Free to Choose, Born to Buy (and Left to Die)

In the past two weeks I've been reading a series of books which connected together despite being on disparate subjects. Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, published in the 1970s, argues for a completely free market -- that is, one with no regulations, tariffs, government licenses, public financing, etc. Friedman follows initial chapter on the power of markets with sections that compare the effects of government attempts to improve safety,  protect consumers against defective products, raise wages, etc.  Time and again he made good points about market efficiency,  but the general attitude advocated is extreme. Friedman is not nearly as extreme as other free marketeers: he respects the potential power of monopolies and advocates for free trade so that potential monopolies are always disrupted from outside, and  (staggeringly, for the 1970s) acknowledges environmental hazards.  Although I'm often tempted to agree with him on principle, in practice caution is warranted. While Friedman is correct in pointing out that people who buy defective products will not be likely to purchase them again,  consumer-driven corrective measures aren't always the best. What would he make of malware, for instance, which invades people's computers and then pretends to be an anti-virus program, which will rid the obvious infection for a fee?   On the whole, this work makes the same arguments as Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, but Sowell was far more thorough.

A much different view was taken by Juliet Shor, whose Born to Buy examined the commercialization of childhood. After providing a history, an overview of the tactics, and an examination the consequences, Shor argues -- pleads, as a parent -- for regulation and taxation to reign in the corporate invasion of schools, the ubiquity of product placement in television, the insidious attitude in advertising that encourages kids to not only seek approval by buying things, but to assert their coolness by badgering their parents into buying them the latest and greatest -- advertising that blames the parents for being  mean and the cause of their child's misery if they don't. Released in the same year as Susan Linn's Consuming Kids,  Shor's work contains more concrete data, but is not quite as helpful:  Linn focused on especially destructive themes and counseled parents on how they could make decisions in their household and in conversations with their children to counter consumerism and premature sexualization.  Shor largely passes by  media sexualization and only looks at government regulation to reign in the abuse. Considering that the Supreme Court regards corporation as people who can dump however money they'd like into elections,  I would not count the US government as an ally in this fight.   Born to Buy is still very much worth reading, though, just for the numerous interviews with marketing execs, many of whom (parents themselves) left the business when they could no longer reconcile their work with their consciences. (With good reason:  their usurpation of child psychology and carefully planned invasions of home and school borders on villainy.)  A quotation from one:

"Banks [,a marketing agent], believes buzz practitioners are just getting started.
'We'll have ten or fifteen more ways of encircling the consumer in ten years [...] surrounding almost every move you make, that would be the ideal.' Asked about consumers who didn't like being marketed to, Banks didn't hesitate. 'Covert messaging. Use their friends.'"

Born to Buy was published in 2004. Nine years later, 'Banks' must surely be pleased with the ubiquity of facebook, which converts our friends' passions into ads for us, projected across the internet via plugins.

And lastly there was The Working Poor: Invisible in America, which profiled the millions in America who do their damndest to fulfill the promise of the American dream, but cannot seem to escape poverty.  David Shipler attempts to find out why, and realizes the answer is...complicated! Yes, shockingly, a societal problem has nuance. Poverty cannot be reduced to bad character nor oppression inherent in the system. Instead, it's a little of both. More extensive comments on this piece will follow this week.

The Disappearance of Childhood

The Disappearance of Childhood
©1982 Neil Postman
177 pages

Television is killing your children -- conceptually. In 1985, Neil Postman penned Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he, building off of the lesson in Technopoly that technology changes our culture without our knowledge, examined television’s malevolent effects on political, civic, and religious discourse. The Disappearance of Childhood, published in 1982, is an earlier form of this argument, and one which focuses only on the effects of television on childhood.  In it, he asserts that childhood is a social construct, not a biological fact; that it sprang into being with the advent of the printing press and the need to instill widespread literacy; and that the rise of easy-accessible information through the television (and by extension for modern readers, the internet) has killed the innocence of youth. Although its historic claim about childhood is dubious,  concerns about the diminishment of modern childhood remain valid, and the connection between the two, the idea that technology is not value-free, but in fact shapes us as we use it, is as fascinating as ever.

Postman's initial bold claim that childhood is an invention of the middle ages is staggering in its audacity. With hundreds of thousands of years of history behind us as a species, we cover the globe in a seemingly infinite mosaic of sharply different cultures. Yet for all this diversity, there is not one semblance of childhood as special outside of medieval Europe and the cultures it influenced? To be sure, there are avenues of thought that make the thought understandable: modern children have far easier lives than their predecessors of any age. The demands placed on children in earlier epochs meant they had to participate in the life of their household, on the farm or at work, early on.  But does this translate to nothing about children being regarded as special at all? The  claim is simply too broad to go down easily.

