My new (first!) book, The Daddy Shift, is now available for order everywhere books are sold, and its very first review appears in this month’s issue of Mothering magazine:

In The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family, Jeremy Adam Smith leaves no stone unturned in his adroit navigation of the slippery terrain of the changing role of “dad.” Part lucidly written historical, social, and economic analyses of moneymaking and caregiving roles, and part eloquent portraits of stay-at-home dads of various cultural backgrounds (including gay couples), the book covers a lot of ground. But it never feels as if Smith is stretching to make his points. His investigations are very well researched, and he’s pursued them with a rigorous intellectual integrity that makes his arguments engagingly persuasive. The result is an impressive book that even the childless should read, for at essence, The Daddy Shift is not just about stay-at-home dads, but about the changing roles of men and women in society.

Not a bad start. And here’s what the magazine Body + Soul has to say in its next issue: “Smith’s book is a gentle but persistent appeal to get beyond all those preconceived notions and make the choices that work best for ourselves and our families.”

My publisher, Beacon Press, even made this nice little promotional video. Embed it on your blog, forward it to friends! Here are some upcoming Bay Area events:

On May 30th at 2 pm, I will conduct a workshop for new and expectant parents on father involvement at Natural Resources in San Francisco. Come explore how new fathers and mothers can equally share in the joys and burdens of parenthood. Emphasis will be placed on successful co-parenting relationships and in understanding and overcoming obstacles to father involvement. To sign up, call 415 550-2611 or email info@naturalresources-sf.com. Co-sponsored by the Bay Area Homebirth Collective.

On Saturday, June 6, at 7 pm, Cover to Cover will host a release party for The Daddy Shift. Cover to Cover is located in San Francisco, 1307 Castro St (between 24th St & Jersey St). Come one, come all.

On Sunday, June 14 at 5 pm, Jeremy will read at an event for the ‘zine Rad Dad, which has been nominated for an Independent Press Award. The reading will be held at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley, CA.

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This is the edited transcript of a May 7 talk I gave to the nurses of UC Berkeley Health Services on surviving compassion fatigue, re-posted from the Greater Good blog.

I’m going to warn you: This is a somewhat difficult talk, full of paradoxes. I’m going to talk about the best in human nature and behavior, and also the worst. I’m going to talk about how human beings seem designed to care for each other, but also how the grind of daily care can be soul-destroying. And in the end, I hope to share my thoughts on how we can work with other people to bring out the good in each of us.

I’m an early riser, and I do most of my writing in the early morning. A month ago, I was walking to a coffee shop at 6:30 am, and I was doing what I often do during my early morning walks, which is to look around at the Victorians and hills and mist of the place where I live and think about how beautiful all of it is.

Without warning, I felt a blow on the back of my head, and someone ran past me holding a tire iron. (more…)

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On April 3, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the state’s same-sex marriage ban violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples. Just four days later, Vermont’s legislature voted to legalize same-sex marriages. Now it looks as though Maine and New Hampshire will join them.

Opponents have been predicting that the sky will fall. Chuck Hurley of the Iowa Family Policy Center, for example, claims that heterosexual marriage is the “seabed and cradle of civilization,” and that same-sex marriage “is a battle of good versus evil, truth versus lies.”

I’m not gay. I am a married, heterosexual father. I am also raising a child on the border between Noe Valley, a notoriously child-friendly enclave in San Francisco, and the Castro, one of the world’s gayest neighborhoods. In San Francisco, one doesn’t have to imagine a dystopian time when homosexuality is an integral part of American life. In my neighborhood especially, that particular “apocalypse” is now, and it apparently involves a great deal of diaper changing. Gay and lesbian families are a daily reality in the place where I live–in particular, they are very much a part of my family’s daily life, my son’s life.

I expect Iowans and Vermonters–along with residents of Maine and New Hampshire and, indeed, everyone in America–might be interested in hearing how it’s going, since those states are about to join Connecticut and Massachusetts in becoming destinations for same-sex weddings. Have the gay and lesbian couples around us undermined my marriage or threatened my son in some way? In neighborhoods like ours, have the Christian Right’s apocalyptic predictions of social collapse come to pass?

