Child Employment and Character Building

I recently unearthed a diary from when I was 12 and planned to open a beauty spa in my parent's house. What I later learned in B-school was called the "Unique Selling Proposition" (USP) was that, after the neighborhood ladies had paid me to apply wet oatmeal to their faces, do their makeup with the Lip Smackers line, and french braid their hair, I was going to invite them to lie on chaise lounges in my backyard with Fleetwood Mac album jackets that I'd covered in tin foil. You know, to boost the skin-cancer properties of unprotected tanning.

It may sound like a pre-teen's fever dream, but in fact the spa was just another in the series of childhood businesses I started, each with their own USP. Yet people say "Child Labor" like it's a bad thing.

Today I'm over on "It Builds Character…And Other Parenting Clichés" with a post lamenting the loss of childhood entrepreneurship.  The team of contributors there tackles everything from home décor during the potty training phase to why Gwyneth Paltrow is never going to convince us that her life is as bad as ours. Clearly, I've found some like-minded ranters; I'm thrilled they invited me to guest post!

Hope you'll click through here to read more (and to see a picture of me in my Business Bandana when I was nine and co-director of a thriving neighborhood preschool.)

SpongeBob's Teachings on Corporate Lies

I am a lousy church school teacher. Having regarded my formative years as an Episcopalian as more of a social event than anything else - some of my best school friends attended the same church, so most of the praying that went on in class was over tests and who would ask who out for Senior Ball. I never read the Bible or anything Jesus-y like that.

Still, it taught me the benefit of taking part of a faith community, and I definitely buy into the whole "love thy neighbor" message. So when the call went out for church school teachers for the 4th,5th, and 6th graders at church recently, I signed on, breathing a sigh of relief when an email told me that our entire curriculum would be based on SpongeBob Square Pants.

It's clever, really. Our church school leader selects a Sponge Bob episode for the kids to watch, and develops with questions that tie it back to key teachings - "How might SpongeBob have been a better neighbor to Squidward? What does Jesus say about the way we treat our neighbors?" type of thing. Lively discussions ensue, often with sidebars on farting and bodily fluids. It's all good - the kids want to come back.

Recently, though, I got to class and the DvD for the week was missing. Faced with a roomful of staring kids who were moments away from stampeding back to Coffee Hour,  I said "I know! We'll pop in a random episode and you'll tell me what the spiritual message is!" In the episode, SpongeBob drew a little squiggle with a magic pencil, which quickly became a Zombie  2-dimensional SpongeBob wreaking havoc all over Bikini Bottom. Horrified at what he's wrought, it become SpongeBob's job to capture and erase the squiggle before it does any permanent damage.

All of which is a very, very long way to say that even SpongeBob, and the kids in my class, know that a lie can careen out of the liar's control and do terrible collateral damage.  Which is why I'm so pissed off to read columnist Kathleen Pender's piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today about how, exactly, U.S. corporations like GE and Cisco avoid paying a penny of tax to the federal government, even when they're raking in billions of dollars in profits. It involves a shell game of hiding profits offshore, using techniques like "the double Irish" and "the Dutch sandwich" (mmm, lunch.)

 In 2004, the government gave major corporations a one-time tax holiday to repatriate their foreign profits at an effective tax rate of 5.25% (which ended up being closer to 3.7% after foreign tax credits.) The idea was that these cut-rate foreign profits would be used by the companies to boost investments in R&D and training in the US and create jobs. But a study from National Bureau of Economic Research found that not only did that NOT happen, but that "a $1 increase in repatriations was associated with an increase of almost $1 in payouts to shareholders." Furthermore, as Pender reports, "A report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said that companies including Hewlett-Packard, Pfizer, Ford, Merck and Honeywell announced large layoffs shortly after repatriating funds."

In short, these corporations are lying about their obligations, and getting away with it. Love they neighbor (and pay your fair share) be damned.

Guess what? My biggest client is a UK-based publishing company that pays me in British pounds. As such, they are not required to file a W-9 for me; it's up to me alone to report that income to the US government and pay taxes on it. 

It would be easy for me to not do that, and personally lucrative. Instead I track every penny of those payments, report them to the government, and pay taxes on them. You know why? Because I find it exhausting to even contemplate the web of self-delusion it would take to convince myself that doing the wrong thing is right.* I know these corporations may seem faceless, but there are actual human beings running them. 

How they sleep at night is a Holy Mystery, perhaps even beyond SpongeBob's ken.

*Yes, I recently wrote about the white lies I tell my kids. And now they know it's not the cleaning man's fault their things are missing, and I'm paying big time.

Give Working Moms a Break

A few months ago I attended a conference for women in publishing and during one panel discussion, the audience - 90% female - sat rapt listening to Kara Swisher talk about how she gave birth while holding a BlackBerry in one hand. For those not  familiar with Kara, she used to write about the online technology business in the Wall Street Journal and now is a partner in AllThingsD.com, a go-to website for coverage and analysis of what's happening in the digital world. She is whip smart, funny, and no bullshit - if you've never seen her 2010 evisceration of interview with Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook's privacy issues, it's worth a look. 

So when Kara talked about how offended she was when, upon arriving back to the office after giving birth to her first child, her boss offered her extra time and flexibility to complete her assignments, I believed her. "What did I need extra time for?" she roared, clearly insulted at the insinuation that motherhood had changed her ability to do her job.

From across the conference room, a petite young woman stood up and made an observation, one that I would wager 75% of us in the room shared. "That's really great that you didn't need extra time. But me? I needed extra flexibility after I had my kids. And I think we need to talk more about the root cause of why there aren't more women in upper level management positions," the absence of public policy that would support the efforts of women to be good mothers and good workers at the same time.

The woman was Katrina Alcorn, who writes the terrific WorkingMomsBreak.com blog. It seeks to shine a light on all the ways that public policy is stacked against success for families with two working parents, and to open up conversations about how to improve the state of play. Having admired a woman who wasn't afraid to offer an opposing (and, given the room, somewhat un-PC)  counterpoint to Kara, I was thrilled when a mutual friend introduced us, and even more so when Katrina invited me to guest post on her blog.

Of course, I have unique qualifications: when it comes to being a working mother, I can say with confidence that I have tried every arrangement that exists. Full time, part time, work at home, work for myself, and of course, temporarily unemployed. That last state came thanks to what my old colleague Matt referred to as "The Ritualistic Shitcanning of 2000," when 300 of us were laid off by my Dot Bomb employer - though I was the only one who was nine months pregnant.

I hope you'll click through and check out my post on WorkingMomsBreak today, about how some days working "part time" just makes me feel like I'm doing two jobs badly. But hey, at least it's by choice.

The Price of Silence

My daughter and her friend from elementary school attend different middle schools, but they’ve sustained a close friendship in part, I think, due to our Monday homework club. Every Monday, Rachel rides the city bus to our house so that the two girls can spend 90 minutes complaining to each other about their school workload, wheedling me for sweets, and talking in voices low enough so I can’t hear even if I place a cup against the wall to listen, not that I would ever stoop to that. Loud giggling is their regular soundtrack.

And every Monday, without fail, I greet Rachel at the door with, “I am so sorry I look like this. I intended to shower today before you came, really I did.”

“Like this” means: black sweatpants spattered in mud, a shapeless grey sweatshirt with either Penn (my alma mater) or Wisconsin (husband’s) printed on the front, my hair puffy where it should be flat and flat where it should be puffy. The only trace of makeup on my face is some sparkly pink mango flavored lip gloss from a cupcake-shaped container that I excavated from the well of the car while waiting to pick the kids up from school.

Mondays are hard.

I’m not going to insult you by pretending that I bound out of bed Monday mornings and head to the shower to get ready for my day. I stay in bed until the last possible second that will still leave me time to read my beloved print newspaper from front to back before it’s time to wake up the kids. Besides, my husband actually leaves the house to go to work in an office, where other people are. He gets priority access to the bathroom.

So I pull on the black sweats and sweatshirt and make a mental note to walk the dog at 10, giving me plenty of time to shower before I have to pick the kids up at 3:00.

At 10, the dog is snoring contentedly so I figure I’ll just keep plowing away on my to-do list, answering emails, researching stories, calling sources. I can still fit in a shower if I leave by 11.

At noon I realize the dog is holding his legs together and groaning, so we head off for the hills for a hike. It’s been raining non-stop all winter, and Achilles’ default gait is “hurtle.” So as soon as we step off the street and onto the trail head, he zigs this way and zags that way through muddy glop until I have spots of mud all over my legs, on my glasses, and sometimes my hair. Inevitably we meet a dog named Sierra or Bailey or Lucy whose owner says, “Sorry! My dog jumps!” just as the pooch leaps up and lays two muddy paws on my midsection, right under the “P” and the first “N” or the “W” and “S.”