That a side, this preview of Amusing Ourselves to Death, which casts childhood as the first victim of the communications revolution that later claimed public discourse, education, and our peace of mind, remains noteworthy. That revolution, writes Postman, spelled an end  of childhood as a special time in which children are protected from the burdens and full knowledge of the world, allowed to frolic in leisure outside the schoolroom, while inside it being good students learning to navigate their literary world.  Before widespread literacy, writes Postman, knowledge was primarily transmitted orally, and children learned the secrets of the world fairly easily. After the printing press made written communication the primary means of cultural transmission, however, not only did the knowledge being transmitted become 'secret' in that one had to learn to read to take part in it, but literary culture so broadened the intellectual capacity of the human race that the ideas being discussed became far more complex. To learn the world meant committing to a course of training and study, and that meant school. School was the potter's house in which young clay was molded into tall, strong vessels of knowledge. and ready for the responsibilities of adulthood.

The coming of mass communication, especially the television, ruined all that. While once courses of study were designed so that people -- children -- were gradually introduced to adult ideas as they grew older, the nightly news now exposes children to the adult world all at once. Within twenty minutes,  young minds can witness the horror of war,  be subjected to lessons about how buying things leads to happiness (and how being ignorant of the right shampoo will mean being forever alone because women recoil from dandruff), and learn a host of interesting words like 'incest' and 'erectile dysfunction' to ask mom and dad about. Because television requires virtually no prior knowledge, no training, no work to be entertaining or 'enlightening',  adults who spend much of their leisure time basking in its blue glow will be rendered infantile, easily manipulated and incapable of sustaining their attention in anything worthwhile. Although most of the book is a serious treatment of technology and society, toward the end Postman sounds a teeny bit crotchety. 

Although The Disappearance of Childhood has a questionable start and loses focus toward the end, the pages between raise a question worth considering for modern parents. Regardless of Postman's historic claims, both parents and child psychologists entertain worries today about 'age compression' or 'kids getting older younger'.  Though Postman muses in 1982 that computers might be a saving grace for literacy, if they continue to require programming language to set up and use (thus requiring another kind of focused education) a recent  article by The Atlantic wondering if it's unhealthy for toddlers to spend so much time on smartphone applications indicates that such hope is absurd.  Although Postman was primarily concerned with television, the internet makes TV look innocent. There's virtually no knowledge concealed from a child with a search engine and a curious mind, and the knowledge revealed won't just be a line of text: might well constitute a graphic video.  Knowledge is a powerful asset, and the danger that today's children are being exposed to too much, too soon,  warrants attention.

The Unschooling Handbook

The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use the Whole World As Your Child's Classroom
© 1998 Marry Griffith
240 pages

What does it mean to educate a child? In the United States, schooling is dominated by standards, by regular exams that force educators to teach the test. But is forced memorization a means of teaching our children well?  Mary Griffith thinks not. A practitioner and advocate of "Unschooling", she believes children ought to be free to learn the way adults do: autonomously, pursuing their own interests with the support of their family. In The Unschooling Handbook, she explains the unschooling philosophy, elaborates on how children can pursue understanding of reading, math, science, art, and even history by themselves,  and offers parents who are considering the prospect resources to make the leap. Intriguing and smartly organized, it's a welcome perspective in reflecting on education.

What happens to destroy the natural curiosity of children, corroding kids who delight in learning about anything into reluctant attendees who look on the schoolroom as if a drilling dentist were waiting for them there?  The answer is the decidedly unnatural approach of compulsory education, making children to rise early and spend all day under the authority of adults they neither know nor trust,  and forcing them memorize a variety of facts about a series of subjects that may not interest them. If a subject does not hold a child's interest, Griffith writes, why do we expect them to retain any knowledge at all?  The information may be held long enough for the test, and then promptly dumped.  The children are not improved by having been forced to memorize it, and the public is not better off for having used resources to make them do it.  That Griffith is concerned with the quality of her child's education is something of a relief: other criticisms of the public schooling systems I've encountered all had ideological roots,  with the parents being paranoid about the prospect of Other People influencing their children, zealously guarding their progeny's craniums like Gollum guarding the Ring.  Griffith doesn't complain about the Government trying to turn her child into a socialist minion, or a docile sheep for the new world order.  Her philosophy does run counter to the state's approach to education, though, and borders on libertarianism: she does not believe in making her child learn anything. She instead trusts that children will eagerly want to learn about a wide variety of subjects, if provided with the right tools. The parents' job is to guide kids through the world, showing it off, and then helping them investigate whatever catches their interest.  It may be Anglo-Saxon mythology or geology; it may be Candy Crush.  

The potential for abuse is a notable limitation of the unschooling approach, for children are not known for being moderate souls. What is to keep a child becoming obsessed with one subject, and learning nothing at all about mathematics?  Griffith's permissive streak seems a vulnerability in a world full of addictive, ever-accessible smartphone games: her technological references stop at 1998, which limits the section on the uses of television and the Internet in education for modern readers. (YouTube is a fantastic resource for learning, but it's also a fantastic way to waste time perusing funny kitten videos.)  The author's answer is that children will, in time, grow bored  even in these indulgences. Trust them.  It's a nice thought, but I'd rather err on the side of discipline. The permissive-parenting argument is a separate argument from that concerning unschooling, though, and that I rather like. I like it because I have learned more reading popular science texts on my own than I ever learned in school, and because the comprehensive variety of information I absorb through my own studying is infinitely more useful than memorizing a few rote facts that pass into oblivion.  The greatest weakness of unschooling is that parents' lifestyles may not allow for it: when living costs such that both parents have to work to support families, who can stay home to attend to the children? Reflection is warranted: perhaps a superior education for children, and a closer relationship between parents and children as a result of more time spent together, and less fighting with them to conform to school's regimented schedule and curriculum, would justify a family deciding to downshift so it could afford to run on only one salary.

