Women Beware: The Democrats' Brave New World for Families

 Morning Joy by Alexis Marie Lahaye

 What Democrats don't understand: Families Need Mothers

"Try to imagine what 'living with one's family' meant."

They tried; but obviously without the smallest success.

"And do you know what a 'home' was?"

They shook their heads.

--Chapter 3, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

White House advisor Hilary Rosen’s consternation-producing comment that Ann Romney “has never worked a day in her life” serves quite efficiently to remind us of the radical-left-progressive ideal of womanhood championed by the Obama administration: Borrow tens of thousands to complete that college degree, sleeping with any man who catches your eye along the way; abort those pesky nuisance pregnancies; marry a suitable man (or not, if you prefer IVF);  suspend contraception just long enough to conceive (or not, if you want to hire a surrogate); have your baby (or not, if pre-natal testing determines it’s a girl, and you and hubby want a boy); find a daycare center that fits within your budget (remember, you have to figure in the costs of your colorist, car detailer, and personal trainer); and get the heck out of the house as soon as possible.

That is, of course, if you pull down a six figure income as a Democratic strategist like Rosen, or earn $316,000  a year selling the University of Chicago Hospital’s plan to dump its charity cases elsewhere, like Michelle Obama. If you are one of the 52 million working women in the United States whose family income is below the median, it’s much more likely that you are out cleaning other people’s houses,  doing other people’s cooking ,  and raising other people’s children, while your children stay at home, sometimes alone.

Either way, the degradation of the wonder of motherhood and the work of the so-called “stay at home mother”  has been a documentable disaster for the American family. 

For an uplifting look at things from the other side of the ideological spectrum, see Under the Gables: Dedicated to Discussion of Women and Their Work.

Our First Grandchild Baptized

Diya Chandra Huth, baptized at Saint Leo the Great Catholic Church in Inwood, West Virginia, Easter Sunday, 2012. Shown here with godfather Christopher Praveen Huth, mama Falana Lyn Huth, proud father Alexander Chandrappa Huth, and godmother Savithri Huth Perez.

Birthday Blast

 

Mother's Day coincides with our twin niece and nephew's birthday every year, and sometimes we have the pleasure of hosting their birthday party. This year, the celebration was simple, but the weather was perfect, and a good time was enjoyed by all. We updated traditional games, including apple bobbing (suspended from the porch with fishing line), hula hoop (the winner had more than 100 spins), pin the tail on the donkey (actually, pin the earrings on Indian glam actress Asywarae Rai--after 14 blindfolded spins to note the birthday milestone), and egg-on-spoon relay race, which is a blast with no updating necessary at all.

Refreshments featured root beer, homemade pizza, corn on the cob, double chocolate cake, and mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Click on the collage to see the action unfold.

Easter Menu 2010

Our Easter feast this year ended with a delicious strawberry-covered cheesecake, seen here on the dining table set off by the lovely placemats knitted by a dear friend in my favorite color. The menu--in full--was:

Cream of fresh asparagus soup
Fresh fruit cocktail in pineapple boats
Baked ham with port and apricot chutney
Sweet and white potatoes with leeks
Wild rice salad with almonds and cherry tomatoes
Key lime torte
Strawberry cheesecake
Lemon mousse (see Top Ten Recipes)

The weather was perfect and the company was lively.

Easter 2010

 

Click on the collage to see larger snaps of our tree-house building, new little chicks (they are now housed in an old bookcase, but we'll need a bigger home for them in about four weeks), lox and bagels breakfast, key lime meringue pie, cheesecake with strawberries, and strolling musicians.

Happy Easter to all!

The Prettiest Little House in Connecticut

The dining room, where we had many a holiday gathering. The pine table opened to seat 12 or more. My aunt used the most inexpensive bamboo shades from China for both picture windows in the main living area.

My aunt is a genius at decorating. She and my uncle bought their three bedroom ranch house in southern Connecticut in the early 1950s, and it has always been beautifully furnished and accessorized. In my opinion, it far outshines any McMansion for comfort, all on a budget that would make a furniture salesman and his friend at the mortgage department of Citibank weep. This house is tiny by 21st century standards--one bathroom with one sink, and laundry room in the basement. But it met all the needs of the family quite comfortably and was paid off in 20 years.

The living area, with a working fireplace, slate hearth and cedar wood paneling.

Another view of the living room, facing the front picture window, also with Chinese bamboo blinds. My aunt did not scrimp on furniture, and the pieces she selected lasted for decades in beautiful condition.

Facing the front door of the house. This is the original door, that came with the house in 1952.

Looking into the kitchen from the living area. Wallpaper is used artfully in every room and the hallway.

A view of the kitchen.

Continuing Education

A Roman Townhouse, c. 2004

I have probably learned more from doing school projects with my children, than I did in college. The model of Roman townhouse pictured here, constructed for my younger son's Latin II class at Notre Dame Academy, was a lengthy effort, took considerable research, and afforded us precious time to work together for many hours. I am proud to say that the final product got the second highest score for accuracy and completeness, and was on display at the school for several years. My son cleverly added a vomitorium to the list of required rooms (atrium, cubiculum, culina, triclinium, vestibulum, and so forth), which you can see in the upper left hand side of the photo, partially obscured by the tiled roof.

In Defense of a Full Nest

On vacation this summer in Cape Charles on the Chesapeake Bay. Wish the nest could have been fuller.

I don’t like my empty nest! I’ve been through this once before, when our foster daughter married in 1990 after being with me and my husband for seven tumultuous but thoroughly enjoyable years. The house seemed as empty as an abandoned museum, and, though it is a tiny Cape Cod, I heard echoes from every footfall. Within several months, we were trying to start a new family. When the home-grown method failed, we got on the adoption bandwagon and by 1997 had packed our little place with three beautiful children from India. Now, all of them—our daughter and two sons—are grown; the elder two are married and our younger son is a junior in college.

Am I looking at the years we raised them through rose-colored glasses? Perhaps. However, I know that I much prefer the schedule of homework, family dinnertime, soccer games, Sunday school, and 10 loads of laundry a week to the order and relative quiet of my present routine. Despite the financial and physical stresses that came along with the children, there is no one moment of experience that has ever made me happier than coming in the door and seeing my husband sitting at the kitchen table with the children, school books open and the casserole I prepared before work bubbling in the oven.

I am convinced that the Empty Nest Syndrome, as many couples experience it in our modern, contraception-oriented society, is not what God had in mind when he created the family. In the natural course of things, children follow somewhat predictably upon the wedding, and in most families continue to arrive over more than a decade, perhaps two. The oldest siblings in a large family are able to help as the younger ones come along, are out the door when their younger brothers and sisters are still in grade school (or toddling), and return with their own children before long before the parental home is emptied of children. In this scheme of things, the nest gets fuller and fuller, rather than dismally empty.

In the happiest of homes I have seen, the full nest accommodates three or four generations of family members, each generation fulfilling its roles and responsibilities toward each of the others: the grandparents to dispense wisdom, the mother and father to provide and maintain the home, the children to learn, grow, and help each other, and the grandchildren simply to delight everyone else.

What's in a Family?

Swedish artist Carl Larsson's Around the Lamp (1900)

What does marriage do for children? A 2006 study by legal scholars W. Bradford Wilcox from the University of Maryland School of Law and Robin Fretwell Wilson of the University of Virginia considers this question as it bears on state policies governing adoption. The weight of the social science, they report, is that children do better in homes with two married parents, as compared to single parent or cohabitating households. The evidence is so strong, in fact, that Wilcox and Wilson, urge that—as “the best interest of the child” is the clearly stated mandate for adoption practices (and not the needs or desires of the adoptive parents)—state adoption laws should clearly favor married couples, and even favor single parents over cohabitating couples. Today, only the state of Utah has a clear preference for married couples in its adoption laws. A number of states are neutral, and most assert no preference.

A sampling of the evidence in favor of two-parent married family (all studies cited have been controlled for confounding factors, including socioeconomic status):

§ A study of the entire Swedish population determined that children raised in one-parent families are twice as likely as those raised in two-parent homes to attempt suicide, suffer from substance abuse, and suffer from depression.

§ An American study found that males raised in one-parent families are twice as likely to commit a crime that leads to incarceration before they are 30 than males raised in two-parent families.

§ Another American study found that teenagers in one-parent families are three times more likely to use marijuana than teenagers raised in two-parent families.

§ Multiple studies have found that children living with two adults in a cohabitating relationship are more likely to experience behavioral problems at school, to suffer emotional problems, and to suffer from sexual or physical abuse from within the family. A study, done in Missouri, showed that preschool children living in cohabitating households were 50 times more likely to be killed than their counterparts living in married two-parent homes.

§ On the positive side, children raised in households with two married parents spend demonstrably more time engaged in activities with their fathers (or stepfathers), who are at home for more hours every week than non-married fathers. They have two sets of grandparents who are more likely to be involved in their lives.

Wilcox and Wilson also present compelling findings that marriage trumps biological connection in terms of positive outcomes for children, that is, children living with a married parent and a step-parent do better than children living with two biological parents who are cohabitating.

Divorce and Female Child Abuse

Portrait of Mademoiselle Legrand, 1875 by Pierre-August Renoir

The popular belief that nontraditional families function just as well as traditional nuclear families is not only mistaken, but dangerous for children, especially for female children of divorced parents. A 2000 study by Washington and Lee University professor and social scientist Robin Fretwell Wilson presents some disastrous numbers on the results of divorce and the collapse of the nuclear family, dealing principally with their effect on female children: Female children of divorced parents, the study documents, are 50 percent more likely to suffer sexual abuse than children living with both married parents. This horrible statistic is distilled from more than 70 social science studies compiled and reviewed by Fretwell Wilson, and applies to female children living with single mothers, single fathers, and parents of both sexes who are remarried to new spouses.

“Using statistical tools to unravel the effect of multiple variables,” Fretwell Wilson reports, “sociologists have found that the factor most decisive to a girl’s increased sexual vulnerability was living in a household with adult males after her parents’ separation." Female children of divorce living with men (either their biological fathers or a male brought into the home by their mothers) were 7 times more likely to be abused than female children living only with women, a 1998 study showed. She further reports that, “measured in terms of frequency, duration, invasiveness, and force, fathers and father-substitutes subject their victims to abuse of singular destructiveness.”

A most poignant finding of the study concerned the maternal estrangement of daughters. One study showed sexual abuse of female children living without their mothers before age 16 to be 200 percent higher than that of female children living with their mothers.

Fretwell Wilson’s study settles the question of whether single-parent families, and the modern “blended” American family can function with the same efficacy in raising healthy children as the traditional nuclear family. The answer is no: The numbers show that child sexual abuse does not occur randomly across the child population: It occurs more often in single-parent or “reconstituted” families. “Far from a Kodak moment,” Fretwell Wilson writes, “the snapshot that social scientists provide of nontraditional families is one of crisis.” And this crisis affects huge numbers of our children: As of 2001, 60 percent of all marriages entered into were statistically headed for dissolution in divorce, 7.2 million children were living in step families, and half of American children were living with parents who had never married.

As a professor of law, Fretwell Wilson devotes much of her study (read it here in the Cornell Law Review) to how the U.S. courts and child custody system can create opportunities to insulate children from sexual abuse following divorce, in visitation disputes, and in other cases dealing with child custody. The first step, her study emphasizes, is for parents, courts, judges, and social workers to stop assuming that nontraditional families work the same way that nuclear families do, and to learn more about nontraditional families through the study of how they actually behave.

Get Married, Stay Married

Dutch painter Jan van Eyck's marriage painting of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife Giovanna Cenami

What is the best environment for raising children? A study by Washington and Lee University School of Law Robin Fretwell Wilson answers this question in the good old-fashioned way: Children do best raised in a stable family home with both of their parents, and all the scientific studies show that this is true. Wilson recently discussed her findings at the November 2008 Georgia Supreme Court Summit on Children, Marriage, and Family Law titled For Children's Sake: Get Married, Stay Married.

Her 2006 research review with University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox describes study after study showing poorer outcomes for children raised outside of stable two-parent families. For males, children raised outside of two-parent families are twice as likely to be incarcerated by age 30; a recent study of the entire Swedish population found that children raised outside of the traditional family structure are twice as likely to attempt suicide, engage in substance abuse, and suffer from depression. Studies elsewhere in the West show lower achievement in school, higher rates of teenage pregnancy and promiscuity, lower employability, and much reduced lifetime income. All of this research “controls” for socioeconomic factors, such as race, income, and, education. From the standpoint of social science research design, all of Wilson’s cited studies have been scrubbed, polished, vetted, and reviewed. The conclusion is hard science—or as hard as social science gets. And Wilson has piled it up in a mountain too huge for public officials to ignore.

Wilson notes that it is the family (a married mother and a father collaborating in the rearing of children), not the biology, that is the main factor in creating positive outcomes for children. The children of cohabitating biological parents shown less positive outcomes. Wilson also reviews studies showing that adopted children raised in traditional nuclear families are better off by all measured criteria than children raised in homes with a single biological parent. These findings are crucial to addressing the question of how the states should regulate the placement of children for adoption when biological parents can no longer care for them. Assuming that states should and must employ a “best interests of the child” standard to regulate adoptive placements (which, by law, all states now in fact claim to do), every effort must be made to place adoptive children in homes with two married parents.