KJ, I could not agree more with your post on the Baby Einstein refunds. There are so many edicts that come from parenting experts that new parents cannot possibly heed all of them. Which has prompted me to create a pop quiz for new parents:

Given that 1) You are not to let your baby cry, 2) you are not to let your child watch television, and 3) you must exclusively breast-feed your child for six months, what should you do when it’s time to cook dinner (you know, to get those extra calories you need to feed the baby)?

1) Hold Junior in one arm as you steam veggies, sauté salmon, and roast potatoes (that’s two hot liquids and one hot oven, if you’re counting) with the other.

2) Let Junior cry.

3) Expose Junior to some Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven.

The answer is so patently obvious that it’s annoying. (Please don’t respond that one parent can cook dinner while the other tends to baby. That ignores the realities of single-parent households, spouses working overtime and/or irregular shifts, or families with older siblings where one parent is cooking while the other is carpooling to soccer practice or piano lessons.) Almost as annoying to me as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. The anti-commercialism group posted a press release on its site, headlined “CCFC Victory! Disney Offers Refunds on Baby Einstein Videos.”

Now, I don’t want to be too hard on the CCFC. They’ve pushed to keep Bratz dolls out of the Scholastic book clubs and book fairs, and they’re opposed to Channel One and other in-school television. (I’d much rather my kids have more instruction time during the school day.) They’ve got ideas for holiday gifts that don’t involve knocking over the nearest Toys R Us.

But their overarching message—that exposure to marketing and commercialism is ruinous to children—is patronizing to parents. They don’t like Elmo selling anything (never mind that that helps keep Sesame Street on the air commercial-free); they don’t like any TV shows with product tie-ins; they want to control what time studios are allowed to air commercials for PG-13 movies.

There’s a very easy way to keep your children from being exposed to too much commercialization. Limit their television. And tell them, “No, you may not have a toy every time we go to Target.” CCFC points to the drastic increase in the amount of money spent on marketing to children in the last 25 years—from $100 million in 1983 to $17 billion today. We can argue chicken vs. egg all day, but companies probably wouldn’t spend that kind of money marketing products if it didn’t work. Parents need to take some responsibility and not just blame companies for trying to make money. And I can’t see where moderate exposure to marketing and commercials has to be hazardous to our children’s health. In our family, some of the best time we spend together is running around at the kid’s museum or the zoo or taking day trips to new places. And some of the best time is spent sprawled in front of the TV for family movie night. I can think of worse things than my son asking to be Buzz Lightyear for Halloween after watching Toy Story with mom and dad one too many times.

Tags: Baby Einstein, kids television, parenting, Television

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Did anyone else read the story about Obama's all-male basketball game against Joanne Lipman's op-ed about how far women have (not) come? And then feel torn about how much to care that the president "presides over a White House rife with fist-bumping young men who call each other 'dude' and testosterone-brimming personalities," as Mark Leibovich vividly put it in the NYT?

Lipman's most interesting point is that women have measured their progress in numeric gains rather than by a shift in attitudes. Too much bean counting, not enough concern about Google searches of famous women that lead to lots of entries about her breasts. Or about how women are otherwise physically caricatured.

The questions about Obama's hoops game are about both bean counting and attitude. To worry about the numbers of women in his White House, you have to narrowcast. We're not talking about the number of women in his administration or in leadership roles, but the number in a particular inner circle of hoops players and, until domestic policy advisor Melody Barnes busted in on Sunday, golf players too. These are particular slices of access, and so part of me understands why Obama was so quick to dismiss concerns about a boys' club as "bunk," and to say, “I don’t think it sends any kind of message or signal whatsoever.”

But of course it sends a message. This is where the attitude part of Lipman's construct comes in. The original story in Politico about the all-male basketball game didn't move me, because the flap seemed to be over one small self-contained sphere. But Mark does a really good job of showing how basketball and golf spill over. This is about how Obama's "comfort level with staff members is not always perceived as equal." And that is tricky. On the one hand, you can't tell a boss or anyone else who to be totally at ease with. And maybe one reason he's not as comfortable and intimate with his women staffers is his incredibly strong relationship with Michelle. On the other hand, well, he's the president. And if his feelings about sexual politics in the workplace, however nuanced, mean that women aren't as close to him, they won't be as powerful either.

Photograph of Barack Obama by Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images.

Tags: obama's all-male basketball game

Last night’s bizarro Halloween-themed Mad Men finally featured the nudity we’ve all been waiting for: a glorious disrobing of Don Draper's decades-long, self-perpetuated costume. For the first time in a long while, Don wears an expression other than stern, troubled, and potentially constipated when Betty confronts him on his universe-shattering box of secrets. He’s visibly weakened. He’s not Don Draper, literally or characteristically—his hands tremble too much to even pour himself a drink.

