Penny Wiseacre

When to nurse a grievance

Summer vacation season is looming, which means that we're about to enter the point in the yearly journalism cycle where someone, somewhere, becomes a "lactivist" because they were asked to cover up while nursing at an airport/on an airplane/at the pool/at the Starbucks/at Disney/at a local park/at a big-box store [1], and their outrage, it must be shared with all of us.

I don't doubt that these incidents still happen, even in 2014, even with the reliable spate of TV news coverage about nurse-ins, even with angry blog posts circulated among like-minded fellows on Facebook, even with hashtags on Twitter.

I don't doubt it's distressing when it happens to you. It is always distressing when some presumptuous stranger swoops into a situation sans context and presumes to say, "Parenting: You're doing it wrong!"

But I really can't get worked up about it. Why? Because breastfeeding in the U.S.A. is a privilege indicator, and I have yet to see anyone who is dealing with the "Please cover up" gaffe admit that, then springboard into saying, "I admit it's a privilege. Let's make it an uncontested right."

And yes, breastfeeding in the U.S.A. is a privilege.

Putting aside the financial investment in what lots of people call the low-cost way to feed your baby -- I'm talking about lactation consultants, breast pump rentals, breast pump purchases, the nursing bras and/or clothes you wear to accommodate nursing or pumping, the pads, the cream, etc. -- putting aside the lucrative breastfeeding customer, let's examine exactly what it takes to make nursing work.

It takes time.

More specifically, it takes having a measure of control over your time. In the U.S., being able to exert some autonomy over your schedule is a side effect of economic and/or professional privilege.

Support for nursing starts with the ability to take paid family leave. (One bit of data to support this: In California, the median duration of breastfeeding doubled once paid family leave was introduced as state policy.) Mothers who return to work before six weeks postpartum are three times more likely to stop breastfeeding. In the U.S., 70% of pregnant women are working, and half of them will be back on the job five weeks after they give birth.

On a national level, if you are in the bottom quartile (25%) of wage-earners, you have a 5% chance of having paid family leave and only a 30% of having paid sick leave. Your good news? You have a 78% chance of being allowed unpaid parental leave. Good luck saving up the cash to take it on your $378/week salary.

We live in one of THREE countries in the entire world without mandatory paid parental leave policy on a national level. We make it harder for lower-income mothers to feed their babies cheaply, i.e. on breastmilk, which is yet another staggering example of how freakin' expensive it is to be poor. Save The Children agrees: In 2012, the U.S. ranked last on the breastfeeding policy scorecard.

So if we're going to get worked up over nursing in America, get worked up over the fact that we've turned something that could benefit all children into a deeply privileged class signifier. Women who nurse for more than a few weeks do so because they can afford to and because they have social and professional capital. They aren't harassed at work when insisting that their employer comply with legal requirements for pumping.

THIS is what I would like to see covered in the news. This is what I want to see people who say they support nursing to get fired up about. Protest because employers are screwing over non-white-collar women who happen to know their rights. Protest to strike the "public indecency" that don't specifically exempt breastfeeding in public from enforcement. Protest because our national policymakers don't give a shit about giving working-class families the same strong start that professional ones enjoy [2].

But if it's mostly complaining at a company because one or more of their employees isn't up on company policy? Eh. Good for you for making companies accountable to their customers. Now let's work on making society accountable to the people who take care of its smallest, most vulnerable members.

[1] I nursed in public -- including on airplanes -- and I never, ever heard a peep out of anyone. To this day, I am surprised nobody gave me a hard time. I have the exact opposite of Resting Bitchface -- really, I'm the human equivalent of a dolphin -- and total strangers often confuse my normal expression for an open invitation to them reading, "Please, open your mouth and monologue at me without preamble or courtesy."

