IN THE ANNALS OF surrogate mothering, British nannies and Southern nannies are the most famous, two utterly different species, now mostly extinct. In response to the recent posts on nannies near and far, a reader sends this beautiful excerpt from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body about a black slavewoman, “matriarch of the weak and young:”

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WE HAVE about three feet of snow in our yard here in Pennsylvania. That may seem unexceptional for residents of Buffalo or Syracuse but for us, it’s very exceptional. During the blizzard on Wednesday, we lost power for ten hours and a gargantuan  pine fell across our road. At the height of the storm, these words from the Bellows Falls Times in Vermont seemed apt. They were written right after the Blizzard of 1888:

“No paths, no streets, no sidewalks, no light, no roads, no guests, no calls, no teams, no hacks, no trains, no moon, no meat, no milk, no paper, no mail, no news, no thing — but snow.”

IN THE THIRD OF a series of essays on the decline in literacy, Thomas F. Bertonneau explores the connection between memory and popular culture. He describes introducing his university students to folk and music-hall songs. He says, “there is a startling difference between the songs that students consume and the songs that their grandparents and great grandparents sang, the memory of which the commercialization of music rudely interrupted, starting about fifty years ago”:  Read More »

BJH writes:

Having read your blog, I am going to go out and find the biggest, hairy-leggiest feminazi I can and give her a big old hug. I am then going to fall to my knees and thank the “higher power” that I have grown up during a time when antiquated views like yours are in the minority. Read More »

It’s hard to overstate the importance of two French intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, in the history of postmodern romance. Much has been written that discredits their image, but the fairy tale lives on.

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SOMETIMES it seems the world has been emptied of fatherliness. You know, father, the big guy who lives with your mother. You know, the guy who says no. Maybe the world took Jean-Paul Sartre too seriously when he said, “There are no good fathers … It is not the men who are at fault but the paternal bond which is rotten.”

Still here and there, fathers, typically men who haven’t gotten the message that the paternal bond is rotten through and through, show up for duty. Here’s one.

James H. writes:

As the father of four girls, I’ve faced many “dates” and do not feel as though I’ve done my job unless I’ve managed to instill some fear and trepidation. Read More »

Eloise had a British nanny

 IN RESPONSE TO the previous posts on nannies,  which can be found  here and here, a working nanny writes in to share her observations. By the way, Eloise, the famous character who roamed the halls of the Plaza Hotel, was able to have a perfectly decent life with her “rawther” British nanny, who never kept Eloise from her very necessary adventures.

Mrs. Cote writes:

As someone who is currently a professional nanny, I just wanted to thank you for pointing out that there are those of us who take our work seriously. You are right to point the low paid, usually foreign women are not actually nannies. At best they can be called babysitters. They should be called dangerous since they are completely unsupervised and are actually allowed to take their charges out of the home. A true governess would work with school age children while a nanny/nurse would care for babies and very young children.

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IN RESPONSE to comments on the phenomenon of over-attentive parents, Alex A. gives a a great summation of one of the main underlying causes of this problem. “Pushiness,” he says, “is a compensation for not being there.”

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Sebastien writes in response to Nanny Power:

It’s a with great deal of interest that I follow your blog from where we are in Paris. 

We have two boys, one of 18 months and the other of three years. In our building there are four households, including our own, that have young children. My wife is a full-time mum and has no desire to change this. The other three families have nannies. Read More »

Fitzgerald writes:

True to form, most Super Bowl commercials showed men in a variety of convenient misandrist stereotypes. But none were quite as repellent and creepy as the Doritos ad with the kid slapping his mother’s date. Revolting on many levels.

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Alex A. from England writes:

An ongoing debate on TV over here has been concerned with the effects of “pushy parenting” on children. Do parents who put a contented marriage first and their children’s demands second, provide a more stable environment for raising children? It’s a commonplace to observe that children will divide and rule if parents don’t support each other in establishing reasonable boundaries. But perhaps modern child-centered imperatives are undermining the “united front” that parents often need to present in order to socialize their children successfully.

Advice from family therapist and Wall Street Journal writer David Code has entered the debate. He has written a book, which I haven’t read, entitled, To Raise Happy Kids, Put Your Marriage First.

If you have the time and inclination to read it, I have provided a link to a British newspaper article in which some of the issues are discussed.

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LAST WEEK, government statisticians reported that women have surpassed men in numbers in the workforce, largely pushed to a slim majority by the recession which has been harder on male occupations in construction and manufacturing.

Hip Hip Hooray for working women! Let’s look at the ten most common jobs women hold and see what a wonderful milestone this is:

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WHEN WALKING through the tonier section of Central Park West in Manhattan a few months ago, I couldn’t help noticing the nannies. They were everywhere, mostly black and Hispanic women, pushing strollers or leading young children by the hand. What was most striking, other than the racial differences between them and their white charges, was the look on their faces.

They wore expressions of deadly boredom, of almost zombie-like indifference. Here in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world, the children were handed over to zombies during the day.

