Kirsten Mortensen's blog

Get ready. This is a Dark Post. Perhaps it being November & gray . . .

I remember years ago reading about the Little Emperor syndrome in China: families forced to limit their offspring to one child ended up raising spoilt little boys. I think we’re seeing a similar effect in the US, albeit through slightly different mechanisms.

We’re trying to correct course, now, some of us. This article in the NY Times discusses how parents are using techniques borrowed from dog training, of all things, to try to recapture some of the authority they’ve ceded in their relationship to their kids.

Let’s hope it’s not too little, too late.

Here’s the thing. Children used to be an unavoidable consequence of sex/marriage. Now they’re something we acquire, one at a time, like art objects, to enhance our lives.

When modern educated women have a child, we’re encouraged to cherish the child and the experience of having that child in our lives. They grow up so quickly, after all! Drop everything and pay attention. Make that child the center of your life.

How unlike 100 years ago when we may well be on our 10th or 15th baby after #1 has already grown up & moved out of the house — 17 or 18 years of straight baby.

Now we savor every second — photograph it, blog it, wonder at it, analyze it. We labor over our parenting styles. And we fall prey, some of us, to being over-awed. I’ve observed parents — my peers — who seem to think their child is as equipped to make decisions as adults are. After all, my son/daughter is so smart, has so many brilliant insights, is so articulate, precocious, mature for his/her age . . .

That’s where the damage is done. Children aren’t equipped to make decisions. They don’t really know very much, and won’t for decades. They aren’t “mature.” Their brilliant insights are not all that special.

And our awe has terrible consequences, because when parents cede so much authority to their children, it puts the children on horribly shaky ground.

Imagine how it feels. You’re small, physically weak, inexperienced, new to everything — but the grown-ups around you, the ones who clearly have uncounted advantages in the world, who de facto control so much — are turning to you for guidance.

So what do you do? Depends on the child. But you must find some sort of coping mechanism.

Perhaps you learn to bluff — you develop a habit of always “knowing the answer,” because after all your parents seem to think you should. This could take the form of being a “little know it all” or of outright lying.

You might become insolent, another mechanism to hide the insecurity that gnaws at you. Better to be on the attack than admit that there’s something terrible wrong — that you don’t really feel the authority with which you’ve been vested.

You will certainly be neurotic. You don’t have the benefit of those few short years, in childhood, when somebody had all the answers: the years that form a kind of experiential bedrock for our personalities, that give us an underlying sense of order and certainty. You will be anxious, fearful — you will have been exposed to a sense of how much is unknown before you were developmentally equipped to handle it.

You will have trouble empathizing with others, because your parents never required you to try to read them. You didn’t have to check their faces to detect how your decisions or opinions might be received — on the contrary, the exchange was all going in the other direction, one way only, as your parents watched you to see what your opinions were and how the things they said/decided were affecting you.

You won’t know how to wield authority or make your peace with it. When you weren’t taught to live under the benign authority of a parent, you can’t internalize its use or learn to cope with it. You will grate at it unnecessarily when you encounter it as an adult. Your ability to recognize true injustice will be crippled. You may well become a compulsive rule-breaker — your knee-jerk defiance of authority might cause you to continually sabotage yourself, your professional standing, your reputation.

If you find yourself in a position of authority, you will use it unevenly. You may become a tyrant. At best, you’ll be unpredictable and inconsistent as a boss/teacher/parent.

I’ve observed that many of these children go on to find themselves “corrected” by their peers — i.e. teased, bullied, or ostracized — because their lack of social skills causes them to run afoul of other emotionally damaged children. Others end up medicated, because their poor impulse control is misdiagnosed as having some sort of physiological component, when the real cause is the family dynamic — and because as they get older, parents find themselves unable to handle with their undisciplined behavior. Drugging the child at least mutes the behavior’s more disruptive manifestations.

What remains to be seen, of course, is what effect these children will have on our social fabric as a whole when they are in their 30s and 40s and 50s.

Personally, I think it’s going to be ugly.

But they won’t listen to their critics — they won’t know how.

We’re just going to have to live with the little, grown up brats, whether we want to or not . . .

From Rich Hailey, someone who actually took the time to understand why gas prices rise and fall. Via Instapundit.

Profit margins on the gasoline business are very slim. The profit margin on gasoline sales was only about 6 percent in 2006 (noted in that NPR article’s Bottled Water sidebar). That’s why you seldom see a gas station without a convenience store or Wal-Mart attached any more. Gasoline is the barely-above-cost incentive to get you to stop someplace where you’ll then hopefully buy a bunch of other stuff.

Wouldn’t it be nice if basic economic cause-and-effect phenomenon like this were taught in our schools? Then maybe people would be a bit less likely to jump to unwarranted conclusions about price-gouging every time supply disruptions or commodities trading drives prices up.

