Pendragons Princess

http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/07/24/no-kids-no-grief/

The Case Against Having Kids

Jul 24, 2009 by Anne Kingston

Elaine Lui was 29 years old and had been married for a year when she and her husband, Jacek Szenowicz, decided that they didn’t want children. “Before that, we didn’t give it a lot of thought,” says the Vancouver-based eTalk reporter who writes the popular celebrity gossip blog LaineyGossip.com. “It was just an assumption, ‘You get married, you have kids.’ ” Front-line exposure to a close relative’s three young children and the work they required provided a wake-up call, Lui says. “That killed it for us. We just looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t want them.’ ”

In the ensuing six years, the couple has been barraged with reasons why they should change their minds, from “Your life will have no value if you don’t” to “You’ll be so lonely when you get old” to Lui’s favourite: “Don’t you want to know what your children would look like?” “Any baby we’d have would be of mixed race,” she says. “So everyone says, ‘Oh, it would be so gorgeous!’ ” She laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s really going to make me want to change my whole life.’ ” It’s a life the couple enjoys: they work together on her website (he handles the business side), golf together, engage in community volunteer work, and dote on their dog, Marcus.

As baby refuseniks, Lui and Szenowicz belong to a tiny but growing minority challenging the final frontier of reproductive freedom: the right to say no to children without being labelled social misfits or selfish for something they don’t want.

“Are you planning to have children?” is a question Statistics Canada has asked since 1990. In 2006, 17.1 per cent of women aged 30 to 34 said “no,” as did 18.3 per cent of men in the same category. The U.S. National Center of Health Statistics reports that the number of American women of childbearing age who define themselves as “child-free” rose sharply in the past generation: 6.2 per cent of women in 2002 between the ages of 15 and 44 reported that they don’t expect to have children in their lifetime, up from 4.9 per cent in 1982.

Still, in a pro-natalist culture that celebrates the “yummy mummy,” and obsessively monitors baby bumps and the mini Jolie-Pitt entourage in magazines, saying “I don’t want kids” is akin to “There’s a bomb on the plane.” In the past, those who chose not to have children did so quietly, observes Toronto-based poet Molly Peacock, whose 1998 memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece was acclaimed a breakthrough for its candid recounting of her decision not to have children. “It has been an intense and underground conversation,” Peacock says, noting many childless women contacted her to say, “At last, someone is talking about what I’ve been living silently.”

Increasingly, though, the childless by choice are vocal about it. Laura and Vincent Ciaccio are spokespeople for No Kidding!, a social club for non-parents founded in Vancouver in 1984 that now boasts more than 40 chapters in five countries. Laura, a 31-year-old attorney in New York City, refers to children as a “calling,” one that she and Vincent, a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at Rutgers University, have decided isn’t for them. “I didn’t want to make such a major lifestyle change just because it was something society expected of me,” she says. “Children should be something people have because they really want them.”

Speaking up on the subject can elicit a smackdown. Last February, the 37-year-old British journalist Polly Vernon wrote a defiant column in the Guardian enumerating the reasons she didn’t want children: “I’m appalled by the idea,” she wrote. “Both instinctually (‘Euuuw! You think I should do what to my body?’) and intellectually (‘And also to my career, my finances, my lifestyle and my independence?’).” The response was terrifying, she reports: “Emails and letters arrived, condemning me, expressing disgust. I was denounced as bitter, selfish, un-sisterly, unnatural, evil. I’m now routinely referred to as ‘baby-hating journalist Polly Vernon.’ ”

Lui, who observes celebrity for a living, rejects what she sees as a pernicious retrograde swing back to the ’50s in which motherhood was celebrated as women’s highest calling. She points to actress Jennifer Garner remaining relevant in the celebrity press simply by being photographed with her two young daughters, and to Tori Spelling reclaiming her reputation after breaking up her current husband’s marriage by churning out bestsellers about motherhood. “Motherhood is the ultimate whitewash,” she says. “Steal someone’s husband, or be a drug addict, then become a mother and you’re redeemed.”

In a culture in which Jennifer Aniston’s childlessness provides weekly tabloid lamentations, a female star who goes public with a decision to remain so demonstrates courage. In a recent interview in U.K. Cosmopolitan, the 36-year-old actress Cameron Diaz, who is childless, expressed a disinclination to have children, citing environmental reasons: “We don’t need any more kids. We have plenty of people on this planet.” She noted stigma still exists: “I think women are afraid to say that they don’t want children because they’re going to get shunned.” But she also expressed optimism the tide was turning: “I have more girlfriends who don’t have kids than those that do,” she said.

Now the childless in North America have their most defiant advocate in a mother of two: Corinne Maier, a 45-year-old French psychotherapist whose manifesto, No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children, created a furor when published in France last year. Count on the same happening when it’s released here this week. Among Maier’s hard-won advice: “If you really want to be host to a parasite, get a gigolo.”

The societal shift in attitudes toward childlessness is most evident in language, with the buoyant “child-free” replacing “childless,” a word stigmatized for conveying a void or handicap. The childless minority has always been with us. But in the past why they didn’t procreate wasn’t the concern of mainstream academic study or social debate: to the extent it was even considered, it was assumed that they couldn’t due to some biological reason or chose not to for negative reasons, such as having had a bad childhood themselves.

