Economics for Humans by Julie A. Nelson

I was surpised a few years ago when I found out that economics comes from the same root as ecology. The common root is oikos, which is Greek for home or household. Back in the seventeenth centure, if you read a book of oeconomics, you would find dinner recipes, home remedies, and advice on managing expenses. Green Parenting is a 21st century blog of oeconomics in a way. The archives of this blog are largely dominated by our documentation of how we cook, what we throw away, what utility companies we use, and our struggle to share responsibilities. Then all of a sudden, we post about the World Bank or Global Warming. You see, we're harking way back to the oeco- in economics and ecology, like we're ancient Greeks. Call me Aristotle, baby. We're erasing the modern boundary between the public and private, the domestic and the civic, the personal and the political. Agoramania in the blogosphere!

A book called Economics for Humans helped me think through what it means to question the separation of what goes on inside a home and what happens in the global economy. Published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press, the book moves from economic history to the challenges people in the United States face now. I think what's most interesting about the book is that Nelson takes aim at right-wingers who think the marketplace solves all problems and "her friends," who believe that corporations are intrinsicly evil. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Probusiness, neoliberal zealots firmly believe that the economy is a machine. They assert that any direct concern with ethics or care is unnecessary because a market economy automatically serves the common good. Antimarket critics also believe the economy is a machine. They assert that ethics and care are impossible within capitalism since the system automatically runs on the energy of self-interest and greed. Either way, the metaphor forces us to divorce the "body" concerns of economic provisioning for our lives from the "soul" concerns of social responsibility and caring relationships. The economy-as-machine metaphor has blinded us to the real-world qualities that make humans work and care and organizations run.

Non-profits, she argues, are not necessarily the instruments of good. Nelson gives examples of corporate hospitals that provide better benefits to their workers than non-profit hospitals. She's extremely critical of lefties who think of non-profits, churches, and volunteers as mop-up operations for the inevitable destruction of mega-multinational corporations. She's also critical of those who insist that government has no place in making sure everyone has access to childcare, eldercare, quality healthcare, and paid leave. She argues that the first step to addressing the caring crisis - a crisis I believe most parents are acutely aware - is to jettison the economy-as-machine metaphor. Then we'll be able imagine pragmatic solutions that involve corporations, non-profits, government, and individual responsibility.

I talked to an economist who specializes in the study of big corporations about Nelson's arguments. This person said, "We know the economy isn't a machine, that's Introduction to Economics stuff." Maybe that's true, but it's that Intro to Econ rhetoric that actually drives the public debate. Most of our politicians and journalists didn't get past that intro class. So I would recommend this book, along with The Invisible Heart by Nancy Folbre, for anyone who wants to learn a humanist and feminist economics.

The Audacity of Hope

For Christmas, we all went up to Utah. The last time I had gone to Utah, I had seen MaGreen’s step-mother Helen nearly die. I spent a week babysitting BabyG while MaGreen talked with her father and sat with her step-mother in the intensive care unit. After a life of substance abuse, her liver was so scarred that her blood was backing up and bursting through some of her veins. When she wasn’t vomiting blood and being rushed into surgery, she was delirious and demented. It seemed so unlikely that she would live. The doctors performed a procedure called TIPS, which I wrote about, and she “recovered.” After a month, she was living at home and on the phone she seemed more clear headed than I had ever known her to be.

Even in the relatively short time I have known Helen, I have learned to check myself when I feel hopeful about her. Paradoxically, I feel sadder when she is clear headed. You realize what has been lost, the extraordinarily kind and perceptive person who has been lost. Talking to Helen when the “real” her emerges only reminds you of the inevitability of her decline. I know this sadness is harder for MaGreen since Helen raised her from a pretty early age.

We got digital photos of Helen by email from my parents when they were passing through Salt Lake City. She looked so much better that it surprised me. Her skin was no longer yellow but back to its Queen Elizabeth white whiteness. For several months, Helen had cogent conversations on the phone with me about the latest Britney Spears story or the weather. Sometimes a terrible and wondrous hope flickered through my mind. Maybe she will last, maybe she will stay sober, maybe she could qualify for a transplant.

When we got to Utah for the holidays, we immediately realized that Helen’s mental state had declined again. Some relatives had warned us, but you can never know for sure until you see a person face-to-face. Helen didn’t exactly recognize us. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn’t. She didn’t always remember our wedding. She didn’t remember dancing with me during the reception. She often thought MaGreen was Caroline Kennedy. She thought MaGreen’s dad was four different people, three of whom were living in the basement and trying to impersonate her real husband. She would walk through each room of her own house collecting objects and piling them up because they were hers. “How did this remote get here, this is my remote.” She would leave the house when no one was looking, walk through the snow in her slippers, and ask her neighbors to take her to the home she lived in before. She seemed more like an Alzheimer’s patient than anything else and my cynical, anti-hope side was clucking its tongue triumphantly.

