My father was very proud of his mug collection. Each mug on his bedroom bureau was embossed with the name of a college or university. Each member of our family had graduated from one of those institutions. Dad had the option of sipping his morning coffee from a Princeton mug or one from Stanford, Harvard, The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Ithaca College, or The University of Rochester. Our family, spouses included, has amassed two PhDs, two MBAs, two master’s degrees and a CPA.  School was what we did and we did it well. I don’t write about this to boast. I write about this as I ask you to imagine how my husband, Harold, and I felt when one of our three sons decided that college was not for him. I ask you to imagine how my son must have felt when he said to us, “It’s not that I won’t go to college, it’s that I can’t.” 

As is the case with most families today, college was a mandate in our household…like brushing your teeth or taking out the trash. Our sons were free to ask us why we expected compliance, but their approval of our answers was irrelevant. They were expected to perform these tasks regardless of their feelings about them.  Harold and I made ourselves available for help whenever help was needed. When it came to school, help was needed for Andrew in a big way. Diagnosed with severe ADHD in middle school, formal education was torture for him, except for the socialization part at which he excelled.  My son suffered no end of criticism and ridicule from teachers throughout his secondary school years. One even called him stupid in front of the class. He was later fired, but that gave us small comfort. 

As concerned parents we put ourselves on overdrive to try to turn our son into the student we “knew” he could be. We enrolled him in private school where we thought he would receive more individualized attention. We spent a fortune on God knows how many tutors and psychologists. We medicated him so he could focus at school, but he was a zombie with no appetite the rest of the time. It took a village to get him through high school. It may actually have taken a whole city. We hired a college counselor to help us with the excruciating process of applying to colleges that accept kids with his unimpressive GPA. We pleaded, bribed, cajoled, and lectured. In short, we did everything but let Andrew be Andrew.

Approximately six weeks before he was to report to college, Andrew asked Harold and me to drop what we were doing and take him to lunch. Over burgers and fries and in public (my kid is far from stupid), he dropped the bomb.  Harold and I had a decision to make and we had a split second in which to make it. We could register devastation and disappointment and push him one more time, as we had pushed him all of his life, to at least give college a try, or we could accept his decision with full hearts, and by accepting that, we could finally accept him for the smart, funny, loving young man he is. We chose the latter.

Andrew didn’t become the belly-scratching, gum-chewing, penniless lout that well-meaning parents hold up to their children as the end result of not obtaining a college degree. Quite the opposite is true.  He obtained a license to sell commercial real estate, (which, by the way, required reading and math skills), found a job in a reputable firm, and rented a house. He grills hamburgers in his backyard and plays basketball at the gym and has no problem finding dates. By the time he was twenty-three he had developed quite a reputation in our area, and he receives job offers on a regular basis. He recently became an entrepreneur by starting an internet company. Did I mention that EVERYONE likes him? 

Blessedly, Andrew doesn’t hold his childhood against us. In between all those tutoring and therapy sessions there were family vacations and a whole lot of soccer and basketball, and I suppose that counted for something. 

Linda Lee,  in her book, Success Without College, writes, “Here is who belongs in college: the high-achieving student who is interested in learning for learning’s sake, those who intend to become schoolteachers, and those young people who seem certain to go on to advanced degrees in law, medicine, architecture, engineering, and the like. Here is who actually goes to college: everyone.”

But college is not for everyone and not everyone should be pushed to matriculate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 25% of college graduates are currently in jobs that don’t require a college degree. Years ago, immigrant families and other laborers saw higher education as the only way out of poverty. A diploma signified to employers that the person who earned it was special. But as the number of kids attending college skyrockets (the number is currently 70 percent), the employment playing field becomes more and more level. Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and professor of economics at Ohio University claims that “the number of jobs requiring a college degree is now less than the number of young adults graduating from universities, so more and more graduates are filling jobs for which they are overqualified.”   In other words, a college degree no longer sets you apart from the pack.

Charles Murray, political scientist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “it has been empirically demonstrated that doing well (B average or better) in a traditional college major in the arts and sciences requires levels of linguistic and logical/mathematical ability that only 10-15 percent of the nation’s youth possess. That doesn’t mean that only 10-15 percent should get more than a high school education. It does mean that the four-year residential program leading to a BA is the wrong model for a large majority of young people.”

Dropout rates today are ridiculously high, particularly for public universities.  Only 33 percent of freshmen entering the University of Massachusetts in Boston graduate within six years. The rate is 41 percent for the University of Montana and 44 percent for the University of New Mexico. The economist, Mark Schneider refers to colleges with these dropout rates as “failure factories” and they are the norm. While American high schools graduate about three quarters of their students in four years, American colleges only graduate 50 percent of their students in six years.