The unschooling approach demonstrated here makes learning a family experience. Education is not something children endure while mom and dad go to their jobs in the 'real' world; instead, education is part of exploring that real world. The core of The Unschooling Handbook is its section illustrating how kids and parents can learn together about the world. Some subjects, like art, music, and science, are naturally entertaining, and those which require more discipline aren't too difficult to pursue, either:  children will gravitate to learning to read if they see their parents reading, and if they are read to.  This kind of education requires care on the parents' part, as they are the cultivators of their children's minds.  Although all children find the natural world awe-inspiring and fascinating, many adults find science dull, probably because their experience with it has involved more the memorization of facts and less hands-on experience that seduces them into learning more about the subject, and eventually to adopting the tools of science to learn even more. A child can be taught botany from a garden and chemistry from the kitchen.  What parents can do is help guide learning from the reactive 'wow' to the 'Eureka!' that follows dogged research. A key seems to be relevance:  children may squirm if made to memorize the dates and names of English kings (unless they find the recent birth of the latest prince interesting, as so many Americans inexplicably do), but if history is used to awe children with the fact that the places they see around them, and their family, have a greater story than what is presently seen, it may take root.  This approach hearkens to our species' ancient practice of oral traditions: being engaged by history is in our blood.

The Unschooling Handbook is both thought-provoking and useful, if dated.  I will assuredly be reading more about this subject -- for I believe learning ought to a result of our enthusiastic attempt to understand the world, and not a forced exercise in training.

Related:

• The Beginner's Guide to Unschooling, from Zenhabits. (Possibly what introduced me to the concept..)
• The School Sucks Podcast 
• The Unplugged Mom podcast,

Crunchy Cons

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of counterculture conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican party)
© 2006  Rob Dreher
272 pages

Imagine a Republican who praised Jimmy Carter instead of dedicating a Two-Minute Hate to him. That's Rob Dreher. In an age of bitter partisan rancor, it's refreshing to encounter someone who looks beyond the asnine liberal-conservative divide and realizes that politics and values aren't as simple as they tell you on the television. Alas, values are still simple to Dreher, who knows there's still an Us and a Them; it's just that the Thems and the Us's sometimes swap sides.  The Us's are those people on the left and right who seek a meaningful life and are prompted by their inner convictions to live differently than the mainstream; the Thems are those wretched modernists, the consumerists, the cafeteria Catholics, and the individualists who defy culture and brazenly think for themselves. (You know, because thinking for yourself makes you so mainstream.)

The title alone may give you a feel for the goings-on of crunchy cons. Various sections cover Dreher's (who is the authority on who may be and who cannot be a Crunchy Con) thoughts on consumerism and technological dependence (bad), food (industrial food bad, CSAs awesome), homes (modern architecture bad -- read Jim Kunstler), and religion (orthodoxy for the win). While the thoughts as expressed can be found in other books*, Dreher's positions and criticisms are couched in the language of conservatism and traditionalism; he attacks agribusiness not on the grounds of social justice (as Eric Schlosser did in Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness), but because he wants  to promote the rugged  old values of small farmers and promote self-reliance.  Dreher doesn't attack consumerism because mindless consumption plays into the hands of the bourgeoisie, or destroys Mother Earth; his hostility stems from the fact that there's more to life than owning stuff, and the idea of our being able to buy happiness is not only unhealthy, it's impious.

Religion undergirds Dreher's approach: for him, being a 'crunchy conservative' means living sacramentally; "viewing the physical aspects of life -- the food we eat, the places we live, the world in which we move -- as being inseparable from spiritual reality."  Dreher's aim in being a crunchy con is to live a meaningful life, and for him, religion supplies that meaning. The problem with mainline conservatism is that world changes too quickly for traditionalism-for-principle's-sake to mean anything. Yesterday's raging liberals are today's  conservatives, because the status quo is a moving target. Dreher's people stand out among  other conservatives by defining what they intend to conserve, instead of being content to resist change on principle. Hence, while most conservatives are fine defending relatively recent developments like automobile oriented sprawl, Dreher is still defending the old-fashioned, traditional, human-oriented cities that have now been embraced by progressives.

There's a lot to like about Crunchy Cons, but there were a few too many flies in the soup for me. Like the authors of The Plain Reader, Dreher puts a lot of stock behind parents being the chief cultivators of their children.  And while I get the reason for concern -- I, too, would prefer not exposing children to television for numerous reasons, the values it imparts among them --  as someone who was raised in a "conservative", no-television household, I'm awfully glad I was able to view TV and other media from time to time that let me see the world beyond the prison walls of my controlled environment. I was able to compare my parent's worldview with another, and figure out what I wanted out of life. This obsession with controlling children, witnessed in both The Plain Reader and in Crunchy Cons, and displayed in the authors' hatred for public schools and media, strikes this escapee as sinister and unhealthy. Your values mean nothing if children cannot grow into adults who can make a choice. And therein lies the rub with Dreher's work, for as much as he advocates choice in other areas -- people should be free to run small farms, instead of being forced to play by agribusiness' rules; people should be freed from compulsory education, raising their children whatever way they decide; when it comes to belief, people should Learn their Place and believe what they're told. Tradition is God, and if you think you can modify it you are a degenerate loser who is responsible for the imminent destruction of humanity.