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This is one of the top ten bridal gowns by Vera Wang, a big name in wedding fashion.  Many of her dresses make women look like waifs who have stumbled into chiffon parachutes, but this satin dress is just plain bizarre. I’m having trouble reading it. Is it an allusion to mermaids? Interestingly, all of Wang’s gowns feature bare shoulders, arms and upper chests. Women pay many thousands for these hideous get ups and they don’t even get sleeves.

As Kidist Paulos Asrat says, “Beauty is the last thing on the minds of modern designers. Edginess, the avant-garde, experimentation and originality win over aesthetics.” You can read Kidist’s other thoughts on Wang wear at Camera Lucida.

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IN RESPONSE to the previous post on video games and their effects on the academic performance of boys, a mother reports her own distressing experience with video game addiction. This is a powerful story of one family’s encounter with the compulsion to play.

Ann writes:

As one who has been subjected to witnessing video game obsession since 1987, I wholeheartedly concur that those who play them incessantly become less and less functional in the real world, but may be predisposed to this behavior by other life factors.

When my oldest child was three, my husband brought home a Nintendo game system, something brand new at the time. My husband comes from a home in which the father was an alcoholic, the mother a sweet, religious, but weak woman who enabled her husband’s drinking and otherwise did the best she could. The family was always either playing cards or other games, or watching TV.

Now, as head of our family, my husband (who himself had been a teenage alcoholic), was no longer drinking and was a fine worker in his job, but still given to addictive behavior. ( I believe, for all my mouthing off and persistently trying to come up with alternative activities and ideas while trying to maintain an intact family, I am probably playing his mother’s role to a “T”).

Enter the Nintendo. He brought it in, set it up, and began to play. This went on for hours. The next day the same thing, and on and on, until almost every bit of time off was consumed by this activity. The things he did with the rest of his free time consisted of eating, sleeping, TV watching, and taking care of bodily functions. Read More »

WHILE FEMINISM has been widely attacked for making the lives of mothers more difficult and for destroying perfectly decent marriages, it has generally remained immune from criticism regarding the condition of the unmarried woman without children. It is here that feminists who harbor doubts remain absolutely certain of progress.

The unmarried woman once faced shame and ostracism. If she hadn’t found a man by the time she was 25, she was designated an old maid. She could only teach or work as a nurse or secretary. She didn’t go to bars alone or travel to ashrams in Asia and, most horrific of all, she likely never had a sex life. She didn’t eat, pray and love.

All that has changed.  Today, she is not a spinster but a success. She can be a CEO or lawyer. She lives not with her parents, but in a house of her own, complete with the sort of household niceties married women have, such as full sets of china and antique dining tables. She’s just as likely to read Martha Stewart and host fancy dinner parties. People hardly ever ask her why she never married. They’re more interested in her job, and she is most certainly not a virgin.

But this rosy picture is misleading. Does the unmarried woman have it better today? Yes, she may be richer, but is she happier?

When my maternal grandmother was raising her four daughters, she sternly told them that she was not “running a school for spinsters.” That’s because there was a long and exalted line of spinsters in my grandfather’s family. These women lived well and served as tempting role models. There was one difference between them and their contemporary counterparts. They lived in the bosom of their families and in the heart of vital communities. They knew no more real loneliness than anyone else.

Three of my grandfather’s sisters, Marge, Clare and Agnes, took up residence together as adults. Clare and Agnes worked to put my grandfather and his brother through medical school. Marge kept house. They were later joined by their sister Dot; her husband was a prison warden who was shot by an inmate a year after the wedding.

They lived in a Victorian house on a hill, immaculately tended and amply decorated with cut-glass candy dishes, doilies and lace. They had a poodle who begged for chocolate kisses. To a child, theirs was a world of feminine enchantment, filled with a crystalline delicacy that can only be created by true female celibates.

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MANY PEOPLE  argue that video games are harmless. They may even improve coordination and certain types of intelligence. That’s one common claim. Video games clearly are not destructive of personal success in many cases. Some people are able to play them in moderation. But there is conclusive evidence that they affect school performance for males.

According to Leonard Sax, physician, popular writer on sex differences in childhood and adolescence, and author of Boys Adrift,  published in 2007:

A series of studies over the past seven years has demonstrated clearly and unambiguously that the more time your child spends playing video games, the less likely he is to do well in school – whether he is in elementary school, middle school, high school, or college. This negative association between academic performance and playing video games remains strong even when investigators control for all possible confounding variables, such as personality traits. I regard this finding as “clear and unambiguous” because all studies of this question have yielded similar results.

In the past fifty years, colleges have gone from being predominantly male to predominantly female. Here are figures from Leonard Sax’s book Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Men:

1949: 70 percent of undergraduate students were male
1959: 64 percent were male
1969: 59 percent were male
1979: 49 percent were male
1989: 46 percent were male
1999: 44 percent were male
2006: 42 percent were male

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