Clearly, a vast number of our young people are wasting valuable time and money in college when they could be learning a trade, working as apprentices, becoming entrepreneurs, immersing themselves in the arts, or working in community service. Most large companies today offer training programs through which employees learn the skills they will need to perform well in the jobs for which they were hired.

 College has become both an entitlement and a prerequisite to a happy life, so much so, that adults even feel free to push other people’s children.  Andrew and I still flinch when we recall a trip to the ER three years ago. Andrew was doubled over in pain from a kidney stone. As the ER doctor, who we happened to know socially, administered a morphine drip, he took the liberty, (with good intentions and Andrew’s best interest at heart) of informing my son that he would not amount to very much if he didn’t go to college and that he would most certainly come to regret his decision later in life. Now that’s what you want to hear when your urinary tract is about to explode.

The single statistic that pops up over and over again in the research is that college graduates earn more money than those without a college degree. Well yes, they do. This statistic compels us to push our high school kids onward toward a degree. For some, this is the right thing to do. But our materialistic culture has also led us to push some of our youth into what can be an agonizing four year ordeal that will in the long run, lead to failure. For those who don’t enjoy learning, going to college is only about earning potential. We, as a nation, are all about money.

The alternative to college is not Skid Row.  Believe it or not, there are plumbers who can afford to take their families on vacation. Computer technologists own their own cars and even support mortgages. Mammogram technicians feel good about helping women detect breast cancer. Some hairdressers who have opened their own shops earn more than some lawyers who work for other people. And some young men with high IQs, winning personalities, and learning disabilities can sell office buildings. I wish my two degrees could have taught me that before my son did. 

This post ends here. What follows, for your enjoyment, is a partial list of people who managed to succeed in life without college degrees:  

Edward Albee, Woody Allen, Maya Angelou, Wally Amos (the cookie guy), Jane Austen, Dan Akyroyd, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Joan Baez, Warren Beatty, David Ben-Gurion, Sonny Bono, Rick Bragg (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist), Richard Branson, Albert Brooks, David Byrne, James Cameron (anyone heard of Titanic or Avatar?), Raymond Chandler, Coco Chanel, John Cheever, Sean Connery, Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Dell, Princess Diana, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bob Dylan, Clint Eastwood, Thomas Edison, Harvey Weinstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Fonda, Benjamin Franklin, David Geffen, John Glenn, Richard Grasso (headed the New York Stock Exchange), Ernest Hemingway, Dustin Hoffman, L. Ron Hubbard, Ralph Lauren, Alex Haley, Doris Lessing, Rush Limbaugh, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Lindbergh, Madonna, Malcolm X, Steve Martin (how many times have I read his articles in The New Yorker?), H.L. Mencken, S.I. Newhouse, Jack Nicholson, Neil Simon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bob Pittman (founder of MTV) Edgar Allen Poe, Wolfgang Puck, Robert Redford, John D. Rockefeller, J.D. Salinger, Margaret Sanger (birth control education), Dawn Steel, Barbra Streisand, William Howard Taft, Nina Totenberg, Ted Turner, Mark Twain, Governor Jesse Ventura, Thomas J. Watson (founder of IBM), Walt Whitman, August Wilson, Anna Wintour, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Harry S. Truman…that’s PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN!

Photo by zazzle.com

For girls, Autumn was the 89th most popular, Genesis was 95th, and Brooklyn was 47th (Brooklynn was 182nd). For boys, Caden was 95th, Josue was 182nd, and Nehemiah was 364th. At least these were the rankings back in 2008, the most recent year for which the Social Security Administration has released information about baby names.

I don’t know anyone with these names, but apparently, according to the researchers who analyzed the SSA data all the way back to 1880, this is no surprise. Because while in 1880s, 40 percent of boys received one of the 10 most popular names, these days that’s only the case for 10 percent of boys. And while up until the mid 1950s a little less than half of all girls had one of the 50 most popular names, these days that’s only true for about one in four girls.

It’s not that names like Anthony or William are disappearing (they are currently still the 7th and 8th most popular names for boys on the SSA list), but they are becoming less common. And if Itzel is the 383rd most popular girls name (it is) that means that the names that don’t even make the list must be very unusual indeed.

(For anyone curious to learn more about baby names’ popularity by year check here and scroll down to the box titled “Baby Name Popularity by Birth Year.”)

I started thinking about such things after reading this article, which talks not only about baby naming trends but also discusses some other conclusions drawn by those researchers who analyzed all the SSA data. Their take on the trend toward more unusual baby names is that it is representative of parents these days valuing individuality over obedience and conformity.

Study researcher Jean Twenge sees this as an indication that our culture is becoming not just more individualistic but narcissistic. The positive side of individualism, she points out, is that there is less prejudice and more tolerance for minority groups, but when individualism is taken too far, the result is narcissism. (That last part is sort of obvious though, right?)

It turns out Twenge has even written a book about this—The Narcissism Epidemic, which you can read more about here. (Clearly Twenge is pretty into this topic, her last book was called Generation Me.)

I don’t know, though. Personally, I don’t think that wanting your children to stand out or have unusual names necessarily means you are narcissistic. And is narcissism currently a widespread disorder (Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD)? Twenge claims nearly 1 out of 10 Americans in their twenties have experienced the symptoms of NPD. Either way, even if it turns out we are dealing with a narcissism epidemic, if I had to choose between having a few more narcissists around and living in a culture of conformity with less tolerance and more prejudice, I would definitely choose the narcissists.

Scott and Jennifer Spiegel were not appeased. They filed a lawsuit this past January, suing for at least $30,000 in damages.

The husband, a personal injury lawyer, is handling the case. He and his wife say the hospital should pay for this painful mistake that took place at 4 AM more than two years ago.

The complaint says the new mom “suffered mental and emotional anguish and pain, and will in the future suffer great pain, discomfort and emotional impairment.”

“It was just an awful, internal feeling,” Mrs. Spiegel, a teacher, told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Yes, just awful. I guess.

I can relate to the immediate shock of discovering you’re nursing someone else’s baby. That probably is unsettling, especially so soon after giving birth. But two years on? After months of nursing your own kid, standing in public bathrooms, like I used to do, or in cars or corners of restaurants, at airports, and under the less-than-enamored gaze of your husband?

Would you truly be haunted — losing wages, seeking medical care — by the act of feeding another woman’s newborn for a few minutes? Isn’t it rather your Salma Hayek moment, something your husband teases you about?

But here’s what’s odd about the case. And it’s not that people taking home a healthy baby are behaving badly. That’s not surprising. (Nor is it surprising the husband is a personal injury lawyer). The odd part is that it took two years to file the lawsuit.

Sure it’s possible Mr. Spiegel procrastinated or it took him two years to take his wife’s complaint of “emotional impairment” seriously.

I think it’s more likely that two years on, with bills for baby Spiegel piling up, the couple saw in the incident something they hadn’t seen before and it was truly awful. They saw dollar signs.

Photo by blmurch.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/08/the-horror-of-it-all-nursing-another-womans-baby/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/05/end-of-life-talks-that-never-happen-why/ http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/05/end-of-life-talks-that-never-happen-why/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:16:22 +0000 Meredith Resnick http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/05/end-of-life-talks-that-never-happen-why/

I read the article in The New York Times, “Facing End-of-Life Talks, Doctors Choose to Wait” (Jan 12, 2010) with interest, but ended up feeling something important was missing.

The piece, which came out earlier this year, cites a study published online in the journal Cancer. The Times reported that “many doctors, especially older ones and specialists, say they would postpone those conversations [meaning the end-of-life ones], according to the findings of the study.

My experience working with dying patients, visiting hundreds of elderly people diagnosed by their physicians with end-stage diseases who had only weeks to live, taught me that even—or especially—the most brilliant (and often the nicest) doctors might be more frightened of discussing death than their patients are.  That doctors are human like the rest of us, and, like the rest of us, are at times timid, ill-equipped—scared, perhaps—to talk about death in a personal way. Saying doctors “choose” to wait makes it sound like their choice is always altogether rational, planned and born out of ethics.

As a clinician, there was nothing more painful for me than to receive a doctor’s order to speak to a patient about hospice only to find out the doctor hadn’t told the patient and family why. Or being dispatched to a patient’s home (or hospital room) only to have the patient’s family—or the patient—tell me in tears that they couldn’t get the doctor to tell them anything.

I fear that many people fail to realize that going on hospice is actually a choice that the patient gets to make for himself or herself—or it should be. But it’s almost impossible to make such a choice when the treating physician who guides the care plan avoids the subject. The public has the idea that most people receive hospice care for months. Some do. And they will tell you it was a blessing. Many of the patients I met received palliative care for a week or so, some for only a day or two.

When I was new to the field more seasoned social workers and nurses told me that doctors only like to focus on solutions, that this explained why they never discussed “What if” with their elderly patients, even the seriously ill. What if, as in, What if the treatment doesn’t work? “That’s your job,” my colleagues told me, like they were relieved someone new was coming in to relieve them of doing just that.

It is a social worker’s job to help the patient process end-of-life issues. But it is the doctor who creates the care plan, who sets the tone of treatment, who leads the care team to best serve the patient. It is the doctor who writes the clinical orders therefore it should be the doctor who also understands that waiting too long to discuss death can do more harm at the end of an individual’s life, than good.

Photo credits:

Photo by kswgoodfriends

Flickr/IQuoncept
Flickr/novamade
Flickr/aaronmac1

The room is dark and candlelit. Next to me a young woman speaks in a slow, self-assured way about her new job at the Financial Times. Slightly scruffy, intense journo-types cluster around other tables, alive with talk of politics, stories, themselves. No one pays me any attention, save a solicitous server - bless - who brings me a drink.

I used to know people in places like this. I used to talk like they did, with purpose and confidence about the day’s events.

Now here I sit, an anonymous mom, self-conscious over whether I look suburban in my tangerine turtleneck sweater.

I’m rubbing blood out of my tangerine turtleneck sweater - my 15-month-old daughter thinks our couch is a luge run and got her first bloody nose earlier that day - when my friend enters 20 minutes late, glowing from the cold and buzzing with what she’s learned at her day of lectures.

A smartly-dressed woman waves to my friend and walks over. I’m introduced kindly as a great journalist, who used to work in London and is back. The woman is polite, but the past tense of my career registers on her face and her attention quickly fades.

I’m okay with being out of the game when I’m home with my daughter. It’s here in the kind of place I used to hang out that I feel I’ve somehow lost something.

For a while I told myself I could return to full-time reporting. My priorities might have changed, but I still had it. Of course it’s not true.

It’s not just that the issues no longer enthrall me or that potential employers would be less solicitous. It’s that my inner clock has slowed to match the pace of a person who toddles down a street two steps, stops to pick up a leaf, looks at it, rubs it between her hands, starts walking again, stops, drops the leaf, picks up two more, heads in the other direction, collects some rocks, holds them up to me like they’re gold, resumes walking and drops everything like it never existed.

There should be a therapy group for career women turned stay-at-home moms. We’d sit in a circle, drinking lattes and bragging about how fabulous we were as lawyers, marketing executives, stock brokers. Or perhaps it would be too painful dealing openly with the loss of professional identity coupled with the guilt over feeling that being a mom isn’t quite enough.

Over wine my friend says I should start working again, if even just part time like she has. She too has a baby, younger than mine, and has managed to do both career and parenting. She pulls out photos — lovely pictures of mother and son — and I finally begin to enjoy my night out.

Later as we’re leaving a group of people stop my friend. They’re full of talk about the next day’s events. I stand quietly buttoning my coat, thinking about my warm bed, my husband waiting at home, and the way my little girl came running, just as I was going out, to throw her small arms around my neck and hold me there at the door like maybe I wouldn’t go.

Photo by moriza.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/05/mom%e2%80%99s-anonymous-embracing-the-new-you/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/04/picking-your-babys-doc-the-prenatal-visit/ http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/04/picking-your-babys-doc-the-prenatal-visit/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:24:53 +0000 Jack Maypole http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/04/picking-your-babys-doc-the-prenatal-visit/

In pregnancy, there is always something going on. And, the choices! Who knew all the choices put before expectant parents? Did you want a birth plan? Midwife or OB/GYN as your provider? Natural childbirth or not? While the little one boots up within, up and coming moms and dads (first time or not) face a need to download so much information in so little time. Inevitably then, you’ll be asked: “Who’ll be your child’s primary care provider?“  While it may not be the most important decision of this new one’s life, it does matter.

Fortunately, and lest any hormone-fuelled panic arise, let’s recall nature gives you a few months lead time (usually), and there are some basic thoughts to help you think it through.

What is the point of a prenatal visit?

If nothing else, a prenatal visit for an expectant parent, gets a daunting process started. And, while even gestating presents its challenges, it is the time afterward, the childrearing and the parenting where the work really begins. Prenatal visits are not required in most practices (and they aren’t where I work), but I think they are a really good idea. They can be done several ways. For example, some parents never do them, while others seem to prep with the same fervor as one might for a college interview. For most folks, the right balance seems to be in the middle.

The idea of interviewing a child’s primary care provider may apply for families already with children who are changing practices, due to moves, new insurance or a desire to see someone new or different. The American Academy of Pediatrics updated a thoughtful policy paper on prenatal visits last fall.  I second the authors’ recommendation that these initial interviews with possible pediatrician (or, I’ll add, family medicine docs) are appropriate for families with more complicated circumstances: families with children with chronic illness, including special needs or premature infants, parents with high risk pregnancies, parents who have suffered loss of a child or difficulties in the care of their child, and also, parents who may intend to adopt. In all of these cases, a sit down with a care provider is a chance to check her out, pick her brains, case out the practice and to gutcheck if it all feels right.

How does one prepare? As in many things pediatric, I advise people to do what works for them. Some come in cold, without notes or having done reading. Others have consulted one or several pregnancy or childhaving guides, and are bristling with queries. Wanna make a list of questions or concerns? Great idea. I myself suffer from a certain amnesia at my doctor’s office. If writing stuff down helps crystallize thoughts and keep you focused, so much the better. Keep in mind, powerpoint presentations, submitting medical papers drenched in highlighter, or using your laptop to fact check statements the doctor makes during the encounter may be a bit offputting. Truly, there are no dumb questions. Having a child is a humbling, profound thing. Among other things, think of this encounter as a long teachable moment.

You have a choice, but how do you pick?

The nice part is, most folks will have a menu of choices in terms of their child’s future primary care provider. I find most expectant or established parents have a sense of what kind of clinician they are seeking, and they find it. Pediatrician? Family Medicine? Physician? Nurse Practitioner? A Solo or group practice, health center or hospital based gig? For those who are uncertain, I find the recommendations of friends and family are often insightful, and help winnow down what can feel like a dizzying list of possibilities.

And then there’s Google and the web. Empowering on the one hand, caveats on the other. State boards of medicine may list individual providers credentials and contact info. Small and large scale websites may offer reviews or comments on some docs.  As for this latter resource, private websites or community chat sites can be helpful, but flawed.  The veracity or intent of web reviews on docs can be difficult to interpret (was the rave review scripted by the physician’s mom? or is there someone trashing a doc who has an axe to grind?).  All food for thought.

In some areas, sought after providers or busy clinics may report they are ‘closed’ to new patients. While different docs work different ways in this regard, many I know will gladly open the door for those who diplomatically and/or determinedly seek to join a closed practice.  Time to work your rolodex? Maybe.

Remember, for all the stress this seems to present to some investigating parents on the front end, picking a primary care provider is not a covenant, nor a lifelong commitment. Parents have the right to change and to choose; there is always a market of care providers out there. And while we docs do well to remember this, sometimes it doesn’t work out or fit right, and families may find a better fit elsewhere. A key part of any clincian’s job will be to make that transition as seemless as possible, if needed.

How do you meet? and when?

For most practices, a simple call to the front desk suffices. Families can then arrange a meet and greet. More and more, practices and clinics provide downloadable forms or communication portals on their website, to allow new and established patients to set up appointments. We get most calls from expectant parents around the seventh month of pregnancy. By then, the impending New Arrival is physically evident, and folks start getting the itch to ready their nest and get things set up. Putting the visit off to the 9th month starts to get tricky for obvious reasons. So check ahead, and query about a potential clinician’s availability.

Some providers will set up appointments for anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Scheduling challenges may make a face to face gatherings daunting. While I haven’t Skyped one of these sessions yet, I’ve done my share of ‘phone meeting’ with prospective families, conference call style. While not as intimate or personal, it works. Email prenatal visits? Not so much. At present, email is too time intensive and doesn’t lend itself to discern whether or not a doc is a good fit. We’ll see if 3D TV changes that in the future. To date, that’s a ‘not yet.’

At present, most insurers don’t cover the cost of meeting for a prenatal/new patient provider interview. Some practices and organizations will charge you for the time. Make sure you check! In some places, clinicians will have group meetings of prospective parents. This works well at busier, larger practices, but probably isn’t feasible in smaller shops.

What are important topics to cover?

For the expectant parents and for new patients, there are some key elements to cover when we meet the first time. While these will vary with the pecularities with each practice (and maybe, even between doctors at the same clinic), there are some universal ideas to touch during your chat.

The Top 9 Issues to Cover:

1. How does one book an urgent appointment or well child visit?

2. How are after hours phone calls and concerns handled?

3. How does the clinic arrange for examining the newborn and/or establishing the first appointment?

4. What resources does the practice have for nutrition, including breastfeeding?

5. Are there any special policies or family concerns around vaccination?

6. Can the practice accommodate children with special needs, including neurodevelopmental issues, such as autism or developmental delay?

7.  How does the clinician feel about the use of complementary or alternative therapies in kids, such as herbs, acupuncture, homeopathy or chiropractic?

8. Do they have a sense of humor, and seem to like kids?

9. See #8

Call that a good start. Now, get to it!

A visit is worth a thousand words!

(photo above by Drjeeeol; cartoon below by me)

Take this scenario: a decade ago you signed up as an anonymous sperm donor. You gave the sperm bank some basic information about you but not much more than that. Years go by. You forget that for all you know there could be dozens of mini-yous growing up with dozens of women you’ve never met. When one day you get a phone call from one of these women, and it turns out that anonymity clause in that contract didn’t actually mean much at all.

Or this one: you and your wife are raising a child together, but you have your doubts. You love the child, but you just aren’t totally sure she is yours. So you get a paternity test, and it turns out you’re not the father. What then?

The first scenario was detailed in a recent Slate article. And while DNA tests didn’t directly connect the mothers with the donor, they did connect some of the mothers with each other. The donor then came into the picture after one of the mothers read an obituary about a baseball manager and had a hunch he was the donor’s father (the donor had disclosed that his father was in the Baseball Hall of Fame)—she was right.

Increasingly, donor anonymity is becoming a thing of the past. The article quotes Wendy Kramer, the founder of the Donor Sibling Registry, explaining that donors only continue to choose anonymity because they are not educated. “If they were properly educated on the consequences,” she told Slate, “then many would choose not to donate.”

The second scenario was the subject of a New York Times magazine article that looked at the legal and emotional implications of discovering, through a DNA test, that the child you’d thought was yours is not. It also outlined the scope of the situation—paternity tests have jumped 64 percent in the last decade, and 30 percent of them reveal that the man who thought he was the father, in fact, is not. About 400,000 tests are taken a year, so that’s happening to about 120,000 men.

It seems to me that if a woman chooses an anonymous sperm donor, she should let him remain so, even if she has the means to discover his identity. However, as the Slate piece points out, a child produced from such a union isn’t bound to do so. The article’s situation has a happy ending, though. One of the mother’s contacted the sperm donor, who agreed to meet her and the daughter (although he has not wanted to be in touch with his other children).

The situations described in the New York Times article seem much more devastating. In one, a man has to continue paying child support for a daughter who isn’t biologically his, even though his ex-wife has ended up marrying the biological father of the girl. In another, a man abruptly drops out of a young girl’s life after discovering she isn’t his biological daughter, which ends up being very damaging for the child.

Obviously, knowing one’s genetic background helps inform a person about what diseases they might be prone to. Other than that, however, it’s hard to see if the benefits of a DNA test actually outweigh the downsides. Regarding sperm donors, it allows someone to be found who doesn’t want to be found, and who has a right not to be, in my opinion. And regarding paternity tests, it helps a father discover something that will certainly hurt him but will probably hurt the child most of all. The man, obviously, has a right to know, but it’s hard to see what good ultimately comes from it.

Photo by SantaRose OLD SKOOL

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/03/how-dna-tests-change-things-mostly-for-the-worse/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/03/when-did-studying-dinosaurs-get-so-complicated/ http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/03/when-did-studying-dinosaurs-get-so-complicated/#comments Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:51:49 +0000 Mark Dursin http://thefastertimes.com/parents/2010/03/03/when-did-studying-dinosaurs-get-so-complicated/

Two years ago, my twin sons were doing their homework at the kitchen table. They were in second grade.

One son was writing out a report on a dinosaur called Parasaurolophus. The other was studying his “challenge words” for Friday’s spelling test; among these words were “unscrupulous” and “hospitality.”

Seeing my sons thunder away at their respective assignments triggered in me the proverbial gamut of emotions. (Emotions, you may notice, tend to travel in gamuts.) First and foremost, I was proud of the little guys, working so hard on tasks that seemed, to me, pretty advanced. So advanced, in fact, that as I reflected more and more on the assignments, I felt my attitude sink from pride to consternation to downright resentment.

“They’re in second grade!” I kept reminding myself. “Should school really be this hard? Should a seven-year-old honestly be expected to spell the word ‘unscrupulous’—especially when he doesn’t even know what a ’scruple’ is?”

For years, I’ve heard folks bemoan the “dumbing down” of America. And most of me understands their concern. But the rest of me wonders if, in our attempts to “smarten up” our kids, we’ve vastly overcompensated—and lopped off a chunk of their childhood in the process.

My son’s report on the Parasaurolophus perfectly encapsulates this concern. See, when I was a kid, there were only five dinosaurs: Tyrannosaurus Rex, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Pterodactyl. At least, those were the only ones anyone ever seemed to talk about. The Big Five—kind of like the vowels (with Diplodocus playing the role of “Sometimes Y”).

Now we’ve got all these new-fangled dinosaurs to contend with-Compsognathuses and Coelophyses and Troodons and, yes, Parasaurolophuses. (And for those of you who aren’t a paleontologist or a seven-year-old boy: a Parasaurolophus is a dinosaur with a tube-shaped crest on its head, which scientists suspect it used to breathe under water. It lived 65 million years ago—”during the Cretaceous period,” explained my second-grader.)

Am I saying we shouldn’t challenge our kids? Of course not. I’m a high school teacher, after all: I’m all for setting high standards. But I also can’t help but recall a conversation I had four years ago with my son’s kindergarten teacher, during the annual Parent-Teacher conference. She was reviewing the curriculum for us, and at some point, she said something about “all the material we had to cover this year”—a remark I still find curious.

This is still kindergarten, right? What exactly is all this “material” you have to cover? Quadratic equations, perhaps? The gases on the Periodic Table? The collected works of Thomas Pynchon?

Knowledge is power, sure, but don’t forget: in many myths, gaining knowledge also marks the end of the innocence. To me, kindergarten is all about getting your ABCs down, playing with clay, and learning to work well with others. Everything else can wait.

Of course, I’m saying this in the face of overwhelming evidence that suggests I have no idea what I’m talking about. My Dinosaur Son, it turned out, chose to do his report on Parasaurolophus; he loved (and still loves) learning all the hard names. And my Spelling Test Son came home the next week with a 112% on his test. To this day, both of them seem unscathed by the experience.

And my “they didn’t have these dinosaur when I was a kid” rant is, naturally, completely unfounded. Not long after my son did his Parasaurolophus report, I went to our local library and located the oldest kiddie dinosaur book on the shelf: Bernard Most’s 1978 picture book, If the Dinosaurs Came Back. The book, filled with illustrations of bright purple and yellow dinosaurs moseying through the city, is probably targeted for four- to eight-year-olds. Sure enough, on the last page, they had a list of dinosaurs—not just the Big Five, but Parasaurolophus and Compsognathus and all those other “new” reptiles which apparently aren’t new at all.

I don’t care. I’m still going to keep thinking about that mythical Simpler Time-when kindergarten kids played with clay, and there were only five dinosaurs.

 Photo: Kevitivity/Flickr Creative Commons

I remember I could only manage the Fishing Channel. Any sitcom, no matter how chuckleheaded—why did that lady knock on that door? why is that guy laughing?—was like reading Heidegger. The news, PBS, movie channels, all seemed to be in some sort of cuneiform, unfathomable. But the Fishing Channel? A line is thrown out, a pretty fish is caught, people look happy, there’s sun and spangled water; that I could handle. This was when I was pregnant and had hyperemesis gravidarum: hyper means excessive, emesis means vomiting, gravidarum means during pregnancy. It’s morning sickness, in a class by itself.

For a long, long time—months—I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t parse sitcoms, because I couldn’t keep any food down. Hell, I couldn’t keep a sip of water down. My throat got scarred from constant vomiting. I had to go on i.v. fluids. I went on serious anti-nausea drugs, pumped through the i.v. (because I couldn’t swallow them). No one wants to read about pregnant women throwing up, trust me, so I’ll spare you more details. Let’s just say that I went to the emergency room often, and I got to the point where I couldn’t function. Just think of how you feel when you have the worst stomach flu of your life, or food poisoning. Then think of feeling that way for months at a time. It was true hell.

Anyway, with little nutrition, and not thinking straight, I cried a lot, I was in despair, and so I lay on a mattress my husband had dragged out to the living room where the tv was, and he (my hero) told me we’d get through this, cleaned me up, and changed my i.v. tubes, as he’d been taught by the visiting nurse, while I lay in my Fishing Channel stupor. One day the nurse visited, and I managed to form a coherent question. I asked her who else she saw on her rounds. “Pregnant women like you,” she said. “And chemotherapy patients.”

That put things in perspective. I was one of the lucky ones; I knew my sickness would end. And I knew (I prayed) there would be a healthy baby at the close of it. The sickness did end. The baby is now 10 years old and strapping—for God’s sake, he weighed 10 pounds, 4 ounces when he was born. (The doctors joked that he helped himself to everything from the buffet table of Mom, leaving none left over.) I should add that the exact same scenario unfolded when I was pregnant with our (9 pounds, 3 ounces) daughter three years after our son. I was just as sick, there were i.v. and drugs again, and she came into the world healthy too.

What does all this have to do with Parenting Ethics? Well, I will say that I have my own dark nights of the soul here. I took drugs—Reglan, Zofran, Compazine, Phenergan suppositories, and low-dose Prozac—when I was pregnant. No one really knows if they might have affected my children in utero. In retrospect, we didn’t ask enough questions. We were so desperate. We did what the doctors said. But now, when I see my kids struggle with something, with anxiety issues, especially, I think—My God, is it something I took? Should I have toughed it out? Did I think more of myself than of them? What do you do when there isn’t enough research, enough data to make a good decision?

So I was heartened to see that, finally, there is some significant research launching on the root causes of HG, as hyperemesis gravidarum is known in shorthand. It is being partly funded by the wonderful HER Foundation, which stands for Hyperemesis Education & Research and was founded by a registered nurse named Kimber Wakefield MacGibbon, in 2000. Like me, like all of us who’ve suffered from HG, MacGibbon was appalled at how little is known about severe morning sickness (much less standard morning sickness) and set out to right that wrong.

Thus this HER Foundation collaboration with the University of Southern California and UCLA, the study conducted by Marlena Schoenberg Fejzo, PhD. Fejzo is trying to get saliva samples from thousands who’ve had HG, to test for epidemiological and predisposing genetic factors. You don’t have to live in California, or actually visit her lab. She’ll send you a kit and you can spit into a cup and send it back to her. Check out this video in which Fejzo explains what she’s trying to accomplish in her research—she suffered through epic HG herself—and click here to help participate in the study. (And if you didn’t have HG, but know someone who did, do a mitzvah and forward them the link. Thank you.)

I can’t stress enough how important this is. When I was pregnant in 1999 and 2002, no one really knew what to do with people like me. How many of us are there, actually? According to the HER Foundation, the “total incidence of the disease is unknown, in part to inconsistent diagnostic criteria; however, .05 to 2 percent of US pregnant women are hospitalized for HG each year. International studies report an incidence of HG as high as 10 percent.” Nowhere near the number of women who had typical morning sickness—but if you’re one of them, I suspect you have an inkling of what HG sufferers endured. 

The HER Foundation’s web site is also helpful in cutting down canards about hyperemesis: The condition was once thought to have a physiological cause—toxins, ulcerations, or infections. But that has hardly been the case of most HG victims (at best guess, it’s something to do with the hormonal shifts in pregnancy). HG has also, and this is just so thoroughly maddening, been thought to be psychosomatic. I cannot tell you how infuriating it was, when I was sick, to have someone suggest meditation, or ask about my worries about becoming a mom, or inquire about stress in my life—I’m pregnant and throwing up like a frat boy on grain alcohol every day, yes I’m stressed out!—or recommend ginger candy, sea bands, raspberry leaf tea, or saltines, thinking they were being helpful. I know, they meant well. But we were so, so beyond that.

Certain illnesses become the pivot points of your life. Ever since my kids have been born, whenever I have a bad day, I think it’s all relative—because nothing has been as bad as my pregnancies. It’s a kind of kryptonite, really. I am made of stronger stuff now. My marriage is made of stronger stuff. And so far in our life together, this has been our greatest trial (the stress on the spouse is colossal) and we survived. 

As it is with all illnesses, start researching and you always find someone worse off than yourself. Among my friends, I’m the cautionary tale, the most extreme case in their outer circle. But each seeming-eon of my sickness ended after three months or so. There are women who were—who are now, God help them—gravely ill for all nine months, women who suffer the medical and psychological repercussions long after the baby arrives, women who have to terminate their pregnancies,

I often wondered—why me? My mother had standard morning sickness, nothing like this. Both of us get severely seasick, though; is there some problem with balance brought on by hormonal changes? Who knows. At any rate, I’m signing up for the study, and I’m proud to spit for science. (It beats throwing up for science, that’s for sure.) And I’m going to update you on what Fejzo finds out. In the meantime, this goes out to my HG sisters, whether they fell under the charms (the lures?) of the Fishing Channel or not. Let’s reel in the cause, let’s troll for the cure. Because we wouldn’t wish this on anyone, anywhere, ever.