At times, Crunchy Cons was an eye-opening delight. Like The Plain Reader, it demonstrates how people can lives of purpose and value amid the noise of an entertainment-obsessed world.  The author's contempt for those who do not seek more meaning, however, and his anti-human belief in the primacy of tradition, left me feeling sick. The Plain Reader was a far better example of a conservative counterculture, and though problematic in ways, it was far gentler.

 *In Praise of Slow, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Fast Food Nation, The Geography of Nowhere, Technopoly, Amusing Ourselves to Death, To Have or to Be, American Mania, and Bowling Alone.

The Plain Reader

The Plain Reader
© 1998 various authors, edited by Scott Savage
272 pages

What really matters?  Such is the question explored by the contributing authors of The Plain Reader, a collaboration between Amish and Quaker communities to express how living simply allows them to ‘put to rout all that [is] not life’ and experience themselves, their families, their communities – every aspect of the human condition, in fact – in a more profound way.  Plain is a provocative work, prompting  readers to think critically about their own lives and how our habits reveal our values.In return, the lessons taught may allow those interested to create a more peaceful, meaningful life.

The Plain Reader begins with the account of a man who quit his job at an oil company and purchased a small working farm to run with his wife and children.  He was tired, he said, of working in a place that  encouraged reckless consumerism that allowed a tiny minority to live extravagantly (that's us) at the expense of both the poor and of future generations, who will left with our messes and without resources. He was tired of working long hours at this company, being separated from his children and world outside his office. In place of all that, he was choosing a life that allowed him to practice sustainability and self-reliance, and to impart those values to his children while watching them grow up and working alongside them at the family farm while experiencing the glory of the natural world.  Toward the book's end, one author writes that the essence of being Amish is choosing to reject anything that gets in the way of experiencing life fully, that constitutes a spiritual obstacle.

In that spirit, the authors of this book live. Some of them are not so different from most people who might pick up this slender volume: they have simply chosen to disengage from the constant havoc of everyday life. They've stopped shopping for the sake of shopping; they've shut off the television and found they liked a quieter home.  They've opted to bicycle to work, or move closer to it so they wouldn't have to drive. Some start a garden and learn to can. And others have taken more dramatic steps, like joining Amish communities and taking up farming as a vocation. Because the sources hail from Christian religious communities, that tradition is touched on within, but these authors do not need to inject religious beliefs into their ordinary lives, like slapping a "HONK IF U LOVE JESUS" sticker onto their SUV; instead, their ordinary lives are their practice, and every action is imbued with the sacred, from birthing to washing clothes. They are not Puritans, for the most part; one contributor is a Quaker minister who uses a laptop to write his sermons and provide his pulpit notes.  He's uncomfortable with having become dependent on the computer to write the notes he used to compose in longhand, but, he concludes, using the computer to write allows him more time to drive his buggy.

The relationship between humanity and machines is a running theme of the book; there exists a proper relation between the two, and working  out what that relation is should be left to people and communities. Critical discussion of the machine is not limited to tools and physical objects, however, like the effect of televisions and computer games on family life;  the authors take on Systems as machines, or as things which treat people like machines. They disdain an compulsory educational system that grooms  children to take tests, but doesn't impart any skills; they reject dehumanizing work, and a medical approach that views organs and individuals in isolation and regards disease in both as something which should be treated with an array of patented pills.  The contributors time and again turn away from the big and impersonal to the small and human-scaled; they embrace barter and favors systems rather than money, and stress the importance of adults who know children personally in teaching them about the world, one-on-one and by example, like apprentices and masters.

A common thread is that of community. As mentioned, most of the authors hail from Quaker and Amish communities, and so put great stock by traditions which bring and keep people together; The Plain Reader, while attacking most of what modern people take for granted, is conservative in that it generally emphasizes the welfare of communities over that of individuals, although the essayists presumably have different ideas as to what the ideal balance is between individual and communal well-being. While one urges people to think for themselves, another writes that removing televisions from the home allowed him to shelter his children, teaching them to accept certain beliefs on face value; he explicitly scoffs at this notion of people believing any old thing they want. The catch is, of course, that the culture the authors adore so much, the traditions they keep to, are themselves artifacts, just as invented by human beings as television sets, automobiles, and SaladShooters.  

Though not a large book, The Plain Reader offers an abundance of food for thought. But that food isn't candy; it isn't necessarily sweet and easy to swallow. It's substantial, chewy, and can be felt all the way down  your esophagus.  Even to someone as receptive to their ideas as myself, some of the essays presented a challenge, especially in  regards to health. While I find the "everything should be treated with pills" model as dubious as any,  the mention of holistic medicine and having an herb for everything makes my skepi-senses tingle. Diet and exercise have their place in warding off most diseases -- but antibiotics have their place, too.  The trick is to not destroy the body's immune system by swallowing a pill for every runny nose.  Everything in moderation -- or should that be, most things?

The Plain Reader commends itself to those interested in a thoughtful life. 

Related:

• In Praise of Slowness, Carl Honore
• Walden ; I to Myself, Henry David Thoreau
• Hey, Mom, Can I Ride my Bike Across America? John Siegel Boettener
• Consuming Kids: the Hostile Takeover of Childhood, Susan Linn
• Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse & George Williams

Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America?

Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America? Five Kids Meet their Country
© 1990 John Siegel Boettner
with excerpts from the journals of Heather Deutsch, Joy Fulton, Jimmy West, Carl Fagerlin, and Ethan Turpin.
439 pages

The United States isn't a nation that makes touring it by bike easy: those who wish to do it must tackle mountain ranges,  broad deserts, a cornucopia of potential natural disasters -- and that's not even including American drivers. Imagine trying to do it while simultaneously watching over five teenagers --  five kids, really, a group of three boys and two girls, all eleven between eleven and thirteen years old. That's what John Siegel Boettner, a middle-school teacher in California, did in the year of 1986. Beginning at the start of summer break, he and his wife toured with the kids from Washington, D.C. across the continent to Oregon, then down California to their home, a journey of nearly five thousand miles -- braving tornadoes, heat waves, snowstorms, and a string of mechanical problems, all in an effort to teach the kids about their country.

John Siegel Boettner isn't your usual teacher: the fact that's he willing to take care of five of his kids for four months across the nation and through a variety of disasters might already indicate that.  An avid cyclist, as soon as he began teaching he organized a bicycle club and began taking his kids on extended trips called "Educational Safaris": in one, he and his wards biked through the northeast,  exploring the sites of the American Revolution. Not only did the bike trips give the kids an opportunity to learn about themselves, of what they could achieve through their effort alone, but it made their history, their culture, come more alive...and such was their teacher's intention here, as after Mississippi they follow the Oregon Trail to the west coast.  By day, John is their leader, captain, mechanic, and coach, helping them to organize and keep moving, and calling the shots when things get hairy...as they did, often.  Unlike David Lamb's Over the Hills,  Hey Mom is peppered with near-disasters, usually near the mountains. By night, he's a teacher, reading to them from the journals of an Oregon Trail pioneer whose path they follow and whose experiences are an eerie mirror of their own.  The trip extends a month past summer vacation, but John feels no guilt about keeping the kids about of school. In his view, the experiences they are gaining on the road are worth far more than a month of memorization and regurgitation. This is the trip of a lifetime, the intimate details of which John accounts in the book, and when it was finished I felt sad, as though I'd been part of the experience and it was now over.

Before leaving on the trip, John read to his kids from Peter Jenkins' A Walk Across America;  Jenkins, too, transversed the nation in an effort to learn about it, to spend time with its people. Like Jenkins before them, John, his wife, and the kids gain much from the kindness of strangers...and strangers across the continent are very kind indeed to a band of kids doing what most think impossible even for adults, crossing a land of three thousand miles by bicycle.   Although this is the story of a journey, it's more about the people -- both the kids involved, like young Ethan who could barely ride a bike when the tale began, and the people who they meet, like the Amish folk in Tennessee.  I find accounts of people walking or cycling the entire country to be fascinating by themselves, but Hey Mom is extraordinary for featuring kids, whose energy, idealism, and joy and make a work to revel in reading.

Very much recommended. 

Related:

• The author giving a TEDx talk called "The Joy of Looking", in which he shares how one of his cycling students taught him the lesson of The Dead Poets' Society: gather rosebuds while ye may.. It's beautiful.
• A Walk Across America, Peter Jenkins

Pedaling Revolution

Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities
© 2009 Jeff Mapes
288 pages

That's some serious wind resistance there, buddy.

Governments across the world today are beset by problems common to all: rising fuel prices and obesity rates, the ever-present spectre of climate change, and the transportation needs of increasingly urbanized (or re-urbanizing) populations. Enter the humble bicycle: accessible to virtually everyone, regardless of age, sex, or income level; clean, quiet, and an excellent source of exercise. For too long in the United States, bicycling has been the province of a few intense racers and tourers who pride themselves on how miserable a trek they can endure. The end of the cheap oil era, however, has prompted cities to reexamine the bicycle as a means of transportation for the many, despite the car-centric nature of the American city.

Curbing car domination is not a futile hope: in the 1970s,  stirred by soaring oil prices, the Netherlands moved to discourage car use and promote cycling. The city of Amsterdam became a pioneer in modern cycling infrastructure; only Copenhagan can rival it. Both cities boast that nearly half of all trips within their cores happen via a cycle. Fittingly, then, Mapes begins with Amsterdam's story -- but the United States has its own homegrown success in Davis, California, a university town whose early growth was managed by a cycling advocate.  But Davis had it easy:  New York City and Portland, Oregon's success in creating room for cyclists in an already established urban area filled with cars is arguably more impressive.