[2] If you're ready to fight for universal paid family leave in the U.S., Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act (FAMILY Act). It's not likely to pass in the current House and Senate, but it doesn't hurt to put pressure on your congressperson to vote for it -- or to explain to you why he or she won't. Also, feel free to support Family Values @ Work, which is hoping to fight for paid leave on a city-by-city and state-by-state basis, pending the day Congress gets its head out of its collective ass.

Why "Whiny Modern Parents" might actually have cause to complain

Normally, I love the Motherlode, but today's post, "Hey, Whiny Modern Parents, Tell Us What You Love About the Gig," sent me on a bit of a rage bender. You can credit the good, old-fashioned cocktail of generational myopia and current affairs ignorance this commenter displays:

I would be interested in some discussion of why today’s parents complain so much. No previous generation has made so many mountains out of molehills, nor do I ever recall my peers, relatives and forbears having so much difficulty with the chores of daily life. All my friends with children work, as did my mother, aunts and both of my grandmothers. They were fun and vibrant. Now all you hear is “sleep-deprived,” “too busy to shower,” “too frazzled to cook — get takeout,” “kids are sooo expensive,” etc. etc.

On the Internet, the mommy bloggers, “parent confession” and discussion sites heavily focus on the negative as does Motherlode. And in real life, most of the under-35 parents I know are in a constant hand-to-brow state of self-pity. It’s rather irritating esp since there are far more safety nets and handouts for parents today than for previous generations, not all of whom lived like June Cleaver.

Why might today's parents complain more? Because the America in which we are parenting hosts a much more challenging economic environment than the America of even 20 years ago, much less 40 or 60. Let us count the stressors that a) reduce all that vibrant fun and b) puncture the myth that the America of yesteryear was some dystopian hellscape lacking social safety nets:

1. Young adults are grappling with rampant unemployment and/or a permanent, long-lasting lag in earnings or financial well-being. Per David Frum, a family headed today by people between the ages of 35 and 44 will be on average nearly 70 percent -poorer than its counterpart in 1984. I would hazard that it's easier to be vital and joyful when your household earning power goes seventy percent further.

2. Perhaps women are less vital and joyful because the persistent salary gap between men and women means that women have a significant retirement savings shortfall relative to men. This after a lifetime of earning less. And bear in mind, women who are mothers face systemic salary discrimination. Still feeling that zip-a-dee-doo-dah about being a working parent in the 21st century?

(Side note: You would think that men, who are increasingly unhappy and stressed about conditions in the U.S. workplace, would be a lot more vocal about how equal pay benefits the entire family. In a country where two-thirds of families are either helmed by a woman breadwinner or co-breadwinner, you'd think that dudes would be into fair pay for all, because it benefits them too.)

3. Pregnant women and caregivers face discrimination and harassment on the job. So you can see where a worker may find it hard to be joyful about, say, a parent's broken hip or a baby's ear infection when she goes from that stressful and unpleasant situation to a boss who will punish her for it on the job.

4. As moms in the workforce get older, the gender pay gap worsens. So, you know, right around college-paying time. So, are parents allowed to start whining yet?

5. Although U.S. productivity has surged, so have hours worked -- while salaries have stayed flat for nearly 15 years. So parents are spending more time at work for less money. Think they might be taking that stressor home with them?

6. Not only do working parents face long hours for less (actual) pay, they face the terror of a wildly unregulated day-care system where the costs for having someone else watch your child can exceed a year's college tuition.

7. Did anyone say student loans? An entire generation of young professionals -- if they're lucky enough to be employed -- is struggling with $1.2 trillion in student loans. While it's delightful that today's young scholars are referred to as excellent revenue sources, what on account of how they can never, ever, ever discharge those loans in bankruptcy and they pay interest rates far, far higher than bazillion-dollar banks have to on their loans, the fact is: Student loan payments can seriously damage your career and love prospects.

Now try being all zesty and peppy about raising kids when you have loan repayments flying out the door on top of the daycare fees that cost more than your college tuition.