The arrival of the pill in the 1960s, which allowed women to delay childbearing, also permitted them to forgo it altogether. Support groups popped up to allow like-minded people to congregate—the first being the National Organization for Non-Parents formed in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1972.

With the advent of the “child-free” came a rethink of the reproductive imperative, formerly assumed to be hard-wired in every human brain. But as demographer David Foot, a professor of economics at the University of Toronto, points out, social factors also play a role, the most significant being female education, which was also abetted by the pill’s arrival. “The higher the education a woman has, the greater likelihood that she won’t have children,” he says. This is consistent across cultures, he notes. The birth rate in Iran, where women go to university, is lower than that in the U.S., where census data reveals voluntarily childless women have the highest incomes compared to other women. In the U.K., 40 per cent of university graduates aged 35 are childless; it has been estimated that at least 30 per cent will stay that way.

Why this is happening is the subject of much theorizing: educated women delay childbearing until it’s no longer an option; they refuse to pay what economists call the “motherhood premium” in which the salaries of university-educated women plateau after childbirth and then drop, while fathers’ incomes are unaffected; they recognize that raising children is a sacrifice of time, money and freedom they’re not willing to make; or they simply don’t want to have children and are able to say no.

(The matter is complicated, Foot observes, because income level is also linked to procreation. What is known is that paying women to have children doesn’t work: the only variable proven to increase the chances of women having children is to offer a supportive social network, as evident by the rising fertility rates attributed to government initiatives in Scandinavian countries and France, where generous tax breaks, incentives, and maternity- and parental-leave provisions have resulted in the birth rate rising to 2.7 per woman, the highest level in Europe.)

A growing literature on childlessness has emerged. It has been deemed a “revolution” in The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today by Madelyn Cain, herself a mother. Academic treatises such as Mardy Ireland’s Reconceiving Women: Separating Motherhood from Female Identity attempt to diffuse stereotypes. There are also the cheerleaders, viz. Nicki Defago’s Childfree and Loving It! And the issue has been politicized in books such as Elinor Burkett’s The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless, which contends the “child-free” subsidize “breeders.”

The array of narratives reveals that the choice not to have children can be as complex—or as elemental—as the desire to have them, as reflected in Nobody’s Mother: Life without Kids, a 2004 anthology of essays by a diverse group of Canadian women, and Nobody’s Father from the male perspective, published in 2006. Many women knew they didn’t want children as children, a claim backed by research in The Childless Revolution that explores the notion that the impulse not to have children is genetic, like being gay. Most were clear-eyed that the choice required a new anchorage. “Children were not a way of ensuring happiness or endowing my days with meaning,” the poet Lorna Crozier writes. “That hard task was mine alone.” The American author Lionel Shriver, who never wanted children, writes in “Separation From Birth” that her greatest fear “was of the ambivalence itself”: “Imagine bearing a child and then realizing, with this helpless, irrevocable little person squalling in its crib, that you’d made a mistake. Who really, in that instance, would pay the price?”

But no book on the subject has been more provocative or summoned more furor than Corinne Maier’s No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children. It isn’t the first time the Freudian analyst hit the French national nerve: her 2004 book Hello Laziness: The Art and the Importance of Doing the Least Possible in the Workplace pilloried the country’s famously lax workplace culture. In No Kids she deploys an acerbic wit to dismantle the idealized depiction of parenthood perpetuated by the French state, “the fertility champion of Europe,” a distinction greeted by the country’s media like a sporting triumph.

Speaking from her home in Brussels, Maier says she was prompted to write No Kids by a conversation she had with two female friends in their 30s who told her they felt like social deviants because they didn’t want children. That perception is well-founded, she writes: “To be childless is considered a defect; irrevocably judged, those who just don’t want children are also the objects of pity.” But Maier believes “conscientious objectors to this fertility mythology” should be rewarded, not stigmatized. “To have a kid in a rich country is not the act of a citizen,” she writes. “The state should be helping those who decide not to have children: less unemployment, less congestion, fewer wars.”

She admits there are times she regretted having her own children, now aged 14 and 11, a declaration that has predictably branded her a “bad mother” whose children are destined for a lifetime of therapy. (Yet she’s only saying what many mothers silently think but aren’t allowed to say. In 1975, Ann Landers famously asked readers: “If you had it to do over again, would you have children?” Seventy per cent of respondents said “no.”) Maier reports that when she had her children she was madly in love, a hostage to her hormones. She too bought into the modern parenting mythology that children could be psychic curatives. Raised as an only child, she believed children would end her feelings of loneliness. Instead, she says, their arrival created new forms of loneliness.

The professional provocateur cuts through the gauzy romanticized depiction of parenthood promoted in France, which has far less to do with love of children than “a form of nationalism to enhance our identity,” she says. Maier doesn’t mince words, calling labour “torture,” and breastfeeding “slavery.” The idea that children offer fulfillment is also dismantled: “Your kid will inevitably disappoint you” is reason No. 19 not to have them. Much of what she has to say won’t be breaking news to most parents: children kill desire in a marriage and can be demanding money pits. Without them, you can keep up with your friends and enjoy your independence.

Research backs Maier’s assertions. Daniel Gilbert, who holds a chair in psychology at Harvard and is the author of the 2006 best-seller Stumbling on Happiness, reports that childless marriages are far happier. He also reports researchers have found that people derive more satisfaction from eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television than taking care of their kids: “Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework,” he writes in Stumbling on Happiness.

Yet a 2007 Pew Research Center survey found people insisted that their relationships with their children are of the greatest importance to their happiness. Gilbert believes the reason people say this is because they’re expected to. He puts it in clinical economic terms: the more people pay for an item, the more highly they tend to value it, and children are expensive: the latest data suggests it costs upward of $250,000 to raise one to age 18.

No Kids is less anti-child polemic, however, than scathing cultural criticism. Maier lampoons the modern family (“an inward-looking prison focused on the child”) and the prevailing mindset that celebrates reproducing one’s DNA as “the ultimate objective of human experience.” Over-attentive focus on children saps cultural creativity, she argues: “Children are often used as an excuse for giving up on life without really trying. It takes real courage to say ‘Me first.’ ”

Parents, not non-parents, are the selfish ones, she avers: “Every baby born in a developed country is an ecological disaster for the whole planet.” She’s pessimistic about these babies’ future prospects, telling French women their children will be “loser babies,” destined for unemployment or to become factory drones. Maier blames contraception, which allows people to opt out of parenthood, for irrevocably altering the parenting dynamic. Once, “people had children because they had them,” she says. Now, every child must be a desired child, which requires of parenthood a “performance worthy of Superman or Superwoman.”

And that in turn has created a backlash among the childless that is less focused on children than on modern parenting itself, what Lui refers to as the “mommy cult” and Vernon calls the “pampering cult of Bugaboo-wielding, Mumsnet-bothering dullness.” Like Maier, Vernon doesn’t like what parenting does to grown-ups: “Spare me the one-track conversations. Spare me the self-righteousness, the sense of entitlement . . . Spare me the pretensions of martyrdom and selflessness.” There’s nothing selfless about having a baby, she argues, pulling out The Planet card: “You really want to be selfless? Adopt, lover.”

Shriver is less righteous about the non-parenting choice, admitting “there is something nihilistic about refusing to reproduce, selfish in the worst way.” She explains: “Take individual fulfillment at the expense of parenthood to the limit, and one generation has a cracking good time, after which the entire human race, poof, vanishes from the planet.” (This, in fact, is precisely the goal of the most extreme childlessness advocates out there: the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which says, “the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens . . . us.”)

Now that we’re a full generation into voluntary childlessness, research is beginning to reveal the longer-term consequences. Ingrid Connidis, a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario and the author of Family Ties and Aging, has conducted pioneering studies among people 55 and over that distinguish between those who are childless by choice and those who are childless by circumstance. All have adapted, she says: “But the childless by choice are more content, have higher levels of well-being and are less depressed.” She has also compared levels of satisfaction between the childless and parents, dividing the latter group into parents who have a good relationship with their children and those who do not. “Parents who don’t have good relationships with children are not as happy as people with good relationships with their children or people who are childless by choice,” she says.

Molly Peacock’s husband, Michael Groden, an English professor at the University of Western Ontario, says he has no regrets about not being a parent. Now 62, he says fatherhood was never a life goal. He and Peacock, who dated as teenagers, married 16 years ago, “Reconnecting with me sort of made that a conscious thought for him,” she says.

As part of his doctoral dissertation, Vincent Ciaccio is investigating why men choose to remain childless—new terrain. As with women, the reasons are all over the map, and include “betterment of relationships,” “career motivations,” “fear of failure as a father,” “not liking kids,” and “the desire to remain in their current lifestyle.”

Connidis’s research also explores the common concern that the childless will be lonely or bereft in old age. She found they’re no less lacking in support than those with children. “They’ve created their own network,” she says, noting people without children are more likely to end up in a nursing home. Her conclusion: “There’s no guarantee that having children will make you happy or not having them will make you sad.”

Of course, the idea that parenting choices should bring happiness one way or the other has modernity written all over it. But what any happiness appears to stem from is not children or their absence but rather the ability to make the choice.

Maier, who’s a brilliant contradiction of her own claim that women have to choose between motherhood and success, knows her polemic would have been ignored if she didn’t have children; she would have been judged “a bitter, jealous old hag,” she writes. No Kids puts her in a no-win position, she says with a laugh: “People think I’m a bad mother. But if I didn’t have children, people would have said I’m a person who is not happy because I don’t have children.”

It’s an ironic Catch-22 that it takes a parent to support the choice not to become one. But somebody has to do it. As Elaine Lui points out: “Why did we fight so hard for the right to make this choice, only to have it not respected when we do?”

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Lui hit the nail on the head here - we are turning back to the 1950’s, society wise, when it comes to the social (second class citizenship) status for women. The article has other facts, too, such as better educated women being less likely to have children than those who have children, especially young, single women who have children out of wedlock. The more intellectually developed a woman becomes, the desire, or instinct, for children diminishes. I like what “The Childless Revolution” says about the desire to have children or not being genetic. It is to an extent, Mother Nature’s way of balancing the human population naturally, even though some women continue to insist on getting IVF in order to have a child. Unlike men, however, women still have a long road ahead of them in the social acceptance of being childfree, especially married women.

Time for another totally original post. While I have only been to the hospital ER for a few times during my teen and adult years, each time I was there, I would get the same phrase. One was when I was ill and had major stomach cramps (which dated back to my childhood years of a food allergy; lactose intolerance), then later on when I had some kidney stones. I should mention, the first event mentioned was when I was fourteen years old and in high school. Having no interest in boys at all at that age, being asked such a question was a bit of a slap in the face. You know, the kind that results in a raised left eyebrow by the person being asked the question. o make a long story short, X rays were taken, etc. I guess the doc was surprised to find out I didn’t have any womb lice growing. The kidney stone time was when I was in excruciating pain (they had to be surgically removed). I mean, how can a doctor in the ER ask that sort of question when someone like me is laying there, writhing in pain and wishing for a shot of morphine?

Now I know I am not the first female that these questions have been asked of in the ER. As tasteless as it is for any doctor to be asking that, how about just helping the patient figure out what the health issue is? If I mention I have a pain located in a certain part of my body, why start with the “Are you pregnant?” bit? No class. Being a nullipara, (doctors are no longer required to take Latin, just write as if their letters look like Latin) do you really think I’m with a kid? With a stomach as flat as mine, you’d think the docs would notice. But of course they couldn’t. Well, that is just one reason I do not like going to doctors or hospitals at all.

I am at a loss for words. The grisly details are ahead:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090609/ap_on_re_us/us_pregnant_woman_killed

By RYAN KOST, Associated Press Writer Ryan Kost

June 9, 2009

HILLSBORO, Ore. – A once-pregnant 21-year-old newcomer to Oregon who was found dead in a crawl space of a home had been cut open and her baby taken from her womb, investigators said Monday.

It couldn’t be determined if the infant son of Heather Snively died before or after he was removed, the Washington County sheriff’s department said in a statement.

A 27-year-old woman, Korena Roberts, has been charged with murder in Snively’s death. She appeared in court Monday but did not enter a plea.

A 911 call on Friday brought emergency workers to Roberts’ house in the Portland suburb of Beaverton. Workers found blood on the floor and Roberts’ boyfriend trying to revive the infant.

Investigators said Roberts claimed the baby was hers. At the emergency room, doctors, who were unable to revive the baby, determined that Roberts had not given birth.

Police said they returned to Roberts’ home and found the hidden body. Roberts’ boyfriend is cooperating and doesn’t face charges, the sheriff’s office said.

A medical examiner said Monday that Snively died of blunt and sharp force injuries.

“At this time, it has not been determined if she died because of head wounds she received or as a result of cutting injuries she received to her abdomen,” the sheriff’s office said.

A grand jury will hear the case, the prosecutor said, and Roberts might also face charges in the infant’s death — if lab tests determine he ever took a breath.

“The issue is was the child alive at all at any point in time,” said Washington Count District Attorney Bob Herman. “This is certainly unusual for its circumstances and nature.”

Investigators said Monday that Roberts, who has two children younger than 10, had been telling friends and relatives for months that she was pregnant, and told many people she would have twins.

Snively had recently moved to Oregon from Maryland because her boyfriend and father of the child had found a better job.

Snively’s mother, Heidi Kidd of St. Albans, W.Va., said Snively met Roberts a few weeks ago through Craigslist, the online classified service. Police said Monday they are still trying to confirm that.

Roberts told Snively she was pregnant and wanted baby clothes, Kidd said. They befriended one another and kept talking online.

Kidd told The Associated Press on Sunday that her first grandson was to be named John Steven.

“I’m still in shock; it hasn’t hit me,” she said. “I mean, that initial phone call; I just couldn’t believe it. I just could not believe I was talking about my own child.”

Neighbors on Monday said Roberts bought a stroller at a garage sale and set up a crib on the front lawn of her rental home. They said Snively was seen at Roberts’ house more than once.

On Monday outside the house, there was a blue plastic play pool, a broken yellow play tractor, offerings of flowers and a handwritten note, saying, “May God be with you.”
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This is screwed up beyond all mortal comprehension. Maybe it is also time to send a very strong message to women: Ladies, if you are pregnant and do not show it yet, do try not to blab about it to the entire planet. Please learn to keep your bedroom behaviour private. I used to think it was bad when new mothers would plaster photos of their kids everywhere including the Internet, then wonder why they would receive alarming emails along the lines of child pornography.

Second, when a mother to be is expecting, not to befriend a total stranger on the Internet for baby clothes, like Snively did. There is so much wrong to this case. Our society has failed women and relegated them to baby making machines to the point where young women absolutely burn with lust for a child of their own. I guess the days of stealing pink babies from unattended shopping carts are over with. Now it’s upgraded to murdering a pregnant woman for her baby. Sick, sick, sick.

This past Friday my husband and I went out shopping like we usually do and while on our way to one of our favorite thrift shops we saw a young boy, aged about 16, run across the street with his girlfriend in hand. The girl was either 15 or 16 and obviously pregnant. Surprisingly, her hand wasn’t holding up her belly though to keep the creature inside from dropping out as they ran. If that happened, that would have been quite a site to see. (Open up the cell phone cameras and let it roll!)

That incident brought my husband and myself to talk about why some women are literally in love with the idea of being pregnant, and being in love with pregnancy itself. Geez, I’d rather be in love with my husband, or chocolate, or even hiking. But certainly not pregnancy. With the first three at least I would get something positive out of it - a great cuddle, a great taste, or a great workout. Pregnancy gives a woman none of those things. Neither does a baby. Such romantic concepts of motherhood, babies, pregnancy, and children don’t benefit women much nowadays (see post below on Oprah’s recent show.) . At least I know I’m not missing a thing.

This isn’t really big news - more of common knowledge - but worth posting just the same:

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/ss/local/114314.php

Study: Illegal immigrants having more kids in US

April 14, 2009, 8:43 a.m.

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Growing numbers of children of illegal immigrants are being born in this country, and they are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty than those with American-born parents, a report says.

The study released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center highlights a growing dilemma in the immigration debate: Illegal immigrants’ children born in the United States are American citizens, yet they struggle in poverty and uncertainty along with parents who fear deportation, toil largely in low-wage jobs and face layoffs in an ailing economy.

The analysis by Pew, a nonpartisan research organization, estimated that 11.9 million illegal immigrants lived in the U.S. Of those, 8.3 million were in the labor force as of March 2008, making up 5.4 percent of the U.S. work force, primarily in lower-paying farming, construction or janitorial work.

Roughly three out of four of their children — or 4 million — were born in the U.S. In 2003, 2.7 million children of illegal immigrants, or 63 percent, were born in this country.

Overall, illegal immigrants’ children account for one of every 15 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Illegal immigrants also have become more geographically dispersed, increasingly passing up typical destinations like California in favor of jobs in newly emerging Hispanic areas in Southeastern states like Georgia and North Carolina.

In 2008, California had the most illegal immigrants at 2.7 million, double its 1990 number, followed by Texas, Florida, New York and New Jersey. Still, California’s 22 percent share of the nation’s illegal immigrant population was a marked drop-off from its 42 percent share in 1990.

The latest demographic snapshot comes as President Barack Obama is preparing to address the politically sensitive issue of immigration reform later this year, including a proposal to give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

Though their numbers have soared over the past two decades, the total number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. has declined or remained flat in the last few years. Demographers attribute that to slower rates of migration into the U.S. caused in part by the recession, as well as to deportations and stepped-up immigration enforcement during the Bush administration.

Among the findings:

• One-third of the children of illegal immigrants live in poverty, nearly double the rate for children of U.S.-born parents.

• Illegal immigrants’ share of low-wage jobs has grown in recent years, from 10 percent of construction jobs in 2003 to 17 percent in 2008. They also make up 25 percent of workers in farming and 19 percent in building maintenance.

• The 2007 median household income of illegal immigrants was $36,000, compared with $50,000 for U.S.-born residents. In contrast to other immigrants, illegal immigrants do not earn markedly higher incomes the longer they live in the United States.

• About 47 percent of illegal immigrant households have children, compared with 21 percent for U.S.-born residents and 35 percent for legal immigrants.

• About three-quarters, or 76 percent, of illegal immigrants in the U.S. are Hispanic. The majority came from Mexico (59 percent), numbering 7 million. Other regions included Asia (11 percent), Central America (11 percent), South America (7 percent), the Caribbean (4 percent) and the Middle East (2 percent).

Children of illegal immigrants hold a delicate place in the U.S. On the one hand, the Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that these children — whether they were U.S. citizens or not — were entitled to a public school education. California and a few other states also provide some college tuition breaks to illegal immigrants.

At the same time, the immigrants and their families are among the poorest people in the U.S., easily exploited by employers and subject to arrest at any time. Children who are U.S. citizens cannot petition for their parents to become legal U.S. residents until they are at least 21.

Earlier this year, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found that more than 100,000 parents of U.S. citizens were deported over the decade ending in 2007, prompting the department to say it would gather more information about families before deporting immigrants.

The Pew analysis is based on census data through March 2008. Because the Census Bureau does not ask people about their immigration status, the estimate on illegal immigrants is derived largely by subtracting the estimated legal immigrant population from the total foreign-born population.

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The average number of children per Mexican couple here in AZ is 4 to 5 kids. While I realize some of these families are here legally, others are not; the others just make more babies in order to get that free welfare check from the government. At this time, it is unwise for these immigrants to even make more babies with the present shape of the economy, as more babies just exacerbates the problem. It should be illegal for the immigrants to send the American money they earn back across the border to their families and anyone caught doing so, to be deported.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090408/sc_livescience/kidscurbmaritalsatisfaction

Kids Curb Marital Satisfaction

April 8, 2009

Parents all know that children make it harder to do some of the most enjoyable adult things.

Bluntly put, kids can get between you.

Now scientists have attached some numbers to the situation.

An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born.

“Couples who do not have children also show diminished marital quality over time,” says Scott Stanley, research professor of psychology at University of Denver. “However, having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child.”

An unrelated study in 2006 of 13,000 people found parents are more depressed than non-parents. Scientists speculate that the problem is partly a modern one, because parents don’t get as much help at home as they did in previous generations.

There are key variables to note in the new study.

Couples who lived together before marriage experienced more problems after the birth of a child than those who lived separately before marriage, as did those whose parents fought or divorced.

However, some couples said their relationships were stronger post-birth. They tended to have been married longer or had higher incomes.

Children don’t ruin everything, Stanley points out.

“There are different types of happiness in life and that while some luster may be off marital happiness for at least a time during this period of life, there is a whole dimension of family happiness and contentment based on the family that couples are building,” he said. “This type of happiness can be powerful and positive but it has not been the focus of research.”

The new research, funded by a grant to the University of Denver from the National Institutes of Health, is detailed in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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A few notes here: according to Ellen Peck’s 1971 book “The Baby Trap”, people who have had children in the past, during the 1950’s to 1960’s, had to get better paying jobs in order to feed their children and provide better for them. It cannot be assumed that just because a married couple has two or more children have a higher income by coincidence, but because they have to have that income because if they do not, they wind up living at the lowest rung of the social ladder. Also, the only reason such marriages last longer is because many times they have to for their kids. It can be very taxing for a married couple to consider separation or divorce if they have children. Second, childfree couples, married or not married, know the value of closeness in a relationship: they do not just automatically assume that because they are close, that closeness will last even if they did have children. Third, and most importantly although never brought up due to the extreme taboo of the matter, children, like that potential affair lingering at the office or elsewhere, are a third party. Marriages as defined by our society are between two people and monogamous. Most people do not consider children to be third paries like that adulterous affair but guess what: they are. Both have the potential to destroy marriages in the same manner. Maybe some people will think this over before they decide to have children. If they can’t tolerate a potential adulterous affair, it is perhaps better that they should not be making babies on any level. And forget about adoption, too.

http://www.worldofceleb.com/Quotes/Babies/Babies2.html

I came across this yesterday and figured some of these are worth sharing:

“Except that right side up is best, there is not much to learn about holding a baby. There are one hundred and fifty-two distinctly different ways –and all are right! At least all will do.”
– Heywood Broun
1888-1939, American Journalist, Novelist

Yes, I have seen kids held all different, weird, and wacky ways when I worked at the local mall. Even upside down! But the kid doesn’t seem to mind it. With all of those constantly changing positions, it’s like riding on the Whirligig at the local amusement park.

“Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

This seems to be especially true of men. Watch a father in public with his kid. Really, he is trying to be a big buddy to the grommet.

“A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
– Ronald Knox
1888-1957, British Scholar, Priest

LOL! Isn’t it interesting how there is a cover for that “other end” but not the first end? LOL!

“Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.”
– Marshall Mcluhan
1911-1980, Canadian Communications Theorist

This is the best one yet. Awesome.

“A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.”
– Mark Twain
1835-1910, American Humorist, Writer

This must have been one of those times when Twain was being serious.

“I don’t dislike babies, though I think very young ones rather disgusting.”
– Queen Victoria
1819-1901, Queen of Great Britain

This, from an era where lesbianism was perfectly legal and male homosexuality, illegal. Whatever.

More here:

http://workinghumor.com/quotes/babies.shtml

“Watching a baby being born is a little like watching a wet St. Bernard coming in through the cat door.” - Jeff Foxworthy.

How true.

“We have far too many kids. At one time in the playpen there was standing-room only. It looked like a bus stop for midgets. It used to get so damp in there, we’d have a rainbow above it. - Phyllis Diller.

That Phyllis Diller is so funny.

More:

http://www.gaia.com/quotes/topics/babies?page=2

“I didn’t know how babies were made until I was pregnant with my fourth child.” - Loretta Lynn

Lynn was married at the age of 14 to an older man where she was born and raised in Kentucky. Kind of a sad statement to not know that babies are the result of sexual intercourse. But that was back in in 1950’s.

I will just provide the link to the review and allow my readers to view the original piece. Frankly, Peck makes a number of good points and also explains how females in our society are thoroughly socialized into motherhood from a very early age. Few of these girls will ever make it to the questioning of this socialization - namely, the childfree women of America. It is a good read and recommended for everyone who does not want to “follow the crowd.”

This is a great article.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article5919880.ece

March 17, 2009

Ten things they never tell you about motherhood

There’s a conspiracy of silence about motherhood, argues our writer. From schoolgate gossips to bed-wetting, here is her guide for Mother’s Day.

Sarah Vine

Motherhood is one of the great obsessions of our age. Everyone seems to have an opinion, even those who will never experience it (men), and those for whom it is a distant memory (grumpy old ladies). Whether you breast-feed or bottle-feed, give birth naturally or deliver by Caesarean, stay at home or return to work, the impression is that whatever you are doing, it’s almost certainly wrong.

The most curious aspect of this is that much of the pressure comes not from some patriarchal conspiracy, but from women. Even the National Childbirth Trust recently stated that it wants to see the use of epidurals during labour reduced by 40 per cent to “boost traditional births” - aka “agonising pain”.
Most confusing of all is what a friend of mine calls “the conspiracy of silence”: the abyss that exists between what people will tell you about having children and what it really entails. The truth is, as my mother once remarked darkly, that if women thought properly about having children, no one would ever give birth again.

Here then are ten things about motherhood that no one will tell you.

1. Bottoms
Motherhood, especially in the early years, is a scatological business. You will find yourself responsible for more dung than the keeper of the elephant enclosure at London Zoo. As a result, things that would once have made you gag are now mild inconveniences. At 3am, when your youngest, all snuggly next to you, covers your side of the bed in a wet, warm pool of wee, you don’t leap out and strip the sheets. Oh no: you stagger to the bathroom, grab a few towels, cover the wet patch and go back to sleep. You get to the stage when having “a little bit of wee, Mummy” on your trousers is normal. You will get used to sharing a lavatory cubicle with at least one other person, sometimes two or three on an outing. With a son you will, at some time, have to hold his willy when he goes to the loo.

2. Partners
You know those frazzled couples you used to see around at weekends? The ones who don’t appear to have washed or ironed their clothes? They call each other “Mummy” and “Daddy”, even though they once had names of their own. Their vocabulary now consists of a series of stock phrases: “You can’t have another Lego Star Wars Space Ship”; or “You can have an ice-cream, but only if you eat your broccoli.” Don’t get too cross with these couples. Remember, they’ve been up since 6am and they probably haven’t had sex for, ooh, about a thousand years. And crucially, one day that might be you.

3. Making a fool of yourself
It doesn’t matter how cool you are, once you have children you will snort like a piggy-wig, neigh like a horse, run through the park shouting “Here comes the wibble-monster”. Sometimes this can be liberating. Other times it’s just very, very embarrassing.

4. The body
Despite what the manuals tell you, pregnancy is not a return journey. Your back may go; your arches may fall; you will get brown spots on your skin. There may be whole areas of your body that you no longer recognise: Caesarians leave you with a weird stomach overhang; a natural birth means you will never again perform star jumps with confidence. Pilates, yoga, Power Plate. All these help. But unless you work at it like Madonna, you will never be box-fresh again.

5. The school gate
For some, an opportunity to display to the world their offspring’s brilliance. For others, a Dantesque vision of Hell. You’ll know which within seconds of your child’s first day at nursery.

6. Celebrity mothers
The only secret to the marvel of the celebrity mother, with her flat stomach, her 6in heels and her sexy husband, is this: 24-hour childcare. Don’t believe the hype.

7. Single friends
It can be hard, not to say very dull, for your childless friends when you turn into a milk-obsessed insomniac whose idea of spontaneity is giving her baby puréed avocado instead of banana for tea. Your friends’ obsession with the banal issues of life, such as whether to invest in this season’s new jump-suit, can seem absurdly indulgent. Besides, you are secretly jealous. Yet if you can both curb your tongue, a childless friend is often the best a mother can have - someone to talk to about the important issues in life; someone who will remind you that you once had an identity of your own and that there is more to life than school admission procedures.

8. Sleep
Unless you happen to be SAS trained, there is nothing that can prepare you for the effects of the prolonged sleep deprivation that comes with having children. They will wake you once, twice, three times in the night; if you have two, they will wake in relays, so as to inflict maximum damage. Should you attempt any sort of alcohol-based evening celebration, you can guarantee that the children will wake an hour and a half before they usually do, with twice the energy.

9 Birthing pools
If you like the idea of sitting in your own bodily fluids, then fine. If not, well, not. I know a man who had to perform an unpleasant fishing operation using the kitchen sieve during the later stages of his wife’s labour. He has never recovered.

10. The Fear
The most agonising aspect of motherhood is the terrible fear that you may lose your child. With the fear comes guilt, worry and, occasionally, panic. There is little you can do about this, except push it to the back of your mind, avoid listening to certain news reports - and pray that it never happens to you.
What we learnt the hard way

“No one explains to you how unnerving it is to be faced with this tiny replica of yourself, and all of your faults. I can be quite stubborn and argumentative and it’s shocking to deal with someone who’s absolutely the same. I say to my son, ‘you don’t have to win every argument’, but they drink in your example. I think he’s being unreasonable and then realise he is just doing exactly what I do!”
Diane Abbott, MP

“If only I’d realised that, no matter how hard I battled, I would lose control of my life. Before I had children I think I believed that, with a little discipline and organisation, I could be in charge. I couldn’t grasp that motherhood isn’t like that - you can’t schedule croup or projectile vomiting or a tantrum. You just have to go with it. I fought that randomness for a while, but I’ve admitted defeat.”
Mary Nightingale, newsreader

“No one told me how painful it is once you start breast-feeding. It’s like having two rocks on your chest and it hurts like hell. Midwives suggest Savoy cabbage - it stinks but it does work. So you’re sitting there with cold cabbage from the fridge flat on your chest to take away some of the pain. Having a baby is definitely not sexy, but you really don’t care.”
Alison Lapper, artist

“All moveable objects will never be where you think they are. I never know where my hairbrush is because someone’s taken it, there’s no Sellotape, the scissors are never where you normally keep them. At first I found it intensely irritating, but after a while you become quite sentimental about it all. Apart from those high-pitched screams - I’ve never got used to those.”
Daisy Waugh, writer

“The one thing that nobody explained to me was the lack of sleep. I was someone who liked a lie-in, so being up every two hours was certainly interesting. People said to me, in that mumsy whisper: ‘You have to try to sleep when the baby sleeps.’ But if I did that nothing would ever get done. When would you put a wash on, or eat, or have a cup of tea?”
Edith Bowman, DJ

“One minute you’re happy soaking in the bath, wondering what life would be like with three in the house rather than two, and before you know it you’re crawling around on all fours trying to entertain the new baby and dreams of soaking in a long, hot bath are just that - a dream.”
Ruth Kelly, MP
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Obsession is right - obsessing over whether motherhood is really all that glamorous and if it’s to really be envied (here we go once again with the holding up of a baby and screaming to the world “Look at what I have!” mentality). This statement really stands out:

“The truth is, as my mother once remarked darkly, that if women thought properly about having children, no one would ever give birth again.”

Ah, ‘thought’ - that magic word that nobody ever engages in when they run through the sheets. Nope, they do not use their brain to think with (if they have one) before doing it. Ignorant people who allow their hormones to take over their peanut-sized brains while they squeeze them out. The truth of the matter is, most childfree people (and men in general) simply do not envy women who have to take care of babies. A baby is nothing to be envied. One is better off envying Bill Gates for his fabulous wealth than envying a sixteen year old girl for her baby.

The celebrity mothers bit tells it like it is. Let’s face it, they can crank them out, then hire a $5,000.00 per hour daycare nurse to tend to the dirty diapers, feedings, and what not. The reality is that no ordinary American woman can afford that sort of help and is left to care for the child on her own. The partners fact is just as true. Married couples are too busy caring for the screaming sprog. And once they have to contend with that, from where will they get the energy to make love without having the sprog interrupt tham at night? If they’re smart, if they finally do get that sort of time, they will learn to use birth control for a change.

On to the comments part of the article: the only one that made any sense was Cleo’s. The “Why do some people breed without doing their homework first” statement. Well, it’s like this: People sprog because “everyone else does it.” People do not think when they sprog. In fact, being a sheeple is, um, automatic self-conformity. In the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, who wants to make a choice of their own? It really is much better for some people to have society to tell them what to do, what to think, what to eat, when to have (haha) sex, and when to breed. Maybe some people need to be told how to live. The real adults do not need that sort of nonsense in their lives. It is great, however, to read an article like this that deglamourizes motherhood.

Chances are the bottle had a label the woman did not read. But continue anyways:

http://news.aol.com/article/daycare-windshield-wiper-fluid/381420

Day Care Mistakenly Gives Kids Car Fluid

By JON GAMBREL,

March 13, 2009

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (March 13) - Ten children at a day care center drank windshield wiper fluid after a staffer served it from a container mistaken for Kool-Aid and placed in a refrigerator, authorities said Friday.

The day care owner surrendered her state license Friday.

Doctors estimate the children, ages 2 to 7, drank about an ounce of the blue fluid late Thursday afternoon before realizing it tasted wrong, said Laura James, a pediatric pharmacologist and toxicologist at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock.

Only one child remained hospitalized Friday morning, after blood samples showed “measurable levels” of methanol, a highly toxic alcohol that can induce comas and cause blindness, officials said. The day care also provided the fluid for testing.

The windshield wiper fluid was bought with several other items on a recent shopping trip, James told The Associated Press. “This product was mistakenly grabbed and thought to be Kool-Aid and put in the refrigerator,” she said.

The day care’s operator, Carolyn Bynum, was interviewed Friday by child welfare investigators and gave up her license, said Julie Munsell, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Services. Bynum declined to comment to The Associated Press.

“She was so upset about what had occurred and she was definitely worried some of the children had been injured,” Munsell said. “It was just a mistake, she says. She says it was just a horrible mistake.”

Bynum’s license had allowed her to care for 10 children in her home in Scott, about 15 miles east of Little Rock. Munsell said Bynum had no found complaints or serious compliance issues in the past.

By surrendering her license, Bynum can no longer care for children without reapplying.

The toxicologist warned that many antifreeze or windshield wiper solutions have bright colors, which can be mistaken for fruit drinks.

“I think the take-home message is not to have these products in the kitchen or where you’re doing any kind of food preparation,” she said.
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There is a lot that is wrong here. Am I to assume the woman never read the label on the windshield wiper fluid before she stuck it in the refrigerator? Maybe it is worth noting that this sort of thing is not a normal habit of most daycare workers. Maybe it sounds too suspicious, since nobody makes a “mistake” like that. Taking care of ten children that belong to other people in one’s home is a bit too much, but still, there is just no leeway for an incident like this to happen. Bynum will have to seek a different job now but my advice would be, get one that does not entail reading anything, period. Not for awhile anyways. Hopefully the kids who drank the fluid will be all right and not get too sick. Again - nobody makes a “mistake” like that.