Mapes' chapters on these cities not only demonstrate their success, but explore how they did it.  There's no authoritative source for how best to integrate bike traffic into transportation infrastructure. Approaches range from the simple (simply painting bike lanes onto existing roads) to the more involved (separate bike paths and even 'bike boulevards') -- and there are some who deny the need for bicycle infrastructure at all, harrumphing that cyclists should just learn to ride safely with auto traffic.  But more than just the built environment have to change to encourage cycling: traffic laws, like right-turn-on-red permits that allow motorists to take over pedestrian and cyclist right-of-ways, must be addressed. The book ends with a section on cycling safety, health benefits, and the important role bikes can play in raising children, and thus in creating a broader, sustainable bike culture.

Pedaling Revolution has great appeal to both cyclists and citizens concerned about the state of American cities, for whom it should prove most encouraging. The argue for cycling more is better made in The Green Metropolis, the cover of which is of a city in bodily form on a bike, but Mapes' account gives the already-converted great reason for hope, and could easily intrigue the curious to becoming part of a bicycling renaissance.

Taken from an April edition of The Selma Morning Times, 1900.

Related:

• Copenhaganize, a blog covering cities around the world as they move toward being more bike friendly, like Amsterdam Copenhagen.
• The Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, David Owen
• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, Jeff Speck
• The Sprocket and Critical Transit, two podcasts hosted by urban cyclists....based in Portland, naturally. The Sprocket's tagline is 'Simplifying the Good Life'; I especially enjoy their interviews with carfree parents.

Bringing up Bébé

Bringing up Bébé: One Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
© 2012 Pamela Druckerman
304 pages

When Pamela Druckerman moved to Paris to start a life with her new husband, she noticed something rather odd about French children: they behaved. Long accustomed to the whining, shrieking, squirming, picky eaters in the United States, she couldn’t help but wonder how the French did it…especially seeing as they didn’t seem to be harsh disciplinarians. Indeed, the children seemed to enjoy a fair bit of leeway…but then again, they also seemed to merit it. Druckerman flinched when a group of children ran ahead of their teacher on a busy sidewalk, but the teacher wasn’t bothered in the least – nor should she have been, since the children stopped at the crosswalk to wait for her, just as the teacher knew they would. The French and their children seem to have made a golden peace with one another…but how?  When Druckerman’s own marriage produced a baby, she began finding out how. Bringing up Bebe is the delightful result of Druckerman’s observations and direct experience with childhood and parenting in France, reflections with a lot of offer parents wondering what kind of approach to take with their own bébés.

Although at times Bringing up Bebe seems like a straightforward story of what happens when an American woman raises a child in France (Druckermen comments on her daughter Bean's early bilingualism, freely mixing English and French in the same sentence), the chapters are organized more by subject, following Druckerman's move to Paris and her following pregnancies.  The chapter titles ("paris is burping") establish Druckerman as a storyteller with a quirky sense of humor, ever entertaining to read. The sections cover diet, disicipline, daycare, food culture, language, and so on, but there are at least two concepts which emerge as a foundation of French parenting and are reference throughout. The first is that of 'éducation:   according to Druckerman, the French treat babies not as angry and hostile things that need to be tamed, but as little tiny people who simply need to be taught what is right. They communicate constantly with babies in the belief that the infants can understand them. (This seems dubious to me, but given that humans are social creatures, such communication can't help but be healthy.)  What's interesting is that since babies are regarded as people in their own right, they're expected from the start to conform to certain conventions of society, like the idea that you are just one person among many and are not the center of the universe, even if the only thing you can do is lie in your crib, wait for your cells to divide, and ocassionally fill your diaper. One parenting trick Druckerman learns early on is "The Pause": instead of running every time a baby cries, French parents wait a few seconds to see what happens. Often, the baby will go back to sleep (or was merely making noises in her sleep in the first place), and it is believed the delay between the baby crying and the parents responding establishes in the baby's mind that she is not the center of the universe.  Although children are granted certain indulgences for being young, in general they are expected to conduct themselves in a civilized manner, and are constantly groomed in this direction in every aspect of their lives. "The Pause" also teaches babies patience, and patience is emphasized so consistently that it allows children to dine with their parents in an adult restaurant, sitting for hours and behaving themselves.  'Education' is constantly enforced, not by punishment but by communication.

Children respond to this, partially through a second concept --  the cadre, or framework.  This establishes a few firm rules that are never to be violated, while giving children a free hand everywhere else. For instance, French parents teach their children that adults must have time to themselves, so the children are made to go to their bedrooms at a certain hour...but they are not forced to go to bed if they are not sleepy. The children thus learn to entertain themselves instead of constanting demanding their parents' attention.) The cadre allows children to explore and learn about the  world on their own, but within certain safe limits.  They are treated like adults who simply need to be taught the right thing, and they grow into adults who do it.

