In the “Things You Already Knew But It’s Nice to Have Them Confirmed So You Know You Aren’t Imagining Things” department, the Washington Post ran news this week of a new research study that concluded that “Women are more likely than men to give up sleep to care for children.”
Specifically, a study by researchers at the University of Michigan, to be published in the upcoming journal Social Forces (and not yet available online), finds that women are nearly three times as likely to wake from sleep to care for others — fearful children, sick spouse, whining puppy. And once awake, women stay up for 44 minutes, while men are back in bed after 30 minutes.
Gotta admit, I’m kinda in this category. I get up in the middle of the night to feed Ellie, but I do it quicker than Tomoko, spending less time fussing over the baby before putting her back in the crib, and—most important—she absolutely has to wake me up or I will sleep through the whole damn thing.
Willful ignorance on my part, or am I just an evil genius? You decide.
Because I do believe I bummed some of my colleagues out yesterday with my early morning post on tragedy and media (what is this, fucking Hannah Montana? What the hell do you want to be talking about in the morning?), here is something that is pure sweetness and light.
Behold the little Argentinian girl who really rocks it (h/t Alexis Madrid–besos!):
Now, I’m not going to go into the racial dynamics inherent in the paper putting that on page one. It’s a census story and the national newspapers have been splicing the data from the 2010 haul for some months now.
But a story about WHITE FOLKS LIVING IN CITIES merits placement next to the demands of the Egyptian protestors? Maybe I’m just reading too much into it, or does the USA Today really know its circulation?
Anyway, here’s my advice to the editors at USA Today: you don’t need to report on this.
Or actually you do, only not with your own people. Outsource the whole fucking thing to the white urban assholes right here at DadWagon (before anyone asks: DadWagon is accepting applications from non-white, non-urban, fine-writing assholes of any gender, sexual orientation, religion, or creed. We have but two requirements: you have to have children, and you have to have a fetish for Asian women).
You want to know why “the number of white children is growing in several large urban centers where the cost of living is high, a trend that runs counter to the decline in white youths in much of the USA”? Ask us.
It’s a simple thing really: we’re all just dumb, pretentious schmucks who use our zip codes as a status symbol.
I read this article in the Times with some interest. It recounts a debate among high power private school parents in Manhattan and educators in their high power private schools over when children should be taught to read.
Essentially, the schools think kindergarten is too young, but the parents would like phonics working for their kids while in utero. I suppose there are educational and emotional reasons for both positions. JP doesn’t yet read, for example, but I get the sense that he has reached a stage where he could be taught to do so. I don’t know that I have the necessary skill (or patience, to be frank) to teach him. It disappoints me a bit that his current school, a pre-K, doesn’t, and that his public kindergarten teacher next year likely won’t.
Is that an expression of a New York–specific anxiety over my child’s academic progress? Probably. I don’t send him to school anywhere else, so it’s hard to tell. I do know that the competition for what seems like increasingly scarce resources here is formidable, as are the pressure and the sense of never knowing what is the right thing to do.
In an environment where my son got turned away from eight PUBLIC schools for pre-K, where there is a lottery for another PUBLIC school that I’m considering having him attend, and where the system for the PUBLIC schools is rife with misinformation, slashed budgets, and limited opportunities, I think it’s fair to see some free-floating concern directed at his academic progress. What else can I control as a parent?
That doesn’t mean the Times should resist the delights of making fun of over-thinking parents, and no, no, no, they don’t. I like this little bit below ridiculing parents:
She also echoed the belief of some parents that the ability to read will bolster her child’s chances of being admitted to a top school. Officials of some of these schools insist that this is not so, and the E.R.B., the standardized test required by most for admission, does not have a reading component.
“It’s not as though we have two extra points for reading Dr. Seuss,” said Mr. Trower, the head at Allen-Stevenson.
Calhoun goes further: If a family seemed fixated on Junior’s uncanny ability to read James Joyce, Mr. Nelson said, “that would probably be a liability in our admissions decision.”
