Posted by: Lourdes Lee Valeriano on January 06
For the new year, my teenager and her friend have gone on a fast—a Facebook fast.
Concerned about becoming Facebook junkies, they've given friends the passwords to their respective Facebook pages and had the friends change the passwords, so the girls are effectively locked out. "We were talking, and we both said it was really distracting us," said my fourteen-year-old.
"Even when you're on school break?" I asked.
"The trouble with Facebook," says my daughter, "is that when someone sends you a message, or writes something on your wall, or comments on a photo, or sends you a picture, you feel you have to answer, and then they answer you, and it goes on and on."
The two girls have been locked out from this time-sucking black hole for some six days now, and so far both their sanity and their social lives are intact. The lockout is going to last just through this Friday, they agreed. Not a long time, but long enough to achieve the girls' goal, which is "so we can see we don't really need it," my daughter says.
Seems like a sensible thing to do periodically. When I came home from visiting friends in Washington D.C. last Saturday, I on purpose did not plug in my computer until Sunday night, and I was relieved not to feel compelled to check my e-mail or scan the news that's been fed onto my reader page. Our lives are so enmeshed with technology that most of us can't (and wouldn't want to) banish it totally, but we can take mini breaks. In the past I have blogged about taking a hiatus from technology. And who among us doesn't have a husband or wife or friend who can't benefit from going BlackBerry-less once in a while?
So for my first blog of 2009, I offer praise to my daughter and her friend for their brave effort to keep Facebook from dominating their lives (although I may have to have talk to them about digital security). And I'd like to hear from you on strategies you or your kids use to curb your own Facebook (or MySpace or BlackBerry or plain vanilla cell-phone) compulsions.
Happy New Year.
Posted by: Lauren Young on January 05
I returned to the office this morning after a nearly three-week holiday hiatus, which wasn’t exactly a vacation since I ended up working half of the time. Thus, with some trepidation, I stepped into the lobby of the building where BusinessWeek has its offices, and I actually had a split-second thought about turning back around, getting on the subway, and going home...for good.
I don’t want to freak my boss out, and she knows I’m not the kind of person who could—or would—call it quits. I love my job. I love my colleagues. I certainly like the steady income as well as the benefits. But 2008 was especially grueling professionally. Aside from the meltdown of the financial markets, my industry—media—also continued to implode. The constant barrage of terrible and actually unthinkable news has worn me down.
While I cannot speak for all of you who read this blog, I would venture to guess that calling it quits is something you have thought about at some time in your career. My mental checklist is as follows:
Could I afford to quit?
Could my family get by on one salary? (My husband is a lawyer, and, thankfully, his firm is prospering.)
What would I do to keep myself busy if I stayed home?
And then there is the ripple effect because we have a full-time baby sitter. Without a job, I can not afford to employ her. Could she find work elsewhere? My mind churns out various scenarios.
The opposite of quitting, I suppose, is being fired. The thought of quitting actually prepares me for being laid off. And we all know there is a lot of that going around. Susan Wenner Jackson, who is a Facebook friend and fellow mommy blogger, talks about her own fear of layoffs in A Good Time to Be Working. Period.
This quote really resonated with me:
I can remind myself that what I’m doing not only contributes to our family income—it’s also a strong safety net in these frightening economic times. That’s something to be proud of.
Like Jackson, I’m proud that I’ve weathered this economic storm so far. I'm lucky
as well as thankful to be gainfully employed.
Have you ever thought about quitting your job? What stopped you from throwing in the towel?
Posted by: Cathy Arnst on December 31
Last week Vice President-elect Joe Biden was given a new brief -- to form a White House Task Force on Working Families, targeted at raising the living standards of the middle-class.
In the announcement, President-elect Obama said "My administration will be absolutely committed to the future of America's middle-class and working families. They will be front and center every day in our work in the White House." The task force's goals: expand and improve education and lifelong training opportunities, improve work and family balance, restore labor standards, help protect middle-class and working-family incomes and protect retirement security.
All well and good, except for one thing. Exactly who is in the middle class? Will the task force concern themselves with working families squarely at the mid-point of the nation's income --$46,326 in 2005? Or will it serve all of the 73% of Americans who consider themselves middle class, whether they make $20,000 or $200,000?
Seems that middle class is all in the eye of the wage earner, since there is no clear definition of what income range actually qualifies for that designation. In March 2007, the Congressional Research Service attempted to settle the matter with its report "Who Are The Middle Class," breaking up Census figures on 2005 income distribution into fifths:
The narrowest view of who might be considered middle class would include those in the middle quintile, those households with income between $36,000 and $57,660. A more generous definition might be based on the three middle quintiles, those households with incomes between $19,178 and $91,705.
But the report also noted that polling data from the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center indicates that only 3.3% of the population consider themselves to be upper class, which, based on income distribution, would put the dividing line between middle and upper class at just under $200,000 in 2005. So, based on the public's own perception of their class standing, a middle class income would range from $20,000 to $166,000 in 2005.
I gotta say, I think any family at either end of that income distribution should be considered way, way outside the middle class. Then again, a lot of this is probably based as much on your neighbors as your paycheck. We may all think we have no interest in keeping up with the Joneses, but if you live in the New York area, where your $100,000 a year will barely buy a one bedroom condo, you probably feel a lot more middling than an Ohioan with a $75,000 annual income.
Earlier this month WBUR-FM, a public radio station in Boston, did a series on The Vanishing Middle Class, and found a lot of people who, despite being firmly in the middle class, statistics-wise, sure don't feel that way:
Not long ago, Sidney Fuller Jones and her husband, Amos, had a toe hold on the middle class ladder. Both of them worked for the state Department of Public Health -- and earned about $80,000 a year -- a little below the median income for a family of four in Massachusetts. But when Amos got sick with kidney failure, it fell to Sidney to keep the family going. They fell behind on their bills -- and it got so bad last year they had to turn to an anti-poverty agency just fill their oil tank. And it reminded Sidney of how life has changed since her childhood in the 1960s -- when her mother was a school teacher and her father worked for the IRS.
JONES: I believe back then they probably considered themselves middle class. I mean we never wanted for anything. And I don't remember being without anything, or hearing my parents talking about bills.
.
Given the tough economic times, the middle class is surely getting smaller every day. NewsChannel 10 in Amarillo, Texas just ran a feature yesterday, How Close Are You to Falling Out of the Middle Class?, which for their purposes ranged from $40,000 to $100,000.
So readers, how do you define middle class? Are you in, or falling out? And what do you think Biden's task force should do to make life in the middle a little more secure, wherever it may be?
By the way, if you want to stay up-to-the-minute on what Washington policy makers are doing for and to the middle class, check out www.themiddleclass.org, a project of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank.
Posted by: Lourdes Lee Valeriano on December 23
Aah the holidays. Time to be home with the family.
Only this season, my fourteen-year-old's friends' seem to be home with us as well, at a moment's notice and at all hours of the day.
Now generally, I love it when my daughter brings friends home. I know where she's hanging out (even though her bedroom door's closed), I get to know her friends better, and I get a warm feeling knowing that these teens enjoy being in my home.
But this these days, I'm not so comfortable. The reason? Her friends are in my home via Web cam. It's disconcerting to walk into the kitchen in my underwear to find my daughter's girlfriends gazing at me from the small square on the laptop screen.
Apart from feeling that my privacy has been compromised, I'm bothered by the lack of clear boundaries. To invite her friends home, my daughter first seeks my permission. But these kids appear on the screen with just a slight blip as a warning. Also, my daughter's physical visitors usually stay in her room or in the so-called den, where we have the TV and the Xbox. But since the laptop is portable, the televisitors can wander into my bedroom if my daughter so wishes. And I can't always tell when they're around, because sometimes the video link is on even when my daughter isn't conversing with her friends. I may be in mid-lecture before I realize that I have an inadvertent audience.
Apart from restricting the use of the computer camera to my daughter's room, I have yet to figure out how to deal with this new form of social interaction and how it affects the family. Yes, with virtual visitors, I won't bust my grocery budget, but I lose quite a bit of control without gaining the crucial benefit of having your kids' friends in your home: the chance to observe and get to know them.
The recent MacArthur Foundation report, Living and Learning with New Media, says the time teens spend socializing electronically isn't bad. But it can be quite uncomfortable for parents.
Posted by: Cathy Arnst on December 23
I just discovered yet another controversy in the modern parent's world. Should we allow our children to believe in Santa Claus? I thought Santa was a given in households that celebrate Christmas, but a recent blog posting on the Chicago Tribune website by health writer Julie Deardorff, titled Mommy, Is There a Santa Claus?, raises questions about the whole St. Nick rigamarole:
As Christmas has grown more commercial over the last century, so has Santa. Now he’s also an symbol of material excess; a Christmas flak who never passes up a promotional opportunity. Well before Thanksgiving, he was soliciting visitors to the John Hancock Observatory while perched on a float along Michigan Avenue.
Then there’s the ethical debate over whether it’s OK to systematically deceive your children. It’s not just one fantastic premise; it’s multiple lies that cover everything from how Santa enters homes without chimneys ("He finds an open window") to how he manages his workload. ("He travels at 3,000 times the speed of light.")
And once you eat the cookies your child has set out for Santa, the message is uncomfortably clear: It is never OK for children to lie to parents. But it is OK for parents to trick children.
This double standard is unacceptable, says River Forest’s Laura Maychruk. "I refuse to lie to my kids," said Maychruk, 39, whose four children have never received a gift from Santa. "It’s my policy for every single topic. I don’t want to give up my morals."
Maychruk goes on to note, by the way, that her kids don't believe her. They choose Santa.
I agree that the Santa thing has become too commercial, and yet...I recently bought the DVD of Miracle on 34th Street (the original 1947 version, of course), and my daughter loved it. She just revised her letter to Santa, for the third time. Jesse is 10, going on 20, so perhaps a little old to still believe, but I'm willing to play along, because I don't want her to grow up any faster. I suspect neither does she.
I like to think that Santa represents all that is good in the world, as espoused in the famous letter, Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Clause, an editorial published in the New York Sun in 1897 in reply to an 8-year old girl's letter questioning his existence. That girl, Virginia O'Hanlon, lived at 115 W. 95th St in Manhattan. It's now a school, and there's a lovely story in today's New York Times about a local singer, David Ippolito, (commonly referred to as "that guitar man from Central Park") who leaves a letter at that address every year that says simply “Dear Virginia, Merry Christmas and thank you."
“I’m probably the least religious man you’ll ever meet,” Mr. Ippolito said, “but I have more faith than anyone you’ll meet. I love this time of year.” “Frank Church,” he said, referring to the editorialist as if he were an old chum, “wrote the absolute truth when he wrote to that little girl.” And what might that truth be? “That the most real things in this life are the things we can’t see,” he said, echoing a line from the editorial.
So readers, what do you think? Is there a Santa Claus? Even in this grim year? Has he become too commercial to support? Should we place truth over childhood fantasies? I'd loved to hear your approach to the Santa conundrum.
By the way, for you journalists out there, Al's Morning Meeting, a Poynter Foundation blog, explores the difficulties of reporting on Santa, with comments from Julie Deardorff.
One More Thing: The investor website Seeking Alpha sets out to prove or disprove the existence of a Santa Claus Rally in the stock market. Seems the market has rallied 87% of the time over Christmas in the last 15 years. Will he work his magic this year? Only if we really, truly believe.