Via Instapundit, Wired has a piece about a programmer who supposedly outsourced his own job to India:

Did you hear the one about the programmer who outsourced his own job? I read about it on Slashdot.org, the “news for nerds” Web site. A pseudonymous poster wrote, “About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 to do the job I get paid $67,000 for. He’s happy to have the work. I’m happy that I only have to work 90 minutes a day, talking code. My employer thinks I’m telecommuting. Now I’m considering getting a second job and doing the same thing.”

Wired says the story is probably apocrophal, but even so, mightn’t it be an early clue to the new direction?

The only trouble is, offshore outsourcing is awfully hard to do when you’re a writer.

OTOH, considering how cheaply many freelancers give away their time, perhaps it’s possible to find a subcontractor here in the U.S.

Hmmm . . .

Technorati Tags: outsourcing

“I ate three lumps of it. But I spat two of them out, so I really ate one and a half of them.”

Ooookay.

Welcome to the mind of a man who, to protest an act of animal cruelty that never happened, cooks and eats a domestic dog. And then exults that his act was “art.”

It’s a mind where 3-2 = 1&1/2.

The worst part is that he got attention for this. Which is all he’s really after, anyway.

Technorati Tags: idiots

First, it turns out all those fine photos of Nessie were a bunch of hoaxes.

Now it emerges that the Face on Mars is really . . . a MESA?

Next thing you know, they’ll be telling us all that film footage of Big Foot is a guy in a gorilla costume.

Oh, wait . . .

Technorati Tags: Mars, Face

Via one of Michael Blowhard’s always-worthwhile round-up posts, here’s a Christian Science Monitor piece that makes a point I’ve noticed myself: the cost of eating out is on par with, if not lower than, the cost of buying and preparing your own food.

This assumes you shop at the higher end of the supermarket food chain — and also assumes the time you spend preparing meals has a dollar value. If your definition of home cooking is to prise open a #10 can of franks-n-beans and dump some in a saucepan, the argument falls apart ;-)

Otherwise, as says one Mark Bergen, “pricing specialist,” Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota: “Simply put, restaurants are more efficient than you are.”

Some nice data about the resturant biz in the article too, though. Their profit margins are under 5 percent. And “most turn over more than their entire staff each year, a rate that has contributed to a decline in service over the past 10 years, experts say.” Yeah, that does explain a lot.

And of course, some requisite hand-wringing about portion size and how that’s making us fat. As if the doggy bag had never been invented. After golfing with my parents last weekend, we stopped at the Doug’s Fish Fry in Cortland. They were offering a fried oyster special. I ate half of mine and had the other half for lunch yesterday. Mmmmmm. (Heat them up under the broiler, a minute or so a side, just until the breading starts to sizzle, crisps them back up without overcooking the oyster.) (A trick I’ve perfected by reheating the ubuiquitous “chicken fingers” that my daughter often orders when we eat out.)

I’m not advocating a steady diet of deep-fried breaded whatever, of course, but in moderation? And they were oysters!

Technorati Tags: restaurants, dining out

That would be science v. religion >:-)

Courtesy of Curtis Brainard and CJR Daily, we have this nice round-up of the media coverage of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion:

[U]nfavorable reviews of The God Delusion have branded Dawkins’ promotion of science as “fundamentalist” and “evangelical.” It gave pause when proponents of intelligent design began to argue like scientists, and it is equally so when the opposite happens, and scientists begin to argue like preachers.

You don’t say!

lol

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between the conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable — perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.

– C.J. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

What evangelical atheists fail to appreciate is that they, too, are in the thrall of myth. More Jung:

The real facts do not change, whatever names we give them. Only we ourselves are affected. If one were to conceive of “God” as “pure Nothingnes,” that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact of a superordinate principle. We are just as much possessed as before; the change of name has removed nothing at all from reality. At most we have taken a false attitude toward reality if the new name implies a denial.

;-)

Technorati Tags: religion, science

Here’s a worthwhile read by Kurt Anderson on the New York magazine website on the “frisson of smug or hysterical pleasure” that characterizes contemporary “apocalypse preoccupations” — including those that have leached into “less-fantastical” — i.e. secular/Western/post-Enlightenment — “thought and conversation.”

My only beef is that Anderson goes a little too easy on environmental doomsayers, conceding that they may be “sincerely fearful of climate change” while focusing most of the piece on people who conceive apocalypse through the mechanics of religious prophecy.

It would be more fair to note that religious fanatics are “sincerely fearful” of moral corruption, believing it propels us toward global disaster. The ingredients are therefore identical. Start with widespread evil and thick-headedness. Then swap in some scary physical processes for a wrathful deity and voila, ya gots your post-modern secular kablooey.

The question is: who are you going to believe?

*(and I feel fine.)

I heard a cut from this 1997 CD, featuring Mary Schneider, Australia’s Queen of Yodeling, on PBS the other morning and realized that my admittedly puny CD collection had a GAPING hole that had to be filled pronto.

I mean, yodeling the William Tell Overture? Rossini’s Large al factotum? The only question is why it took someone this long to figure out it HAD to be done.

Technorati Tags: music