A smaller scale disrobing happens in the Harris household as Greg whines on and on to Joan about how she doesn’t understand what it means to want something her entire life and then lose it. At those words, a heretofore composed Joanie takes a vase and swings it at the back of his head. Sure, her swing had about all the staying power of Jai Alai (she was back to being the dutiful wife by the next scene), but at least it came out, if only for a moment.

And that’s the thing about reality. It can only be avoided for so long. Back at the office, Don and Peggy are watching a dog-food focus group through a two-way mirror with a potential client. It takes a turn for the worse when the participants are told their dogs are eating pony meat. Don barks at Peggy to put an end to the interview that’s clearly upsetting everyone involved, and she delivers the line that drives home the point of last night’s episode: “I can’t turn it off ... it’s actually happening.”

Touché, Peggy.

But unfortunately Peggy’s the only woman on the show who’s afforded the ability not to turn off reality. Near the end of the episode, Joan’s back to feigning false enthusiasm for Greg’s newfangled plans to become an army surgeon. And Don and Betty take the kids trick-or-treating the next night, escorting them from door to door in their costumes, but the real irony is that it’s Betty and Don who are already back in disguise. Joan and Betty can read feminist texts in the tub, confront their husbands' selfish behavior—angrily, even—but when it comes to refuting the facade, they just can't.

Tags: 60s feminism, DOn Draper, mad men, secrets & lies

I'm a fan of using kooky incidents as a jumping point to ponder the Big Questions of Our Time, but Frank Rich's half-hearted defense of Balloon Boy's dad Richard Heene counts as an overt abuse of the form, on many levels. I simply cannot accept Heene as Rich paints him, a man ground down by our economy and striving for the perceived payoffs of fame to the point of the evil misuse of his family. Rich leaves out inconvenient information about Heene that might undermine his view of Heene as the everyman gone wrong. For instance, Rich ignores that Heene is a barking-mad misogynist.

This might not immediately seem like important information when considering Frank's thesis about reality-TV shows, the economy, and the growing lack of respect for the truth. But it is relevant, and I suspect that if Heene were more of a white supremacist than a misogynist, Rich would have immediately seen the connection. All of his examples of the collapse between truth and reality on the political front come from the right, after all. More importantly, there's a long history in the West of white-supremacist groups with tendencies toward fantasy perpetrating hoaxes like  counterfeiting money or luring people into thinking income tax is unconstitutional. White supremacists have been blurring the line between fantasy and reality and using the results to get attention and even money for a long time.

Richard Heene isn't a neo-Nazi or anything like that, but his attitudes towards women are reminiscient of those groups' attitudes toward nonwhite or non-Christian people. Heene's loathing and hatred of women is something to behold, and behold it you can, because he's left a number of videos out there to document his nuttiness. He exhibits a visceral disgust toward women, and obsesses over Hillary Clinton, the calling card of misogynists. Most disturbingly, he coached his three sons into recording a video about the dangers of "pussification" and homosexuality. In other words, Heene is a right-wing crank, and his willingness to perpetuate a hoax and arrogance at thinking he could pull it off are classic traits of the right-wing crank.

The line between right-wing cranks and charlatans is thin indeed, and much of the time, it's invisible. Under his real name Michael Weiner, right-wing crank and talk show host Michael Savage peddles homeopathic medicine and trends towards denying the reality of mental illnesses such as autism. "Men's rights" activists like Glenn Sacks feature endless ads on their shows from family lawyers who make a nice living getting bitter men to sue their ex-wives over and over again. Visit some right-wing blogs and take an eyeful of the ads selling gold and survivalist supplies. Austin dwellers like myself should be familiar with our own famous paranoid conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who makes a nice living from selling books and videos about international conspiracies.

As tempting as it is to suggest that Heene represents the next step in reality-TV excesses, I'm afraid he belongs to a longer tradition of right-wing charlatans trying to turn their weirdness into financial gain.

Tags: balloon boy, misogyny, right wing nuts

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Froot Loops are not part of a nutritious breakfast. Moisturizer will not make your skin look and act younger. And watching videos will not make your kids smarter. They will entertain them, amuse them, and maybe even inform them—and personally, I'd argue that that's enough. But some parents (and their lawyers), disagree, claiming to have plunked the wee ones down for hours a day in front of Baby Einstein DVDs in a misguided effort at brain stimulation. And those parents, with the help of The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, have prevailed. If you've purchased a Baby Einstein video or DVD since June of 2004, Disney will give you a refund (or a "satisfaction upgrade"). As one of the beneficiaries of this great and glorious victory, I'd just like to say: Don't you people have anything better to do?