For Christmas, Helen gave me a copy of Barack Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope. I had wanted the book. I had told MaGreen that I wanted a copy on the flight over from Texas. How could Helen have known that in the few days preceeding our trip, I had started to become infatuated with Barack Obama? The gift was a reminder that even this demented person who couldn’t remember who I am still had the “real” Helen inside of her, the person who is so perceptive she knows their desires better than they know themselves.

I read most of the book between car trips to Myton, Roosevelt, Vernal, Neola, Heber, and Salt Lake City. Obama departs from the style of his first book, which was a memoir. He only makes passing references to his personal and family history. It’s also not a statement of his policy goals. The book is more an analysis of rhetoric, a call for richer public discourse. Sometimes while I was reading, I wanted to cry, and to jump up and down. Obama is so eloquent and intelligent. He puts into clear prose the kind of arguments I have only come across in heady, theoretical books like Zygmunt Bauman’s In Search of Politics. He is such an impossible figure. It’s simplistic to call his background exotic. His genotype, his phenotype, his life story, his identity, and his rhetoric – together they are like some kind of manufactured narrative that magically reconciles all of the festering histories we never even acknowledge in the US. He seems to be the beautiful person I have always felt inside of myself, but who was battered down when I was a child by little unknowing kids regurgitating the latent hatred in our society, the beautiful person I myself won’t allow to show because I am too angry and timid and petty.

Having received this gift from Helen of all people, I felt the audaciousness of the audacity of hope, which is to say I felt ridiculous and naïve and vulnerable. Here I was carrying this book with a mixed-race liberal on the cover through rural Utah. MaGreen may as well have been Caroline Kennedy and I Rajiv Gandhi back from the grave. What would that make BabyG? I do not want to be so cynical about Helen’s chances to recover. I do not want to be so cynical to think that this nation could really come to accept a person like Barack Obama as its leader, which would be akin to a deep reconciliation inside of me.

An Interview with Laurie Boucke, the Guru of Infant Potty Training

Laurie Boucke has been researching infant potty training since using it with her third son in 1979. She is the author of three books on the subject. Her most popular book is Infant Potty Training: A Gentle and Primeval Method Adapted to Modern Living, which has been translated into Italian, German, and Dutch. Her work on infant potty training has been written about in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, and other major newspapers. Her documentary, Potty Whispering, is scheduled to be released in November 2006. She kindly joined me for a live telephone interview from Boulder, Colorado on Border Crossings, a radio show on Houston's Pacifica Radio Station, KPFT 90.1.

Click here to listen to the interview. The whole thing is nearly forty-five minutes. She gives a brief explanation of the method at the beginning. We had a lot of fun doing the interview, so I imagine it will be fun to listen to. Also, here is a link to more information about infant potty training that is mentioned during the interview: pottywhisperer.com.

The Argumentative Indian: An Interview with Amartya Sen

Last February, I had the honor of interviewing Amartya Sen, the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. We talked about his recent book, The Argumentative Indian, a history of rational thought, skepticism, scientific inquiry, and secularism in India.

The interview was recorded for a radio show in Houston called Border Crossings, which has a South Asian focus. Although parenting wasn't the topic of the interview I did manage to squeeze in one question about raising children. However, I believe the whole interview is relevant to parenting. In all of Sen's writings, there is an amazing integration of different kinds of analytic tools, knowledge, and values. I think parenting requires the same kind of flexibility. And Sen always keeps in mind the goal of creating a more just world where every individual can choose the life she or he finds most meaningful. He is a father. When his second wife died, he raised their two children as a single parent. I believe that experience informs his thinking. For all these reasons, I think of Amartya Sen as a patron saint of Green Parenting.

Click on the following link for the interview -- Amartya_Sen_Interview.mp3. I hope you enjoy it.

Raising Kids Who Will Make a Difference

The author of Raising Kids Who Will Make a Difference, Susan Vogt, is deeply Catholic. If there was only one thing I could tell you about the book, that would be it. Nearly every aspect of Vogt’s parenting approach is informed by Catholicism. The title might lead you to expect that the author holds the beliefs commonly attributed to the so-called “Left” in the United States. However, if you try to make sense of politics as a spectrum from right to left, Catholic folks can be downright infuriating and this book will be infuriating too. I remember when I first started working with Catholic people in social justice movements I often felt disoriented. They oppose abortion. Homosexuality may be something to be tolerated or channeled, but definitely not celebrated. The church hierarchy is like a living museum of classical patriarchy. And yet, you’re likely to find Catholics at the forefront of peace movements, anti-death penalty movements, and economic justice movements working in coalitions alongside liberals, anarchists, and socialists.

Once I reconciled myself with Vogt’s avowedly Catholic approach, I was able to open myself up to the wisdom she had to share. For example, when she suggests listing the qualities you might hope for from your child and she includes “sexually chaste until marriage” in her suggestions, I took away the basic idea of making such a list. And I tried to make up my own language like “sexually responsible” or “takes joy in all things corporeal without getting hurt” or “respects her body.” (By the way, I’ve been singing a folk song to BabyG with the refrain “My body’s nobody’s body but mine, you take care of your body and I’ll take care of mine.” It’s a fantastically hokey song.)

The names of the twelve chapters – Identity, Time, Materialism, Ecology, Media, Health, Peacemaking, Spirituality, Global Awareness, Diversity, Service, and Motivation – should give an idea of how encompassing and wholistic Vogt’s conception of parenting is. The book doesn’t really present step-by-step guides. It mostly features the generalizing reflections of a lifelong activist, marriage counselor, and mother of four grown children. She speaks of what worked initially but that had to be let go of or adapted as her children became adolescents. She advises patience. In the Epilogue, she writes, “Some might call these stories of failure…” Indeed, what really sets the book apart are the responses she includes from her children and other parents. Her sons and her daughter expose the gaps in her accounts of family life. Her friends recount having daughters who get pregnant in high schools, sons who are in jail, and children who grow up to be Republican investment bankers. Vogt goes on in the Epilogue, “[R]emember that a parent’s willingness to go beyond embarrassment to vulnerability is a gift to all the self-flagellating parents that inhabit our planet—many of them mothers.”

Vogt’s vulnerability is a gift. Even though the book is definitively in the self-help genre, by the end I felt the degree of intimacy I expect from a well-written memoir. Her best advice is often about what she seems to have struggled with most. “We must take care to not over-control our children,” she writes, “or become too proud of how little we own and consume. Our children and friends will resent our self-righteousness. And our souls will suffer from arrogance.” After all the advice on written contracts with children and morality lessons at the dinner table, I got the sense that the Vogt home was saturated with self-righteousness. Or worse, a humorless and ruthlessly ambitious drive for righteousness. The Vogt children’s responses are worth studying. They resisted. They fought. They played their way out, and back to, their parents’ vision of living with integrity, valuing simplicity, and caring for others.

Who's Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies, & Global Economics

I recently watched a great documentary narrated by Marilyn Waring. In 1975, at the age of 22, she was elected to the New Zealand parliament from a beautiful, rural district where the main occupation seems to be raising sheep. By virtue of her place in government and her seat on an accounting committee, she learned first hand about the absurdities in the way nations count economic activity. For example, she realized that a catastrophic event like the Exxon Valdez oil spill adds to growth, whereas childcare does not. And as a result, the accounting system inherently backs policies that favor destructive industries. Moreover, it makes the caring work done in families invisible and renders public support for childcare a "burden" to the taxpayer.

As Waring explains national accounting, the documentary shows pictures of the devastation from the oil spill followed by mothers caring for children. I can write all about national accounting, but the visual images provide jolting evidence for her critique. I don't think MaGreen could watch it at all because an otter is shown trying to lick and scratch oil of its skin. But Waring really wants viewers to understand that there is no "debit side" to national accounting and what that means in the material world.

After three terms in parliament, Waring withdrew from politics, earned a Ph.D., and became an academic. Through her experience and her studies, she came to understand that the accounting scheme in New Zealand is by no means exceptional. She traced the scheme to the United Nations in New York and read through several shelves of bound procedures herself. The UN, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund all require that member nations use the same accounting method where unpaid caring labor, subsistence farming, and ecological resources are "of little importance."

By expanding her focus to international agreements, Waring is able to make connections between the predicaments of desperately poor mothers in economically underdeveloped countries and mothers in wealthy countries like New Zealand. The documentary was copyrighted in 1995 and released in 1996 for the US. Despite its age – ten years is such a long time in this digital era – the information and analysis that Waring presents is just as relevant now, if not more, than at the time of release. What really sets it apart from many videos about globalization is that Waring shows how democracy, when it is functioning well, can counter act the destructive aspects of capital. The documentary does not end on the familiar dour note of whiny liberalism, but shows several paths out of our predicament.

Green Parenting, as MaGreen and I are trying to develop it, tries to link the intimacy of parenting – the brush of our baby's cheek against our arms – with the global institutions that shape and are shaped by our familial relationships. Parenting guides always focus to the exclusion of all else on the relationship of the mother and child. Maybe a partner is included, but only in the margins. We need to place parenting in the full context in which happens.

Here are some related links:
Wikipedia on Marilyn Waring
Distributor of Who's Counting

EcoKids: Raising Children Who Care for the Earth

Our friend Julie gave us a copy of the book EcoKids, which I just finished reading. The author, Dan Chiras, is an ecologist and father of two boys. He teaches courses on renewable energy, green building, and sustainability at Colorado College. The subtitle really is accurate. Chiras focuses on ways to raise future environmental leaders.

The book starts off with a lovely autobiographical note. Apparently, even though he went to college during the Vietnam War, Chiras was an apolitical pre-med student. He explains that his transformation into a hardcore tree hugger wasn’t because of a single event. A number of early experiences – growing up in the country, hiking through old growth along the Appalachian trail, witnessing a good fishing stream turned to muck by factory effluent – coalesced while he was driving through Gary, Indiana. I’ve driven through Gary and I imagine many people have become die-hard environmentalists that way. I used to call Gary the “armpit of America”, but I think too highly of armpits now to smear them that way. Chiras quit the medical track and devoted himself to environmental studies before it really emerged as a discipline.