Coming through the front door I think, ok, do NOT go check email before you get in the shower, you’re never going to have time to…oh hey! That guy I wanted to quote in the feature I’m writing finally got back to me, better respond right away. And I meant to send a query letter to another publication and they’re on the East Coast, so I should probably get that taken care of before they leave for the day. The phone rings, and it’s my friend who is adopting a baby. A metallic buzz from the laundry room startles me; I have to get the ballet clothes into the wash if they’re going to be clean for the kids’ rehearsal this week.

It’s 2:49 and I still have mudprints on my midsection. I jump into the car and race to pick up my youngest child, remembering that I need to drop off copies of the yearbook order form for the teachers to jam into backpacks. I will have to walk through school looking like Dawn of the Dead, but it’s not like they haven’t seen that in the halls of suburban education before. Once that’s done, I have only enough time to pick up the other child and race home to await Rachel’s arrival for homework club, and ponder why once again, Monday has gotten away from me.

I make my apologies to Rachel in the front hall as she unhoists her giant backpack. I make a silent pledge that I'll at least get a shower in before Andrew gets home from work, maybe just as soon as I finish up the 15 work emails that came in while I was out driving carpool.(After 19 years together, is it naive to hope that the sight of me wearing his mud-stained college sweatshirt and what looks like a fright wig is still a turn-on?)

“It’s ok, Nancy,” she says, a wry smile on her freckled face. "Can I have a Jolly Rancher?"

I think this is why Homework Club has always worked so well; for the price of a piece of hard candy, Rachel always keeps her opinion to herself.

Haste Makes Redfaced

The English language is rife with aphorisms that warn against the dangers of rushing. Slow and steady wins the race, look before you leap, measure twice and cut once. Hurrying is how you neglect to see that red t-shirt sneak into the laundry with the load of whites, or get two thirds of the way through a recipe before realizing you are missing four key ingredients needed to finish it, or speed to the school pickup before remembering that your kid is going home with a friend that day. Unfortunately, "rushing" is also the default speed at which I seem to live my life.

We had a busy fall. The girls moved up a level and are taking ballet twice a week, and the older daughter embarked on a nine-month long confirmation program at church. The husband is working long hours, and I bit the bullet and took a 12 week writing class that involved a bunch of homework, on top of my regular work. For about three months there I was living my life in 15 minute increments, happy if we were all where we needed to be at the appointed time and fighting off a little bit of panic every day. Reasoned consideration was in short supply.

In December I was in London and saw a poster that resonated with me. It was produced by the British government during the Blitz and hung all over the city of London during the war, an admonition and comfort to the British people. On a bright pinky-red background topped with a crown, white block letters spell out “Keep Calm and Carry On.”  

That’s it, I thought. I need that poster across from my desk so I can remember to slow down, not give in to the false allure of doing things faster. More important to do things well than to do them quickly. When I got home, I ordered it from the Imperial War Museum web site, paying three times as much for shipping as I did for the actual poster and resigning myself to wait for the month it would take to arrive. It’s worth it to have something so unique, I thought.

My new philosophy in mind, I felt smug when I decided to take all the VHS cassettes that hold our family movies and drop them off to the photo store, to be converted to DvD. Our VHS player died years ago and now exists only to hold up a sheen of dust, and I’ve been meaning to get these converted forever. I was finally going to do it right and cross it off my list.

I scooped up the whole pile of tapes from the cabinet where we’d always kept the family movies, back in the Pleistocene Era when the VHS player worked. At $25 per tape it wasn’t going to be cheap, but how else would we ever watch them? After I dropped them off I even had enough time to get a cup of coffee and do some writing. Carrying on!

Fast forward to me picking up a big bag of tapes, each one fastened with a rubber band to its new DvD twin, and the labels from the VHS tapes carefully reproduced on the covers of the DvDs. The girls and I laid them out on the table: 1999/Camp Gorham; Christmas 2000, San Diego.

But what’s this? Cool Runnings? Isn’t that the Disney movie about the Jamaican bobsled team? Holy Mother Mary, did I record that on a VHS tape and leave it with the family movies, and then pay $25 to have my non-HD, hoopty version of the movie, complete with commercials, converted to DVD? In case you’re interested, yes I did. Also, you can buy a Cool Runnings DVD new from Amazon for $11.49.

There was one other video that was mysterious, labeled “Dr. Video.” Hmmm. Did I maybe take the camera with me to one of the girls’ checkups? Maybe it’s a sonogram? The VHS cassette was no help, completely barren of labels. After we got through watching an excruciatingly plotless movie which consisted entirely of scenes of our older daughter opening every gift she was given that year, we slipped Dr. Video in the DvD player.

A grey circle appears on screen. Looks a little like an artery. A man’s voice starts narrating. “Ok, we are standing at the front curb filming towards the house,“ he says. "The line proceeds in a northerly direction."

That circular grey shape is no artery. It’s the sewer line at our old house, the time we hired someone to do a fiber optic inspection to determine if it needed work. Yes. Because I didn't take the time to actually figure out what was on all the videos I was dropping off, I paid another $25 to convert an inspection of the poop pipe of a house in which we no longer live to DvD. Would you like to borrow it? I’m charging $1 per day, until I earn $25 back.

Right after sent in my order for my Keep Calm poster, we got a sales circular from Cost Plus. On the cover it featured the exact poster, mounted on canvas and framed, for about half of what I paid. A day later I saw it again, different store, different frame, same low price. A friend of mine said, “Yeah, you were so excited about your poster I didn’t have the heart to tell you that you can pretty much find them anywhere if you take the time to look.”

Keeping Calm. Carrying On.

I Never Expected To Be This Broad

I  have a slight acquaintance with a man who is a knot expert, one of the leading thinkers about knots in the entire world. He teaches knot theory in the math department of a top university, and his office is hung with samples of sailor knots, artfully mounted and framed. Once I came across a knot at a flea market, attached to a wooden plaque, intricate and heavy and the size of a loaf of rosemary foccacia. At the last minute I decided not to buy it for him, worried it might seem a bit overfriendly. The next time I ran into him I mentioned having seen such a knot for sale. He sighed and said, "I already have that one."

There was a time that I too seemed slated for specialization. In high school I realized that my affinity for foreign languages, lust for travel, and fear of poverty made me a shoo-in for a career in international business. I earned both an undergraduate and graduate degree in the subject and spent about ten years in what my resume will tell you were "positions of increasing responsibility" in international marketing and product development, getting a more nuanced understanding of the challenges of cross-cultural business success.

Then I had kids. Then I realized that my favorite part of international business had become writing up long reports for my bosses, filled with superfluous anecdotes about the people and cultures I'd visited, and light on terms like EBITDA and IRR. Great if you aspire to be Mark Twain, not so much if you aspire to be George Soros. 

Thus followed a major mid-life career change which has broadened and flattened my skill set like a pancake. Here is a partial list of things at which I've become merely proficient in the past five years:

1. Technical Support: I am the go-to gal for my own home office tech setup as well as everyone else's iPod, iPad, and laptop. I have a success rate of about 53% at fixing computer glitches. The rest of the time I just say, "Try to reboot it. I'm going to read in bed for awhile."
2. Hairstyling: Trimming bangs and split ends over the sink is what I'm known for, which is good because it is the only cut I can do. If I had a son, he'd probably have a bowl cut.
3. Stage Mothering: On Saturday I learned for the first time that ballet dancers on pointe are not standing on the pads of their toes inside those shiny shoes as I had always assumed, but actually on the tips of their toes. After 1.5 years of trying, the ballet teacher last week told my youngest daughter that Mommy almost had the hair bun right. (See No. 2 above.)
4. Veterinary Services: I can remove ticks with only a little bit of gagging.
5. Plumbing: I can sometimes get the long hair gunge left by three females in our family off of the bathroom drain, using a white plastic hooky thing my husband bought me. Mostly I just wait for him to get frustrated.
6. Urban Farming: Every spring I plant the garden with seedlings and high hopes, and reliably harvest a dozen tomatoes and one artichoke. 
7. Team Cow Penning: With my sister, I can separate three cattle from a herd and get them into a pen at the center of the corral while riding horseback. Cowgirl Camp ruled.

Of the skills above, Team Cow Penning is the only one I'd really care to get better at. But there's a limited market for it.