It bears repeating: People who are raising children in today's America are facing financial and societal pressures that parents did not have 20, 40, 60 years ago. We are shorter on money and time and opportunity.

To me, the real miracle is that anyone is still taking that tremendous leap of optimism and saying, "Yes. I will do this. I will raise a person in this world,." There's joy in that commitment to the future. Even if it's not the vital, fun type that others would prefer we display.

When Pottery Barn names your baby

Children are apparently the levers by which retailers hope to pry open your pocket, if the nakedly aspirational catalogs I get are any indication. Because I once bought a monogrammed chair for my daughter, I am now on the Pottery Barn Kids catalog list for life.

(At right: the daughter in her reading nook. I had asked her to take off her shoes, but she got distracted by a book halfway through. I can't chide her for that because I do the same thing.)

The thing that always bemuses me about this catalog is how meticulously it details the fantasy of productive, achieving upper middle-class life. The tidy family calendars hanging in the background feature activities like "violin," "swim meet," "family movie night: Wizard of Oz."

The prop styling include a paper cup with the drawn-on face of Max from Where the Wild Things Are, homemade mobiles with wholesome wood and paper parts (no plastic, no garish colors) and air plants in glass globes. And then there are the names, everywhere the children's names.

What "Gone Girl" taught me about slacking on the housework

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait suggested that maybe women could get over their disgruntlement over doing more housework than their male partners by just ... well, by just doing less. Or as he put it:

Women in general just have higher standards of cleanliness than men do. People who care a lot about neater homes spend more time cleaning them because that makes them happy. And while I agree in general that domestic life requires more gender equality, the housework problem has a partial solution that’s simpler and more elegant: Do less of it.

Let us skip-hop around the stereotypes innately baked into the assumptions about hetero partnerships here and break down the risible assumptions in the passage above. Then I will explain how they tie into last summer's breakout novel, Gone Girl, which will eventually be used by time management consultants as an inspiring story about the power of a well crafted to-do list.

Multigenerational households for fun and (no) profit

If you're cruising the real estate listings and decide that a multifamily compound is the thing for you, bear this in mind:

If I were them, I wouldn't buy a house either

Last week, the Atlantic Monthly performed its version of trolling for pageviews with "The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy."

The structure of the story is fairly typical: Ask the question ("Why aren't Millennials spending?"); reject the most obvious answer ("Because they have been severely hit by under- and unemployment and have crazy student debt loads and are mirroring the rest of the population in terms of curbing consumerism."); postulate that there is some giant generational shift that rejects the behavior of its forebears:

It’s highly possible that a perfect storm of economic and demographic factors—from high gas prices, to re-­urbanization, to stagnating wages, to new technologies enabling a different kind of consumption—has fundamentally changed the game for Millennials. The largest generation in American history might never spend as lavishly as its parents did—nor on the same things.

Or it's highly possible that these folks observed the same thing that Zillow did. Per the Atlantic Wire last week: "Millennial Homeowners Are Especially Screwed." Why so screwed:

48 percent of mortgage borrowers younger than 40 are currently underwater. It's 39 percent among those who are 20-24 years old; 48 percent for the 25-29 cohort; and 51 percent for the 30-34 demographic

Being underwater means the financial penalty goes well beyond "I am paying more for this house than the market says it is worth."

It means that you have no opportunity to get out of your current mortgage and into one with a better interest rate, so you end up paying even more on the house that's worth less. It means you can't sell unless you're prepared to empty out your savings account and bring money to the table for closing. (Which is what we had to do. And it suuuuuuuuuuucks.) It means the cost of getting out of the bind you're in is often way out of reach -- no better loans, no chance to relocate for a better job -- and so you're stuck, literally and financially.

If you're just out of school, you're employed and you're building a career, why would you risk that?

Twentysomethings aren't buying houses because they're into New Urbanism. They're holding back because they've lived through the last decade and paid attention. And good for them.