Each chapter presents a mix of ecological theory, inspirational stories, and practical advise. His background as an academic often comes through. Sometimes I felt like I was sitting in a college lecture hall, as if an undergrad had transcribed one of his talks. On the other hand, he strongly advocates teaching environmentalism in the field, while hiking or driving past a clear cut or visiting a sewage plant.

I enjoyed the contradictions in his style, which became more and more obvious as I read through the book. For example, in a subsection called “Age-Appropriate Education” he writes, “Avoid the tendency to try to teach young children abstract concepts like I did with my children. Being an environmental scientist, writer, and educator, I found myself lecturing about air pollution long before my boys could understand what I was talking about. (Sorry guys.)” And yet, Chiras doesn’t seem to have internalized his own message. A little later in the book, he writes, “Ask your children what the statement ‘Ecosystems are the life-support systems of the plant’ means.” That’s a very abstract, lecture-like, rhetorical question to pose to a child. I ultimately found these contradictions endearing. My dad is an academic and I’m one too, so I identified with Chiras’s difficulty holding back the lectures. Also, Chiras doesn’t give the impression that he never made mistakes or that he has parenting figured out. You learn indirectly about his divorce and his teenage boy’s desire to own a gas-guzzling, muscle car.

My favorite part of the book was probably the description of his house. It made me want to live off the grid. He has solar panels and a super efficient refrigerator. The bedrooms are partly under ground. Elk sometimes graze above where he sleeps. I also liked how he referenced useful resources and books. Now I have half a dozen books to add to my reading list. The one’s at the top are Household EcoTeam Workbook: A Six-month Program to Bring Your Household into Environmental Balance and Living Simply with Children.

EcoKids is the first parenting guide I’ve read that isn’t strictly oriented to the relationship between the mother and child – the world outside the family is also a consideration. The book was close enough to what I think MaGreen and I are trying to accomplish with this blog that it clarified in my mind what the difference is between ecological parenting and green parenting. For me, green parenting includes social responsibility from the beginning. Race, ethnicity, class, and gender aren’t side notes for me. You can’t just add and stir them in at the end. That said, EcoKids is excellent and you should read it.

Raising Healthy Children in a Toxic World

I just finished reading Raising Healthy Children in a Toxic World: 101 Smart Solutions for Every Family by Philip Landrigan, M.D., Herbert L. Needleman, M.d., and Mary Landrigan, M.P.A. The book was published in 2001 by Rodale, but is out of print. I got my hands on a copy through an inter-library loan. It presents much of the same information as Raising Children Toxic Free, the older more widely available book that I already reviewed, along with some very important new information.

Both books are excellent. What I like most about them is that the authors are public health veterans and they keep in focus the biggest, baddest toxins – lead, radon, and aesbestos. If you learn about toxins through newspapers, magazines, and chat groups, it is easy to get caught up with the very latest studies. According to Landrigan, Needleman, and Landrigan, good old lead remains the most dangerous threat. Odds are that there's lead paint on the walls of the very house MaGreen, BabyG, and I live in. It was built in the 1950s well before lead paint was banned. As readers of this blog know, we have obsessed over cleaning products and plastic bottles, but we never thought to have our walls tested. Fortunately, none of the paint is peeling, but we were about to have our kitchen cabinets sanded down. They are goopy with old paint. Sanding them could cover everything – the floor, toys, bedding – with lead-laden dust and really mess BabyG up. Lead causes loss of IQ, behavioral problems, and other very scary problems. After reading Raising Healthy Children in a Toxic World, I convinced MaGreen to put off the kitchen cabinets project until we have the paint tested.

Landrigan, Needleman, and Landrigan's favorite new term is "prudent avoidance." In the section on food additives, they write:

So which food additives should you avoid? Using the theory of prudent avoidance, we suggest that you eliminate as many as possible. This means minimizing exposure to those things that are thought to be linked to health threats, even though the research that can prove or disprove the link may be incomplete or years away. Use your common sense to determine just how much risk you're willing to accept and what level of effort you're willing to commit to avoid items and lifestyles that may prove hazardous to your health and or the health of your children.

Prudent avoidance is their advice not only for food additives, but also for insecticides, herbicides, electromagnetic fields, toxic art supplies, and toxic cleaning supplies. I think it is their way of saying, Just get this crap out of your lives entirely but if you can't, only use it occasionally. They do recommend silicone nipples over plastic nipples for baby bottles, but otherwise they take no positions on plastics. MaGreen and I are trying to do prudent avoidance for all plastic that BabyG might eat from or stick in her mouth because of the new research on pthalate exposure.