I supposed it would be nice to be recognized as an expert in something rather than as a Jill of Some Trades. But the benefit of this broad worldview is that by now I've learned that is nothing I can't do, in at least a half-assed fashion.

I may not know knots. But I can bake you a pretzel and tie your shoe, and sometimes that's plenty.

Boredom and the White Cloth of Surrender

I wonder how many times each day a kid bursts out of a bedroom overflowing with books, art supplies, and toys in order to sigh to a parent, "I'm so BOOOORED." It's probably equivalent to the number of times an adult looks around in a panic and thinks, "How am I going to get the lawn mowed, the meat thawed for dinner, the dog walked, and the office budget report completed before I fade to black in front of Real Housewives?"

Remember childhood boredom? When you used to cast around your home wonder WHAT you were going to do with the long weekend afternoon stretched out in front of you? The concept of having "nothing to do" for even fifteen minutes has become as remote to me as the summit of Mount McKinley. If I'm in my house, there is always something to be done, whether it's folding a load of laundry or returning work emails or replanting the anemic looking ivy in the living room. I've often said that for a real vacation, I don't require a spa or a resort or a plane ticket. I just want to go to a Motel 6 and slip into something more comfortable, like ennui.

And yet kids flee from boredom like it's broccoli-covered beets.

I regard a bored child as I do a youngster who coughs on me without covering his mouth or touches all the cookies on a plate before selecting one. It's not necessarily the child's fault; they just need some redirection from an attentive adult.

That's why I instituted a zero tolerance policy for boredom in our house. More accurately, I encourage boredom, but not the bemoaning thereof.

It was probably five years ago when someone in my house said, "I'm bored," and I first said, "That's fine. I need help dusting. I'll get you the cloth." By the fourth or fifth time this sequence unfolded, the kids knew I meant it and would clap their hands over their own mouths as the b-word escaped, then scurry off to their bedrooms like cockroaches before a flashlight. "No, no, I didn't say I was bored, I was going to…." before the door slammed shut.

Even more dramatic is their reaction when an unsuspecting friend comes over to play and, at some point during the visit, stops by where I'm washing dishes in the kitchen to inform me, "I'm bored." My kids scramble as I head towards the closet where we keep the cleaning supplies. "No she's not, Mom, she's not, we're gonna go play in the backyard, bye Mom," they yell, pushing the confused offender before them before I can make the ceremonial presentation of the Boredom Cleaning Cloth.

I credit my mother-in-law for reinforcing my embrace of tedium. When the kids were still tiny she said to me, "There is just no need for a child to say they're bored, ever. A kid needs that room to let their minds wander and to think up new things. Don't fall for it." As someone who personally conceived of the entire Kid's Choice Awards event while staring out the window on a drive to Lake Placid with my mom, my aunt Margaret, and my cousin Michael back in 1977, I can certainly vouch for the creativity that bubbles up when pre-planned activities aren't provided. (Had I not been so distracted by a simultaneous Little House on the Prairie obsession, I probably would have made something of it, too.) 

Giving in to boredom takes the parent off the cruise-director hook. The other day my bored 4th grader and her friend spent three hours planning and staging "Animal Wicked," the tale of what happened in Oz before Dorothy dropped in, with all parts played by stuffed animals. The male lead was played by a fuzzy snake wearing leg warmers.  I promise you I would never have thought to suggest any aspect of that activity, and definitely would not have cast the purple cow as the green Wicked Witch of the West (too pitchy.) But the berry-colored bovine turned in a triumphant performance that has me looking forward to seeing her take on Evita.

In fact, watching the juicy projects and plans my kids and their friends come up with while bored makes me a little ashamed that I can encourage it in them, but not myself. It's so tempting to appear busy all the time, to use it as some kind of a proof that we are important to the people around us - bosses, clients, spouses, children. In our pinched and worried world, there is something brave about saying, "I am not going to do anything for the hour," and just seeing where it takes us. 

In a sense, not ever letting yourself be bored as an adult amounts to a voluntary handover of the creative spark that might help us come up with better, smarter, more colorful ways to live our lives.

So I'm going to see if the Boredom Cleaning Cloth is bidirectional. Next time I am tempted to take it out and clean up dust that isn't yet bothering anyone, I'll sentence myself to 15 minutes hard labor: staring into space and allowing my mind to wander.