The answer is no. Quite the opposite. In fact, neighborhoods like the Castro and Noe Valley are flourishing. Locally, Noe Valley is jokingly referred to as “Stroller Valley,” because of the on-the street visibility of families with young children. Some of these parents are gay and lesbian, but most are straight. And today, heterosexual parents in neighborhoods like the Castro know a secret: These are great communities in which to raise children.

Three-year-old Ezra is one of my son’s best buddies, and this past October, Ezra joined our circle of friends and family in seeing his moms Jackie and Jessica get married. “At the wedding Ezra saw the community and the family come together, and he saw us become married,” Jackie later told me. “He won’t fully understand what that means until he gets older, but it was a very powerful day for him. Most of his friends have a mommy and a daddy, and so I think it was huge for him to have all those friends come together and see us married.”

Jessica added, “It’s so important that Ezra grows up in a supportive environment. He can’t just feel like our family is tolerated. He has to feel accepted. That’s what marriage does for us: It allows us to just be a family, to be a normal part of the community.” Jackie and Jessica have always felt as though, as Jessica said, “The onus is on us to prove the merit of our relationship.” With Ezra in the picture, both mothers felt that marriage was a necessary step in positioning themselves in their social world.

For Jessica’s parents, their daughter’s marriage was an intensely meaningful event. “It was wonderful to see Jessica so dressed up and looking so beautiful,” said Jessica’s mother Elizabeth. “I was just so happy for them.” Every member of Jackie and Jessica’s circle of friends and family that later I interviewed felt the same way: It made us happy to see our friends marry. That’s a commonplace feeling at weddings, but, of course, not everyone in America has the right to a legal marriage. Their wedding was extraordinary because it came to us all as a gift we never expected.

Iowa and Vermont are about to receive the same gift. I wonder if the Iowa Supreme Court judges and Vermont legislators who legalized same-sex marriage are aware of how much happiness they are helping to create? Their working lives consist of books, papers, arguments, precedents, a place apart from our small, private worlds. And yet their votes, I can tell you from my experience in San Francisco, will immediately improve many lives. Christian Right activists in Vermont and Iowa are already gearing up for ballot battles. Do those two states have the courage to embrace the happiness their leaders helped create?

California did not: In November 2008, voters passed Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. This event was devastating to Jackie and Jessica’s friends and family–many of us, we later recalled, wept on hearing the news–and yet most felt that something had started that would prove unstoppable in the long run.

“I was hurt,” said Jessica’s father Oscar. “I was looking forward to their marriage being solidified, accepted, institutionalized, like everybody else’s marriage. It was an unpleasant moment, but it makes no difference to me. They love each other and they are making a family, and that’s enough for me.”

During this period of our lives, the director Gus Van Sant filmed Milk, a movie that would later be nominated for eight Academy Awards, in our neighborhood. Harvey Milk, played in the movie by Sean Penn, was the first openly gay politician “in the history of the planet,” to quote Time magazine. He represented the Castro on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and was killed in 1978 (along with Mayor George Moscone) by city supervisor Dan White. When White was sentenced to a mere seven years for the crime, there were riots.

Every day during that spring and summer of 2008, my family watched Milk come together. The facades of many Castro businesses were torn down and rebuilt to appear as they were in the 1970s; we saw Sean Penn and James Franco (whom my wife describes as “supernaturally beautiful” in real life) loitering around coffee shops; we watched staggering amounts of preparation for scenes that appeared to last for two minutes; and we residents were herded like cattle to avoid stumbling into scenes where our clothing would have made us anachronisms. Gray-haired gay men reminisced about those days—and the Castro’s children, including my son, asked about this Harvey Milk person.

One early morning I walked with Liko down Castro, and they had apparently just finished filming scenes of the riot that ignited after White’s conviction. The Castro was once again transformed, now with smashed windows, burned-out cars, and graffiti.

“What’s going on, Daddy?” Liko asked.

“It’s part of the movie,” I said.

“Was there a fight?”

“People were angry because Harvey Milk had been killed.”

“Who was Harvey Milk?”

“Harvey Milk was a leader who fought for the rights of people like Ezra’s mommies,” I said, and paused: How could I explain this in a concrete way that he would understand? I said, “Some people think that girls shouldn’t be able to marry girls and boys shouldn’t be able to marry boys.”