Here are three new sources of toxins I learned about from the book:

1) Dirty curtains, especially heavy ones, hold lots of dust that can cause allergies and asthma
2) Home-made or natural peanut butter from health food stores may have a naturally occurring toxin called aflatoxin, which is produced by the mold Apergillus flavus. So even though they recommend buying locally grown organic food, for peanut butter they advise buying commercially prepared brands.
3) Elephant's ears, aloe, amaryllis, angel wings, chrysanthemums, cyclamens, dumb cane, golden pothos, poinsettias, and philodendrons are all toxic houseplants.

The new book is written as a series of tips. So it is easy to pick up for a minute or two and freshly freak yourself out. In that sense, the book deserves an official Green Parenting FREAK OUT award. But I think it is good to keep the freak out juices flowing because otherwise you start to convince yourself that there probably isn't lead in the paint and the toilet bowl cleaner probably won't hurt your baby if she drinks it. I started to worry, though, about the whole prudent avoidance thing, because prudent and prudish come from the same root. As I got to the last third of the book, my anti-purity hackles were aroused. Part of me wants to sneak into the Landrigan's house and look under their sink. I bet there's a secret stash of Draino, Windex, and Snickers bars in there.

Dr. Spock – A Forgotten Guru of Green Parenting?

MaGreen's labor slowed down considerably just when we reached the nurse's station. We were embarrassed. I swear Mr. Mechanic, the engine was making a strange noise just a few minutes ago. So MaGreen and I started walking around the hospital floor hoping that the movement would get the labor going strong again. The strange thing was that most of the hospital floor was about to be demolished. Hallway after hallway of empty rooms lit by fluorescent lights. Wards that once bustled with doctors groping nurses in starched white uniforms. Empty. Supply closets, stairwells, bathrooms. All empty. There were a few boxes of latex gloves lying around. The corkboards were tacked with performance evaluations of disbanded teams.

We found a dark waiting room with some tattered couches. There was a shelf of books. Most of the titles were mystery novels. My eye settled on the one parenting book among them. It was a twenty-year-old paperback edition of Dr. Spock's famous childcare manual. I didn't know anything about Dr. Spock. The cover of the book was shorn off and the pages browned. I thought it might be entertaining to find all the sexisms and outmoded assumptions in it. I stuck the book in my pocket thinking (wrongly) that I might need something to read in the hospital. Twelve hours later BabyG was born. I forgot about the book and left it in the car trunk where it got even more tattered.

Six months later I went to the airport to pick MaGreen and BabyG up after their adventures in Utah. I had an hour to wait. There was Dr. Spock in the trunk. He became my companion in the crowded baggage claim area. To my great surprise, there was a chapter towards the end that offered tips to agnostic parents. How was it that such a mainstream parenting guide could even mention agnosticism? I read the first few pages of that chapter eagerly. It described very clearly the challenges and questions an agnostic parent, like myself, faces. The deep questions. How do you hold back from foisting your believes on your child? How do you teach skepticism without squashing belief in the possibility of mystery and unknowable forces?

Before I could get to the answers, I saw an acquaintance of ours who had her baby one month after MaGreen did and I hadn't seen her since then so I stopped reading and said hello. We first met this woman when she hosted Green Party meetings. That was back in 2000 when Ralph Nader was a candidate for US President and when Gore won but Bush occupied the White House. More recently, she ran a non-profit that trained Latina women as doulas. Her partner is a famous activist folk singer and was, at the time, on tour in Europe.

"What are you reading?" she asked.

"I'm reading Dr. Spock," I said.

"Is he the one who believes in harsh discipline and leaving children alone when they cry at night?" she asked.

"No, no," I said. "I think you're thinking of Ferber."

Later, when MaGreen was cleaning out her car, she threw away the Dr. Spock book thinking that nobody was reading the tattered, old copy. Between our activist friend confusing Spock for Ferber and MaGreen throwing away the book, I started to become defensive on Spock's behalf. How could he be so easily forgotten, his work buried in the rubble of demolished maternity wards?

So I went to the used bookstore, but all the copies of his book were recent. Dr. Spock's voice was lost, in my opinion, as he started revising with the help of younger doctors. The section on agnostic parenting was cut. Lost forever. I did find, however, a biography of Dr. Spock, which I bought and read. Here's what I learned:

1) He received a gold metal for rowing on a US Olympic crew team.
2) He studied Freud and psychoanalysis extensively. He was perhaps the first US doctor to get specialized training in both pediatrics and psychiatry.
3) His parenting advice in Baby and Childcare was infused with a psychoanalytic perspective without using Freudian jargon or ever referencing Freud.
4) The book ultimately sold over 50 million copies and was translated into 39 languages.
5) His approach was markedly less disciplinary and violent than those of previous experts.
6) He was the first person of celebrity status to oppose the Vietnam war and tirelessly worked to end the war. He helped persuade Martin Luther King to publicly oppose the war and in 1967 they marched together in Chicago.
7) He ran for President of the US as the official candidate of the People's Party on an antiwar platform.

MaGreen and I have tried to envision Green Parenting as bringing together the personal, home-based actions of raising a child with collective, political action. And we have struggled, especially with the second part. Perhaps we don't need to look any further than Dr. Spock as an example. He felt an obligation to act on behalf of young people at every level, from toilet training to marching in the streets. As the old hospitals tumble and new parents look for the latest advice, I think we should be mindful that every old-time parenting expert wasn't a reactionary-tie-your-kids-up-and-beat-them authoritarian. Green Parenting already has a history. We just need to find that history, name it, mimic its successes, and learn from its mistakes. Right?

Raising Children Toxic Free

I found a used book called Raising Children Toxic Free. It was published in 1994 by HarperCollins. The authors, Drs. Herbert L. Needleman and Philip J. Landrigan, are both pediatricians. Both of them devoted their careers to public health research and campaigns for the regulation of toxins, especially lead poisoning. Their work back in the 1970s helped to show that even low levels of exposure to lead could harm a child's mental development. As more and more research was done by non-industry scientists, the "acceptable" level of lead in the environment and in children's blood was revised downwards several times. In Raising Children Toxic Free, Needleman and Landrigan bring their expertise as pediatric public health scientists, and their experience fighting for policies to reduce lead poisoning, to helping parents keep a whole range of toxins out of our children. They are rational. Their claims are based on evidence. At the same time, they do not believe – as we are often encouraged to believe by advertisements and corporate propaganda – that we should assume a chemical is safe until giant studies prove otherwise.

Needleman and Landrigan give five reasons for children's greater vulnerability to toxins:

1) Children absorb more through their intestines and lungs than adults.
2) Children stick their hands in their mouths after playing on the floor and in the dirt.
3) Children breath, eat, and drink more as a percentage of their total weight.
4) Children's immune and detoxifying systems are, in many cases, less strong.
5) Children's bodies are developing very quickly, so anything that alters cellular growth can have far more dramatic effects than in adults. This is also especially true with fetuses.

Given that children are more vulnerable than adults to toxins, you would think that regulations of toxins would be based on child health. Needleman and Landrigan explain that, unfortunately, this is rarely true. The chemical levels that are defined as acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency are based on what adults can tolerate.

After their basic introduction to pediatric toxicology, they discuss several major groups of toxins chapter by chapter. These are lead, mercury, asbestos, pesticides, radiation, tobacco, solvents and PCBs, and air pollution. In the back of the books, there is a household inventory, which is basically a questionnaire you can go through to determine if your child is exposed to any of these toxins and what actions you can take to reduce their exposure.

The specific sources of toxins that they cover are leaded paint, lead pipes, asbestos-insulated pipes. basement living areas where radon can accumulate, inadequately ventilated fireplaces, wood-burning stoves, storm windows that seal pollutants indoors, termite treatments, gas stoves with pilot burners, kerosene space heaters, gas clothes dryers, electronic air precipitators, furnace humidifiers, lawn pesticides, flea repellant for pets, pesticides stored in the house, old prescription drugs, motor oil, alcohol, toluene, dry-cleaning, gasoline, home insulation, cigarette smoke, glues, toilet-bowl cleaners, room deodorizers, polishes, varnishes, and paint thinners.

I highly recommend the book to parents. For that matter, I think people without kids should be interested as well. The only problem with the book is that it hasn't been revised since its initial publication in 1994. It seems to be out of print, but used copies are widely available on the internet. Their more recent book, with its decidedly less optimistic title Raising Healthy Children in a Toxic World, was published in 2002 but is very hard to find. I'll try to find a copy soon and write about it.

Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott

My wife and baby have been away for a month now in Utah. I did go visit them for one week, but that was nearly three weeks ago. I missed some big moments – being with them on my first Father’s Day, BabyG's six-month birthday, BabyG winning the cutest baby prize at a festival, MaG and BabyG riding on a float in a parade, and BabyG's first tooth poking out to name a few.

I tried to compensate by pulling out all our baby manuals and reading about six-month-old babies. We have William and Martha Sears’s big book and the American Academy of Pediatrics Caring for Your Baby and Young Child. But the book I read cover to cover is called Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott. I guess Lamott’s book does not really go with the first two I mentioned. It really is a journal not a manual. The chapter titles are dates and most everything she tells you about just happened on the particular day of the entry.

I read the book hungrily in three or four sittings although I’m not sure what I was looking for. Lamott is a dread-lock wearing, black-church attending, single-mothering white woman in her thirties living near San Francisco. She was also a recovering alcohol and coke addict. There’s this picture of her on the back with an open, white umbrella propped on her shoulder. It’s the right picture. She’s that hopeful. White umbrella hopeful. And yet, as every review has noted, she is "brutally honest," which tethers the book, keeps it out of the clouds.

