From the recent turn around of the Komen Foundation to not buying LEGOs to leaving Go Daddy, I’m realizing more than ever how important it is to support causes we believe in by writing checks.
Of those I just listed, only Komen is a non-profit, but I want to make a plea for women to give money away. I don’t think enough women do. I was in the non-profit world for years and I was blown away by so many women’s negative and complicated relationship to money. Women who cared about social causes, who were political, who wanted to have an impact on the world often had a hard time writing checks. That is, they didn’t do it. Many progressive women don’t like to talk about money. It’s almost like it’s dirty or evil, that money is corrupt and used to hurt people. Women who generously volunteered their time often would not financially support the same causes.
Money isn’t good or bad, it’s energy. It’s a tool. More women need to get comfortable using it.
There are few things more empowering that writing a check to support a cause you believe in. If you are feeling pissed off or like a victim, few things can make your mood or outlook turn around faster than giving money away. It feels really good and that’s why I do it. Philanthropy is one of my most selfish acts.
How much money should you give? It should hurt, at least a little. I’m not into martyrdom, but you should notice it. For a long, long time the church has recommended tithing your income. I think this is perfect amount as general rule, though I, personally, don’t usually give to the church.
One more reason to do it: Since I started giving money away, it has flowed to me more easily. I know that sounds kind of hippy-dippy, but I think it’s more than karma. I think it has to do with healthy risk taking. Clinging to money and feeling fearful isn’t much help to anyone.
Besides writing stories, I believe if more women tithed their income, we would absolutely change the world. Just try it. See how it feels.
Would you like some more evidence on child brain plasticity and how it’s affected by the child’s experiences?
Web MD is reporting on a new study:
The study followed 92 children from preschool into their grade-school years.
For the study, Luby and her team videotaped each parent and child while they completed an experiment called “the waiting task.”
Children, who were between the ages of 4 and 7, were presented a brightly wrapped gift, but were told they had to wait eight minutes before they could open it.
In the meantime, moms were asked to fill out a stack of forms.
“It really simulates a real-life parenting situation that people often face. You’re cooking dinner and your child is throwing a tantrum, and how do you juggle that?” Luby says.
“The maternal support had to do with how much positive parenting the parent showed: how much they reassured the child, how much they helped regulate the child when the child made bids that they needed that gift,” she says.
Later, trained assistants scored the moms on how well they helped their children through the stress of the task.
Researchers continued to follow the children, and when they were between the ages of 7 and 13, their brains were scanned using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Researchers were particularly interested in the size of a comma-shaped brain region called the hippocampus, which plays a role in memory and how we handle stress. Hippocampus size has been linked to factors such as stressful life events and depression severity.
Support Bolsters Brain’s Learning Memory Centers
Among the 51 kids in the study who had no symptoms of depression as preschoolers, those who got more support from their moms as they completed the waiting task had larger hippocampi seen in later scans.
OK, people, we are making it into mainstream America. How exciting is this?
The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a new study that only 2 – 3% of preschoolers spend their day playing. The problem with this?
Kids learn through play. When kids play, they’re not wasting their time. They’re learning everything from motor skills to social skills and numbers. Think of all the counting that comes with hopscotch, or with making two even teams. Those activities are a lot more fun than flash cards, but they teach the same thing: math. Kids playing outside also learn things like distance, motion, the changing of the seasons—things we take for granted because we got time outside.
This study is about vigorous play, so not the kind of LEGO play I’ve been blogging about, but the principle is the same: play affects brain development. I also love the emphasis put on active play because I think this is so important for girls, especially to learn healthy risk-taking. Read more about it here.
In the same post, I wrote about United Nations world population fund director Nafis Sadik, widely credited with bringing attention to the correlation between over population and the status of women. When women are educated, when they achieve economic independence, when they have access to good health care, when they are valued in society for their intellect and their accomplishments, they have fewer babies.
The Lancet has just released a study on global trends in abortion, focusing on overall rates, access to safe vs. unsafe abortions, and how the legal status of abortion impacts abortion rates. The results shed some interesting light on the effects of efforts to reduce abortion by outlawing or restricting access to it. Looking at data from 1995 to 2008, the authors found that abortion rates were actually lower in areas of the world with less restrictive abortion laws:
The Guttmacher Institute provides a full summary of the article. Not surprisingly, the more restrictive abortion laws are, the higher the proportion of unsafe abortions (with Eastern Europe being a significant outlier, with the highest global abortion rates). About half of all abortions are unsafe, leading to the deaths of roughly 47,000 women each year, or 13 percent of all global maternal deaths—almost entirely in developing nations, where restrictive abortion laws are more common and access to contraception and medical care are generally lower.
It’s clear that top Republican candidates are being short-sighted and ineffective, rushing off in the precisely the wrong direction if their goal is truly to reduce abortions.
As governor, Mitt Romney vetoed a bill that would have given rape survivors access to emergency contraception. As a presidential candidate, he’s promising to defund Planned Parenthood and eliminate federal funding for birth control.
As a member of Congress, Newt Gingrich voted anti-choice 72 times. He voted for “personhood” rights, which would make abortion and many forms of birth control illegal. He voted 10 times to bar the city of Washington, D.C. from using its locally raised tax dollars to provide abortion care to low-income women. He voted to eliminate Title X, the nation’s family-planning program.
And this from Rick Santorum:
Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.
Republican candidates are going blue in the face telling Americans how much they care about the economy and, if elected president, how hard and effectively they’ll work to fix it. They promise to create jobs and to help businesses grow. Yet, not one of them seems to understand that for at least half of the population, economic status is inseparable from reproductive rights. No matter what kind of tax brackets or bailouts America votes for over the next four years, if a teenager has a child, that alone is the strongest indicator that the mother and baby will spend a lifetime in poverty.
So why does Rick Santorum, who cares so much about our economy, believe that a woman who has been raped should be forced to have a child?
Here’s what he said last week on CNN to Piers Morgan:
Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.
How is this mother going to financially support her child? What are Santorum’s plans to help to get this baby access to health care and a good education? Why didn’t he talk about that on CNN?
As governor, presidential candidate Mitt Romney vetoed a bill that would have given rape survivors access to emergency contraception. As a presidential candidate, he’s promising to defund Planned Parenthood and eliminate federal funding for birth control.
As a member of Congress, Newt Gingrich voted anti-choice 72 times. He voted for “personhood” rights, which would make abortion and many forms of birth control illegal. He voted 10 times to bar the city of Washington, D.C. from using its locally raised tax dollars to provide abortion care to low-income women. He voted to eliminate Title X, the nation’s family-planning program.
Don’t these candidates understand that all of these policies are inextricably linked to the economic status of women? To all of those pro-choice Republicans who plan to vote for one of these men because you want to just “focus on the economy” this election, if you refer to yourself as “fiscally conservative but socially liberal:” That division makes no sense when it comes to women’s lives. Choice isn’t “just one issue” and it isn’t one choice.
Reproductive rights mean that women have the choice to graduate from college, the choice to borrow money to start a business, the choice to get a good job with a fair wage, the choice not live in poverty and keep their kids out of poverty. Choice means that women get to be autonomous citizens, just like men do, with the power to determine their own destinies.
Years ago, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, said that pro-life politicians believe “life begins at conception and ends at birth,” meaning pro-life politicians are adamant about protecting the fetus but don’t care much about protecting the child once its born. I can’t think of a more obvious proof of this short-sightedness than the current Republican presidential candidates who pledge to get Americans out of financial crisis while simultaneously promising to deny women their reproductive rights.
Frank’s statement is also strongly supported by the work of Jean Schroedel, a professor and dean of the School of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University, who examined the relationship between state abortion laws and spending on children. Her research revealed that the states that most severely limit abortion are the same ones that spend the least on foster care, parents who adopt special needs children, and poor women with dependent children. States with strict abortion laws consistently accorded lower political, economic and social status to women. For example, Louisiana had some of the toughest abortion laws and spent $602 per child. Hawaii had some of the most liberal laws and spent $4,648 per child.
Schroedel also discovered that states with restricted abortion laws consistently accorded lower political, economic and social status to women.
Her findings echo the work of Nafis Sadik, who was the executive director of the United Nations World Population Fund. Sadik has been instrumental in turning the debate over how to limit population growth into a campaign for women’s rights.
She is widely credited with bringing attention to the correlation between over population and the status of women. When women are educated, when they achieve economic independence, when they have access to good health care, when they are valued in society for their intellect and their accomplishments, they have fewer babies.
In France, mandatory sexuality education begins when students are 13. Parents are prohibited from withdrawing their teenagers from this program. France’s teenage birthrate is approximately 6 times lower than the rate in the US; its teen abortion rate more than 2x lower, and overall AIDS rate, more than 3x lower.
So what’s wrong with America?
If our presidential candidates really want to help our economy, they ought to be improving the status of women, not taking away their rights. They should be advocating for for preventative policy initiatives to reduce unintended pregnancies, expansion of family planning and funding services, comprehensive sexuality education programs, and insurance coverage for contraceptives.
Last week, President Obama did just that. He passed the Affordable Care Act ensuring that most women will get their contraception covered with no copay. He’ll have my vote, because I understand that reproductive rights have never been “just one issue.”
In my post about “Tom and Jerry,” I wrote about the exclusion and stereotyping of female characters. I didn’t write about the extreme violence in the cartoon. If I blogged about other animated male duos who relentlessly, brutally attack each other– Sylvester and Tweetie or Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd– I’d also complain not about the violence, but that the girls have gone missing as well. In fact, on my blog that rates kids’ media on how appropriate it is, I’ve hardly written about violence at all. Why?
I’m no fan of tons of blood and gore, but I also believe that violence is a crucial part of fantasy play. I don’t take the violence in fairy tales, myths, or stories literally. That is, I think of the violence in narratives mostly as a metaphor. For example, you could look at the story of David and Goliath as primarily a violent one (along with many stories in the Bible.) David kills Goliath. Or you can look at as story about the little guy going after the big one and winning: Erin Brockovitch taking on a corrupt power company. We all look at the story that way, right? So much so that the characters have become part of our language when we describe contemporary battles.
What happens when that language leave girls out?
Everyone slays dragons. In myths, in our dreams, in movies, we see it happen visually and literally on huge scales. In our own lives, we do it every day, in ways that are smaller and less dramatic, but can seem enormous in the moment: getting a project in on deadline, winning a debate, or organizing a messy closet.
I also think the violence in narratives provide useful metaphors and imagery for kids to experience emotions in a healthy way. Little kids live dramatic lives. They don’t get to go to a movie and they feel like their whole world is caving in. Narratives are a safe way to practice experiencing intense emotions: they actually see a world cave in.
Just in case you’re missing my point: I’m not advocating for violence where the males are always the heroes and the females are the victims. Violence shown as men hurting women in kids’ media, the way it is in the adult world of “entertainment,” is not my goal. I’d like to see female heroes acting bravely. If we had more female heroes, it wouldn’t be weird to show female victims as well.
“Violent play is not by definition bad or harmful for kids. Any child shrink worth her sand table will tell you it can help them learn about impulse control, work out the difference between fantasy and reality, and cope with fear….Children of both sexes crave larger than life heroes. They need fantasy. They also, it seems, need a certain amount of violent play…something that allows them to triumph in their own way over this thing we call death, to work out their day-to-day frustrations; to feel large, powerful, and safe.”
Around the time I turned forty, I started dyeing my hair. I didn’t have much gray, but the strands that suddenly appeared freaked me out. I didn’t feel like I was ready. Maybe when I was fifty I would be ready. I have really dark hair, so just a little gray showed up a lot. To me, anyway.
Remarkably, that was the first time in my life I’d dyed my hair. I got a semi permanent dye, and no one noticed the change. I was so annoyed, I started pointing it out. People squinted at my head and still didn’t notice. A couple months later, my hair developed a brassy, orangey-tint. It was subtle. Again, no one I pointed it out to noticed (or at least that’s what they claimed) but I didn’t like it. I missed the darker color. So I started dying my hair just to get rid of the orange.
What a waste of time. What a waste of money. What a bore checking my hair for signs that it was time to go back to the salon.
After two years of dyeing, I stopped. I am so happy to have my hair back. Seriously. I feel so grateful. I did not like that orange hair. I love my hair color. Maybe my mind will change. I don’t know. This whole process is a giant mystery. But I doubt it. I always thought that when people said they earned their gray it was bullshit. Maybe the joy I feel when I look in the mirror is only because I’m happy that orange hair is gone. But also, I like the gray now. I think it’s pretty. Confused at my reaction, of course, I turned to books.
Going Gray is by Anne Kraemer. At 49, she saw a photo of herself with her dyed dark hair and thought she looked awful. She let her hair go gray and when she did she felt happier, sexier, and comfortable with herself in the world. (I’ll post her before and after photos when I have time, this is another two minute blog before I wake the kids.)
I also read a book called Healthy Aging by Andrew Weil. As many of you know, he’s got a big gray beard and he’s bald. That’s OK, of course, because he’s a successful man. I was curious what he would say about gray. He wrote about his dog. He’s a dog lover and he’s lived with dogs for years, going through their life cycles with them from puppyhood to old age. At the time Weil wrote his book, he had a beautiful, strong dog with a shiny coat. He writes that while stroking the dog, he notices gray hair on the animal’s chin. That starts him worrying. He knows what’s to come. The dog will get older and more frail and eventually he’ll die. Weil starts to think about his own death. All these feelings sprout from seeing a few gray hairs on his dog’s chin.
Weil writes about how our fear of death is manifested in the physical evidence of aging that we see. That’s not rocket science obviously, but as I read on in his book about the healthy aging process, I started to think about signs of aging as signs of health instead of signs of death. Physical health and also emotional health. Weil writes, as have others, the ever growing use of botox is affecting us. Babies learn from facial expressions. They’re mimics, and that’s how they process information and how their brains develop (and that’s the problem with Lego marketing ARGH, but that’s another blog).
When babies cannot see emotions in frozen faces, they don’t learn the way they’re supposed to. Not only that. Emotions are meant to be felt. That’s why we have them. Wrinkles are signs that we feel. Wrinkles are healthy. Not for a twenty year old but for a forty year old. Gray hair is healthy as well.
I blogged a couple months ago about a book I loved called Fifty Is Not The New Thirty. I don’t know about fifty yet, but so far forties have been one of the best times of my life. When you see a wrinkle or a gray hair, try seeing it for what it is: you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. That relaxes me.
Update: I haven’t been able to find the before/ after photos of Kraemer on the internet that are on my book cover. If you do, send them along and I’ll try to keep looking. When I didn’t find them immediately, I started to think: why post them? She looks gorgeous, but maybe part of the gray hair phobia is that we don’t look the same way in photos (and on TV) that we do in real life. Dyed hair often doesn’t look brassy and weird on TV the way it can in reality. Altering real life looks to make them look “good” for a TV/ photo lens is part of the problem. Maybe its better not to focus on a photo even though hers happens to look good. Speaking of gray, I just saw Emmy Lou Harris two days ago. Talk about beautiful– her voice, her hair, her presence. Wow.
Update:
OK, got the photo. Thank you Prof Prog Strumpet.
Since I caved on posting that photo, here’s one of Emmy Lou too. But remember, it’s not about the photos, it’s about LIFE.
This morning my five year old went to her food shelf, got out her plastic pumpkin tub of candy, ate half a Crunch bar, and then asked for a bowl of Cheerios.
They love getting dressed up for Halloween and they love the idea of getting candy, but the actual candy is no big deal. Every year, the “day after,” I am eternally grateful to be free of the fights and power struggles that can accompany Halloween candy.
I created Pigtail Pals in honor of my daughter, Amelia, named after Amelia Earhart, when I was looking for a cute outfit for her as an infant and could find only pink and princess. Not a single onesie in all of humankind had a little girl and an airplane on it. I thought girls deserved more empowering and diverse messages than just sparkles and tiaras.
What are your best-sellers?
This fall the best sellers have been my “Pretty’s Got Nothing To Do With It” and “Full of Awesome” designs that I just released in September. Traditional favorites are the astronaut, pilot, carpenter, doctor, military, and scientist designs. And the entire Whimsy Bee line is a hit with its colorful and imaginative designs.
It’s smart of Pigtail Pals to be a for profit instead of a nonprofit! The more successful your company is, the more you can help girls. You call yourself a “mompreneur.” What is that? Who were you inspired by?
Exactly, I want to show other businesses that this is the message parents and girls want, and that a business can be successful doing this. I want to change the way the marketplace looks for young girls. And since Dora has gone the way of the ballerina princess, there is room for the smart and adventurous Pigtail Pals designs to take over. Pigtail Pals has, since the very beginning, made donations to organizations that support girls, and we will continue to do so as our success grows.
A mompreneur is a mother who sees a hole in the marketplace for children, and creates her own product to fill that void. At the time I created Pigtail Pals, there were no other apparel lines on the market that showed girls doing smart, daring, and adventurous things. There were a couple of lines that had empowering phrases, but my preschooler can’t read, so that didn’t mean anything to her. I wanted something in pictures that would really speak to little girls. Girl empowerment is something our daughters need to be raised with, not just something they are introduced to once they are finally old enough to be a Girl Scout or participate in some of the other national programs that only focus on older girls. My girl can’t wait, she needs these messages now.
What do you teach in your workshops? What kind of excercises do you do? Can you see the change before and after or is it more gradual? Do you find parents, teachers, or kids more willing or more resistant?
I teach media literacy in my workshops – a tangible way for parents to digest and parent through all the crap that is out there. I teach how to specifically deal with the highly inappropriate birthday gift, or mother-in-law that bestows makeup and tiny high heels with every visit, or the song that just played on the radio talking about casual or violent sex. Our culture is saturated with this stuff. I find most folks are eager to learn about this, and I see those light bulb moments flash across everyone’s face about 15mintues into every workshop.
The exercises I use are just common sense stuff. For example – I take a box of crayons, and dump it out, but it is full of only pink and purple crayons. I ask the parents, if they had purchased this as a school supply, would they find something wrong with it? Would they return it to the store? I ask them what is missing, and then I ask them to close their eyes and picture their daughter’s closet and toy box. I see little sheepish smiles creep across their face. And they get it – they get how incredibly limiting choices are for girls, and that they bought into it. There is nothing wrong with pink, or purple, but when a girl’s world is full of that and only that, we need to think about what messages that sends. Childhood should be a time full of vibrant, amazing color and learning experiences.
What are your future plans for the company?
In the near future, I’m going to release a line of tee designs that show boys and girls playing together, having great adventures. Also, I’m going to build out the new line of Full of Awesome products. That blog post was such a runaway hit, it is really inspiring to me.
Eventually I want to move into toys and room décor, and I would love to open really special retail spaces.
How do you protect your daughter’s imagination?
We tell stories all the time in the car while driving around town. We create some story to act out while we play outside. My home looks like a preschool with all of the art supplies and learning toys in this place. We take lots of family adventures to educational places like children’s museums and fairs and performances. We read and read and read.
Are there books, TV shows, clothing lines or products you recommend for girls?