The debate about whether very young children (under 3) should watch any television at all has raged long and loud over the past decade. The American Academy of Pediatrics doesn't recommend it, based on studies linking increased TV-watching with various attention disorders. The anti-Baby-Einstein team points to a study finding that babies who watched the videos for an hour or more a day knew fewer words, but, like most other studies involving kids and television, the researchers didn't (or couldn't) take into account the other differences in environment which may accompany that screen time. Meanwhile, most parents are just trying to shower in peace, and welcomed the advent of Baby Einstein and its ilk not so much for any affirmative benefit, but because they felt and sounded like the video equivalent of watching a fan go around.

The target market for this particular product consists largely of parents who should be savvy enough to understand its limitations. I got my money's worth out of those videos, which didn't replace time I would have spent "getting down on the floor to play," but time that would have spent watching some other form of video—or, if I'd been a television purist, parked in a crib, playpen, or bouncy chair screaming angrily, because none of my kids self-entertained particularly well when they were young, and certainly not at the moments when I really needed them to. I had no greater expectations than a few minutes of down time, and I find it hard to believe anyone else did, either. If Disney would like to make reparations for its sins of omission and commission in the marketing of the videos, I'd invite them to send my $15.99 to the Children's Literary Foundation. We'll keep the DVDs—because they're fun to watch.

Tags: Baby Einstein, Disney, kids television

Commenter Alphabet Soup is right about one thing: It is a little odd to have a discussion of opting out on DoubleX (or, of course, anywhere) without Linda Hirshman. One explanation is, as Alphabet suggested, that I'm in the special place in hell for people who report findings that are later debunked, sentenced to read unredacted Census data for eternity. Another, which has the virtue of being true, is that I was in Europe spending my gains on a well-deserved vacation.

I'm back now, and predictably unimpressed with the so-called "findings" in the Post article. In fact, this whole DoubleX discussion starts by buying, without further inquiry, the Post suggestion that the opt-out revolution is a myth. But, as Emily correctly says, there's been a small rise in the number of families with kids under 15 and a stay-at-home mom. So, where’s the myth?

Professional economics writer David Leonhardt skewered the Post’s journalism in his Economix blog on the New York Times (sorry, Post):

The Washington Post has a front-page article today arguing that the so-called opt-out revolution — the alleged increase in stay-at-home mothers—is largely fiction. ... But then you get to the final paragraphs:

Historically, the Census Bureau’s annual population survey shows that there are more mothers at home now than in the mid-1990s. In 1994, 19.8 percent of married-couple families with children younger than 15 had a stay-at-home mother. Last year, it was 23.7 percent of families — an increase that Elliott said was statistically significant.

“I don’t think we exactly know why,” she said. It sure sounds as if those numbers undercut the thesis of the story, doesn’t it? And those are the only historical statistics in the story.

Well maybe, as Emily suggests, the opt-out revolution is STILL a myth, because, as the Post reports, the affluent, educated women supposedly making the "revolution" aren't opting out. It's the poor ignorant ones who are. But Leonhardt even disputes that, citing well-respected economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who reported that "earlier this decade 60.3 percent of female Harvard graduates in their mid-30s were working full time. In the 1990s, the equivalent number was 63.5 percent."

But, but, you debunkers might be thinking, Goldin and Katz must be wrong, too, because the Post said women in families with incomes over $100,000 and bachelor's degrees have not increased their opting-out. And you would be right. Your problem is that you think making a family income of over $100,000 a year makes you elite, or, so to speak, one of Lisa Belkin's BFFs. I don't know about Lisa, but I wasn't talking about the random $100,000 bachelor of arts woman. I was talking about the women who announced their weddings in the Styles section of the New York Times, which, like graduating from Harvard, often means never having to say family income of only $100,000.

Well, what about the really, truly elite? In Opting Out: An Exploration of Labor Force Participation of New Mothers, Barbara Cheeseman Day and Jennifer Downs of the same United States Census Bureau that fueled the Post article just told the Population Association of America 2009 Annual Meeting that, "Women at the highest income levels of $200,000 or more are slightly more likely to opt out than those with incomes between $100,000 and $199,999." Actually, if you read the Census ladies’ charts you see that the really elite women opt out at almost exactly the same rate as the women making between $50,000 and $100,000.

I don’t know if the opt-out phenomenon is a myth (the revolution is a whole other story). Cheeseman and Day’s snapshot and Goldin's Harvard data suggest opting out among the truly elite, but, since the Bureau has yet to see fit to publish historical data about the truly elite population, we don't know if, like their sisters in families under $100,000, these elite women have decreased their work-force participation over time or not. But what we do know is that the "over-$100,000" slice so beloved of the opt-out debunkers isolates the most working of all the women surveyed. The poorer ones stay home more and the richer ones stay home more. Hardly the material for myth-unmaking.