For example, she wrote on October 6 at 3:45 am, “My vagina ached terribly. I kept trying to push his pacifier in, but his jaw was sort of gritted, the way you are when you’re coming down off cocaine. I just couldn’t get the pacifier in. I kept feeling like I was trying to push a bit into the mouth of a wild horse.” But then the next entry is about his first smile. Later she admits to having thoughts of violence. She even makes reference to saying out loud to her baby that she’d fetch a stick with nails poking out when he wouldn’t stop crying. I told MaG about that part over the telephone and she said, “Honey, I want you to know I never have those kinds of thoughts.” I never think about getting a stick either, but when BabyG won’t be consoled I do occasionally have disturbing flashes of anger. And it’s helpful to read a book that bears witness to those kinds of thoughts. You’re less alone if you know someone else has felt the same way and, probably, more able to cope with those kinds of thoughts.

One big thing that I realized when reading Operating Instructions is that the 1980s are definitely over. The entries were written between 1989 and 1990. The language, the mentality, and the liberal politics are characteristic of the 80s. For example, she makes reference to Leona Helmsley. I haven’t heard that name for years. And I don’t think a writer today could get away with the rather innocent way she writes about attending a Black church. She rants about George Bush, meaning the father, who, in retrospect, was a moderate in comparison to his son. No mention of the big alternative parenting methods that have since become more or less mainstream, like attachment parenting. And no internet. There were no parenting blogs, discussion boards, and listservs back then. Why buy a journal of someone’s son’s first year in this day and age? Granted Lamott is a brilliant writer. But if she were writing the same book today, she would have to try much harder to differentiate her diary from the thousands of parenting blogs available on the web, many of which are insightful and provocative.

But then why did I read the book cover to cover? Why did my computer remain shut all that time? I think I was drawn to her struggle as a single parent. MaG’s in Utah taking care of our baby without my help. I’m here alone. Lamott’s story of creating surrogate family helped me think about trying to do the same. Two-parent families may not be forced to use that strategy like a single-parent has to, but I think we should anyway. MaG went to Utah because her step-mother is very sick. She went to tend to her family, but I think the month she spent there gave her family and friends a chance to tend to her and our baby too. I didn’t quite identify with Lamott's perspective. (Her relationship with the Black church really bothered me, the way she'd let older, much poorer women slip money into her pocket. It was like she was preying on a support network when she had access to other wealth as a famous writer.) But her deliberate way of parenting with family and friends – I’m into that.

Happy Birthday!!!!

Raj and Miah decided to celebrate Raj's birthday by having a baby! What else do you do on a birthday, but give birth?

BabyG was born 11.46AM, December 22, 2005.
She is 7lb 7oz, 20in.
And she and MaGreen are doing just fine.

We Hauled out a Holly: Our Native Christmas Tree

Tree dilemmas are all over!  The two shrubby evergreens in front of
our house are wiping their brows for having survived this holiday season.  I found a merry holly at a store called Buchanan's (psst...here's a list my friend Julie gave me of native plant stores in Houston.).  I was looking for an oak, like GreenDaddy wanted,but unfortunately they're all basically branchless sticks at this time of year.  Only Ziggy or Charlie Brown would buy one and decorate it.  Luckily I saw the holly, perfect because it’s full of all these little red berries.

What I learned while decorating our Ilex Vomitoria, or Pride of Houston
Yaupon Holly:

1. Putting lights on holly is not the same as putting them on an evergreen.  You can’t just wrap them around the whole thing, you have to follow each of the main branches…our has about seven.  
2. Important to find symmetrically balanced tree. Otherwise you'll have to stick your heaviest knicknacks in the pot so it won't tip.
3. It’s hard to put lights on.  My dad always did it for us.
4. It’s a relief not to have pine needles, but squashing the red berries that fell all over the floor while I put up the lights might be its own kind of meditiation on the word Vomitoria.
5. When the lights are on, berries seem to glow of their own accord and are gorgeous.
6. According to GreenDaddy:  whereas only a real square would not have appreciated our unusual wedding cake, many people will be upset by our strange little tree.  

I think its lovely.  It looks prairie-like and sweet.  It is true that we can't get a good photo of it, though.  I’ll put one up, but be   
assured it looks much nicer in person than it does in photograph. (I almost decided not to share an image since the image doesn't do it any real kind of justice.)

What I learned after decorating the Ilex Vomitoria:

1. I thought I was buying the Ilex Opaca, which is a tree that grows 20 to 25 feet as is supposed to be a fabulous tree
2. Ilex Vomitoria is a bush that grows about 15 feet, but it draws lots of birds and butterflies.
3. Vomitoria does signify that the leaves, when boiled, makes a person vomit.  According to a website I read but can’t find again, Native Americans (which natives, I don’t know) used to eat its leaves in order to vomit as a means of cleansing themselves before hunting.

You would think either GreenDaddy or I would have noticed the difference between a tree and a shrub, and the truth is that we did.   GreenDaddy kept saying things like, “I just don’t see how these branches are going to turn into a trunk.”    Since I saw the picture of the tree in my book and it had a trunk and red berries, and since I saw the label at the store calling it American Holly Tree, I just figured this particular type of tree would look more like a shrub than a tree until it was older.  I think the man who put the tree in the car for me just picked up the wrong tree.  

