{"id":250,"date":"2008-07-06T23:09:38","date_gmt":"2008-07-07T06:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2008\/07\/06\/250\/"},"modified":"2008-07-06T23:12:44","modified_gmt":"2008-07-07T06:12:44","slug":"250","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2008\/07\/06\/250\/","title":{"rendered":"Maria Montessori should have a word with those boys"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Nocera had a scalding piece in the New York Times<\/em> on Friday about the Google child care fiasco<\/a>.\u00a0 (More coverage here <\/a>and here <\/a>and here<\/a>.)\u00a0 Basically, the story goes, Google’s childcare benefit is being hijacked by nepotism without regard for cost or affordability, putting it outside of the reach of all but the wealthiest of Googlers.<\/p>\n

This story ties in neatly to another Times article, Russell Shorto’s piece in the magazine section last week, on Europe’s birth rate crisis<\/a>.\u00a0 He looks at the factors driving below-replacement-rate fertility in Europe and argues that there are several different currents at work; the Eastern European health collapse, the German happier-with-no-kid phenomenon, and statist policies across Europe encouraging reproduction.\u00a0 But these policies, he says, don’t exist in a vacuum; Italy, for example, where he centers his story, goes to absurd lengths to encourage women to have children, but they — unlike northern Europe, where there are elaborate childcare institutions — don’t provide the social infrastructure to support the families after they’ve given birth, like Google’s Kinderplex.<\/p>\n

And then there’s the US, which is a special case, an industrialized country with no statist policies encouraging fertility yet with high birthrates, above replacement rate and thus, soon, with younger populations than even developing countries such as China.\u00a0 One explanation for the US anomaly could lie in our flexible job market, which allows women to enter and exit the workforce as required, a flexibility lacking elsewhere, notably in Europe.\u00a0 Shorto writes:<\/p>\n

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: \u201cYou might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn\u2019t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it\u2019s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.\u201d<\/p>\n

By this logic, the worst sort of system is one that partly buys into the modern world \u2014 expanding educational and employment opportunities for women \u2014 but keeps its traditional mind-set. This would seem to define the demographic crisis that Italy, Spain and Greece find themselves in \u2014 and, perhaps, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other parts of the world. Indeed, demographers have been surprised to find rapid fertility changes in the third world, as more and more women work and modern birth-control methods become standard options. \u201cThe earlier distinct fertility regimes, \u2018developed\u2019 and \u2018developing,\u2019 are increasingly disappearing in global comparisons of fertility levels,\u201d according to Edward Jow-Ching Tu, a sociologist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. According to the United Nations<\/a>, the birthrate in 25 developing countries \u2014 including Cuba, Costa Rica, Iran, Sri Lanka and China \u2014 now stands at or below the replacement level. In some cases \u2014 notably China \u2014 the drop is explained by a concentrated effort at containing the population. In the rest, something else is happening. The lesson of southern Europe is perhaps operative: embrace the modern only partway and you put your society \u2014 women in particular \u2014 in a vise. Something has to give, and that turns out to be the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not sure if this analysis is right, but it is insightful.\u00a0 I can say with certainty that the “US model” creates enormous strain on working families, especially ones — like ours — that either choose or need to maintain two careers.\u00a0 There is simply no good answer in the US for this issue; Google, at least, offers<\/em> childcare, even if it is prohibitively expensive.\u00a0 By contrast, for example, Harvard, at least when we needed it, didn’t even do that much.\u00a0 Most employers don’t, and the US federal government certainly doesn’t help. \u00a0 So working families, even extraordinarily privileged ones, are forced to juggle<\/a> and improvise<\/a>.\u00a0 I wonder the kind of advice that my wife and I will give to our children, especially our daughter, about the wisdom of pursuing a career and a family at the same time.<\/p>\n

My wife has been working, on the side, to create an infant child care center at her employer, the University of Redlands<\/a>; not out of self-interest — our baby days are over — but in the interest of the common good.\u00a0 And it’s been an uphill struggle; infant childcare is expensive no matter how you do it and even so progressive an employer as a university doesn’t necessarily see their role as a provider of child care.\u00a0 Even Google, the product of those two Montessori kids<\/a>, doesn’t seem to think that childcare is a core issue for their employees.<\/p>\n

I can’t wait until Sergey and Larry have children of their own.<\/p>\n

PS: Highly recommended: Shorto’s\u00a0 The Island at the Center of the World, The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America<\/strong> ISBN 0-385-50349-0<\/a> (New York, Doubleday, 2004).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Nocera had a scalding piece in the New York Times on Friday about the Google child care fiasco.\u00a0 (More coverage here and here and here.)\u00a0 Basically, the story goes, Google’s childcare benefit is being hijacked by nepotism without regard … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2092],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2092"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s8jQA6-250","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}