Parents' Rights Is Lazy Parenting

I was listening this morning to The Daily, and the lead story was about school librarians and book-banning. It got me thinking about the dominant rhetorical strategy being employed by those who want to be Nazis do censorship. Set aside for a minute any human concerns for the marginalized folks whose existence and representation tend to be at the center of this culture war battlefield. Let's take the right-wing, wouldbe censors at their word and assume this is actually about "parents' rights." I am not the first to point this out, but an obvious issue is that Parents' Rights™ actively negates the rights of the majority of parents who don't wish controversial books to be removed from their kids' school libraries. It is more accurately a debate about whether one set of parents has the right to impose their worldview on other parents.

That led me to this conclusion: at its core "Parents' Rights" parents are lazy parents. In effect, they are asking the state* to do their parenting for them. If a parent doesn't want their kid reading Lawn Boy, for example, it is the parent's job to inform their child that they're not allowed to read the novel and then, if necessary, to police the kid's reading. Instead, under the guise of their "rights," these parents are arguing that the schools should restrict access from all students simply because they don't want their child to have access. They apprently can't or won't suprevise their own child and ask the state to do so on their behalf. They can't control their own household so they ask the state to control their entire community. If I remember correctly, folks on the right had a term for situations where the government acts in an overprotective manner, curtailing individual choices: the nanny state. I guess these kinds of criticisms only apply to the state when one disagrees with the state's actions, huh?

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* - Public schools are special-purpose government entities.

Convenience, Kids, and Camaraderie

My three-year-old attends two different "preschools" this year, one Monday/Wednesday/Friday and another Tuesday/Thursday. (We'd prefer that she attend just one, but we missed our shot at the five-days-a-week class.) It's presented a natural experiment of sorts. The dropoff policy for the MWF school is that parents park their cars and walk their kids to and from the classrooms. The policy for the TR school is that parents queue their cars in the driveway and allow the teachers to come get the kids out of the cars. I have generally good interaction with the teachers and administrators at both schools. The stark difference ends up being in the relationships among the parents. The simple act of walking past the same faces six times a week, the eye contact, the head nods, the hellos, and at times, the conversations generate solidarity. Staring at strangers through my windshield and rearview mirror may generate curiosity but not much else. I know many of my daughter's classmates and their parents by name at the MWF school. At the TR holiday program today, I realized I was standing awkwardly among a group of nameless strangers. The convenience of the rolling dropoff isn't all that convenient after all.

Parenting as a Sociologist: "Big Girl" vs. "Big Kid"

As I have noted before, I am a new parent. My daughter is now a bit over 18 months old--and she's wonderful! As she is becoming more verbal, though, my wife and I are now starting actively to think about the language we use around her. One place where we work is to avoid the fallback compliment that she is "a pretty girl." We do indeed want her to have a healthy self-concept; we just don't want her self-concept to be tied up in her attractiveness, to think of herself as an object. Instead, I try to compliment her intelligence, physical ability, and happiness whenever possible. A second issue, however, is more contested between my wife and me: whether to say "big girl." My argument against it stems from an article that I first read in grad school and still assign when I teach undergraduate social psychology.[1] Here is the relevant section from that piece:

…[A]dults commonly associate behavioral standards of social maturity with sex identification in an attempt to control children’s behavior, as when a preschool aide lectured a 38-month-old girl who had struck another child: "You're a big girl. You don't need to hit." While a sex-neutral expression such as "big kid" could conceivably be used in these ways, adults seldom do so.

In short, the language of social identification which adults employ when interacting with young children conveys to them that "bigness" is associated with sex identification, that social maturity is directly associated with "boyness" and "girlness." By implication, therefore, adults' language practices serve to implicitly instruct children that "boy" and "girl" are alternative identities to that of "baby," identifying categories from the same membership categorization device. It appears that as far as adults are concerned "babies" do not mature into "big kids" but into "big girls" and "big boys." Clearly…our society is populated not by persons, per se, but by sexed persons (302).

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In short, the practical necessity of claiming positive social value and the constraints which languages of social identification impose on individuals' efforts to do so may have a profound influence on both their definitions of self and their behavior. In a sense, therefore, identifying categorical terms do motivate behavior (308).

It is surprisingly difficult to avoid saying "big girl." I have been thoroughly socialized to feel it as "natural." It come out of my mouth without me consciously thinking about it, which makes it very difficult to avoid. I'm working on it, though. That is my bigger point: it is one thing to sociologize in a classroom, on a blog, in a research report, or at an academic conference, but putting such ideas into practice is decidedly difficult, even for a person highly trained in the discipline with an intellectually sympathetic spouse.

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[1] Cahill, Spencer E. 1986. "Language Practices and Self Definition: The Case of Gender Identity Acquisition." The Sociological Quarterly 27(3):295–311.