“Why?” he asked.

I stopped in my tracks. I had no idea how to answer him. Nothing I could say would make any sense to him, and I feared implying that Ezra’s mommies were somehow not normal.

This was the first and only moment that I felt real rage against the supporters of Proposition 8. They claimed that they didn’t want to be “forced” to explain homosexuality to their children, and yet they were forcing me to explain something far worse to my child: how fear and hate can drive us apart. Love, I realized, is easy to explain to children. Discrimination, on the other hand, is virtually impossible.

On our way home that day, we stopped at Marcello’s for a slice of pizza. We sat on a bench outside and ate, watching the movie crew take down the wreckage of the play-riot.

“Why are they making a movie here, Daddy?” Liko asked.

“Because something important happened in your neighborhood,” I said. “People like Harvey Milk worked together to make the world a better place.”

“How is it better?”

I paused again. Was America, in fact, a better place than it had been in Harvey Milk’s time? Images flickered through my mind, of wars and strife and falling wages and rising unemployment and all the stupid things I’ve seen and heard in the media in my three and a half decades of life. I asked myself: What mattered most?

After a moment, I came up with an answer. “It’s better because back in old-fashioned days, some people were allowed to fall in love and other people weren’t. Whenever you increase the amount of love in the world, Liko, it becomes a better place.”

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1. Greater Good (the magazine where I work as senior editor) has been nominated for another Independent Press Award in the category of “Best Social/Cultural Coverage.” The new issue of Greater Good tackles the question, Why do we make art? You can read most of the essays online.

2. There is now a Wikipedia page about me. The book release party for my book The Daddy Shift will happen on Saturday, June 6, 7 pm, at Cover to Cover books on Castro St. in San Francisco. On Sunday, June 14 at 5 pm, I’ll read at an event for the ‘zine Rad Dad. The reading will be held at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley, CA.

3. In January 2010, WW Norton will be publishing The Compassionate Instinct, co-edited by me, Dacher Keltner, and Jason Marsh. In Spring 2010, Beacon Press will publish Are We Born Racist?, which I also co-edited.

4. Andrea Doucet, a Canadian sociologist who wrote an important academic book about stay-at-home dads, is now turning her attention to breadwinning moms. She’s set up a new discussion forum for the moms, and I hope you (or your wife/partner) will join her.

5. I got mugged on April 4–my birthday!–and now I’m recovering from a concussion. Hence, the relatively long silence. Some thoughts on that later.

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I am guilty guilty GUILTY of neglecting my blogs, including this one. I’ve had a lot going on with my so-called career. But mainly, I blame Facebook, which has started to suck up a startling amount of online energy.

For years, I’ve been writing articles and blog entries on the science behind kids and violence, and recently I’ve felt like all those bits and pieces have started to come together into a coherent narrative. Last week I posted some notes on children and violence to my Facebook page, which drew some interesting comments from friends, including Dawn Friedman, who writes the blog This Woman’s Work, and Gerard Jones, author of Killing Monsters and Men of Tomorrow. I am sharing my notes below along with reader comments–since I haven’t asked anyone’s permission, including Gerard’s, the reader comments are anonymous. I invite your thoughts as well.

Evolutionary and psychological roots of violence:

1. Violent feelings are natural, and have an evolutionary basis

2. Measured in terms of the number of acts, childhood is the most violent period of human life; as they grow humans learn to avoid violence

3. It’s an empirical fact that the vast majority of mature humans avoid real-world violence at all costs

4. A minority of humans do act violently; thus sooner or later, we are all confronted with violence

5. Imaginary violence is not the same thing as real-world violence, but it is a form of preparation for the real thing

Violence in children:

6. All children, boys and girls alike, need physical play

7. For young children, violent play is a form of physical play

8. Violent play exists because it is a way of dramatizing conflict and learning to control violent feelings; this is how we prepare to confront real-world violence

9. Teaching children to repress violent feelings (and violent play) is not the same thing as teaching them to control those feelings

10. Violent and scary play is a way of confronting scary things and learning about conflict in a controlled, fantasy way

11. Adults often seek to repress violent childplay because they cannot control real-life violence; thus, adults teaching children to conceal violent feelings or play is itself a kind of escapist fantasy: If we don’t see the expression of violence, we imagine that it does not exist. This is a comfort; it’s also delusional.

Ways for adults to foster peacefulness in children:

12. If we behave violently, so will our children; thus we adults should never, ever be violent, except in the most extreme circumstances

13. Imposing rules and limitations on violent play without repressing it helps children learn to control the expression of real-world violence; it also helps demarcate imaginary and real-world violence

14. But the real key to reducing real-world, one-on-one violence is to foster empathy and self-control

15. The best way to foster empathy and self-control is to foster the imagination (i.e., conscience)

16. Fostering imagination allows children and young adults to conceptualize and pursue pathways away from violence

17. This is something they must learn to do on their own; it’s a long-term process accomplished over many years

18. The process consists of questions, conversations, modeling, and also stories…

19. Telling developmentally appropriate stories with violence in them is one way to help this process along. For example, The Iliad is mind numbingly violent and Achilles is the most violent character in The Iliad; and yet when Achilles and Priam weep together, the consequences of violence are revealed to Achilles as well as the reader; Achilles regains his humanity and his sense of restraint. This is what matters in a story with violence in it: it must show the consequences of violence and the humanity of victims.

20. Violent stories without consequences are amoral and help foster real-world violence; this is something we should explicitly explain to children when they are old enough.

21. People need heroism; there are more ways to be heroic than to fight; children, especially boys, also need stories in which heroism is expressed in caring, nonviolent ways

22. Participating in political action (e.g., taking children to anti-war demonstrations) is also a good way to foster nonviolent ethics, by making it public and heroic

Selected, edited reader comments to the original note:

1. Am particularly taken with #19 (hadn’t thought of Achilles’s “redemption” quite like that), #20 (YESYESYES. If only Hollywood could hear you!) and #21 Can’t just say no to a naturally occurring, evolutionarily-based inclination, must alchemize/channel it toward positive release.)

2. This makes me think of Rudolph Steiner’s ideas about how imagination is crucial to the development of empathy and how fairytales and myths play into that.

3. I was very influenced by reading Who’s Calling the Shots when we were grappling with our then-4-year old’s interest in having a toy gun. It allowed me to ease up on trying to control N—’s play while still keeping a discussion open about our values. (As an aside, it’s influenced how I’m handling Barbie with my daughter, too.)

4. I’m conflicted on this. I don’t really think violence is “natural” for little kids. I think some kids are more physical than others, that there’s a range, but violence as we understand it includes the intention to do harm, knowing the consequences of our physical acts, and i’m not sure little kids have that. That said, i totally agree with your point about empathy, not necessarily because of violence but because empathy is the foundation for social justice.

5. Part of the problem here is that we all use “violence” freely but rarely talk about what we mean by it. By this definition, no, violence isn’t natural. But it’s become common to refer to kids’ make-believe shoot ‘em ups and swordfighting as “violent play” and superhero cartoons as “violent entertainment.” The “V word” has become a common way to politicize and dominate discussions.

6. Funny you should bring this up; just today I was watching a group of four-year-old boys engage in a series of imaginary superhero playfights that three times out of five turned into real fights, in the sense that excitement escalated and one of them ended up really hitting and one of them got really upset about it. Was it violence? I say yes, definitely, and I know that most researchers who study violence in children would consider it to be violence as well, albeit of the impulsive childlike variety. Context is everything: I don’t think these little kids were being violent in the same sense that, say, a drug dealer is violent, or, for that matter, a policeman making an arrest or a soldier on a battlefield–in fact, each of those contexts–the motivation, the intention, the situation–are different, and produce different types of violence with different levels of potential for harm.

7. This is one reason some over-controlling (frightened) adults want to eliminate kids’ rough play. Pretty common for some kid to go too far and some other kid to get hurt or mad. But that’s one of the ways we learn boundaries and self-control. You hit your friend for real and the play date ends. It’s a great way to learn where fantasy stops and reality starts. Too bad adults sometimes have such a hard time distinguishing between their own fear-based fantasies and their kids’ realities…

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It’s ambitious. Highlights:

• Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit: In both the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate, Obama championed efforts to expand the EITC, which is one of the most successful anti-poverty programs to date. President Obama will reward work by increasing the number of working parents eligible for EITC benefits, increasing the benefit available to parents who support their children through child support payments, and reducing the EITC marriage penalty which hurts low-income families. Under the Obama-Biden plan, full-time workers making minimum wage will get an EITC benefit up to $555, more than three times greater than the $175 benefit they get today. If the workers are responsibly supporting their children on child support, the Obama-Biden plan will give those workers a benefit of $1,110.
• Extend Paid Sick Days to All Workers: Half of all private sector workers have no paid sick days and the problem is worse for employees in low-paying jobs, where less than a quarter receive any paid sick days. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will require that employers provide seven paid sick days per year.
• Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA): The FMLA covers only certain people who work for employers with 50 or more employees. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will expand the FMLA to cover businesses with 25 or more employees, and to cover more purposes including allowing: leave for workers who provide elder care; 24 hours of leave each year for parents to participate in their children’s academic activities at school; leave for workers who care for individuals who reside in their home for 6 months or more; and leave for employees to address domestic violence and sexual assault.
• Encourage States to Adopt Paid Leave: President Barack Obama will initiate a 50 state strategy to encourage all of the states to adopt paid-leave systems. Obama and Biden will provide a $1.5 billion fund to assist states with start-up costs and to help states offset the costs for employees and employers.
• Expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit: The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit provides too little relief to families that struggle to afford child care expenses. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will reform the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit by making it refundable and allowing low-income families to receive up to a 50 percent credit for their child care expenses.
• Protect Against Caregiver Discrimination: Workers with family obligations often are discriminated against in the workplace. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will commit the government to enforcing recently-enacted Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines on caregiver discrimination.
• Expand Flexible Work Arrangements: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will address this concern by creating a program to inform businesses about the benefits of flexible work schedules for productivity and establishing positive workplaces; helping businesses create flexible work opportunities; and increasing federal incentives for telecommuting. Obama and Biden will also make the federal government a model employer in terms of adopting flexible work schedules and permitting employees to petition to request flexible arrangements.

• Strengthen Fatherhood and Families: Barack Obama has re-introduced the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act to remove some of the government penalties on married families, crack down on men avoiding child support payments, ensure that support payments go to families instead of state bureaucracies, fund support services for fathers and their families, and support domestic violence prevention efforts. President Obama will sign this bill into law and continue to implement innovative measures to strengthen families.
• Support Parents with Young Children: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will expand programs like the successful Nurse-Family Partnership to all low-income, first-time mothers. The Nurse-Family Partnership provides home visits by trained registered nurses to low-income expectant mothers and their families. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis concluded that these programs produced an average of five dollars in savings for every dollar invested and produced more than $28,000 in net savings for every high-risk family enrolled in the program. The Obama-Biden plan will assist approximately 570,000 first-time mothers each year.

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I turned my blog entry here into an op-ed for the British Guardian newspaper, on how the recession could affect fathers and fatherhood. Many of the comments are interestingly hostile, resisting the idea that fathers can or should be anything but breadwinners. A friend of mine observed “that the negative commenters’ real problem is with the economic realities that make a single-income household economically precarious, rather than with a dad staying home after, say, being laid off. But somehow it’s easier to object to a social more than an economic one. i.e. easier to lambast the stay-at-home dad than the economic absurdities that forced him to be home (as opposed to a system that would allow him to choose to stay home).” Which is absolutely right on, in my view.

Some news for those living in the Bay Area: I’ll be running a workshop for expectant and new parents on father involvement at UC Berkeley: “Come explore how new fathers and mothers can equally share in the joys and burdens of parenthood. Emphasis will be placed on successful co-parenting relationships and in understanding and overcoming obstacles to father involvement. Enroll at the UCB Learning Center by calling 510-642-7883 or emailing careserv@uhs.berkeley.edu.” Spread the word to those who might benefit!

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[From an op-ed in progress...]

It’s a new media trend: Since 80 percent of people laid off in the recession have been guys, pundits and journalists are asking themselves if this will cause men to do more at home. More women as breadwinners and more men at home is “a thought to file under ‘let’s try to find a silver lining,’ ” writes Lisa Belkin at the New York Times.  Slate’s Emily Bazelon takes a dimmer view, imagining “a family with a husband rattling around the house, unemployed and unsettled about it, while his wife keeps working but brings home a paycheck that’s less than half the income the two of them used to make together.”

Over in the United Kingdom–which is experiencing the same kind of downturn as we are here–Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg triggered a firestorm of criticism for suggesting that men losing jobs should “re-invent” themselves as stay-at-home dads, and “that unemployment could have a ‘liberating effect’ on outdated views about what was men’s work.” He’s been accused of emasculating British industrial workers.

Perhaps Clegg, a politician, might be criticized for having a politically tin ear, but he’s absolutely correct: economic downturns can open up new possibilities for men, and this recession is likely to have a huge effect on gender relations.

During the Great Depression, unemployment would utterly destroy men, because their entire identities were based on their jobs and their ability to support families. At the same time, however, widespread unemployment had the ironic effect of allowing more caring and cooperative conceptions of fatherhood to gain a hearing. According to a study by historian Ralph LaRossa and colleagues, more books and magazine articles in the Great Depression promoted the idea of the “New Father” than at any other time before or since. “Measuring virality and manliness in ways that were independent of whether one had a job [served] to counterbalance the emasculating effects of the Depression,” writes LaRossa.

And as more men were tossed out of work, more women found jobs. The number of married women working outside the home almost tripled from 1900 to the middle of the Depression; women zoomed from being less than 3 percent of clerical workers at the end of the 19th century to being more than half in the Depression. Incomes rose accordingly.

Women’s employment and incomes continued to grow throughout the 40s and, yes, even the 50s–and expanded straight through the 70s and 80s, when men’s economic prospects started to dim. It’s no accident that the hero of the 1982 film Mr. Mom–which marked the film debut of the stay-at-home dad–was a laid-off autoworker named Jack. Had Mr. Mom been made in the 1930s, it would have been a tear-jerking melodrama: Jack would have sunk into alcoholism and domestic violence while his wife endured the humiliation of employment.

But a lot had changed in America between the time of the Great Depression and Mr. Mom. Ultimately, Jack masters househusbandry while his wife becomes a successful ad executive. When their identities as breadwinners are destroyed by economic instability, argues Mr. Mom, men must do exactly what Nick Clegg suggests, and reinvent themselves as caregivers. Moreover, the film suggests that men ought to support their wives’ career aspirations, a startling departure from the past.

In the face of today’s financial disasters, women are economically stronger than ever and men’s identities are much more diverse. Since 1965, according to several empirical studies, men’s time with children has tripled. Since 1995, it has doubled. So has the number of stay-at-home dads. Researchers are finding that even low-income and chronically unemployed men are finding meaning and satisfaction in taking care of kids–whereas in the past, they would consciously reject those roles. As motherhood has shifted to include careers, the definition of fatherhood has shifted from pure breadwinning to one that encompasses both breadwinning and caregiving.

I call it “the daddy shift.” A bad economy is bad for mothers, fathers, and children–and, indeed, everyone. None of us can wave a magic wand and bring our jobs and a healthy economy back; for many of us, life is about to become very hard.

But the history of the American family teaches us that we can grow stronger in the places where we have been broken. The key, research reveals, is for mothers and fathers to cultivate loving relationships with each other, and to prize time with children. That can be hard to do when you don’t know how you’re going to pay the mortgage, and yet we are even worse off when we lose each other as well as the house.

When journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates (author of the remarkable memoir The Beautiful Struggle) was laid off from Time magazine in 2007, he became a stay-at-home dad. “You know, getting laid off is always a difficult thing, but it gave me back time with my son,” Ta-Nehisi told me in an interview for my forthcoming book, The Daddy Shift. “That’s absolutely huge. I guess not making much money would trouble me, if I felt I wasn’t a very good father. If you are a man who thinks that what you bring to a relationship is economic power and that’s it, then I guess that would trouble you.”

America can learn from Ta-Nehisi. Couples that can support each other and focus on care survive recessions; couples that don’t–who allow stress and despair to take over their family lives–break apart. I would argue that the role reversals American families are experiencing can be a source of strength, and an evolutionary adaptation to a global economy that is intrinsically unstable and technology-based. When the right values are in place, families can survive economic downturns intact, and sometimes even thrive.

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I collaborated with Texas-based DadLabs to develop a new video on the hormonal changes men experiences when their partners become pregnant. You can watch it here: Do Men Get Pregnant, Too?

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Last month, I posted a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers: The Story of Success that provoked a lively discussion over at my blog Daddy Dialectic. Gladwell argues that early cultivation (such as actively managing a child’s education and providing her with a range of experiences and learning opportunities) is crucial to later success in life. It also helps quite a lot, he argues, to help children learn to speak up for themselves and confidently interact with adults.

While Gladwell is guilty of a certain amount of reductionism and success-worship, his argument, in my view, is ultimately a hopeful and egalitarian one: success is the product of environment more than anything else, and we can help all children to succeed by  equalizing their opportunities in life. We can do this by providing early childhood education and well-funded public school systems, as well as universal health care, among other programs.

However, some readers seemed to feel that active cultivation of a child’s education and talent “ultimately produces selfish, self-absorbed adults who are out of touch with most of humanity,” as one commentator put it.

In the minds of these readers, “concerted cultivation” is the equivalent of the dreaded “helicopter parenting,” wherein privileged moms and dads over-schedule their kids and push them to succeed at the expense of empathy and social intelligence.

But that doesn’t follow at all, and I actually think this belief misses something important about why inequality continues to grow in America.

It may very well be the case the middle- and upper-class children are more prone to be “selfish” and “self-absorbed”–although, honestly, I’ve seen those qualities, as well as others like kindness and understanding, pop up among members of virtually every social class. Belief in the intrinsic depravity and inhumanity of educated people goes hand-in-hand with a powerfully felt anti-intellectualism and social resentment. (Another commentator suggested–tongue in cheek?–that the children of the educated classes should all be sent to Maoist reeducation camps!)

The fact remains that early education and attention to a child’s well-being leads to many good outcomes in life, and also for society. Some of these are material–more income and wealth–but some are not, including increased likelihood that they will get married and stay married, and stay out of jail. These are empirical facts. And it’s a fact that when children’s health and educational needs aren’t met, inequality grows, and bad things happen. Really bad things: rising crime rates and incarceration, declining innovation, and shorter lives, to name a few.

What happens when societies make comprehensive commitments to the health and education of children–in other words, when concerted cultivation becomes public policy? Take a look at this graph:

The huge difference in child poverty rates between the United States and almost everywhere else in the developed world, especially Northern European countries, is not accidental. It’s the product of decades of diverging social policies, as well as different philosophies of education. In the twenty-first century, it’s better to be educated (and by that I mean, have at least a B.A.) than not, cosmopolitan instead of provincial. It’s better to read books instead of watching TV, and to learn more than one language. It’s better when governments rely on science instead of superstition to make policy, and it’s better for them to be secular instead of religious. This is not an issue of rich vs. poor. Instead it pits social development against neglect and underdevelopment.

I’m not a relativist. I think embracing these values, as individuals and a society, will give my son a better life. That some people might think I’m a snob for saying that education is good and ignorance is bad just illustrates how frighteningly neurotic some parts of America have become.

And I think that adopting these policies will actually decrease the hyperventilating anxiety I described in my original post, which causes, for example, some parents (of all social classes, not just the most privileged) to hold their kids back a year so that they can beat out other kids in academics and athletics, which becomes a kind of vicious cycle as others try to keep up. Creating a situation of functionality and equality will reduce the craziness we see in places like San Francisco, where parents live (with cause) in fear that their kids’ life chances will diminish if they end up in the wrong school.

To put it a different way, let’s stop blaming parents (and teachers) for struggling to make the best of the system. Instead, let’s change the system.

Liberal and conservative alike, we Americans too often forget that our children are the poorest in the developed world.  Liberals and progressives blame conservative social policies, but as the comments at Daddy Dialectic reveal, there’s enough blame to go around. While we’ve wasted time worrying about strawmen–like, for example, “helicopter parents”–we’ve neglected our school system to the point where many districts are on the brink of disaster, and some are disasters. More than just time, we are wasting talent and lives, and there’s no excuse for it.

(Incidentally, if you’d like to read a superb overview of what public policies have fueled  America’s rising rate of child poverty and Europe’s falling rate, see Jody Heymann’s 2006 book, Forgotten Families.)

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