There is a lot of good stuff out there, you just have to know where to find it. My daughter is 5 years old, so right now we are really into the Ramona and Judy Moody books. This winter we’re going to start reading the Little House on the Prairie series. Amelia has checked out every single whale and dolphin book our public library offers. For TV, she loves Animal Planet, SciGirls (PBS), National Geographic, Diego, Wild Kratts (they have two female sci/tech assistants that rock the show), Word World, Peppa Pig, and Scooby Doo.
For other clothing lines, I really like Be A Girl Today (http://www.beagirlblog.com/) for awesome girls sports tees. And the Girl Scouts offer great tees, too.
For other products, a few other mompreneur small businesses I love to promote are Cutie Patutus for dress up clothes, Sophie & Lili for wonderful cloth dolls, and Go! Go! Sports Girls for sports-themed dolls. Every girl should have a doctor kit, a tool box, a wooden train, giant floor puzzles, and Legos by the bucket.
On my blog Reel Girl, which is all about imagining gender equality in the fantasy world, people sometimes complain that issues I care about don’t matter because the characters I write about are imaginary. Or that I am limiting imagination by imposing PC dogma on artists. How do you respond to comments like that?
“You can’t be what you can’t see.” –Marie Wilson, the White House Project. Sexualization is an enormous problem, most specifically in the media. The stats on the representation of girls in the media in a non-sexualized manner are so miniscule, I would argue this isn’t ‘PC dogma’, it is a matter of civil rights. Girls get a seat at the table.
In the past year or so, various sites and movements have cropped up to help defend girls from sexist media or at the very least, educate parents about the negative influences out there, so ubiquitous they are ironically invisible. There was Peggy Orenstein’s best seller Cinderella Ate My Daughter, The Geena Davis Institute has been doing studies and releasing statistics about the lack of girl characters in animation, author Lyn Mikel Brown and other founded SPARK and advocated for more girl balloons in the Macy Day Parade. And its great news that parents and advocates got so upset about the JCPenney T shirt and got it off the shelves. At the same time, Disney announced its not doing anymore princess movies which translates to even fewer movies starring girls since girls are mostly only allowed to star if they are princesses. Disney also announced this year that is shifting its tween programming to boy based animated cartoons. Do you see the media and more awareness about the media going in a positive or negative direction? Are there other sites or movements that you know of that support girls and girl media?
I think parents and girls need to be very aware that the media is a long ways off from them content that is fair to girls. Like I said, there is good stuff out there, but in reality it is few and far between. Disney is the very last place I would look for positive girl media. As parents become more aware and more savvy, they will start to demand products and media that reflect that. So Pixar is making “Brave”, and that is tremendous, and that will only fill our appetite for so long. They will need to give us more if they want us to keep consuming.
One under-reported issue is that when girls go missing in kids films, and the toys, clothing, and other products based on and derived from those films, both genders learn that girls are less important than boys. This is a problem with sites and orgs that focus on girls, in some ways, that continue this polarized segregation. Parents are a huge force here– they should be reading their kids stories about girls, taking them to movies with strong girl parts (if they can find any) and encouraging cross gender friendships. What do you think about this issue? Are there sites, movements, blogs that you know of or like that help educate boys also?
I have a three year old son, so this is an equally important issue for me. My colleague Crystal Smith of Achilles Effect (and author of a great book with same name) is awesome. The work of Jackson Katz is like no other when it comes to boys and media. The blog The Mamafesto writes about her son and his adventures through boyhood.
My work focuses on girls, because the crush for them with sexism and sexualization is immense, and it comes at them as soon as they are born. I don’t necessarily think it is easier for boys, but it is different. I think we need to get back to some common sense childhood. Let’s allow our kids the space to play and explore without limitations based on gender. Pigtail Pals also offers a line for young boys called Curious Crickets, meant to honor the creativity and wonder in boyhood.
Both of my children enjoy and thrive in cross gender friendships. These are crucial for the socialization with the opposite sex in their tween/teen years and beyond. We try to find positive media that equally respects boys and girls. My kids will see my husband wash dishes and fold laundry, and they will see me wrestle with the dogs and use tools and run my business. It is all about balance.
