and settle in for the wait.
I think back to another food shelf I found years ago. They distributed food by weight: so many pounds per person in the family. It sounded fair. I would fill my box and wait my turn by the scales. If I was even one ounce over our limit, I would have to return one potato or a carrot or an apple until the needle on the scale registered the correct amount--exactly.
But back to Manna Market. I take out my knitting, hang my coat on the back of my chair and sit at one of the long tables to sip my coffee. All the tables will be filled by 6 p.m. when registration ends and the ticket stubs are brought up to the podium. First there are announcements. “Tonight is a raffle for a child’s bike that was donated.” Just what the ancient couple at my table needs. Then we are reminded that on our way back to our cars we are banned from using our cell phones. “The parking lot is not lit and there have been a few close calls where cars didn’t see people in the parking lot. Unattended children are not allowed to run around the school halls. Every 7th number can pick up a bag of Halloween candy from the table by the podium to take home.” Halloween was 6 months ago. She continues, “If you are still drinking your coffee, you cannot get in line when your number is called. You must dump it out in the bucket placed on the folding chair in front of the podium. A trash can is provided for your Styrofoam cup. Please make your choices quickly tonight to keep the line moving.”
Then one of the senior pastors from the local Lutheran church takes the mic and asks for quiet, which lasts about 45 seconds at the most. He gives a proper homily on gratitude that goes on for 10 minutes. Then he sings a bible song. No one chimes in, so it is essentially a solo performance, all 5 verses. Last week it was “Rock of Ages.” He ends with a prayer and reminds everyone there are blue sheets on the tables to write any prayer requests that will be brought to the staff at their next meeting.
Then the numbers are called. They are also posted on an overhead projector for us hard of hearing folks. The numbers are picked out of the pretzel jar and called one at a time slowly, like at a bingo game. There is a group of people with name tags behind the caller who meet each number and carry a box for you. It would definitely put a snag in the works should an old person drop a box full of groceries and need to be rescued. The caller continues to call numbers and people pack up their belongings and head for the other half of the gym. They are met by one of the box holders who write the name and number on the box. Half way through the maze is another group of box people who are ready to issue you another box with your name and number should your box be full already. Today half of the box people are girls wearing fake diamond-studded tiaras. One lady at my table informs me that it is some junior high girls’ club from the Lutheran school doing their community service hours.
Unlike Ruby’s Pantry, the numbers are not assigned as you register, but are picked randomly once everyone has registered. There are at least 30 tables and about 8 people at a table I figure. About 240 people or more. Some days my number has been called after waiting only 10 minutes at the tables. Other nights I wait over an hour and there are still others who must wait even longer. It is already after 7 p.m. this night. I came at 5. I knit on.
There are definite cliques here. I start to notice clutches of friends at different tables each week, some holding places with their coats or boxes for others still coming. I am part of a clique, too. After several weeks I find myself surrounded by a deaf couple and a Native American woman. I have enjoyed the couple immensely, jumping at any chance to practice my sign language. A few years ago I learned that senior citizens could go to college for free in Minnesota and I promptly signed up for American Sign Language, ASL. After 2 semesters, I am feeling like I can get most conversations. The Native American lady came over each week to see the progress I was making on the needle point project I was working on at the time and finally just joins my table each week. She whips out her phone and soon we were comparing craft projects, grandchildren and similar hobbies.
The only unwelcome guest at our table is Hugo. The first time I came to Manna Market he sat next to me and came out with totally inappropriate sexual harassment jabs. I was completely unprepared for that. A pickup at a food shelf? You’ve gotta be kidding. Right? I was quiet for a minute and then pulled out my deaf card, a sure turn-off. “I cannot hear you when you hunch over your phone like that. I am deaf and I need to see you when you talk to me.” It worked, of course. Then I promptly got up and reported the incident to one of the senior pastors who had absolutely no idea what to do. Finally I told the pastor that he needed to keep an eye on the guy and make sure he didn’t bother any other women, especially girls who wouldn’t know how to handle themselves. The next week he tried it again. I didn’t say anything but just got up and joined a group of women across the room. He hasn’t bothered me again since. I am ready, though. One wrong look, one word and I will SCREAM at him that I am calling the police and will do it, too. He chose his victim poorly. A survivor of childhood trauma is not someone you want to fool with.
Finally my number is called. A school girl greets me with a huge smile, a box in her hand and a slightly crooked tiara on her head, her teeth covered in matching silver braces. The first table has a pile of gigantic whole salmon fillets. Salmon! I haven’t had salmon in years! I say yes and the girl grabs a plastic-coated salmon. At the next table are three piles of various meats. I can pick one of the three I want, but not items from other piles then. I choose sausage links, a hoagie sandwich and hamburger meat. We move on, my box hardly standing still at any one table. Next I can pick any three vegetables: a bag of potatoes, a bag of onions, eggplants, hot peppers and cucumbers. I choose and those get dropped in the box. It continues to fill with fruit, produce, heads of lettuce, tomatoes, avacados, and bunches of cilantro, chard and beet greens. My first box gets spirited away while I am studying the next table of three choices. There are towers of kefir, hummus, tofu, tempe, yogurts, mango juice and several items I am clueless as to what they are. I choose one as my box is propelled down to the next table. Cereals, cake mixes, noodles, soups, chips, crackers, donuts, cookies, cakes, candy and breads complete the giveaways today. On my way out the door to the parking lot I pass another table with cosmetics and baby food. I am told to pick one of each. I pass. A pastor shakes my hand on the way out and wishes me a good night.
I drive the car up to the alley behind the school and line up between the orange cones funneling us up to the last tables now outdoors. A truck is stacked high with gallons of milk. A table holds cases of pop and another table is piled with dog and cat food, which I decline. My boxes are loaded into the trunk for me, the hatch slammed shut and I am off within seconds.
As a writer, I am intrigued as I observe humanity in all its forms around me. I ponder the lives of all those people I saw tonight. I say a prayer for them as I drive home. I add a prayer for Hugo, too.
Monday, June 10, 2019
I Wonder...
I wonder ... and brain freeze.
I am part of a wonderful women writers' group. About ten of us, give or take a few, meet every month for lunch and go around the table updating the others on our progress, any new developments in our work, networking about new ideas, etc. Without fail, the majority will bemoan the fact that they have been so uninspired this past winter or summer; that they haven't found a way to buckle down and write consistently everyday. They try this method or that suggestion, and nothing works. So I started wondering why. What makes my brain, for example, sluggish, or decidedly blank or uncreative?
Is there a time that works better for me? Is there a place that works better for me? What kinds of reading material feeds my spirit? Does exercise help? Does coffee? Making love?
