What sound is most likely to wake a sleeping woman? An infant’s wail — and that is true whether or not she has children of her own.

What sound is most likely to wake a sleeping man? A car alarm going off, followed by the howling of the wind (not a baby) and the buzzing of a fly. A crying baby is not even on the list of the 10 most sleep-disturbing sounds for men.

Those are the results of research by the British company Mindlab, which combines neuroscience and marketing (and which conducted this particular study at the behest of a “nighttime flu tablet” manufacturer). Volunteers in a sleep lab were attached to an electroencephalography machine, and a variety of recorded noises were played. The EEG recorded disturbances in brain activity in response to each.

Labels: babies, gender differences, men, women

posted by Eve at 10:15 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

This is the last in my series of columns on out of wedlock births. By now you know that 4 in 10 U.S. births are nonmarital; this rises to 7 in 10 for African-American Women, and 5 in 10 for Hispanic women, our fastest growing minority population. Women in their 20s and 30s account for the lion’s share of the trend. …

Most of the state and private programs responding to nonmarital births over the last 40 years have poured their energies into “taking the baby out” of the sexual encounter via birth control. Abstinence programs, which are less common, try to teach young people how to avoid nonmarital sexual involvement. “Big-picture” efforts have aimed to boost young people’s educational and job attainments, in order to steer them toward a different future. While occasionally, policy experts have referenced the need to help young people think more healthfully about the meaning of their lives, including about the importance of their heterosexual relationships, no extensive efforts have ever been directed to addressing the intertwined issues I have surfaced above. For brevity’s sake, I would say these issues might be identified as: the moral weight of heterosexual relations; the public nature of heterosexual relations; the intrinsically parental orientation of heterosexual relations, and the crisis of fatherhood.

Also for brevity’s sake, as well as to get at the conceptual nub of my proposals, I would suggest that any response to these issues must “put the baby back into sex.” By this I mean that men and women need to acknowledge the overwhelming importance of heterosexual relations’ orientation to the procreation of children – helpless creatures who require decades of intensive labor, a lifetime of interaction, and who apparently come into the world with an inbuilt desire to remain connected to both their father and their mother. No matter the heights and depths of couples’ romantic aspirations and experiences, these can never be divorced from the crucial reality that heterosexual relations are procreative. The law has always known this. Most churches did or still do. And now couples must acknowledge it too, with help from every possible governmental, religious and other social institution. Once the baby is re-introduced into couples’ sexual consciousness, they can better understand that nonmarital sex has its own intrinsically public significance; the door is also opened for women and men to understand the “giftedness” of the other precisely in connection with procreation. They might further be open to the realization that men and women were literally “meant for each other,” meant for “communion,” and that what they can do together is more than the sum of its parts. This is a fundamental approach to helping men and women internalize a view of one another that is more respectful, more elevated, than what obtains today, especially among the most disadvantaged. Motherhood and fatherhood have not lost their fan base in these communities; were each sex to be helped to see the other, beginning in adolescence, as potential mothers and fathers, leaders of their children, of the next generation, and of their community, this might help to transcend current gender mistrustful stereotypes. Tantalizing indications of the possible beneficial effects upon young men and women of learning about their mutual procreative capabilities have come from “fertility awareness” programs like TeenStar.[6]

Who might act on the goal of “putting the baby back into sex”? And how might they proceed? The most likely actors are of course families themselves, churches and governments.

Labels: babies, culture, Helen Alvare, heterosexual couples, out-of-wedlock births, pregnancy, premarital sex

posted by Imapp Staff at 1:23 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

In recent years, American conservatism has morphed from a smoke-filled room of martini-swilling adults into nothing short of a nursery. The Right, once known for its emphasis on individual accomplishment and personal responsibility, once a haven for those keen on adults making their own decisions, has linked arms with the stroller moms of Park Slope and put babies at the center of its universe.

The most sensational recent case of this may have been Sarah Palin’s “Seventh Heaven”-esque family, which pitted those inspired by such fruitfulness against those repulsed by it. But even before the Palin brood hit the national scene, conservative intellectuals far from Wasilla had been celebrating babies at all costs. City Journal contributing editor Kay Hymowitz argues that the fight against teen pregnancy is based on a middle-class bias that misapprehends “adolescent baby lust.” Traditionally, conservatives discussing teen birthrates do not accept any lust as worth reckoning with, so this makes for a change. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s recent book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008), proposes family-friendly policies, a two-step approach intended first to gain the support of parents with many children (a traditionalist-leaning bloc), and, in turn, to see those same policies encourage all Americans to have larger families, and thus to shift, for the sake of the children, towards social conservatism.

What ties these authors together is the belief that social ills come not from unwanted pregnancy, but from the fact that we think a pregnancy could possibly be undesirable. In other words, for Hymowitz, the problem is not that very young women want children, but that our society frowns on early marriage. For Douthat and Salam, the concern is not that those who can’t afford to have babies have them anyway, but that the state fails to make childrearing affordable. These writers, along with columnist David Brooks, do not merely want to correct what they see as a stigma surrounding procreation. The purpose of the movement is to encourage Americans—even arugula-eating sophisticates—to have more babies.

Labels: babies, demographics, fertility, natalism, tax policy

posted by Eve at 1:03 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT