I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:  MAREN MORRIS-“I Wish I Was” NPR’S SOUTH X LULLABY (March 18, 2016).

Maren Morris was a buzz artist at SXSW.  I listened to about 45 seconds of her single “My Church” and determined it was way too country for me.  So I wasn’t really looking forward to this Lullaby.

However, Morris’s sound strips down nicely.  Although she still sings with a rich country twang, she also adds levels of soul to her singing (particularly after the guitar solo).  There’s two guitars (Morris in rhythm), and her two supporting dudes singing very nice harmonies.

And the setting for this video is quite lovely–the chirping insects would agree.

[READ: February 10, 2016] “Curling Parents and Little Emperors”

The August 2015 Harper’s had a “forum” called How to Be a Parent.  Sometimes these forums are dialogues between unlikely participants and sometimes, like in this case, each author contributes an essay on the topic.  There are ten contributors to this Forum: A. Balkan, Emma Donoghue, Pamela Druckerman, Rivka Galchen, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Ben Lerner, Sarah Manguso, Claire Messud, Ellen Rosenbush and Michelle Tea.  Since I have read pieces from most of these authors I’ll write about each person’s contribution.

Druckerman’s name sounded familiar.  It turns out she wrote the book Bringing Up Bébé in 2012.  The book compares the child-rearing practices of middle class parents in France with those of the United States.  She says that US parents tend to have a more anxious, labor-intensive child-centric style of parenting.  And that today, college educated American mothers spend nine more hours per week on child care than they did in the mid-1990s.  This style has taken hold in most countries.  Except France.

In this essay, she says that the book has really taken off and has been translated into nearly two dozen languages.  And it is has been as divisive as it has been celebrated.

American were the most reluctant to admit they were hyper-parenting.  Swedish parents believe that the French spank their children too much (it is illegal to spank in Sweden).  And the French were tempted not to take her seriously,

She says that no one is aiming to be perfect, but “I think hyper-parents everywhere would be glad to recover their nine lost hours per week.”

Incidentally the “curling parents” in the title refers to the sport.  “Scandinavians told me about ‘curling parents.’  In the sport of curling athletes continuously scrub a sheet of ice so that a stone can guide smoothly across it.”  In China, the same phenomenon means they refer to their children as their “little emperors.”