Though you might pay more going to a local native plant store, their service is superb.  When I called to tell Buchanan’s about my sad tree mix-up, Donna (not the owner but “the other Donna” she said) told me I could bring my tree back in three weeks, so I wouldn’t have to undecorate it and redecorate it.   So I can still have a big tree to plant, like I had planned on.  

But also, I’ve just seen lots of pictures of the ‘Pride of Houston’ which can be trained into a tree-shape.  I think I like it better than the American Holly, which has the sharp leaves and grows in a conical shape.  So maybe I won’t even exchange the tree…though we’ll probably not use this tree to plant BabyG’s placenta.

Who’d Want to Be Gandhi’s Child?

Last weekend, anti-war activists in Houston were abuzz with activity. Dick Cheney was to speak at a fundraiser for Tom Delay at a luxury hotel in town on the coming Tuesday. The opportunity to create media coverage of the terrifying mélange of corruption, scandal, lies, and policies of war, economic exploitation, and torture that Cheney and Delay represent was very enticing to the activist community. Local groups that often refuse to work together converged. Moveon.org spurred its Houston area members to action. By most accounts, the protest was a huge success.

Miah and I, however, did not go to the protest. She could go into labor anytime and I’d had bronchitis for two weeks that was beginning to abate. It was not the time for us to stand in the cold with a sign as the police circled us on their horses. I still made a little contribution to the organizing effort by writing and designing a feature about the coming protest on a local news website.

Our parents were in town that weekend and they were a bit upset with my participation. “It’s not inconceivable that you could be locked away for this type of activity,” they said, “and now you have to think about your child.”

My response was that repression grows strongest when people are silent and that it is our duty to our child to speak out so that she does not grow up in a society that locks people up for voicing dissent. Still, I took my parents’ concern to heart. At what point does the parents’ obligation to keep their family safe outweigh everything else? I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m not sure there is a single answer. Clearly, parents in 1938 Germany faced a different set of choices than parents in 2005 Texas.

I actually don’t think safety is my biggest concern when it comes to activism and parenting. I’m more worried that the rigidity and inflexibility of belief that is required for activism – how else can people be sure enough of themselves to stand up to authority – is contrary to what is called for to parent well. Unqualified commitment to a set of ideals, whether its Evangelical Christianity or Green Anarcho-Feminism, is sure to create distance in families and rear children who are more perceptive of their family’s hypocrisies than their family’s love.

Gandhi’s eldest son, Harilal (pictured above), had an estranged relationship with his father for, what seems to me, legitimate reasons. For example, Gandhi opposed his son’s remarriage after his son’s first wife died on the grounds that he opposed marriage for the sake of sexual gratification. Though I admire Gandhi and read his writing closely, I would not have wanted him as a father. Not because I would have missed my father if he was in jail, but because I would not have wanted my childhood to be defined by my father’s uncompromising experiments with truth.

Diaper Free: Potty Training Indian Style

Last October, the New York Times published an article called “Dare to Bare” about the growing number of American and European families raising babies without diapers. It was written by an anthropologist named Meredith F. Small. She wrote, “I am ashamed to admit that, even though I've studied how babies are cared for all over the world, it never occurred to me to focus on how children in other cultures use the potty, or not.” Though she’d adopted parenting techniques from Kenya and India like co-sleeping, she kept using diapers and chides herself for it.

When MaGreen read the piece she became interested. If you have been a regular reader of this blog you know that when MaGreen becomes interested in something, she researches it exhaustively. She bought a book by Laurie Boucke called Infant Potty Training. It explains elimination communication (EC) in great detail. The main message is that potty training can be a continuum of communicating and working with the child as she gets older. Infants can communicate the need to eliminate by squirming, grunting, straining, or making sounds. Initially, parents hold the child over a bowl, sink, or toilet. Eventually kids can get to the receptacle but need help disrobing. Ultimately, the child can walk to the potty, disrobe, and eliminate, often much earlier than kids raised on diapers.

I was hesitant. But, you know, my older brother was raised without diapers. And for that matter, I was potty trained in India during a family vacation.

Like Meridith Small, it hadn’t occurred to me that a child could be raised without diapers in America. Despite having Indian parents, living in India, and seeing my own cousins’ kids raised without diapers, I never considered going without diapers for our expected baby girl. When I read the book, I was pleased to find out that Laurie Boucke learned the diaper-free method from an Indian woman. A strange form of pride welled up inside me.

When MaGreen and I started to talk to acquantances about our diaper-free plans, we got lots of comments. “You could hurt the child,” one mother told us at a party. “You know you have to support their heads.” There were rants against the diaper-free method on the feminist listserv I subscribe to on the grounds that it keeps women out of the workforce.

When my parents visited last weekend, I thought they would get upset when we explained our plans, but they were excited. I gave my mom a copy of Laurie Boucke’s book. After a few minutes she laughed and said that she didn’t need to read it. “This is just how it is done in India,” she said.