What do the men on the following list have in common:

Ludwig van Beethoven
Nicolaus Copernicus
Rene Descartes
Edward Gibbon
Horace
Soren Kierkegaard
Sir Isaac Newton
Blaise Pascal
George Santayana
Adam Smith
Leonardo da Vinci
St. Paul

Two things, really.  First, they are some of the great minds and talents of Western Civilization.  Second, they were all bachelors.  In this piece in The New English Review, Christopher Orlet considers the benefits of bachelorhood.  Marriage has its champions, but not all were meant for it.  And I’ve known many good men who have been called to a life of celibacy (not that all bachelors are celibates, by any stretch).

Some years ago a noted Japanese researcher analyzed the biographical data of some 280 famous mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists and discovered that all peaked professionally in their twenties, at which point their careers spiraled downward. Married scientists suffered the worst decline in productivity. However, those who never married remained highly productive well into their fifties. “Scientists tend to ‘desist’ from scientific research upon marriage,” the researcher told an interviewer, “just like criminals desist from crime upon marriage.” One theory suggests married men lack an evolutionary reason to continue working hard (i.e., to attract females). Though it likely they similarly lack the prerequisite time and solitude.

I might qualify Orlet’s statement to say that married men don’t suffer a decline in productivity.  They just produce other things that are more commonplace: babies, families, other kinds of work.  But I can testify: my most productive years of writing - at least regarding quantity - were in my twenties, in graduate school, when I was without wife or child.  I worked 18 hour days, mostly writing and reading and talking about both.  Those were halcyon days.  I still write now, but in far less quantity and hopefully far more quality.  Nevertheless, I am productive.  I have the human beings to show for it.

A family that games together stays together, according to a new study by GfK NOP, a U.K. based international market research company. The study reports that 4 out of 5 (83 percent) of people in the UK believe the Nintendo Wii increases family interaction and made parents “feel close to their children.”

Pollster GfK Nop polled 464 people aged 16 and over and the report claims:

“While console games playing has traditionally been by oneself or with friends, the Wii appears to encourage people to play amongst the family. Close to a half (46 per cent) of Wii owners say they play Child against Parent (compared to a fifth - 21 per cent - for PS3 owners) and 43 percent of Wii owners play with their Spouse or Partner (compared to just 27 percent of XBOX 360 owners).

“Less than one in ten (9 percent) of all people asked claimed that playing on a Wii is unsociable; while one in three (33 percent) claim the PS3 is unsociable.”

Richard Matthews, Director of Insight at GfK NOP says, “The Nintendo Wii has been innovative in breaking down age and gender barriers and in changing traditional perceptions of gaming from solitary and anti-social to healthy, educational and interactive.” One wonders, however, if it is the game system that seems to engender feelings of closeness or the fact that the family is engaged in lightly physical, fun activity that enriches their time spent together? I love the tennis, bowling and golf games on Wii.

For many kids, board games are “bored” games because they often do not require much physical activity. The Wii game system, however, involves the entire body.  It also seems that kids really enjoy competing against their parents. Why? Because this is one of the best and most healthy ways for kids to test their own development and progress in their journey toward becoming an adult. One of the most memorable days in a boy’s life, for example, is the day he finally beats his dad at something. It gives him a sense that “I’m becoming a man.”

Additionally, the Wii game system creates a context for convivial family environments. ”Convivial” is the term used by a high school student in a youth ministry context when I asked him what he longed for at his home with his family. “I wish it were more convivial,” he said. This kid, wrestling with his own faith, is in a home with good doctrine but no laughter. Sad, isn’t it? For many kids, home is all business: Do the right things, believe the right things, and think as conservatively as your parents with little to no laughter or genuine affection.

The Wii game system also seems to break down generational and gender barriers, according to the study. Some of you may remember when churches used to be like this before the days of extreme forms of “youth this” and “women’s that” or “children’s this” and “men’s that.” Since most kids grow up in the church totally quarantined from adults in church life, until they graduate from high school (unless they get dumped into “college and career” or immediately turned into youth “interns”), some might suggest that churches set up “Wii Nights” because, according to the study, women and those over 60-years-old have taken a particular liking to the game system as well. Who knew?

Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, and Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food, have a nice discussion here about conservatism, agribusiness, the “Slow Food” movement, global “hunger,” the real cost of food, and the family dinner:

Look at what food marketing does to the family dinner. The American food industry spends $32 billion a year marketing 17,000 new products to us. They are trying very hard to undermine parents’ roles as gatekeepers of the family diet […] Food marketers work very hard to get us to eat 24/7, and if you look at the images on television, you see families too hurried to cook a meal. They’re so busy that all they can do is grab a cereal bar on the way out the door. All of this emphasis on snack food has the effect of eroding the crucial institution of families sitting down together. One of the great blind spots in American conservatism is not appreciating the role of consumer capitalism in eroding values such as the family dinner.

It’s a long discussion, and one more to add in your “Why to Garden” file.

I will not burden you with her name, and I will spare you the pictures, but I would like to announce the birth of my second daughter, Saturday, July 12, at 3:25am, in Savannah, Georgia.  She weighed 8 lbs., 7 oz., is healthy, has a gently bobbing head, and makes sounds like babies make.  Her mother, my wife, is healthy.  And her two-year old sister, my other daughter, is a confused and angry monkey.  I am now officially drowning in a sea of women. 

I don’t like it when I see men dressed like boys, and women dressed like girls.  I have no problem with tennis shoes, or with shorts, or with baseball caps.  I just have a problem when, aside from the size and cost of the clothes, it’s hard to tell the difference between what a boy and a man are wearing.  The same for women who try to look like young things.  Even when she’s got the body for it, it’s just a little embarrassing.  Part of the problem here is that we so desperately want to look and act and be young.  We want to discover our inner child.  We wear shirts that say “Runs with scissors” and “Eats glue.”  We sit in great big Starbucks chairs with our shoes off and our legs Indian-style, like Kindergarteners on growth hormone.  I can’t stand it.  Those kinds of things are the subjects of this book, called The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West.

The gist of it is this: In a now-vanished age, parents knew the difference between right and wrong and taught it to their children. For reasons that might have been fascinating to explore, the same generation that fought World War II, the Greatest Generation, rejected this role, raising children more interested in self-gratification and creating their own culture of music and clothes than in emulating their parents.

“The common compass of the past - the urge to grow up and into long pants; to be old enough to dance at the ball (amazingly enough, to the music adults danced to); to assume one’s rights and responsibilities - completely disappeared,” she writes.

West’s book makes some pretty big jumps from this idea to the destruction of Western Civilization, but it may be worth a skim in the bookstore.

Ms. West does know how to set the pulse racing. Along the way, we read of parents who hire strippers for their children’s parties, schools that have dropped honor rolls as too hurtful to students who do not make the list and a suburban mother outraged that her daughter has been suspended for giving oral sex to a classmate on the school bus. In court the mother argued that the school “was not clear in its written policies that oral sex on a bus was unacceptable behavior.”

Ah, it is quite nice to be a grown up.  Not always fun, but quite liberating.

A new study suggests that having children doesn’t make you happy.  Or perhaps I should rephrase.  A new study suggests that people with children report lower happiness levels than those without.  This is unexpected, to be sure:

In fact, no group of parents-married, single, step or even empty nest-reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.

This is a complicated matter.  How would one explain such results?

For the childless, all this research must certainly feel redeeming. As for those of us with kids, well, the news isn’t all bad. Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who’ve never had kids.

But still, how do you explain that parents show less happiness than non-parents?  The easy answer is that kids are no fun, but it seems it would be more complicated than that.  My answer is that happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 

I dislike the word feminist.  It’s just so loaded.  But that’s what this article is about, until we come up with a better word.  Sandra Tsing Loh at The Atlantic Monthly says feminists have come to some unusual places in fifty years: getting out of the house, getting college degrees and terrific jobs, and then: wanting to go back to the house.  What gives?  Weren’t women supposed to take over the world? 

[A]ren’t women at home subject to the oppression of their chauvinistic, soul-crushing husbands? As if a mere human could compete with clogged freeways and Sisyphean paper pushing (or its more up-to-date equivalent, paperless pushing) and burnt-coffee-laced afternoons counting the acoustic tiles in stale conference rooms, and the hours spent arguing over the wording of a memo that within minutes after its dissemination will be dragged into the now-two-dimensional circular file […]

Even providing a chilled martini at six o’clock and roast beef at seven to the legendary suburban alpha male of yore allowed most of one’s day to be fairly flexible. As for today’s poorer husbands, many of them are likely too tired from their job’s repetitious, socially invisible physical tasks to continually oppress their wives.

Of course, it’d still be hard for some women to admit this, to admit that they want to be home.  Just like it’s hard for more conservative stay-at-home-moms to admit that they might rather be out somewhere, working.  I still think the issue of working moms is too contentious to receive the more nuanced treatement it needs, at least from the Church.  Most of us Evangelicals are still too quick to condemn moms who work, moms who send their kids to pre-school, moms who do anything but stay at home and teach their children Latin. 

Until the home becomes as viable a workplace as it was a hundred years ago - when so many businesses and farms and means of employ were in the home or nearby - families are going to have to make tough decisions about what to do with the children, and what to do with the parents who tend to them.  It’s not a black and white matter of either A) loving your children or B) loving some selfish career.  Don’t you think?

There are two kinds of moms.  The kinds who put their kids in daycare, and the kinds who don’t.  The former group is subdivided into those who work and those who play.  The latter group consists of women who work at home or who have family to tend to the babies.  In my experience, women only hang out with other women who share their proclivities for, or against, daycare.  Women on one side of the line typically have strong feelings about women on the other side of the line.  At least that’s my experience.

My wife was a nanny for several years, and then worked at a daycare for a year.  The daycare was the most exhausting job she’s ever had.  All I could think was: you get to wear shorts and tennis shoes all day long, you get to develop real relationships with children, you get to be outside much of the time, and so on.  All she said in reply was: I spend my day cleaning snot and human waste from objects and people, including myself; I work with colleagues who are irrational, demanding, exhausted, and confused (the babies and the staff); and I spend much of my energy wondering how much these children would be better served by care from a member of their own families, including their parents.  And as for me, after working in the nursery during Sunday school and church for a few Sundays, I think I’ll keep my day job.

In Standardized Childhood sociologist Bruce Fuller describes how in the last 40 years, increasingly desperate working parents have turned to formal institutions to care for the youngest of children-in 1970 about 25 percent of 4-year-olds were in preschool; by 2000 more than 60 percent were. He describes America as having a “ragged non-system of child care” with the most recent statistics showing there are 113,000 nonprofit preschools across the country “situated in YWCAs, church basements, even licensed homes where women take in small gaggles of children.”

Over the decades, policy debates have raged and quieted over the need for and the benefits of universal preschool. (We’re currently in a quiet period.) But no one has resolved the tension between parents’ desire for day care that is high-quality and low-cost. Low-cost means low pay for the workers, which means high turnover, which means lower quality.

Daycare is a tender, complicated issue, because it touches on issues of gender roles, parenting roles, economic abilities, and ultimately the formation of the character and minds and abilities of our children.  So it won’t surprise me if some of your comments are full of invective.

The modern economy is a gelatinous, fluid beast, and it places families in unconventional situations.  I am not sure how things were in the 5^th century BC, or in 5^th century AD, or even in the 15^th century AD, but in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the agricultural economy meant that a lot of people worked at home, which is to say on the farm.  Men worked all day, women worked all day, and somehow, the kids got mostly fed and mostly educated and became mostly adults.  But now, in the last fifty years or more, the economy demands people work elsewhere.  Men work in an office, and now a lot of women work in an office, and that means somebody’s got to do something about the kids.  It’s not an easy situation.  Sometimes, the kids go to daycare.  Sometimes, the dads and moms decide that the moms will stay home and tend to the kids until school begins.  Sometimes the moms stay home and do school, too.  Sometimes they decide the impossible: that they will both work outside the home and both stay at home.  That’s what Marc and Amy Vachon decided:

After Maia was born, they negotiated part-time schedules, which turned out to be the easy part. Amy worked four days a week, Monday through Thursday; Marc worked three 10-hour days, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. 

The division of work led naturally to the division of child care. On the days he went to the office, Marc would leave early and bike to work (having only one car, despite two commutes, is one way they are able to afford life on two part-time salaries), while Amy did the entire morning child routine. On Monday and Wednesday, when she worked too, she would take Maia to family day care across the street from their house. On Friday, she and Maia would spend the day together. On Tuesday and Thursday, Amy would sleep a little later and leave Maia in Marc’s care. If Maia got sick on a Monday, they agreed in advance that Marc would take off from work, and Amy would do the same if the sick day was a Wednesday. It was a schedule that continued after Theo was born three years later.

Whew.  I’m exhausted.  The economic concept of the “division of labor” doesn’t mean that everybody divides everything equally.  It means they divide things equitably.  Which is to say that economic creators (e.g., individuals, nations, etc.) specialize in something they do well.  Same goes for the home, I always thought.  But, more power to parents who bypass healthy equity for radical equality.  I couldn’t imagine a worse situation in my home.  But still interesting to see others try it.

Here’s one for a future collection of great essays.  It’s from Joseph Epstein, and the title: “The Kindergarchy.”  Epstein is writing about how children came to rule the world: “Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in American and in perhaps any other national life.”  I’ll just excerpt some rich paragraphs.

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