Although I'm not a parent, nor do I anticipate becoming one at this point in my life, I found much to appreciate here. The French parenting approach is in line with my own values, and seems quite sensible.  Definitely entertaining and nicely written: those who are interested in considering it as parenting advice might want to read customer reviews at Amazon or some other place to get an idea for how successful the approach has been in other people's lives. I bought this book to start off my Bastille Day reading set, and it's definitely a keeper.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
© 2012 Peggy Orenstein
260 pages

When did every little girl become a princess to be bedecked in pink and fawned over? Such is the question posed by Peggy Orenstein, author of numerous books on issues of motherhood and raising women. The answer is at least twofold. First, advertising toward girls in general has emphasized coy, yet overt sexuality, even to the very young: and secondly, in the early 1990s, the Disney Corporation realized there was a lot of money to be had in developing a line of princess goods.  But this isn't really a book on advertising: Orenstein is more concerned about what the princess culture is doing to the minds of girls. The substance of the book is an examination of  how girls view themselves and each other in society.

 What makes a princess special? There's no answer. A princess is special just because. She exists solely to be an object of attention: her specialness is not the result of her accomplishments, her skills, her talents, her character, or anything substantial.Therein lies the problem with the princess culture, for it influences girls to aspire to be objects of appreciation. Their sense of self-worth is an external fair, subject not to what girls feel themselves capable of, but how girls feel others respond to them. If they are not regarded as Special, they feel worthless. Distracted by the quest for attention, they don't bother with the kind of self-growth that would merit attention, or  be fulfilling on its own. Substance is placed by superficiality. This is particularly troublesome in the case of sexuality: in Orenstein's words, girls learn to aspire to be desired before they have desire (of that kind) on their own. Orenstein sees this as a problem for girlhood in general, because the princess culture has utterly hijacked what it means to be a girl. If a helmet isn't pink, it isn't a girl's helmet. If a mother scorns all the fluff, her inadvertent lesson to her daughter is that it's not okay to be a girl.  This being the problem, her solution -- in addition to reversing Reagan's deregulation of children's advertising -- is for parents to focus on teaching girls how to live for themselves, and not for the approval of others; to define themselves and not try to fit Disney's definition of a girl.

Orenstein is a fun author, especially as she covers beauty pageants for four-year-olds and facebook, using phrases like "Sesame street walker".She's also one who has to practice what she preaches, for her own daughter Daisy is one of the afflicted: the account conveys her desperate frustration in trying to raise Daisy to be a strong person in an environment swamped by odious messages in the advertising. It shares themes with Consuming Kids and So Sexy, So Soon and covers similar ground. What So Sexy, So Soon referred to as "age compression", Orenstein calls "KGOY", Kids Getting Older Younger. This refers to the way kids are attracted to objects advertised to older children, hence kiddie thongs and Barbie in the toddler aisle.  Of obvious interest to the parents and guardians of young women, and quite readable. 

Books in the News

Every so often I see news articles which touch on subjects I've been reading about; I used to link to them in weekly review posts from time to time, but I may start doing it in this format.

For Consuming Kids:

Advertising offers struggling schools a lifeline (USA Today)

Financially struggling schools nationwide are increasing the volume of advertising that children see in the halls, at football games and even on their report cards.
School administrators say that with a public unwilling to adequately fund K-12 education, they’re obligated to find new ways to keep teachers in classrooms.
“We know that we can’t continue to only look at ways to cut, we also need to be innovative about the assets we have and learn how to bring in more revenue,” says Trinette Marquis, a spokeswoman for the 28,000-student Twin Rivers Unified School District in McClellan, Calif.

For Asphalt Nation  and Suburban Nation:
States eye new motorist taxes: miles you drive could cost you (USA Today)

States are looking for new ways of taxing motorists as they seek to pay for highway and bridge repair and improvements without relying on the per-gallon gasoline tax widely viewed as all but obsolete.
Among the leading ideas: Taxing drivers for how many miles they travel rather than how much gasoline they buy. Minnesota and Oregon already are testing technology to keep track of mileage. Other states, including Washington and Nevada, are preparing similar projects.
The efforts are being prompted by the fact that gasoline taxes no longer provide enough money to pay for roads and bridges — especially when Congress and many state legislatures are reluctant to increase taxes imposed on each gallon. The federal tax of 18.4 cents a gallon hasn't been raised in nearly two decades.

For The Shallows
Some caution texting is ruining art of conversation, Martha Irvine

Statistics from the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that, these days, many people with cell phones prefer texting over a phone call. It's not always young people, though the data indicate that the younger you are, the more likely you are to prefer texting.And that's creating a communication divide, of sorts - the talkers vs. the texters.Some would argue that it's no big deal. What difference should it make how we communicate, as long as we do so?But many experts say the most successful communicators will, of course, have the ability to do both, talk or text, and know the most appropriate times to use those skills. And they fear that more of us are losing our ability to have - or at least are avoiding - the traditional face-to-face conversations that are vital in the workplace and personal relationships."It is an art that's becoming as valuable as good writing," says Janet Sternberg, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York who is also a linguist.

So Sexy So Soon

So Sexy So Soon:  the New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids
© 2008 Diane E. Levine, Jean Kilbourne
226 pages

For me, the filthiest show on television is Toddlers and Tiaras. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned: I'm generally repulsed by the stereotypical idea of 'sexiness' in western culture -- provocative clothes, made-up faces, and posed behavior. What attracts me to a woman is more an internal matter: I like character, strength, and self-respect. Perhaps I dislike the idea of sexiness because it's only about sex, missing the real substance of human relationships altogether. In any case, as objectionable as I find sexiness in general, to see children attempting to invoke it is outright horrifying. Although parents and guardians tend to be protective of their children and have always worried about the declining morality of the younger generation, since time began, surely today's problems are extreme enough to not be dismissed as the simple historical pessimism of the old.  We live in a world in which Victoria's Secret markets g-strings to little girls, where the toys are hookers, and top 40 stations play songs like "I'm Sexy and I Know It". This is a far cry from Aristotle kvetching about rebellious teenagers.  So Sexy So Soon is similar to Consuming Kids in that it examines the effects of advertising upon children. However, it is much more narrowly focused (on premature sexualization) and written with a greater emphasis on helping parents address the problem, primarily through communication.

The authors are not prudes: they acknowledge from the start that human beings are sexual creatures from the moment of our births. There is nothing the matter with sex or children being curious about the differences between men and women: has any generation of tykes not wondered where babies come from, or played the equivalent of "doctor"? The essential point of So Sexy so Soon is that advertisers are using sex to sell products. They're not interested in educating children about sex, let alone guiding them towards sexual responsibility. Their only concern is manipulating children into thinking sexy is a concept they should be concerned about, and to realize it they must buy these products or listen to this music or wear this makeup. So what if kids grow up with warped attitudes toward sex, gender roles, and their own self-worth?  So what if little  children, in the process of trying to emulate adults, start talking about oral sex and grinding against one another?  Sex sells -- even to kids.

Levine and Kilbourne both write with an eye toward helping parents. While moderating the home environment is crucial, they stress communication. At least one of the authors specializes in parent-child communication, and she advocates asking open-ended questions to find out what kids know, and letting them know that if they're confused about the barrage of messages they receive through television, music, and the Internet, that they can express that confusion with an adult without being judged. Children are the victims of premature sexuality, not its creators. Political action is also necessary: marketers and companies must take responsibility, because the tide of garbage they produce in their quest to maximize profits is overwhelming parents, setting their children against them. That tide has been building since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan  deregulated child-targeted advertising. The same agency which allowed the problem to transpire should be held accountable for fixing it.

So Sexy So Soon is of eminent interest to parents; both it and Consuming Kids are eye-opening works that detail the problems of childhood advertising. I would read them together.

Consuming Kids

Consuming Kids: the Hostile Takeover of Childhood
© 2004 Susan Linn
288 pages

To some, children are the joy of our lives; a refreshing source of curiosity, energy, youth, and joy. To others, they are nothing but grist for the mill. In Consuming Kids, child psychologist Susan Linn reveals the scope and consequences of the increasing commercialization of childhood, which effects more than just parents. It is a profoundly disturbing book; were I a parent its revelations would horrify me. But it demands to be read.

Consuming Kids opens at a conference in which children are the focus -- or rather, the target, because this is a marketing conference, where the latest psychological insights into the minds of children are put to good use. "Teenagers are socially anxious; build on that." These marketeers are family scientists as well: they cite a study about the importance of the Nag Factor, wherein the 'pester power' of children is tapped to manipulate parents into taking the kids to a given restaurant or frequenting a particular store. (That same study featured in Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and provoked my interest in this subject.) Linn is a psychologist by profession: she cares for children and is sickened by the way that studies done with good intentions -- to understand children's motivations -- are being perverted to use by companies which essentially profit by targeting vulnerabilities, like the aforementioned anxiety of teenagers or the fact that children cannot tell the difference between an advertisement and a factual program, let alone think critically about the content of said ads.

Linn devotes the bulk of the book to examining the consequences of child-targeting advertising: the promotion of consumerism among children, the idea that things will make them happy; the sinister way that they are conditioned to favor certain brands through cartoon figures and "role model" spokespersons like Ronald McDonald;  the rise of childhood obesity amid the expansion of advertising of candy and processed food to kids;  the use of violence and sex to capture attention; the rise of childhood addiction to alcohol and tobacco,  and the corruption of the public sphere, from PBS to the schoolroom. (The latter section makes this  work of interest to everyone, not just parents.)

I've read other works with a bone to pick with advertising of one kind or another, but I rarely enjoy them and never review them because prior reads have been so sloppily done; they consist mainly of one person idly complaining for paragraph after paragraph. This is certainly not the case with Linn, who tempers her passion with professionalism and focus. Her introduction immediately shares her sense of unease with the reader, and then she develops her many substantial criticisms. Hers is a convincing argument, not a rant, and it ends with impressive sections evaluating what our response should be. After examining advertising's relationship to free speech, she then points out that this is a particularly nonpartisan issue. It doesn't fit neatly into a party box: this kind of marketing has negative consequences for everyone save the firms targeting the kiddies. She then ends with a chapter detailing what we can do at home, in the community, in schools, in the marketplace, and as members of polities both large (the nation) and small (the city).

Consuming Kids is a magnificent piece of work; I would only fault it for being slightly dated with regards to references to advertising through the Internet and social media; most of Linn's concern is advertising through television and the schools. Otherwise, she's golden, offering a comprehensive criticism that is both passionate and moderate in tone. Highly recommended to parents and anyone concerned about the welfare of children and society.

Related:

Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser