Work-family balance isn't an artisanal cheese

Midway through an engaging book review by David Remnick in the Jan. 16 New Yorker, I happened upon a brief but disturbing remark.

Remnick, who is editor of the magazine, was reviewing Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, but the remark in question had little directly to do with the First Couple. Here is the significant paragraph (emphasis added on the disturbing part):

In some respects, the Obamas resemble a post-sixties version of the Clintons. They are graduates of some of the richest institutions in the country. In Hyde Park, they lived among other highly educated, liberal, earnestly well-meaning, and self-regarding people, with all the requisite concerns about “family-career balance,” “doing good and doing well.” They lived with the small hypocrisies and pleasures of their milieu, bringing together some hyper-wealthy friends and unabashedly progressive causes. It is a liberal aesthetic raised to a style of life.

By “family-career balance,” Remnick apparently means what’s more commonly called “work-family balance” or “work-life balance”—that is, management of the competing demands of jobs and childcare. Since those responsibilities sometimes conflict to the point of being mutually prohibitive, work-family balance is indeed a requisite concern for many people. Especially for women, who tend to shoulder a greater portion of the “family” part of the equation and sacrifice economically because of it, but also for men, who often feel more pressure to prioritize work and consequently miss out on time with their kids (both of which scenarios probably apply to the Obamas, come to think of it).

But look how Remnick presents the term, framed with scare quotes amid wry phrases like “earnestly well-meaning, and self-regarding” and “small hypocrisies and pleasures.” Requisite, of course, literally means necessary. But Remnick is suggesting that in this case the necessity isn’t quite real, that the concerns are a puffed-up product of class expectations. He implies that “family-career balance” is a fashionable issue over which the privileged and progressive may furrow their brows as a matter of propriety, not a really source of serious tension in their glamorous lives.

As if figuring out how to both do your job and raise your kids were a task on the order of, oh, selecting an artisanal cheese.

Esther Fein and David Remnick

Remnick isn’t being mean-spirited; his précis is only lightly sardonic, not to mention otherwise spot-on. (Don’t you just know people like that, even if those in your orbit rank somewhere below the Obamas? Heck, I’ve had neighbors whom this describes to a T except for the “hyper-wealthy” part.) He pokes friendly fun at those people—and, implicitly, at himself. The New Yorker is politically liberal, arguably the country’s most esteemed periodical, and famously well-paying. As editor, Remnick occupies the same sort of glittering, left-leaning environment he gently mocks.

He is also a husband (to New York Times reporter Esther Fein), and father of three children.

Who knows how the Remnick-Fein household handles its child-caring duties. Maybe for whatever reason the matter has never posed much of a problem, despite the parents’ demanding careers. A 2006 profile of Remnick in the Guardian (back when his sons were teenagers and his daughter seven) depicts his family stuff as ordinary but remarkably stress-free: “He does his fair share of ferrying to music lessons and little league games. Asked to explain how he manages to balance these things, Remnick shrugs and says he doesn't do anything other than spend time with his family and work. 'It's not like I build toy ships, or travel to Tahiti. I don't go surfing. I don't know: what do people do?'”

Well sir, many of them struggle with work-family balance, even if they’re financially successful. Or so I assume, anyway. Because, sure, wealthy people can afford great childcare, but many also work long hours and travel for business, and even wealthy parents want to spend time with their children.

But the rich are hardly the only ones facing the problem. If juggling work and children is tough for the 1 percent, imagine how it is for people who have not “careers” but plain old jobs, people who can’t afford great childcare and for whom staying home with a sick kid might mean not only forfeiting a day’s pay but possibly getting fired.

Remnick is aware of all this, of course. But maybe it doesn’t all click together; I suspect he doesn’t connect “family-career balance” to the shortcomings in our system—problems with family leave, daycare, job flexibility, health care and so on—that can lead to genuine desperation, financial sacrifice and, in some families, economic disaster. His use of “career” rather than “work,” together with his light-handed tone, suggest he is imagining hyper-responsible parents checking off quality time with little Abigail and Aiden between conferences and fundraisers, just another aspect of the “liberal aesthetic raised to a style of life.” After all, it was under Remnick’s editorship that, in a 2004 New Yorker review of books describing this dilemma, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote, “Choosing between work and home is, in the end, a problem only for those who have a choice. In this sense, it is, like so many ‘problems’ of twenty-first-century life, a problem of not having enough problems.”

Maybe I'm making too much of Remnick’s offhand phrase in a piece that’s mostly about something else.

But I can't help thinking that if even the brilliant editor of one of the country’s most influential publications doesn’t fully understand why work-family balance is a serious issue for a lot of people at every socioeconomic level, then those of us for whom it’s an honest-to-God requisite concern have an long way to go.

Why so much fitness and parenting advice is bullshit

Et tu, Psychology Today? And you, Dr. Michael J. Breus? What’s your excuse, Thomas Friedman?

You never have to look far to find flagrant violations of the “Correlation does not imply causation” law. They abound in newspapers, magazines, TV programs, parenting and diet books—anywhere, basically, that covers topics like parenting or fitness, and thus relies heavily on behavioral research. In the past month, you could find examples of the problem, among other places, on the website of the country’s leading popular psychology monthly, in a piece by the triple-Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist, and in a psychologist’s column on Huffington Post.

As many of you may recall from your old science and psychology courses (or from a Brain, Child piece I wrote last year), just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one of them caused the other. For example, if there’s a correlation between A and B—more of A tends to go hand in hand with more of B—that’s no proof that A caused B. It might have. Or maybe B caused A, or some combination of the two, or a third factor, C, caused both.

In a Psychology Today blog post titled “Parents: Your Words Matter,” University of Chicago psychology professor Sian Beilock writes about a correlation between the way parents talk to their preschool children and the children’s later problem-solving skills. Researcher Susan Levine, Beilock reports, found that the more parents talked about spatial characteristics of objects—using words like “big, tall, circle, curvy, edge”—the better the child performs, years later, on spatial problems.
 

“What Dr. Levine and her colleagues found was that children's spatial abilities are in, large part, driven by what their parents say,” Beilock writes.

If that’s what Dr. Levine and her colleagues really found, there’s no evidence of it in Beilock’s post, nor in the abstract of Levine’s article in Developmental Science. Based on what they present, it could just as easily go the other way around.

Now, I’m not going to argue that parents words don’t matter (though in research I’ve conducted in my own household, I found little correlation between parental instructions to take one’s dirty dishes into the kitchen and the likelihood that one’s dirty dishes will actually be taken into the kitchen). It may seem logical that a child who’s always hearing her parents talk about objects' sizes and shapes might be more attuned to those qualities and, thus, better at solving problems involving those concepts.

That might make intuitive sense, but intuition isn’t proof—another lesson from those college psychology courses. Besides, it’s just as intuitively logical that parents who are good at spatial problems are more likely to perceive the world in spatial terms and (unconsciously, perhaps) pepper their language with spatial words. And that their children tend to inherit those skills and later prove, unsurprisingly, to be good at spatial stuff, too.

One big moral of this story is that simple correlations between parental actions and children’s behavior rarely proves cause and effect if the parents and children are biologically related. In most stuations, it’s too difficult to rule out the possibility that genes, rather than parenting, are the cause. 

Thomas Friedman forgets that, too. He writes about a study in which 15-year-olds whose parents read to them when they were little scored higher on a test than kids whose parents didn’t. From this, Friedman concludes:

We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.

Spot the correlation/causation error here? Again, it's a problem of ignoring possible genetic influence. What kind of parents read books to their kids? Probably those who like to read themselves. What kind of people like to read? Usually people who are good at reading. What kind of parents involve themselves in their child’s education? Most likely parents who did well in school themselves.

So it’s no big leap to imagine that children who are read to also inherited their parents' reading skills and academic achievement. Yet neither Friedman nor the researchers seem to have considered that possibility. But hey, even if their conclusion were 100 percent scientifically sound, they still would hardly justify this comment, quoted by Friedman, from the guy who oversees the testing:

[J]ust asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring.

First, judging from the monosyllabic grunts I usually get in answer to that question, it seems doubtful. Anyway, how would he know this? I’m going to step out on a limb and guess that there probably aren't many parents alive who purchase “hours of private tutoring” for their children yet don't bother to ask how school is going. So who would be the control group here?

Finally, in his rhymingly titled Huffington Post piece, “Sleeping Late, Eating Late, Leads to Gaining Weight,” Michael J. Breus similarly jumps to a conclusion, based on a correlation between sleep patterns and weight gain.

A message to night owls: There's news that your bedtime -- and those late-night snacks -- may be preventing you from dropping those stubborn extra pounds.

 Again, it’s not hard to think of another explanation for this correlation: That people who like to stay up late are often also people who like to eat a lot. As a card-carrying member of both groups, I can vouch for this. But Breus, a.k.a. “The Sleep Doctor,” doesn’t even consider that possibility. Wonder if this could have anything to do with the topic of his recent book, The Sleep Doctor's Diet Plan: Lose Weight through Better Sleep.

Even if those writers and researchers are leaping to conclusions, you might ask, where’s the harm? Why wouldn't you want to ask about your kid's school day, whether it got him better test scores or not? (Do you ask about your partner's work day, even if you don't think it will get him or her a raise?) Besides, if there’s any chance, however slight, that it would improve their school performance, why not go for it? Asking the question is pretty easy.

The spatial language situation is a bit more difficult. You might be willing to stop and think about every word you say to your child and deliberately insert spatial terms into the mix. (Although what if by doing that you’re squelching some other form of communication that might be equally important? I used to play word games with my then-preschool kids. On the day when I asked one to name the opposite of “short” and he came back with both “long” and “tall,” I knew he would be good in language classes, and voila, he is. Yet I can't say his language skills are the result of playing word games; very likely, he and I both liked playing word games because we’re both good at language.)

But the most damaging result of all of this misinterpretation and misinformation is guilt. It's the guilt you might feel if you take Friedman seriously when he proclaims, “We need better parents.”

Don’t most of us—at least, those of us who comprise the audience for these articles, i.e., people interested in figuring out how to be better parents—already do plenty of fretting about what we’re doing wrong? Must we really be told, once again, that we’re never good enough?