While pondering these conundrums, I thought about a study being done in Seattle. A group of childbirth professionals were wondering about a new phenomenon where couples in labor were coming into hospitals around the country, only recently, without birth plans, without a list of wishes. They had simply given up. It had all become too confusing and overwhelming. They surrendered to whatever staff were on duty and told them to do whatever they needed to do. You might ask what I am doing reading studies on prospective parents and current childbirth trends. The short version is that I am a retired midwife-turned-author.
What was scaring many of these couples was the fact that they could say what they might like to try or do during labor, but should a doctor suggest something different, or push for interventions, they were at a loss. How could they possibly contradict medical advise, signing a waver if necessary and risk harming their baby? The responsibility in the face of conflict was just too much. I get it.
So now you are asking what the two stories above might possibly have anything to do with each other. Well, it occurred to me that perhaps my writer-friends were experiencing the same kind of overwhelming, confusing, dis-functioning, paralyzing episodes that those parents were. Pondering how to go forward only produced fear. In turn the brain is left with no options. All it can do is freeze in self-defense until it can slowly thaw and heal. If we continue to bombard it with information, i.e. the millions of ways one can publish on social media, the lists of books on writer's block, the innumerable blogs for inspiring writers, ad infinitum, is it any wonder we check out? Literally? Does the Information Age and the World Wide Web possibly have anything to do with it? It might even be super-human or heroic that we are even able to produce any writing at all, in spite of such overload.
To test my hypotheses I have begun experimenting with my own brain, the only one donated to the study thus far. First I wondered about how much new information I am feeding my brain on a daily basis. I could list the newspapers or radio every morning, then checking my email, scrolling the news there, then opening any interesting attachments. Next I would check my blog, perhaps work on an article I have been trying to write, taking a short detour to look up the latest Paleo recipes, then back to breakfast and the radio or music. Oh, yes, and volunteering once a week and working part time.
The everyday shopping, driving, cooking, cleaning, etc. have to be squeezed in besides. And this time of year there are garage sales all along the way that the car turns into almost on its own!
The night before last I had watched a movie with my husband and then read a memoir in bed for close to an hour. I mark important places with Post Its to review later. I am currently writing two memoirs simultaneously. One about our 25 years living and working with Hmong refugees, and one about entering the Land of Psychosis as I experienced it some years ago when I was inadvertently given a very powerful drug that I reacted badly to. It was an interesting trip, not unlike what I imagine LSD might be like. It gave me a glimpse, however, into what the mentally ill mind experiences all the time, year after year. I am now back to normal--I think.
In my preliminary evaluations, I decided there was too much information coming in at too fast a pace. I was reacting by trying to produce as much in ratio to my writings at the same time. I was simply TOO BUSY. That went for reading, screen time and radio. I noticed that on the days I was really on a roll, I would be even more exhausted and often took a nap by four in the afternoon, have supper and tuck in early, sleeping in until eight the next morning. It was exhibiting almost like a self-inflicted mania. What would happen if I just stopped? (What would happen if I didn't was an even scarier prospect.)
So I did. I went almost a week without the news, the radio, TV or my laptop, and turned off my phone only checking it twice a day. Instead I walked, sat outside watching mama ducks nervously trying to keep track of 17 baby ducks, sipped herbal tea and did nothing. I took a nap. I don't remember what else I did. It was pretty quiet. It helped that I was visiting a friend in Wisconsin that week, but once I got home I committed to doing without for a while more. I cleaned off all the tables and desks at home. I mended the little pile on the sewing machine, then I put away the sewing machine.
I am trying to keep my desk tidy. The more cluttered it is, the more frantic my mood, I've noticed. It makes me wonder about the wisdom of our Amish friends whom I had gotten to know when I was practicing midwifery. No cars, no computers, no phones. Perhaps we humans were actually meant to live like that. I wonder how normal this pace we have gotten ourselves into is. I no longer think that modern man (and woman) have been blessed with technology. I wonder if in reality it is a curse. We only relate to one another in tiny time slots now, like my writers' group: two hours in any given month at most. If there are ten of us, that is about five minutes each to talk, given we need to eat during that time, too.
In the end, perhaps writing and birthing babies isn't all that different. Nature will take care of both if we let Her. Each one works well without a whole lot of interference. Granted my brain isn't in the same place as my, well, you-know-what, but I need to respect both and the time and space needed.
I am part of a wonderful women writers' group. About ten of us, give or take a few, meet every month for lunch and go around the table updating the others on our progress, any new developments in our work, networking about new ideas, etc. Without fail, the majority will bemoan the fact that they have been so uninspired this past winter or summer; that they haven't found a way to buckle down and write consistently everyday. They try this method or that suggestion, and nothing works. So I started wondering why. What makes my brain, for example, sluggish, or decidedly blank or uncreative?
Is there a time that works better for me? Is there a place that works better for me? What kinds of reading material feeds my spirit? Does exercise help? Does coffee? Making love?
While pondering these conundrums, I thought about a study being done in Seattle. A group of childbirth professionals were wondering about a new phenomenon where couples in labor were coming into hospitals around the country, only recently, without birth plans, without a list of wishes. They had simply given up. It had all become too confusing and overwhelming. They surrendered to whatever staff were on duty and told them to do whatever they needed to do. You might ask what I am doing reading studies on prospective parents and current childbirth trends. The short version is that I am a retired midwife-turned-author.
What was scaring many of these couples was the fact that they could say what they might like to try or do during labor, but should a doctor suggest something different, or push for interventions, they were at a loss. How could they possibly contradict medical advise, signing a waver if necessary and risk harming their baby? The responsibility in the face of conflict was just too much. I get it.
So now you are asking what the two stories above might possibly have anything to do with each other. Well, it occurred to me that perhaps my writer-friends were experiencing the same kind of overwhelming, confusing, dis-functioning, paralyzing episodes that those parents were. Pondering how to go forward only produced fear. In turn the brain is left with no options. All it can do is freeze in self-defense until it can slowly thaw and heal. If we continue to bombard it with information, i.e. the millions of ways one can publish on social media, the lists of books on writer's block, the innumerable blogs for inspiring writers, ad infinitum, is it any wonder we check out? Literally? Does the Information Age and the World Wide Web possibly have anything to do with it? It might even be super-human or heroic that we are even able to produce any writing at all, in spite of such overload.
To test my hypotheses I have begun experimenting with my own brain, the only one donated to the study thus far. First I wondered about how much new information I am feeding my brain on a daily basis. I could list the newspapers or radio every morning, then checking my email, scrolling the news there, then opening any interesting attachments. Next I would check my blog, perhaps work on an article I have been trying to write, taking a short detour to look up the latest Paleo recipes, then back to breakfast and the radio or music. Oh, yes, and volunteering once a week and working part time.
The everyday shopping, driving, cooking, cleaning, etc. have to be squeezed in besides. And this time of year there are garage sales all along the way that the car turns into almost on its own!
The night before last I had watched a movie with my husband and then read a memoir in bed for close to an hour. I mark important places with Post Its to review later. I am currently writing two memoirs simultaneously. One about our 25 years living and working with Hmong refugees, and one about entering the Land of Psychosis as I experienced it some years ago when I was inadvertently given a very powerful drug that I reacted badly to. It was an interesting trip, not unlike what I imagine LSD might be like. It gave me a glimpse, however, into what the mentally ill mind experiences all the time, year after year. I am now back to normal--I think.
In my preliminary evaluations, I decided there was too much information coming in at too fast a pace. I was reacting by trying to produce as much in ratio to my writings at the same time. I was simply TOO BUSY. That went for reading, screen time and radio. I noticed that on the days I was really on a roll, I would be even more exhausted and often took a nap by four in the afternoon, have supper and tuck in early, sleeping in until eight the next morning. It was exhibiting almost like a self-inflicted mania. What would happen if I just stopped? (What would happen if I didn't was an even scarier prospect.)
So I did. I went almost a week without the news, the radio, TV or my laptop, and turned off my phone only checking it twice a day. Instead I walked, sat outside watching mama ducks nervously trying to keep track of 17 baby ducks, sipped herbal tea and did nothing. I took a nap. I don't remember what else I did. It was pretty quiet. It helped that I was visiting a friend in Wisconsin that week, but once I got home I committed to doing without for a while more. I cleaned off all the tables and desks at home. I mended the little pile on the sewing machine, then I put away the sewing machine.
I am trying to keep my desk tidy. The more cluttered it is, the more frantic my mood, I've noticed. It makes me wonder about the wisdom of our Amish friends whom I had gotten to know when I was practicing midwifery. No cars, no computers, no phones. Perhaps we humans were actually meant to live like that. I wonder how normal this pace we have gotten ourselves into is. I no longer think that modern man (and woman) have been blessed with technology. I wonder if in reality it is a curse. We only relate to one another in tiny time slots now, like my writers' group: two hours in any given month at most. If there are ten of us, that is about five minutes each to talk, given we need to eat during that time, too.
In the end, perhaps writing and birthing babies isn't all that different. Nature will take care of both if we let Her. Each one works well without a whole lot of interference. Granted my brain isn't in the same place as my, well, you-know-what, but I need to respect both and the time and space needed.
Sunday, May 12, 2019
for Mothers Day
A Mother’s Pledge to and Covenant with
Every Other Mother on
Mothers' Day
I will not raise my precious child to kill your precious child.
And if it is within my power, I will
not hand over my beloved child to others
to kill your beloved child, or
to learn how to kill the one you cherish.
Why make such a pledge, and commit to such a covenant? Because the photo above—and worse—is what the weapons industry and their bought-and-paid-for deceitful politicians and mass media outlets are turning your child into today. Tomorrow they will turn your child into mud!
"You fasten the trigger for others to fire,
then sit back and watch.
When the death count gets higher,
you hide in your mansions,
As young people's blood
flows out of their bodies
and is buried in mud."
—Masters of War
No child—including your child or grandchild—can protect himself or herself from the schemes and snares of the spiritually and mentally disordered adults who own and operate—for gigantic profits and for the perpetuation and protection of their own luxurious life styles—the corporate, military, media, academic and institutional-religion interlocking juggernauts, that brainwash children into the tinsel glories and sadistic pleasures of violence and war. Children's brains, and their stage of brain development, are helpless and hapless clumps of putty in such hands. If mothers do not protect their children, and every mother's child, from the brain and body destroying wickedness of these systematic, for profit child abusers, who will? Not the Church, Synagogue or Mosque! Not the state and its institutions, e.g., schools! And, most assuredly, not the corporate media!
For the most part only the mother has the knowledge and courage, that comes from her bonding in love with her child from the first instance of her child’s existence, that can resist and override the incessant propaganda—regarding the nobility, pleasures and goodness of violence and war, which from early childhood onward is poured into the brains of most children by everything from parades to movies to TV shows to Young (8-12) Marine Uniformed Squads to video games, e.g., America's Army 3, Black Ops, Gears of War 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, etc.
A perpetual warfare state requires a perpetual warfare economy as well as perpetual wars. All this can only be accomplished by having a bottomless pool of young boys and girls perpetually nurtured to find attractive, and therefore desirable, participation in what they unquestioningly believe to be a noble, holy, heroic, virtuous, indeed exalted, activity—war. No high-tech or low-tech stone is left unturned to do the child brainwashing-recruiting job thoroughly. And truth, being the first casualty of war, necessarily becomes the first casualty of recruiting for war. Lies about anything and everything—from God's will, to historical facts, to the consequences of combat, to veteran's benefits—abound in this nurturing-recruiting process from the cradle to the military swearing-in ceremony. The developing, but still critically underdeveloped, brain of the child-adolescent, usually possesses no developed mental abilities equal to the task of discerning or warding-off the war-directed neurological hard wiring process that he or she is unknowingly being subjected to by adult con artists—in the service of the states, the churches, the schools, the media and big money.
Do ponder the systematic, ongoing brutalization of your child's mind and its future consequences for your child and for you, as well as for other mothers and their children. Then, ask yourself how important it is to you to protect your child from those who desire to turn him or her into their agent of violence and brutality in order to protect and enhance their agendas in this world? Again, if you do not protect your child from these mentally and spiritually disordered human beings who in their lust for power rapaciously prey on children, then you can be assured that the big shots who call the shots in the state, in commerce, in the media, in religious institutions and in academia will not only not lift a finger to protect them, they will do them great harm. They will, however, feign concern for your child ("I feel your pain”) and shed public crocodile tears and call your destroyed child a hero when what is left of him or her comes home to you in a body bag or brain damaged, limbless or insane.
We all live with failures and undone tasks. We all live with "It might have been”s. But surely, if there is any area where one would not want to have to say, “It might have been," this is it. Today, Mothers’ Day, take this pledge and make this commitment to yourself and to all other mothers—and then do what you see needs to be done to fulfill it. And, if not a single other person agrees with you, you will always know that you did, out of love for your child and love for other mothers and their children, what you could do to protect your child and them from the Masters of War and the Moneymakers of War—whether they be Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus or atheists, white, black, brown, yellow or red, American, British, French, German, Israeli, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Palestinian, Congolese, Russian, etc.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
P.S. Of course there is no possibility that the nurturing and hard wiring of a child's neurological pathways, in the fashion desired by the industrial weapons’ makers and those who serve them and live off of their largess, can be considered consistent with nurturing the mind of Christ in the child. Indeed, the change of mind (metanoia in Greek) that those who prey on the not yet fully developed brains of children and adolescents in order to turn them into future willing-killing instruments to serve their interests, is so incompatible with the change of mind (metanoia) that the Jesus of the Gospels teaches and calls for in His disciples, that it can be said, they are as far apart as hell is from Heaven.
War is indeed hell. So protect your child, and the children of other mothers like yourself, from those who wish to form his or her brain in a way that will eventually make your child desire to run into the arms of those, who without giving it a second thought, would throw your infinitely precious and beloved son or daughter into hell.
The First Mothers’ Day Proclamation
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
whether your baptism be that of water or tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.
Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage,
for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience.
We women of one country will be too tender of those of another
to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
composed by Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
Thursday, April 25, 2019
The Data All Guilt-Ridden Parents Need What science tells us about breast-feeding, sleep training and the other agonizing decisions of parenthood.
RE: The New York Times, Opinion Dept.
by Dr. Emily Oster
published on April 19, 2019
The Data All Guilt-Ridden Parents Need:
by Dr. Emily Oster
published on April 19, 2019
The Data All Guilt-Ridden Parents Need:
What science tells us about breast-feeding, sleep training and the other agonizing decisions of parenthood.
My Introduction Here: I can't resist a challenge, and this article was one. My commentary will appear at the end of Dr. Oster's (long) article. I hope my words might bring some sanity back into the conversation. Feel free to add your own thoughts here, too. My email address will be listed at the end.
and over a thousand babies she calls her own, even when she cannot pronounce their names correctly. With stories so graphic you will feel your own contractions again, she guides us through her world of Amish bedrooms, hospital labor rooms, birthing suites, and operating theaters. Get your scrubs on. It's time to push!
comments may be sent to ssskimchee@gmail.com
My Introduction Here: I can't resist a challenge, and this article was one. My commentary will appear at the end of Dr. Oster's (long) article. I hope my words might bring some sanity back into the conversation. Feel free to add your own thoughts here, too. My email address will be listed at the end.
Here goes....
In 1980, 8.6 percent of first births were to women over 30; by 2015 this was 31 percent. This is more than an interesting demographic fact. It means that many of us are having children much later than our parents did. By the time a baby arrives, many of us have been through school, spent time in the working world, developed friendships, hobbies. And through all of these activities, we have probably grown used to the idea that if we work harder — at our jobs, at school, at banking that personal record in the half marathon — we can achieve more.
Babies, however, often do not respond to a diligent work ethic. Take, as an example, crying.
When my daughter, Penelope, was an infant, she was typically inconsolable between 5 and 8 p.m. I’d walk her up and down the hall, sometimes just crying (me crying, that is — obviously she was crying). I once did this in a hotel — up and down, up and down, Penelope screaming at the top of her lungs. I hope no one else was staying there. I tried everything — bouncing her more, bouncing her less, bouncing with swinging, bouncing with nursing (difficult). Nothing worked; she would eventually just exhaust herself.
I wondered whether this was normal. I’m an economist, someone who works with data. I wrote a book on using data to make better choices during pregnancy; it was natural for me to turn to the data again once the baby arrived.
And here, faced with crying, I found that the data was helpful. We often say babies are “colicky,” but researchers have an actual definition of colic (three hours of crying, more than three days a week, for more than three weeks) and some estimates of what share of babies fit this description (about 2 percent). But the same data can also tell us that many babies cry just a bit less than that, and almost 20 percent of parents report their baby “cries a lot.” So I was not alone. The data also told me the crying would get better, which it eventually did.
But I also found, more so than in pregnancy, that there are limits to the utility of general information. Parenting is full of decisions, nearly all of which can be agonized over. You can and should learn about the risks and benefits of your parenting choices, but in the end you have to also think about your family preferences — about what works for you.
In 1980, 8.6 percent of first births were to women over 30; by 2015 this was 31 percent. This is more than an interesting demographic fact. It means that many of us are having children much later than our parents did. By the time a baby arrives, many of us have been through school, spent time in the working world, developed friendships, hobbies. And through all of these activities, we have probably grown used to the idea that if we work harder — at our jobs, at school, at banking that personal record in the half marathon — we can achieve more.
Babies, however, often do not respond to a diligent work ethic. Take, as an example, crying.
When my daughter, Penelope, was an infant, she was typically inconsolable between 5 and 8 p.m. I’d walk her up and down the hall, sometimes just crying (me crying, that is — obviously she was crying). I once did this in a hotel — up and down, up and down, Penelope screaming at the top of her lungs. I hope no one else was staying there. I tried everything — bouncing her more, bouncing her less, bouncing with swinging, bouncing with nursing (difficult). Nothing worked; she would eventually just exhaust herself.
I wondered whether this was normal. I’m an economist, someone who works with data. I wrote a book on using data to make better choices during pregnancy; it was natural for me to turn to the data again once the baby arrived.
And here, faced with crying, I found that the data was helpful. We often say babies are “colicky,” but researchers have an actual definition of colic (three hours of crying, more than three days a week, for more than three weeks) and some estimates of what share of babies fit this description (about 2 percent). But the same data can also tell us that many babies cry just a bit less than that, and almost 20 percent of parents report their baby “cries a lot.” So I was not alone. The data also told me the crying would get better, which it eventually did.
But I also found, more so than in pregnancy, that there are limits to the utility of general information. Parenting is full of decisions, nearly all of which can be agonized over. You can and should learn about the risks and benefits of your parenting choices, but in the end you have to also think about your family preferences — about what works for you.
Breast-Feeding
Take breast-feeding. When I was pregnant and I imagined myself breast-feeding, I usually pictured myself out to brunch with some friends. When the baby was hungry I’d pop on my color-coordinated nursing cover, and she’d latch right on while I enjoyed my mascarpone French toast.
This is not what it was like at all. Like many women, I found breast-feeding incredibly hard. I have one particularly vivid memory of trying to nurse my screaming daughter in a 100-degree closet at my brother’s wedding.
These struggles are made worse by the societal, familial and medical testimonies to the many benefits of breast-feeding. Here, for example, is a partial list of supposed benefits to breast-feeding, culled from medical sources and less official parenting resources: smarter babies with less diarrhea and asthma, fewer ear infections, and a lower risk of obesity and diabetes, and thinner, happier moms with better friendships.
Take breast-feeding. When I was pregnant and I imagined myself breast-feeding, I usually pictured myself out to brunch with some friends. When the baby was hungry I’d pop on my color-coordinated nursing cover, and she’d latch right on while I enjoyed my mascarpone French toast.
This is not what it was like at all. Like many women, I found breast-feeding incredibly hard. I have one particularly vivid memory of trying to nurse my screaming daughter in a 100-degree closet at my brother’s wedding.
These struggles are made worse by the societal, familial and medical testimonies to the many benefits of breast-feeding. Here, for example, is a partial list of supposed benefits to breast-feeding, culled from medical sources and less official parenting resources: smarter babies with less diarrhea and asthma, fewer ear infections, and a lower risk of obesity and diabetes, and thinner, happier moms with better friendships.
Better friendships? Don’t get me wrong — motherhood can be lonely and isolating, and meeting other moms is a great idea. That’s what stroller yoga is for. But I’m hard-pressed to figure out which of my friendships were enhanced by my attempts to feed a screaming baby in a closet.
Many of the benefits cited here do, however, have some basis in evidence, just not always especially good evidence. And even when the evidence is good, the benefits are smaller than many people realize. This is where being an economist comes in handy.
Most studies of breast-feeding are biased by the fact that women who breast-feed are typically different from those who do not. In the United States, and most developed countries, more educated and richer women are more likely to nurse their babies. This is the result of a host of factors, chief among them a lack of universal maternal supports.
Having more education and resources is, of course, linked to better outcomes for infants and children independent of breast-feeding. This makes it very difficult to establish the causal effect of breast-feeding — whether, for an individual woman, nursing her baby will make the child better off.
Some of the best evidence on breast-feeding comes from the Promotion of Breast-Feeding Intervention, or Probit, study, a large randomized trial from the 1990s run in Belarus, in which some of the mothers received breast-feeding guidance and support and some didn’t. Based on this data, the most well-supported benefits of breast-feeding are lower risks of gastrointestinal infections (with symptoms like diarrhea or vomiting) and of rashes and eczema early in life. To put some numbers to it, the study found that of the babies of a group of mothers encouraged to breast-feed, 9 percent had at least one episode of diarrhea, compared with 13 percent of the children of mothers who weren’t encouraged to breast-feed. The rate for rashes and eczema was 3 percent versus 6 percent.
Yet the study found no effect on respiratory infections, including ear infections, croup and wheezing. So why do we continue to see the “evidence-based” claim that breast-feeding reduces colds and ear infections? The main reason is there are many observational studies that do show that breast-feeding affects these illnesses.
For example, an observational study of nearly 70,000 Danish mothers and their children published in 2016 found that breast-feeding more than six months reduced the risk of an ear infection from 7 percent to 5 percent. This study was very careful, with excellent data that allowed the authors to adjust for a lot of differences across mothers and children.
But observational studies are less convincing than randomized trials because they have a harder time establishing causality. Should we give any weight to this evidence if we have the Probit trial?
On one hand, randomized evidence is clearly better. On the other hand, the Probit trial is only one study. If there are small benefits from breast-feeding, they might not show up as significant effects in a randomized trial, but we would still like to know about them. Given the weight of the evidence, I’d put the link between breast-feeding and a small reduction in ear infections in the “plausible” category. But there is nothing as compelling on colds and coughs.
What about long-term benefits, and the claims that breast-fed kids will grow up to be thinner, healthier and smarter? One woman told me her doctor had warned her that by quitting breast-feeding, she was costing her child three I.Q. points.
Let’s return from the land of magical breast milk to reality. Even in the most optimistic view about breast-feeding, the impact on I.Q. is small. Breast-feeding isn’t going to increase your child’s I.Q. by 20 points. How do we know? Because if it did, it would be really obvious in the data and in everyday life.
The question, really, is whether breast-feeding gives children some small leg up in intelligence. If you believe studies that just compare kids who are breast-fed to those who are not, you’ll find that it does. There is a clear correlation here — breast-fed kids do seem to have higher I.Q.s.
But again, this isn’t the same as saying that breast-feeding causes the higher I.Q. One study of Scandinavian 5-year-olds found that children who nursed longer had cognitive scores that were nearly 8 points higher on average. But their mothers were also richer, had more education and had higher I.Q. scores. Once the authors adjusted for even a few of these variables, the effects were much smaller.
In fact, the most compelling studies on this compare siblings, one of whom was breast-fed and the other not; these find no significant differences in I.Q. This same type of sibling study has also looked at obesity and, again, found little to no impact.
The good news for guilt-ridden moms is that there is little convincing evidence for any long-term effects like these. The Probit researchers followed the children in the trial through the age of 6½. They found no change in allergies or asthma, cavities, height, blood pressure, weight, or indicators for being overweight or obese.
If you’re a mother trying to decide whether breast-feeding is worth it or not, there’s one more piece of data you should take into account: the possible effects on your own health.
A lot of the claimed benefits of breast-feeding are about mothers, and many are bogus. Breast-feeding doesn’t seem to promote much additional weight loss or provide free birth control. There is no evidence linking breast-feeding and friendship quality.
However, there is real evidence for a link between breast-feeding and cancers, in particular breast cancer. Across a wide variety of studies, there seems to be a sizable effect — perhaps a 20 percent to 30 percent reduction in the risk of breast cancer for women who breast-feed for longer than 12 months. In addition, the case for causality is bolstered by a concrete set of mechanisms. Researchers suggest that breast-feeding changes some aspects of the cells of the breast, which make them less susceptible to carcinogens.
After all that focus on the benefits of breast-feeding for kids, it may be that the most important long-term impact is actually on the health of the mother. Moms often feel selfish for thinking about their own wants and needs when faced with decisions about their kids. In this case, the data gives you permission to put yourself first for once.
Sleep Training
There are other fraught parenting decisions for which the evidence is much easier to understand than it is for breast-feeding. One example is sleep training.
Sleep training — colloquially, the “cry it out” technique — refers to any system where you leave the baby in his crib on his own at the start of the night, and sometimes let him fall back to sleep on his own if he wakes during the night. The name refers to the fact that if you do this, your baby will cry some. Pediatricians often recommend sleep training, and many parents do it.
But go on the internet, and you’ll find many articles detailing the extensive long-term damage sleep training will do to your child. At its core, the concern from the opponents of “cry it out” is that your baby will feel abandoned and, as a result, struggle to form attachments to you, and ultimately to anyone else.
This idea comes, perhaps surprisingly, from 1980s Romania, where thousands of children lived in orphanages with very little human contact for months or even years. One of the things visitors noticed in these places was the eerie quiet. Babies didn’t cry, because they knew no one would come. The argument is that “cry it out” does the same thing.
This is absurd. Sleep training methods do not leave the infant for months without any human contact, nor do they suggest subjecting children to the other types of physical and emotional abuse that occurred in those orphanages.
To learn about the impact of sleep training, we need to study it in the way it is actually used. Fortunately, many people have, and in a lot of those cases they used randomized trials.
Consider an Australian study of 328 mothers whose 7-month-old babies were having problems sleeping. Approximately half were assigned to do a sleep-training regimen, and the others were not. In the short term, the authors found significant benefits: The intervention improved sleep for children and also lowered parental depression. But they didn’t stop there.
They returned to evaluate the children a year later and five years later, when the children were 6. In this later follow-up, which included a subset of the original families, the researchers found no difference in any outcomes, including emotional stability and conduct behavior, stress, parent-child closeness, conflict or parent-child attachment. Basically, the kids who were sleep-trained looked exactly like those who were not.
These results are not an outlier. Review studies of sleep-training interventions do not find negative effects on infants. And many show sizable improvements in maternal depression and family functioning. Sleep affects mood, and parents who sleep less feel worse. The evidence paints a pretty pro-“cry it out” picture.
Nonetheless there are academic articles that argue against it. One small study that gets a lot of play shows that in the few days after sleep training, mothers are less stressed, but the same is not true of infants. The researchers interpret this as a signal that the mothers and children are losing emotional touch with each other, but this is a stretch. Why not interpret the evidence to say that cry-it-out relaxes parents without hurting children?
Fundamentally, the argument against sleep training is theoretical: that some children are devastated, even if those results don’t show up in the data, or that the damage may not manifest until babies are adults.
I think it is fair to say that it would be good to have more data. It’s always good to have more data! However, the idea that this uncertainty should lead us to avoid sleep training is flawed. Among other things, you could easily argue the opposite: Maybe sleep training is very good for some kids — they really need the uninterrupted sleep — and there is a risk of damaging your child by not sleep training.
Does this mean you should definitely sleep train? Of course not — every family is different, and you may not want to let your baby cry. But if you do want to sleep train, you should not feel shame or discomfort about that decision.
‘Working Moms’
Finally, there are some parenting decisions where the data just isn’t much help at all, and family preferences have to take the front seat. One example is the question of whether to work outside the home.
This decision is stressful. It often seems to define your whole parenting persona: What kind of mom are you? Are you a “stay-at-home mom” or, as the child of one of my friends once described her, a “stay-at-work mom”? Language like this is never helpful, and even less so when it frames this decision in such a gendered and heteronormative way. What if Dad stays home? What if there are two moms? Or only one parent?
Really, this decision could be better stated as: “What is the optimal configuration of adult work hours for your household?” Less catchy, but more helpful.
If you try to look to the evidence on what is “best” for children, you’ll be disappointed. There are studies of this, of course, but they’re hard to learn anything from, because it is extremely difficult to separate a family’s circumstances from decisions about employment. A 2008 meta-analysis found that children in families where one parent worked part-time and the other full-time performed best in school — better than children with two parents working full-time and better than those with one parent who didn’t work at all.
But again this is probably a result of many differences between those families, not just the mothers’ career decisions. There is really no compelling evidence that proves that having a stay-at-home parent affects child outcomes, positively or negatively.
(There is reliable evidence that time at home in a baby’s first few months is beneficial, but that is an argument for longer maternity leave, not for not working at all.)
This means that the decision really comes down to what works for your family. One part of this is obviously your budget, but the other part is your preferences.
I work because I like to. I love my kids! They are amazing. But I wouldn’t be happy staying home with them. It isn’t that I like my job better — if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the “marginal value” of time with them declines fast. (“Marginal value” will be familiar to anyone who remembers their Econ 101. There may not be any useful data on this question, but economic theory still comes in handy.) The first hour with my kids is great, but by the fourth, I’m ready for some time with my research. My job doesn’t have this nose-dive in marginal value — the highs are not as high, but the hour-to-hour satisfaction declines much more slowly.
It should be O.K. to say this. Just like it should be O.K. to say that you stay home with your kids because that is what you want to do. In our attempts to focus so much on what is best for our kids, it is a good idea to step back and think about what works for you.
And Everything Else
These decisions — breast-feeding, sleep training, working — are just three of many that will come up in the first year of a child’s life. More await, from co-sleeping to screen time and more.
One day, your child will have a temper tantrum. How on earth do you deal with that? Exorcism? And what about potty training? You may find your child is one of a surprisingly large share (about 1 in 5) who refuse to poop in the toilet (it has a name: “stool toileting refusal”). In your pre-child life, you probably never thought about the question of how to encourage someone to poop in a particular location. But there you are, needing to find your way.
That lady on the internet comment board wants to tell you what to do, but she doesn’t live in your house, and she cannot know what is right for your family.
I’m not trying to give advice. I’m just arguing that in many cases the data can be helpful. But if the data falls short and you still want advice, let me pass along something our pediatrician once told me. It was our 2-year-old’s checkup, and I had my usual list of neuroses.
“We are going on this vacation, and there are bees,” I said. “It’s kind of isolated. What if Penelope is stung? She’s never been stung before. What if she’s allergic? How will I get her to a doctor in time? Should I bring something to be prepared for this? Should we test her in advance? Do I need an EpiPen?”
In other words, I had built up this elaborate and incredibly unlikely scenario in my head. I needed someone to remind me that yes, this could happen. But so could a million other things. Parenting is not actually about planning for every possible disaster.
The doctor paused. And then she said, very calmly:
“Hmm. I’d probably just try not to think about that.”
Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown, is the author of “Expecting Better” and the forthcoming “Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, From Birth to Preschool,” from which this essay is adapted.
Many of the benefits cited here do, however, have some basis in evidence, just not always especially good evidence. And even when the evidence is good, the benefits are smaller than many people realize. This is where being an economist comes in handy.
Most studies of breast-feeding are biased by the fact that women who breast-feed are typically different from those who do not. In the United States, and most developed countries, more educated and richer women are more likely to nurse their babies. This is the result of a host of factors, chief among them a lack of universal maternal supports.
Having more education and resources is, of course, linked to better outcomes for infants and children independent of breast-feeding. This makes it very difficult to establish the causal effect of breast-feeding — whether, for an individual woman, nursing her baby will make the child better off.
Some of the best evidence on breast-feeding comes from the Promotion of Breast-Feeding Intervention, or Probit, study, a large randomized trial from the 1990s run in Belarus, in which some of the mothers received breast-feeding guidance and support and some didn’t. Based on this data, the most well-supported benefits of breast-feeding are lower risks of gastrointestinal infections (with symptoms like diarrhea or vomiting) and of rashes and eczema early in life. To put some numbers to it, the study found that of the babies of a group of mothers encouraged to breast-feed, 9 percent had at least one episode of diarrhea, compared with 13 percent of the children of mothers who weren’t encouraged to breast-feed. The rate for rashes and eczema was 3 percent versus 6 percent.
Yet the study found no effect on respiratory infections, including ear infections, croup and wheezing. So why do we continue to see the “evidence-based” claim that breast-feeding reduces colds and ear infections? The main reason is there are many observational studies that do show that breast-feeding affects these illnesses.
For example, an observational study of nearly 70,000 Danish mothers and their children published in 2016 found that breast-feeding more than six months reduced the risk of an ear infection from 7 percent to 5 percent. This study was very careful, with excellent data that allowed the authors to adjust for a lot of differences across mothers and children.
But observational studies are less convincing than randomized trials because they have a harder time establishing causality. Should we give any weight to this evidence if we have the Probit trial?
On one hand, randomized evidence is clearly better. On the other hand, the Probit trial is only one study. If there are small benefits from breast-feeding, they might not show up as significant effects in a randomized trial, but we would still like to know about them. Given the weight of the evidence, I’d put the link between breast-feeding and a small reduction in ear infections in the “plausible” category. But there is nothing as compelling on colds and coughs.
What about long-term benefits, and the claims that breast-fed kids will grow up to be thinner, healthier and smarter? One woman told me her doctor had warned her that by quitting breast-feeding, she was costing her child three I.Q. points.
Let’s return from the land of magical breast milk to reality. Even in the most optimistic view about breast-feeding, the impact on I.Q. is small. Breast-feeding isn’t going to increase your child’s I.Q. by 20 points. How do we know? Because if it did, it would be really obvious in the data and in everyday life.
The question, really, is whether breast-feeding gives children some small leg up in intelligence. If you believe studies that just compare kids who are breast-fed to those who are not, you’ll find that it does. There is a clear correlation here — breast-fed kids do seem to have higher I.Q.s.
But again, this isn’t the same as saying that breast-feeding causes the higher I.Q. One study of Scandinavian 5-year-olds found that children who nursed longer had cognitive scores that were nearly 8 points higher on average. But their mothers were also richer, had more education and had higher I.Q. scores. Once the authors adjusted for even a few of these variables, the effects were much smaller.
In fact, the most compelling studies on this compare siblings, one of whom was breast-fed and the other not; these find no significant differences in I.Q. This same type of sibling study has also looked at obesity and, again, found little to no impact.
The good news for guilt-ridden moms is that there is little convincing evidence for any long-term effects like these. The Probit researchers followed the children in the trial through the age of 6½. They found no change in allergies or asthma, cavities, height, blood pressure, weight, or indicators for being overweight or obese.
If you’re a mother trying to decide whether breast-feeding is worth it or not, there’s one more piece of data you should take into account: the possible effects on your own health.
A lot of the claimed benefits of breast-feeding are about mothers, and many are bogus. Breast-feeding doesn’t seem to promote much additional weight loss or provide free birth control. There is no evidence linking breast-feeding and friendship quality.
However, there is real evidence for a link between breast-feeding and cancers, in particular breast cancer. Across a wide variety of studies, there seems to be a sizable effect — perhaps a 20 percent to 30 percent reduction in the risk of breast cancer for women who breast-feed for longer than 12 months. In addition, the case for causality is bolstered by a concrete set of mechanisms. Researchers suggest that breast-feeding changes some aspects of the cells of the breast, which make them less susceptible to carcinogens.
After all that focus on the benefits of breast-feeding for kids, it may be that the most important long-term impact is actually on the health of the mother. Moms often feel selfish for thinking about their own wants and needs when faced with decisions about their kids. In this case, the data gives you permission to put yourself first for once.
Sleep Training
There are other fraught parenting decisions for which the evidence is much easier to understand than it is for breast-feeding. One example is sleep training.
Sleep training — colloquially, the “cry it out” technique — refers to any system where you leave the baby in his crib on his own at the start of the night, and sometimes let him fall back to sleep on his own if he wakes during the night. The name refers to the fact that if you do this, your baby will cry some. Pediatricians often recommend sleep training, and many parents do it.
But go on the internet, and you’ll find many articles detailing the extensive long-term damage sleep training will do to your child. At its core, the concern from the opponents of “cry it out” is that your baby will feel abandoned and, as a result, struggle to form attachments to you, and ultimately to anyone else.
This idea comes, perhaps surprisingly, from 1980s Romania, where thousands of children lived in orphanages with very little human contact for months or even years. One of the things visitors noticed in these places was the eerie quiet. Babies didn’t cry, because they knew no one would come. The argument is that “cry it out” does the same thing.
This is absurd. Sleep training methods do not leave the infant for months without any human contact, nor do they suggest subjecting children to the other types of physical and emotional abuse that occurred in those orphanages.
To learn about the impact of sleep training, we need to study it in the way it is actually used. Fortunately, many people have, and in a lot of those cases they used randomized trials.
Consider an Australian study of 328 mothers whose 7-month-old babies were having problems sleeping. Approximately half were assigned to do a sleep-training regimen, and the others were not. In the short term, the authors found significant benefits: The intervention improved sleep for children and also lowered parental depression. But they didn’t stop there.
They returned to evaluate the children a year later and five years later, when the children were 6. In this later follow-up, which included a subset of the original families, the researchers found no difference in any outcomes, including emotional stability and conduct behavior, stress, parent-child closeness, conflict or parent-child attachment. Basically, the kids who were sleep-trained looked exactly like those who were not.
These results are not an outlier. Review studies of sleep-training interventions do not find negative effects on infants. And many show sizable improvements in maternal depression and family functioning. Sleep affects mood, and parents who sleep less feel worse. The evidence paints a pretty pro-“cry it out” picture.
Nonetheless there are academic articles that argue against it. One small study that gets a lot of play shows that in the few days after sleep training, mothers are less stressed, but the same is not true of infants. The researchers interpret this as a signal that the mothers and children are losing emotional touch with each other, but this is a stretch. Why not interpret the evidence to say that cry-it-out relaxes parents without hurting children?
Fundamentally, the argument against sleep training is theoretical: that some children are devastated, even if those results don’t show up in the data, or that the damage may not manifest until babies are adults.
I think it is fair to say that it would be good to have more data. It’s always good to have more data! However, the idea that this uncertainty should lead us to avoid sleep training is flawed. Among other things, you could easily argue the opposite: Maybe sleep training is very good for some kids — they really need the uninterrupted sleep — and there is a risk of damaging your child by not sleep training.
Does this mean you should definitely sleep train? Of course not — every family is different, and you may not want to let your baby cry. But if you do want to sleep train, you should not feel shame or discomfort about that decision.
‘Working Moms’
Finally, there are some parenting decisions where the data just isn’t much help at all, and family preferences have to take the front seat. One example is the question of whether to work outside the home.
This decision is stressful. It often seems to define your whole parenting persona: What kind of mom are you? Are you a “stay-at-home mom” or, as the child of one of my friends once described her, a “stay-at-work mom”? Language like this is never helpful, and even less so when it frames this decision in such a gendered and heteronormative way. What if Dad stays home? What if there are two moms? Or only one parent?
Really, this decision could be better stated as: “What is the optimal configuration of adult work hours for your household?” Less catchy, but more helpful.
If you try to look to the evidence on what is “best” for children, you’ll be disappointed. There are studies of this, of course, but they’re hard to learn anything from, because it is extremely difficult to separate a family’s circumstances from decisions about employment. A 2008 meta-analysis found that children in families where one parent worked part-time and the other full-time performed best in school — better than children with two parents working full-time and better than those with one parent who didn’t work at all.
But again this is probably a result of many differences between those families, not just the mothers’ career decisions. There is really no compelling evidence that proves that having a stay-at-home parent affects child outcomes, positively or negatively.
(There is reliable evidence that time at home in a baby’s first few months is beneficial, but that is an argument for longer maternity leave, not for not working at all.)
This means that the decision really comes down to what works for your family. One part of this is obviously your budget, but the other part is your preferences.
I work because I like to. I love my kids! They are amazing. But I wouldn’t be happy staying home with them. It isn’t that I like my job better — if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the “marginal value” of time with them declines fast. (“Marginal value” will be familiar to anyone who remembers their Econ 101. There may not be any useful data on this question, but economic theory still comes in handy.) The first hour with my kids is great, but by the fourth, I’m ready for some time with my research. My job doesn’t have this nose-dive in marginal value — the highs are not as high, but the hour-to-hour satisfaction declines much more slowly.
It should be O.K. to say this. Just like it should be O.K. to say that you stay home with your kids because that is what you want to do. In our attempts to focus so much on what is best for our kids, it is a good idea to step back and think about what works for you.
And Everything Else
These decisions — breast-feeding, sleep training, working — are just three of many that will come up in the first year of a child’s life. More await, from co-sleeping to screen time and more.
One day, your child will have a temper tantrum. How on earth do you deal with that? Exorcism? And what about potty training? You may find your child is one of a surprisingly large share (about 1 in 5) who refuse to poop in the toilet (it has a name: “stool toileting refusal”). In your pre-child life, you probably never thought about the question of how to encourage someone to poop in a particular location. But there you are, needing to find your way.
That lady on the internet comment board wants to tell you what to do, but she doesn’t live in your house, and she cannot know what is right for your family.
I’m not trying to give advice. I’m just arguing that in many cases the data can be helpful. But if the data falls short and you still want advice, let me pass along something our pediatrician once told me. It was our 2-year-old’s checkup, and I had my usual list of neuroses.
“We are going on this vacation, and there are bees,” I said. “It’s kind of isolated. What if Penelope is stung? She’s never been stung before. What if she’s allergic? How will I get her to a doctor in time? Should I bring something to be prepared for this? Should we test her in advance? Do I need an EpiPen?”
In other words, I had built up this elaborate and incredibly unlikely scenario in my head. I needed someone to remind me that yes, this could happen. But so could a million other things. Parenting is not actually about planning for every possible disaster.
The doctor paused. And then she said, very calmly:
“Hmm. I’d probably just try not to think about that.”
Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown, is the author of “Expecting Better” and the forthcoming “Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, From Birth to Preschool,” from which this essay is adapted.
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My commentary here:
Marriage
About 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the United States divorce. The divorce rate for subsequent marriages is even higher.The median length for a marriage in the US today is 11 years with 90% of all divorces being settled out of court. However, studies have shown that lower-income couples are currently more likely to get a divorce than higher-income couples. I am not sure marriage is such a good idea. Guess you shouldn't get married....
Pregnancy
About 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. But the actual number is likely higher because many miscarriages occur so early in pregnancy that a woman doesn't realize she's pregnant. Stillbirth affects about 1 in 100 pregnancies each year in the United States; this is about 1 percent of all pregnancies and about 24,000 babies. Guess we shouldn't get pregnant...
Infant Death
World wide, of the 8.2 million under-five child deaths per year, about 3.3 million occur during the neonatal period —in the first four weeks of life. The majority - almost 3 million of these - die within one week and almost 2 million on their first day of life. Today in the U.S., more than 2,000 babies die of SIDS every year, according to government figures.
World wide, of the 8.2 million under-five child deaths per year, about 3.3 million occur during the neonatal period —in the first four weeks of life. The majority - almost 3 million of these - die within one week and almost 2 million on their first day of life. Today in the U.S., more than 2,000 babies die of SIDS every year, according to government figures.
The U.S. is a worse place for newborns than 68 other countries, including Egypt, Turkey and Peru, according to a report released Tuesday by Save the Children. A million babies die every year globally on the same day they were born, including more than 11,000 American newborns.
According to the Center for Disease Control, approximately 12,000 children and young adults, ages 1 to 19 years, die from unintentional injuries each year in the U.S. Guess we should rethink this too....
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I think you get the message which is, we can quantify, analyse, and apply every statistic available, but people, REALLY? Our babies don't come off a conveyor belt at birth, ready to evolve along with the rest of the world, at the same ratio as say, technology. They are in fact born expecting--hardwired, if you will--the same environment that they had in the womb. They are actually more immature than most other mammalian species, and, by the way, we are the only mammal that has ever asked, "What should I feed my baby and where should my baby sleep?"
My answer to Dr. Oster and other economists, statisticians, and scientists is that our babies and parenting norms should never come under the heading of statistics at all, nor should statistics have such a major part in the conversation concerning their needs. We are our baby mammals' only and entire world. They have no one else. My decisions as to all aspects of their care and nurture must come from instinct and my heart alone. If I bond from the beginning I will continue to know what is best for my baby. Advice comes from others who have discovered what works best for babies, An old saying goes: Two Jewish grandmothers are better than one pediatrician.
Bio
From the editor:
Midwife-turned-author, Stephanie Sorensen seems to swim seamlessly through cultures, religions, superstitions, raw fear and ecstasy to the first breath of a new baby. She invites her readers to join her, taking us on a tour to the innermost workings of another world. She lives among one of the most diverse populations on earth, and has given birth to a book that takes us on a bizarre journey, giving us a rare, intimate glimpse into her daily life. With graphic prose we enter with her into the Land of Birth. Midwife, mother, grandmother, doula, world traveler and author, Sorensen lives and breathes birth. She has five children scattered around the world, grandchildren
Midwife-turned-author, Stephanie Sorensen seems to swim seamlessly through cultures, religions, superstitions, raw fear and ecstasy to the first breath of a new baby. She invites her readers to join her, taking us on a tour to the innermost workings of another world. She lives among one of the most diverse populations on earth, and has given birth to a book that takes us on a bizarre journey, giving us a rare, intimate glimpse into her daily life. With graphic prose we enter with her into the Land of Birth. Midwife, mother, grandmother, doula, world traveler and author, Sorensen lives and breathes birth. She has five children scattered around the world, grandchildren
Ma Doula, A Story Tour of Birth, North Star Press, St. Cloud, MN, won as a finalist in the Midwest Book Awards, 2016.
comments may be sent to ssskimchee@gmail.com
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