Urbana.org All Things New Blog - family

Time to think about death

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:48:00 -0600

My grandfather died last night. It was in Hawaii, and he was in hospice care. I was told he'd wanted to be alone.

I barely knew him; had only seen him once in the last twenty years. All this to say: I believe my duties here revolve more around my mother than around my grandfather. In any case, he's not having a funeral. There will be a bit of a ceremony at the VFW next summer.

The stages of life! Babies are born in all kinds of circumstances, from happy family occasions to shameful, lonely, finger-pointing situations; from fast and healthy to dangerous, premature and so on.

People die in all ways too, and I know so little about it. As a Christian, I have many beliefs about life and death, but I know enough to know that Christians have thought much more deeply about death than have I.

I'm a 34-year old grad student. Which is to say, I'm in a world where I'm among the most mature, and most experienced. Then I get little windows to see how little I really know.

Wisconsin: We're Dead Last

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:01:00 -0600

In the latest numbers from the US Dept. of Education, Wisconsin has the worst reading scores in the United States for African American 4th and 8th-graders, the Capital Times reports.

This in a state generally recognized for the quality of its public schools. What's going on is the largest racial gap in the country. Wisconsin also has the largest racial gap in incarceration rates.

Lots of smart people have opinions toward solutions here, and I can't evaluate them, out of sheer ignorance. But this much I know: the sum total of people's non-racist actions can at times result in racial discrepancies.

This is important because addressing racial discrepancies is without fail politically charged, and usually involves name-calling. So people of good will stay away from the problem.

On Vacation

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

All Things New is on vacation until the 11th. In the meanwhile, if you've got a topic you urgently want me to adress, let me know.

Changing Motherhood

Sat, 09 May 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Our day has seen the rather intense politicization of motherhood. This year for mother's day, a Question: How has motherhood changed in your lifetime?

It takes more than a fractured village

Fri, 01 May 2009 02:01:00 -0600

My pastor is wrapping up the dissertation for his Doctor of Ministry degree, an in my biased opinion terribly fascinating project: ministering to fatherless black men. Since I’ve got a bit of a reputation of a bookish type, he’s talked me in to helping him, by reading a selection of his resources, so as to be able to talk them over with him. It sure beats my usual: read things I’m interested in and nobody else.

And so, I, a married white man hailing from an intact home (and with a decent relationship with his own father), am reading all about issues of fatherlessness in African America.

And what I’ve learned is disheartening at all levels: there’s the part about how fatherless men of all stripes have to come to terms with their own manhood; there’s the question of why so many black families have no men in the homes, and there’s the question of how churches fail these young men, and (this is the dissertation bit, which I’m not really involved with) how churches can appropriately minister to them.

Two points have really stuck out to me:

The war of the sexes, a matter for endless joking, is a serious issue, as we should expect. But, as Bakari Kitwana says in The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture, it has hit African American life more than elsewhere, for reasons I haven’t seen explained. But: the war of the sexes has a real impact on young men being raised by single mothers. And although women are the ones carrying the biggest burden here, there are no winners, and all participants are perpetrators.
Successful marriages do not occur in a vacuum: as the National Research Council points out in A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society:

Historical and comparative studies suggest that nuclear families are most stable when marriage partners have common and overlapping group affiliations and when the family unit is supported by social circles of other families committed to norms of solidarity and permanence (p. 512).

I feel I’ve got a decent marriage of six years, and when I read this I realize this decency draws on the cumulative capital of the many successful marriages around me. Conversely, the several failed marriages around me (in your twenties you go to weddings all the time, in your thirties there are lots of divorces) mostly include failed marriages in earlier generations. There is something creepy here—when you realize how little control you have over your own destiny.

The corollary, of course, is how few things have to go wrong for a major impact on a person’s life. We are truly each others’.

Earth Day Alienation

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I was really excited about Earth Day 1993. I was seventeen and ready to do something about the environment—clean up some litter, wear an Earth Day t-shirt, and take a stand.

Now, with the awesome wisdom that comes at the broad age of (you do the math), I’ve come to feel that the best way to mark Earth Day is to actually enjoy the earth.

Writing in Orion Magazine a few years ago, educator Richard Louv said:

While public-health experts have traditionally associated environmental health with the absence of toxic pollution, the definition fails to account for an equally valid consideration: how the environment can improve human health. Seen through that doorway, nature isn’t a problem, it’s the solution: environmentalism is essential to our own well-being.

Today’s environmental problems are so abstract, that we can find ourselves more alienated from nature as we think about them. Children, say the activists behind the No Child Left Inside movement, cannot possibly understand Global Warming, when they can barely understand the concept of a world beyond their own horizons.

When we tell children about replacing that light bulb so that polar bears don’t die, it doesn’t compute for them; it may in fact make them withdraw altogether.

What they—and we adults—need instead is a good walk in the woods. Smell last fall’s rotting leaves. Look at migratory birds. Try to re-discover delight in the spring of life.

Then go protest some other day.

[photo credit: me]

More Fodder for Competitive Parents

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 02:01:00 -0600

This is is a great study: young babies—those too young to talk—exposed to bilingual environments develop a variety of mental skills not seen in babies from monolingual homes.

It's a great study, but the journalism points to a sickness in our culture. More below. First, what are we talking about?

The researchers taught bilingual and monolingual babies to look at one side of a screen in anticipation of a visual "reward" image of a puppet, after the infants first learned to associate a sound cue with the image. The visual treat was then switched to the other side of the screen, so that researchers could see how quickly babies would learn to switch their anticipatory look to that other side.

Bilingual babies beat out monolingual babies in three such experiments, even when the sound cues changed from nonsense syllable combinations to a structured sound cue, and then a visual cue. In all three cases, bilingual babies soon learned to switch their anticipatory attention to the other side of the screen, whereas monolingual babies never adapted.

As a fan of languages, I think this is a hoot.

But I don’t think any great moral lessons are to be drawn here; and as a parent of a 9-month old myself, I am a little wary of competitive parenting. Even the smartest kids grow at different rates. My two and a half year old, for instance, is a little behind the curve in speech, and a little ahead in reading. It’s not a big deal.

But some parents at the playground get highly defensive and even antagonistic when another kid beats their own at anything. There’s a hyperdrive in our parenting culture these days, so I see stories like this and know how it will be turned around into more competitive parenting. Alas.

The researchers insist that the babies' acquired skill has no bearing on IQ:

... enhanced executive function does not necessarily translate into better intelligence — and in any case, monolingual babies have plenty of opportunities later to exercise executive function.

"My conclusion is that it's a very particular component of our cognitive toolbox, and early learning certainly has no negative effect," [lead scientist] Melher said. But despite suggestions from other researchers, he personally doubted whether such early bilingual training leads to improved IQ or better test scores.

Even so, the fierce culture of competitive parenting will guarantee tons of page views (and therefore advertisement views) for a an article promising tools for getting your baby into Harvard. Look at the hyperlink above to the story: the url ends with: bilingualbabiesgetanearlyedge.

"An early edge"? Nevertheless, I will continue to sing my dumb Swiss hiking songs while spooning rice cereal to the beast. Because it’s partly for my own sanity.